The West Is Collapsing - Family And Fertility Rate

Mads Larsen, an expert demographer, is at the tip of the spear globally in research and messaging on the collapsing fertility rate in the West. He is the source on the issue for many other "experts." The direction of the shrinking fertility rate has undeniable consequences including a lack of human productivity, immigration, and even a new need for an AI driven economy.

 Raw Transcript

all right Mads Larson our guest here in this episode is one of the foremost experts in fertility rate birth rate and
he has been sounding the alarm for years on the direction that the West is going our population may seem to be growing
you may think that there's a lot of people on the earth but we are primed for a population collapse within just a
couple of generations which brings on new forces that could be very predictable in terms of resources
conflict economies and yes even war he comes to us from Oslo Norway in this
episode and he is oftentimes the source for other experts that are projecting
the decline in our population there are few issues in the world that are more
important than the fertility rate and the direction in which we are going now this episode is brought to you by Go and
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[Music]
hello and welcome to Quick Show my name is Greg Matson and I am your host in this episode we bring on Mads Larson who
is specializing in mating and has kind of been at the uh front of the discussion here on the infertility rate
collapse that we're having here in the West mads welcome to the show thank you so much i appreciate the invite all
right so this is a recent quote from we'll call him a thought leader Eric Weinstein he says in in a presentation
he just gave about a month ago said "This is not cute it's not funny it's a
terrible tragedy a reproductive holocaust." In other words this is this
is in reference to the the birth rate or fertility rate that we have in the West
and the the honestly I mean unbearable consequences of of the direction that we
are heading in where do we stand today with the infertility rate and why should
people care well it's it's the deepest question there is should we exist or not with the
fertility rate we have in Norway now England 1.4 America is still a little bit higher but with that fertility rate
for every generation the generational size will shrink by a third which means that in just three generations we will
have 30 children we used to have 100 and that is if we can keep the rate at the
current level if say a country like Norway continues to decline toward South Korea's level of 0.7 and remember South
Korea was about where Norway is in 2013 so this can happen quickly and the the
leading experts in this field believe this is a self-reinforcing process that we're more likely to see rates continue
to drop than to pick back up again and if we get at South Korea's level it's it's going to be game over very quickly
then in just uh three generations there will be four children where they used to be 100 so a 96% decline and then in four
generations there will be 1% left and uh we can imagine the consequence of that
we never experienced anything like this that decline will probably be very painful and it will we don't know how to
deal with it we haven't we haven't as as a species we haven't faced this challenge before and we're not dealing
with it that's the issue right we're not dealing with what what's going on out there let me give you an idea of this so example in South Korea if you're
dropping a third in three generations you're going from let's give a base number of 100 you're then dropping down
to 33 34 then you're dropping down to 11 or 12 then you're dropping down to four in three generations
you're at a 90 96% decrease in fertility
yeah no it's a it's a horror story i mean this this is about the future of our species and also the way I frame it
when I when I talk about it in Scandinavia it's it's about the future of free women uh in Scandinavia we're
the most feminist nations in the countries in the world so that is very important to us and if you look at the
map not everyone have stopped reproducing we have a fertility belt that goes across Africa Middle East and
a little bit further east where women are still reproducing their numbers uh what we see is that in the countries
where women are free to choose their own partners and plan their own lives to the extent that we do for instance in the
west this is where uh fertility rates are plummeting so we have as the first
first human societies in hum in the spe in the history of our species created
societies where women can choose their own partners what we call free women and we've had this for about half a century
and that's just half the job now we have to find a way to have free women and combine that with sufficient
reproduction or there will be no free women in the future the world will be taken over by those who have very
different feminine ideals yeah that's and I want to get to that and touch on that even more here shortly
as far as looking at the environment that we're in what are the forces that are are making these changes here i want
to bring up also especially for our audience here you know there was a a a a recent polls but major polls that were
done uh studies that were done in 2023 showed that even the state of Utah which you would think would be near the top uh
I mean it's still number 10 in the in the country and but in the US but uh it
dropped from number four to number 10 and it's its decline has gone down what
was I think it was going back to well going back to the 50s in in the US even
there was about a 3 and a half 3.5% replacement rate now it's dropped all the way down to I think
1.8 is I think is about where it's at right now in the US utah has fallen not
quite that far it's 1.8 and change I think but it's it's uh it's really fallen how do we if you've got a place
like Utah that has dropped like that so quickly really over the last decade or so 12 years or so yep what what are we
looking why why are these forces coming in here what are the forces that are coming in that are making this drastic
change is it all cultural is it biological um what what's happening with this yeah so uh I have a a very specific
hypothesis for this what what is generally consensus in the field is that
this is driven by uh by by low pair bonding rates people are single in the west about a third of the population is
single and what we've seen and this is especially accelerated in the past 15 years it's that it's become harder and
harder for women to find a man that they consider to be good enough for pair bonding and starting a family with so uh
as in Utah we also in Norway have quite pro-atalist attitudes norwegian women
want 2.4 children but only have 1.4 and the problem is that they either can't
find a man that they consider to be good enough or they find him so late that they have a drastically shortened
reproductive window so that is that is what's driving this so um you see this
reflected in and amplified by trends like Tinder and dating apps where women are becoming highly selective and it's
very few men are able to get through those filters to meet women and we have seen this ever since women became free
that all across the world where this is occurring women keep raising their standards for what they consider a good
enough mate and that means that more and more men are excluded from women's potential pool of candidates
which makes it harder for for societies to to connect enough men and women for
pair bonding and then put them in a situation where they can reproduce yeah this hypergamy right
which is which is growing it's uh I mean women are n more naturally the
selectors right over men they're the one that are filtering they're the one on the na on the uh dating apps that are
going you know swiping left swiping left okay swiping right based on a small amount of data
uh at the same time they are there's certain surveys out there certain studies out there right now in the US
that show that women are actually more promiscuous than men are and and and you say to yourself well
how can that be what is that really true well when you think about you've got a top 5% or even go all the way to 20% of
men that are being selected by all of these women the men those 20% or 5%
going all the way up to 1% are the ones that are having all the sex and the
they're with with a lot more women a lot more partners and and then then you you're
left with that other 80% of men that aren't having hardly any sex or they're not having any kind of sexual partnership that's going to build toward
marriage or whatever it might be or their selection process is very
hyperfocused on a certain type of man and that's got to be pretty tough and
it's causing a lot of problems for a lot of the men that are not finding the
women that they want to be with yeah what we want to separate that into
two different issues so what we're looking at first here is what you're talking about uh Tinder what you could
call the short-term market women might be there with long-term intentions looking to find a a
uh a partner that they can start a family with but because they have um
well let's just start at the beginning and and and uh explain why this why this market has gone in in in in today's
situation so we have two attraction systems as human the original ones we had is a promiscuous attraction system
which we had for uh 6 million years ago and going back this was our original system so this is what most animals have
so there it's exactly like you're saying women are the selectors so women have highly discriminator a highly
discriminatory promiscuous attraction system where only the most capable successful males uh get most of the
reproductive opportunities and then men have a very inclusive promiscuous attraction system because the more
children they can have the greater their the the legacy they leave their genetic legacy but around 4 million years ago we
became a pair bonding species through developing evolving a pair bonding attraction system and there women aren't
necessarily more selective that's quite familiar with men and women in quite similar in monogous regimes we made
assortatively which means that we find someone with about the same partner value as we have and and become
boyfriend girlfriend that's how we partner up um so what has happened in the modern day after we got free mating
markets about uh um half a century ago which became uh it was like putting them
on steroids and throwing gasoline on them with modern dating apps uh what we see there is that these apps appeal to a
very strong extent to women's promiscuous attraction system because you can see on these screens if a guy is
hot it's really hard to see if he's got a personality that you're going to fall in love with so what happens is that
there are two reasons why women have the power here the first is that their promiscuous uh attraction system is very
discriminatory so they're only interested in having sex with a very small percentage of men women aren't
sexually attracted to men it's more precise to say that they're sexually repulsed by men when it comes to
promiscuous sex only few men motivate them to have that kind of sex but then you have that second attraction system
that makes women be able to fall in love also with men that are at their level in terms of partner value and when that
happens that that is when pair bonding occurs so that is the the first element what you're seeing on Tinder is the
first time in the history of our species after at least two million years of arranged marriages we now have open
markets and men and women have not evolved adaptations to operate on open
markets in a way that allows us to have the peer bonding and reproduction add up
and the way we have to solve that if we were going to solve it would be to develop new culture uh that makes these
markets add up on open markets to make that work but there is another uh aspect
there the second aspect that is really important and a bit darker because even though it's really hard to change
culture we can imagine how we could solve this first problem don't use dating apps try to meet in real life go
back to more traditional forms of dating where people get to know each other better uh but the reality is also that
men have become less worth for women the love that women evolved for men 4
million years ago had as its function to secure access to male resources because
our offspring became more and more demanding the function of the love that men of old for women was to was to give
low value men access to female sexuality so what has happened in the past 50 years is that women now have their own
full-time jobs so they they don't need a man for calories or resource from them
too i don't need a man you hear that a lot especially from the younger generation here yeah yeah and this is
what we had a big debate about this in Norway uh last year and many women said "Yeah we don't need you anymore we don't need men so if you're going to be good
enough to pair bound with us you have to give something extra." So what happens now is that for per bombing to add up in
a monogous regime the median woman has to consider the median man to be of
similar worth as she is and I don't think that is the case anymore because women have become a lot less dependent
on men and as the case is in Norway through our welfare state men pay more in taxes than they reser receive while
the average woman receives more than $1.2 $2 million over a lifetime than she
pays in taxes so instead of having to go and and have sex with a relationship with a man to get access to his
resources we now use the welfare state uh to transfer those money directly
which again makes men less attractive for women so I believe that well the
consensus is that this is an issue with pair bonding we can't couple people up and I believe it's going to be very hard
to solve that if not impossible because men's value for women has drastically
sunk and that is a reality that we have to deal with that means that people are still going to hook up and and and and
form couples and people will marry and have children but not enough for us to be able to reproduce our population
yeah that's uh that's obviously very concerning now now if I was to go back we've talked about the women here quite
a bit but where does the problem lie it seems to me it's on both a men and women
right you've got men where where I mean are they too lazy are they lazier than they were in previous generations less
productive uh you've got gaming going on you've got porn you know very easy
access to porn obviously and and then with women you've got a a an ideological pressure of feminism that
has come about especially since the sexual revolution of the 60s and the pill which I think is
the most life-changing and societal changing uh uh technology i
don't know if I'd call it an advancement or not but I think that's changed more than anything else more than a air conditioning more than the car more than
anything but you've got feminism you've got careerism and a cultural pressure to
be independent and to pursue your your abilities in the in in a career in a
corporate world perhaps um is this more of a male issue that men need to change
more or is it more of a a female issue that women need to change more well I wouldn't attack the problem that
way we moderns we like to think of causal agents individuals uh with
responsibility and blame uh as an evolutionary scholar I see this differently men and women are born with
different uh mating psychologies and those mating psychologies play themselves out differently in different
environments so uh I don't see much free will on a group
level i just see human nature playing out incentivized uh by
environmental environmental factors so I would say that if if it's it's precisely
what you said u the pill made possible something that that has been an 800y
yearlong process uh after we dissolved Europe's kinship societies we became
individuals that lived in nuclear family and we became more and more individualistic and we tried to implement these free mating markets
around 1750 and that went catastrophic that that was very that went very poorly
for women illegitim illegitimacy rates skyrocketed because women were uh
seduced by higher value men who then abandoned them when they were pregnant so what allowed us to be the first human
societies in the history of our species to have open mating markets meaning free
women was precisely post World War II prosperity that allowed us to afford to
break up more easily and then it was the contraceptive pill that allowed women to choose their own partners on the
short-term market without risk of pregnancy that's where everything had gone wrong around 1750 uh without the
birth control pill women couldn't be free and choose their own partners because they became pregnant whether
they wanted to or not yeah much larger consequences uh and and you know you're
going to be thinking a lot more about well is this really the guy I want to be with is this going to be the father that of my children and
um big big change uh all right so what are the pressures that are currently
making these changes you talked about the the freedom of women which has really pushed this but what about things
like climate change and and um maybe an idea of well we need closer
to a you know I won't say zero population but we need to reduce the human footprint the carbon footprint and
the mentality there that would be a very strong political and social pressure
against reproducing yeah well those things are mentioned
often in the media research does not support that those are factors that contribute significantly people are
afraid of of climate change uh people some people many people think
overpopulation is a problem um but people still want to have
children like our Norwegian women want 2.4 they're just not able to make them
so it's not because there's no room for a third car seat as has been mentioned in the debate it's not research shows
that real estate prices do not have a a causal connection to this it really is
that people can't find partners that they can start families with that is the main driver and then it's different from
country to country which which mechanisms uh this plays out through what cultural factors are there's a lot
at play of course the overarching uh macro structure of this is that as we
moved from being agriculturalists to urbanites uh the algorithm changed on how many
children it made sense to have but now it's just kept falling and
it's this uncoupling of men and women seems to me predominantly to be best
understood as a as as a result of increasing individualism we have for 800
year or a little bit longer depending on which part of Europe been on an a path of everinccreasing individualism and of
course with the media of this century that has accelerated so it's uh we're
being pulled apart which also uh has consequences for what I believe uh would
be the only solution to this crisis that has a realistic chance of working
what is the only solution a further individualization of reproduction so we have as a species
gone from reproduction being a responsibility of of of your group of of
when we're hunter the gatherers uh the couple the human mating cycle was three to four years so we typically together
fall in love have sex have a baby the man would contribute during the most vulnerable phase and then love would end
and they would leave each other and find someone else and once the child could walk around it became a group
responsibility and then it became a responsibility when we became agriculturalist uh for your kinship
group uh and then as those were dissolved about 800 years ago in in my
region of the world it be we became nuclear families over three generations and then later as we moved into u into
we became proletarians we went to nuclear families over two generations
and I believe that the only way we can get the rep the fertility rate up now is
to make it so that women feel safe enough and and feel that they have enough resource access that they
conclude that having three children will give them a better life than continuing as as single and childless because I
don't think we'll be able to hook enough men and women up together to peer bond anymore so we need an individualization
in the beginning this will marginalize men and be to women's benefit and I'm thinking over
perhaps in not too many decades hopefully we will have technology that through artificial wounds that allows us
to uh reach reproductive equality also for men i don't see us solving this at least not in feminist cultures like the
Norwegians uh through increasing the peer bonding rate because that would mean we would have to upvalue women
which would be uh felt as an attack on feminism and I don't think that's that's viable at least not in the Scandinavian
nations so I think we need a resource transfer to young women who are willing to start reproducing without necessarily
having a a partner that they can rely on for the next 20 years so why not attack that from the other side why why not say
well we need to develop the culture of men more to provide more worthy men so
to speak productive responsible committed why why not go to that side
two reasons go back to what your thoughts are about human nature yeah uh
two reasons first of all we don't know how to do that we're terrible at changing culture we see in the past that it happened but then when we try to do
it in the present we just don't have the tools for it we don't know how to work i mean we could try it's not a bad idea to
make more competent men uh but u it it Yeah we're just not good at it worth a
try but I think that in some cultures more masculine cultures that would be an
alternative and I think perhaps that will be experimented with now that more populations realize how existential this
threat is but in feminist countries like Scandinavia trying to go in a more traditionalist masculine direction would
be dead in the water no one will ever permit that it's that's any policy that
we try has to be perceived as feminist and making men more competent doesn't sound like feminism that sounds to many
uh Scandinavians is some kind of fascist conservativism and they would never go along with it right yeah and I
understand that i just So I I mean if you go back and you look at the DNA of this the freedom of women if that's what
we're going to call it it's a lot of this comes from technological advances
absolutely right whe whether it's the domestic uh the washing machine you know
anything that is going to relieve women of the responsibilities that they would normally have in the home make them a
little bit more independent little by little incrementally and then the pill changes everything um technology has
brought us to some degree to this point absolutely right and and but but you're
saying that moving forward it's more technology that would be the solution
yeah uh so I I would say the the the three most important aspects for the freeing of women uh was first the
dissolution of Europe kinship societies when we lived when we lived in polyggonist societies women were treated
more like uh the property of powerful men so when those kinship groups were dissolved that set the European cultures
on a on a European women of a on a path of ever greater independence and and
empowerment parallel with that process of individualization and I said the second big one was the pill and then in
a sense Tinder also uh was really empowering for women i'm not necessarily saying it was positive but it's very
empowering because the dissolution of kinship societies turned women into individuals who over time uh wanted the
right to make their own choices and be not have to depend on a man for life and then the pill gave them the opportunity
for unlimited short-term sex without dealing with catastrophic consequences and Tinder gave them easy access to the
most attractive men so if they want to have sex and date the very most attractive men they now have unlimited
access to do so so those I would say were the the big three changes that uh that stand out the most in terms of of
of their effect so looking at this if if we continue down this road and we're already playing
this game in the West there there are two ways to keep to to bolster your
economy uh and well there's other ways but as far as population goes is you you either
have more babies or you bring in immigrants right and you know the number
one resource of all that any country has is people and and so we're in a process
now where you where we've had you know a border that has been wide open for
several years and it's been increased over the decades uh for the US and the
south to the southern border to bring in immigrants and that seems to be for many
politicians and many thinkers the way to keep the economy bolstered because we are as you're seeing it you know the
numbers are decreasing in the fertility rate the problem I see with that is that
if we depend on that then our policies are going to be always pro- immigration pro mass
immigration to me to some degree i mean eventually as you do this and I'm all for bringing in people into any country
that are the right people the people that want to be there the people that want to produce
uh and and assimilate to that society but it's a perpetual
cycle that you're going to become more and more pro- immigration and less and
less pro- family to me or pro reproductive policies are are going to
go by the wayside because the immigration seems to be a lot easier than as you say changing
culture yeah well in terms from the perspective of this crisis the fertility crisis that
is an abysmally bad idea uh we take people from high fertility nations and
we bring them to Norway and their fertility rate very quickly drops down to our level in Denmark for instance the
fertility rate of immigrants is lower than that of the native population so if if we're concerned about making people
then if that is our primary concern which it doesn't have to be but it is then it's a bad idea to bring people
from high fertility relations to no to low fertility nations because they so quickly adapt the the local fertility
ideals uh because it's it's I mean it's the same human nature you respond to your environment and if you live in in
uh in Copenhagen or if you live in a in in the in an African village uh those
are very different algorithms for uh for for uh how many babies you should have
so in that sense it's it's not good we tried to do this in in at the beginning of this decade uh uh we now have a a
much higher immigrant population uh but it but at the same time our fertility rate has just kept dropping so at least
for that it's it's it's it's not a good solution and also in welfare states like Norway uh many uh many immigrant groups
um have very negative effect for state finances for instance many groups cost maybe around $2 million uh dollars over
a lifetime so it's a net negative of about $2 million so it's it it's it's a short-term solution to a lack of labor
issue but in the long term that doesn't solve the problems we're talking of now
yeah exactly it's a short-term solution which is very popular with politicians so I mean if you want to get reelected
and you're trying to bump up the numbers and that's a real easy way to do it just bring in more immigrants you got a
solution for yourself as a politician but not for the country yeah well that's a that's a very American problem where
you have this twoparty system where one party is so strongly incentivized to
bring in immigrants for votes uh that's that's that's not the optimal situation
but uh yeah I don't I don't know any other countries who have that problem when you have many parties it works
differently now let's talk about this economically you look at Japan japan has the largest percentage
of basically boomers as we call them here in in the world and to their
population a ratio to their population so what you end up with in Japan and where we're all moving toward here in
the west is this upside down pyramid where where you have fewer babies and
youth at the bottom here that are new and then you've got a workingclass age group that are between let's call it
ages 25 and and 65 and then you've got all the retirees and the boomers that
are right now living longer because of medical advances and and
pharmaceuticals and because they were a part of the boom that's why they're called boomers where they had a large
population growth during the times back in the 30s and the 40s and then what you
end up with is this this working class that is now burdened and
shrinking that has to both take care of the largest group of people that are
already past their working years and then of course though it's smaller they've also got the younger generation
that they're also taking on and and that that middle group there in that pyramid
shrinks and yet is still expected to produce all of the tax revenue all of
the resources all the productivity and what I mean what is what is a country like Japan going to do
and ultimately what what what does the west do about that yeah our current
social orders do not work for this and and it's it's important what you're saying about the the shape of this uh
pyramid because if you look at at at total population numbers it's it's
really challenging to get even fertility researchers and politicians to go along
with how serious this threat is it's it's it was a bit of a mystery i figured it out now but I that used to puzzle me
and and then they would they would refer to your total population number which is going to keep steady for quite a bit i
mean Japan has started shrinking but not that rapidly but when you uh when you look at how this plays out first this
crisis is being hidden by so many people becoming very old while you have very
few young people so you don't see that big decline but once that plays out once those generations starts dying out it's
going to be like a cascade where your population drops very quickly and at the
same time consists mostly of very old people so yeah our current social order for this isn't equipped to handle this
at all we can of course hope that by this time we will have robots elon Musk
is building the Optimus robots experts are thinking by 2040 2050 we may have
tens of billions of humanoid robots who can help young people old people that
can keep uh the economies going uh so that's the practicality that we might
be able to solve with automation and AI but then we still have to ask ourselves as human beings shouldn't we still exist
shouldn't we grow our numbers go out into colonize Mars the solar system aim
for the stars shouldn't we try to expand and and look positively at a future as far as we know we're the only
intelligent life in the universe should we not feel a tremendous responsibility for continuing that to to
continue to be that species that can marvel and enjoy this creation that we
exist within or should we just like lower our shoulders oh yeah well our fertility rate has dropped so much
there's probably nothing we can do about it and we do have a climate crisis so let's prioritize the environment and
just die out it's kind of sad and we're not going to die out there are still parts of the world where they don't have
free women where they are reproducing and I have nothing against them they run their own culture their own family
policies but as a Scandinavian I would really like to I like there to exist free women and cultures like ours also
in the future yeah yeah and of course if you look at you know humanoids
uh robots and AI the issue again is technology and I'm not anti-technology
here at all but I mean the technology reduces the need for more people so do policies change also
because of that do does do taxes change because of that you know do family structures to change because of that
right it's it's it's absolut absolutely this is the biggest and deepest cultural and technological change our species has
ever been through everything's going to change and we're going to see we're going to see this over the next 5 10 15
years so yeah we're an incredible we're an incredible transitional period and that's that is my main point and that is
what I would love for our nations to do now so we're in this fertility crisis where we're staring towards self-
eradication and that we know and we also at the same time know that perhaps around 2040 or a little bit later we're
going to live in an entirely new environment where we don't need to go to work 8 hours a day to secure ourselves
maturely we can use our time and resources with the help of an AI that is a billion times smarter than us to
create fantastic lives for human where we spend our time and resources to work
for ourselves and others to create great lives that is a fantastic opportunity
but we need to think we need to remember that the most foundational for any
society at any point in history is mating if we don't reproduce we
disappear and now that we're at the threshold of what could be a golden age of humanity let's include humanity in that
golden age so let's start experimenting and thinking what kind of society do we
want to build with this new technology because we can build wonderful ones and we can build really bad ones and we need
to have as our first priority to make reproduction adapt we need to make people come together and and and pair
bond and reproduce so we have have humans also in the future and that that I think is the perspective we need to
have now we need to start thinking about what experiments do we want to run to see how people would prefer to reproduce
in the future yeah another another issue is is I don't
I don't want to be doomsdayish here but I'm a little more pessimistic than you are on these things what what is you you
look at the the the demographic change here and and the lack of resources and yeah you know humanoids and and
everything can help make up for some of that but if resources do become a little bit more scarce for whatever
reason because of these demographic changes you you put yourself into a position of of a weaker
society that is more vulnerable to other
countries perhaps or that is more desperate and and needs more resources and so
don't we put ourselves globally into in these different places into a position of more volatility and war possibly with
with this demographic change yeah none of us want to live in in in a society
with uh where we have to fight over a shrinking pie human psychology tends to
become very nasty what has underpinned the peace after World War II is is this
this increasing pie it's it's a lot easier to make democracies work nicely when we're fighting over over a growing
surplus so yeah and as uh countries will be powerful countries will be incentivized to attack their neighbors
to consolidate power before they their uh their demography collapses the Peter Zion the the
uh geopolitical strategist predicted in 2014 that uh Russia would attack the
Ukraine by 2022 because after that they didn't they didn't have the the
generational size or they wouldn't have enough enough people to do it so that's one aspect and yeah that things will
become unstable we will fight over resources and and that's a world we're not going to enjoy living in a shrinking
world is not a good world and and that is a a a typical environmentalists think that
okay this birth rate just means that we're going to be a fewer people a long
time in the future and that'll be nice but you can't really reduce your populations in a humane way by stopping
to have babies uh that's going to be a very nasty difficult and painful world to live in
that we don't want to relegate our descendants to be to have any to to be a part of that's that's a that's a really
tough world to to live in it it it can get incredibly nasty if we were going to
reduce the population uh for climate reasons we have to start murdering people the old and the weak and
unproductive and keep engineers alive and I hope we don't have the the cultural appetite for that kind of
behavior but just to to stop reproduction yeah that's no way to
create a better future yeah what uh I I'm I'm interested in your journey
imagine what you've gone through on this what is it that originally triggered you to look into this more what what when
was the aha moment like this is something I need to really grab on to and get a message out there because
you're kind of at the tip of the spear on this uh yeah no and how has your journey
gone with opposition i mean how does how does the how is the message accepted uh among demographers and and and other
social scientists and and the academy for example is it falling on deaf ears
is there anything changing with this i've uh been working on this topic for a
very long time um first as a novelist I uh I wrote several novels in Norwegian
about 20 years ago that uh became great bestsellers and that my debut novel
triggered a year-long debate about modern mating where I as a novelist was I exposed what are the dynamics of of of
this these mating markets that we have created now and I was quite effective in opening people's eyes up how inhumane
and dysfunctional dating had become and this was before Tinder uh and then uh my plan was I
wanted to go uh back to academia and and and get my degrees there i had a
bachelor at the time but to go deeper into it and do a PhD where I where I looked into the entire history of human
mating to see how to try to explain how we got to where we are today and
parallel with this I had not predicted this i should have but I hadn't uh the
fertility rate uh collapsed in Norway uh we smuggly believe that we had the
solution because fertility rates were collapsing around the world and ours weren't so we thought well you're all
just going to have to become just like us and that really warmed our heart you need social democratic welfare you need
feminism gender equality and then you will have our foriterates we are the solution m and then uh in the 2010s the
the the fertility rate collapsed in Norway from 2.0 to 1.5 and it's kept
falling so uh that dysfunction that I identified 20 years ago in dating
markets that is now playing out in in reducing the pair bonding rate and to that reducing the fertility rate in a
way that now steers us towards self eradication so I'm so I wanted to
understand the entire history of human mating and of western mating and how it brought us to where we are today so I
could explain why things have become so dysfunctional and that's what I did with with uh the book I published last year
Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder if any of your your viewers want to read it it's it's open access so you can just
search for it and go to Taylor and Francis's uh website and just download it for free and there I cover the past
awesome so there I cover primarily so I I I do draw our canvas of six million years like we talked about earlier uh in
in this podcast but then I focus on the last 800 years and three western sexual revolutions that brought us to where we
are today and I show how men and women's different mating psychologies play out
different in different environments and how the underlying drive of this is our
individualism uh when we were hunter and gatherers we were much more individualistic free but then when we
tied ourselves to fields as agriculturalist we had to submit to the kin group because that was just necessary to get the calories and
protections we needed and that also changed our mating because we couldn't break up every 3 years cuz it's really
hard to break up a field and carry along your half in case of divorce so we were submitted to lifelong relationships and
then when we dissolve Europe's uh kinship groups that's when this our our
this individual drive that we have in us from 2 million years of evolution and
perhaps longer that has that has played out over the last 800 years and men and
women wanted to choose their own partners i think that's that's a desire we've always had but it's important to
remember uh since we became Guina's home for 2 million years ago as far as we know there has never existed a society
with free women meaning individual partner choice we've always had arranged marriage no society was able to pull off
to let young men and women do their own choices there and now we perhaps see why
uh women's very discriminatory uh promiscuous attraction system draws them to the most attractive men and women
didn't evolve the necessary traits and skills to discern what men's intention were uh how these markets work and what
the difference is between your value on the short-term market versus the long-term market uh so yeah we we now
are it's this is uncharted territory and I think we really should try to solve this some countries will perhaps look to
the past and become more conservative and and restrict women's freedoms but I think at least Scandinavia we've been in
the forefront for 150 years so we should take it upon ourselves to do these experiments and see if we can make it
work can we have free women and just give them more resources so they feel uh
safe enough and it's attractive enough to have children on your own if we can pull that off that could be a recipe for
that other countries could try too and Norway we're a very rich country because we have oil money we can afford to
experiment with this now and then if AI and automation plays out as we think
then perhaps from 2040 other countries could also afford to implement this
model for a new more individualistic mating if we can show in Scandinavia that we can make it work
yeah and I you know I for one I if at all possible and I do think it's
possible but I think it is the hardest toughest road I still believe in
building a family i think that that is the ideal situation for the parents for
the kids for society for civilization as a whole and I I my concern there with
what you're saying is and I get it i get it completely but it's I don't want to lose the ideal i
just don't want to lose the ideal of of how to live and and and I you know uh of
relationships and bonds and security for the kids and and you know I know you can replace those in different ways i just
don't know if they're as as uh effective
as what you'd have with a man and a woman in a home building a family but uh
so what about what about Yeah no abs absolutely that's what we evolved for it's that's that's the structure we
evolved for but if if we can't pull it off anymore you're battling human nature and
I'm also thinking that that if if we continue to exist we can fight for a
better more just world in the future but if we cease to exist we're out of the game so I just want to prioritize that
we could keep our fertility rates up and maybe 20 40 years from now we'll find a
way to create families again to a greater extent how is the message received throughout
uh you know the social sciences academia politicians that you may have had encounters with what how is the
message received well it's it's odd uh those that are the
fertility researchers we have in Norway they're they're very capable they're good people and they've been trying now for many years to get people's attention
to this and they haven't succeeded um through the book I talked about in an earlier article in 2024 I was able to
trigger a very large national debate on this and also through podcast uh I get some international debate on
it and the problem is that this is such a novel problem it's hard to think
around and there's a couple of challenges because humans we're not good at reasoning we think by analogy mostly
so we when we when there's a brand new challenge we don't know how to deal with it there are no cultural scripts we can use we think Okay what does this look
like and with low fertility give me one name who do you remember that wanted
women to make more children uh Genghask Khan i don't know yeah uh I
was thinking about Hitler so when we know proal policies it's it's Hitler so
people think that if if you want women to have more children you're you're a you're a a right-wing extremist and I've
also people think maybe you're racist because there's still children in Africa they are reproducing uh so it's just
really hard to think clearly around this so for many years people just avoided it now I was able to trigger this debate
and it has started and and for the researchers the problem there is they're afraid to portray this as negative so
they know how to do the math they know how this will play out if it doesn't turn around but I've talked to uh
leading international experts and the leading Norwegian experts and it was long a puzzle to me why they didn't
sound the alarm but when I was in a debate with one of them I at the end I I just they just wouldn't do it and I just
gave up at the end and I I said to the representative from the Norwegian
Finance Department just to amuse me could you look at the audience and tell them that a fertility rate of 1.4 four
means that each generation will lose a third of the children and strangely she
did she she told them that that my numbers were absolutely correct these are the consequence and she turned around to toward me and said "But you
can't portray this so negatively cuz then you give the power to the right-wing forces." So there's and this
is what I've also heard from very top international researchers they are censoring themselves i mean they're not
forging their numbers they're doing the research they know it's a problem but they're not willing to tell the public that this is an existential threat cuz
then they believe we're going to get a handmade tale uh that you right-wing politicians are going to take away
women's freedom they're not going to be worked they're going to be put into the kitchen and the bedroom and and and we're going to go back to a to a very
dark time and in some countries yes there there's a lot of misogyny online and in some countries maybe they will go
in a more conservative direction but there is 0% chance that that's going to happen in Norway we're the most feminist
nation that ever existed i mean even our right-wing party is from an international perspective a bunch of
social democratic feminists we don't have men that want to put women back into the kitchen at least with any
semblance of power so it's yeah these these researchers they've just been holding back and centering themselves
because they think this is this is going to hurt feminism and that is unfortunate
primarily because this is a result of free women we are in this situation because we have created the first
societies in human history with free women and if we want there to be societies with free women also in the
future we have to be able to combine having free women and sufficient reproduction and like I said half the
job is done now let's do the other half and then just closing our eyes and and being afraid that we're going to get a
Norwegian handmaid's tail that's very shortsighted and lacy
so yeah politicians and and researchers they haven't been it's an uncomfortable
it's it's so hard to understand it because we don't have cultural scripts that help us think around this we've thought about overpopulation for so long
so that underpopulation to be a problem challenging and then it's just the fact that it's uncomfortable for women
because it's it is the fact that we have free women that is causing this problem so then it's oh no if we acknowledge
that then the obvious step is to take freedoms away from women and it shouldn't be at least not in our country
yeah that's a hard that's a hard dichotomy there i I I I think that you
know I and I've played with this idea for a while and talking about different things but it's you know the more liberty or freedom you give a group or
everyone even the higher the disparity go right the disparity is going because
of choice right the more choice so you're thinking now in terms of disparity you have and the different
directions that people are going to go and uh you know it's and for a lot of
people the answer to that is tyranny right it's like well you have to force it and and you can't do that either so
what is the answer somewhere in between there it's you know what what if you were to give women more choice but you
incentivized or you know put a carrot out there more of here are the benefits of motherhood
here are the benefits of the policies and and government policies that help support you in this position may
completely outweigh what you're what you're taught about careerism right i I
don't know it's like you said I mean it's such a difficult problem to turn around it's you know I actually I
actually received an email today from some somebody just emailed me to uh he he'd seen some pods I've been on and he
said precisely this oh this is super easy we can just manipulate women we can just uh like try to shame them for not
wanting to be mothers etc and yeah we could do that and it would probably work that's a cultural change and and we're
bad at making cultural changes but we can try and we might succeed uh there's just zero chance that we're going to do
that in Norway there's no way we're going to be manipulate try to manipulate women culturally uh to think more of
motherhood in a way that can be perceived to take freedoms and choice away from them it's just we're a fe very
very feminist culture so for us we as a nation need to take upon ourselves to experiment with doubling down on the
feminism and trying to solve this this way and then other countries need to take other experience it's like genetic
diversity we have cultural diversity and this happens this is among what I've studied in in other things I've done as
an academic i look back over a vast pans of time and see how cultural regions
deal with deep cultural changes and when you get to that cultural change like the
one we're in today with the fourth industrial revolution we have no idea what's going to work in in Scandinavia we just
happened to bring along the cultural legacy that made us make the best post World War II societies through being
able to implement social democracy which was tremendously successful we have no idea if those norms and
values is going to create a functional societies after the fourth industrial
revolution with this challenge we have with mating now we have all kinds of mating regimes and cultures around the
world and nations need to build on those legacies and perform experiments and go in a direction that feels natural to
them so that we have a lot to choose from so let's say we try 100 different things of them fail 10 of them work okay
two of them work really well and then if those are culturally exportable then others can learn from that so I'm not
saying everybody should do uh what I'm proposing for Scandinavia and Norway trying to individualize reproduction
more but I think we should take upon ourself because we've been leading this feminist way for 150 years so it's
natural for us to continue down this path and and doubling down on it and if it works we can export that to the world
and we'll be super smug about ourselves and feel wonderful and if we fail well then hopefully other countries is able
to find some solutions that actually work you know I one more question here
it's stepping back just a little bit here on what you were saying about there there's there's no way that this is
going to turn around and and the feminism is so strong and um do you think that outside you know there
there's societal pressure the shaming which I don't agree with at all but then
there's also reality so it's will the reality of a very quickly
uh uh shrinking population and all the I I believe all of the problems that that
is going to cause will that give the pressure to people to say "Oh we we need to produce we better
produce." We're in a position maybe somewhere in the middle of the spectrum right now where we're learning all about this and what the consequences will be
uh at some point does the rubber hit the road so to speak with with with people
that would push against having more children i mean it seems to me like that reality eventually kind of slaps you in
the face as a society and says you're doomed if you don't change
yeah that that could absolutely happen when things get too bad we do get forced to change and give up even the most
cherished values and norms but before we get to that point we would have had so
many decades with low reproduction it's and then we're going to have such an old population and we will have gone
down this painful path for so long that we're just going to find ourselves in a in a reality of pain that we really
don't want to be in the earlier we can Yeah i mean the earlier we can take this
seriously and start to do something about it and start to experiment with solutions the much better for us and our descendants we don't want to wait until
society collapses stuff that's I mean we've we've forgotten how bad and and
Yeah we don't want collapsed society civilization uh comes with a lot of perks that at
least I really enjoy yeah yeah well Mads really appreciate your time on this
we're going to want to have you back again if possible where can everybody find you
um I'm on Research Gate which is a this a like Facebook for academics where you
can find all my work i'm also on Google Scholar or just uh look at search my name and then the book title stories of
love from Vikings to Tinder go to Taylor and Francis to download it from there uh that's about it thank you so much for
the invitation i really enjoyed our talk thank you for uh for talking about this topic that you've done several times and
I hope you're keeping interested in it and hopefully our populations uh will want to insist that our politicians
start to do something soon we know from Finland who's about three years ahead of us that it is possible we just have to
argue a little bit people have to get aware that this is an actual problem and then people will start demanding from
their politician that something needs to be done and we're headed in that direction but it is it is a really
challenging uh uh problem that we're dealing with well keep talking and hopefully you you you eventually get
open arms on the message so really appreciate it man appreciate your time coming all
the way your message here all the way from Oslo Norway thank you thanks so much