The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates - Mads Larsen

1. 0:00 – 5:59

   Why Mads’ Activism Caused Trouble

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      You managed to get yourself in trouble.

   2. MLMads Larsen0:02

      Well, I, um, I tried to get my country of Norway to start taking the fertility crisis seriously, and as we've seen in many nations, people are unwilling to do that, and, uh, yeah, that motivated some, uh, some attacks along- alo- along that way.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:20

      How did all of this start?

   4. MLMads Larsen0:23

      Well, it started with, with an article that, uh, me and Leif Guinier, a professor in evolutionary psychology, wrote earlier this year where we, uh, conceptualized and theorized the concept of involuntary single women, INSYNS. Um, and then, uh, we, I did some interviews about that and, uh, peop- people weren't happy. Um, they felt that talking about involuntary single women was, was, uh, misogynistic and, uh, they didn't want to connect that to, uh, declining fertility.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:53

      What's the line between talking about involuntarily single women and misogyny?

   6. MLMads Larsen1:01

      Well, one of the main drivers of low fertility is that people are just having too hard of a time to find partners. So women either do not find a partner with whom they can have children or they find one too late so that the reproductive window is shortened. So this means that, uh, women aren't having the children they would like to have. In Norway, women would like to have 2.4 children and they're having 1.4. So, um, a dysfunctional dating market is an important contributor, uh, to this, uh, fertility crisis.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:28

      Okay, and how is that misogynistic?

   8. MLMads Larsen1:31

      Um, that is a bit of a puzzle that I think I have eventually, uh, managed to solve through going through this process. Um, many felt that, uh, if you, uh, bring the attention to how the dating market works for women, you are some- somehow blaming women for low fertility. And as, as an evolutionary scholar, um, I would never think of assigning blame to any groups. We are born into this environment with a certain nature and that plays out differently in different environments, and now we've created an environment where it has become very difficult for women to find partners.

   9. CWChris Williamson2:08

      What are the specifics of the mating psychology that are going on that are contributing to making this environment difficult for women in that regard?

   10. MLMads Larsen2:17

       Well, we are the first, um, first societies in, in human history that have, um, that have individual partner choice. No other society have done that before. It's always been different extents of various degrees of arranged marriage. Um, so when we opened this up in the 1960s, we talked about this last year how the six million year buildup to the, today's mating regime, and when we opened these, uh, mating markets up, what has happened is actually quite predictable as a consequence of the difference between women's promiscuous attraction system and pair-bonding attraction systems. And, uh, the regular fertility researchers do not understand these mechanisms. Um, for everyone, it's just a big puzzle why we're no longer partnering up and, and creating children. But from an evolutionary perspective, it's, it's quite predictable.

   11. CWChris Williamson3:04

       Explain that. Dig deeper for me.

   12. MLMads Larsen3:07

       Well, as, as we talked about the last time, six million years ago, uh, with our last common an- chance- ancestor with chimpanzees, we mated promiscuously, which is what most, which is what most animals do. So there, um, women or females are incentivized to be very choosy. They're supposed to, uh, give mating opportunities predominantly to the most successful males because that is the most effective way of distributing, uh, beneficial genes to the population. So, um, and then because of the development of our species around four million years ago, we, uh, e- evolved a different attraction system, pair-bonding attraction system, and there, that's more, um, say egalitarian 'cause then it's, it's, uh, you want paternal investment from the male and then a woman will typically then pair-bond with a, with a male of similar partner value. So you have in a promiscuous system, mating, uh, opportunities going to the most v- to the only to the mostly to the most attractive males, and in a pair-bonding attraction system, it spreads more evenly. Uh, but we didn't become, uh, a pure pair-bonding species. We have a mixed system. We both have a promiscuous attraction system and a pair-bonding attraction system. And for every human community that has existed, a fundamental challenge has been how to reconcile women's different preferences according to those attraction systems in a way that allows functional mating. Uh, now men are different. Uh, our, their promiscuous attraction system is very inclusive. Most men would sleep with most women while most women would sleep only with a small proportion of men. Um, so what, what happened when we tried to, um, introduce this system for the first time with the west's second sex revolution in the 18th century, things went very poorly because we didn't have contraceptives and we were so poor that breaking up, uh, was very hard and women weren't independent. They were dependent on men. So you had a very high rise in illegitimacy because women competed for the most attractive males and when, when they became pregnant, a lot of the time the man just moved on, which wasn't allowed a century earlier. So then we had a, uh, a pullback with romanticism and we went back to reconnected copulation and pair-bonding again, but then in the 1960s with, uh, birth control and post-World War II prosperity, we were able to implement this system. And then because of this, uh, this gap between women's promiscuous and, uh, pair-bonding attraction systems, we've seen an increasing stratification among men where some men at the top, uh, get an increasing amount of mating opportunities and then while men at the bottom are being, uh, excluded from mating, both long-term and short-term. That means relationships and uncommitted sex respectively. Um, and if, and if people can't find somebody to partner with, if they can't pair-bond, it's just much less likely that they will reproduce. So as the, the single rate has skyrocketed over the past four or five decades, you also see an increase in, in low fertility.

2. 5:59 – 9:23

   The Stats That Caught Mads’ Attention

   1. CWChris Williamson5:59

      What are the stats that convinced you this was an important...... um, area to look at both from a birth rate standpoint but then also from a relationship satisfaction, singleton standpoint as well?

   2. MLMads Larsen6:15

      Well, so in Norway, the fertility rate is 1.4 and, uh, experts haven't wanted to portray this negatively. They've said that, "Well, it's low but the population going to- continue increasing." People have an impression that centuries ahead, this will have drastic consequences. But the fact is that with a fertility rate of 1.4, you lose one third of your generational size per generation. So in only three generations, we will have lost 70% of the children, and that is if we in Norway are able to keep a fertility rate of 1.4. The leading experts in this field predict that the rates will just continue to decline as they have for a long time now, not so long in Norway, but in other nations. It seems to be a self-reinforcing process whereas people get used to there being fewer children even though they want more. For each generation, people want less children. So if our, um, fertility rate keeps falling, for instance down to South Korea's level of 0.7, then in three generations, 100 people in generational size is reduced to just four, and in the next generation, one. Which means countries will be empty and that is a- that is a ve- that is a very real existential threat, uh, that experts and populations have not so far wanted to take seriously, and that's what I tried earlier this year by spurring this debate in Norway and, um, yeah. People weren't ready for it but, uh, but it is moving along and, uh, people are contributing and with time I think people will accept that this is an existential threat, perhaps the greatest challenge of our era and then we perhaps can start experimenting with ways to, uh, to find a- a way to motivate people to reproduce again.

   3. CWChris Williamson7:53

      Yeah, I mean, I've been harping on about this what to me felt like kind of late, uh, but to the internet and maybe wider society was still outside of the Overton window as an early adopter. But yeah, I- I- you'll be maybe the fifth, sixth, seventh conversation that I've had on something to do with birth rates, uh, declining fertility and, um, I'm gonna keep on fucking banging this drum because, uh, we can... Think about how much public attention has been galvanized towards climate change, worthy cause. Something that people probably should be concerned about, about not trying to destroy the ecosystem so on and so forth.

   4. MLMads Larsen8:31

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson8:32

      It's not gonna happen in 75 years. There are more pressing concerns and my biggest learning when I started digging deep into X risks were that you should be triaging your efforts onto the ones that are more global, more catastrophic and sooner and, uh, there is nothing, there is nothing. I mean maybe, maybe you could look at, um, misaligned AI nanotechnology and engineered pandemics but even those you don't have a particularly good prediction mechanism. We know how many one-year-olds were born last year. We know how many there are in Norway, in the UK, in America, in Australia. We know that number. Demography is destiny, as it's called. So if we know that i- we have a guarantee and

3. 9:23 – 23:51

   Why is a Declining Birth Rate a Bad Thing?

   1. CWChris Williamson9:23

      one thing, uh, that some people may be thinking is why is a declining birth rate a bad thing? I think this is one of the sort of key, uh, areas of ignorance that a lot of people-

   2. MLMads Larsen9:39

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson9:39

      ... have if they haven't thought about it. Said, "Well, the- the- the world's overpopulated in any case or- or maybe that just means more room or maybe that means more jobs or maybe that means it's easy to get into good schools or something like that." So can you just give the overview of what a declining population means downstream from that for the people that are alive to see it?

   4. MLMads Larsen10:02

      Yeah, absolutely. Uh, a few weeks ago in Norway we had this- this big controversy because up north, uh, they had to shut down a school and people were very unhappy. Um, if every generation you lose a third of your generational size, there's going to be a lot of schools shut down and then when they grow up, there won't be enough people to step into the jobs that exist and this across time will age the population drastically. You can imagine if... Look at a situation like South Koreas where in three generations you'll go from 100 to 4 people. Um, who's gonna- who's gonna keep society running? You're just going to have a bunch of really, really old people and this will also change, um, cultural psychology. We've been very fortunate since World War II with an- with a growing economy. When we start have- have to fight, when we have negative growth or- or stalled growth, we're going to be fighting over a shrinking pie and our species tends to get quite unpleasant in those situations. Um, also you would think this is connected to the... This is- this- this has some interesting connections on several levels with the climate crisis. One thing is that people assume that this will be a slow decrease and that having fewer people will be good for the climate. In a way that is true, that is one factor but if we're going to solve the climate crisis, we're going to have to make a lot of progress between now and- and say 2050 when we're supposed to reach net zero And it's possible to do that. But if we have to channel more and more of our- of our, uh, resources toward taking care of the elderly and we see societies start slowly disintegrating and becoming... We'll have more and more ghost towns and- and the cultural psychology turns uncooperative, I don't think we're going to be able to make those technological steps to allocate those resources that we need in order to get there. So I- I think solving the climate change, uh, climate crisis and other challenges that we have in the decade ahead, it's just going to be a lot harder if we have, uh, uh, collapsing population numbers.... and also, um, because of the climate crisis people are less willing to engage, uh, low fertility because they assume that it will be beneficial. So some people are, th- they're so used to the, to the, to the challenge of overpopulation, which we've talked about for generations, so that switching your mind and thinking about a brand new problem that goes against the previous concern, it's just really difficult. But if we don't have these discussions now, things do not look good. We're gonna have to start experimenting and see what we can do soon 'cause I'm pretty sure very few people would wanna live in societies where there are less and less young people and where we e- eventually disappear, and that is where we're headed now. This isn't, this isn't some temporary thing. This is a really large trend and experts think it will only get worse. So at some point we have to take this seriously and see what we might be able to do about it.

   5. CWChris Williamson13:08

      Yeah. Uh, maybe, uh, not the best thing for us to bond over, but the UK's recent census data came out and said that we were at, I think, 1.44, uh, compared with Norway's 1.4. So just for, uh, clarity, to run those numbers again because it's really difficult to work out what 1.4-

   6. MLMads Larsen13:27

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson13:27

      ... multiplied by 1.4 multiplied by 1.4 when you need 2 or 2.1. Um, that means that last year there were 591,072 births in England and Wales in 2023. That's the lowest number since records began, the lowest number that, that has ever been recorded, 1.44. That means that 100 people in Britain today will have 52 grandchildren between them and only 37 great-grandchildren. So in 100 years' time, you're talking about 63% of the population being wiped out. Every 100 Norwegians, 30 great-grandchildren, and for every 100 South Koreans, four.

   8. MLMads Larsen14:09

      Yep. That's, those are, those are terrifying numbers-

   9. CWChris Williamson14:12

      Sobering.

   10. MLMads Larsen14:13

       ... and that we're not sounding the alarm and refusing to talk about it, it's, it's, it makes you feel like you're in that movie Don't Look Up. I mean, the asteroid is heading straight for us, but out of, uh, misplaced concerns, political concerns, confusion, we're not willing to accept the facts the way they are. And I've-

   11. CWChris Williamson14:32

       Yeah.

   12. MLMads Larsen14:32

       ... I've s- I've experienced that in Norway over the past months. Um, I've talked to quite a few of the leading experts and, uh, the people that research fertility, people that work on this in the government, and they all have this unified, um, approach to this, that we can't portray this as a negative thing. We, this is, this is, I mean, this is their, this is what they research. This is what, this is all they do. And they are concerned, but they're afraid that if, if they tell people how seriously, how serious this is, somehow the politicians won't take them seriously. They will think they're alarmists. This could affect their career and their funds. And they're hoping, like, the current strategy among, uh, commentators in the media and among researchers is that somehow those children that weren't born when women were in their early 20s and late 20s and early 30s will now over the next gen years be born when women are in their late 30s and in their early 40s. So there's no data that supports that this will happen, but the researchers are assuming that if we just wait 10 years perhaps the fertility rate, in best case scenario, will go up to 1.7 because women around 40 will start having so many children that it really boosts the fertility rate. And that could happen. It's not impossible, but it's a really puzzling strategy after we've waited now for 15 years while this has, has plummeted that we should wait 10 more years before we portray this negatively because the rate could go up, uh, over the next 10 years.

   13. CWChris Williamson16:06

       It seems strange to me that somebody doing research into the literal future of the human species, forget the kind of projected future of the environment that the potential human progeny will inhabit, climate, these are, th- this is the number of people that are going to be around in future. It seems odd to me that when you're able to throw soup over a van Gogh or glue yourself to the M25 in protest of big oil or whatever, um, and, and you know, even the more sort of down to earth, uh, data sciency people, Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data, uh, who specializes in climate science, been on the show, you know, she's, she doesn't pull any punches when she's talking about the climate, you know. She's really... And she's as, as sciency and evidency as it's possible to be. Seems odd to me that these researchers would think that they wouldn't be taken seriously if they gave what are, to be honest, much more easily verifiable pieces of data that will occur in a much shorter time about something that's a pretty big threat to human civilization.

   14. MLMads Larsen17:16

       Yeah. No. I mean, we will get there. Uh, South Korea, uh, the government there is pretty clear. They said not too long ago that this is, this is the point of no return. If we don't get the fertility rate up now, we're gonna disappear. Uh, we're not there yet. This is a process. Finland is a little bit ahead of Norway. A colleague of mine, she's been running the debate there for three years, and three years ago, they had the same anger and the, and the attacks on people w- who said that this was a really serious problem, but after a process of a few years, the population and politicians have gotten to where they're tak- now taking this seriously and they're gonna start experimenting to see what they can do. And also here in Norway, the politicians are beginning to take this seriously. Strangely, they're taking it more seriously than the researchers that, that, that unders- well, th- that have the data and, and work on this. So we just, uh, established a, a national birth rate committee, uh, that will, uh, study this and see what kind of solutions they may suggest. Uh, I don't have too high hopes to anything substantial coming from there. They're probably gonna try to throw a little money on the problem and we know from other countries-... that that doesn't work. Um, giving, giving money to parents to have children, it, it doesn't have an effect. That in those instances, there are certain ways you can boost the numbers a little bit, but then suddenly you're paying a million dollars or $2 million per extra child. So it's, it's not, it's just not feasible. Uh, but the researchers that are doing this and, and those that are working on it in the government, they, uh, they have what I think at least are misplaced fears. I was, I was in a, a debate, um, last week, uh, with someone from the birth rate committee and someone from the Ministry of Finance. And, uh, the woman from the Ministry of Finance has started by showing the audience, um, a kind of frivolous e- equation. She was showing that, uh, having more children, uh, would be negative for the national economy because in Norway, we are a very generous welfare state and we have oil money. Every group, um, in the population is, is, is a net negative. So she was making the... kind of jokingly saying that, "Well, at least children aren't profitable for us." And then later in the debate 'cause I was so curious and I've been curious for so long why they're not portraying this with the seriousness that it, that it requires. They all have this attitude that, "Okay, let's talk about it, but not negatively." And then when I pushed her on it and, and I asked her, "Just to amuse me, could, could you say, could you confirm to the audience that 1.4 means that we lose a third of the generation?" And she did that. She finally did that, "Yes, that is true, but you can't portray this so negatively because then you will empower the political forces on the right." So there's this belief that if we talk about low fertility, there's going to be, there are going to be these people on the right that will deprive women of their, uh, their reproductive rights and we will be taken back to the Dark Ages. And at least in Norway, the risk of that is infinitesimal- infinitesimally small. We, even our right-wing party are, from a international perspective, uh, feminist social democrats.

   15. CWChris Williamson20:28

       (laughs)

   16. MLMads Larsen20:28

       So I don't think... I, I don't, I don't think us having this discussion and taking things seriously is gonna turn us into The Handmaid's Tale. But this is, this is a common assumption. Also, some, some of them, they're afraid that they will be perceived as racist, that if we are concerned about, uh, Western countries having low fertility, uh, that would be inappropriate because there are so many people in Africa. So they have all these strange, um-

   17. CWChris Williamson20:53

       Hang on, hang on.

   18. MLMads Larsen20:54

       ... strange fears.

   19. CWChris Williamson20:55

       That, that is, that, that is Olympic-level mental gymnastics to say, "If we care about our country, that somehow throws into harsh light people of a different skin color in a different country." I mean, I've been banging the drum f- f- from my conversation with Stephen J. Shaw, who wrote- did this amazing documentary called Birthgap, uh-

   20. MLMads Larsen21:16

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson21:16

       ... South Korea is his pet project. Like, who's, who's campaigning for the South Koreans that are going to by their great-great-grandchildren have one person for every 100 South Koreans that there are now? There's entire schools that are empty in Korea at the moment.

   22. MLMads Larsen21:33

       Yeah. Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson21:34

       And, uh, uh, uh, d- does it not count? It, it, it only counts if it's the dark, the darker-skinned people? It doesn't matter if it's the ones from the East?

   24. MLMads Larsen21:44

       I wouldn't take the content that seriously. This is the beginning of a debate that is very confusing. And at that phase of the debate, personal attacks, anger, those kind of accusations tend to be quite common. So, uh, over the last months, I've been call- I've been called a misogynist, a fascist, uh, because, because I bring up this problem, people assume I want the government to force women to have sex with and have children with incels. Uh, and yeah, so those accusation of racism or, or wanting to poli- uh, empower the far right, it's just the, the confusing beginning phase of a, of a really important debate, and that will only last for so long. Once we, once people work their way through that and throw out those accusation that... I don't know if they're that serious when, when they accuse people-

   25. CWChris Williamson22:41

       I-

   26. MLMads Larsen22:41

       ... of being racist.

   27. CWChris Williamson22:42

       Dude, I, I mean, I, I, I very much applaud your patience with this, but I find it, I find it so difficult. You know, I... My default is never to throw a label at somebody like that. I don't... Uh, none of my friends do that. None of the people that I respect or care about do that either. And I just find it... I find it very trying to imagine the psychology of somebody who defaults to, to that, that defaults like... It's, it's so boring as well. It's so fucking predictable. Like, these, these, uh, uh, i- i- i- bigotry... Well, like, just... It's like the bigotry dartboard and you just close your eyes and throw a dart and whichever one it lands on. You know, you could've... H- honestly, you could've told me that this would have been transphobia and I would have said, "Yep, could've picked that one as well." Like, it's just so obvious to me and it doesn't, it doesn't take the best of what your interlocutor is trying to propose to you. It takes what... your mental model of the worst of it and then just tries to run away with that. So, I mean, fair play for keeping your cool with regards to it. Do you see...

4. 23:51 – 27:01

   Is Mads the Vanguard of This Issue?

   1. CWChris Williamson23:51

      You know, y- you do seem quite even-keeled as best I can tell. Do you kind of see your role at the moment as being, like, the vanguard of this pol- political talking point? You're kind of through the breach first and you're going to take some arrows and maybe that's a price that's worth paying? Is that kind of how you're perceiving it?

   2. MLMads Larsen24:12

      Well, people are people. And in the cultural moment that we live now, those kind of accusations are the weapons available. Um, so when I, I presented, uh, my research for the Norwegian, uh, ins- Fertility Institute a few weeks ago...... and they had been so amazed at how I, this summer, had been able to elevate this debate about low fertility to the national level and, and trigger a really fairy debate, uh, fiery debate on it. They had tried to do that for years but they weren't successful, and the reason why they weren't successful is because they didn't portray this as, as the problem that is as serious as it is, uh, w- while I said that this was an existential threat and that we need to look at how mating markets work, how, why is modern dating so dysfunctional, and then I describe, uh, using the evolutionary sciences what it is about female and male mating psychology that in our current environment creates this gratification that contributes to singledom that then results in low fertility. So the way I see this there's, there's several, there's, there's several, uh, bottlenecks in the pipeline between being single and having a child, and then I describe the different, uh, hindrances along that pipeline. And of course, um, especially in a culture like the Norwegian one, a very social democratic culture, uh, the evolutionary sciences are not broadly embraced, to say it mildly. Uh- Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:40

      ... and, and yeah, it's-

   4. MLMads Larsen25:41

      I saw in, uh, I saw in one of the articles that it referred to-

   5. CWChris Williamson25:43

      Mm-hmm.

   6. MLMads Larsen25:43

      ... it as a controversial wing of psychology, or a, a controversial subset of psychology that you come from. Yeah, and when we published the NSING article in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, uh, uh, one of the newspaper commentators referred to this as the online publication, the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. So yeah, it's, it's been strange, and also the attacks of, I would say over the last few weeks, uh, people in, n- and newspaper commentators, experts, even the leader of the, of the Birthrate Committee, have disproven my positions, about 10 or 20 of them. But the weird part is when they write these articles to disprove my positions, not a single time have they, uh, argued against the position I actually have. It's been exclusively straw men, which is a little bit predictable too and it's okay. Um, I just want this debate to get started, and now it has started, and if that means that I have to, uh, just endure all those weird attacks and personal attacks and, and, and being discredited, well, uh, hopefully I'll be able to be in this for the long haul and I hope to contribute more productively with time. But right now, the debate is going, and for that I'm thankful.

5. 27:01 – 39:09

   The Global Issues Causing a Birth Rate Crisis

   1. MLMads Larsen27:01

   2. CWChris Williamson27:01

      Let's get back to the underlying dynamics that are driving this sort of decline in birth rate because it's something that we are seeing across the world for, uh, as I'm sure that the researchers that you were talking with recently know, uh, f- the birth rates, uh, especially in sort of south, the south areas of, of Africa, uh, fittingly I think Chad has the highest, uh, birth rate in the world, which is kind of on brand given the name, um, every 15 years-

   3. MLMads Larsen27:28

      They're very humble.

   4. CWChris Williamson27:28

      ... every 15 years the birth rate decreases by one child per mother in African countries too, so it's from eight to seven to six, around about every 15 years or so, or at least this was when I looked at the data about 18 months ago.

   5. MLMads Larsen27:41

      Yeah. Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson27:41

      Um, it may have sped up, it may have slowed down, but my point being this is a global, uh, situation. I think everywhere except for Israel basically, uh-

   7. MLMads Larsen27:50

      Mm-hmm. ... they've managed, uh, e- everybody is, is, uh, uh, dealing with this. And this was really interesting and telling to me when I s- looked at the, uh, news article from the UK that came out because you had some very country specific reasons given by people in the comments. They were saying, uh, migrants, Islam, taxation, cost of living, the COVID jab, who would want to bring a human into this cruel rotten world, tap water, this is good, the country's too full, and this is good, the world is too overpopulated. And I was thinking, well some of this stuff is kind of universal, right? But a lot of that migrants, Islam, taxation, cost of living, COVID jab, uh, you know, th- it's very specific to the country, and yet we're seeing birth rates across the world change. So can you just square, square the circle of the dynamics for me of what is universally happening that's causing- Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson28:46

      ... this to occur because presumably the intersexual dynamics and the sex ratios in different countries are all at different levels, and yet we seem to have this sort of universal, uh, degradation of birth rate.

   9. MLMads Larsen29:01

      Yeah, um, so, um, let's line this up along the, these bottlenecks that I, that I talked about. So, um, I, I like to view this as, as, uh, something that happens in three steps. First you have to be able to find a partner, you have to date, you have to find someone, you have to agree that you're a couple, and that has become increasingly challenging. The next step is that you have to decide to have children, and there there are different hindrances, and then you have to be able to make one. Now the latter one, it's not, it's per- it seems not to be that big of a deal. As you're aware, sperm quality has decreased 40% among men, uh, but according to the experts it's still more than good enough for making children, so it's not that we're not able to. Now th- then there are some problems for women because they postpone having children, but w- women aren't, uh, th- their fecundity has not decreased in all likelihood, um, at the earlier ages. So, so the latter bottleneck seems not to be a real issue. Um, and then we have to-

   10. CWChris Williamson30:00

       Uh, hang on, just to, just to, just to step in there, you mentioned at the early ages-

   11. MLMads Larsen30:03

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson30:03

       ... but obviously if f- uh, the first and second one-

   13. MLMads Larsen30:07

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson30:07

       ... finding a partner, getting a partner, then push you into the third one-

   15. MLMads Larsen30:09

       Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson30:09

       ... the third one can then become... Right, I've, I've jumped ahead of where we're ending.

   17. MLMads Larsen30:12

       Absolutely.

   18. CWChris Williamson30:13

       But yeah, carry on.

   19. MLMads Larsen30:13

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, no absolutely. So the, the, but the issue is there hasn't been changes in fecundity. Fecundity seems to be the same or better than before. So it's not that we're not able to have children, but yeah, when women start very late then it becomes more problematic, but that is not more problematic than it used to be, it's just that women are starting later.So then we have to look at, then we have to look at the world. So where and, and so where in the world were birthrates, where people are still reproducing and growing, are in countries where female equality is not a very high value. And, and, and this is an important factor. This is a result of the empowerment and liberation and equality, uh, afforded to women in the process that has been ongoing in the West since, for like, 800 years. And here it's very important for me to state, uh, that I am an enormous supporter of equality for women. I am such a big supporter of that, that I would like also women in the future to have the same rights and opportunities that women have today. If we continue down the path we are now and just self-eradicate, those populations that are left are not champions of women's freedoms. So when, when we go into this and we talk about what has happened, um, with women over the past, say, particularly 150 years, that explains, um, much of the first bottleneck. But describing these mechanisms and this process is not f- um, doesn't mean that I, I'm, I'm against it. I'm just describing these are the mechanisms that are at play, this is how human nature plays out in certain environments, and I wish it wasn't that way, but it really seems to be that way. So, this is what I, I will be describing. So, what we talked about last year is that our lineage, uh, over the... yeah, it's interesting to look at the last six million years. Uh, we became a pair bonding species around four million years ago, and women only evolved an attraction to men, uh, that motivated sufficient pair bonding and reproduction in really impoverished environments. So men, as we talked about, because their promiscuous attraction system is so, uh, generous, they're a lot more willing to have sex with women and, and engage with women than what... or a lot dif- many different kinds of women than what women are. So if, if a man activates her pair bonding attraction system, that can be a man with similar mate value as she has; they fall in love, they have sex, they have a child. But if you have an environment like we have now that appeals predominantly to, or to a great extent to the promiscuous attraction system, uh, which is what Tinder does et cetera, um, then women will be a lot more selective. So, we have a few things that have happened here. Women have been empowered to have their own jobs, make their own money, be free, and importantly, to choose their own partners for the first time in human history. The result of that has been that the better women are doing, the more they exclude, uh, the lowest value men from their potential pool of partners. And with prosperity and with a promiscuous mating regime like we have now, or, or that is a lot more promiscuous than before, female mating psychology seems, uh, to channel the attention to higher value men to avoid, uh, the deception of similar value men. That's something that happens in permis- when there's high promiscuity. While lower value men in a s- in this, in a, um, environment like we have today, even though they are, uh, receiving less mating attraction and having less opportunities and we see their number of sex partners going down, they will have increased expectations of promiscuity. Uh, so you, you get more and more dysfunction the further away from this third sexual revolution of the 1960s we get. This is only getting worse. So, the problem with creating relationships now, and this has been something that's been in the d- in the debate in Norway, um, to an enormous extent, what women are, what very many women have said in this debate, I don't know how representative it is, but their main point, talking point is that men aren't good enough, and if men do not become better, women simply don't want to partner with them and certainly not have children.

   20. CWChris Williamson34:37

       What do you think they mean when they say "better"?

   21. MLMads Larsen34:41

       It's, it's quite predictable. Women, of course, because they have, uh, because of our evolutionary past, they have a, a lower desire for partner variety, while men because by having promiscuous sex they would leave a larger genetic legacy, they have a higher desire for partner variety. So one Norwegian st- one study showed that Norwegian women want five lifetime sex partners, and Norwegian men want 25. So this is a question of how markets work. When you have a high demand of female sexuality and a low supply, women will have the power on the short term mating market. So, as we know, if you, if you as a woman go on Tinder now, you will get access to thousands and tens of thousands of men and, and you will have men that have much higher mate value, um, give you a lot of attention and try really hard to get a date with you, and then get you to bed. So when you have that kind of enormous choice, that kind of power, it's very natural that you increase your standards. Now, if women understood better, and I do understand it, many understand it very well and some understand it to some extent, but this isn't, this isn't a cultural script that we're raised with. We're not offered this information when we grow up. It's just not a part of our culture 'cause this mating regime is so new, but it's, it's a big difference between a short and long-term mating market. So if... many women confuse the power they have on the short term mating market with the long term mating market where men and women are more equal. So the short, their experiences on the short term mating market motivates women to increase their partner demands, which then when they, when... which they can do on the short term mating market. There's no limits to how many attractive men they can have there. But if they want a boyfriend, then they have to go on dates with men that have similar mating value with them because in monogamous regime, our species mates assortatively. People with similar value find each other. And this makes it harder and harder for women to find partners. Uh, and, and the funny thing in the debate that's been in Norway is that-So many said that, "Oh, my God. We really- th- those men need to stop telling women to lower their standards. Uh, the problem isn't that we have high demands." And, and then they go and list 10 things that men have to do to get better. So, um, this environment that we live in now, it just motivates women to... Number one, they don't need men anymore. They used to need men, and those emotion, that attraction women have for men evolved in a much more impoverished environment where having a man was- could be of existential importance, and now they don't need 'em. Women can have wonderful lives without men. Um, for many women, the type of men that they would have access to simply isn't good enough to justify not longer, uh, being single. And on an individual level, that is perfectly fine, and I support it 100%. So what women are doing on the short and long-term mating market, I have no issue on that. As individuals, I lay no blame. But our society will disappear if we don't do anything about this. And the thing is, this is a brand new system that no human community has succeeded with be-... We've been doing this for 50 years, and these processes, these changing between, uh, uh, different mating regimes typically can take centuries. Some of them, the older ones took much longer even. So that we, after 50 years, haven't found a way to reconcile individual and social needs, it's no wonder. But now that we see the effect that our inability to find partners leads to self-eradication, we need to talk about it, we need to agree that this is a problem and that it's an existential problem, and we have to start experimenting. Not by forcing women to marry incels, but to try to find if we can create new dating arenas, if we can increase the knowledge around this, if we can change people approach to dating and mating, then I am, I am naively positive. I mean, I- I've studied the human m- or hominin mating over six million years. We face tremendous challenges, and our ancestors solved every single one of them. And the 21st Century's reproductive crisis, it's not the biggest one. I, I, I, I think we can make changes and these fertility researchers that I've talked with, they don't have much of an historical perspective. They look at today and they see this is a problem, they don't understand why it's happening, and then they give up and a lot of them say, "We just need to embrace low fertility." We've solved problems like this-

   22. CWChris Williamson39:06

       Ho-

   23. MLMads Larsen39:06

       ... so many times. Yeah, go ahead.

6. 39:09 – 47:42

   Do Men Need to Change & Improve?

   1. MLMads Larsen39:09

   2. CWChris Williamson39:09

      H- how do you know that it's women's standards being too high and not men, the standard of men decreasing?

   3. MLMads Larsen39:21

      Um, because it's, it's relative. I mean, men are men and women are women. Uh, going out and saying, "Men, you have to get better," I mean, who would go out and say, "Uh, Somalis need to get better," or, "People with Down syndrome have to get better"? We don't talk like that to groups. We don't say they're not good enough and tell them to better themselves. Uh, uh, one, because it's inhumane, and two, it doesn't work. You can't tell groups to pull themselves together. Uh, so yeah. Maybe men have gotten worse and worse, maybe women have gotten better and better, I... but I think it's more, it's a, it's... it's a change in that women... We had patriarchal societies where women were subservient and dependent on men. Uh, if they didn't find a partner, they would be sanctioned socially hard, um, they would live in poverty many times. So now that we've created these wonderful new societies, that innate biological attraction that women had to men that motivated sufficient reproduction in the past, it's no longer strong enough. Life is too good. And given that, we have to look for new solutions.

   4. CWChris Williamson40:32

      I can see why, uh, (laughs) uh, somebody that wanted to find, uh, potential holes or headlines to pick in your argument would be replete with options, because, uh, un- a, uh, mean characterization of some of the points that you're putting forward would be something like, so the argument is women should get into relationships with guys who either aren't good enough or that they don't fundamentally like, that bringing back a patriarchal or enforced monogamy style... socially enforced monogamy, not Handmaid's Tale. Uh, socially enforced monogamy style, uh, society is better, that, uh, equality and women's financial and socioeconomic independence is, um, anathema, uh, to, um, having a, uh, a flourishing society. Therefore, all of the things that we have done should be rolled back. And the more that we roll them back, the more that we then get the birthrate to be able to flourish again. So, uh, I mean, w- we've spoken about this, I've spoken about this hundreds of times. Uh-

   5. MLMads Larsen41:36

      Mm-hmm.

   6. CWChris Williamson41:36

      But it's a difficult circle to square to say that something which was good and that everybody is in support of, uh, women getting their socioeconomic independence, women having equal access to the things that they should, women not being under the boot of their father or their brother or stuff like that. Like, these things are good in a developed society, and yet they can also have this externality which is wh- it's misaligned with mating psychology, and downstream from that what you end up with is this really difficult situation. And, you know, to the women that are, are listening too, especially the ones that are struggling to find a guy that they think is good enough, uh, you know, there's no... I... Uh, and this is why we get into interventions a little bit later on, but I think it's very difficult to say, "Hey, girls, lower your standards." Like, what does that mean? What does that mean? In a- in the same way as telling guys that you need to do better. Like, what does that mean? Especially at a group level. You know, at the individual level, what you're asking is...... kind of like a, a, what's it called? A tragedy of the commons type thing, a God's eye view-

   7. MLMads Larsen42:46

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson42:47

      ... uh, coordination. You, individual man, you should work harder so that you can help the birthrate, or you, individual woman, you should lower your standards so that you can help the birthrate. It's like, not for you. You take a, a personal, uh, cost, you pay a personal cost in order to supply a public benefit, and, uh-

   9. MLMads Larsen43:09

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson43:10

       Yeah. It's, it's, it's fascinates... Okay, we've got th- what, a couple of other things here. W- when women say men do better and they've got a list of, uh, a list of things, what are the main areas? Because presumably, one of the places that we should be looking at for intervention is how do we make men more attractive to women in this new environment? That has to be one of the roots that you lay out. It would be stupid to not give that information out to guys 'cause there will be a subset of men that go, "Hey, just give me the cheek. What is it they're looking for again? And if you just give me that and I'll just like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick and I'll be sweet." So what are the areas that women say men are lacking in?

   11. MLMads Larsen43:50

       Well, these lists that, that has spread, they're, they're not terribly insightful or helpful, I think. But it reflects the experiences that women have had with men. Um, don't be so interested in hunting and fishing and cars. Uh, don't talk about yourself. Uh, give me the right emotional support. Uh, don't brag about things. It, it's, it's these minutiae that they say that men, in general, suffer from, and it's, it's not men in general. There's, there's some, there's a normal distribution among men. You have a, a few men at the top that are phenomenal and a few men at the bottom that are terrible, and then you have just a bunch of normal guys. And, and women are right. In today's environment, men aren't good enough for women, but then we have to ask, what are we gonna do about that? And I don't know a single person, I don't even know if I've met a single person who wants to go back to the Dark Ages and, and put women under the boot of the patriarchy. But if we really love female freedoms as highly as many proclaim, and I certainly do, then we owe ourselves to start experimenting and trying new things to see if we can have societies that exist in the future where women also are free. I mean, th- the stakes couldn't be higher, so this misplaced fear that if we talk about low fertility, women will suddenly live in oppressive patriarchies the day after tomorrow or 10 years down the line or 50 years down the line. I mean, I understand the fear because nobody wants to go back. Women don't wanna be unfree again. What I've done in my research and in other projects also, I- I s- I've studied the cultural changes over the last thousand years to see how, what is it that made modernity emerge? And we never go backwards. We have these really deep cultural changes intermittently, and they're terrible, and we're living through one now. Um, and in those cases, we have to start entertaining new thoughts, new norms, and new values. And, and different communities should try different solutions based on what is salient to them based on their cultural legacy, and I think Norway's in a unique position here. We've been spearhanding- uh, spearheading new gender relations for 150 years. We've been in the forefront of female equality, and we, in Scandinavia, we have really good culture for this. We have, uh, a s- cohesive populations. We have a lively national debate. Uh, we're willing to find and experiment with new things and find solutions, and I think we can do it here also. And I think all nations should do that, build on their cultural legacies and try new things. And, I mean, in Norway, it would be so anathema for, uh... I think the risk of us going back to the Dark Ages is very small, but I'd be willing to, uh, to suggest a suicide pact on this. I mean, we're stirring towards self-eradication. Let's just agree if, um, um, and I understand women's fear of this, so let's agree. Female freedoms at the level of 2024 can never be threatened. Let's have that as our starting point. Let's experiment with new ways of dating and mating, but never ever anything that would involve jeopardizing women's freedoms. And if those means that we come up with aren't able to help us increase fertility, then we'll die together. We'll disappear. We'll, we'll just dwindle until there's no one left, and that will be the Norwegian way. And then, I'm sure some other countries in the world will experiment with more, uh, Handmaid's Tale-like, uh, like means for raising fertility, but that won't be us. Uh, and that is t- that is the key to success. We have all these different communities, all these different cultural legacies that make different means salient to us. We need to start experimenting. We need to do something because we're all disappearing in, in this part of the world.

7. 47:42 – 57:07

   How Society Can Help Elevate Men

   1. MLMads Larsen47:42

   2. CWChris Williamson47:42

      Yeah. I, um... Just to kind of play the other side, and so much of what I was learning about over the last few years to do with, you know, the increasing socioeconomic ex- successive of women over the last 50 years, particularly, uh, the tall girl problem. As I've come to say that if you stand on the top of your own status hierarchy, it's very difficult to find someone above and across on the other one. And, um-

   3. MLMads Larsen48:06

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson48:06

      You know, 50 years ago when Title IX came in, and, uh, th- the gap between women and men in university was smaller than the gap between men and women now. Men are now further behind in terms of their university, uh, uh, attendance than women were when Title IX, a policy that was brought in to precisely help raise up what was at the time, an underperforming minority, right? Or an underperforming group, perhaps not a minority. And, um, I'm just trying to think about like where that energy is to help raise up underperforming men.... um, you know, if we do have, if, if this is true, let's say, let's, let's, let's, uh, take the sort of public proclaimants as accurate that men are not being of a, a high enough standard in order for women to date them-

   5. MLMads Larsen48:58

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson48:58

      ... that would be like saying, "Well, women aren't of a high enough intellect in order to get, to go to university." Well, what do you do? You, you, you help, you spend billions and billions in taxpayer-funded money to create councils and research initiatives and social change campaigns, and you help to change norms, and you raise up the group which is falling behind. But even more so in this one, the dearth of appropriate and eligible male partners directly impacts the wellbeing of the life of the single women who, uh, don't have anybody to date. You know, you could say that, kind of in a roundabout way, more smart people, including women going to university, makes for a smarter and more prosperous world because there's, like, people doing innovation and stuff like that. But it's a much less direct route, right, than if you spend a lot of money helping men to become better, which I'm sure that the men aren't going to have a problem with. It's like, "Hey man, like, here's free gym membership, and mindfulness training, and blah, blah, blah." Or looking at the socioeconomic problems, which is, "Well, why aren't men flourishing? Why aren't they going to university? Why is it two women for every one man doing a four-year US college degree? Why do women outearn men between 21 and 29 by over 1,000 pounds a year, the age during which the, uh, socioeconomic success of your partner is probably going to be more indicative of your mating success when men and women are more likely to be available in trying to find potential partners, where their fecundity is highest, so you're going to be able to get the best bang for your buck, so to speak, out of your mating efforts?" Uh, stage two of the bottleneck that we'll get onto.

   7. MLMads Larsen50:33

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson50:33

      I just get the sense that there, there really is very little sort of charitability being paid. Uh, you know, even the word "incel," uh, William Costello, Andrew Thomas was on very recently talking about it. Uh, the, the word "incel" just sort of conjures up all manner of, of, of... And maybe it needs to be rebranded, you know. U- unfortunately, it's a very great term that was used and sort of spread too widely as a meme. But, like, who wants that? Who wants there to be people who want to do a thing and can't do the thing, and are sort of clawing and, and desperate and, and, and trying and, and don't get that? Like, that's not, that would be like saying, like, uh, in- in-intellect or something. Oh, involuntarily stupid or something, that's the reason that women aren't going to university. It's like, no, no one said that. No one thought that. But because we are dealing with men who traditionally have been in, uh, a preferential position in society, and because we're talking about women's bodies, which is a very, uh, fraught topic that nobody wants to come in and, and feel like they're starting to mandate anything, uh, yeah, i- you know, if you talk about situations that sort of raise up men and men's standards, that feels like kind of manipulating the market in a way. Like, men know men should raise themselves up. They should try. They should want to do it. It's the, "If you loved me, you'd know why I'm mad at you" kind of argument. And then on the other side, if you say, "Well, what about women's standards being too high?" They'll go, "W- what? So you're saying that you want me to get into a relationship with somebody that I don't like, that I don't love, that isn't good enough for me? We've spent all of this time building up our socioeconomic success, finally getting egalitarian access to all of the things that we need, and you're telling me that now I have to roll back my financial independence to, like, some weird olden worldy 1900s, 1800s Victorian England version of mating mentality just so that I can feel remotely satisfied with a partner that I don't think meets my stan-..." And that's not gonna happen." So, I mean, this is like a... I mean, you, you seem to think it's a tractable problem, but to me, it's a, like a, you know, spaghetti junction of cables that every time you try and pull on them... Like, today, there's been, we, between the two of us, there's been, like, 20 absolutely unspeakable things that you've s- that, that w- one of us has said, right? Like that these, that, that this area of discussion is so non-typically done in a manner that isn't used as a, a, a cudgel to, to hit people over the head with or to try and get some sort of-

   9. MLMads Larsen53:04

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson53:04

       ... nefarious campaign across that you don't, nobody uses what's called the Oxford manner, right, the abilit- the ability to play gracefully with ideas. That's not allowed. Um, but yeah, anyway, just, uh, to kind of fight the other side of this, when women had a problem, we said, "What can we do to fix society?" But now that men have a problem, we say, "What is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves?"

   11. MLMads Larsen53:27

       Yeah, we don't tell, but that's, it's certainly not in Scandinavia, that's not what we tell poor people, "Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps." That more of an American strategy. But what you said about the incel term is very interesting. Unfortunately, that coin was termed, uh, or at least it spread into the mainstream with these terrorist attacks of the 2010s. And what this has cost, it's very unfortunate. I mean, incels, it's arguably the most or one of the most marginalized groups in society. On some level, it, it is the most marginalized group. These are men that be, are being deprived of life opportunities or just suffering in, in, in, in, in s- in solitaire. Uh, and I, I, I wrote one op-ed in Norway where I said, "There's a reason why you don't know the name of a single Norwegian incel." Uh, I speak up about these matters, and I'm in a position to endure the hatred and the attacks that come, and, and they have become increasingly grave. Could you imagine what happened if a regular guy, an incel, spoke up and said, "I have never had any mating opportunities. Let me tell you how this destroys my life." First, he wouldn't be met with compassion. He'd be villainized. He'd be seen as a misogynist and a potential terrorist. So we've created the culture where these men that are the most marginalized and you could say oppressed-... aren't even allowed to speak up about how terrible their lives have become, so we don't hear anyone bear witness to this marginalization. Women spoke up loudly and proudly about what the patriarchy were doing to them, and they succeeded with, with liberating themselves from that. It's very difficult to see in the short to, to mid-range how these men can be a part of the public conversation because the costs that we impose on them are so enormous. And to that other thing you said about how can we raise up men, well, that's, that's w- what you could call one of the Scandinavian paradoxes. In raising up women, as I... Again, (laughs) a thing that I mentioned to you last year, uh, the, the Norwegian welfare state, men pay more into it in taxes than they receive from it. Women receive more than $1.2 million from the, from the welfare state over, over their lifetime than they pay in, in taxes. And $1.2 million, it's, that's still pretty good money. So and, and I think that is one of the linchpins of our society. The reason why Norway according to the UN almost every year is the best society living in the world is precisely because we transfer these resources from men to women, and that allows... And there's a variety of reasons why that creates a better society. But then a negative aspect of that is that men lose these resources and women gain them, which is good for society, good for the women and the children they bear, but it makes men relatively less attractive. Because number one, women to a much lesser extent need the resources of a partner, and men are, or have lost these resources that in previous times would make them more attractive to women, and that's a, that's a very bad externality. So we created the b- perhaps the greatest society in human history, and because of the way we did that, we're now steering towards self-eradication 'cause we created a society where men actually aren't good enough to entice women's, uh, attraction systems so that women are, are, want to have sex with them and pair bond with them and have children with them, and, uh, that is unfortunate. And like you said, that is a spaghetti.

8. 57:07 – 1:02:31

   How to Improve Our Mating Ideology

   1. MLMads Larsen57:08

   2. CWChris Williamson57:08

      What about the second bottleneck? Let's say that we've managed to weave our way through the first one. We've managed to find a partner. We're happy with them. We're ready to settle down, get married, and, and, and the question comes up, "Are we gonna make babies?"

   3. MLMads Larsen57:26

      Yeah, so, uh, that has to do about cultural ideology. This is what we covered the last time over a, over a, over an hour, and, uh, I recently published a book called Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder where I take the reader through a 800-year journey of Western ideologies of love to show how we ended up where we are today and how that explains our dating dysfunction and the demographic collapse. So we now live in a world with the mating ideology that's called confluence love. Confluence means to come together, so we're supposed to come together and do things together. We're supposed to stay together, and when it's not, move on. Uh, so it's, we have serial pair bonding interspersed with opportunistic short-term relationships. So we sleep around when we're single, and hope, um, preferably not when we're hitched up, and then, uh, relationships last for as long as they, uh, last. And this, this, the values of this mating regime is convenience, reward, and individualistic self-realization. So we're supposed to, uh, to do whatever works for us as individuals. And to modern ideology, that makes a lot of sense, and, uh, we've, we've wanted, we wanted to do that for a good while but we weren't prosperous enough, but now we are, and now we've implemented this regime, uh, symbolically from 1968. Uh, before that, to give an example of another, uh, ideology of love, from the early 1800s until 1986 we had the ideology of romantic love where cultures imposed on people, they indoctrinated them, acculturated them, socialized them, however you wanna put it, into thinking that a man and a woman as individuals, they're only half a person, so you're supposed to find that other soul that matches yours and then you're supposed to merge in a pair bond underpinned by very strong true love, and this love lasts a lifetime, and then you self-realize as a couple through the breadwinner housewife model. So from our perspective, that, that sounds a little bit silly, but imposing those beliefs on people pushed them together and made them have children to a sufficient extent. Well, you could say maybe, uh, to a too high extent, uh, because they really dep- the population growth during that period was enormous. So in that second bottle- when it comes to having children, in earlier times, in all earlier times, and I'm sure there were exceptions here and there but maybe those weren't too functional, societies imposed on people that they had to pair bond and have children. If not, you'll be sanctioned, ostracized, or maybe you'd be a monk or go to war or work the fields, uh, and we don't do that anymore. And we only... And here's an important part, contraception. We only... We didn't evolve to have this incredible desire to be parents. We have a desire for it, but as we see now, it's not strong enough for our current environment. Uh, evolution works in a way that it implants proxies for, uh, you're sexually attracted to someone. Uh, e- e- y- you do these things and then in some, at least, it's efficient reproduction. But now that we detached copulation from, from reproduction through effective contraceptives, those adaptations that we evolved from the previous mating regimes don't work as well, and we also have this ideology where ha- not having children has b- uh, ha- where having children has become quite voluntary. I mean, there's still some pressure, but you'll do fine without. In some milieus, it's even seen as heroic not to have children. You have environmentalists.... uh, that think having children is wrong. You have all kinds of different, a- anti-natalist beliefs. And, and this reduces the pressure that in previous times pushed p- people toward reproduction. So that's ... When people do manage to pair bond and they have to decide whether to have children or not, you have those ideological differences from earlier times, and then you have other environmental pressures such as the costliness of having children, the difficulties, the time pressure, et cetera. So, uh, you have all these factors that play in there. And what politicians and fertility researchers are drawn to are those more mundane environmental factors. So Norway probably has the best social regime in the world for having children. We give incredible benefits to parents and children that they're, there's pr- there's probably never existed an environment in the history of humanity where it's more beneficial to have children than in Norway, and still we're not doing it. So what this birth rate committee, uh, is probably going to do is suggest we throw another $100 there, another $1,000 there, but we know from research that that's not gonna work. So if, if we're gonna work on this second bottleneck, it's about cultural change and p- and evolving towards a new ideology of love. And that sounds very inappropriate for modern minds. We're not ... We're supposed to leave individuals alone. A lot of people have said in the debate over it that it's inappropriate for politicians to engage. But, I mean, if we're steering towards self-eradication, nothing is more important than e- than the question of existence versus non-existence, so we really should be open, uh, to experimenting and trying to question even our most sacred values.

9. 1:02:31 – 1:08:09

   The Actual Reasons Why People Aren’t Having Kids

   1. MLMads Larsen1:02:31

   2. CWChris Williamson1:02:31

      In a lot of the studies, I think, that I've seen lots of the survey data, GSS data and a few others come back, and some of the highest rated reasons for why people haven't had kids is, um, "Not ready yet. Still working on myself. Uh, don't have the money and, uh, i- i- insufficiently financially s- secure." W- what do you make of the sort of cost of living and self-actualization ideologies sort of slash thought pattern when it comes to its contribution? 'Cause at least in terms of self-reports, "Uh, haven't found somebody I'm sufficiently attracted to..." Wow, didn't mean to do that. "Uh, haven't found somebody that I'm sufficiently attracted to, um, to be able to, uh, have a partner with," is very low down the list, very low.

   3. MLMads Larsen1:03:24

      Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, we don't know. That is the thing about this. We ... Experts actually do not know what the precise factors are that have created this situation. They don't understand why people aren't had ... They know some ... Right, they know that urbanization is a factor, uh, individualization, but how they play in, how much they affect things, uh, it's still a puzzle. And especially one of these factors could be amenable to policy. What is it we have to do? W- h- ... What kind of society do we have to move towards to make people again having children? It's been very under-researched. Uh, that is among, uh, other things I've, I'm, I'm, I'm part of a, a group of, of researchers that are applying for funds now, and we wanna actually find this out. We wanna study female and male mating psy- uh, reproductive psychology and see what are the actual factors. Not what people say are the factors, but through long- through longitudinal studies to uncover what the actual elements are that motivate or demotivate reproduction. And it's, it's ... Especially within evolutionary psychology, this has been so under-researched over the last few decades. There's been so many valuable contributions on, on dating and relationships and parental investment, partner preferences, sex, everything within mating except its ultimate function, which is to reproduce. That's been-

   4. CWChris Williamson1:04:48

      Hmm.

   5. MLMads Larsen1:04:49

      ... enormously under-researched and which is, which is puzzling. And now it's, it's become r- existentially important to understand these mechanisms.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:04:56

      I suppose y- y- you hinted at it before, the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons, you know. Proximate reason, sex feels good. Ultimate reason, it makes babies. Um-

   7. MLMads Larsen1:05:06

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:05:07

      Looking at the ultimate justification, you, you ... It's a much more direct, uh, intervention to just get straight to the proximate because y- you know exactly how that works. You can manipulate it more directly. Uh, e- e- getting in and, and sort of ... The ultimate is usually the unspoken thing. It's the thing behind the thing. Uh, but I do wonder ... I was having a conversation with a friend, uh, who was telling me that he, uh, held his sister's newborn baby for the first time, and this is the first member of his kin that's been, like, newborn. His first family newborn. He held it in his hands. And as, as he was doing it, immediately he had these sort of classic visions of a warrior man going to protect this child. It's not his child, but it's pretty close, right? You know, he's an uncle. And, uh, it ... We had a conversation and I think there's an odd maybe sort of memetic child desire that goes on that increasingly atomized, uh, non-pangenerational living where people are in their own houses, they move away from home at 18, they don't get to see their brothers and sisters and potentially their children quite so much anymore. Everyone's in their own silo. On top of that, a declining birth rate means that there are fewer children around to show people who don't yet have children that children are a thing that you can have. How much have you considered this? This kind of, um, the ... One of the big impacts of being around children is that it per- perhaps encourages you to have children. And by that, having fewer children begets reduction in the incentive to or the drive to have children.

   9. MLMads Larsen1:06:46

      Yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's why the leading research in this believe that this unfortunately is, is a self-reinforcing process.Like I mentioned, Norwegian women want to have 2.4 children but they have 1.4. Now that it's fell to 1.4, the next generation will probably want to have quite a bit fewer than 2.4 and we're seeing this through the generations. So we're not able to fulfill our fertility ideals and this puts us in a spiral that just entails us, as society, circling the drain until there's no one left-

   10. CWChris Williamson1:07:19

       Yeah, and, and the fertility is-

   11. MLMads Larsen1:07:19

       ... unless we're able to turn this around.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:07:22

       Yeah, the fertility ideal-

   13. MLMads Larsen1:07:23

       Yeah, so that's why, that-

   14. CWChris Williamson1:07:24

       ... as well is a moving target.

   15. MLMads Larsen1:07:27

       Yeah, no, that's why I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation how unfortunate it is that the main Norwegian researchers on this, they're just waiting for women around 40 to have an unprecedented number of baby because, I, I mean the leading international experts are pretty uniform. They're, they don't all agree but they're pretty uniform. This isn't turning around. It's, it's, they say that it's more likely that it continues to decline than that it tapers off or goes up again. So if we don't turn this around, likely it will only get worse and this circling of the drain is just gonna go faster and faster until our societies collapse.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:08:04

       Didn't someone say that the best you can do is, for the fertility rate,

10. 1:08:09 – 1:19:01

    Opposition to Mads’ Work

    1. CWChris Williamson1:08:09

       is to just resign and relax?

    2. MLMads Larsen1:08:13

       Yeah. That was a commentator in Norway's biggest newspaper. She, uh, she thought 1.4 was just, that was just a, um, a, a number that captured the moment. Um, and she also, so she talked to this expert and they said, "Yeah, yeah. No, Norwegian women will start having babies soon in their 40s. So this is, this is gonna go up again." So yeah. She, she actually wrote that the best thing we could do for there to increase the fertility rate is to resign and relax, and if we do that, we disappear.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:08:45

       And then Norway's ex-sexiest woman of the year said that men were whining, and then a gay guy said that men are trying to cry their way into women's pants.

    4. MLMads Larsen1:08:57

       Yeah. There's been... And I'm grateful that they chime in. I'm, I, I haven't responded to almost any of them. Uh, I'm just glad that people are participating in this debate and if they wanna smear men or, or wanna attack my credentials or my intentions or call me a fascist, that's just how these debates work. And hopefully this is, uh, the first phase of the debate, and then if we're able to get past it, we can agree that this is an existential challenge. And after that we can start talking about experiments and then executing them and maybe we can have more research around this and, and we can have a, a national movement (laughs) to try to turn this around. I, I, like I said, I think especially Scandinavian nations are the best situated nations for doing something about this. We should spearhead this. We should be in the forefront. We're so rich and wealthy and we have such good national conversations and we're so far ahead in general. Should we, we've been doing this for so long, why can't we, like, cease? This is the biggest problem we've faced, at least in a very long time. Let's try to solve it. Let's not resign and give up.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:10:08

       What happened at your university when they found out that you were researching fertility rates?

    6. MLMads Larsen1:10:16

       Well, there too I am very understanding. I, I was working at a center of, of environmentalists and they need to have their profile and I respect that. M- and when they found out that I was going to research declining populations from a negative perspective, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. But I found a different university that I'm applying for research funds from, so I'm okay. But, uh, well it's, people don't understand that 1.4 means that our societies will disappear. They don't see the problems with it and they don't see how this can work against solving the climate crisis. Collapsing societies aren't gonna develop new technology, they're not gonna be cooperative. They're probably not gonna recycle too much either. I mean, it's, we want functioning societies, stable functioning societies for the next generation so we can fix the climate crisis. And this is a new situation. Before this summer there harden to har... Maybe one or two op-eds a year in leading newspapers where people said that we'll be fine, 1.4 isn't a big of a deal. And one op-ed wrote that this for sure won't be as bad as the Black Death, so we'll be okay, which is a pretty low bar.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:11:29

       (laughs)

    8. MLMads Larsen1:11:29

       So yeah, I, I, uh, I, I understand. I'm, I'm, I'm, and yeah, um, especially for environmentalists it's hard to wrap your head around how, uh, uh, a declining population could be a negative thing. So, uh, I, I try to be understanding. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, yeah. It wasn't too cool-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:11:50

       Did I, uh-

    10. MLMads Larsen1:11:50

        ... but I'll be okay.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:11:51

        ... I ap- I applaud your patience. I really do. It's, uh, you know, when you're... I, I had this really great conversation with Richard Reeves. I'll send it to you once we're done 'cause I think the political psychology side of science communication activism, talking about topics that are kind of on the edge of the Overton window, I think it, it really might be good framing for you given that he's the, uh, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, so he's having a similarly unpopular discussion. And, um, we spoke about that and he had this really interesting insight where he said that people who talk about unpopular topics and feel, uh, scapegoated or, or, or, uh, castigated or, uh, you know, insulted, uh, when they do it, what they do is they become increasingly ... aggressive with their tone because they're more and more frustrated that they get sort of labeled as this really nasty thing. So, you know, you see, uh, a lot of, uh, I think men's rights activists, uh, probably, uh, uh, a- a good chunk of them get thrown into this bucket because they've been fighting about family court or divorce law or, you know, male suicide or whatever it, whatever it is for, for a long time, and because they've either been ignored or insulted, what they do is they just keep ramping the rhetoric up. I think you could see this with the climate, uh, movement too, right? The, "No, you don't understand. If we get past however many parts per million in CO2, it's gonna be a problem, so I'm gonna throw paint over a, a... throw soup over a painting. I'm gonna glue myself to the M25 and I'm gonna do..." You know, big, big d- all bigger, bigger, bigger. And, um, as Richard said, the problem you have when you do that is that you become less and less acceptable to be understood, especially in an arena that's increasingly inflammatory because you are more inflammatory. The way that you communicate these ideas becomes more aggressive, which is the exact opposite of the impact that you wanted it to have. So at the very time when you need to be as, uh, peaceful and gentle as possible, you're putting the strong argument forward, but you're doing it from a place of sort of rationality and realism as opposed to one of, like, just steaming in, it's all emotion because it's much easier to dismiss the arguments of somebody saying something you don't want to believe that is already unpopular if they do it laden with emotion as opposed to if they come in and they say, "Hey, interesting st- I'm just gonna put some, some facts forward for you here. Here's, here's some things that you should consider." And they go, "What a reasonable e- n- nothing that anybody can say is that you haven't been reasonable with the way that you've put your, your points forward." And, uh, I- I- I never thought about that before. It was really interesting. I've never been an activist really for anything. I've got interests and stuff. But I've certainly felt that, uh, distaste sometimes when I've been talking about stuff to do with men's mental health or whatever, and I- I, you know, the rhetoric does get a little bit more agitated. It does get a little bit more fiery. You think, "Is that actually effective? What am I doing? Am I using this as a, a, a punching bag opportunity to vent about my own internal frustration at nobody listening? Or am I doing this to try and make as big of an impact as I can in the world?" Because those two things-

    12. MLMads Larsen1:15:05

        Mm-hmm.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:15:05

        ... often are actually, uh, counter to each other.

    14. MLMads Larsen1:15:09

        Yeah. No, you asked, uh, earlier if, if, if I saw myself as some kind of firebrand. I, I wish I wasn't in the position. I want to jump over these next two phases and jump to the one where we start researching this and conducting experiments and try to turn things around. I don't enjoy being the object of hatred and derision and having... Well, if, if, if at least they attacked something that was actually my position, but so far it's been exclusively straw man, and it's, uh, uh, it, n- of, of course it's, it's tiresome. It sucks. My, my department lied to a newspaper that I was no longer connected to them. I have a contract out the year and they just didn't want to be associated with me. The reason why I'm sitting here is because, uh, my university would no lan- longer let me use the podcast studio, which were just bizarre. I'm like, just, "What is this? It's so odd." But that's-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:16:09

        Seems very petty.

    16. MLMads Larsen1:16:09

        ... how these things work. Yeah, I was at a dinner a couple of weeks ago with a, a member of the Birthright Committee, a very reasonable, uh, person, and, and he said he's, uh, th- they haven't been able to create debate about this. And this summer I was able to do that and, and, and that noise will help them. So now, now we're working through that phase where people are just arguing and bickering and saying this isn't a problem and hopefully we can get to the point where we can have a reasoned discussion about this, and that's when the Birthright Committee will put forward their findings. However useful or un-useful they are, I don't know. We- we'll have to see. But then after that, something else will come. I mean, this isn't a one-year conversation. We're gonna be talking about this for generations unless we're able to turn this around, let's recircle the drain. I mean, it's gonna become more and more apparent how devastating, how disastrous the consequences will be of losing a third of your generation or two thirds of your generational size per generations. It's, it's... This discussion is not over. It has just started.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:17:13

        Yeah.

    18. MLMads Larsen1:17:13

        And thank you for, for pushing this and not just inviting me, but so many others to talk about this. Y- you're the, you're one of those who really are spearheading this in the international marketplace of ideas, and that's really valuable.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:17:26

        I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, it's, uh, it's an, such an odd type of existential risk because, you know, some of them, fire, wildfires start, you feel the heat, uh, there's black plumes of smoke in the air or there's smog on the ground or, you know, people die in a pandemic. But demographic collapse is this sort of really unique class of future risks.

    20. MLMads Larsen1:17:51

        We've never faced this problem before. Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:17:55

        Yeah.

    22. MLMads Larsen1:17:55

        No, I mean, it, uh... send an enemy at us, guess it's we're immediately gonna know exactly what to do. Our neighbor comes, go to war against us, we're gonna band together, we're gonna forget all the bickering, and we're gonna unite, and we're gonna do our best to survive and beat them and murder them and win. That's in our nature. When we're now self-eradicating, uh, we're just, "What?" It's w- y- we've had low fertility before, but we never had this kind of increasingly global phenomenon that is, that just isn't stopping. It's just th- it's just a continuing decline. So our cultural intuitions, our cultural legacies, we have almost nothing to build on. We have to think anew. We have to analyze and understand something that is really complex. And then we have to come up with completely novel solutions probably, and that is a hell of a challenge. We have very little to go on here. This is a brand new environment.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:18:50

        Well, I know that you've only just published your last book, which was awesome, but, I mean, you've got a hell of a topic for the next one and jumping in with two feet and doing whatever it is that you need to do.

11. 1:19:01 – 1:20:05

    Where to Find Mads

    1. CWChris Williamson1:19:01

       Dude, I appreciate you, uh, I- I- I really do. I very much appreciate you sort of sticking your neck out, as we would say in the UK, and, uh, and, and doing this work. It'll be interesting to see how you and Leif and the rest of the guys get on. I loved when we met at HBEST last year and it's been, uh... it's interesting to see where people end up. So I really hope that you sort of make it through. If people want to keep up to date with what's happening from your side of the world, your, uh, data, your research and stuff like that, where's best to go?

    2. MLMads Larsen1:19:29

       Well, m- maybe under the YouTube video you can put a link to my Stories of Love and Vikings to Tinder. It's open access, so it's free to download. Uh, if you want to see what I've published-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:19:38

       Awesome book. Great book.

    4. MLMads Larsen1:19:38

       ... you can go to my Google Scholar. Yeah, thank you. You can go to my Google Scholar page and just type in my name and then you'll see my publications there. Also, ResearchGate is good. There are different ways to find it.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:19:49

       Unreal. Mads, until next time, mate. I'll see you.

    6. MLMads Larsen1:19:53

       Thank you so much, Chris. It was a pleasure talking to you again. Take care.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:19:56

       (upbeat music) Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, there is something else you will absolutely love right here. Go on, give it a tap.

Episode duration: 1:20:05