Why a DYING China Is More Dangerous Than a Rising One

In this episode, I take you on a deep dive into why China’s decline—not its rise—could be pushing the world toward inevitable conflict. I unpack the real numbers behind China’s looming demographic crisis, explain how flawed incentives and authoritarian policy like the one-child law have triggered an irreversible population collapse, and why that matters for both China and the global economy. We'll draw historical parallels to show why peaking powers are often the most dangerous, examine what China’s desperation means for Taiwan, and explore the broader impact on everything from global supply chains to AI innovation. I’ll also tackle tough questions about falling birth rates, the impact of women’s education, and whether automation can save aging societies. Get ready for a challenging and eye-opening journey into the realities shaping the future of the world. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl#CashAppPod *Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosure. Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Ethos: Get a free quote athttps://ethos.com/impact Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at https:// https://incogni.com/impactbusiness.att.com http://business.att.com Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:28Speaker 00

  Now, the bad news is both of them predict that we're going to collide, but they're very different arguments. And given what we've been seeing in the economic data coming out of China, it might actually be true that it's the decline of China that's dangerous. Let's take a look.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  China is collapsing.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  China's population dropping. The world's second largest economy's growth prospects are diminishing.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  For 20 years, the world has been told the opposite, that China is growing so fast, building so much and taking control of so many critical industries that it's only a matter of time before it wins this century. But that story ignores this line. For 70 years, China's population moved in one direction, up. Then, in 2022, it stopped and began to fall. For the first time since a famine killed tens of millions of people in the 1960s, China is shrinking, and this time it may be impossible to reverse. This line changes everything because from this point on, every year gives China fewer workers, taxpayers, consumers and young people to carry out its ambitions.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  The longer it waits, the weaker it gets. A rising power can wait, a dying one can't. And the Chinese Communist Party knows its window is closing. It knows that China of 10 years from now will be older, smaller and weaker than the China of today, which means anything it still intends to accomplish will have to happen while it still can, and it has already started building for it.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Deep in the Chinese desert, inside Asia's biggest military complex, China is constructing something on a scale that is impossible to ignore. What is being built here reveals exactly how seriously Beijing is preparing for what comes next. The largest military training base in Asia, where China has built a replica city, a full-size copy of the center of Taiwan's capital Taipei. And at the heart of it stands a building around 136 meters long with a central tower painted red and white that matches almost exactly Taiwan's presidential office. And they're not even trying to hide it. In 2015, Chinese state television literally broadcast the footage of soldiers storming the mock building and taking the fake capital.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Dude, imagine that they had one that was the White House. We'd feel some type of way.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Yes, I feel some type of way right now. How you recreate my capital just because y'all bored? Y'all have too much free time. What is happening right now? That's wild.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Got to reunify China.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Added a replica of Taiwan.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  There's no problem with authoritarian leaders.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Its judicial yuan, a building matching Taiwan's Defense Reserve Command, and between the fake presidential office and the fake judicial yuan, they dug a tunnel. The analysts who study these images have a name for the kind of operation you practice on a target like this, a decapitation strike. Killing or capturing a country's leadership in the first hours of a war before the outside world has worked out what is happening. And it's not just this side. In 2024, satellite analysts found a second replica hundreds of kilometers away of the exact same government district in the Taklamakin Desert. China built a full-size mock-up of a Taiwanese naval base, parked a destroyer-shaped target at the dock and put a missile straight through the middle of it.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  And somewhere else, it laid out the outline of an American aircraft carrier and a replica of the US Navy's main base in Japan. Piece by piece, China is building every target it would have to hit on the first morning of a war for Taiwan. Now, Beijing caused these routine drills.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  No one in particular, but I don't know who they expect.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  These are just routine drills, Drew. We've done an exact replica of your Navy base. We've done a replica of your capital, but this isn't about you. Don't be so narcissistic. I don't know what you're trying to make about you.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  I don't want to fight China. I'm telling you that right now. I want no problem, Xi. Like, we can't even get through Iran and they building fake cities to practice on? No way, no way, no way.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  It would not be a good time. It would not be a good time.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  I don't want those problems at all.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  To understand why it's being built, we need to follow China's collapse step by step, and it begins with the one-child policy. For 35 years, China ran the most aggressive population control program in human history, the one-child policy. Forced sterilizations, mandatory abortions, fines that could wipe out a family. Because Beijing...

• 5:51Speaker 00

  I don't know how many people are aware of that kind of thing, but when we talk about, um, why, Tom, do you fear authoritarian rule? This is precisely why. When the government can tell you when you can and can't have children, when the government can roll up on you and force you to have an abortion, when the government can roll up and get you sterilized, how every alarm bell ever doesn't go off in your head, I don't understand. And everybody that I think pushes these agendas forward that says, you know, we need to look for China, look to China for inspiration, they are ignoring the fact that it is inevitable that at some point, things start moving in the wrong direction. And when you don't have people that can pull you back from that brink,

• 6:31Speaker 00

  when you don't create a system that can actually offer checks and balances within the system itself, when you don't actually stymie a lot of the things that people are trying to do, then you can get this runaway effect where it starts going in the wrong direction. Now, I think the one-child policy period of China is a glowing example of how China finally started moving in the right direction. So it can get so much worse than that, that when that starts looking good, you know you've got a problem. And that is how far bad the authoritarian of it all can break. So just, man, as you think about the collision that the US is going to be having,

• 7:13Speaker 00

  where more and more people on the far left start saying, not Nordic model, but instead Chinese model, keep in mind some of the absolute atrocities that China's doing now, recent history, and then long term.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Real quick, if we're the number one economy, they're the number two economy, they're going down. We're having a slight decline, but it's not like we're dropping down 4%, negative 4% GDP or anything. So is it maybe that can help our gap and not to make Thucydides' trap a thing?

• 7:41Speaker 00

  There are reports that China may be off in terms of their total population by hundreds of millions of people, that they've either blinded themselves to because they put such incentives on local people to over-report because that's how they get resources allocated to them. So there's an incentive structure to over-report. And then on the global stage, they don't want people to know that their population is declining. That's just a sign of weakness. So they've got reasons why internally they're incentivized to lie and why globally they're incentivized to lie. You put those two incentives together and odds are they are lying. It's just a question of by how much. Okay, so if we have this psychological energy that we're growing, we're getting big, but we put this policy in place that actually changed that,

• 8:26Speaker 00

  but nobody really noticed because there was so much cultural belief that we're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And actually, we start softening and softening and softening. You start doing this overbuild of housing specifically because you think in terms of like, more population, more population, more population, but that more population actually isn't coming. And so you've started declining without realizing it, but your economy is growing. And so the reason that I would say that China isn't necessarily going to decline faster than the US is that their economy is still growing faster than the US. So right now, whatever lead we may have, because people debate whether we're number one or they're number one, but no matter how you shake it or bake it, right now China's growing faster.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  And so over time, if they're not already number one, odds are that they will catch up to us unless their decline like just completely eats that up. Now, their rate of growth is declining. So the direction of travel that they're going in is bad, but they're still like whatever, 4%, 4.5% growth with us at our 1.2 or whatever horrific number we were in at last check. It's like, we're definitely in a worse position. Now, we're sort of flattish. They're declining at a faster rate. So we'll see who can stabilize first. Can America get growing first? We're both betting very large on AI.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  So we'll see who ends up winning that race. But understanding the why their mental image of themselves is so different than the reality is going to be important to understanding this decline. And it's the same idea that makes Thucydides' trap Thucydides' trap, which is that psychologically, you can't deal with decline. And that's what ends up causing the conflict. So this is like, in some ways, a cousin instead of a mirror image of that, which is saying, yes, that's true, it is the decline, but you need the decline of whoever's going to be the aggressor. So the aggressor will only become aggressive when they're declining. So if America still sees itself as, no, no, no, we've got a shot, then they're not going to be the aggressor.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  If China looks at it and goes, oh, our window is closing, then they are likely to be the aggressor.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Beijing was convinced China would not have enough food, jobs or homes for everyone. So it decided to cap families at one child by force, and it worked. A billion people were told exactly how many children they were allowed to have, and they obeyed. Then Beijing looked at this line, saw where it was heading and panicked. So it did a complete 180 and started begging its people to have more kids. It came as bribes, cash for babies, longer maternity leave, tax breaks, housing subsidies, even propaganda about the joy of a big family. But the line kept falling, which is interesting because remember, this is one of the most controlling states on earth, and it could force its people to stop having children,

• 11:23Speaker 01

  but it couldn't convince them to start again. So why won't... Well, the numbers simply don't add up. In China today, raising one child to the age of eighteen costs around seven times what the average person earns in a year. One of the highest ratios on earth, and that is before university. Part of it is housing, apartments in cities like Shanghai and Beijing that cost more than a young couple could ever hope to save. And part of it is school, which in China is not really about learning. It's probably best described as a war. Everything funnels toward one exam you take at age eighteen, the Gaokao. This single test literally shapes the rest of your life.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  So, parents pour thousands into private tutoring to buy their kid an edge because every other parent is doing exactly the same, and falling behind is just not an option. This education arms race got so expensive that in 2021, the government banned most private tutoring outright.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  How wild is that? Like, they so want you to have kids and people are getting so psychotic about how expensive they're making the kids. It's not like China's making the kids expensive, but they're spending so much money trying to make sure that their kid gets ahead that even when you try to ban tutors outright, like, they just keep going hard in the paint.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Just to make children cheaper. It didn't work. But here's the part that matters most. Even if China fixed every one of those issues tomorrow, this line would still not turn around. And the reason is math so simple, it's almost stupid. To make a baby, you need a woman of childbearing age, roughly twenty to thirty-four. Not if you act as Democrats. A country can

• 13:06Speaker 00

  I apologize.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  possibly have is capped hard by how many women it has in that age bracket. Right now, China has about a hundred and five million of them. By 2050, it will have around fifty-eight million, nearly

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Bro, that drop is crazy.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  half of them gone, and nothing can stop that because those women already exist, or rather, they don't. The mothers of 2045 are the baby girls being born right now.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's something that he leaves out that I think is really important. So, this is something that, uh, most people, especially in the West, they do not want to confront. So, absolutely, if you don't have the women, you're, that, nothing else matters after that point. But, part of the reason that we don't have the women, part of the reason that people stop having kids at the rate that they were having them before, is there's really one thing that you can do if you want to just completely decimate, uh, your birth rate, and that is to educate women.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  I'm gonna let that sit for a minute. Now, educating women is awesome. I love it the most. Women should have every ability to get as much education as humanly possible, but there is a knock-on effect to that reality that people are not facing. When you combine birth control, which nature's way of getting you to do something or not doing something is a super blunt instrument. It only has pleasure and pain. So, it wants you to have kids. That's the whole point of evolution. Have kids that survive long enough to have kids. That's what we are optimized to do, that one simple thing. Everything else is just an accoutrement around getting you to have kids that survive long enough to have kids, period. So, sex is going to be one of the things that we find most pleasurable. So, you think about it, if you were gonna rank order things, like, orgasm's gonna be

• 14:45Speaker 00

  pretty high on the list of things that feel good, and that is nature's way of saying, "I gotcha, bitch." And so, you're going to get pregnant. And that's just all of that sexual energy, especially when you're young and dumb, you're at your most fertile, you have like no prefrontal cortex to stop you from happening, so you wanna have sex all the time, and you do, and there's nothing that's going to stop you from getting pregnant because you're young and contraception doesn't exist, at least not from an evolutionary perspective. Now, you add to that, that all of that can happen, but people can now stop themselves from getting pregnant, and then, you educate a woman. Now, the reason that that becomes problematic is all of a sudden she realizes, "Oh my God, I have a whole lot of other interests."

• 15:29Speaker 00

  And you're not in the tribe separating her out and putting her with the other women and just raising the kids, and that becomes the thing that they do, and like Afghanistan is doing right now, you make sure that they can't get educated. Because, education is options. Education is knowledge. Education is a vision of a different world, the thing that I might be fascinated by, whatever that is. And so, you take that away, and now, all of a sudden, you channel all of their energy right back in line with the evolutionary desire to raise kids. And so, it's like, cool, that's my outlet, it's how I generate meaning and purpose, it's how I get that sense of progress, it's how I invest in the future, it's how I prove to myself, to the world, that I really matter, and evolution is squeezing that woman's brain when she has a kid to invest in that child.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  So, before having a kid, they might be on the fence. After having a kid, if they don't end up killing the kid from postpartum depression, yikes, too early, you've got all of that energy now being funneled into the kid so that it's like, "Man, this is what I was meant to do, this deep sense of fulfillment." And now you get the propaganda machine where all the women that have kids are telling the next generation of girls, "You don't understand, it's gonna be the most amazing thing, it's incredible, you're gonna love it the most." Okay, so, when you lay that out, this is why developed nations cannot get their birth rates moving in the right direction again. And, it's one of those, it may just be, this is the cycle that we go in, that in times of plenty when things are good, we rightly educate women, we give them all the options

• 16:58Speaker 00

  in the world, the birth rate declines, and then that society's gonna weaken over time because they're not passing their values on to their kids, and then whatever group is passing their values on to their kids and having a lot of children, they're gonna be the dominant group.

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• 20:34Speaker 00

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. In fact, Ryan, we looked this up. Does Islam have the highest birth rate of all religions? Or is there somebody that beats them? Because, boy, oh, boy, I would not be surprised if Islam has the highest birth rate, which Ryan's gonna tell us if that's a fact or fiction.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, they have about 2.9 to 3.1 children per family.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  And that's sorted by religion? So there's no other religion that meets it?

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Uh, this is just answering. Let me find four.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Because I'd be curious if they're doing that by nation? Like, oh, here are Muslim nations versus the religion of Islam? Because I want to know, like, what religion?

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Muslims have the, this is globally, so this is the whole world. Muslims, 2.9 to 3.1, Christians, 2.6 to 2.7, Hindus, 2.4, Jews, 2.3.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  They really are at the top? Okay, so they've got a value system that is pushing that. Now, I'm definitely out of my skis to say this, but I, boy, I wouldn't be too surprised that as you go more fundamentalist, so the nations that are more fundamentalist Islam, that they are probably going to have lower education rates for women. And so now you create a funnel where even when you're looking at the religion on a global scale, they're already able to get their followers to be excited about having kids and having kids. So, big win. And then, if they're also restricting education of women on the more extreme end, obviously, I want to be very clear, this is on the extreme end. But if you're seeing that on the extreme end, now you've got the double whammy,

• 22:09Speaker 00

  which may, almost certainly, is the very thing that gives them the highest birth rate the world over. So now, if you're China and you don't have that leverage, and you're putting your Muslims in a fucking concentration camp, woo buddy, you're back in that same old problem that we in the West have been facing for a while, which is, time's a plenty, educate the life out of women, get birth control rolling, and now you've got yourself a birth rate problem. And they are suffering from exactly that. And it is very hard to reverse that unless you reverse the things that led to that, which are birth control and an educated female populace. Uh-oh.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  This record low year, and a mother who was never born cannot have the daughter who would come after her. That is why this line only points down. And here is the uncomfortable truth. No country that has fallen this far has ever found the way back.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  That's obviously not true. So I don't know what the real statistic is, but if that were true, China, after 45 million people died in their self-made famine, they wouldn't have started growing again, which they obviously did. But anyway, that stat, which you're gonna hear all the time, it's gotta be drawn from something. It's like, without dramatic changes to the social contract, or I don't know what it's gonna be. But, anyway, it's obviously not true, but I'm sure it points at something that is.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  State facing this tightens its grip on the population with more control to know exactly what everyone is searching for and texting. But you don't need to live under a surveillance state for someone to be quietly building a.

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  Thank you so much to Proton for sponsoring this video. Now, back to that following line, because as it drops, China gets desperate. And that desperation is already impacting you, whether you've noticed it or not. It starts in the factories. See, China built enough industry to supply a planet that keeps expanding forever. And now, the market inside its own borders is shrinking. There are not enough young people left to buy the stuff.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  The market outside of their borders is shrinking as well, which is gonna be a bigger and bigger problem for them as they go.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Stuff, so all those products China built its entire economy to sell have to go somewhere. So they go to you. China exports the surplus.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  By the way, this is a bigger problem than people realize. So China dumping its goods on the rest of the world is going to cause manufacturing problems for them. I think he goes into that in a second, so I'll just say that. And then, it's also going to drive the cost of the goods down, which obviously is bad for competition in the home country. So, yeah, this is, the fact that they are dumping products on the rest of the world to try to make up for their own flagging economy is not good.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Surplus at prices nothing else on Earth can match, and the factories in your country cannot compete with a nation dumping its surplus just to survive. There's literally a fight breaking out right now over Chinese electric cars and steel. Chinese cars are taking over everywhere they're allowed to, and that is really bad for Western carmakers and bad for the economy of those countries. But it's still not the thing I am most worried about. Because, while yes, China makes things, it also controls the raw materials the modern world is built from. For the 19 of the 20 most strategic minerals in the planet, China is the number one refiner with around 70% of the global market. Gallium and germanium are the perfect examples.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  We use them in cars and phones, and also in military radar and satellites. China refines around 98% of the well supply of both. And a declining China knows exactly what that is worth. In 2025, it started turning those materials into a weapon, slapping export controls on them and spiking prices outside China to as much as six times what they were inside it. But that leverage does have a shelf life.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  All right, so when people talk about deglobalization, they're like, hey, this world is gonna be de-globalized in like three years. This is exactly what they're talking about. They're talking about US tariffs and us starting to get more protectionist. They're talking about China starting to put export controls. Everybody's going to weaponize the advantages that they built up during the era of globalism. So, yeah, things are about to get weird. So think about that. Man, this is like a PSA to anybody that watches a show that's involved in any element of the government, man. We've got to make things here, period, end of story.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  China cannot squeeze those supplies forever because every restriction gives the rest of the world another reason to go and build its own.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Just as when we in the US put capital controls on other countries, other countries race to gold, trying to get out from under the US dollar, US debt, which creates problems for ourselves. So everybody, remember, second and third order consequences.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Righter danger here is the one nobody can build around. And it comes from what China has stopped buying. For 30 years, China was the engine of the entire global economy. It bought about half the world's steel and three quarters of its iron ore. It poured more concrete in three years than the United States poured in the whole 20th century. Entire countries like Australia, Brazil, and Germany build their prosperity on selling to China and its endless construction boom. And a lot of that concrete went into empty cities, because.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Okay, sit with that for a second. They've built empty cities? I remember hearing that China would, in a single month, build a city the size of Pittsburgh. And I was like, what? Like, that doesn't even make sense. I was like, how do you move people in that fast? Like, how is it that their population is literally moving around that quickly that every month you can pump out a Pittsburgh? It's like, it's nonsensical. And it was nonsensical. It was literally grow at all costs. It was build, build, build, there'll be the demand to meet it, and there is no demand to meet it. When you start putting the housing crisis that they are having now inside of this reality, of the misread of the demography and where this was going, that cultural energy just pushing them ever forward,

• 28:46Speaker 00

  building an economy that just assumes an only up phenomenon, but you don't have only up. And by the way, everybody around the world is basically using imported immigrants to try to make up for the fact that they have a low birth rate. But China doesn't exactly seem to be getting on that bus. So when you put some of your population in concentration camps, people get a little bit more hesitant about rolling up on you. So, this is where it's like, man, I don't know what the, what the thinking was. And I will come back to the statement I made earlier about when you have authoritarian rule, you start getting these weird distortions, and they can amplify over time. They may take time to play out, but when they break bad, they break really bad.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  In China, construction counts as growth the moment the concrete is poured, whether anyone moves in or not. And local officials got promoted for hitting growth targets. So they built a lot more than they needed, which is.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  This is why I say, you show me the incentive structure that a government organization is making, and I will tell you whether this is headed in the right direction or not. You don't want to put pressure on people to lie to you. You want to make sure that you're getting as close to ground truth as humanly possible.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  It's led to China now sitting on somewhere between 65 and 80 million empty homes. The people who were supposed to fill those cities are the children who will never be born. Now, that boom is over, permanently. Chinese steel demand has already peaked and turned down. And when the biggest customer the world has ever had stops buying, it's not only China that feels it, it's every country that fed it. And China cannot simply spend its way out of this because its money is already spoken for. According to Beijing's own top research institute, the National Pension Fund is projected to run dry right around 2035. So China.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  It's the same problem that everybody that has a Ponzi scheme, structure, like social security. It's like, if you don't have new young kids in a growing fashion, you have an old people problem, and you will just start burning through your capital. So, yeah, on this one, you guys should look at that. And even though they're talking about China's pension fund, you might as well see US. We have the same problem.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Is in deep trouble, and so are we. Its unsolvable problem is quietly becoming the world's problem. By 2100, the United Nations projects China to fall to around 630 million people.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  That assumes, by the way, that their numbers right now are correct, and they probably aren't. So that number is probably lower.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And half of today, and that is the bottom I promised you. Except, it isn't, because I have been lying to you a little bit. Because this was never really just about this Chinese line of population collapse. Look at this. More than half of every country on Earth is already below the birth rate needed to replace itself. And by the end of this century, according to the largest study of this ever done, 97% of countries are projected to be below that line too. And there is no known way back up, but here.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  There is a known way.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, start humping.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Start, start humping and stop educating your women. Oh, God. It's not my recommendation. It's just, that's where the data, that's where the data leads. Now, I do want to say, because I know that I'm going to get called out for this. It could be just correlated. Maybe educating women has nothing to do with the causation. No, no, no, there's, here's the thing. Now it's like, okay, I put it out on the table. I acknowledge that that's possible. Now I will just say, between birth control and giving people options, there's no way it's just correlated. No way. If a woman is like, well, my only option is kids, then they're gonna have kids. And then the, their brain will get squeezed by evolution when they have that child and they'll be like, unlike anything they've ever done, they'll be so happy. And then they're gonna want to have more and yay.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  It's like ransom though. Like, do you want parents in that situation? Well, I guess all that, I have to have a kid. Like, wouldn't, shouldn't it be a bit more their choice, like their autonomy? Like, it shouldn't just be like,

• 32:37Speaker 00

  True.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  That's my only way out?

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Some people need to be chased by a lion. Sometimes, to do the right thing, you, quote unquote, right thing, you, you have to have the external pressure or you're not going to do it. I didn't have kids. Because, first of all, none of this occurred to me. It was like, oh, have kids, don't have kids? Like, yeah, like, it would be cool. Uh, I've always explained it to people. I really want kids. Like, I really want kids. The only thing I want more than to have kids is to not have kids. And I don't mean that to be cheeky. I mean that like, it's just a balancing act and the things that I would have to give up to get this incredible, wonderful thing. I'm just not willing to give up. I just want those things a little bit more. Now, I know that if I had the first one, then I'd be like, oh my God, this is incredible. Like, now I want to have more because nature will do its thing.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  But because I don't have kids, there's no sense of loss. It's not a sense of absence. And so, because my wife also didn't want to have kids, it was just like, oh, okay, like, no problem. But my wife assumed she wanted kids until when? She became an entrepreneur. And then she was like, I have another way to express myself in the world. And I have another way to find meaning and purpose. I have another way to contribute. And so I love doing this thing. And so it was just always like, oh, should we have kids today? No, I want to keep doing this a little bit longer. Should we have kids today? No, I want to keep doing this a little bit longer. That's what we were both saying. There was never a day where we're like, I, we're not having kids. There was a day where Lisa was like, oh, I guess I don't really want kids. But it was like, it's just so subtle and so slow because there were so many other things that we could do to be fulfilled.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Now, if you had asked if, when, when Lisa was a housewife, she was miserable. She masked it. I didn't realize she was unhappy. She thought to be a good wife. She just needed to support me and that it was going to be temporary and then we're going to make movies and it was all going to be good. And so, anyway, if in that period, if she had no vision of go make movies, then she would have said, let's get pregnant. Because when we first got married, she was like, okay, do we start having kids now? And I was like, hey, slow your roll. We're gonna have kids. Cause when we got together, we both were like, yeah, we're gonna have kids a hundred percent. We're gonna have kids, but like, give me two years. And then it was like, in the two years, I was like, okay, well, now I'm sort of getting my feet under me in business. Give me like, two years. It's all I need. Eighteen months, two years.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  It's not gonna be long. Dude, at one point, Drew, I actually bought every, literally, I bought every baby book you can imagine. And I was reading them dutifully. Because we were gonna be like, I can't remember if it was like, starting in January, we're gonna start trying. But I was like, okay, we're, I'm really gonna read all this stuff. I want to be ready. That's how close we got to having kids. And then, because Lisa found another way to like, express herself. Now, that's truly anecdotal and obviously just one thing. But when I really look at the, the incentives, the things that make somebody choose that path.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  When she was a housewife and stuck there, if she didn't think she was ever going to have another outlet, then having kids would have been, like, this will be amazing. It'll be an incredible thing for me to do and to contribute and to pour myself into something. And so, uh, again, just going back to what are the incentives, both evolutionarily and from that sense of like, I want to do something, I want to contribute, I want to matter. It's like, if she's just staying at home and cooking and cleaning for me, she's gonna be like, ah, like, what, what am I even doing? And so you need that existential question of like, why do I matter? Why am I doing this? And then the answer becomes, I'm gonna have a child.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  All right, I gotta put something else on the table.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Please.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Cause what I hear with the population, the clap, the collapse is, we don't have a replacement population. We don't have people that can take these jobs. We don't have people that can shovel that snow, whatever it may be. Isn't that the whole?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  Technically, but yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, but isn't that the AI, um, productivity promise too?

• 36:09Speaker 00

  It's one of the answers.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  If we just robot our way out of this, we don't need as many people, we can just replace with a robot?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Thousand percent.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Got it. Okay.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Now, that's a GDP thing, where it's, well, it's also if we, Japan's whole thing is, okay, we've got all these old people. How are we physically gonna take care of them? That's why they're so early on robotics. They're like, I legitimately need them in the old folks home or in their house. I need a robot to be able to help them around because we just don't have people that are gonna take care of these people. So few people had kids. Uh, so they've got that problem. But then you've got the GDP problem, which is like, I need economic actors that don't take eighteen years to bring online. And that's where people are putting a lot of hope in AI, where AI can go out into the economy with or without a body and start doing economic things. And that could be transformational. And I think it will certainly help with some of the problem. And this will become, when, when that happens and we're looking back, we're gonna say, yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Necessity was the mother of invention. Part of the reason that we had to push this forward was the arms race of it all between us and China. The other part was, we all had demographic challenges. We tried bringing cheap labor in until the end of time. That creates instability in the society. So let's pump the brakes on that and let's start bringing in AI.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, maybe we can invest in figure some of these other optimists, some of these other robot companies. Instead of pulling women out of education and putting them in re-education camps.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  And de-education camps, Drew. Don't be ridiculous.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  We can't educate them at all. We gotta take their education away.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yes. And by the way, I want to make sure it is said loud and clear. I want women to be able to get educated. I am just telling you from a cause and effect perspective, what is likely to be, uh, the cause of the decline. Just like I want people to have access to birth control, I want women to have access to all the education in the universe. I want them to be able to pursue the life they want to live unimpeded. There's a knock on effect to all of that. And

• 38:00Speaker 03

  I want them to be happy. But, get in the kitchen.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  No but, no. I, I am the one, I didn't have kids. So there's no way I'm gonna point fingers at other people. Like, a thousand percent, enjoy your time out of the kitchen. Put shoes on, ladies. Walk around. No need to be barefoot. However, there is a, there are consequences.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  However, and to say.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  I think people should have rights. Am I wrong? I'm not wrong. That's the problem.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Give them somebody else.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Sad to report. I am sad to report. The Clippers in the chat right now. It's just the way it is, the way it is. There are consequences. Okay, back to our video.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  It's the difference. China is the first superpower to walk into that future while armed, authoritarian and openly preparing to settle its greatest territorial ambition. The most dangerous power is almost never a rising one. It's a peaking one. Look at history. Imperial Germany in nineteen fourteen, Imperial Japan in the nineteen thirties, Russia in twenty twenty-two. Every one of them gambled the instant it sensed its window closing. And China is walking into that exact moment right now.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  By the way, he gives some really sort of just cursory glances, but I did a bunch of research to find out how true this is. It's very true. Uh, so in the decades leading up to nineteen fourteen, Germany had enjoyed a massive industrial and military base. But by nineteen twelve, um, German leaders realized they were peaking. They looked east, saw Russia rapidly industrializing, building strategic railways, expanding its military. The German generals calculated that by nineteen seventeen, Russia's military capacity would permanently eclipse Germany. So the closing window theory. Germans, uh, chief of staff Helmut von Moltke famously declared nineteen fourteen, and this is a quote, "We must wage a preventive war in order to defeat the enemy while we still have a chance of victory."

• 39:58Speaker 00

  So think about that with Taiwan, man. That starts to get wild. So Germany didn't launch World War One out of hubris, which is what you normally hear. They launched it out of sheer panic that basically their, um, their chance of victory was closing. They had that strategic window and it was gonna close forever. Um, so same thing with Japan. Like, this one's crazy. So Japan ended up attacking the US because it saw itself as a declining power. Because in the late nineteen thirties, Japan, they were, uh, they were a dominant regional power. But its economy was heavily reliant on Western, um, sources, especially US oil, by the way, which I didn't realize.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  When the US, UK and the Netherlands imposed a total oil embargo in August of nineteen forty-one, they did it to halt Japan's expansion. And that literally put a like, mathematical countdown on the Imperial Japanese Navy. And so there was a whole bunch of reasons because, uh, Japan had signed like a treaty with, uh, Italy and Germany. And so as soon as they did that, the US, um, in, in exact opposite of what Japan was expecting, instead of it being like a warning, the US was like, oh, okay, this is all just one big war. We're gonna have to close these guys off, uh, from an oil perspective. Because as soon as they sign that, we know they're part of the problem. We don't want them expanding into China because that's just, you know, part of the same big war.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  And so Japan now goes, okay, we gotta get into this. Their own military calculated that they only had eighteen to twenty-four months of oil reserves. So the Japanese leaders knew that trying to fight the US was like, super risky, but waiting meant complete quiet economic suffocation. So it's like, okay, we gotta get in this bad boy. We gotta get in here. We gotta do our thing. And so they chose to strike Pearl Harbor. Whoops. Uh, but they had this now or never mentality because basically they were just gonna run out of gas. Similar things in Russia. So this guy is making a actually really profound point. He goes quite quickly past it, but it actually,

• 41:58Speaker 00

  uh, there is a lot of historical credibility to the fact that people really do strike when they feel like, oh, we're now in decline. The fact that Japan struck the US because they were worried that they were racing towards weakness, that's crazy to me. I didn't realize that.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Its ambition has an address, Taiwan, an island off China's coast that builds more than ninety percent of the world's most advanced computer chips. Take Taiwan and China takes the last piece of the machine the modern economy runs on. A war there will instantly trigger a global depression. American commanders have already put a date on the calendar of this invasion. A date by which China's own leader has ordered his military to be ready by twenty twenty-seven.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  All right. So my man knows how to end a video very abruptly.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  That was a very well put together video too.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I did know this guy before, OBF. Go check out your boy, OBF.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  At OBF on YouTube?

• 42:57Speaker 03

  At OBFYT.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  At OBFYT. All right, get after it. That was dope, man. Uh, great video.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Thanks, Oliver.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Very, very important, uh, if true, given the decline that we actually do see now starting to come out of, uh, China's economy, their inability to hide it anymore. Uh, may accelerate that push towards Taiwan. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting seventy-five plus ingredients,

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