Based Camp - November 10, 2023


What's Going to Happen to East Asia as Civilization Begins to Collapse？

Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Economics Explained Simone
The Two Enemies of Pronatalism Pragmatic Investing

Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

190.9

Word count

4,905

Sentence count

333

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we continue our series on China's economic and political systems, and how they plan to deal with population decline. We discuss China's "One Child" policy, and the impact it could have on the world's largest economy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So you might say, well, why am I still kind of bullish on China?
00:00:03.140 One, they can force population, which is going to be relevant for whatever comes after they 0.80
00:00:07.680 pass through the eye of the needle, the collapse.
00:00:09.340 But also they have set up their entire system.
00:00:12.220 That's what the social credit system is.
00:00:13.740 That's what the constant monitoring is.
00:00:15.460 That's what the money that the government can track is.
00:00:17.900 Why did they do these COVID protocols if it put them in such a dangerous position vis-a-vis
00:00:22.440 their existing economy?
00:00:23.720 Because it was all a plan for the collapse.
00:00:26.140 You're saying they were preparing for collapse.
00:00:28.220 Yes, they were preparing to maintain their existing government systems in a collapse.
00:00:33.980 Total economic collapse.
00:00:35.180 I mean, like, if that is true, that is pretty baller on there.
00:00:39.500 Well, what it means is they will have something that a lot of the world doesn't have, which
00:00:43.120 is not a competent government.
00:00:44.820 The Chinese government is not competent.
00:00:46.780 It is anything but competent. 0.99
00:00:48.080 It is wildly incompetent.
00:00:49.960 But at least a government that is capable of becoming competent again, a government that
00:00:56.740 is capable of disseminating some of the hard policies that can culturally unify a geographic
00:01:02.440 region, increase its fertility, and maintain some level of isolated technophilia.
00:01:08.020 Would you like to know more?
00:01:09.520 Hello, Simone. 0.69
00:01:11.060 We have done two previous episodes on what is going to happen as civilization, as we understand
00:01:17.420 it, begins to collapse.
00:01:18.600 As we have stated in the previous ones, it will collapse for one of two reasons.
00:01:24.480 Either population collapse, as we've said, you know, historically speaking, the economy
00:01:28.820 has risen around the world for the past 500 years or so, because the number of consumers
00:01:32.940 and the number of producers was growing exponentially.
00:01:35.200 We are about to hit a world in which the number of producers and number of producers, consumers,
00:01:39.220 at least the ones who have high economic productivity, are declining exponentially.
00:01:43.040 And we have leveraged every layer of our economies, which was great in times of growth, but in times
00:01:47.300 of scarcity will lead to economic collapse or AI fixes it, but AI also frees the bourgeoisie
00:01:53.620 from the proletariat, meaning that the wealthy within our society will increasingly become more
00:02:00.700 wealthy and will increasingly become concentratedly wealthy and will use that wealth as systems
00:02:05.580 begin to collapse to protect themselves from the masses.
00:02:09.120 And that means the masses, again, will experience economic posity or what's the word I'm looking
00:02:17.240 for here?
00:02:19.440 Depravity?
00:02:20.840 Disempowerment.
00:02:21.440 Economic disempowerment.
00:02:22.040 Economic disempowerment of which we have almost never seen.
00:02:25.100 And possibly just economic, also economic isolation.
00:02:28.160 Yeah.
00:02:28.460 And as we pointed out, in a lot of the world, what this is going to look like is not like moving
00:02:33.260 back to the developing world. 0.85
00:02:34.560 It's not like we will live like we're in a developing world.
00:02:36.320 It will be much worse than that.
00:02:37.600 It will be a developed society that is collapsing, which if you want to look for a good example 0.99
00:02:42.860 of that on the global stage, you are looking at what it's like to live in South Africa today.
00:02:46.520 That is what most of the world is going to be like within our children's lifetimes.
00:02:52.080 But this is the Western world.
00:02:53.520 And when I say the Western world, I'm actually including a lot of the world, Russia, India,
00:02:57.100 places like that.
00:02:58.140 The one place that is really going to buck this pattern is East Asia. 0.60
00:03:02.140 But East Asia is going to buck it for reasons that may be equally dystopian.
00:03:10.280 Yeah.
00:03:10.780 So this is very interesting.
00:03:13.020 South Africa may also end up bucking in.
00:03:15.600 But we you can watch our video on Africa and a pronatalist system in the future.
00:03:20.240 We really don't know what's going to happen to Africa.
00:03:22.380 We have limited experience there.
00:03:23.980 But most of us have lived for extended periods of time in East Asia.
00:03:26.980 So we have a much better understanding of East Asian cultures and how they are reacting to this.
00:03:32.740 So the country that matters most for where East Asia is going in regards to all this is China.
00:03:41.080 We can already begin to see China's reaction to rapidly falling birth rates, which is a restriction of.
00:03:49.020 So first they just tried to force people.
00:03:50.700 They were like, OK, get out there, have kids.
00:03:52.680 We're telling you have kids.
00:03:53.540 And people said, no.
00:03:54.240 And China was like, oh, this hasn't happened before.
00:03:57.860 OK, well, we will restrict your access to vasectomies. 1.00
00:04:01.520 We will restrict your access to abortions. 0.97
00:04:03.600 And you're going to see what happened, you know, with the one child policy.
00:04:07.460 If you look at like the year without a, what was it, a year?
00:04:10.560 It was the summer without a birth or something like that.
00:04:13.160 It was this region where they go, we're having a summer without a birth in this region because we're so good at following the Communist Party's orders.
00:04:19.140 And what they really just did was forced abortions on everyone who got pregnant and like murdering people. 0.96
00:04:24.200 And it was horrifying.
00:04:25.100 And if you want to learn more about it, look up other videos on it.
00:04:27.780 It is almost as gruesome as you can conceive.
00:04:30.760 Now, what we are likely to have is similar things.
00:04:34.040 The summer where every woman gets pregnant. 1.00
00:04:35.520 How does that happen?
00:04:36.040 Well, you get inseminated when you go to a doctor's visit.
00:04:37.900 You get inseminated when you when you get the flu.
00:04:40.560 You get inseminated.
00:04:41.300 There are so many ways that they could fix this if they really have to is the way that the CCP thinks.
00:04:48.720 And they could even do, you know, birthing facilities.
00:04:51.540 They could do all sorts of things that show sort of a top down thought process that we wouldn't even consider in the West.
00:04:58.660 Now, before they get to this, they're going to have to go through the needle, which is complete economic collapse. 0.99
00:05:04.660 The Chinese system, and we can do a different video on this, is so fucked, it's almost impossible to describe how fucked the Chinese system is. 1.00
00:05:14.340 A lot of people are like, well, no, it's just their demographics. 0.99
00:05:17.840 It's not just their demographics.
00:05:19.960 They get something like 83% of their energy needs inputted and like 86% of that are coming from the Middle East.
00:05:28.480 That means that they're going around like all of these people who hate them, like India and through like the Strait of Malacca, which could easily be blockaded or like it's they are in an incredibly vulnerable international position.
00:05:42.880 Worse than that, they don't even produce their own food.
00:05:45.720 The food they do produce is they don't even produce their own phosphates for that food.
00:05:51.760 So they wouldn't even have the same food production they have now if they were blockaded.
00:05:55.180 Oh, and on top of that, and they don't even need to be blockaded.
00:05:58.880 You just need to have the beginnings of a collapse of a globalist system, which we are already beginning to see, which is what happens in this future.
00:06:06.480 On top of all that, they don't even have water.
00:06:09.540 Like they have water in some parts of China and not other parts of China.
00:06:12.540 There's a great video on it that I'm going to link to here on China's water situation.
00:06:17.520 But something like 96% of their water is just unusable because it's so polluted.
00:06:22.400 And this is a huge problem when their current energy needs, like their current energy production within the country is mostly coming from coal, which requires lots of water to make work.
00:06:33.700 So and then they require water to grow their own crops, which they can't even grow.
00:06:37.200 I almost forgot to mention their huge infrastructure problem.
00:06:41.240 To learn more about this topic, I check out the video.
00:06:43.560 China has a debt problem three times larger than Evergrande by Economics Explained.
00:06:47.360 And then their whole housing situation, which, OK, I'm going to quickly touch on this because a lot of people don't know what's going on with the housing situation and why it's so much worse than individuals think it is.
00:06:57.360 So something like 76% of all of China's wealth is in their housing market.
00:07:02.560 Why is that?
00:07:03.360 Because that has been the most stable of all of the markets within the Chinese economy.
00:07:09.020 You know, historically, companies have in the stock market has been really up and down because it can randomly be interfered with the state.
00:07:17.200 The state cannot interfere with the housing market in a way which would cause it to collapse, or at least historically it couldn't.
00:07:22.920 Why couldn't it?
00:07:23.600 Because when the Tom and his party took power, what they did was they said, OK, we're nationalizing all property, all land in the country.
00:07:30.080 And then what ended up happening is the Chinese, if you want to understand how the Chinese system is modeled, it's kind of like states, but they're called provinces like you would have in the U.S.
00:07:38.560 But in the U.S., a lot of federal tax dollars go back down to states to help pay for things.
00:07:42.500 That's not true in the Chinese system.
00:07:44.380 In the Chinese system, the provinces really have to pay for everything local themselves, and the federal tax dollars go to big federal national projects.
00:07:51.820 But so it turns out that these states are not good at collecting taxes.
00:07:56.780 Anybody who knows historically, that's a sign of an empire that's about to collapse.
00:08:00.080 So there's something like estimated they're only collecting like 3%, 3.5% of the taxes are supposed to be collapsing.
00:08:05.180 This is really in line with like a non-functioning civilization.
00:08:09.340 But anyway, so how do they make up for this?
00:08:11.720 What they do is they rezone land that is on the outskirts of urban centers as urban land, which allows them to sell it because rural land is still owned by the people in China.
00:08:23.420 And then they sell them through debt that's taken out that's not supposed to be taken out by these like secret holding codes.
00:08:28.520 You can look into this more.
00:08:29.980 But essentially, they are supplementing not having tax income with land sales at the provincial level.
00:08:37.440 And this can make up like 33% of like a province's like ongoing operating expenses, which means that if the real estate situation in China collapses, which it's going to and it is, also their ability to get government revenues also collapses.
00:08:53.300 To an extent that is not easily replaceable with tax revenues.
00:08:59.760 In addition to all of this, their like whole economic infrastructure, their whole reason for existing on the global stage was as a bit globalist multi-country supply chain.
00:09:10.780 So they would do one part within a globalist multi-country supply chain.
00:09:13.720 Well, with COVID, they showed that they would just like close their ports, close their factories.
00:09:18.440 And you're increasingly seeing them do stuff like this, which means that they are no longer useful as a player in a multi-party supply chain.
00:09:25.900 Because if you block just one step, even if you're like one of 100 steps, you've blocked the entire supply chain, which means that if you're doing anything in China and now needs to be lateralized in China now for minimal economic problems when they block supply chains.
00:09:39.820 The problem is that China can't do any advanced technology. They just suck at it. 0.99
00:09:43.500 Even Huawei's newest chip looks like it's probably based in Taiwan. 0.99
00:09:47.020 They're pretending like they're making it locally.
00:09:48.700 That's wild that like China can't even make chips for its own phones. 0.88
00:09:52.460 Like the main thing it's doing, they just do not have this technological capability.
00:09:58.200 So anyway, and as to why they don't have this technological, they had this huge project where like they were trying to do like simplistic things, like just make their own pencils that didn't suck.
00:10:06.160 Like this was a huge project in China for a long time.
00:10:08.440 Pencils. There was a pencil campaign.
00:10:10.260 Yeah, there was a big pencil campaign that was like, I think up to like 2015 or 2016.
00:10:14.560 So recent.
00:10:15.500 Wow.
00:10:15.720 To just find out how to make competent pencils.
00:10:18.400 I meant ballpoint pens. Sorry about that.
00:10:20.720 They actually really kind of suck at this.
00:10:23.560 And worse than all of this is that if you're going to set up a new part of your supply chain, it's like always cheaper to do in Mexico now if you're a U.S. company because labor is less expensive in Mexico now. 0.82
00:10:32.840 So why would you do it in China?
00:10:34.100 So they've lost their like economic recent debt, their entire system is a house of cards.
00:10:38.440 They are geopolitically incredibly vulnerable.
00:10:40.940 All of this is painting this this horrible, horrible, horrible picture for China. 0.99
00:10:45.620 And some people are like, yeah, but they have like good battery supplies.
00:10:48.760 And it's like, yeah, but that doesn't increase their economy.
00:10:51.400 OK, they need to find ways to increase their economy if they're going to economically grow.
00:10:57.080 That just slows the speed at which they are declining, which is going to be catastrophic.
00:11:04.220 All right.
00:11:05.000 So you might say, well, why am I still kind of bullish on China?
00:11:09.500 One, they can force population, which is going to be relevant for whatever comes after they pass through the eye of the needle, the collapse.
00:11:15.700 But also they have set up their entire system.
00:11:18.600 That's what the social credit system is.
00:11:20.100 That's what the constant monitoring is.
00:11:21.940 That's what the money that the government can track is.
00:11:23.840 Why did they do these COVID protocols if it put them in such a dangerous position vis-a-vis their existing economy?
00:11:30.080 Because it was all a plan for the collapse.
00:11:32.520 You're saying they were preparing for collapse.
00:11:35.000 Yes, they were preparing to maintain their existing government systems in a collapse.
00:11:40.340 Total economic collapse.
00:11:41.600 I mean, like if that is true, that is pretty baller on their part.
00:11:45.860 Well, what it means is they will have something that a lot of the world doesn't have, which is not a competent government.
00:11:51.200 The Chinese government is not competent.
00:11:53.160 It is anything but competent. 0.99
00:11:54.460 It is wildly incompetent.
00:11:56.340 But at least a government that is capable of becoming competent again.
00:12:02.120 A government that is capable of disseminating some of the hard policies that can culturally unify a geographic region, increase its fertility, and maintain some level of isolated technophilia.
00:12:14.020 Yeah, but I don't really get that impression that that's the direction they're moving in.
00:12:18.080 I see a lot of efforts to subdue the population and control the population and maintain, you know, for those who have power, maintain their position.
00:12:25.880 That is all true, but that is going to be infinitely better than the religious extremism that is going to dominate the rest of the world. 0.99
00:12:33.280 Right, but I don't see how that, I mean, unless they have some sort of elite, separate, highly educated, technophilic, suddenly innovative.
00:12:41.980 Yeah, so this is also important to note.
00:12:43.360 So a lot of people are like, yeah, but won't China, like, start genetic selection, genetic engineering? 0.85
00:12:47.460 No, China is really resistant to all of these.
00:12:49.540 People who ask this stuff and expect East Asian countries to engage with this technology do not understand fundamentally how conservative East Asian countries are.
00:12:57.960 They are more conservative, like, at a small C level than probably anyone or any cultural group you have met.
00:13:07.640 They are more conservative, for example, than ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities.
00:13:12.040 They are more conservative than Amish communities in the ways that they engage with cultural technologies. 0.63
00:13:18.220 They will, it seems very unlikely to me that they will engage with these technologies.
00:13:23.240 They, if anything, will go back to something that looks more like the imperial exam systems.
00:13:27.720 They will go back to a model that is based on old Chinese empires. 0.65
00:13:31.520 But what is important and what I am, it's not great, but it's not going to look like what we are going to see across the West, which is small, stable, technophilic havens surrounded by religious extremists who hate them and want to kill them.
00:13:48.140 China is just going to be like a large, economically depressed region that is finding a new, stable state for itself.
00:13:56.400 And it will take a while to find that, as China always does. 1.00
00:13:59.820 But as it begins to find something that works, it will begin to come back as a major and unified player.
00:14:06.560 This has huge implications for all of the countries around it.
00:14:12.640 One, we're going to talk about Taiwan, and we'll do another video on whether China would attack Taiwan or anything like that. 0.94
00:14:17.160 But if Taiwan leaves the globalist economy, the globalist economy is kind of fucked.
00:14:22.440 Because they are the only ones who can produce a lot of the chips that are used in, like, everything. 0.90
00:14:30.520 Yeah, for now.
00:14:31.420 Everything.
00:14:32.580 Like, it is almost kind of weird that no one else has figured out how to produce these chips at the scale of Taiwan.
00:14:39.780 They produce a huge chunk of the chips we use for almost everything in the world.
00:14:43.900 And if things went down in Taiwan, there are only a few countries that could even supply themselves with chips.
00:14:50.980 China isn't one of them. 0.97
00:14:52.440 Okay?
00:14:53.140 I'm just saying that right now.
00:14:54.920 Korea probably could. 0.69
00:14:56.200 And so it would make sense for the U.S. to maintain a tight alliance with them.
00:14:59.860 Japan probably could.
00:15:00.900 The U.S. could to a lesser extent.
00:15:03.880 Very few countries in Europe could.
00:15:05.720 I know that the UAE has looked into building technological capability on this front.
00:15:10.380 Israel could, probably.
00:15:11.740 But very few countries could.
00:15:12.920 To clarify, I'm not talking about existing capacity for advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
00:15:17.960 I'm talking about having the human capital to build that.
00:15:21.140 Or the investment capital and will to build out things like that.
00:15:25.660 So, I mean, if the chips were shut off, which countries could conceivably begin producing them themselves after, you know, like a 10-year investment and boot-up period.
00:15:35.540 And this is just really meaningful if you're thinking about the future of a deglobalized world and what partnerships matter.
00:15:43.500 In the past, if you've ever played like a game of Civ and like a new resource unlocks like iron or uranium and you're like, I've got to make sure I have a good alliance with a country that has some within their borders.
00:15:55.300 It's going to be the same way with people who can produce these advanced silicon chips, especially if Taiwan leaves the world stage. 0.78
00:16:04.280 Okay.
00:16:04.840 But now what happens with Japan and Korea? 0.94
00:16:09.100 Korea's fertility rate is desperately low.
00:16:11.680 I do not think this means that Korea will cease to exist.
00:16:14.700 I think it means that some subgroup within Korea is going to replace the existing population.
00:16:19.360 This could be an immigrant population or a religious extremist population within Korea.
00:16:23.080 One thing that people don't know about Korea who like don't know Korea is Korea is great at cults. 0.98
00:16:28.520 They are a math exporter of cults.
00:16:30.900 They have exported many cults.
00:16:32.700 The Moonies, for example, came from Korea.
00:16:35.300 And they create really good cults.
00:16:37.520 When I say good cults, I just mean that they are internally consistent.
00:16:40.520 I expect the future of Korea, when we say what it's going to be, it will be a single cultural unit, which will make it very different from other countries around the world. 0.99
00:16:48.360 But it will be run by a single, what we would today think of as a high fertility cult. 0.71
00:16:53.720 Whether that cult is technophobic or technophilic is yet to be seen.
00:16:57.760 If it is technophilic, it will be one of the largest players in world history.
00:17:01.900 And so that could be really interesting.
00:17:03.960 I could see the same with Japan.
00:17:05.500 Like I visited what you could describe as like cult complexes in Japan.
00:17:12.260 And they feel very different from mainstream Japanese culture and also a lot more prenatalist.
00:17:17.560 They're not currently technophilic to my knowledge, but they totally could become technophilic.
00:17:22.040 When you're familiar with like their cultural ethno groups in Japan that are based around the descendants of samurais that believe you need to have something like six sons or something like that.
00:17:31.780 What?
00:17:32.120 Yeah, and they still hold to these practices. And so they have really high fertility groups.
00:17:35.800 I should clarify here that this is not the descendants of all of the samurais who are in this group.
00:17:39.720 It is a small, small group in Japan that would best be called a cult by outsiders as all groups that culturally extremely differentiate from mainstream society are often called if they are considered youngish.
00:17:52.660 Now, clearly, this group takes inspiration from what they define as their heritage.
00:17:58.560 However, who's to say how many of them are actually from those samurai families?
00:18:02.520 So what we might actually see by Japan, Weeb's fantasy, is it gets taken over by the descendants of the samurais. 0.99
00:18:09.900 The samurai empire.
00:18:10.980 And they have, yeah, basically a martial, unified samurai empire of a country, which, again, makes it very different from a lot of the Western world.
00:18:20.580 And so you can say, why are they able to do this?
00:18:23.300 Why aren't they falling apart in the same way the Western world is falling apart?
00:18:26.620 The core reason is that they are basically already city-states.
00:18:30.420 Japan is a city-state and Korea is a city-state.
00:18:32.980 A huge portion of each country's population and an increasing portion of each country's population is based around the metropolitan centers of each country.
00:18:41.140 And so is their economy.
00:18:42.260 So is everything that they're building, which makes it easier to culturally consolidate, especially when everyone around them is so hostile to them.
00:18:52.440 So that is the direction I think that those countries are going.
00:18:55.740 If you look at, what's the word I'm looking for here, Indochina and Oceania, not including Australia or New Zealand, those are the two areas, like Indonesia and stuff like that.
00:19:06.940 You know, Indonesia is going to be a really big player in the future.
00:19:09.880 But how they're a big player isn't clear to me.
00:19:12.020 They could be won by a technophobic population.
00:19:14.840 Singapore, obviously, is really well set up for this haven state world that we're entering into, that we've described in other videos.
00:19:21.580 I think they're going to be a very large player.
00:19:23.240 And if Israel ends up getting taken over by technophobic populations, the number one contender to be the core linchpin in the network of havens is going to be Singapore, if they can get their act together pronatalist-wise, which I suspect they will be able to because the government there is sane.
00:19:42.660 What I thought you were going to talk about is the, I think, you know, when it comes to, we've talked about corporations producing humans, like essentially corporations, either through, you know, surrogates that they hire to gestate their material, as it were, or through artificial wombs someday, just start creating humans and then using them like in a corporate way for, you know, producing things for having their own sort of state.
00:20:09.120 I feel like if that is going to happen somewhere, I feel like if that is going to happen somewhere, it's more likely to happen somewhere in East Asia.
00:20:14.440 I mean, I've always thought like China is on that list.
00:20:17.860 Who does it?
00:20:18.600 We don't know.
00:20:19.340 I actually think it might be Korea.
00:20:21.000 It could be.
00:20:22.000 It could be.
00:20:22.400 But you've also got to keep in mind how conservative these countries are.
00:20:24.860 Again, I say people expect them to be the ones that do the weird genetic stuff.
00:20:27.900 This will happen in a somewhat post-collapse state, I think, where like just people stop enforcing things, the attention to this sort of goes down.
00:20:39.880 And then at some point, some really entrepreneurial person is going to just go for it, ask for forgiveness, not permission, or not even that.
00:20:48.800 Because at that point, if they're the ones with the humans, they may be the ones with the power.
00:20:53.540 So it won't even matter.
00:20:54.500 Yeah, so I could see something like this being done by like a Korean tribal.
00:20:59.700 Samsung humans.
00:21:01.140 Samsung humans.
00:21:02.300 Yeah, Samsung humans to live in your Samsung apartment. 0.99
00:21:06.900 Yeah.
00:21:07.960 Another country.
00:21:08.980 So a lot of people are like, yeah, but what about the rising individuals today?
00:21:11.520 Like we're invested in some countries like Vietnam, for example.
00:21:13.880 I think they have a really positive future in the near term.
00:21:17.540 But one thing we have to remember about countries like Vietnam is, unfortunately, these countries that are doing well
00:21:23.520 because they're developing countries today are doing well because of the globalist system we live in.
00:21:28.580 The countries that are going to be hit hardest as the developing system begins to collapse are going to be the ones that are what we call developing countries today.
00:21:37.760 Right, because you're getting free rent when it comes to the policed seas, like open shipping channels, and demand from other nations.
00:21:45.640 Yeah, so this is why Latin America is going to be hit so hard.
00:21:49.100 And one of the reasons why we just like don't even talk about like it does not matter economically in the future, because Latin America has really tied itself to China.
00:21:56.440 And as China collapses, specifically southern Latin America, Mexico is going to be fine. 0.57
00:22:02.260 Like they'll partner with the US.
00:22:03.560 But if you're looking at South America specifically, they rely too much on exports to China, and the Chinese economy is going to stop.
00:22:13.040 Like what are they exporting?
00:22:13.920 They're exporting like raw materials, like metals and copper and stuff used in this building craze.
00:22:19.920 And these buildings are empty, a lot of them.
00:22:22.840 You know, they are trading like crypto.
00:22:24.940 The reason why in China, an unfurnished building room trades for more than a furnished room is because it is like an unmolested like token.
00:22:36.160 They are a tokenized unit.
00:22:38.100 And the reason why, and I didn't really get to this, like why is it that the real estate always goes up?
00:22:44.320 It's because everyone knows that when the real estate does begin to persistently grow down, that's when the state, as they understand it, collapses.
00:22:51.020 And so if you can't take your money out of the country, and the stock market doesn't matter, well, if the money is going to crash anyway, because it will crash anyway if the real estate crashes, because the government will crash, which is doing all sorts of funny things with their currency, then you might as well put it in real estate.
00:23:07.360 It's the only place that makes sense.
00:23:09.480 So anyway, anything else you wanted to talk about?
00:23:12.840 No, but I hope East Asia does well, and I'd love to see things bounce back.
00:23:17.540 I think the fun thing about them, and they're really like, this is the area to watch.
00:23:21.100 This is like the geographic zone to watch because I think it's the most wildcardy one because it's seeing such a profound, at least like in China, Japan, South Korea, such a profound crash that like it's so hard to, like who knows what's going to happen?
00:23:37.980 And I think that's really, it's both very dire, but also possibly exciting if you're like, well, I mean, you know, who knows?
00:23:43.980 They're going to get really creative, possibly.
00:23:45.740 Yeah, and it does make sense to keep alliances with most of these groups open, while also correctly ranking their importance.
00:23:56.880 And I think one of the big problems with China today is people vastly overestimate its importance to the future of the world.
00:24:02.060 Yeah.
00:24:02.500 It's just not that important.
00:24:04.220 I remember I mentioned this once on a call with, you know, one of these CCP Chinese, whatever people, the high level person, and they got all mad. 0.97
00:24:11.620 They're like, China has risen many times, and this is, you see China has a long history, and it always rises.
00:24:19.940 And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:24:21.080 Listen to what you're saying.
00:24:22.040 Why does China need to keep rising?
00:24:24.540 It's because it keeps collapsing.
00:24:26.880 And you are at the end of one of those cycles right now if you look at history.
00:24:30.420 So, yeah, China's just not that relevant from a future perspective.
00:24:35.260 Taiwan is super, duper, duper, duper, duper, duper, duper relevant, like much more relevant. 0.93
00:24:41.140 Actually, one of the funny predictions I have for the future, people want a really funny prediction for the future, is I believe there is actually a good chance, if China doesn't successfully take Taiwan, that in 50 to 60 years, there could be a real possibility of Taiwan taking China.
00:25:00.700 Just because they will be economically so much more productive than China, so much more important to the world stage.
00:25:06.620 And China itself, there is a small chance, we've talked about all the systems they've put in place to allow the system to collapse while still maintaining centralized control.
00:25:14.740 But if that centralized control falters, or you end up getting fights within the CCP, which ends up subdividing the country.
00:25:21.020 As has happened before in Chinese history, everybody knows about the warring states period, or the three kingdoms, or the, you know.
00:25:26.760 And this weakens them enough that Taiwan can come in and begin to take them one at a time, which could happen. 0.50
00:25:34.520 That would be an interesting twist of fate.
00:25:37.500 Anyway, yeah, any other thoughts?
00:25:39.700 No, love you.
00:25:40.540 Love you, too.
00:25:41.640 Love you, too.