The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - These Six Countries Are Running Out of People || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

We've kicked, flogged, and beaten the snot out of China's demographic horse, but what other countries are facing a similar demographic decline?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/49tfyXo

Hey, all, Peter Design here, coming to you from Yosemite Park, the Northwest Park, just above Tilden Lake over there. And that's Chittenden Peak in the back. I'm not sure about that, though. Anyway, taking another question from the Patreon page. Aside from China, which has the worst demographics in human history and is looking at societal collapse within a decade, what other countries make your top 10 list? Let me give you six. How about that? It's just one video. The first three are the countries that industrialized first, and all, urbanized heavily first. And they are Germany, Japan, and Italy. The situation in all three of these

countries is that they were among the first countries to pick up the industrial technologies and get what they needed to go into urbanization in a very big way. It happened in Germany very, very quickly because Germany used to be a series of a number competing regions. And so when all of a sudden they got electricity and rail, it was very easy for these regions to each set up their own node. They tried to compete with one another a little bit. We had a series of conflicts in the 1800s, and eventually we got the urbanized Germany that led into the world wars. In Japan, very similar. The region's topography is very, very rugged. So as soon as the technologies were available for people to live better, they chose to and they moved into high rises. Italy's a little

different. Italy's population is concentrated in the Poe Valley. And if you remember your Machiavelli, uh, Italy is a series of, again, competing city states. And so once you got the technologies to go up instead of out. Everyone did it. Anyway, these three countries, their geographies and their political histories really meshed with industrial technologies. You will notice that all three of these were the Axis powers in World War II. That is not a coincidence. Because when these countries started to urbanize and industrialized, they got a burst of national power that they used, perhaps unwisely. But it's not a coincidence. Next country down is Korea. Korea is the head of the, what they used to call the Nix, the newly industrializing countries of East Asia. Korea's geography

is a little bit like Japan's and that it's very, very rugged, and people live on the few chunks of flat land. And so when industrial technologies came about, you could move from rice farming into a high rise, and that was kind of a no-brainer for most people. In addition, they had so little land that once they got the industrial technologies, they were able to reclaim land from the seas, and those, again, went straight up. As a result, with the exception of China, Korea is arguably the fastest, aging society in the world now. The next two are countries that I'm not worried about now. But if things don't change, I'm going to be worried about them very much so in 20 or 30 years. Not that that's going to be my problem at that point. But anyway, and those are Brazil and India.

Now, these are countries that came late to the game. They didn't really start seriously industrializing until the 1980s, early 1990s. But because the path has been paved and all the technologies have been invented, they were able to adapt those technologies very, very quickly, urbanize very, very quickly. And so as a result, their birth rates are significantly below the United States at this point. If they keep aging at their current position, they're not going to enter a Japanese-style crisis until like 2070. I mean, there's still a lot of time for this to go a different direction. But we've already had 40 years of record low birth rates for both of those large developing countries and unfortunately they have not moved up the value added scale like say the germans or the

japanese or the koreans have in the time that it's taken them to industrialize so if if if nothing changes on the birth rate front those two countries will be looking at demographic degradation without the attendant increase in technological prowess skilled labor or standard of living so you know if you're in india or if you get in brazil chop chop you got some work to do Yeah, that's top six. Okay, that's it. See you guys on the other side of the lake.