Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Year 2025

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

525 days ago, I began looking at the state of the world every century, then every fifty years, and finally every twenty-five years as the pace of change accelerated.  After almost a year and a half, we have finally reached the present….or at least the world as it was three weeks ago.  The first quarter of the 21st century was a period of dramatic changes, and in some ways, very little change…..and most of you were there for the whole thing. Learn more about the world in the year 2025 and how the world changed in the 21st century on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! Mint Mobile Get your 3-month Unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/eed Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Austin Oetken & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Disce aliquid novi cotidie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

525 days ago, I began looking at the state of the world every century, and then every 50 years, and finally every 25 years, as the pace of change accelerated. After almost a year and a half, we have finally reached the present, or at least the world as it was three weeks ago. The first quarter of the 21st century was a period of dramatic changes, and in some ways very little change, and most of you were there for the whole thing. Learn more about the world in the year 2025, and how the world was. changed in the 21st century on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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viral in a search for salvation. When I started this series looking at the state of the world at different years in history, I didn't really plan it out that far in advance. I assumed I'd do it every 100 episodes and that would be that. However, I soon realized that as I got closer to the 19th century, the world was changing so much that waiting 100 years just wouldn't cut it. The rate of technical and social change in the 20th century was so great that I couldn't even wait 50 years. For example, the first half of the 20th century saw the world go from horse-drawn carts all the way to jet aircraft. So I started doing episodes every 25 years in the 20th century, not realizing that the timing would work out such that episode 225 would be just a few

weeks into the year, 26. The other thing is that all of you, 100% of you, were around for the year 2025, even if some of the younger listeners weren't around for the last 25 years. So you all know what happened, and I see no point in recapping the past year's current events. So what I want to do is zoom out, really zoom out, and look at the major trends that have been shaping the world over the first quarter of the 20th century, and what might be shaping it going forward. Geopolitically, in the year 2000, the world was unipolar. The United States, fresh off the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, was the undisputed world power, both economically and militarily.

One of the biggest changes to that has been the rise of China. China's rise was driven by a combination of export-led growth, state-directed industrial policy, massive infrastructure investment, and gradual integration into global markets, beginning with its ascension into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Over the next two decades, China became the World's Manufacturing Center, building globally competitive firms and accumulating deep financial and technological capabilities. rapid industrialization, heavy investment in education, port, rail, energy, and housing, and tight political control by the Chinese Communist Party, allowed long-term planning at a scale unmatched by most countries. By the 2010s, China began shifting from pure low-cost manufacturing towards higher value sectors such as electronics, renewable energy, electric vehicles, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence, while expanding its global influence through trade, lending, and initiatives like the Belt and Road

program. The rise of China economically also corresponded with the rise of globalism and the interconnectedness of the global economy. Production has become increasingly fragmented across international borders, with companies seeking out the most favorable locations for labor, skills, or regulation when sourcing components. Simultaneously, global finance has expanded, driven by liberalized capital markets and payment systems, all based on the U.S. dollar. While global integration spurred economic growth and decreased extreme poverty, it also led to certain domestic industries declining, inequality increasing within nations, and greater susceptibility to external shocks.

These vulnerabilities became particularly evident following the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking of poverty, one of the most underreported stories of the last quarter century has been the incredible reduction in extreme global poverty. This has been one of the biggest changes in the economic status of ordinary people, since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Extreme poverty is generally defined as an income below the World Bank's international poverty line. This line, which stood at $2.15 per person per day as early as 2020, is adjusted for purchasing power parity and represents the minimum income required

to cover essential needs such as food, shelter, and basic survival. According to the World Bank, the share of the world's population living in extreme poverty fell from about 27% in 1990 to under 9% by 2019. One of the biggest single events of the 21st century was the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. 9-11 re-shaped global politics, security, and civil liberties for much of the first quarter of the 21st century by shifting international priorities towards counterterrorism and asymmetric threats. Led by the United States, a broad coalition launched the war on, on terror, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaeda, followed by the 2003 invasion

of Iraq. And I'm sure that every single person who was alive at the time knows where they were when they heard about what happened. But perhaps the single biggest event, and again, one which all of us remember, was the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the sharpest global economic shock since World War II, triggering a deep but uneven recession in 2020 as lockdowns, travel bans, and supply chain disruptions collapsed output and trade, followed by a massive government stimulus that later contributed to inflation and higher debt. The World Bank estimates that the pandemic pushed tens of millions of people back into extreme poverty and set back development gains from the last two decades. The COVID-19 pandemic stands as one of the deadliest global crises

of the modern era, with the World Health Organization estimating that the virus was directly or indirectly responsible for approximately 14 to 15 million excess deaths worldwide from 2020 to 2021. The shutdown of so many economies worldwide has had second and third order repercussions that have affected almost every aspect of society. And it'll probably take researchers years to figure out just how much the world was impacted by those few years. We can't talk about the 21st century without talking about technology.

Computers and the Internet both existed before 2000, and clearly computers got better and bandwidth got faster and more ubiquitous. However, there are two trends, both closely interlinked, that I think had the biggest impact over the last 25 years. Smartphones and social media. It's almost hard to imagine the world before we all had phones in our pockets that occupy most of our time almost continuously. Since 2000, smartphones and social media have fundamentally reshaped how people communicate,

organize, consume information, and perceive reality by putting a permanently connected, algorithmically curated information system right into the pockets of billions of people. The spread of smartphones after the late 2000s turned the internet from an occasional destination into a continuous environment, while social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, NowX, and Instagram, transform social interactions, news distribution, and even dating. The same tools that facilitated open communications fueled social movements and fostered global economic and family connections and also introduced significant challenges.

They exacerbated political divisions and incentivized content designed to provoke anger and emotional reactions. Constant connectivity facilitated by smartphones defines the modern world in the 2020s, blurring the lines between online and offline existence. When I began traveling in 2007, the iPhone had been announced but wasn't yet for sale. And over the years, I saw smartphone usage explode around the world as I traveled, and also dramatically changed how people traveled. When I started, you'd never see people with phones.

And 10 years later, everyone had a phone in front of their face no matter where they were. Artificial intelligence or AI is another technology trend that's only just begun to emerge. Although it's already had an impact in just a few years, it has not yet come close to fulfilling its potential. And I predict that if I were to record a similar episode like this 10 years from now, AI would be one of the top topics. In most of these episodes, I usually give the estimated global population for that particular year. And for every episode, the global population has increased. 2025 was no different. The global population increased by about 2 billion people from the year 2000.

However, something has dramatically changed. The most important change since 2000 was not the continued rapid growth, but a widespread decline in birth rates across nearly every region of the world. According to the United Nations, the global total fertility rate fell from about 2.7 births per woman around the year 2000 to roughly 2.2 births by the mid-2020s, moving the world close to the replacement level of about 2.1. And many demographers claim that we are already below the replacement fertility rate right now, and all developed countries are most definitely already below it. And in some cases like South Korea, they are well below it. The current global population is increasing, not because of increased births, but because people haven't been dying off.

Think of stepping off the gas on a car before you reach the top of a hill. The car is still going forward, but it's no longer being powered. Sometime around the year 2020, we reached peak children. Since then, the number of children in the world has decreased and looks to keep decreasing for the foreseeable future. Some countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Russia have already seen their population start to shrink. In South Korea, the fertility rate has dropped to 0.8,

which means that for every 100 great-grandparents, there will be only 6.6 great-grandchildren. This sort of global population decline has never happened in human history without war, famine, pandemic, or some other disaster. Because the population will be dropping due to a decrease in fertility, not an increase in deaths, the world's population will also be getting older. In 2025, the median age in Japan was 49.8 years, and in 2050, it will be 52.3. This is a year. This is a This means fewer working-age people paying into retirement programs to support an ever-larger population of retirees.

This will definitely be the subject of a future episode. I want to end with something that I've observed and that several other people have commented on as well. Another common theme in these episodes is me saying that the rate of change has increased in every period I've covered. I don't think that's the case with the first 25 years of the 21st century. Certainly there has been a great deal of change, but something else has happened. If you go back and look at catalogs, magazines, or television shows, you can instantly tell the difference between something from the 80s, 70s, 60s, or earlier.

Fashion and design changed dramatically from decade to decade. However, at some point, that stopped. And I noticed this when I was unpacking items that I had put into storage back in 2007, some of which I had purchased around the year 2000. Nothing had really changed. These were the same things that I could buy today. Fashion and design from 2000 to today hasn't changed nearly as much as they did from, say, 1965 to 1970. At the same time that the rate of cultural change has slowed, a cultural commonality is set in across the world. The differences between major world cities has become less pronounced as they all share the same architecture, stores, and technologies. This could also be seen in popular

movies and music. The top 10 movies at the box office every year now just tend to be sequels and remakes. There's very little that is original anymore. Popular music has followed a similar logic. Streaming platforms reward songs that quickly capture attention and sustain repeat listeners, encouraging shorter tracks, familiar chord progressions, and consistent moods rather than structural experimentation. Key changes, once a hallmark of pop songwriting, has become rare because they risk disrupting listener engagement metrics. At the same time, many hit songs now credit multiple writers and producers reflecting an assembly line approach.

It seems we've reached a point where, quite literally, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I've been asked where I'm going to go with this series. Some have suggested I do an episode predicting what I think the year 2050 would be like, but I don't think that'd be very valuable, as it would just be me making stuff up, most of which would end up being wrong. However, I do have something in mind. And for that, you'll have to come back

for episode 2100, 75 days from now. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything has.

happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.