Stephen J. Shaw is doing amazing work on the fertility crisis and the ongoing depopulation collapse. He’s the one who made the original Birthgap documentary, and I think he just came out with a new one, which is why he’s doing the podcast circuit.
In any case, I found this interview quite fascinating. From what I’ve seen of him, Stephen J. Shaw strikes me as a thoughtful, gentle, and caring man—not at all the sort of monster that the left-wing opponents of the pro-natalist movement like to paint us all as. It’s not at all about forcing women to have children, or about trying to breed more of the right kind of genes and less of the wrong kind. Rather, he sees our collapsing fertility as an existential human crisis, and wants to do everything he can to avert (or at least mitigate) the coming collapse.
Ward Radio is a Latter-day Saint podcast that tackles all aspects of Mormonism, from rebutting anti-Mormon arguments and debating various models of Book of Mormon geography to running deep dives on ancient apocryphal texts and fringe scientific theories. They also tackle cultural issues too, and in these two podcasts, they specifically look at the depopulation crisis from a Latter-day Saint point of view. The first one is all the main co-hosts of the podcast, and the second one is the main host’s wife and a bunch of her friends / guests from other LDS podcasts.
If current demographic trends continue, then a hundred years from now, the world population will be under 1 billion, and about 200-250 million of them will be members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another 50-100 million will be Amish, and maybe another 50-100 million will be Jewish. The Latter-day Saints will absolutely love the Jews and the Amish, to the point of annoying everyone else around them, and the Jews and the Amish will grudgingly tolerate the Latter-day Saints.
I listen to a lot of long-form podcasts these days, usually while I’m doing work that doesn’t require my full attention. So I figure it would be good to start posting links to the more interesting ones.
Chris Williamson is a great interviewer, and he has a knack for finding really interesting guests. He particularly likes to talk about modern dating and the “man-o-sphere,” which I find only somewhat interesting, and the depopulation crisis, which I find extremely interesting.
The ongoing collapse of birth rates (some places in the world have been under replacement for multiple generations now, and in just a couple of decades, almost every country in the world—including most African countries—will be under replacement if current trends continue) is, in my opinion, the greatest global crisis of our time—much, much larger than climate change, the threat of which has been greatly exaggerated by the global elites in order to push us into a techno-feudal society with them as the royalty and the rest of us as debt-serfs. But the depopulation crisis is a true existential crisis for humanity, and it’s also the exact inverse of the Malthusian population-bomb disaster that popular culture has taught us to fear.
(Also, as a side note, I find it fascinating to think that if current demographic trends continue, a hundred years from now the global population will be under 1 billion, and somewhere around 200 million of those people will be members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another 50 million will likely be Jews, since they are one of the other few demographic groups with an over-replacement fertility rate. The latter-day saints will absolutely love the Jews, and the Jews will tolerate the latter-day saints.)
Anyway, this is the latest interview that Chris Williamson did on the topic, with a Scandinavian researcher that shares some interesting data from his most recent studies. Worth giving a listen, if you’re as interested in this topic as I am.