 So a couple of articles came up just like the last couple of days, one in The Economist and I'm not sure actually where the second one was, that's The Economist, this was in I think Bloomberg or something. No, this is The Washington Post. So one in The Economist and one in The Washington Post. Both talking about demographics and the demographic crisis that both China and Russia are facing. We've talked about this a little bit, particularly we've talked about the fact that China, for the first time since 1961, for the first time since the massive tens of millions of people dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward, actually should be called the Great Leap Backwards, but the Great Leap Forward under Mao Zedong for the first time China's population shrunk this year. And what's particularly interesting about the fact that it shrunk is that the Chinese admitted that it shrunk. That is, there's some speculation that says that the population has started to shrink years ago and they're only admitting it now, but anyway, they're admitting it. China's National Bureau of Statistics announced a decline of 850,000 people to a new total of 1.4118 billion. It's a first decline in 60 years, right, since 1961. The birth rate reached its lowest level on record, 6.77 per thousand people down from 7.52 in 2021. So that's a big decrease just in one year. So this is a big deal because not only does this mean China population now shrinking, indeed it is speculated that later this year India will surpass China as the most populous country in the world. For the first time probably in many centuries, I think for many centuries China was the most populous nation on the planet. But this means that China has a shrinking workforce. It has a rapidly aging population. So you have fewer people paying in to support an older population since China does not really have a pension system or a social security system. And since many people are still relatively poor in China, it does mean that a lot of the income that young people are going to be producing is going to have to go to helping their parents and grandparents live. And, you know, this is going to really be a drag on, it means saving rates are going to go down, consumption rates are going to go up. If you know something about economics, you know that what ultimately drives an economy is saving rates in a sense of it's fundamentally what drives an economy long term. Economic growth is investment. So there will be less investment in China, more consumption, particularly focused on the aging population. Another interesting aspect of this is that it wasn't that many people didn't predict this. That is, everybody expected a population of China to start decreasing, but a lot of the expectations were that it would decrease in the 2030s in about 10 years. And this has happened 10 years earlier than many had expected. Again, this is going to cripple the ability of China to have kind of the economic dynamism. It thinks that it needs in order to compete with the United States in order to build up a military, in order to become a dominant power in the world. It is a real issue. And then of course there is a real potential for a real crisis as people age and if China does not kind of have, if the Chinese people do not have the resources to support their parents and grandparents. There is a risk economically that China enters a period of stagnation similar to what Japan entered in the 1990s. Remember, Japan has been shrinking for a while now and part of its economic struggles is no immigration, shrinking population, a significantly aging population. Japan I think is now the oldest society in the world where 29% of the population is over 65. That is, and China is heading in that direction and that could result, it won't be the only thing that results in stagnation, but if you combine it with rising authoritarianism in China, you combine it with a shrinking of the space in which private enterprises allow it to function the limiting of the freedoms of Chinese in the economic realm. You can see that the likelihood of stagnation in China is significant. Again, I've said this for a long time now. I really don't think China is a significant threat long-term to the United States. It might be a short-term threat, but long-term it's going to have big problems domestically. Now, of course, demography is not destiny. Demography can change pretty quickly. Birth rates can change pretty quickly. If you think about demography, in the 1970s when China's population was growing significantly and it looked like it was going to have a massive population, the state stopped that. The destiny of China was not to grow forever and to have massive, this massive population. The One Child Policy basically stopped it. So there are things that can be done and those things don't have to be corrosive. Israel for a while, the Jews in Israel for a while had very low birth rates and there was a real risk that the Arab population would exceed the population of the Jews in Israel within, I don't know, by 2050. And the birth rates have accelerated in Israel and they've gone up not just among religious Jews but also among secular Jews. I think a lot of it has to do with one's attitude. I've said this before, I think on the show, that I believe that having children is an act of optimism, it's an act of belief in the future. It's an act of one's belief and one's ability to support a family, to provide for a family, to make a living. And I think that if China was freer, if the Chinese had significant values and believed in the future and didn't have European-style cynicism, then birth rates would go up and I think that's what's happened in Israel. I think Israel, as it became richer, as it became stronger, as it became more confident in its own survival long term, it's also, you know, that confidence and that optimism has resulted in having more children. Just one other aspect of this is, and we'll see another country where it's even worse, because of the one-child policy because Chinese families prefer to have boys than girls, there was quite a bit of female fetuses aborted. There's about 104.69 men to every 100 women in China, which of course also creates challenges instead of challenges to having kids. There are just too many men, not enough women. And again, there are real restrictions on immigration, just like in Japan, kind of bringing in, if you will, women from other parts of China, other parts of Asia or other parts of the world, why just Asia. Let me just say a few other things. They're just trying to incentivize people having children, they're giving money to families that have a third child, they're extending paternity leave, they're trying to learn from some European countries like Hungary and Poland that have been subsidizing childbirth and have had some minimal success increasing the number of babies in the economy. Anyway, we are seeing, I think, the beginnings of real challenges in China. The unemployment among young people is very high at 16.7% for 16 to 24-year-olds. Economic innovation, growth in the tech sector has been reduced significantly because of the crackdown by the government. And the number of young people is shrinking. And remember, who innovates, who grows an economy, who really is the productive energy of the future, it's young people. And when you have fewer young people, you're going to have less innovation. You can do that with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to youronbookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. There's a little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.