Every Major War Started The Same Way — And China Might Be Next — We Had To React

Key Takeaway

Practice second- and third-order thinking before making major decisions: ask what incentives the system creates, what assumptions must stay true, and what happens if the window of opportunity closes. Today, choose one personal or work decision—hiring, spending, planning, or investing—and write down its likely downstream effects over one, three, and five years. The episode’s central lesson is that panic, distorted incentives, and an inability to accept decline can turn manageable problems into destructive actions.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu and Drew react to an OBF video arguing that China’s demographic decline, economic pressures, and military preparation could make a Taiwan conflict more likely. The conversation explores demographic incentives, authoritarian failures, supply-chain dependence, AI and robotics as possible responses to labor shortages, and historical cases in which declining powers acted aggressively when they believed their strategic window was closing.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Every Major War Started The Same Way — And China Might Be Next — We Had To React from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

China and the United States will almost certainly find themselves at war precisely because China is declining. Their decline makes our collision inevitable. The craziest thing is that this contradicts my theory about the Thucydides trap, which is that it is China that is rising and the US that is declining. That's why we will eventually collide. The bad news is that both of these views predict a collision , but they are very different arguments. And, given the economic data from China, it may be true that it is China's decline that is dangerous.

Let's take a look. China is collapsing. China's population is shrinking. The growth prospects of the world's second- largest economy are fading. For 20 years, the world has been told the opposite: that China is developing so fast, building so much, and seizing so many critical industries that it is only a matter of time before it wins this century. But this story ignores this line. For 70 years, China's population has been moving in one direction— upward. Then, in 2022, it stopped and began to fall. For the first time since the famine of the 1960s, which killed tens of millions, China is shrinking, and this time it may be impossible to reverse.

This line changes everything, because from now on, China will have fewer workers, taxpayers, consumers, and young people every year to realize its ambitions. The longer he waits, the weaker he becomes. A rising state can wait, a dying state cannot. And the Chinese Communist Party knows that its window of opportunity is closing. She knows that China in 10 years will be older, smaller, and weaker than it is today, which means that everything she has planned will have to be implemented while it is still possible. And she has already started preparing for it.

Deep in the Chinese desert, inside Asia's largest military complex, China is building a facility on a scale that is impossible to ignore . What is being built there shows how seriously Beijing is preparing for the future. This is the largest military training base in Asia, where China has built a replica city, a full-size model of the center of Taiwan's capital, Taipei. In the center stands a building about 136 meters long with a tower painted in red and white, which almost exactly copies the presidential office of Taiwan.

And they don't even try to hide it. In 2015, Chinese state television literally showed footage of soldiers storming this model building and capturing the toy capital. Dude, imagine if they had a replica of the White House. We would feel kind of strange. Yes. I feel kind of strange right now. How do you recreate my capital just because you're bored? You have too much free time. What is happening now? This is just wildness. for the reunification of China. Added a copy of Taiwanese No problem with authoritarian leaders.

Judicial Yuan, a building corresponding to the Taiwan Defense Reserve Command, and between the fake presidential office and the fake Judicial Yuan, they dug a tunnel. Analysts who study these images have a name for the type of operation you practice on targets like this: a beheading strike—the assassination or capture of a country's leadership in the early hours of a war, before the outside world realizes what's happening. And it's not just on this side. In 2024, satellite analysts discovered a second copy of the same government quarter hundreds of kilometers away.

In the Taklamakan Desert, China built a full-size mock-up of a Taiwanese naval base, parked a destroyer-shaped target at the dock, and hit it with a missile right in the center. And somewhere else, he laid out the outlines of an American aircraft carrier and a replica of the main US Navy base in Japan. Piece by piece, China is building every target it would have to hit on the first morning of the war for Taiwan. Beijing calls these routine exercises. Aha. no one in particular, but I don't know who they're expecting.

It's just routine training, Drew. We made an exact copy of your naval base. We made a copy of your capital, but this is not about you. Don't be so self-indulgent . I do n't know why you. I do n't know, I don't want to fight, I don't want to fight with China. I'm telling you this right now. I don't have any problems. We can't even handle Iran, and they're building fake cities to practice? No way. No way. No way. That wouldn't be, that wouldn't be a good idea.

That wouldn't be a good idea. no problems at all. To understand why this is happening, we need to trace China's collapse step by step, and it all starts with the "one family, one child" policy. For 35 years, China has carried out the most aggressive population control program in human history. One-child policy, forced sterilization, mandatory abortions, fines that could ruin a family because of a child. I don't know how many people know about this kind of thing, but when we're talking about it, why, Tom, are you afraid of authoritarian rule?

That's why. When the government can tell you when you can or can't have children, when it can come in and force you to have an abortion , when it can force you to sterilize, how come all the alarm bells don't go off in your ears, I just don't understand. And everyone who, in my opinion, is promoting these ideas, calling for taking an example from China, is ignoring the fact that there will inevitably come a point when everything starts to move in the wrong direction. And when you don't have people who can pull you back from the brink, when you don't create a system of checks and balances, when you don't stop what they're trying to do, you get an unmanageable process that leads nowhere.

I think the one- child policy period in China is a prime example of how China finally started moving in the right direction . So the situation can get so bad that when it starts to seem normal, you realize you have a problem. This is how far an authoritarian system can go in its decomposition. So when you think about the clash that awaits the US, where more and more far-leftists are starting to demand not the “Scandinavian model” but the “Chinese model ”, remember the horrors that China is committing now, in the recent past, and in the long term.

Quickly about the main thing: we are the first economy in the world, they are the second, they are falling, we have a slight decline, but we are not sliding into four percent negative GDP or anything like that. So can this narrow our gap and prevent us from falling into the middle-income trap? There is evidence that China may be wrong about its population by hundreds of millions—either because they themselves are turning a blind eye to it, or because of incentives for local officials to inflate the numbers in order to obtain resources.

So, there is a structure of incentives for falsifying reports. And on the world stage, they don't want anyone to know about their population decline. This is a sign of weakness. So they have reasons to lie both domestically and internationally . If you add these two factors together, they are most likely lying. The only question is how much. OK. So if we have the psychological energy that we are growing, we are getting big, but we are implementing these policies to change that, but no one has really noticed because there has been so much cultural belief that we are just getting bigger and bigger.

But in reality, we are starting to get weaker, weaker, and weaker. You start overbuilding housing precisely because you think in terms of "more population," but that population is n't actually coming. And now you have begun to decline without realizing it, even though your economy is growing. So the reason I would say that China won't necessarily decline faster than the US is because their economy is still growing faster than the US economy. So right now, no matter what advantage we have, because people argue whether we're number one or they are, but no matter what you say, China is growing faster now.

And so over time , if they're not number one yet, chances are they'll catch up with us, unless their decline swallows it up completely. Now their growth rate is slowing down. So the direction they are moving in is bad. But they still have, say, 4.5% growth, and we have 1.2% or some of the horrible numbers we had last time, we are definitely in a worse position. Now we are supposedly on par. They are declining at a faster rate. So let's see who can stabilize first. Will America be able to start growing first?

We are both betting very big on AI. So we'll see who ultimately wins this race. But understanding why their mental image of themselves is so different from reality will be important to understanding this decline. This is the same idea that creates the " Thucydides trap," which is that psychologically you can't accept decline. And this is what ultimately causes conflict. So it's a cousin to some extent, not a mirror image of what it means: yes, it's true, it's a decline, but it requires the decline of whoever is going to be the aggressor.

So, the aggressor will only become aggressive when he is in decline. So if America still sees itself as, " no, no, no, we have a chance ," then it will not be an aggressor. If China looks at this and says, "oh no, our window of opportunity is closing," then they will probably become the aggressor. Of course. Beijing was convinced that China would not have enough food, jobs, or housing for everyone. So, it was decided to forcefully limit families to one child, and it worked. Eight billion people were told clearly how many children they could have, and they complied.

Then Beijing looked at that graph, saw where it was headed, and panicked. So he did a complete 180- degree U-turn and began begging his people to have more children. This was accompanied by bribes, child support payments, longer maternity leave, tax breaks , housing subsidies, and even propaganda about the joy of a large family. But the graph kept falling, which is interesting, because remember: this is one of the most controlled states on Earth, which could force people to stop having children, but could not convince them to start again.

So why don't they want to? Well, the numbers just don't add up. In modern China, raising one child up to the age of 18 costs about seven times the average annual salary, one of the highest rates in the world, and that's without taking university into account. Part of it is about housing. Apartments in cities like Shanghai and Beijing cost more than a young couple can ever save. And partly it's about school, which in China is not really about learning. This is probably best called war. It all comes down to one exam, which is taken at the age of 18—the Gaokao.

This single test literally determines your entire future life. So parents invest thousands in private tutoring to give their child an edge because all the other parents are doing the same thing, and falling behind is not an option. This arms race in education has become so expensive that in 2021 the government completely banned most private classes. How wild is that? Like, they want you to have kids, and people get so obsessed with how expensive they make kids. It's not that China makes children expensive. But they spend so much money trying to ensure their child's success that even when they ban tutors, they still continue to go all in.

just to make children cheaper. It did n't work. But here's the most important part. Even if China fixed all these problems tomorrow, this schedule still wouldn't change . And the reason is in mathematics, so simple that it's almost meaningless. To give birth to a child, you need a woman of childbearing age, approximately 20 to 34 years old. So the number of children that the country can I apologize. possible to have, is strictly limited by the number of women in that age group. There are now about 105 million of them in China.

By 2050, there will be about 58 million. Almost. Dude, this drop is just crazy. Half of it disappeared. And nothing can stop it, because these women already exist, or rather , they don't exist. The mothers of 2045 are girls being born right now. Okay, here's something he's overlooking that I think is very important. This is something most people, especially in the West, don't want to face. Of course, if you don't have women, nothing else matters after that point. But part of the reason why we don't have women, why people are not having children at the same rate they used to—there's one thing you can do if you want to completely eliminate fertility, and that's educate women.

I'll give you a minute to realize this. Education for women is wonderful. I'm thrilled about this. Women should have every opportunity to get the best education possible, but this reality has a side effect that people don't want to consider. When you add birth control, nature's way of getting you to do or not do something becomes an extremely crude tool. He has only pleasure and pain. So, nature wants you to have children. This is the whole point of evolution. To have children who will survive long enough to have children too.

This is what we are optimized for, this one simple thing. Everything else is just an add-on to making sure you have children who will survive long enough to have children of their own, period. Therefore, sex will be one of the things we find most pleasurable. Think about it: if you try to rank things by level of pleasure, orgasm would be very high on the list, and it's nature's way of saying, "I got you, baby." And so you get pregnant, and all this sexual energy, especially when you're young and naive, you're at the peak of your fertility, and it's like you don't have the prefrontal cortex to stop this process.

So you want to have sex all the time. You do it, and nothing will stop you from getting pregnant because you're young and contraception doesn't exist, at least from an evolutionary perspective. Now add to that the fact that all of this could happen, but people can now prevent pregnancy . And then you give the woman an education. So the reason this becomes problematic is because she suddenly realizes, "Oh my God, I have a bunch of other interests." And you are no longer in a tribe that separates her, sends her to other women to raise children, so that it becomes their only occupation.

And, as Afghanistan is doing now, you ensure that they cannot get an education, because education is about opportunity. Education is knowledge. Education is a vision of another world, something that can fascinate me, whatever it is. So if you take that away, you're suddenly channeling all their energy back into the stream of the evolutionary drive to raise children. And it's like: " Cool." This is my way out. This is how I create meaning and purpose. This is how I get a sense of progress. This is how I invest in the future.

This is how I prove to myself and the world that I am really worth something." And evolution puts pressure on a woman's brain when she has a child to invest in it. So they may hesitate until the baby is born . And after the birth, if they don't kill the baby because of postpartum depression—oh, too soon —all that energy is now directed towards the baby, and they're like, "Dude, this is what I was born for. It's a deep sense of self-realization." And so you get a propaganda machine where all the women who have children are telling the next generation of girls, “You don’t understand.

This will be the most amazing thing. This is incredible. You will like it more than anything." OK. So, if you add all this up, it becomes clear why developed countries can't move their fertility rates in the right direction . And maybe this is just the kind of cycle we're in . That in times of abundance, when everything is good, we fairly educate women, give them all the opportunities in the world, the birth rate drops , and then society weakens over time because they don't pass on their values ​​to their children; and the group that passes on values ​​to its children and has many children will become dominant.

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Yes, that's about 2.9 to 3.1 children per family. And is this distributed by religion? So there is no other religion that can match this? I'm just answering questions. Let me find complete statistics by religion. I wonder if they count by country, for example: here are Muslim countries , and here is the religion of Islam ? Because I want to know which religion has... This is global data. That is, this is the whole world. Muslims—2.9-3.1, Christians—2.6-2.7, Hindus—2.4, Jews—2.5. Top of the list. So , they have a value system that drives this.

I could be wrong, of course, in saying this, but boy, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the more fundamentalist a country is, meaning Islamic states with more radical views, the lower the level of education among women there. And so you create a funnel: even if you look at religion on a global scale , they already know how to encourage their followers to have children. So, a big win. And if they also restrict education for women in more radical circles—I want to emphasize that this only applies to extreme cases—then it becomes a double whammy that almost certainly gives them the highest birth rate in the world.

And now, if you're China and you don't have those leverages, putting Muslims in damn concentration camps, oh my, you're back to the same old problem that we in the West have been facing for a long time: educate women, provide mass access to contraception, and you've got fertility problems. They suffer from this very thing , and it is very difficult to change it unless we eliminate the factors that led to it, namely contraception and the education of the female population. Oh, oh. This is a record low year.

And a mother who was never born will not be able to have a daughter who would follow her. That's why this line only points downward. And here's the inconvenient truth. No country that has fallen so low has ever found its way back. And this, of course, is not true. So I don't know the real statistics, but if that were true, China wouldn't have started growing again after 45 million people died in a man-made famine , and it did. But in any case, these statistics that you keep hearing have to be based on something .

It's like without any radical changes in the social contract or anything like that . I don't know what it will be, but in any case, it is clearly not true, although I am sure it points to something real. The state, faced with this , is tightening control over the population to know exactly what everyone is searching for and writing about. But you don't have to live in a police state for someone to secretly build Okay, by the way, this is the most subtle transition to advertising, but it's his advertising.

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And this despair is already affecting you, whether you notice it or not. It all starts in factories. You see, China has built enough industry to support an ever- expanding planet. And now the market within its own borders is shrinking. There aren't enough young people left to buy these products. The market outside their borders is also shrinking, which will become an increasingly big problem for them in the future . So, all those goods that China built its entire economy to sell have to go somewhere. So they come to you.

China exports these things. By the way, this is a bigger problem than people realize. So China dumping its goods on the rest of the world will cause production problems for them. I think he 'll talk about it in a moment, so I'll just voice it. And this will also lead to a decrease in the cost of goods, which is obviously bad for competition in the country. So yes, the fact that they are dumping goods on the rest of the world's markets in an attempt to compensate for their weakening economy is not good.

Moreover, at prices that nothing on Earth can match, and factories in your country cannot compete with a state that dumps its surplus simply to survive. A fight is literally unfolding over Chinese electric cars and steel. Chinese cars are taking over all markets where they are allowed to do so, and that is really bad for Western automakers and the economies of those countries. But that's still not what worries me the most. Because while China does produce goods, it also controls the raw materials on which the modern world is built.

For 19 of the planet's 20 most strategic minerals, China is the number one processor, with a share of about 70% of the global market. Gallium and germanium are perfect examples of this. We use them in cars, phones, and military radars and satellites. China processes about 98% of the world's supplies of both elements, and a declining China knows exactly what that's worth. In 2025, he began weaponizing these materials, imposing export controls and raising prices outside China six times compared to domestic prices. However, this leverage has an expiration date .

OK. So when people talk about deglobalization, they're saying, "Hey, this world is going to be deglobalized in about 3 years." This is exactly what they are talking about. They talk about US tariffs and how we are starting to become more protectionist. They are saying that China is going to introduce export controls. Everyone is going to use the advantages they gained during the era of globalism as a weapon. So yeah, things are going to get pretty weird now. So think about this. Oh man, this is like a call to action for anyone who watches this show and is involved in any element of power.

We have to produce things here. Point. End of story. China won't be able to restrict these supplies forever, because every restriction gives the rest of the world another reason to go and create their own. It's just like when we in the US impose capital controls on other countries, other countries rush to gold, trying to get out of the grip of the US dollar and US debt, which creates problems for ourselves. So let everyone remember the second and third order consequences. But the danger here is something that no one can avoid, and it stems from the fact that China has stopped buying.

For 30 years, China has been the engine of the entire global economy. It bought about half of the world's steel and three-quarters of its iron ore. He poured more concrete in three years than the United States poured in the entire 20th century. Entire countries , such as Australia, Brazil, and Germany, built their prosperity on Chinese sales and its endless construction boom. And a lot of that concrete went to building empty cities. So okay, think about that for a second. They built empty cities. I remember hearing that China built a city the size of Pittsburgh in one month.

And I thought: what? This doesn't even make sense. I wondered: how can people be relocated so quickly? How does their population move so fast that they can stamp across Pittsburgh every month? This is simply absurd. Same . And it was ridiculous. It was literally growth at any cost. Build, build, build, demand will appear, but there is no demand. When you consider the housing crisis that they have now, the realities of misjudged demographics and where things were headed, and the cultural energy that was pushing them forward, building an economy that only allows for constant growth— but growth can't last forever.

And by the way, all countries in the world basically use immigrants to compensate for low birth rates, but China doesn't seem to be going for that . When you create concentration camps for a portion of your population, people become a little more wary of dealing with you. So here I don't know what they were thinking, and I'll go back to my previous thesis: under authoritarian rule, strange revelations arise, which can intensify over time. They may take time to manifest, but when they explode, it is a real disaster.

In China, construction is considered growth the moment the concrete is poured, regardless of whether anyone lives there. And local officials received raises for meeting growth targets. So they built significantly more than they needed, which is... That's why I say: show me the incentive system that a government organization is creating, and I'll tell you if it's moving in the right direction. You shouldn't pressure people to lie to you. You must be sure that you are getting information that is as close to reality as possible. That's why China now has 65 to 80 million empty homes.

The people who should populate these cities are children who will never be born. Now this boom is over forever. Demand for steel in China has already peaked and is starting to fall. And when the biggest buyer the world has ever seen stops buying, it's not just China that feels the pinch. Every country that provided it feels this. And China can't just spend money to get out of this situation , because these funds have already been distributed. According to Beijing's own leading research institute, the national pension fund will be depleted by around 2035.

So, China has the same problem as anyone who has a financial pyramid structure, like Social Security. It's like when you don't have new young kids growing up, you get an aging population problem. And you will simply start eating away at your capital. So, yes, in this issue you should pay attention to that, and although they talk about China's pension fund, you can also see the US. We have the same problem. in deep trouble, and so are we . Their unsolvable problem is quietly becoming a world problem.

The UN predicts that by 2100, China's population will decline to about 630 million people. This By the way, this assumes that their current numbers are correct, which is most likely not the case. So this figure is probably even lower. half of today's, and this is the bottom I promised you. Although no, because I lied to you a little. Because it was never just about this Chinese line of demographic collapse. Look at this. More than half of all countries in the world already have a fertility rate below that necessary for self-reproduction.

And by the end of this century, according to the largest study, 97% of countries are also projected to be below this threshold. And there is no known way to go back. But there is a known way. Yes, start multiplying. Start reproducing and stop educating your women. Oh my God! This is not my recommendation. It's just...That's where the data leads. Now I want to say it because I know I will be criticized for it . Could this just be a correlation? Perhaps women's education has nothing to do with the cause.

No, no, no. That's the thing. Now, okay, I put it on the table. I admit that it is possible. Now, I'll just say this: between birth control and giving people choice, it's definitely not just a correlation. No way. If a woman thinks, "Well, my only choice is children ." Then they will have children. And then their brain will get an evolutionary boost when they have a child, and it will be unlike anything they've done before . They will be so happy. And then they will want to have more, and hooray.

It's like a ransom. Do you want parents like that in this situation? Well, I guess I should have kids. Shouldn't it be a little more their choice? Well, their autonomy? It shouldn't be easy... True. This is my only way out. Some people should be chased by a lion. Sometimes, to do the right thing, "in quotes" right, you have to have external pressure, otherwise you won't do it. I didn't have children. Because, first of all, it didn't even occur to me . It was like: oh, to have children or not to have them.

Like , yeah, that would be cool. I always explained to people that I really wanted children. Like, I really want kids. The only thing I want more than having children is not having them. And I'm not trying to be funny. I mean, it's just a balancing act, and the things I would have to sacrifice for this incredible miracle, I'm just not willing to give up. I just want those things a little more. Now I know that if I had my first child, I would have thought: oh my god, this is incredible.

Like, now I want more, because nature will do its thing . But since I don't have children, there is no sense of loss. It is not a feeling of absence . And since my wife didn't want kids either, it was just, oh, okay. Like, no problem. But until what point did the wife think she wanted children? She became an entrepreneur. And then she thought, oh, I have another way of expressing myself in the world, another way of finding meaning and purpose. I have another way to contribute.

So I like doing this thing. And so it was always like, "Oh, should we have kids today? No, I want to do this a little more . Should we have kids today? No, I want to do this a little more." That's what we both said. There was never a day when we said, "We're not going to have kids." There was a day when Lisa said, "Oh, I guess I don't really want kids." But it was so subtle and slow because there were so many other things we could fill our lives with.

If you asked if Lisa was unhappy when she was a housewife . She hid it. I didn't realize she was unhappy. She thought that to be a good wife, she just needed to support me, and that it was temporary, and then we would make movies and everything would be fine. And now, if at that time she didn't have a vision to make films, she would have said: " Let's get pregnant." Because when we first got married, she said, "Okay, are we starting to have kids?" And I said, " Hey, slow down." We will have children, because when we got together, we were both sure: yes, we will have children , 100%.

"We'll have children , but give me 2 years." And then, after those 2 years, I said, “Well, now I’m getting a little bit on my feet in business. Give me two more years. That's all I need. 18 months, two years. " It won't take long. " Dude, one time, Drew, I actually bought every, literally every baby book imaginable, and I read them diligently because we were going to...I don't remember if we were supposed to start diligently in January. But I was like, “Okay, I’m really going to read all of this.

I want to be ready." That's how close we came to having kids. And then, because Lisa found another way to express herself. This is purely subjective and, of course, just one example. But when I look at the incentives, at what makes someone choose this path, if she was a housewife and stayed at home, if she didn't think she would ever have another outlet, then children would be the thought: "this would be great." "It would be an incredible thing for me to contribute and invest myself in something." And so, again, going back to what the incentives are, both evolutionary and in the sense of "I want to do something, I want to contribute, I want to matter." If she just sits at home, cooking and cleaning for me, she'll think, "what am I even doing?" And the existential question arises: "Why do I matter?" "Why am I doing this?" And then the answer becomes: "I'll have a child." Okay, I need to put something else on the table, please.

Because I hear about the population, about the collapse , they say, we don't have population replacement. We don't have the people who can fill these jobs. We don't have people who can clear snow or anything like that. Is n't that the point of AI ? Well, yes. Yes, but isn't that the promise of AI in terms of productivity? Type of response. If we just robotize our way out of this, we don't need as many people. We can simply replace them with robots. By 1000%. Got it.

Okay. It's a GDP issue, and then there's the issue in Japan— they say: okay, we have a lot of elderly people . How are we going to physically take care of them ? That's why they got into robotics so early . They say: I really need jobs in nursing homes or in their homes. I need a robot to help them because we simply don't have people to take care of them. So few people had children. So they have this problem. But then there's the GDP problem: I need economic entities that don't take 18 years to create.

And this is where people have a lot of hope for AI, because AI can enter the economy with or without a body and begin to perform economic tasks. This could be transformative, and I think it would definitely help with part of the problem. And when that happens, and we look back, we'll say, "Yes, necessity was the mother of invention." Part of the reason we had to push this forward was the arms race between us and China. The other part—we all had demographic challenges . We tried to attract cheap labor indefinitely.

This creates instability in society. So let's slow down with this and start implementing AI. I'm just saying, maybe we can invest in Figure, in other optimists, in other robotics companies, instead of taking women out of education and sending them to re-education camps . And to the camps of de-education . Tell me, this is ridiculous. We can't just give them everything. We must take away their education. Yes. And by the way, I want this to be said loud and clear. I want women to be able to get an education.

I'm just telling you from a cause and effect perspective what will likely cause the decline. Just as I want people to have access to contraception, I want women to have access to all the education in the universe. I want them to be free to live the life they want. All this has its consequences. And I want them to be happy, but go to the kitchen. but. No. I am the one who had no children. So I will not point fingers at others in any way. Enjoy your time outside the kitchen 1000%.

Put on your shoes, ma'am. Go ahead. You don't have to be barefoot. However, there are times when I say I think someone else is wrong? I am not wrong. That's the problem. give it to someone else. Sad to report. I'm sad to report that I'm currently in chat. That's how it is. That's exactly how it is. There are consequences. Okay, let's get back to our video. difference. China is the first superpower to step into this future. Armed, authoritarian, and openly willing to pursue its greatest territorial ambitions, the most dangerous power is almost never the one that is growing.

This is the one that has reached its peak. Look at the story. Imperial Germany in 1914, Imperial Japan in the 1930s, Russia in 2022. Each of them took a risk as soon as they felt their window of opportunity was closing. And China is now entering just such a moment. By the way, it only gives a very superficial overview, but I did a bunch of research to find out how true it is. This is very true. So, in the decades before 1914, Germany had a strong industrial and military base, but by 1912, German leaders realized that they had reached their peak.

They looked east and saw Russia rapidly industrializing, building strategic railroads, and expanding its military. German generals calculated that by 1917 Russia's military potential would forever eclipse Germany's . So, the closing window theory . German Chief of Staff Helmut von Moltke famously stated in 1914, and I quote: "We must wage a preventive war to defeat the enemy while we still have a chance of victory." So think about it in the context of Taiwan, dude. This is starting to get wild. So, Germany did not start World War I out of arrogance, as is commonly said.

They started it out of pure panic, because basically their chance of winning was disappearing. They had this strategic window, and it was about to close forever. So, the same with Japan. It was just madness. So, Japan ultimately attacked the United States because it saw itself as a declining power, because in the late 1930s Japan was the dominant regional power, but its economy was heavily dependent on Western, particularly American, sources of oil, which I didn't know, by the way. When the US, UK and the Netherlands imposed a complete oil embargo in August 1941, they did so to stop Japan's expansion.

And this literally started a kind of mathematical countdown for the Imperial Japanese Navy. So, there were many reasons why Japan signed a treaty with Italy and Germany. And once they did, the US, contrary to Japan's expectations, instead of taking it as a warning, reacted like, "Oh, I see." This is all one big war. We have to cut them off from the oil, because as soon as they signed it, we realized they were part of the problem. We don't want them to expand into China, because that's part of the same big war." And so Japan says, "Okay, we need to get involved." Their own military leadership estimated that they only had 18 to 24 months of oil, so the Japanese leaders understood that going to war with the United States was extremely risky, but waiting meant total economic strangulation, so they decided, "We've got to get in on this." We've got to get in on the action.

We've got to act. And so they decided to attack Pearl Harbor. Oh. But they had a " now or never" mentality, because they were basically running out of fuel . It's the same situation in Russia. So this guy makes a really profound point. He gets over that point pretty quickly, but there's actually a lot of historical evidence that people do attack when they feel, "Oh no, we're in trouble now." The fact that Japan attacked the United States out of fear, that they're moving towards weakness, to me, is just crazy.

I didn't know that. Their ambition has an address—Taiwan, an island off the coast of China that produces over 90% of the world's most advanced computer chips. By seizing Taiwan, China would have the last piece of the mechanism that holds the modern economy together. A war there would instantly trigger a global depression. American commanders have already set a date for that invasion—a date that China's leader has ordered his military to be ready for by 2027. Okay, this guy knows how to end a video abruptly. The video was also very well done.

Go away. Yeah, I didn't know this guy before, OBF. Make sure to subscribe to OBF. Yeah. @OBF on YouTube? @OBFYT @OBFYT. Okay, let's get to it. That was cool, man. Great video. That's right. Thanks, Oliver . That's really, really important, if true, considering the recession, that we're seeing in China's economy right now; their inability to hide it any longer could accelerate the attack on Taiwan. If you enjoyed this conversation, watch this episode to learn more. We're now seeing a world where the two largest economies are in economic trouble.

Both are trying to hide it. Both are hiding it in ways that at least give visible signs. So, again, our

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