YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Zeihan

lines on the record: 79
first: 2019-03-05
most recent: 2019-03-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sure, Alberta, Canada. It is as different from the rest of Canada as Texas is from the rest of the United States. And I say that in a good way, although I will warn you now, only go in the winter if you are a skier, because god damn it's cold. But it's a beautiful place, beautiful people, wonderfully bizarre economy by any modern standards.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate to push any more tourists in the direction of New Zealand, but oh my God, everything, every preconceived motion you have about New Zealand is wrong. It is so much better than what you're thinking. The best months to go are February because most of the tourists have left home and most of the Kiwis have gone back to work or school. So you kind of have the country to yourself to a degree.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been very fortunate, so I don't know if I can narrow it down to just one, but you know, I'm a kid from small town Iowa who leads an international life now. That could not have happened with Mounty parents who were teachers, without my high school guidance counselor, who got me out of some very sticky situations without some of the college professors that made it all possible, without Rotary, who gave me my first scholarship to travel internationally, without my former colleagues at Stratford who beat the crap out of every idea I've ever had and made I know it's a little cliche to say it takes a village, but it really did take a village to raise this idiot.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole point of disunited nations, that's the title, is looking at the preconceived notions we have about which countries are the countries of the future and why they're not, and then which ones should be. So we take apart Germany and China and Brazil. Show why these are not countries that we're going to be taken seriously a decade from now, instead looking at the countries that are.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Middle East. China's Xinhua is okay so long as it doesn't deal with China or the United States. And if you speak French, France 1 is pretty good. But that's about it. So basically you have to hunt and peck for local sourcing. Luckily, the digital revolution helps that quite a bit and you can build your own feed based on what you're interested in. But there just is not much any longer.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely hit my world because I have gone from being able to tap dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of sources at any given point to really there only be in a habit of a half dozen. If you're looking for something that covers international news in a meaningful way, there is nothing left in the United States with the possible exception of Bloomberg. About five years ago, they decided they wanted to break into the general news space, but then they had an editorial change about two years ago. And they've kind of backed away from that. They're still by far the best in the United States, but they're not what they used to be. But the same thing has happened with Ajan's front press and with DW and everybody else. So the only real international coverage that is any good anymore is A Jazeera. And you can't rely on Al Jazeera for anything that's in the Middle East. So ironically, you have to go to the Middle East to get news about the rest of the world.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Email comes along. All of a sudden, you don't need as many people abroad. Text messages come along, and all of a sudden you don't need anybody abroad. You just send them the people abroad when you need them, and they can send back the messages that turn into stories. Well, as this got better and better and more and more efficient, eventually every media outlet pretty much closed all of their foreign offices. And they might have some headline reporter like Amanpur who goes out and globetrots, but she pretty much travels by herself. There's certainly no supporting infrastructure out there, which meant that the volume and quality of international reporting basically collapsed. And pretty soon that turned into the quality and reporting of domestic stuff collapsed. And now we're in an opinion 24-second news cycle.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunately, we've had quite a breakdown on what is useful. So it started at the end of the Cold War when we started getting the digital revolution in its very early stages. It used to be that every major media outlet and most even regional newspapers would maintain foreign offices. And so you'd have Americans living abroad writing about the things that were happening abroad and then sending the stories home, usually by facts.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ability of a farmer to load up a combine with herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizer all at once. Run it automated through a field and the cameras on the machinery will take photos of each individual plant and identify whether it's a weed, a crop that's supposed to be there, and if it is a crop that's supposed to be there, whether it's healthy or what it needs. And then it gives it a little jolt of whatever is appropriate. Herbicide, if it happens to be a weed, pesticide, or fertilizer, if it happens to be a plant that maybe needs a little help, which means that with one pass, you can do the equivalent of five passes, but with one tenth the chemical use. We are on the verge of not only agricultural production increasing by a factor of two or three within the next decade, but of conventional farming turning into conventional gardening, and that means that conventional farming will have a lower pollution rating and a far loader.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that most of it comes down to how the technological revolutions, the digital revolutions have applied to industries that we don't think of very much. So does it improve things like supply chains and manufacturing processes? Certainly. And I don't mean to denigrate that, but let me give you two that most people just never think of. Number one is shipping. It's like, you know, until very recently, we were still using paper. So the digitization of customs clearings by itself is enough to reduce overall shipping cost by like 15%. And in a world where shipping costs are about to skyrocket, that's monumental. Just fully digitizing that system of information transfer for goods is great. Even more transformative is what is about to happen with agriculture. So we all worry about things like facial recognition and what that means for privacy. Well, the computers don't care if it's a face. Computers can do it for plants now. So what we're seeing with the new combines are...”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says that any cargo that is shipped between any two ports must be on a vessel that is American owned, captained, crewed, and built. We don't require that for any other transport method we have in this country, only for the one that gives us a massive geopolitical advantage, which is stupid. So you change that, and the cost of transport internally in the United States plummets. It also takes a lot of trucks off the road, which will make the rest of the infrastructure system last longer. So there's no downside there unless you happen to be in organized labor and you see the handful of jobs that remain in American shipping as sacrosanct. But again, this is the only transport sector that we do this in. And it's outlived its usefulness a century ago.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me start by saying that the relatively decrepit nature of American infrastructure is a real problem, but it's also a massive opportunity. Building roads, not hard, which means that all you have to do is apply the money. And as soon as you do that, economic growth comes from it, both from the construction, what happens on the backside. So I don't see this as a problem. I see this as an opportunity. Second, the waterway structure. So the greater Mississippi is about 13,000 miles of navigable waterway. That is more than the combined systems of the rest of the planet. Now, most of the locks on our system that allow it to be navigable are in excess of sixty years old, and a scary proportion of them over a century old. Now replacing all of them wholesale, every little bit would cost only about two hundred billion dollars. So in terms of cost benefit, that's cheap. Now, if we're going to do that, and I recommend that we do, the first thing we've got to do is appeal or at least heavily amend the Jones Act of 1920, which basically”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're the only country with an opportunity to get through it in one piece, so we can make evolutionary changes without having to have a complete break in our system. That gives us an opportunity if we manage that process right, to repair our capital structure, to get ahead of the debt, do all kinds of things that other countries can't even dream of.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means that they are consuming now, that's good for the economy, and they'll be investing later, and that's good for the economy, but there are no German millennials or Italian millennials or Japanese or Chinese millennials. Everybody else basically stopped having kids in 1980. So we are the world's largest financial consumption power now, and in just a decade or two, we're going to be the world's only consumption and financial power. So how we manage this transition, how we get through this tight spot, the snake swallowing the watermelon and all that, you know, that's important.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to their peers internationally. They're actually fairly small. And that's because our baby boomers had kids. We know them as the millennials. And while we can talk till we're blue in the face about how they're all wastes of skin, they exist and they don't. Well, exactly. There's a lot of them.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you're looking internationally, the breakup of the order and the start of this disorder is a wildly rare opportunity. The United States has the opportunity to figure out what the international agenda is and what the international structure is and whatever decisions we make in the next five years will stick for the remainder of this century. That just doesn't happen very often and we're utterly incapable of even having the conversation much less coming up with a decision. So wasted opportunity. Domestically, the baby boomers are the biggest retirement this country has ever seen as a percentage of the population of the largest population we've ever had and the transition of them from taxpayers to tax takers is I don't want to use the word catastrophic, but it's certainly transformative. How we manage that will determine the tenor of the American economy for the next 30 years. The kicker is that while our baby boomers are a big group relative”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Media is great for that, but it's not good for a structured discussion about what we actually want. And so we will get people like Cortez talking about the Green New Deal and we get people like Ted Cruz talking about whatever crazy ass idea he's got next. But we're not going to have much constructive to say to one another until we get the framework of whatever these new parties happen to be.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of them from his administration, and the midterm elections were not notable for how well the Democrats did, in my opinion, but for how badly the fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, and business conservatives did. They were basically ejected wholesale from Congress, and Trump's version of Republicans rose up to take their spots. Now, on the Democratic side, the unions are gone. They're not Democrats anymore. They are a fully fledged members of the Trump coalition. So Trump is actually fairly advanced in setting up the post-Republican Party, whether it's still called Republicans when this is all said and done, who knows, whether or not it sticks, who knows, whether or not it'll outlast Trump, who knows. These transitions usually take about a decade. We are now only in year three. There's a lot of room for this to shake out. But what that means for us as a country is we don't even have the political structure that's necessary to have a conversation about the big issues right now. We can scream at each other.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with that. Start with an understanding that the parties that we know are not permanent. We have had the collapse of the Cold War system, big change. We've had the post-Cold War boom, big change, and now we're having the collapse of the global order, big change. Of course we were going to have another political reorganization. We're going through that right now. It's just that our 24-hour, well, 24-second news cycle makes it a lot louder and more aggravated than it has been in times past. But this is not new. So what we're seeing is a complete disintegration of the old party structures on the left and the right, and the factions that make up those parties are casting around looking for issues that might allow them to be the nucleus of whatever comes next. So, for example, on the Republican side, Donald Trump broadly considers the business community, the national security community, and the fiscal conservatives to be as ideological foes. And he is systematically ejected.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you want to go back to the last big upheaval that was the Great Depression, that was World War II. Back then, the Democratic Party was the party of big business, and the Republican Party was the party of African Americans.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would argue that all of the angst and anger and fire and fury that we're seeing in Washington right now is actually a really good sign. Every generation or two, the American political system convulses, dissolves, and then reforms. And we are in that process of transition right now. We're just doing it with social media. Big events that have happened in the past, post-war reconstruction, the war of 1812, the Great Depression, all of these trigger to break down in the bipartisan network. And the parties that we know as Democrats and Republicans have not always existed, and they've certainly not existed with this alignment of factions.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been penned so far that automotive steel and aluminum tariffs are not included. Those are now hammers that the United States can use in any bilateral negotiation on any topic that it wants. So it's not so much that tariffs are the new normal, it's just that tariffs are the new tool that the US will use whenever it feels like.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those deals are easy. Those deals will be wrapped up this year. Those deals will be ratified probably early next year. And that's enough for the United States, which means that any other trade talk isn't about the money. And so instead of the United States sacrificing economic access in order to achieve a security goal, the United States now doesn't have to sacrifice anything because the other side is the side that actually needs something out of this. And we've seen the beginning of this with Korea and with Japan and with Canada, and it hasn't really sunk in everywhere else except for maybe China, that this is the new rules of the game. And this is not Trump. Trump is just the earliest, least sophisticated iteration of what is going to be the new norman American foreign policy. And for Trump specifically, you will notice that in the deals that have penalized.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's see. We've got to deal with Korea last year. It's going to be implemented now. The new NAFTA deal will be ratified this year. It will go through all the normal pain and agony in Congress, but ultimately I think it's going to go through without a major problem in this country and in Mexico. Canada is a separate issue, but we can deal with that later if you'd like. Japan talks are underway. They will be completed this year because the Japanese don't have a lot of room to go. The Japanese realize that now that the Americans have a deal with Canada and Mexico and Korea, that's four of their five biggest trade partners are already integrating into a new post-order system. It's either get on board or don't. And they're getting on board. Britain has nowhere to turn. Post Brexit, they're going to have a depression regardless. This was always going to be a hard crash out. And the United States is the only country that can help cushion that. And that's assuming the global order holds if the global order breaks, there's really nothing else.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that leaves us with a more or less intact North American market. That's already forty percent of the American trade portfolio. You throw in a couple of other countries that are undoubtedly going to work out and break the United States' way. Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, you're at the vast majority of the American trade portfolio. That's enough.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they, on every negotiating point, they took a hard line. If anything, they were looking for more concessions out of this renegotiation, which of course just cheesed Trump off. And then all of a sudden, Team Trump has a deal with Mexico. And they just go up and say, look, we've got to deal with the country that matters. We've got to deal with the country that has demographic growth that is complementary to our manufacturing system rather than competitive. They're the country or the future. You are not. You know our terms. Take it or leave it. That refocused minds. And it only took a few days then for the Canadians to finally cave. They are very, very lucky that Team Trump didn't ask for more because they would have had to give more.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cold War's over. Trump's the first American president to look at the world in a different light, probably a more accurate light considering the day. But it takes a while for the bureaucracy and policy to catch up. So Canada was always thinking, you know, we don't have to give anything because we're in this special position.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Canada, things are just hilarious. So everything about Canadian foreign policy is rooted in the Cold War. If you look at a polar projection of the Earth, you'll notice that Canada is on all the flight paths for ICBMs from the Soviet Union to the United States. Because of that, the Canadians during the Cold War could have been free riders in security terms. To their credit, they were not. But they would use that leverage to get concessions out of the United States on economic deals. So Canada during the Cold War would always get just a little bit more. And a lot of times those deals had to do with something that was happening internally in Canada. So there was always a lot of Cabecois fingers in that pot.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, he's basically the Mexican Bernie Sanders in many ways, basically realized that he was a populist kind of in the same brand as Donald Trump. And the last thing that he wanted his term, he saw himself as a domestic renewal guy kind of like Clinton. The last thing that he wanted was to be in a pissing contest with Trump for his first few years. So he reached out to Penya during the lame duck period and he reached out to Trump and said, you know, if you guys can figure out what's next, what NAFTA II looks like, I'll get it ratified. So far, he's a man of his word. And so we have a deal with Mexico.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly what it's going to be. One of the big concerns that I had about the Trump administration in the early months was what was going to happen in NAFTA. Because unlike our trade arrangements with everyone else in the world, which were largely driven by strategy, and so we were willing to sacrifice economics in order to get the countries on board, the NAFTA accord is really the only major trade deal the United States has that is actually based on the numbers. And so if NAFTA was to go away, the United States would actually suffer a recession. I mean, the rest of the global structure could go to hell and the United States might not even notice, but Canada and Mexico are countries that really matter. Now, things are getting really interesting with those talks. When the Trump administration was originally interfacing with the Mexicans, the Mexicans didn't want to give anything. And then Pe ⁇ a's party lost the election and Lopez Obrador came in. And Lopez Obrador, well, I would not consider very good at Matt.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after You end up with something less like the United States and more like Argentina. But if you look forward to the world we're going to where rule of law breaks down, where international commerce grinds to a halt, where finance is hard to come by, you know, the Argentines, for them, that's just an average Tuesday. So either they've got the perfect geography and will have a domestic reset like we have under the current government, and they will thrive for decades to come or the rest of the world breaks down and they just are more familiar working in that sort of environment. Either way, the future of Argentina looks really bright. And the first stage of that will basically be the Argentines dominating the border states of Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia. Second stage is starting to peel off large sections of southern Brazil itself. And this is, in essence, for those of you who know your Latin American history, a repeat of what the Argentines and the Brazilians did in their early years of independence, which is at this time the Argentinians.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agriculture, one of the best in the world. So the Rio de Plata region is one of the world's handful of zones that actually has naval waterways that directly overlay arable land. It's kind of like a mini-Midwest, just about a third of the size. The rivers basically go up to Argentina's borders with Brazil, and that's where the navigability stops. So all of the good stuff is on the Argentine side. Argentine is not tropical like Brazil, so they've got a lot lower input costs for all their agriculture. It makes it a lot easier to raise the capital locally in order to generate a manufacturing base. And they've done all the stuff in the past. Now Argentina is also a good warning case. From the prone era on, the Argentines basically woke up every morning and they were like, okay, we've got this perfect setup. How can we break it?”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese grew to be the world's second largest economy, but also the most overcapitalized, overfinanced, over exposed, over leveraged economy in world history. Of course this is going to end. The question on the backside is not will China survive the fall, it won't. The question is what becomes of the Asian power balances after China's fall.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now here in the United States, just to give you a scope here. So subprime hit about 3% of the American mortgage market, which came out to Dudan financial assets that were less than 1% of GDP. Based on who you're asking within the Chinese system, they're already north of 70%. And the economic sectors that are most overexposed, finance obviously, and agriculture. So when they finally have their adjustment, they don't just face a meltdown subprime style in every economic subsector at once. They also have a famine problem, which will, among other things, lead to a political split within the system. So that's piece two. Piece three is the global system. Nixon went to China. For good reason, he basically inducted Maoist China into the global order in order to buy them as an ally against the Soviets. That only really started in nineteen eighty, and it only really got going in 1990. So the entirety of the Chinese success story, the entirety of the panda boom, happened during the most internationally abnormal period in human history. And in that time,”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between riotous urbanization, climate change, the advancing of the desert in northern China, and water shortages, the Chinese breadbasket is basically in a period of not so slow motion collapse. They only have one river that's navigable. That's in the center of the country, which is an area sharply politically distinct from the northern Han zone that dominates the political system. And then the south is separated by a series of mountains and tropical zones from everybody else. So it's really hard to keep this thing together. They've achieved it by basically following a three-part strategy. Number one is to be the crap out of anyone who ever steps out of line. It's a national security state for internal reasons, not external reasons. Number two, they follow a nationwide financial strategy that's kind of like Enron and Subprime, where it's all about the throughput and doesn't really matter if productivity is involved. That generates a lot of bad debt.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start with the arable land. The US Midwest is Perfect. Absolutely perfect. The northern Chinese breadbasket is about 15% the size of the Midwest. They're feeding a population four times as large. And you can imagine that that's not working very well.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means that the Japanese have always worked on consolidating the footprint they've had to build up rather than out just because of their geography. It's all about the value added. They're the world leader in robotics for good reason. And so we have seen Japan despite ever fewer working age individuals. I've seen their production continually to rise. And when they had their crash back in nineteen eighty nine, the economy really hasn't grown very much since then. Like single digit percentages, that hit their export income. That hit their export system overall. That did not hit the domestic market. So they are actually, instead of one of the world's most exposed countries, one of the least exposed. In terms of major countries that are less involved in the world in terms of economics, the United States is at the top of the list. Japan's number three.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're utterly incompetent, win and win easily. While that navy allows a lot of options, it means that they can secure their own supply chains, whether it's to Southeast Asia or even better yet the western hemisphere. So the tools that they have had to develop in order to maintain any sort of local system just happen to double as the tools that are perfect in order to survive in an era without the Americans providing strategic overwatch. That just leaves the demographic question. This isn't a new problem. The Japanese have seen their population aging and shrinking since the nineteen sixties, arguably since they started to industrialize around nineteen hundred.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all, you're absolutely right about Japan from a demographic and a resource point of view. Your internal consumption has stalled and it's shifting towards collapse. They have to basically import every raw material they ever use. However, it's an island nation, and like all island nations, it's gotten pretty good at a navy. I would argue that today Japan still has the second most powerful long-reach navy in the world. Now, if you were to sail the Japanese Navy against the Chinese Navy in the East Asian theater, the Japanese would get wrecked. The Chinese have a better air force, they've got better cruise missiles, but only 30 Chinese ships can operate a thousand miles from shore, whereas pretty much all the Japanese ships can. So in any conflict, the Japanese basically don't even sail in the general direction of China. They'll go to like, I don't know, Singapore and sink anything that the Chinese have on the ocean, and then that's the end of China's import-export system along with all of their energy supplies. So in a fight, the Japanese unless...”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question will be Does this happen on a gradual slow enough time period that the Americans can assimilate the changes and so engage in a maybe constructive way? Or, well, the Turks or the French or somebody else, do something that the Americans perceive as a threat, in which case we get more of a knee-jerk American reaction that is much more disruptive. Now, the power imbalance between the United States and whoever these new powers are is going to be immense. So it's not like you're going to see a catastrophic civilization ending war or anything like that. This is not World War II. This is not World War I. This is probably not even something like Korea. But it really matters whether or not the Americans engage out of opportunity or out of fear.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S. Navy rides to the rescue. And that can lead to an intervention. But that is a very different sort of intervention than, say, intervening to help with food distribution to prevent a famine. So this sort of dollar diplomacy, it will be a dominant theme in American policy, but don't expect it to do a lot of good if that's what you're after. Now, longer term, you know, the disorder won't last forever. Eventually there will be winners in these conflicts and eventually new regional powers will arise. If I had to be a betting man, I'd say that the four countries that look to come out of this looking the best are Japan, France, Turkey, and Argentina. And eventually they are likely to reach a point in consolidation and influence that the United States is going to take notice. And at that point, a generation from now, the United States will probably”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It leads to some sort of impact upon some American community, whether that is geographic in the terms of a town or a sliver of the political system. I really don't see it happening for at least 20 years. Now, during that time, you have accurately pointed out that we're going to still be aware. And so you will get slivers of American communities who will see something that they don't like and they just take off and see if they can do something about it. Now, we've done this before. The late 1800s, early 1900s, we called it dollar diplomacy because you had Americans, whether they were in business or religious groups, would go out and basically be the face of America without any American government leadership at all. Now, as soon as you put Americans abroad, should they get into trouble?”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you two scenarios one that's shorter term, one that's longer term, because I think we're going to be having them both. First in the shorter term, the tolerance in the U.S. political system for disruption globally is very high. We are entering a period that's relatively narcissistic. We've been here before. It doesn't last forever, but it will last for at least a decade, probably two, maybe three. And during that time, you should not expect to see any significant American intervention in the wider world for humanitarian purposes. And honestly, not even for strategic purposes. American strategic policy is about preventing the rise of any single one ultra bad guy, whether that's the British Empire, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union. There's nothing like that on the horizon for the next generation. So you will see the United States participating in these little maybe surgical tactical interventions, but not much. And on the humanitarian scale, unless...”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, they're absolutely right about everything that they have said, but it's based upon a geopolitical compact that is now broken. Now, everything that they've said doesn't end, but instead of having a single unified global structure, you get a series of regional structures. Some, like in the Western Hemisphere, will probably broadly continue along this path because you're not going to see that kind of disruption that's not trade dependent. It's not export dependent. It's financially self-sufficient. In fact, With the global capital flight and trends we're already seen today, the money coming to the United States is just immense, almost obscene. The underpinnings of these advances should continue in the Western Hemisphere, but in the Eastern Hemisphere where there's nothing holding up the roof, not so much. The amount of backsliding there is going to be catastrophic.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely correct. The order has done that because by creating a global continuity and global economies of scale, we have allowed the unleashing of creativity of the human race on a scale that we couldn't even have imagined six, 70 years ago.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Saudi, all of the above. And that just leaves Northeast Asia. Now, the Northeast Asians import almost all of their crude from the Persian Gulf. There's just nowhere near enough production locally. If you take all of the Asian production put together, it's only about a quarter of what they actually need. So you get the Japanese, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Chinese sailing their ships to the Persian Gulf, picking sides in a century's old blood feud that has turned into a knife fight, loading the crew themselves and then shipping at home, and probably raiding each other along the way. Those three conflicts are nothing less than the end of the world that we know. That's the end of global finance and global energy and global agriculture and global shipping.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Iran versus Saudi Arabia. You remove the Americans, these are two countries that are quite willing to throw everyone else in the meat grinder in their quest for regional supremacy. We're in this very strange position right now where Iran has become the country of order in the Middle East. They've basically won, and now they're kind of like the dog that caught the car. They just don't know what to do. The Saudi strategy is basically to burn the whole place down because if the entire Middle East is on fire, they're on the other side of a desert. So we now are, at least the Trump administration for now is allied against the country that is trying to hold up some sort of civilization and allied with the country that wants to burn civilization down. You know, this is not a sustainable position for the Middle East. This is not a sustainable position for the United States, but this is where we happen to be right now. No matter how that conflict goes, energy is going to go offline, whether it's Iranian.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving west, up to at least the frontier of Poland, maybe all the way to Warsaw. Doing that means the absorption of 11 different countries, half of which happen to be in NATO, and now if NATO still mattered, that would be a problem for the Russians, but it really doesn't. So, you know, there's that opportunity. That knocks a lot of oil offline because Siberian crude can, it's finicky stuff, not so much in terms of quality, but in terms of production. Most of it comes out of the permafrost. And if you get Russian forces moving west, you can count on all the pipelines that send the crude to world market getting shut down, whether out of military strike or just transport disruption. So the Siberian wells will freeze in the winter. You can only drill in the winter. So the last time this happened with the Soviet breakdown, it took about 7 million barrels of crude offline. And that was without any shooting. So expect at least that magnitude of disruption. Word number two is probably going to be in the Persian Gulf.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First is probably going to be between the Russians and the Europeans. The Russians are literally dying out as a people, and they see an expansion to something more or less similar to the old Soviet era boundaries being a far more defensible position than they're in right now. And they're correct.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That material or with markets beyond the horizon being available, what is close by is simply not in the right proportions and quantities, whether that happens to be lithium or steel or oil or natural gas or really anything. And so you'll get conflicts over that. Now that will manifest as dozens of brush fire wars, most of which are petty and small and highly localized. You'll also have the wars of national disintegration like we've seen in Syria. There's going to be a lot more of that sort of stuff. I mean, watch Greece very closely if you want to see what happens in a first world country when that goes down. The real globe-spanning wars, the ones with real impact. There's probably going to be three.”
2019-03-05 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Zeihan – The Future of Geopolitics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.123] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source