Episode – 2025 : The Year 2025
Podcast Transcript
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.
When I started this series looking at the state of the world at different points 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.The first half of the 20th century saw the world go from horse-drawn carts 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 2,025 would be just a few weeks into the year 2026.
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 I want to really zoom out and look at the major trends that have been shaping the world over the first quarter of the 21st century, and what might be shaping it going forward.
Geopolitically, in 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 accession to the WTO in 2001.
Over the next two decades, China became the world’s manufacturing center, building globally competitive firms and accumulating deep financial and technological capacity.
Rapid urbanization, heavy investment in education, ports, 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 toward 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.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 based on the US 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 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 of early 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 percent in 1990 to under 9 percent by 2019.
One of the biggest single events of the 21st century was the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
9/11 reshaped global politics, security, and civil liberties for much of the first quarter of the 21st century by shifting international priorities toward counterterrorism and asymmetric threats. Led by the United States, a broad coalition launched the War on Terror, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaeda, followed by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
I’m sure that every single person who was alive at the time knows where they were when they heard about what happened.
Perhaps the biggest single event, and again one which we all 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 massive government stimulus that later contributed to inflation and higher debt.
The World Bank estimates the pandemic pushed tens of millions of people back into extreme poverty and set back development gains in the two decades prior.
The COVID-19 pandemic stands as one of the deadliest global crises in 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 across 2020 and 2021.
The shutdown of so many economies worldwide has had second- and third-order repercussions that have affected almost every aspect of society. It will probably take researchers years to figure out just how 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 were two trends, both closely interlinked, that I think had the biggest impact over the last 25 years: smartphones and social media.
It is hard to imagine the world before we all had phones in our pockets that occupy 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 in the pockets of billions.
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 (now X), and Instagram transformed social interaction, news distribution, and even dating.
The same tools that facilitated open communication, fueled social movements, and fostered global economic and familial connections also introduced significant challenges. They exacerbated political divisions, and incentivized content designed to provoke anger and emotional reactions.
Constant connectivity, facilitated by smartphones, defined the modern world by 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. Over the years, I saw smartphone usage explode around the world as I traveled, and also dramatically change how people traveled.When I started, you’d never see people with phones. Ten years later, everyone had a phone in front of their face, no matter where they were.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is another technology trend that has only just begun to emerge. Although it has already had an impact in recent years, it has not yet come close to fulfilling its potential. I predict that if I were to record a similar episode ten years from now, AI would be one of the top topics.
In most of these episodes, I usually give the estimated global population for the particular episode year. For every episode, the global population increased.
2025 was no different. The global population increased by about 2 billion people from the year 2000. However, something had dramatically changed.
The most important change since 2000 was not 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 2000 to roughly 2.2 by the mid-2020s, moving the world close to the replacement level of about 2.1.
Many demographers claim that we are already globally below the replacement fertility rate right now, and all developed countries are below it. 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 yet. Think of stepping off the gas of a car before you reach the top of a hill. The car is still going forward, but it is no longer being powered.
Sometime around the year 2020, we reached peak children. Since then, the number of children worldwide has decreased.
Some countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and Russia, have already seen their populations 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, Japan’s median age was 49.8 years. In 2050, it will be 52.3. 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 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 is the case with the first twenty-five years of the 21st century.
Certainly, there has been a great deal of change, but something 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 even earlier. Fashion and design changed dramatically from decade to decade.
However, at some point, that stopped.
I noticed this when I was unpacking items I had put into storage in 2007, some of which I had purchased around the year 2000. Nothing had really changed. They were the same things I could buy today.Fashion and design from 2000 to today haven’t changed nearly as much as they did from 1965 to 1970.
At the same time that the rate of cultural change has slowed, a cultural commonality has set in across the world. The differences between major world cities have become less pronounced as they all share the same architecture, stores, and technologies.
This can be seen in popular movies and music.
The top 10 movies at the box office every year now tend to be just sequels and remakes. There is very little that is original anymore.Popular music followed a similar logic. Streaming platforms reward songs that quickly capture attention and sustain repeat listens, encouraging shorter tracks, familiar chord progressions, and consistent moods rather than structural experimentation.
Key changes, once a hallmark of pop songwriting, have 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 will be like, but I think that won’t be very valuable, as it would just be me making stuff up, most of which would be wrong.
However, I do have something in mind, and for that, you’ll have to come back for episode 2100 seventy-five days from now.This episode can be found at: https://everything-everywhere.com/the-year-2025/