Chapter 1: What geopolitical shifts are expected in the next decade?
America doesn't win the next era because it's brilliant. It wins because everyone else is screwed. What's that mean?
Doesn't exactly fit on a bumper sticker, but yeah, that broadly works. You got two big things that are going on. Number one, in the globalized world, it's all about who you can access safely. And in the Western hemisphere, we really don't have to worry about any security threats from a trade point of view. So people always talk about, oh, if the U.S.
and China get into a war, won't that be bad for X, Y, or Z? I don't mean to suggest it would be a piece of cake, but the Chinese are dependent on trade and we're not.
Chapter 2: How does energy influence global trade dynamics?
It's really that simple. And if we can nail down Canada and Mexico in a productive relationship, you know, we used to call that NAFTA or NAFTA II. We're now having second thoughts. That's half the hard work right there. In addition, we export food, we export energy, the Chinese import both biggest in the world, in fact.
And so maintaining supply chains for us is an issue of building the industrial plant. And while you can't just wave a magic wand and make that happen overnight. We've done this several times before. Every country on the planet has. Of course we can do it again.
Chapter 3: What demographic challenges is China facing?
It would just be nice if we started sooner rather than later. The other piece is that the Chinese stopped having babies about 45 years ago. And they're now on the verge of running out of 50-year-olds. And there is not an economic model that humans have yet to dream up that will work with where they will be demographically in less than 10 years' time.
So we are living in the equivalent of 2006 subprime. where everyone's like, oh, and it's all about to go tits up.
Appropriately apocalyptic from you to start. The stuff about China, is that a challenge of just geography, virome, biome, topsoil, just sort of the constitution of where they are? Is that sort of one of the fundamental problems?
All of that is legitimate concerns.
Chapter 4: How is AI reshaping workforce productivity?
The river where most of them live on, the Yellow, isn't navigable. They have never been able to use it for trade, so they've never internally traded among themselves. The one river they have that is navigable, the Yangtze, has always been an independent, well, I should say always, but often been an independent political entity going back for 3,000 years of Chinese history.
And down in the south in the tropics where you've got Hong Kong, you've got city-states and little enclaves of flat land that have always looked to the outside world rather than the Chinese. The soil sucks. The northern part where 70% of the population lives, it's low-s soil in a drought zone.
So if anything ever happened to logistics or distribution, what would go down in northern China would be what has gone down in northern China 27 times before, and that's civilizational collapse. If we were talking about any country that had fewer people than the Chinese have always had, that would just be the end of them.
It's just that there have always been enough Chinese in the past to pick up the pieces and move forward on the other side of the break. But that requires you having children.
Chapter 5: What role does the U.S. play in global supply chains?
And so this really is an end to the concept of China and the concept of even the Han Chinese. Because we're in a situation now where probably they have more people over age 54 than under. And I'm sorry, that just doesn't work. And very soon it will be over. That's before you consider the broader geography of China versus the rest of the world. You got the first island chain off the coast.
So the Chinese have never, ever, ever been able to be a global commercial power, except when the United States, when it created the global system, told everybody that they couldn't bring guns to trade talks. And that one decision that we made allowed the Chinese to play on the global field in a way that they just never could until that point.
And so, lo and behold, this is the one era of Chinese history where they're unified and successful.
Tell me more about the guns to the meetings rule and how that helped.
Chapter 6: How are countries adapting to energy shortages?
Sure. So before World War II, it's a good break, we basically had an imperial system where if you wanted links to resources and markets and populations that were outside of your home country, you had to build a navy and you went and took it. You built your empire. And those empires attempted to not trade with one another if they could help it. They just traded within their own network.
That model generated what we like to call history, and it led to World War II, when all the empires crashed and burned at the same time fighting for dominance. Well, at the end of World War II, the only Navy that was left that was worthy of the name was the American Navy.
And we had never been a trading power because we more or less had a continent to ourselves, and we're still digesting the continent.
So we had this idea that we will use our Navy to protect everyone, and we will allow everyone to trade with anyone else, and we will allow our market to be open to your goods if, in exchange, we get to write your security policies so we don't get another conflict like this again.
One of the things that people want to break down the trade relationships and say that it's unfair for the United States, what they forget is it was supposed to be unfair to the United States.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
From an economic point of view, we bribed up an alliance. If you remember your history, it wasn't just Britain and Germany and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Italy that were allies during the Cold War. It was China, too, because it was all about boxing in the Soviets, and it worked beautifully. The idea that this should be recalibrated in a post-Cold War environment, perfectly reasonable.
But if you don't want to pay people to be on your side, they need another reason to be on your side. And so what we're seeing in American politics right now is this kind of cognitive disconnect where we still want everyone to do everything we say, but we also don't want our market open. And that is not a viable long-term plan.
Okay, so Chinese demographic collapse. You've said China will be gone in 10 years. China, as we currently understand it, yeah.
Chapter 8: Which countries are emerging as new powers in the global landscape?
There'll still be some Han. Give it 50 years, there might not be. So China, very populous. People might say, well, if I just look at the numbers, you said before that numbers were the solution last time. There's more numbers now. I'm going to guess that the issue is that the numbers are trending in the wrong direction, that it wasn't a good-
Since I talked to you last, there seems to be this reckoning that's going on in the statistical community in Canada. Where'd that come from? Sorry. You picked me up right after doing another project in China. The issue appears to be that they now believe, the statisticians now believe that the local and regional governments have been lying about their demographic data for over 25 years.
And so after Tiananmen Square, 10,000 people killed by tanks in downtown Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party said, well, that was no fun whatsoever. Let's try to not ever have to do that again. One of the ways we're going to make sure that happens is we discovered that there were kind of two kinds of protesters.
You had the white collar workers that just made signs and they were really easy to run over with tanks. And then you had the ones that were kind of scary that brought wrenches and guns. So you had white collar and you had blue collar. So why don't we move our entire economy from a blue collar economy to a white collar economy?
Problem solved, because white collar folks live in high rise apartments. You can cut off their water. You can bolt them into their house. Now, there's lots of ways you can deal with white collar protesters. Blue collar, a little different. So they started advancing their STEM work. They started secondary and tertiary education systems. And, you know, this wasn't a stupid plan.
We can critique how successful the transition was and why they were a manufacturing economy and still are and really weren't ready for that kind of fast transition. Different topic. But the thing is, when you go to primary school and secondary school and tertiary school, the first time you pay taxes is typically when you're 21, 22, or 23.
So there's a delayed gratification here, which as Americans like to say, the Chinese have no problem with. It's false, but whatever. So the first big crop of these new white collar workers who were supposed to be working at high paid jobs and paying lots of taxes, that was supposed to manifest in calendar year 2019. But then there was COVID. And in China, COVID lasted a lot longer.
And they really didn't get recovery until 2023, maybe even early in 2024. And so they didn't get any good data. And then when they did get the data, they're like, whoa, tax receipts are down. That's the opposite of what's supposed to be happening. And when the statisticians in Shanghai went and looked back at everything, they're like, okay. Here's the problem.
In a first world country, there are dozens, hundreds of touch points where the government becomes convinced that you're a real person. Your mom goes to neonatal. You're born. Every immunization, matriculation for every grade level. You pay taxes. You get your driver's permit. You get your driver's license. There's thousands throughout your lifetimes.
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