Based Camp - China's Real Population Numbers are Shocking (Demographic Collapse is More Advanced than we Thought)

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I am excited to be talking to you today. Today, we are going to be talking about

00:00:05.820 China and recent information that has come out through multiple angles that leads people to

00:00:14.900 believe that China's total population, a lot of people know their fertility rate was lower than

00:00:20.980 the official figure said it was. And so they did all of this, oh, we got it wrong. We're readjusting

00:00:26.060 our population numbers. We're readjusting our fertility rate numbers. Turns out that their

00:00:31.700 total population is still being represented as dramatically higher than it really is. And this

00:00:38.280 has major implications because it means that one, their entire stock market might be vastly overvalued

00:00:44.640 right now, even given how fragile it is. And two, for people who are thinking about global population

00:00:52.900 numbers right now, they might be way lower than we think they are. And this isn't just a China

00:00:58.040 problem. I've also mentioned a lot recently, it's a Nigeria problem, which is another very populated

00:01:01.520 country. A lot of people don't know, but Nigeria gives out oil money dollars to different provinces

00:01:07.820 based on their reported population. And there's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual

00:01:14.420 provinces are reporting. So there is always a huge incentive to lie in the extreme. And I mean,

00:01:19.100 it's Africa, right? How corrupt are these numbers going to be?

00:01:20.900 So this is very similar to the blue zone scandal, which came out whereby they found that all these

00:01:25.340 supposedly very old people that lived in countries were not actually alive. It was their family members

00:01:30.440 collecting their pensions and lying about them being alive. And here's just another issue of incentives

00:01:35.120 being misaligned. People are lying about their populations because they get more money when they

00:01:39.440 say that these people are there, they aren't there.

00:01:41.960 Yeah. And I think that globally speaking, we may have to do a re-pledgering that's going to have

00:01:48.860 people realize that the total global population is dramatically lower than anyone thinks it is,

00:01:54.180 especially if you're looking at UN numbers. There was a case recently where somebody sent an email to

00:01:57.680 the UN saying, Brazil's own tabulation of their population shows it's 10 million less than yours.

00:02:03.440 And the UN in response, they go, why don't you update it? And they go, we don't want to alarm anyone.

00:02:08.480 I'm like, and that's over a double digit off from where their fertility population actually is.

00:02:17.980 Percentage, double digit percentage off. So the UN is just lying through their teeth at this point

00:02:22.440 to try to hide this.

00:02:23.700 So it turns out after recording this, this situation was astronomically worse than anyone anticipated.

00:02:29.560 This first series of graphs I'm showing you, the red line is the actual fertility rate of these

00:02:34.100 countries. The blue lines is UN's repeated projections of the fertility rate of these

00:02:39.980 countries. What's interesting here, as you can see with some like Columbia, it never even was

00:02:44.380 really attached to the real fertility rate. With others like Korea every year, they just expected

00:02:48.960 to stop going down anymore, which is just, well, negligence. They're lying to people. If we go to this

00:02:55.740 next set here, you can see what's happening throughout Latin America. The red line is the real

00:03:00.900 fertility rate. And all of the other lines are the UN every year saying, stop worrying about this.

00:03:06.960 This is why the world's not panicking. If the world saw these red lines projected forwards by any

00:03:14.140 reasonable equation, they would be shitting themselves right now. Look at this even in Africa

00:03:20.520 and the Middle East. So here you have Tunisia and Turkey. The same thing is happening. And it's not

00:03:26.280 just the UN. You also have IIASA and IHME. Every major organization is attempting to gaslight people

00:03:34.460 about the severity of this. We're going to have a different episode where we go over this, but

00:03:37.980 wow, I am shocked to see this coming out in a mainstream newspaper. Now here, I'd like you to

00:03:44.220 take a moment to think, okay, if the UN is lying about all these other countries' fertility rates

00:03:49.940 and these countries' own governments are like, hey, actually you are hugely over-representing

00:03:54.440 our fertility rates. Imagine what's going on with China right now when their government doesn't

00:03:59.620 want people to know how bad things are and has been famously able to push around the UN.

00:04:04.940 So specifically, China doesn't have a 1.4 billion person population. Their population is probably

00:04:11.180 below 1 billion people and fell below 1 billion people a while ago.

00:04:15.400 Hmm. So out of all the places, this is the place that I'm worried about the most.

00:04:21.000 Why? Just the way they live. They're different.

00:04:25.180 What, Chinese people?

00:04:27.180 They just wreck everything. They make everything weird. That's what I'm worried about.

00:04:31.180 To you, to you, everything, chicken. Why is it orange in Chinatown?

00:04:35.180 The way they write, the letters are weird. Their alphabet's not like ours. Their's like

00:04:41.020 someone testing out a biro. Everything's, there's no logic to anything that they do.

00:04:46.860 There is. There is. Of course there's a logic to it.

00:04:49.860 The way they read a book, it's all the other way around. From back to front instead of from

00:04:52.860 front to back and up and down. And everything that we've done, they've gone, right, we're

00:04:56.580 going to do it weirder.

00:04:57.380 But let's talk about this. A lot of this episode, and I always want to give credit when a lot of it

00:05:02.940 comes from somebody else's research, came from a show called Lei's Real Talk. Or Li's Real Talk.

00:05:08.680 Anyway, pretty decent China watcher show. It's certainly not as good for me as like China's fat

00:05:14.340 chasers. But she does real solid work. And she sometimes breaks stories. And it's definitely a

00:05:20.820 source that I think people should have in their back pocket if they are doing China stuff. But

00:05:25.080 everything that she's talking about here is data that can be independently checked.

00:05:28.760 So first, there's an argument that China's birth statistics are inflated as evidenced by the

00:05:34.660 discrepancy between reported births and the number of BCG vaccinations administered. Logic. In China,

00:05:41.780 the BCG vaccine is mandatory and given to newborns within 24 hours of birth. Therefore,

00:05:46.860 the number of BCG vaccines should closely match the number of births. A Chinese researcher conducted a

00:05:52.860 study comparing the official birth data to BCG vaccine administration records from 2008 to 2021.

00:05:59.480 The study found each bottle of BCG vaccine can vaccinate between one to five babies with an

00:06:05.660 average of 1.35 babies per bottle. Using this average, the calculated number of births based on

00:06:11.420 BCG vaccine usage was consistently lower than official birth statistics. Over the 14-year period from 2008 to

00:06:18.160 2021, the discrepancy totaled 58 million births. Extrapolating this trend back to the 1980s when

00:06:25.520 China's economic reforms began, the total overestimate could be as high as 178 million people.

00:06:32.420 This research argues that this discrepancy suggests systematic overreporting. And I will have a

00:06:37.900 link to this study in the description. It's in Mandarin, so be aware of that.

00:06:42.480 Wow. Then there's data from the Lunar New Year Travel Study. A significant decrease in Lunar New

00:06:50.120 Year travel between 2019 and 2023 suggests a potential population decline, particularly among

00:06:56.380 lower income groups. Logic. Lunar New Year is the peak travel period in China with almost everyone

00:07:02.220 traveling to visit family. A large decrease in travel numbers, especially among lower income groups,

00:07:06.800 could indicate population decline. Data and source. Official data from Xeonoon News Agency shows in

00:07:14.660 2019, 2.984 billion person trips during the 40-day Lunar New Year period. In 2023, 1.556 billion trips

00:07:24.700 during the same period, which represents a 47% decrease overall. So these might be representing

00:07:30.880 very large population drafts. Breaking down the data, air and rail travel is typically used by more affluent

00:07:37.920 travelers, decreased by only 15%. Bus and road travel, typically used by lower income groups, saw the largest

00:07:44.620 decrease. Calculation. Assuming 422 million people, 30% of the official 1.4 billion population, didn't travel due to

00:07:52.500 poverty or old age, in 2019, 986 million people made 2.984 billion trips, an average of three trips per person.

00:08:00.240 In 2023, assuming 2.5 trips per person due to economic factors, this suggests a potential population

00:08:06.780 decrease of 556 million people who didn't travel in 2023. Something ain't right. Yeah. I'll explain what

00:08:15.780 would cause this. And she's actually done a different piece where she goes into this in a lot more

00:08:20.540 detail. But she argues that this unexplained decrease is due to unreported population decline

00:08:26.300 due to COVID-19 fatalities. So not only is the overall population really less than they're reporting, but they're

00:08:31.520 hiding a huge chunk of the population that died during COVID-19. She has a different episode where she goes into

00:08:37.760 kindergarten closures because there was a sudden increase in kindergarten closures where 20% closed year over year

00:08:43.300 this last year. And she says this indicates that a lot of people were either died during COVID or something like that or

00:08:49.900 etc. And they decrease in specific regions at really high levels, particularly smaller towns. And we don't have the

00:08:55.460 rural data. But she argues that the country could have lost more than 20% of its population in COVID.

00:09:01.280 And from simply from deaths, from death. And some of the CCP's behavior indicates that this is the case. By that, what I mean is

00:09:10.580 right now, they've had a mandate to destroy records of deaths during the COVID period in a lot of hospitals. And we'll go into more

00:09:18.620 data that the COVID deaths may have been dramatically higher than they're reporting. But so not only is their overall

00:09:24.020 population lower, because they were lying about some stuff, but their overall population is higher, lower, because of

00:09:28.920 people dying. And keep in mind for the flight thing, it was the low and middle class numbers that dropped this huge

00:09:36.100 amount, not the upper class numbers that didn't drop that much at all.

00:09:38.560 And theoretically, people who were uniquely hurt in a disease outbreak would be those who can't go to a

00:09:47.660 private hospital, for example, and get better treatment. So that could be the play. I see.

00:09:52.820 Or were more likely just to be shipped to one of the, I forgot what they call them, not concentration camps.

00:09:57.380 Really, yeah, scary isolation zones where you just went to a cell.

00:10:01.180 Yeah, really bad situation there. And the next is the salt consumption analysis. This was an analysis of

00:10:10.660 regional salt consumption data, which suggests China's population is significantly lower than

00:10:14.960 official figures. Salt consumption per capita is relatively stable. By analyzing regional salt sales

00:10:20.160 data and known per capita consumption rates, one can estimate the population. A Chinese researcher

00:10:26.040 conducted a comprehensive study of salt consumption data from 2000 to 2022. The methodology

00:10:31.120 involved collecting regional salt consumption data from various news reports over 20 years.

00:10:36.180 Using known daily salt intake figures for different regions, ranging from 8.5 grams to 11.5 grams per

00:10:41.800 person per day, they calculated the estimated population based on salt consumption data and

00:10:46.280 compared it to official census data. Findings. From 2000 to 2014, calculated population was 19.29%

00:10:53.820 lower than the official data. In 2015 to 2022, calculated population was approximately 31%

00:11:01.040 lower than official data. So again, the huge chunk disappeared there. So they've been overreporting

00:11:06.540 for a while, but now they're not even reporting what happened with COVID. Applying the 31% discrepancy

00:11:12.060 to the official 2022 population figure of 1.4 billion yields an estimated population of 986 million.

00:11:19.980 The full study will be linked to in the description. What's interesting here is the arguments are supporting

00:11:25.200 from multiple directions. So it's not just one study. They're all showing this huge,

00:11:30.200 like 31% lower number. And then she ran a different set of math, just for another set of math you can

00:11:36.440 run here, where she looked at the reported fertility rate of China versus India and starting populations of

00:11:43.800 the two countries. And then showed that China showed a much higher growth than it should have in overall

00:11:50.520 population when contrasted with India. And then people can be like, that might be because they

00:11:55.100 have better medical care. And so then what she did is she looked at, okay, what was the lifespan

00:11:59.380 increase between China and India during those periods? And India had a larger lifespan increase

00:12:05.320 over that period than China had, which implied that the numbers should have favored India further,

00:12:10.080 which implied we are seeing systematically wrong numbers here.

00:12:13.920 Wow. What good sleuthing on her part. This just sounds, these are such amazing questions. I'd be so proud of

00:12:19.760 one of our kids if they looked at a problem from this many different angles. I really respect her.

00:12:29.360 Yeah, I really respect her as well. Yeah, there was also a Russian and a Japanese study that put their

00:12:34.940 population at around 800 million. Specifically, the Russian expert's name was Viktor Mikov, and he

00:12:42.220 concluded China's population is not the official, the number that's nearing 1.5 billion.

00:12:46.900 This seems like a classic China problem in terms of the way that rewards or funding is dealt out to

00:12:55.640 different regions causing major problems. I recall this being an issue in the height of early

00:13:03.020 communist China.

00:13:04.300 This is really interesting. So Russians gathered Chinese urban populations, added them up, and then

00:13:10.160 arrived at a total urban population at 280 million. And assuming the rural urban populations have a

00:13:16.920 one-to-one ratio, then China's actual population should be around 500 million.

00:13:22.780 Why should they be one-to-one? That doesn't make sense to me.

00:13:25.800 But if total rural population carries a higher weight, it may not be one-to-one, but they said that

00:13:33.720 China's total population should not exceed 800 million. I'd expect their urban population to be

00:13:38.320 higher than their rural population.

00:13:39.980 Exactly.

00:13:40.500 Given China's recent push on this.

00:13:42.640 Yeah.

00:13:43.980 That is fascinating. So we've got more stuff here. Here's an article. And so just in terms of like

00:13:51.220 China having a lower population than it otherwise might've had. One here, for people wondering how

00:13:55.680 big this difference is, it could be. So they did two different calculations here. So what you might

00:14:02.480 have is a real population of, oh yeah. So this was just a 944 million number I already said. Okay.

00:14:07.700 Now in terms of who is saying that more people died during COVID than official numbers, this is not

00:14:13.480 an urban monoculture coverup. There was an article by the CDC on this topic. And there was an article in

00:14:19.100 Nature on this topic. And the Atlantic did a piece called, can a million Chinese people die and nobody

00:14:24.340 know? Official statistics on COVID can't be trusted because they share Beijing's political interests.

00:14:29.060 Making the dead disappear is only part of it. And then evidence of underreporting satellite energy

00:14:35.120 revealed heightened activity at crematorium centers during the outbreak. Domestic footage of

00:14:41.300 overwhelmed hospital wards circulated on Chinese social media before being censored a morning and

00:14:47.660 funeral index based on online search volume for related terms indicated 712,000 excess mortalities.

00:14:55.420 So nearly a million excess mortalities from December 2022 to February 2023.

00:15:02.960 That's recent. That's after the pandemic. 2022 to 2023 is when the pandemic is very quote unquote

00:15:09.580 over. Whatever the case may be, over a million more people died. So basically they're just hiding their

00:15:15.580 deaths. They're fudging their births. The whole Chinese situation is not only paper-tigered. It's a

00:15:25.420 Petumpkin village. It's fake. It isn't an actual economic superpower in the way that we believe that

00:15:33.400 it is. And I think that right now, another thing that she's been arguing in her recent videos,

00:15:39.360 and I actually think she's right about this, is when we ask why is Xi Jinping not doing logical

00:15:44.780 things to protect his economy or his people right now, given how bad things are, the answer could be

00:15:51.320 that he's trying to transition into a wartime economy. And a wartime economy is not going to

00:15:56.140 be driven by consumer demand. It's going to be driven by centralized production cues.

00:16:03.420 Are there signs that they are centralizing their production?

00:16:07.220 Oh yeah, absolutely. Keep in mind, all the billionaires have been like disappearing. They've

00:16:10.220 been centralizing all the major industries. Remember when, what's his face, Alibaba guy disappeared,

00:16:14.400 right? That's very much a move to a... How does that have to do with... What does that have to do

00:16:20.020 with centralizing production? Okay. Remember how we have defined in other videos the difference between

00:16:26.440 a socialist state and a fascist state? Yes. Whereas a socialist state puts the state industry,

00:16:33.440 like the economic means of production, under the state for the purposes of distributing wealth as

00:16:38.540 equally as possible. Whereas a fascist state puts the means of production under a state for the

00:16:44.300 purpose of spreading a particular ideology or worldview in keeping existing oligarchs in power,

00:16:50.040 i.e. what the Democrats are doing. That's why the Democrats are fundamentally a fascist party.

00:16:53.320 A lot of people don't understand this. They think I'm like exaggerating when I say that.

00:16:56.460 Anyway, that's what China is doing right now is they're transitioning to a fascist economic system

00:17:02.000 where they are putting the means of production under the authority of the existing power

00:17:08.160 structure to heighten the power of the existing oligarchical structure because they think that

00:17:12.800 they know that an economic collapse is impossible. Basically, the entire economy there has been

00:17:17.180 more of a Ponzi scheme than the rest of the world's economy for a while. It's like foreign investors

00:17:22.880 come in, foreign investors come in, your money will always grow. Look at how many people we have,

00:17:27.740 imagine how big this could be. And I think very similar to what happened in Japan in the 80s,

00:17:32.360 but about a thousand times worse.

00:17:37.520 What are the implications of this?

00:17:41.220 And if they're transitioning to a wartime economy, do we have good reason to believe,

00:17:44.540 therefore, that they are going to come for Taiwan faster?

00:17:48.800 Oh, I think they meant to go for Taiwan by now, but Russia's F up in Ukraine has significantly

00:17:56.500 lowered their desire for that particular conflict. That's my read of it. All of this, I think,

00:18:03.920 started before they saw what happened in Ukraine. And right now, there's an ongoing conversation.

00:18:09.220 Do we do it? Do we not?

00:18:10.800 Because I thought it's more of just a siege scenario. And Taiwan, from an energy-independent

00:18:15.120 standpoint, is so screwed that all you have to do is just besiege them.

00:18:19.860 Do you know how much our GPUs that we've been buying up? Simone and I have been buying up GPUs

00:18:23.860 are going to be worth if Taiwan gets sieged?

00:18:27.020 Value will look pretty good.

00:18:28.100 We're going to get a very good resale value on those. By the way, one of the things we're

00:18:31.620 looking for right now is a CTO for the companies. If anyone's like a GPU specialist or running data

00:18:36.160 center specialist, let us know. We'd really be interested in working with you or has a good

00:18:40.420 technical resume otherwise for a position at a startup. But yeah, so the implication could be that

00:18:48.000 they're going for Taiwan. I don't know. It's just such a dumb decision if they do,

00:18:51.660 but it could be with the goal of securing the existing administration, knowing that an economic

00:19:00.560 collapse of the region is not going to happen, but already underway.

00:19:06.080 Golly. Okay.

00:19:07.240 Yeah. I was reading in totally outside of, let's say someone wants to write all this off as

00:19:16.300 conspiracy theorizing and they choose to not believe any of the stats presented. I was just

00:19:20.820 reading that China's getting to the point that for every child born, six people are dying. It's that

00:19:26.460 bad.

00:19:27.060 Wait, is that bad now? That's horrifying.

00:19:30.060 Yeah. Let me make sure I have that right. Okay, here we go.

00:19:34.380 A demographer warns that if China's fertility rate remains on its downward trajectory, eventually

00:19:39.160 six people will die for every newborn. This was from an article called China's pro-birth policies,

00:19:45.880 not yet enough to counter demographic crisis, expert warns published in the South China Morning Post.

00:19:51.240 So that's mainstream, not question, people talking about just how bad things are,

00:19:58.600 how their fertility rate dropped to 1.09 in 2022, but that's likely highly overstated. We don't have

00:20:03.800 numbers for 2023 officially. And to your point about this, anything they do send to us may be

00:20:09.880 very highly overstated. Even in China's best possible, most enthusiastic and optimistic number

00:20:16.940 presentation, we're still looking at an extremely dire scenario. If things are even worse and as bad

00:20:24.020 as you describe and as bad as people are seeing through things like baby vaccinations and salt

00:20:29.960 intake and vacation travel and mourning, it's bad. It's also very concerning that apparently excess

00:20:38.580 deaths are so much higher, even between 2022 and 2023. It implies...

00:20:44.020 What gets me on this? And I think that a lot of people... What were you going to say it implies?

00:20:46.940 It implies that it's not just a COVID thing and it's not just people

00:20:53.280 being hopeless and not having kids anymore thing, that people... The country may also be deeply unwell

00:21:02.580 in other ways that we aren't fully aware of. Yeah, I guess my takeaway from a lot of this is one,

00:21:10.280 India is likely a bigger player in the global future than we think. China has long... Basically what this

00:21:16.520 means is India's population is higher than China's population and going forwards for the rest of

00:21:21.600 human history we can project right now will continue to be higher. But in addition to that,

00:21:26.920 it just means that China is... When people are predicting future events, do not over-index China's

00:21:34.080 role in those events, I guess I would say. When I talk to a lot of people, I would say this is one of the...

00:21:40.120 In terms of smart people who I talk to, like really smart people, consistent mistakes that they

00:21:46.180 make in the single most consistent mistake I see they make is believing too much that China has a

00:21:52.340 future. Seeing them trying to play out the roles and the moves that they make 50 years from now,

00:21:59.460 100 years from now, thinking that they are going to find a way to fix this quickly when they should

00:22:06.360 have already done that. Like it's basically too late for them at this point. Even if they start going

00:22:12.240 on a forced birth campaign or something like that, I just wouldn't expect that much benefit from it,

00:22:20.180 given that it would need to admit things that mainstream Chinese officials just aren't admitting

00:22:25.040 right now. Keep in mind, they were one of the first countries to jail someone who was doing gene

00:22:30.740 editing in humans very publicly, right? Like they made it clear, we don't do genetics here. We don't

00:22:35.900 believe in genetics here. All humans are exactly the same. And that's going to make any sort of a

00:22:41.380 campaign they do to try to increase fertility rate, likely create an adverse outcome. So I just

00:22:47.380 don't, I do. And it also means that their existing power on the world stage might be being overstated.

00:22:53.760 And a lot of China's existing power, people misunderstand. They're like their existing

00:22:57.520 power is due to what they produce. And I'm like, that is not true. Their existing power is due to

00:23:03.460 the amount of money American and European investors have poured into China. That is where their

00:23:10.120 valuation comes from. Obviously China is... So you mean people buying companies, putting companies

00:23:17.220 in... People buying stock, investing in, etc. Interesting. Investing in China is why China has

00:23:24.140 a high valuation. Like when you're looking at like Chinese GDP or like the share of the global market

00:23:27.980 and blah, blah, blah. A lot of this is like basically fudged numbers due to the people who have put money

00:23:34.120 into that. And that's also why you don't get this counter narrative of actually China is not that

00:23:39.700 relevant, politically speaking, because nobody benefits from this. The wealthy oligarchs who run

00:23:45.560 our society, they have tons of money invested in this that they can't quickly get out. And so they're

00:23:51.480 not going to want it widely disseminated that actually China is already over. So they don't publish it in

00:23:59.340 their newspapers. They don't talk about it. They don't promote people who are talking about it.

00:24:03.180 It's the same with the political apparatuses. It neither serves the conservatives nor the Democrats

00:24:09.440 well to say China is not particularly relevant as a power player. Because people want to focus on

00:24:15.620 what do we do if Taiwan gets attacked? And as I've always said, what we do if Taiwan gets attacked is

00:24:19.480 nothing. Because Taiwan won't exist in 100 years at their current fertility rate. We are not

00:24:25.340 saving a thing of persistent value by saving Taiwan at this point. If Taiwan can get their fertility rate

00:24:31.620 up, I would commit American force to help them. But at their current fertility rate, you are just

00:24:37.440 delaying their death by a century. There is no point. It's very seriously, a country with a fertility

00:24:44.160 rate that's hovering around one, halving their population every generation. Why would I have our

00:24:51.160 either capital or actual human beings dying to defend that? That's insane.

00:24:59.720 Yeah. But by that logic, are you trying to argue that we should only fight for countries with high

00:25:04.160 birth rates? So if someone invades a high birth rate African country, defend them.

00:25:09.500 No, it's not just based on the birth rate. It's based on their relevance in a future Earth scenario.

00:25:15.060 That's Africa. They're the ones who are going to decline last.

00:25:18.200 I don't think that you are actually really helping that much in terms of the future trajectory of

00:25:22.840 Earth by committing tons of resources to preventing random groups in Africa from attacking each other.

00:25:29.400 Whether or not it just all comes out in the wash there because the infrastructure and the economic

00:25:35.380 infrastructure in that region is so poorly developed that you're just really not getting

00:25:40.040 much of an outcome from that. But if somebody was to say, oh, would you care? Like, where would

00:25:45.260 you care about defending if they were attacked? What's a country where you're like, this country

00:25:48.820 is going to have an outsized, a level of impact in the future. When I look at current.

00:25:52.900 India. So India.

00:25:54.900 No, Israel.

00:25:56.600 Oh, Israel's a big example here. Technologically, they're going to matter in 50 to 100 years.

00:26:02.440 Fertility wise, they're going to matter in 50 or 100 years. In terms of who is it worth investing

00:26:08.100 to protect, Israel is who it's worth investing to protect. Taiwan is not particularly worth investing

00:26:13.920 to protect. In terms of the Ukraine, I thought that it was worth it to just show that Russia

00:26:19.280 couldn't push people around in the beginning. I no longer think it's worth it. Now they're just

00:26:23.300 fighting over land and neither country is going to matter much in the future either. And Russia has

00:26:27.640 already expended all of their military power.

00:26:30.740 Yeah, I guess if this were like an elimination based reality TV show and you're trying to decide

00:26:35.660 to who to ally yourself with, if there's someone who's just clearly tanking, they lack the charisma

00:26:41.100 or physical prowess or whatever the show's based on, cooking ability, baking ability to hang in there.

00:26:48.640 Yes. You really need to look at someone's ability to be there in the future. And it's not just

00:26:52.520 whether you like them or whether... I like Taiwan a lot.

00:26:58.280 Yeah. They're a contender.

00:27:00.480 Yeah. Yeah, but they're just not a contender. And it's the same with China. So keep in mind,

00:27:06.540 like China and Taiwan are enemies. I am very pro-Taiwan. I am very anti-CCP, but I admit that

00:27:11.940 they both are dealing with this population problem and there really isn't an out for them at this

00:27:17.080 point that I can see. And so when people are like, oh, what do you think that China is going to be

00:27:22.680 doing in X mini? I'm like, they're not going to be doing anything that matters. Now this does have

00:27:27.520 impacts on like semiconductor production and everything like that. But I think we'll be

00:27:31.340 able to offshore Taiwan semiconductor production, at least the relevant parts before things go tits

00:27:37.040 up. Keep in mind that because we've hit a Moore's law sort of ceiling now, we are entering optimal

00:27:43.460 semiconductor world at this point. Do you understand what I mean by that, Simone? So historically,

00:27:48.420 if one company was like really ahead of other companies in semiconductor production,

00:27:52.700 it didn't really make sense to try to compete with them because it's, you've got

00:27:57.520 you want to try to catch up with this company, but every year they're improving so much. They're

00:28:03.300 like 30% better every year. So even if I figure out how they're making the semiconductors they're

00:28:07.460 making this year, I'm not going to be able to compete with them economically by the time I get

00:28:15.100 that up. Because by the time I get that fab up, by the time I get all that up, it's going to be five,

00:28:19.560 10 years from now. And they're going to be like a generation, not one generation, like 10 generations

00:28:23.640 ahead of me, right? Like I will be able to make very simple semiconductors, but nothing particularly

00:28:27.500 impressive. But now the advancement in semiconductor production has lowered dramatically. You are

00:28:35.180 getting very small increment because we've reached the edges of what physics can do. And so this gives

00:28:40.900 other companies and countries a long time to catch up with this. And I think the next major advancement

00:28:48.340 in semiconductors that we should focus on from a human civilizational perspective is how can we,

00:28:55.100 one, lateralize semiconductor production? Right now it takes 40 different countries,

00:29:00.360 all developing. The lasers are developed in Norway and the plans are developed in California and the,

00:29:06.960 you know, the end products developed in Taiwan. How can we lateralize this process and how can we

00:29:13.100 microtize this process? I.e. I think we're going to need to focus on more modular and smaller

00:29:19.740 semiconductors as global supply chains as global supply chains begin to break down. Even if they are

00:29:24.980 slightly slower, it's going to be equally useful given the way that cloud networks work and the way

00:29:32.020 that you can just chain like GPUs together. Hmm. If you were living in China right now, let's say in a place like

00:29:41.680 Shanghai where the birth rate is so low, where would you move? If Shanghai's fertility, by the way,

00:29:52.780 is 0.6 as of 2023. So not even this year, lower than. I get out. I don't think that there is a way

00:29:58.840 to, to, I think that China is internally burning itself. I think that the situation in China is going

00:30:04.300 to get astronomically worse than it is today. I think they're going to start blocking emigration

00:30:09.160 though. I feel like they already stopped. They stopped it like five years ago. They put major

00:30:13.680 bans and restrictions on people out migrating. Yeah. So then that's not a realistic, you're just

00:30:21.100 saying figure out how to, you know, essentially figure out, figure out like you're running from a,

00:30:25.980 a Holocaust that's about to happen. Like figure out, like you don't get how bad things are going to

00:30:31.920 get. That's my read of China right now. You do not know. You cannot comprehend you. If you want

00:30:39.060 to know how bad things are going to get in China in the future, ask your grandparents about the

00:30:43.820 great famine. Okay. That's the scale things are going to in China right now. What does worry me

00:30:50.260 is again, those excess deaths between 2022 and 2023, like we're not in the middle of the pandemic

00:30:55.680 anymore. And to my knowledge, there've been no immense natural disasters in China though. Okay.

00:31:03.160 I'm not following the news that closely. I do wonder, especially after all these stories of

00:31:09.700 people being like buildings, collapses or infrastructure, not really working well.

00:31:14.260 And I guess it's just so hard to trust what you're hearing because then when you hear

00:31:17.740 from anyone who is in any way proud of China, and I think there's a lot to be proud of in China.

00:31:24.860 I think the Chinese people are awesome. And I've traveled through China

00:31:27.640 in a decent amount, not an amazing amount, but I've been to like Zhangjiajie and Changshan,

00:31:35.060 not like your typical, just Beijing and Hong Kong and Shanghai though. I've done those too.

00:31:39.920 It's an amazing place. But when you talk with anyone who has pride in China,

00:31:44.320 then it's just propaganda talking points. So I don't know who to consult, right?

00:31:50.000 Well, I'll tell you to consult. And this is the thing also about out migrating from China.

00:31:57.400 Historic and real Chinese culture is better preserved in the immigrant communities than

00:32:03.520 it is preserved within CCP China. If you're like, I want to get in touch with my Chinese traditional

00:32:09.760 roots, you are better off living in one of the American Chinese immigrant communities than you

00:32:14.440 are under CCP China, because they often were founded by individuals from before the cultural

00:32:21.020 revolution. And they maintain more true uninterrupted through lines to traditional Chinese culture.

00:32:28.940 I do think that's really interesting that when in some countries, you get these selective pressures

00:32:36.300 where people with a certain fidelity to a certain culture just leave en masse. And then anyone who

00:32:44.420 stays basically gets completely changed through those same selective pressures. And then the

00:32:49.920 original country is somewhere else now. And you can even see this in not necessarily in holistic

00:32:56.580 cultural sets or cultural, mimetic, religious, whatever sets, but even just in accents. Like I've

00:33:02.020 heard it argued that the true British accent of we'll say before the American revolution may be more

00:33:11.340 alive in some versions of American speech in like the 1900s than even the modern British accent,

00:33:17.160 which is an interesting, yeah, because like certain groups migrated and like things evolve. It's not

00:33:23.980 like after a point of great migration, do things stay the same in the original home country? No,

00:33:30.120 things change. In fact, often when there is a great migration, it's because there's significant

00:33:34.140 change in the home country. So I like that point about cultural fidelity, maybe not even being in China.

00:33:41.000 And if you really love China, and if you believe in China, you maybe need to rebuild that somewhere

00:33:47.220 else. Uh, yeah, I like that way of looking at it rebuilt, but I don't think it can be rebuilt in

00:33:54.140 China. Not so long as Xi Jinping is in charge. Now, if, and this is one area where I realized I have a

00:34:00.020 big difference between my friends who believe that China has a future in me, is they're like,

00:34:03.560 Xi Jinping, he won't be in charge for long. He's got replacements in the wing. As soon as he Fs up

00:34:09.060 enough, they're going to replace him. And my belief is, uh, the opposite of that. I don't think

00:34:15.080 they have real replacements lined up for him. I have looked into these people's, they've said,

00:34:19.600 Oh, this guy is competent. I don't see it. I don't see it. I don't think that they have a good

00:34:23.940 replacement for him. If I were him, I would not want to take, or if I were anyone else, I would not

00:34:28.420 want to take his place. I would be terrified to take his place. I, I don't think that they, I think

00:34:34.140 that he's for a long time purged everyone competent who might take his position. I don't think that

00:34:39.960 there is somebody who can competently take his position. I think when Xi Jinping falls, a lot of

00:34:46.460 people think, Oh, this is when things begin to fix themselves. No, I think that's when warlords begin

00:34:51.300 to take over. I think that's when things begin to fracture or they go incredibly stupid a la Venezuela,

00:34:57.640 like a bus driver taking over. I think that as much as Xi Jinping is a problem, he's also the

00:35:04.480 bulwark against complete idiocy. And I have intense fear around what happens when he does fall,

00:35:12.240 because I think people think some competent bureaucrat is going to take over. And that's

00:35:15.860 not the tea leaves I'm reading. The tea leaves I'm reading is some idiots going to take over who

00:35:21.660 we would never have assigned power with intention. And if I'm wrong about this, if the system is still

00:35:27.520 working, if they still can get a competent person in there and they can get rid of Xi Jinping,

00:35:31.880 China has a chance. But it's got no chance under Xi Jinping. Or the Dowager Empress, as I call him.

00:35:39.800 The Dowager Empress. He reminds me of the Dowager Empress in the last fall of China.

00:35:45.580 The scary dragon lady. I guess everyone calls Dowager Empresses or any mean woman dragon lady. But

00:35:50.480 yeah, the one with the really young son who just killed a bunch of people, that one?

00:35:56.340 Yeah. In fact, if I was in office, I would always call him the Dowager Empress.

00:36:03.260 Because I think people need to draw this connection more to, one, understand just how much he's hurting

00:36:08.860 the country. And to, two, through a historic parallel, and to, two, understand just how long

00:36:14.800 within the Chinese bureaucracy, somebody who is that toxic to the country's long-term best interest

00:36:20.600 can stay in power if people don't take care of them.

00:36:24.820 Take care of them. If you were, let's say, someone incredibly competent, the right person for China,

00:36:33.320 were suddenly installed and given autocratic power, what would you have them do? What would

00:36:39.840 you encourage them to do if they came to you and asked you for a fight?

00:36:42.660 The first thing they need to do is become completely transparent about all of their records.

00:36:46.620 Their economy, their population, their fertility.

00:36:49.020 I've heard of me wonder, so what if Xi Jinping doesn't even know the gravity of this and can't

00:36:52.980 because there are so many adverse incentives at play where a province is not going to tell you

00:36:58.240 because then they won't get their tax revenue? I feel like there's a crisis of reality.

00:37:01.540 You can put in place independent departments, independent branches of government using things

00:37:06.500 like AI and satellite images, all the stuff that foreigners are using. And then they get

00:37:11.020 commendations and wealth for finding areas where people are fudging things.

00:37:16.080 All right, so let's say, first thing, you establish the Department of Truth, and they go out

00:37:21.740 and their job is to just find out what's going on.

00:37:24.220 Department of Transparency. Then you need to reinstitute goodwill among investors that if they invest

00:37:31.420 in something, they will be able to get their money into and out of the country easily.

00:37:35.260 That's one of the big things that's going to drive down investment right now, right?

00:37:38.380 As people are terrified that if they put money into China, that the money's never going to be

00:37:42.740 able to come out of China. And because that's true right now, China's basically realized like

00:37:47.040 it's just, you need to develop-

00:37:49.500 What if suddenly you do that and all of the money-

00:37:51.860 A lot of the money, this is all going to cause short-term pain.

00:37:55.700 But you're saying within China's autocratic system that apparently can think long-term,

00:37:59.300 even though it definitely can't.

00:38:00.500 No, no, no, you are a long-termist autocrat suddenly.

00:38:03.220 You need to, you need to, basically all of this is around developing investor confidence.

00:38:08.020 You need to develop investor confidence, long-term investor confidence with foreign investors.

00:38:14.820 That is the first core thing you need to do. So everything involved in that,

00:38:19.300 not jailing, making things. If somebody achieves a certain level of wealth,

00:38:23.100 you're not just going to go after them. You're not going to, all of that stuff.

00:38:25.780 So investor competence is thing number one. Thing number two is fertility collapse is a

00:38:31.620 national security issue right now. And I may even put it under the purview of the military,

00:38:38.420 focusing on artificial wombs and the like.

00:38:41.700 Oh, so just invest heavily in science.

00:38:45.220 Heavily in science and genetics.

00:38:47.540 Right. But what good will artificial wombs do you if no one wants to have kids anyway,

00:38:51.860 whether or not they get pregnant? You have the state raise them.

00:38:55.860 So you would encourage the first ever government-funded human production plan.

00:39:02.980 I think if you do those two things simultaneously and big enough.

00:39:09.460 I guess you could, would you, this is very dystopian, but would you

00:39:14.100 offer to pay women a, a living wage to carry pregnancies to term? And then if they don't want

00:39:21.460 to raise those children.

00:39:22.340 No, but I wouldn't disallow anyone from a high level government position with less than four kids.

00:39:29.060 So to say, I know the anti-cat lady tenure policy.

00:39:33.700 I think you need to create, and you might.

00:39:35.780 But that's nobody, because no one has been allowed to have a lot of kids.

00:39:40.580 No, it's been long enough under the three-child policy and loosen one-child restrictions.

00:39:44.820 What? Come on.

00:39:45.780 When was the three-child policy?

00:39:48.420 No, when was one-child policy loosened?

00:39:52.420 No.

00:39:52.900 Because it was still culturally so discouraged. They're basically no.

00:39:57.940 The policy was formally passed into law by the National People's Congress,

00:40:01.780 the National Legislature of China on August 20th, 2021 was the three-child policy.

00:40:08.900 Simone, the one-child policy was loosened in 2016.

00:40:12.660 Loosened, loosened.

00:40:15.540 You can say, this is the thing, and this is where everybody gets things wrong.

00:40:19.060 They always blame us on the one-child policy.

00:40:21.060 But the problem is that fertility rate now in China is lower than it ever was under the one-child policy.

00:40:26.420 And that's a culture problem.

00:40:27.540 I just, I'm not going to...

00:40:28.900 Listen, you shouldn't penalize people for not having a lot of kids under Xi Jinping in China,

00:40:35.140 during COVID in China.

00:40:36.900 Would you be having kids?

00:40:37.940 No, you would be shouting, we are the last generation, along with everybody else.

00:40:41.060 No.

00:40:41.300 Yes, and those people need to be penalized.

00:40:44.020 That's the exact point I'm making, Simone.

00:40:46.340 You need to penalize people who are infected.

00:40:48.820 You shouldn't penalize people who are making smart and logical decisions.

00:40:52.580 I disagree strongly.

00:40:54.020 That's the only way you create a cultural change.

00:40:56.340 In fact, I would go further.

00:40:57.860 I may disallow salaries above a certain amount to people who have less than a certain number of kids.

00:41:03.860 I would tap your max possible salary to the number of children you have,

00:41:08.980 which will quickly create the perception that more kids means more wealth.

00:41:14.900 No, I would, that's a fun, that's a fun concept to reconnect from a, just from a policy perspective in general.

00:41:24.100 Because the thing in the past and why people would have a lot of kids, aside from other cultural reasons,

00:41:29.220 was the more kids you had, the more wealthy you were.

00:41:32.580 And if we just reconnect those in some way, either, of course, through progressive tax breaks for the more kids you have,

00:41:40.420 but also just through other means.

00:41:42.100 Yeah, the more kids you have, the more money you're allowed to earn or something.

00:41:45.380 It's just the level of dystopian control that you have to have over a people to do that is too much.

00:41:51.700 Aren't we too libertarian for the money?

00:41:54.740 No, no, but you're...

00:41:56.740 It's different from what I want for America.

00:41:58.740 China is culturally different from America.

00:42:01.060 Okay, so yeah, you're trying to come up with a solution that certainly doesn't fit with our cultural values,

00:42:06.900 that is more coercive, that is more, I'm not going to say evil, that is just creepy,

00:42:11.540 because you're like, this is going to work for them.

00:42:14.340 Yes!

00:42:16.740 You're saying, if I was in China, what would I do?

00:42:19.060 Like, you know, the person who's like, I'd start a democracy is an idiot.

00:42:22.660 That is not what you would do.

00:42:23.940 You need to fix the problem in a Chinese way.

00:42:27.460 Uh-huh, yeah.

00:42:29.300 What's actually going to work?

00:42:32.660 Yeah, I could see a kind of China making human production army thing with artificial looms.

00:42:41.380 They could pull off the look.

00:42:42.740 I feel mean saying that.

00:42:44.660 I, again, respect China.

00:42:47.140 I was on this really...

00:42:48.980 I was on like a five...

00:42:50.100 Did I tell you about my five-hour bus ride to Zhangjiaojie from Changsha?

00:42:56.980 Oh, tell me about it.

00:42:57.940 It was about five hours.

00:42:59.060 Like, some guy had this cell phone that constantly kept ringing,

00:43:02.500 and it was just children's choirs singing Christmas songs in English.

00:43:07.140 And they were chewing this thing that smelled incredibly strong, like throughout this bus,

00:43:14.100 that just made me want to vomit the whole time.

00:43:16.660 And we're on these twisting roads.

00:43:19.540 So I'm just hearing children's choirs singing Christmas songs and smelling this putrid smell

00:43:24.660 of whatever it is that people are chewing and spitting out on the bus.

00:43:29.300 It's betel juice, probably.

00:43:32.580 Betelnuts are an addictive stimulant that's chewed in parts of China,

00:43:36.260 particularly the southern provinces such as Henan, Henan, Zhangjing.

00:43:42.020 Okay.

00:43:42.260 Did they have black juice?

00:43:43.780 Yeah.

00:43:44.740 Yes, betel juice.

00:43:46.660 Did not smell good.

00:43:47.620 So they were...

00:43:48.580 I've had good moments and I've had bad moments.

00:43:50.420 But like, good moment just before that bus drive,

00:43:52.820 the taxi driver, or the taxi cab driver who took me to the bus station where I took that bus,

00:43:57.940 was so concerned about me that he got in to the bus station and helped me buy a ticket and told me where to sit.

00:44:06.260 Because he was like, girl, what are you doing?

00:44:08.580 This is not safe.

00:44:11.140 So they're really, they're awesome, cool bro people who help out total nonsense idiot foreigners

00:44:18.420 who are kind and hardworking and enterprising and creative.

00:44:25.540 And it makes me so sad to think that they're under this level of threat.

00:44:31.380 Damn.

00:44:32.260 But I don't know.

00:44:32.980 Oh, I wish there were a less dystopian way to do this.

00:44:37.060 There are less dystopian ways to do this.

00:44:39.220 But you've got to, I think that the less dystopian ways of handling this are going to be handled in the immigrant communities.

00:44:46.740 Yeah.

00:44:46.820 You can't find a new, like in the US, I'm like experiment with new ways of having your family culture work.

00:44:52.980 New traditions, new holidays, new ways of relating to things.

00:44:56.580 What can China do right now that other countries can't do?

00:45:01.220 So if suddenly you become transparent and you're like, okay, guys, now I'm in charge.

00:45:07.300 We're figuring out our population situation.

00:45:09.780 We're going to be financially transparent.

00:45:11.700 You can leave and enter the country as desired.

00:45:14.500 We'd love to welcome immigrants.

00:45:15.860 We'd love to welcome industry.

00:45:17.780 What would you do?

00:45:18.460 Peter Zion talks about their natural resources being not great.

00:45:21.260 Like they're not that energy independent.

00:45:23.020 They're not even that food independent.

00:45:25.660 What are you going to do?

00:45:26.620 Yes.

00:45:26.940 I would make them like a nuclear hotspot fast, like small.

00:45:31.900 That was the thing I was talking about was transparency and everything like that and taking a short term hit.

00:45:35.740 The big problem China has now is they got so used to that period where they were a growing power instead of a weakening power that they've built this idea of we'll always be bigger tomorrow and therefore let's bully the neighboring countries.

00:45:49.100 Let's bully the people around us.

00:45:51.180 They need to understand that they are in a position of short-lived power right now and they need to be doing everything they can right now to build goodwill among their neighbors.

00:46:00.540 That nine dot line that they've drawn, that's not going to hold for 50 years and when it stops holding, the people who they were bullying are going to be awfully mad at them.

00:46:12.700 They need to walk back all of this stuff they've been doing in the local region.

00:46:16.860 Okay, so start playing nice with others, but then what will a admittedly smaller going forward China do to build prosperity and.

00:46:29.020 They need to, as I said, one, forcing competent people to have more kids, culturally speaking, through the way that you influence them.

00:46:38.120 Okay, incentivizing, not forcing, incentivizing through cultural means.

00:46:43.220 The state-raised kids, state-produced kids, that could be an option that they have access to that we don't really have access to.

00:46:48.740 And they, I think, right now, something that is being understated in the investment world is how much of a problem it is that nobody trusts Chinese stock market or wants to put money onto it.

00:47:00.520 And it's not just because they're shrinking.

00:47:03.000 It's because the government has basically said, okay, now you put the money in, now we're going to keep it from going out.

00:47:09.120 Like, we tricked you into the hot.

00:47:10.300 Here's an interesting idea.

00:47:11.800 If you create state-created humans and state-raised humans, maybe China, because China also has an international reputation, I think, of producing very smart, competent, hardworking people.

00:47:29.640 To, with your army of government-creative people, like, because we are the intellectual mercenaries of the world.

00:47:38.220 You want to hire Chinese people.

00:47:40.060 You want, we will build the best factories.

00:47:42.360 We will build, and then they just start investing in all of the type of human infrastructure that will matter in a post-AI world.

00:47:50.540 Because the rest of the world is too indolent, probably, to raise the sort of disciplined, smart person, practical person, not hedonic person, to thrive in a post-AI society and still matter in a post-AI society.

00:48:04.960 So maybe if China did that, and they continued with the same, oh, America, you suck with your titty-tainment, like, you go and enjoy your hedonism, and we're going to produce our competent, hardworking, tight-lipped people who we will produce and train, then maybe they can just be, like, the one non-idiocracy.

00:48:25.900 No, that would really be cool if they could do that.

00:48:28.000 And I'd also say that one of the core things that people get wrong when they're predicting future world events and stuff like that is how cheesed America is from so many perspectives.

00:48:39.760 We are not moving into a multipolar world.

00:48:42.440 We are moving into a world in which America is dramatically more dominant than it is today.

00:48:47.120 And I think a good book to start, if you're interested in this subject, is Peter Zeihan's book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning.

00:48:53.360 He talks through in a very sort of guns, germs, and steel kind of way just why America has the tailwinds that will give it a huge advantage in the instance of a world in which there is no more support for international trade.

00:49:07.720 So, one, as globalization and global economic systems begin to break down, yes, that is part of why America will be strong, is we are the most self-sufficient country in the world by a dramatic margin, whether it's energy or food or any of the things that civilization needs to survive.

00:49:23.060 But in addition to that, we also have a weirdly high fertility rate for our level of prosperity and output.

00:49:31.600 And it's because America has what it turns out is the greatest resource any country can have in the 21st century, which is we have religion and a lot of it, a lot more than any other developed country.

00:49:43.780 And it turns out that a lot of these countries, when they were modernizing and got rid of their religions, did a great harm to themselves.

00:49:53.000 And when I look to the future, when people are like, future world polarity-wise, where are you looking at world power centers?

00:50:01.120 One, people are hugely sleeping on how much power America is going to have.

00:50:04.720 The other area that they're hugely sleeping on is Israel.

00:50:07.680 Like, no matter how positive you could be about Israel, you need to be 10x more positive than that.

00:50:15.120 Yeah, I guess if we were to look at any country that actually was producing some kind of hyper-competent workforce that is famous for going out and getting a lot of things done and that doesn't focus on hedonism over everything else,

00:50:29.020 it was so weird how in your class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, one of the most difficult schools to get into in the entire world, there were so many Israeli students.

00:50:43.140 So many Israelis.

00:50:44.340 And not only that, but Israelis.

00:50:46.560 They weren't just...

00:50:48.460 Oh, and they were all having kids.

00:50:49.860 They were all having kids.

00:50:51.240 They all had businesses and they were going through school.

00:50:54.380 They were like so much more on top of their lives than anyone else.

00:50:58.440 And even though they worked harder and even though they were incredibly conscientious, they all just seemed very happy.

00:51:05.060 Like, they didn't...

00:51:05.460 There were a lot of tortured souls at your school, but they weren't among them.

00:51:08.660 None of the Israelis.

00:51:09.660 A lot of the Jews.

00:51:10.840 A lot of the American Jews were among the tortured soul category that you're talking about.

00:51:14.000 Reform Jews.

00:51:15.260 Yeah.

00:51:16.480 And actually, Simone, we have an invitation to go to Israel and meet Wiz and live with some of these Haradi families for a bit.

00:51:22.960 I'd like to take it up at some point.

00:51:27.140 It's a really cool invitation.

00:51:29.020 We...

00:51:29.360 It would involve being around people.

00:51:31.260 Has invited us to stay with some of the Haradi families in Brooklyn in the next couple weeks because he's going to be there and he's going to be...

00:51:36.600 That's so cool.

00:51:37.940 I was like, I don't think we have time.

00:51:39.440 I was like, in future years...

00:51:40.560 Now the timing is not amazing, alas.

00:51:43.440 In future years, I really want to, but not right now, unfortunately.

00:51:47.560 But the...

00:51:48.100 Yeah, people are...

00:51:49.300 They do not understand how much fertility rates in technophilic regions matter.

00:51:54.020 Yeah.

00:51:54.820 Yeah.

00:51:55.120 And I think that's the cool thing is that China has the building blocks.

00:52:00.120 China has the technophilia.

00:52:01.820 China has this...

00:52:03.500 I just love how modern so many of the things there are.

00:52:06.300 Another big advantage, which is they don't have the bureaucratic bloat of other regions.

00:52:12.400 Yeah.

00:52:14.140 It would seem...

00:52:15.220 I don't know.

00:52:15.720 Like, October 7th seems to have been largely a product of the government not having...

00:52:20.220 We were going to do an episode on this, but we can just briefly mention this now.

00:52:23.360 I have looked at their competence since October 7th in terms of essentially wiping out all of Hezbollah in Palestine.

00:52:31.060 No, but keep in mind, that groundwork was laid well before October 7th.

00:52:35.540 Exactly.

00:52:36.840 And the problem is, Simone, which you might not be considering, that groundwork was weighed before October 7th.

00:52:44.540 They wouldn't have been able to execute on that groundwork if October 7th hadn't happened.

00:52:51.140 Why were they making plans for how they were going to take out Hezbollah that they obviously, from a geopolitical standpoint, couldn't execute on unless...

00:53:01.340 I used to think October 7th, I was like, they must have some level of impossible stupidity here.

00:53:06.580 I am now leaning towards the, oh my god, this was all planned from the beginning.

00:53:12.200 I'm leaning toward, they put so many resources into embedding devices with Hezbollah and getting intel from Hezbollah that they snoozed on Hamas, just being like, you guys are so incompetent.

00:53:25.520 Do you think they could have had...

00:53:26.380 Hezbollah wasn't attacking them as aggressively as they are right now.

00:53:28.880 Do you think they could have had all those things explode?

00:53:32.180 Oh, you mean just from a diplomatic standpoint, because they would have put so much hate on it?

00:53:35.800 I think it was an insurance policy, because keep in mind, they weren't just incendiary devices or explosive devices.

00:53:42.240 They were also intel-gathering devices.

00:53:46.520 Okay.

00:53:47.540 So I think it was about optionality to have that there.

00:53:51.640 And who knows?

00:53:52.460 They knew that Iran was probably going to get more resources at some point.

00:53:57.460 Obama had started that trajectory, and that's about when they started doing this.

00:54:01.260 So I think they knew it was going to be a rising threat.

00:54:03.100 And I don't think they could have anticipated or even encouraged October 7th.

00:54:09.480 I think it's more of a just, they thought that they knew what they were doing.

00:54:19.040 It seems plausible to me that just what Hamas did was so out of...

00:54:27.920 I'll tell you what.

00:54:28.700 So British intelligence, when they looked at this, there was an ex-British intelligence guy,

00:54:33.060 and he was saying, it is shocking that Israel accomplished more in a year and a half than we accomplished during the entire war on terror against the Taliban.

00:54:42.960 He's like, if we could have dismantled the Taliban to the level that Israel dismantled Hezbollah,

00:54:48.760 this would have been, this is like 99% more than what we did.

00:54:51.860 Like, it was stunning, stunning that they were able to accomplish it.

00:54:56.580 Well, here's what we need to do.

00:54:57.880 We need to get, like, spy novel writers in the same room as, like, government officials or, like, sci-fi writers

00:55:04.000 and just feel like, figure it out, guys.

00:55:05.940 Get creative, man.

00:55:07.000 Get drunk, and then just start making some plans.

00:55:09.680 Is that with all of this in context,

00:55:11.520 we should consider ourselves very fortunate of the Secret Service agencies

00:55:15.840 that apparently are actively attacking us now, which is the British one.

00:55:19.520 That it's not a squad.

00:55:20.440 Yeah, we should be glad that of the ones most likely to support us,

00:55:26.500 it would be the competent ones.

00:55:28.140 You wouldn't, but here's the thing about Mossad.

00:55:30.720 You won't know that they're out to get you until you're dead.

00:55:35.520 They're just that effective.

00:55:37.420 So who knows?

00:55:39.440 But, yeah, I guess we just did a surprise attack.

00:55:42.600 We're going to talk about China.

00:55:44.020 Here's where we dunk on China.

00:55:45.860 Oh, ha.

00:55:47.380 We love Israel.

00:55:48.660 Another one of those episodes.

00:55:49.720 It's like when I'm thinking about, like, world players who matter.

00:55:53.920 Yeah.

00:55:54.260 Israel literally, like, in my future calculations of geopolitical politics,

00:55:59.360 matters 2x what China matters.

00:56:01.360 Yeah.

00:56:01.560 Yeah, they're kind of in the potential to have outsized influence,

00:56:05.200 very similar, in my mindscape, to the UK or Britain

00:56:11.920 before they became the British Imperial Empire.

00:56:15.640 They were this sleepy backwater.

00:56:17.200 Rome didn't even want to hold on to them, right?

00:56:19.020 They sucked.

00:56:19.780 They were gross.

00:56:20.500 It was cold.

00:56:21.240 No one took them seriously.

00:56:22.880 They were a bunch of barbarians.

00:56:24.200 Like, you said in that other episode on your one civilization theory.

00:56:29.000 I identify too much with you, Malcolm, but I'm not trying to take credit for it.

00:56:32.460 It's a really good theory.

00:56:33.300 No, it's ours.

00:56:34.680 Yeah, royal we.

00:56:36.480 Nobody really helped inspire it by telling me that I should think more of ancient Chinese civilization.

00:56:40.580 That was really the thing that got me investigating, and then I was like, no, actually, they suck.

00:56:45.780 Oh, my God.

00:56:46.860 So, poor China.

00:56:49.860 I'm trying to point out things that I love about China.

00:56:53.720 Szechuan food.

00:56:54.840 People in Szechuan province in general.

00:56:56.240 I love Szechuan food, too.

00:56:56.260 I love Szechuan food, too.

00:56:56.840 I eat Chinese food almost every week.

00:56:58.140 I love it.

00:56:58.400 Most people in Szechuan province are just genuinely awesome people and really cool.

00:57:02.840 No, I have a lot of Chinese friends.

00:57:04.320 I think that the whole, like, a lot of the Chinese people I know are some of the smartest people I know.

00:57:10.840 It's crazy smart.

00:57:12.660 Anyway, so, yeah, we love China, but I can't remember where I was going.

00:57:15.820 It doesn't matter because we need to make dinner.

00:57:17.640 But I'm sorry to anyone who came here just wanting to hear about China and there we go on Israel again.

00:57:23.640 But no, no, yeah.

00:57:25.000 Great, yeah.

00:57:25.500 So, yeah, no one thought, yeah, Britain was backwater.

00:57:29.060 No one cared about it.

00:57:30.040 Relatively small population, and yet so much influence in the entire world.

00:57:35.700 And I think it's, yeah, it's easy for people to write off Israel to be like, it is a tiny postage stamp of land within a hostile area.

00:57:44.800 They, why would they matter?

00:57:46.660 Why are we trying to help them?

00:57:48.440 I don't know.

00:57:49.040 Before the rise of the British Imperial Empire, I would have wanted to know what was going on with these guys, see how I could work with them.

00:57:56.340 So, I guess I see your point in that we have to look to the future and look for their potential.

00:58:00.820 Yeah, don't make big sacrifices to make alliances with the Ottomans.

00:58:05.640 Yeah, exactly.

00:58:06.180 China right now is the Ottoman Empire.

00:58:07.820 They're the Ottomans, yeah, sadly.

00:58:09.820 But I think what also gives me hope at the end of this, and I want to end with this because it's where there's hope for China, is that China isn't in China anymore.

00:58:17.780 Just like Venezuela is not in Venezuela.

00:58:19.420 Yeah, I agree.

00:58:20.120 We know through our travel agency, which works with a ton of Venezuelans, that all the Venezuelans are in Spain.

00:58:27.400 They are in Peru.

00:58:28.420 They are in Doral.

00:58:29.060 Probably in Venezuela, I should say.

00:58:31.380 Yeah, because they left.

00:58:32.700 It was Cuba, like all the good Cubans.

00:58:34.500 Sorry, not good Cubans.

00:58:36.920 We are going to hell so many times over, Malcolm.

00:58:42.320 Real Cuba is in Florida.

00:58:44.440 Yeah, though.

00:58:45.340 And that is a theory that gives me a lot of hope because when I hear about new news with China's demographic collapse, I just think, I weep for China, and it makes me very sad and scared.

00:58:55.900 But then I think about, yeah, all these amazing Chinese immigrant communities throughout the world, and you've got stuff.

00:59:02.160 So, yeah, people can move.

00:59:03.760 Populations can move and build something even better.

00:59:06.660 And as we've talked about in other episodes, the more that you evolve and move around and play jazz with other cultures and take the best from them and do it better yourself.

00:59:17.360 The more you will thrive and know in the future.

00:59:19.880 And I will say that China is not the most effed world power right now.

00:59:23.900 Germany is.

00:59:25.460 Germany is.

00:59:26.020 And Latin America is just vaporizing.

00:59:29.540 And no, we're all in trouble.

00:59:31.080 But the thing is that Latin America has cultural enclaves in other countries that have decent fertility rates.

00:59:37.140 Germany has no backup plan.

00:59:38.640 If I was a German that wanted to maintain German culture, there's nothing left.

00:59:41.960 Gosh, yeah, we're there.

00:59:42.820 There are no.

00:59:43.940 I guess you could say that.

00:59:45.740 Amish.

00:59:46.200 You will believe Amish people are church enclaves, but.

00:59:48.940 I love the Amish.

00:59:50.020 Oh, my God.

00:59:50.340 You should hear their stuff on Trump.

00:59:51.620 We watched the video of them, like them talking about Trump.

00:59:53.680 They are so based.

00:59:54.620 Yeah, they're so based.

00:59:55.620 Love the Amish.

00:59:56.120 Love you to death, Simone.

00:59:57.180 I'll let you go.

00:59:57.280 Love you, too.

00:59:57.980 Bye.

00:59:58.560 Okay.

00:59:59.060 Ciao, ciao.

01:00:00.500 Taquitos.

01:00:01.200 Oh, are you going to do the.

01:00:02.080 Just get the kids.

01:00:03.120 You get the kids.

01:00:03.800 I'll stir taquitos.

01:00:04.780 And then if you just drop them off, I'll play with them while I cook food.

01:00:07.640 And you can wrap up work for the day.

01:00:09.120 Yeah.

01:00:11.160 Yeah.

01:00:11.560 You ready for that?

01:00:12.780 And let me know what we're getting for replies on this.

01:00:15.020 This is a long and spicy thread with Lyman's Dog.

01:00:18.600 Oh, no.

01:00:20.000 Have you even checked it?

01:00:20.940 No, I'm just going to ignore it.

01:00:23.620 I'm very bad with Twitter.

01:00:25.440 Remember, I thought that someone had closed, somehow closed their tweet to replies.

01:00:30.660 And I just didn't know I was blocked because I'm so old.

01:00:35.040 Other people said then they were blocked.

01:00:37.620 I don't know.

01:00:38.200 But yeah, they weird.

01:00:39.880 Yeah.

01:00:40.080 I don't understand Twitter.

01:00:41.300 X.

01:00:42.420 Sorry.

01:00:43.200 We're definitely at an age now where there's things I don't understand and things I make

01:00:46.320 a real hard focus on staying on top of.

01:00:49.840 AI.

01:00:50.180 AI is something I'm like, I've got to be up to date.

01:00:53.020 I love you.

01:00:56.500 I love you too.

01:00:58.500 You're seeing that that thing else came out that.

01:01:01.540 Yeah.

01:01:01.780 So today, anti-natalism documentary, which I actually loved.

01:01:04.620 I haven't seen it at all.

01:01:05.440 That was so well done.

01:01:06.560 It was so well done.

01:01:07.520 This guy is a true star.

01:01:09.180 Yeah.

01:01:09.440 Tim came out.

01:01:09.860 I hope it does incredibly well.

01:01:11.660 Yeah.

01:01:12.740 So people haven't seen it.

01:01:13.660 This is the guy who's done some other like really big documentaries.

01:01:16.380 I want to.

01:01:17.020 I haven't watched it all yet.

01:01:18.180 I only watched the beginning.

01:01:18.920 I was like, oh my God, this is so.

01:01:19.740 His storytelling is top drawer, like the way he, but the problem is that it includes

01:01:25.780 stories of conditions that cause babies to die terrible deaths.

01:01:29.640 I, and then, so of course I'm crying first thing in the morning while watching this fricking

01:01:33.360 thing.

01:01:34.740 And then the Lime and Stone thing happened today.

01:01:37.720 Lime and Stone play more.

01:01:39.240 So yeah, that was so much reading.

01:01:41.300 It was so much reading.

01:01:42.740 So much reading and so much, I don't know, felt like disingenuousness.

01:01:46.320 He posted the thing where he's like, why are they attacking me out of nowhere?

01:01:49.600 This is the guy who runs the Institute of Family Studies thing.

01:01:51.540 And we're like, he does the whole, whoa, whoa, hold on in his whole, you haven't even

01:01:55.040 read that.

01:01:55.540 He's like, I don't run the Institute for Family Studies.

01:01:57.940 This is just 10% of their spending that I'm involved with.

01:02:01.180 So he takes umbrage.

01:02:03.580 Even with that.

01:02:04.260 Well, he just out of the blue, he's like, they just attacked me out of the blue.

01:02:08.380 And I'm like, it may have been that article that you wrote on us that was really long

01:02:13.000 and compared us to Nazis and eugenicists and said that you should be running the pronatalist

01:02:18.240 movement and not us and that we shouldn't even be considered pronatalists and tried to

01:02:22.240 throw a, that might've mischaracterized everything we've ever done.

01:02:25.720 He's like, they're communitarians.

01:02:27.440 Like they only care about people in their community.

01:02:29.400 They're not about trying to help everyone.

01:02:31.880 I'm about trying to help everyone.

01:02:33.920 I'm all about freedom and I'm going to give everyone freedom.

01:02:36.280 And not only is my movement about freedom, but how dare their movement allow people to

01:02:41.580 use surrogates or do genetic testing.

01:02:44.180 And I'm like, you're like contradicting yourself here.

01:02:50.000 But I'm not going to attack him anymore because I said I'd stop attacking him after this.

01:02:57.720 If he doesn't try to undermine the big tent pronatalist movement again, to try to take it over.

01:03:03.960 We honestly could have been a lot worse than him.

01:03:05.680 I had a much meaner episode planned about him, but we ended up just talking about it in the

01:03:09.840 episode where we were talking about, what was it?

01:03:12.660 When it is not true, because this is something he believes that more wealth doesn't lead to

01:03:17.600 lower fertility rates.

01:03:18.760 And I'm like that belief continually arguing that, which he does persistently throughout

01:03:23.180 all his work.

01:03:23.900 And he's like, why are they telling reporters not to talk to me?

01:03:26.580 I'm like, that's like an environmentalist arguing that like industrial logging doesn't hurt the

01:03:33.520 rainforest because one person is like planting trees or like they can find this one study.

01:03:38.680 Like broadly, everyone who's sane and knows that industrial logging hurts the rainforest and

01:03:44.300 other environmentalists aren't going to send reporters to talk to you.

01:03:47.980 Like obviously, if you're the pronatalist version of a flat earther, when a reporter comes to me,

01:03:53.500 I'm like, yeah, don't talk to the guy who doesn't think that wealth causes lower fertility rates.

01:03:57.860 That's a pretty insane position when you can just Google any graph on this and you will see it as

01:04:04.000 a very strong trend.

01:04:05.620 But yeah, I don't want to go too deep on that particular thing.

01:04:08.440 So what would the other thing?

01:04:09.480 He said there was something else that came out today that was stressful.

01:04:12.120 You read this morning.

01:04:13.020 It wasn't stressful.

01:04:14.160 It's more of-

01:04:14.860 Well, the Swedish piece.

01:04:15.460 They were so mean to us.

01:04:16.760 The Swedish piece.

01:04:18.160 I think it was a translation, but it was like-

01:04:21.300 They said the parents who beat their children.

01:04:22.920 Yeah, the parents who beat their children and want everyone to have children.

01:04:27.560 And then we live in a dank farmhouse.

01:04:29.820 They said we live in a dingy farmhouse.

01:04:32.100 Dingy.

01:04:32.460 That was the word.

01:04:33.280 Dingy.

01:04:33.920 It was like, oh, I wonder if there's a more diplomatic way that this is written in Swedish

01:04:39.660 or did she just flat out call our home dingy?

01:04:42.760 Was this somebody who came to our house or were they writing about somebody else?

01:04:45.000 Yeah, she's the woman who came to our house.

01:04:47.020 Her picture's at the very end of the article.

01:04:48.620 You remember she wore the bright shirt.

01:04:49.960 Oh, I like that they included a lot of our full arguments in that piece.

01:04:54.280 That's always nice when somebody does that.

01:04:55.740 Well, we always ask someone to come at us.

01:04:57.860 We're always like, be controversial, but the famous as villains.

01:05:01.780 And I'm glad she did it because it made the article more interesting.

01:05:05.000 But it's always stressful reading those and being like, wait, my house is dingy.

01:05:09.000 I try to clean up before people come.

01:05:11.860 Broadly, I thought it was a good article and it's the type of article that I would want

01:05:14.920 written about us.

01:05:15.160 No, but it's always stressful for anyone to talk about, like to read.

01:05:19.960 Anything about you.

01:05:21.200 It's just as stressful if it's positive.

01:05:23.700 So I'm just ready to de-stress.

01:05:26.320 Let's talk about China as a dumpster fire.

01:05:29.120 It's going to make me feel so much better.

01:05:31.580 Okay.

01:05:32.380 Let's do it.

01:05:33.240 Okay.

01:05:41.280 Do I have any debris on me or anything like that?

01:05:45.800 Yeah.

01:05:46.280 Let me, not that I can see.

01:05:49.960 Not that I can see.

01:05:50.640 Yeah, this right here.

01:05:51.880 I can't.

01:05:53.720 Is wiping your nose on it going to make it go away?

01:05:56.440 I'm trying to lick it off, but it sounds scary.

01:06:01.380 Just give me the shirt to wash.

01:06:03.200 We have a.

01:06:03.940 I brought a bunch of shirts and pants down for you to wash.

01:06:09.060 I hope you didn't put them in the clean laundry basket.

01:06:11.340 I need to make things more.

01:06:12.300 We need a better hamper system.

01:06:13.920 We will work this out.

01:06:15.460 I'll just change my shirt.

01:06:16.500 What do you want for dinner, by the way?

01:06:17.760 You know what would be really cool if you learned how to make?

01:06:19.500 If you learned how to make taquitos.

01:06:22.520 That can't be hard to do, but I would need to.

01:06:24.320 Oh my God.

01:06:25.120 Wait a second.

01:06:25.740 No, I can use.

01:06:27.520 Hold on.

01:06:27.940 What if I tried this?

01:06:29.080 I will make corn tortilla taquitos using your slow cooker beef.

01:06:33.860 And keep in mind, that is prime beef.

01:06:35.820 The Christmas beef.

01:06:36.440 Yeah, that's perfect.

01:06:40.040 I will try it.

01:06:41.700 I don't know exactly how they're properly cooked.

01:06:43.460 I'm just going to first lightly fry corn tortillas and butter.

01:06:48.240 Then I'm going to roll them in the meat, which I will saute ahead of time with some pumpkin.

01:06:56.840 Would you like put some pumpkin or not?

01:06:58.240 Yeah, that's a great idea.

01:06:59.340 And then I will cook them further in the air fryer.

01:07:04.220 That's exactly what I would have suggested.

01:07:06.580 All right.

01:07:06.880 Let's see with maybe some melted cheese on top.

01:07:10.700 I don't know.

01:07:11.000 I haven't gotten there yet, but we're going to see how that goes.

01:07:13.320 No, no melted cheese.

01:07:14.220 We're going to try dry.

01:07:15.360 You can dip them in sauces.

01:07:16.420 We're going to see how this works.

01:07:18.560 I'm excited for it.

01:07:19.800 Okay.

01:07:22.020 By the way, the episode we did today on the spy, it got demonetized.

01:07:27.440 And I think it's because we were talking about things that we aren't allowed to talk about.

01:07:30.680 So just don't.

01:07:31.940 No, even saying we aren't allowed to talk about something.

01:07:34.200 You can't say that.

01:07:36.240 Okay.

01:07:36.880 Okay.

01:07:37.220 I deleted everything else.

01:07:38.320 So that must have been what flagged it.

01:07:40.000 That is so creepy.

01:07:41.840 That's really dystopian.

01:07:42.940 Yeah.

01:07:43.260 We live here.

01:07:44.260 Have fun.

01:07:45.360 The deep state is spying on us.

01:07:47.380 We can't say that.

01:07:49.220 One of the comments that somebody had that got to me is they were like, they did arrest

01:07:52.700 like random women who nobody follows for questioning their school board.

01:07:56.520 Do you think was your guy's platform?

01:07:58.440 They're not going to attack you.

01:07:59.860 And I was like, that makes sense.

01:08:02.520 Touche.

01:08:04.720 Creepy.

01:08:05.120 Have a great day.

01:08:05.400 Thank you.

01:08:35.400 Thank you.

Based Camp - October 31, 2024

China's Real Population Numbers are Shocking (Demographic Collapse is More Advanced than we Thought)

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