Pod Insights Modern Wisdom The World You Grew Up In Is About to Change Forever - Peter Zeihan About this episode Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical analyst, speaker and author.
What does the next decade really hold? Beneath every forecast about the future, one thing quietly determines everything else: energy. From globalisation to warfare to artificial intelligence, how will the world be reshaped in the years ahead?
Expect to learn why Peter thinks China will be gone within the next 10 years, how we're entering a labour shortage that no one is ready for, how a shrinking workforce changes geopolitics, what Peter thinks of Mamdani’s win, how the future of wars will be a battle over energy, if America is actually ready for a world built around de-globalisation, the current and future state of the Ukraine-Russian war and much more…
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0:00 Is China Really on the Brink?
6:19 Has China Been Lying About Their Data?
11:08 Can AI Save Us From Population Decline?
17:21 Can We Survive Demographic Collapse?
25:19 How Politics is Impacting Population Data
34:23 The Future of Global Energy
41:03 Are Electric Vehicles Truly Sustainable?
51:24 Where the Green Movement is Really Headed
01:03:40 How Technology is Impacting Modern Warfare
01:08:40 Could China Ignite the Next Global Conflict?
01:15:09 The Power Alliances Reshaping the World
01:18:50 Where to Find Peter
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Transcript 14,541 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Chris Williamson? America doesn't win the next era because it's brilliant. It wins because everyone else is screwed. What's that mean?
0:07 Speaker 01 Doesn't exactly fit on a bumper sticker, but yeah, that broadly works. You got two big things that are going on. Number one, in the globalized world, it's all about who you can access safely. And in the Western Hemisphere, we really don't have to worry about any security threats from a trade point of view. So people always talk about, oh, if the US and China get into a war, won't that be bad for X, Y, or Z? I don't mean to suggest it would be a piece of cake, but the Chinese are dependent on trade and we're not. It's really that simple. And if we can nail down Canada and Mexico in a productive relationship, you know, we used to call that NAFTA or NAFTA II. We're now having second thoughts. That's half the hard work right there. In addition, we export food, we export energy, the Chinese import both, biggest in the world, in fact.
0:52 Speaker 01 And so maintaining supply chains for us is an issue of building the industrial plant. And while you can't just wave a magic wand and make that happen overnight, we've done this several times before. Every country on the planet has, of course, we can do it again. It would just be nice if we started sooner rather than later. The other piece is that the Chinese stopped having babies about 45 years ago, and they're now on the verge of running out of 50-year-olds. And there is not an economic model that humans have yet to dream up that will work with where they will be demographically in less than 10 years' time. So we are living in the equivalent of like 2006 subprime, where everyone's like, oh, ooh and ah, and it's all about to go tits up.
1:37 Chris Williamson? Appropriately apocalyptic from you to start. The stuff about China, is that a challenge of just geography, virome, biome, topsoil, just sort of the constitution of where they are? Is that, that's sort of one of the fundamental problems?
2:01 Speaker 01 All of that, all of that is legitimate concerns. The river where most of them live on, the Yellow isn't navigable. They have never been able to use it for trade. So they've never internally traded among themselves. The one river they have that is navigable, the Yangtze, has always been an independent, well, I should say always, but often been a political, an independent political entity, going back for 3,000 years of Chinese history. And down in the south, in the tropics, where you've got Hong Kong, you've got city-states and little enclaves of flat land that have always looked to the outside world rather than the Chinese. The soil sucks. The northern part, where 70% of the population lives, it's low S soil in a drought zone. So if anything ever happened to logistics or distribution, what would go down in northern
2:45 Speaker 01 China would be what has gone down in northern China 27 times before, and that's civilizational collapse. If we were talking about any country that had fewer people than the Chinese have always had, you know, that would just be the end of them. It's just that there have always been enough Chinese in the past to pick up the pieces and move forward on the other side of the break. But that requires you having children. And so this really is an end to the concept of China and the concept of even the Han Chinese, because we're in a situation now where probably they have more people over age 54 than under. And I'm sorry, that just doesn't work. And very soon, it will be over.
3:26 Speaker 01 That's before you consider the broader geography of China versus the rest of the world. You got the first island chain off the coast. So the Chinese have never, ever, ever been able to be a global commercial power, except when the United States, when it created the global system, told everybody that they couldn't bring guns to trade talks. And that one decision that we made allowed the Chinese to play on the global field in a way that they just never could until that point. And so, lo and behold, this is the one era of Chinese history where they're unified and successful.
3:58 Chris Williamson? Tell me more about the guns to the meetings rule and how that helped.
4:04 Speaker 01 Sure. So before World War II, it's a good break. We basically had an imperial system where if you wanted links to resources and markets and populations that were outside of your home country, you had to build a navy and you went and took it. You built your empire. And those empires attempted to not trade with one another if they could help it. They just traded within their own network. That model generated what we like to call history and it led to World War II, when all the empires crashed and burned at the same time fighting for dominance. Well, at the end of World War II, the only navy that was left that was worthy of the name was the American Navy. And we had never been a trading power because we more or less had a continent to ourselves
4:49 Speaker 01 and we're still digesting the continent. So we had this idea that we will use our navy to protect everyone and we will allow everyone to trade with anyone else and we will allow our market to be open to your goods if, if in exchange, we get to write your security policies so we don't get another conflict like this again. And so one of the things that people want to break down the trade relationships and say that it's unfair for the United States, what they forget is it was supposed to be unfair to the United States. From an economic point of view, we bribed up an alliance. And if you remember your history, it wasn't just Britain and Germany and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Italy that were allies during the Cold War.
5:30 Speaker 01 It was China too, because it was all about boxing in the Soviets and it worked beautifully. The idea that this should be recalibrated in a post-Cold War environment, perfectly reasonable, but if you don't want to pay people to be on your side, they need another reason to be on your side. And so what we're seeing in American politics right now is this kind of cognitive disconnect where we still want everyone to do everything we say, but we also don't want our market open. And that is not a viable long-term plan.
6:08 Chris Williamson? Okay, so Chinese demographic collapse, you've said China will be gone in 10 years.
6:13 Speaker 01 China as we currently understand it, yeah, there'll still be some Han. Give it 50 years, there might not be.
6:20 Chris Williamson? So China, very populous, people might say, well, if I just look at the numbers, you said before that numbers were the solution last time. There's more numbers now. I'm going to guess that the issue is that the numbers are trending in the wrong direction, that it wasn't that-
6:33 Speaker 01 Oh my God, it's so bad, so bad. So, um-
6:39 Speaker 01 Since I talked to you last, there seems to be this reckoning that's going on in the statistical community in Canada. Where'd that come from? Sorry. You picked me up right after doing another project in China. The issue appears to be that
6:55 Speaker 01 they now believe, the statisticians now believe that the local and regional governments have been lying about their demographic data for over 25 years.
7:04 Speaker 01 And so after, let me back up. After Tiananmen Square, you know, 10,000 people killed by tanks in downtown Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party is like, well, that was no fun whatsoever. Let's try to not ever have to ever have to do that again. One of the ways we're going to make sure that happens is we discovered that, you know, there were kind of two kinds of protesters. You had the white collar workers that just made signs and they were really easy to run over with tanks. And then you had the ones who were kind of scary that brought wrenches and guns. So you had white collar and you had blue collar. So why don't we move our entire economy from a blue collar economy to a white collar economy? Problem solved because white collar folks live in high-rise apartments. You can cut off their water. You can bolt them into their house. You know, there's lots of ways you can deal with
7:47 Speaker 01 white collar protesters. Blue collar, a little different. So they started advancing their STEM work. They started secondary and tertiary education systems and, you know, this wasn't a stupid plan.
8:02 Speaker 01 We can critique how successful the transition was and why they were a manufacturing economy and still are and really weren't ready for that kind of fast transition. Different topic. But the thing is, when you go to primary school and secondary school and tertiary school, the first time you pay taxes is typically when you're 21, 22, or 23. So there's a delayed gratification here, which as Americans like to say, the Chinese have no problem with. It's false, but whatever. So
8:32 Speaker 01 the first big crop of these new white collar workers who were supposed to be working at high-paid jobs and paying lots of taxes, that was supposed to manifest in calendar year 2019.
8:45 Speaker 01 But then there was COVID and in China, COVID lasted a lot longer and they really didn't get recovery until 2023, maybe even early in 2024. And so they didn't get any good data. And then when they did get the data, they're like, whoa, tax receipts are down. That's the opposite of what's supposed to be happening. And when the statisticians in Shanghai went and looked back at everything like, okay, here's the problem. In a first world country, there are dozens, hundreds of touch points where the government becomes convinced that you're a real person. You, your mom goes to neonatal, you're born, every immunization, matriculation for every grade level, you pay taxes, you, you get your driver's permit,
9:27 Speaker 01 you get your driver's license. There's thousands throughout your lifetimes. The first three in China, not birth, because until recently, not all Chinese were born in hospitals. The first one was when you get a single battery of immunizations at some point around six months old. What they discovered was that the doctor who was giving the shots got paid per shot. So the doctors lied about the number of shots that they got. The second point is when you enroll in kindergarten. Well, local governments get subsidies from the federal system based on how many students matriculate. So the local governments lied about that. The third point is when you pay, pay national taxes for the first time, which is typically 17, 18, 19, unless you switch to tertiary education, then it's 21, 22, 23. So you
10:12 Speaker 01 get to calendar your 2024. And the Chinese realize that the children that they thought started to be born in the late 1990s were never born at all. And so the question they have, and there's no way to get the data, is, um, did we overcount our population by 100 million people? Or did we overcount by 300 million people? Or more? So even according to the official statistics, China is no longer the most populous country. That's India, has been for a while, probably has been since about 2006. The Chinese are now publicly
10:53 Speaker 01 admitting that their birth rate has been lower than the United States is since 1991. And it looks like it might be significantly worse than that. So yeah, 10 years. High confidence.
11:06 Chris Williamson? Wow. Um, since the last time that we spoke, AI has taken on even more of an important role. Uh, yeah, I'm aware, I'm aware, like, just, I think one of the, it's, it's an odd, uh, it's not happening and it's good that it is, uh, sort of scenarios that happens, especially when it comes to birth rate decline is whether it's, we don't need more people on the planet, we're a scourge on the earth, fragile world hypothesis, climate change in future. It doesn't matter in any case, capitalism, life's miserable and I don't want kids or young people to be born into a world.
11:41 Speaker 01 Everyone's trying to shoehorn it into their existing worldview. Sure.
11:44 Chris Williamson? Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The demand for answers outstrips their supply. So they repurpose old answers into a new problem. One thing that I am interested about is, uh, some of the losses in productivity, uh, being offset by increases in efficiency enabled through robotics and AI. China seems to be pushing pretty hard on this stuff and not bad at stealing AI technology. When push comes to shove and repurposing it.
12:14 Speaker 01 I mean, honestly, it's software. It's really easy to steal. You just need to jump drive.
12:18 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Um.
12:21 Chris Williamson? How much could that be a lifeline, uh, for somebody like China? And then also for the rest of the world, when we think about demographic decline, uh, more broadly.
12:28 Speaker 01 Sure. Well, let's, let's start with the obvious. 80% of applications for AI that I have seen and the other 20% are not a different category. They're just in, in flux, but 80% I've seen, it, it's not about where we have the work shortage. It's about white collar workers. It's about making white collar workers either redundant or more productive. And if you're into some degree of data collation and assessment, uh, you're in real trouble. If you have the brain power to take the data in front of you and make something of it, you're probably fine at least for now. So right now, if you're like, say a paralegal, oh God, you're screwed. That whole job category is going to go away because your job is basically to research multiple cases
13:09 Speaker 01 and bring the information together for someone who will then take it and do value add. Your job is to collate and AI can do that in seconds. Um, once you start doing the value add, uh, by the way, my doctor put it, it's kind of like 80, 20. It's like 80% of it's pretty good and 20% of it is really not. And when you're prescribing medications, the 20% really matters. So doctors are fine, but the people who do the research for them, maybe not so much. That's not where the job shortages are. The job shortages in the advanced world, especially in the United States, are all blue collar. They're welders, they're electricians, they're not coders. So it's not that this is a negative from my point of view.
13:53 Speaker 01 It's just it's getting a little overhyped and most of the people who are doing the, the writing and the panicking about it are of course white collar workers. And that colors the discussion. Uh, it doesn't mean that it will always be like that, but that's where we are now. And the pace of improvement, while it's very noticeable, I would yet, I would not yet call it revolutionary or particularly impressive. Uh, I mean, I use it, but I'd like to think I'm pretty good at that 20%. All right. That's piece one. Uh, piece two, the Chinese. The Chinese problem is that they've run out of people under age 50 and it's people under age roughly 45 that do the consuming and have the kits. And there is no way that AI can help with consumption or child rearing.
14:39 Speaker 01 So the robotic systems that the Chinese are working on, not that they're not important, but AI only helps to a degree there. AI is, cannot physically move things. It can learn from systems, it can design systems even to a degree, again, 80, 20. But it can't actually produce. Artificial intelligence is a completely different technological suite from automation.
15:05 Speaker 01 And even if automation could solve the production side of the equation, as the Chinese run out of workers. Robots don't pay taxes. And they can't raise kids.
15:17 Speaker 01 And they can't consume product. And so even if the Chinese could maintain their production levels without people, they'd still be dependent on international trade that they can't guarantee and on the largesse of the United States in the long term. It doesn't change their core problem.
15:34 Chris Williamson? Yeah, AI isn't going to be able to fix the topsoil.
15:37 Speaker 01 No, no. I mean, not as we understand it.
15:39 Chris Williamson? Yeah, well, maybe in, you give us 50 years, we'll see.
15:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, we'll see.
15:43 Chris Williamson? Uh, Japan, South Korea.
15:46 Speaker 01 Fifty years, that is the right timeframe. I haven't talked to anyone who's involved in Silicon Valley at all, who expects us to get general thinking AI before the 2040s. And based on what's going on with the large language models, that date keeps getting moved back. This is not a technology that's leading us in that direction.
16:06 Chris Williamson? Interesting, the sort of technological progress that typically you see at this exponential curve with AI seems to be doing what history does, crawling and then leaping and then crawling and then leaping. And it makes it kind of inherently unpredictable. I don't think many people saw what was going to happen with L L Ms in advance. I remember reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, what, a decade ago? I think that came out. Maybe, yeah, a decade, let's call it 10 years ago, something like that. And that was the best minds on the planet, contributing to the best mind on the planet, trying to work out whether or not, at no point was it, well, you know, these sort of things are going to predict what you're going to say next. And then if you just scale that up enough, and Nvidia becomes a $3 trillion company, maybe
16:48 Chris Williamson? you'll be fine. Maybe, maybe we're going to get it that way. Nobody saw it coming. So, yeah, there are some.
16:53 Speaker 01 Considering, considering that you can fit the entire algorithm set and training data for ChatGPT on a thumb drive that's about half the size of this. No, it's like, I look at Nvidia's valuation, like, you know, this, I mean, great for them, but, you know, this is, this, this is the very definition of a bubble. All it takes is a couple of corporate thefts and everything that's special about them goes away.
17:19 Chris Williamson? Wow. Yeah, the the security must be intense for that. Okay, so Japan, South Korea, Italy hitting new fertility lows even more than in the past. Interesting that this is now sort of come across into into Europe. When when will the media and sort of the wider world accept that birth rates are as big of a priority as they are?
17:40 Speaker 01 I mean, everything with demographics is glacial. It takes decades for it to arrive. And so everyone just like, you know, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. And then the day it arrives, it's too late because you are now a bloody smear into the glacier. In the case of Japan, we actually have a culture that saw this coming. And they have done a number of things over the last 30 years to make it easier to have children, to stay in the workforce longer. And so their birth rate is actually risen quite a bit, nowhere near replacement levels. I don't want to oversell it. But it's now higher than not just China, Japan, and Taiwan, and Germany, Italy, but also the Netherlands, and India, Thailand. Yeah, India, India is aging. So the math is going in a different direction. Everyone is still sliding, but we're all sliding at a little bit different rates.
18:25 Speaker 01 And you play that out over decades, and it really matters. So China, probably with the data we have right now, is in the worst shape. And after that, it's a kind of a three way tie between or among Germany, Italy, and Korea, most likely.
18:40 Chris Williamson? The fact that this bleeds across into Europe, sort of west, west, is, I know, it feels, it definitely feels like it's coming home to roost in a way. It's way less theoretical with the fact that it's it's already spread over here.
18:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, at the moment, most people are, when they think about demographics at all, they think about it in terms of federal budgets and the baby boomer retirement and how much it costs to pay for pensions. And, you know, that's, that's part of it. But that's just the leading edge. The baby boomers are aging out. The last of them are going to be retired in five years. And in most of the world, there wasn't an echo generation like the millennials in the United States. So we really are at the beginning of the end here.
19:25 Chris Williamson? Are we entering a labor shortage that no one's ready for? Is there, is there any country that can handle demographic collapse the best, better?
19:36 Speaker 01 The bottom line is if you still have people in thirty, in your thirties, uh, that you still have a chance to have kids. So when I look at countries like, say, you know, not just the United States, but Germany, no, excuse me. Not just the United States, like India, or Mexico, or Poland, or Brazil, you know, these are all places that have not passed that Rubicon just yet. And so with the way we understand economic theory and the way that we understand biology and parenting, they don't require reinvention. They just need to encourage their young people to have kids for some, in some way, for whatever reason, they want to modify the language. But once you pass that, once your average age slips past forty and especially past forty-five, there's no longer a traditional biological path.
20:21 Speaker 01 It's about smoothing the decline, stretching it out, and a number of European states have proven to be very good at that. Japan has proven to be surprisingly good at that, but it's still a bit of a starvation diet in the long run, unless you change the economic model. So whether it's fascism or socialism or capitalism, everything is based upon the balance between labor and capital and supply and demand. That's how we understand economics, how we have understood them for a millennia, half a millennia.
20:51 Speaker 01 If you can come up with something new, and I'm all ears, then maybe it will work in a different demographic profile. At the moment, the leading theory, and it's, it won't work, is of course, um, modern monetary theory. That just shuffles those four factors. It doesn't really change the math. What the Trump administration seems to be trying, whether or not they're doing this consciously or not is a question, uh, is some sort of, um, metered demand, a restricted demand model, where your demand is only met if the government greenlights it. And other people's demand, that just doesn't count. That doesn't factor in. I'm not saying I think this is a good idea.
21:34 Speaker 01 I'm saying it's like the only thing that I've seen in the last decade that might theoretically apply to a future society.
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22:45 Chris Williamson? I keep on hoping for some sort of fantastic, hopeful leg up, some lifeline that's going to be thrown. And every time that I do deeper and deeper research into it, it just gets kind of worse. Well, I guess what I'm interested from a geopolitics standpoint is how a shrinking workforce changes the relationship between countries. We understand sort of what it does within countries, but how does that change the geo part of the geopolitics?
23:16 Speaker 01 Countries that are aging out but haven't yet crossed that line. They've run out of consumption, but they're not yet a retirement home. Those countries are really, really dependent upon exports and Korea is probably the poster child for that. China is very close second.
23:34 Speaker 01 They need an open, globalized world because they can never consume what they produce. And so if they're going to have any income in any long-term tax capacity, it's going to come from selling stuff to other countries.
23:45 Chris Williamson? Ah, of course.
23:46 Speaker 01 The countries that have the youth, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, haven't risen in wealth to a level to absorb global manufacturing capacity. The only first world country of size that's left that is still a net consumer is the United States. And while I can say a lot of negative things about the Trump administration, one thing that they really do understand is the consumer base of the United States is a tool of geopolitical power. And extending or denying that to other countries is a very powerful negotiation tactic. I mean, we needed to negotiate a second round of Britain. What's a second round of globalization? This is one way to do it.
24:31 Chris Williamson? Wow, I totally, yeah, that that makes complete sense. If you have a shrinking population internally and you don't want your GDP to just fall through the floor, you need to get people who do have spare people, you do have countries that have spare people to buy your stuff, buy your stuff.
24:48 Speaker 01 The alternative is absolutely limitless mass immigration, which from a cultural point of view, no one's a real fan of.
24:55 Chris Williamson? No, uh, how much of a solution versus a crutch is immigration? When it comes to stemming the tide?
25:05 Speaker 01 At this point in time, it's at best like a really thin cane. If you
25:12 Speaker 01 if your goal is to use someone else's young people to pad your demographics, so you don't fade away, you need to start before you have a problem. And this is one of the reasons why the settler societies have always had faster growth than the rest of the world. So the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Americans, the Canadians, this has been less of a problem for us because none of us are from where we're living now. And we've been bringing in waves of people over and over decade and decade into the centuries. But if you started today, so let's, let's just take Germany because the numbers there are really clear and the Germans are great with numbers. So we can trust them. Now, the Germans, just to hold where they are, average age of like 50, just to hold here, already export dependent, just, just to not slide anymore.
25:55 Speaker 01 They need to bring in 2 million people a year that are under age 25 forever. In a country that only has eighty million people.
26:02 Chris Williamson? Wow.
26:03 Speaker 01 Fast forward twenty years and the Germans are less than a third of the population. It's not viable anymore. Had they started back in the fifties, it'd be a different conversation.
26:15 Chris Williamson? Yeah, that's crazy. I didn't realize the numbers were that bad. Okay, you mentioned Trump administration there. What do you make of Mamdani's New York win? Is it remarkable? Is it indicative of some important trend?
26:28 Speaker 01 No, I mean, if there is a trend from Mamdani, it's the same trend from Trump. These are two people who never had a real job in their lives and all of a sudden are now political leaders. We should not expect this to go well in New York, just like it hasn't exactly gone well in Washington.
26:51 Chris Williamson? I'm I'm interested in whether or not there is something remarkable or unique, noteworthy. Happening with elections and populism and sort of rising nationalism. You've got US election cycle volatility, a little bit of that. You've got farmer protests in Europe. You mentioned migration and a ton of people having problems with that. I wonder whether that could be driving some political change, not just inside the US. But yeah, I'm interested in what you think about those dynamics and the others impacting how the world at large generally thinks about populism, nationalism, internal politics.
27:32 Speaker 01 Well, a couple of broad demographic thoughts. As a rule, the younger cohort, twenty five and under, tends to be more politically radicalized, more classically, excuse me, not classically liberal, more pejoratively liberal, woke, whatever you want to call it. And much more in favor of things like redistributed economic policies because they don't have anything to lose. They only have the possibility of gains. It's it's just it's age math. And that has been true in every part of the world throughout the entire modern era. Nothing's weird there.
28:08 Speaker 01 Flip it. When you turn 65, your income goes away. You're now either on a fixed income or the assets you've accrued over your life. That's all you have. That's all you will ever have. And so you get a little crotchety. And so the environment we're in today, in most of the world, the young cohort is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more brittle and more desperate. Whereas the older cohort is getting larger and larger and larger and more ossified and more unwilling to make any compromises. Throw that against a globalization. We have the time where we're looking through some of the most radical economic transformations because of what's going on with globalization and de-globalization, at least in our lives,
28:53 Speaker 01 certainly since the 70s, I'm sorry, certainly since the 40s, probably since the 1870s. And based on definition, maybe since the 1500s. At the same time, we have our first ever, as a species, demographic conversion. Of course, it's going to be a shit show.
29:09 Chris Williamson? Hmm, uh huh. Yeah, I wonder whether, I wonder whether the increased radicalization will have some sort of a bump when those young people become slightly older. If their economic situation doesn't improve by as much as they'd hoped, as much as their previous generations has hoped. I wonder whether that will hold on to some of that sort of progressive radicalization or tamp down.
29:35 Speaker 01 It would be the first time in history if it happens.
29:37 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it's time down the inevitable trajectory that goes from higher openness to lower openness, higher sort of liberal worldview to more conservative worldview. But yeah, I mean, the, the prospect that the future is going to be owned by the people who have children and the only people who are having children. Really fascinating stats, I'm sure that you saw, looking at where the birth rate decline has come from, if you organize it by political cohort inside of the US. And from 1990, it's almost exclusively been taken out of people that are left leaning. So that, no?
30:13 Speaker 01 There's a couple of problems with that data point. I saw the same study. Number one, they, the way they defined left lead, okay, the, um, the classic Democrat Party in the United States, there are three clusters to it. You've got racial minorities, you've got organized labor, and you have the, the educated coastal elites. The way that study defined it, it was just that third group.
30:38 Chris Williamson? Interesting.
30:40 Speaker 01 The first two groups tell us something different. Number one, the the middle group, the organized labor, they're socially conservative, always have been. And now they're voting that way. And they really like, I went, well, really like Trump might be a bit of a stretch. But Trump is not a pro-business guy. He's probably the most anti-business president US has had in my lifetime. And the unions love it.
31:05 Speaker 01 Then you've got the racial minorities and blacks and Hispanics and Asians agree on nothing. Asians tend to be much better educated, much more wealthy, not necessarily politically conservative or liberal, more likely to be independent.
31:20 Speaker 01 African Americans tend to have been lockstep into the Democratic Party for quite some time, but they voted for Trump in the biggest percentages we've ever seen in modern history. And the Hispanics split right down the middle this last election. They are economically for a degree of redistribution, not anything like the coastal elites. They tend to be the most up and coming part of the United States. So they're most likely to shift economically conservative, which doesn't put them in the Republican Party either anymore, because that's not what the Republican Party is today. But at the same time, they're the most anti-immigration group we have.
32:04 Speaker 01 They want family reunification for their family and no one else. So the Democratic Party has shattered as an institution. And when people start talking about conservative or liberal, you really have to ask what it is there, how they define those terms, because the way America defines those terms has changed radically in just the last five years.
32:24 Chris Williamson? It is crazy. The the top line of data that we're seeing at the moment, I'm seeing more and more graphs from stuff like our world in data and like we got the stats, etc., being posted on social media. There's a great, great guy from the FT that's doing a load of stuff in terms of data visualization. His stuff's getting shared around a lot. But there are always our nuances. And when you dig into those, you find out that the story might not be the story.
32:48 Speaker 01 Politics has always been messy and now we're in a time of change, so it's really messy.
32:53 Chris Williamson? Speaking of Trump, Trump elevates Saudi Arabia to major non-NATO ally status. That sounds like the the most litigious slap on the wrists that I can think of. But is that a big deal? Like, what US Middle East tensions, are they important? How much are we concerned?
33:14 Speaker 01 I'm not going to say they're unimportant because that would just be rude. But the idea that Saudi Arabia is an ally is a real stretch. And I'm not just saying that because Mohammed bin Salman ordered the dismemberment and cooking of a journalist and then used the same barbecue pit for a diplomatic party for 300 people later that day.
33:33 Chris Williamson? They cooked Jamal Khashoggi as well?
33:35 Speaker 01 They, I mean, they didn't eat him.
33:37 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:39 Speaker 01 They dismembered him, they put him in a giant barbecue pit, they burned all the evidence. And then later that day, they held a diplomatic barbecue event using that barbecue pit to make sure they could destroy all the forensic evidence.
33:54 Chris Williamson? So there was little, little particles of Jamal Khashoggi probably inside of a little bit of the barbecue.
34:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's just put that to the side for the moment.
34:02 Chris Williamson? Seasoned with journalists. What a fucking horrendous story.
34:09 Speaker 01 The rulers of Saudi Arabia are literally the House of Saud. It's a family and MBS is a member of that family and King Abellavold was part of that family. And it is this family that created the global jihadist movement that the world has had so much heartburn with. It is this family who their support created things like Al Qaeda and ISIS and is indirectly, at worst, responsible for things like the 9/11 attacks. So the idea that Saudi Arabia is an ally in any way requires an immense stretch.
34:50 Speaker 01 Unless you go back to the Cold War, when we needed Saudi crude to fuel the tanks of Germany and Italy and Britain and Japan and Korea and China in order to fuel the alliance. So if you want to rebuild that world, Arab oil to fuel an alliance to fight whoever, you know, there's a conversation to be had there on strategy. But anything else, this is not a country that has been our friend for a very long time.
35:21 Chris Williamson? Wow. What do you make of the future of energy? EV demand slowing a little bit, shale production and stuff's going on, nuclear renaissance? What's the future of energy look like in your opinion?
35:33 Speaker 01 Any country where EVs are not subsidized, there are no EVs. So that hopefully would tell you everything you need to know about that supply chain. That doesn't mean that all green tech is stupid, just that one piece. As for green tech, work large, if you're in a sunny place, put up solar. If you're a windy place, put up wind. You know, I would like to think that that's not particularly complicated conversation. If you're not in a sunny place, maybe you shouldn't put up solar. Why people have trouble with that statement bothers me. I mean, I live at 7,500 feet above Denver. I get 330 days of sunshine a day. Of course I have solar panels on my roof.
36:16 Speaker 01 But if I lived outside of Toronto, I would get one fifth solar radiation per year. Why would I be so stupid as to put solar panels on my roof in Toronto? It's like this, this idea that the technology works everywhere is really a problem. And that goes for the others too, natural gas, oil, nuclear, all of them. Because if you, you have to have the infrastructure that goes with it. Now that infrastructure is there, why would you burn that power source? Nukes are getting interesting. The United States seems to in bits and pieces being moving on from 1973, finally, it's only been 51 years to 52 years.
36:55 Speaker 01 Uh, the hope is that the small modulars will work, but right now we still have yet to build a prototype. And so until there is a prototype, I can't tell you what the supply chain might look like. But the, the sexy nature of it is if you can fit a nuclear reactor into a 10, 20 foot container unit and just plug it into a decommissioned coal plant's transformer network and basically produce as much power as the old coal plant did for 5% of the cost of building a new power plant? Well, that, that sounds great. If the technology works, let's build it once and then we'll talk about it.
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38:23 Chris Williamson? that you'll love it. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 35% discount on your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com/modernwisdom using modern wisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom. Modern wisdom at checkout. How far away from that technology are we?
38:46 Speaker 01 We were supposed to get the prototype up last November and then the company knew it went belly up. We've had three more countries, excuse me, three more companies say that they're working on it. I have not seen what I consider to be a reliable timeframe for when their prototype will come online. The national labs are involved, people are working on it, but I'm sorry.
39:04 Chris Williamson? Without that, is nuclear dominance not as inevitable?
39:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, nuclear, if you're going to build a large plant, let's just put the regulatory and the NIMBY concerns to the side for a moment. From the day that you put a shovel in the ground and you have every dollar that you need to get it set up, you're talking about four to eight years, probably closer to eight. And that assumes that the power grid can take the power. One of the problems we have in the United States is because of the period from roughly 1985 until roughly 2020 was a period where we were moving towards higher and higher end industry that used more precision labor and more equipment.
39:43 Speaker 01 But less smelting and electrical work. It meant that the amount of stuff that we were producing was actually going up in value, but the amount of power that we needed to do it was going down in value. And as we moved from manufacturing agriculture to a services economy, same thing, power demand stagnated or dropped until very, very recently, largely because of AI, but also because of the reindustrialization effort we're now going through because of the Chinese problems and de- globalization. So for 35 years, we really didn't build out the grid because we didn't need to. Now we need to. And the biggest thing that is missing is high voltage, long range transmission line, something that's like 70 kilovolts or higher. The only part of the country right now that has spare transmission capacity is this
40:28 Speaker 01 little triangle from Pittsburgh to St. Louis to Chicago, Appalachia coal country. Because in the 60s, 70s and 80s, we had a number of administrations who realized, here's where the coal is. It's cheaper to move electricity than coal. So let's burn the coal locally and send the power out to the population centers. Basic math. So the federal government stepped in and helped push through all of this development work. And so now this zone has like quadruple the long range transmission that they're using in some places, less than a fifth. It's the only place that could really build out what we need quickly. Everywhere else in the country needs to build those lines before they think about things like nuclear power.
41:13 Speaker 01 Because if you build nuclear power, you might be able to supply your city right there, but you're not going to be able to ship it anywhere else. That's in part a regulatory issue, but it's mostly just hardware.
41:24 Chris Williamson? How effective is nuclear when it comes to the excess capacity from the grid? I have a friend who helps to build crypto mining facilities in West Texas. And one of the things that they do, which is supposedly of a massive benefit to the grid, is they are able to turn on and turn off their requirement for buying energy. So there is additional energy that's available on the grid and he pushes a button or the people that he builds the plants for push a button and they go, we'll take your cheap energy. Fantastic. We'll go and mine us some more Ethereum.
42:01 Chris Williamson? How, how much tolerance, how much foot on, foot off gas do you have with nuclear plants? Do you know?
42:08 Speaker 01 Uh, from a technical point of view, you can go up and down whatever you want. But going up looks a lot to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission like a meltdown. So functionally, no, not at all. So nuclear is only for baseload in the United States. And I think that's broadly a good way to look at it. So for data centers, nuclear is a good match because data centers churn 24 hours a day. Nuclear goes 24 hours a day. Solar and wind for data centers are some of the stupidest things I've ever seen people put on paper. Because to make that work, you need to build five times the solar and wind that you would need to power the center.
42:49 Speaker 01 And then build a massive, at least 24 hour duration battery system. By the way, no one in the country has more than 10 minutes.
42:59 Speaker 01 And just the cost is just extreme. And even then it wouldn't be stable or reliable. So nukes, yeah, nukes would work for that.
43:08 Chris Williamson? You mentioned EVs when they're not subsidized. No bueno. What are the underlying dynamics? Is that consumer demand? Is that cost? Is that prohibitive ability to produce? What are the underlying dynamics?
43:22 Speaker 01 It's electricity. It's really simple. Electricity is easy to generate. It's kind of squirrely to transmit and it's almost impossible to store in an economically viable manner. You need a supply chain that is among the most sophisticated that humanity has ever produced, that produces and processes a dozen major elements. And in order to do the transition, the United States, under the Biden administration, said that it wanted to do, get to a majority EV situation in less than 25 years. We would need every scrap of lithium and copper and molybium and tantalum. Oh, and graphite and all the rest from the entire planet. And no one else could have any at all.
44:06 Speaker 01 Just to do EVs just here. So no, it was always fucking moronic. That and the cost that's attached to it is onerous. So of course, if you aren't, if you have to pay for it all yourself. Sales are basically dropping to zero.
44:28 Speaker 01 Tesla, Musk talked a good game, not viable economically, not viable geopolitically. And we don't have the processing materials here in the United States to do it anyway.
44:44 Chris Williamson? So that suggests, assuming that Elon isn't ignorant of this, I have to assume that he isn't. He tends to do his research.
44:52 Speaker 01 He's a marketer. You should think of everything that he says in that light.
44:55 Chris Williamson? But the, that, the knowledge that this is the future of the EV market, that in order to be able to make this work within the US, you need this absurd volume of rare earth minerals, processed in the right way, capacity, all the rest of the thing. Not only do the stars need to align, but you also need to align a bunch of weird rocks in one of those rock towers on the ground.
45:18 Chris Williamson? That is betting the entire future of the company on the direction of the country. And is he basically, in your opinion, is he making an assumption that the subsidies will continue to roll in? Because that makes Tesla very.
45:36 Speaker 01 It's a non-viable company by any normal math.
45:39 Chris Williamson? But if you get continuing support because there is a push toward green, because EVs are seen as the best way to help climate change, so on and so forth, it is riding, that the EV revolution is riding off the back of subsidies coming from any government. Is that the way to look at it?
45:55 Speaker 01 For Tesla at this moment, as we understand physical chemistry, yes, there's nothing viable at Tesla. There's very little that's viable EV writ large anyway, even before you consider the cost of the supporting infrastructure build out, which is a couple of trillion dollars on top of everything else. Just the vehicles don't do what they were, have been advertised to do. They're also net dirtier than gasoline because of the production cycle on the front end. Now, if you change the electrical system in a way that I don't understand today. I reserve the right to change my mind. If you move away from lithium as the core component of battery storage into something that is less environmentally damaging its production and more energy dense and can
46:40 Speaker 01 take the vibrations better, I reserve the right to change my mind. But in the last five years, I haven't even seen a prototype system suggested for any of this. The closest I would say would be the slow motion move from lithium cobalt batteries to lithium iron batteries. That might help with energy storage at the grid level. It might really make a difference, but for transport, no. It's less dense than what we had. Where does the net dirty come from? What is the dirty? Well, people always forget that the electricity comes from somewhere. And if, let's say, I've got an 11 kilowatt system on my house.
47:19 Speaker 01 If I had a Tesla and the sun shone for 24 hours a day at my high altitude noon peak, it took me two and a half days to charge the car. So you're not using solar and wind to charge your car. You're using fossil fuels. And so the only potential gain that you're getting is that an EV engine is more energy efficient than a gas engine on a mile per mile basis. But the cost, the carbon cost of generating the vehicle and especially the battery at the front end is just so much more. And if you're living in a place that's predominantly coal and you're driving an American style sedan, you're over the long term generating a lot more carbon than anything before.
48:01 Speaker 01 Now, those are some very broad statements and there are a thousand exceptions to them based on the local situation. So for example, the Chinese vehicles from a weight basis are less than half that of the American vehicles. They would never pass our safety tests, but they're smaller and they kill a lot of people. But because they're so much lighter, a lot of what I just said does not apply to the Chinese situation. So a Chinese EV can break even on a carbon cost basis within 10 years, maybe. But at the price of a few pedestrians?
48:38 Speaker 01 Societies make choices when they start crafting laws.
48:44 Chris Williamson? Okay.
48:46 Chris Williamson? What are the, what are the other sort of damages with, with regards to production when it, I know, I understand about the, the lithium. I, I remember Joe had some guy on his show talking about cobalt mining and it was fucking disgusting. It was insane.
49:02 Speaker 01 It's disgusting in every sense of the word. Yeah. Environmentally, chemically and socially.
49:08 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Um, what, what else? What else is there going into EVs, which are a little, uh, byproducts we wouldn't realize?
49:14 Speaker 01 I didn't top off my study for this. A big one's graphite. Uh, graphite's basically a synthetic form of carbon. There is a natural graphite, which is vastly preferred, but the chemical structure is very limited to a few specific mines. So the cost goes up as it's more of its used. There's a synthetic version. Uh, basically you're using it for the electricity, regulating the electricity flow in a battery. And if the graphite is not the right kind, you basically get the electricity starting to leak out into the battery itself, which can get a little blammy, but more likely it's just going to be a huge efficiency loss. Copper, obviously, anything that uses electricity is going to use a huge amount of copper, lithium, we've already covered cobalt's a mess.
49:55 Speaker 01 Manganese, using a lot of alloys for both copper and steel. Um, sometimes you're going to put this in electrodes as well. There's just, there's a lot of moving pieces. Um, and that's one of the reasons why I'm a little hopeful because a lot of people are playing with a lot of different chemistries to see if they can come up with something better. We just haven't hit it.
50:13 Chris Williamson? Isn't there a rule in the UK that they want to go completely gas powered vehicle free by 2030, that there's no more, or is that, is that elsewhere?
50:24 Speaker 01 Lots of countries have announced that either for their cities or for their countries. And unless they're willing to subsidize it to a huge degree, it's not going to happen anywhere. That doesn't necessarily mean that I have a problem with those goals. I mean, lots of time, well, you know, let me use the California example. California gets a lot of shit. California deserves a lot of the shit that they get. But when it comes to regulation, uh, the state legislature has empowered their regular tour bodies to create these regulations to say, you know, we want to be carbon free or we want to on the grid by this year. We want to have no non EVs sold in the state by this year. And as time moves on, if the technology is not manifesting to make that policy.
51:04 Speaker 01 The regulator has the authority without going back to the state legislature to move the date or change the mandate. It's a little bit more intelligent than most people give California credit for, and we're going to probably see a lot of places climbing down. We've seen a lot of countries in the last couple of years back away from a lot of what they've done with EVs because it's just not working out.
51:30 Chris Williamson? Which country do you think is closest to being wiped out by energy shortages? Which one is the most precarious?
51:39 Speaker 01 At scale, the Chinese are the ones in the biggest pickle. They import about 70% of their oil, about similar number for natural gas, and the vast majority of that comes through the Strait of Malacca, probably were originating in the Middle East. And so if you ever have a real dust up with either Japan, or the United States, or India, Vietnam, or Australia, or Sri Lanka, or Pakistan, or Oman, that'll stops. It's really easy to cut completely.
52:12 Speaker 01 For more traditional places, the Europeans are getting clever. I'm not as worried about the Europeans as I used to be. Three years ago, there's plenty of reason to be worried.
52:26 Speaker 01 Three years ago, when the Ukraine war started, the Europeans were in the situation where they thought that if they didn't side with the Russians, the lights were going to go out. But in the three years since, they've built a lot of infrastructure to bring in carbon energy from other places, and it has been broadly successful. And so they've backed away from a political goal that was questionable economically and made a very clear strategic decision that is broadly working out for them, but they didn't sacrifice all of their plans. So they realized, you know, maybe solar and wind does not work in the world's
53:09 Speaker 01 least windy, least sunny continent.
53:15 Speaker 01 But conservation and efficiency are still very good plans. So you you've seen some change in mindset and a little bit more realism in the policy and it's it's showing benefits.
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54:10 Chris Williamson? Right now, you can get 15% off any data plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to saly.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's S A I L Y dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I'm interested in sort of what the future of the green energy movement looks like, this sort of green transition. And it's how possible it is at the current levels of stability and technology and rollout and instability.
54:39 Speaker 01 There are no EVs, there are no battery chassis, there is no solar, there is no wind, there is no nuclear without globalization. Too many of the parts, too many of the materials come from a different continent. And so if we're not all doing this together, none of that happens. And so you should move on. If you're in the Western Hemisphere, where there is more mining than consumption, that's probably going to be a little easier. But for the Eastern Hemisphere, hard pass, it's just not going to work. Now, again, if you change the technology on me, I reserve the right to change my mind, but that's where we've been for the last 25 years.
55:12 Chris Williamson? How much of the Eastern Hemisphere being card carrying, flag waving, we are going green people, it seems to be mostly a Western thing in any case, no?
55:22 Speaker 01 For the most part, yeah.
55:26 Chris Williamson? How hopeful are you for a green transition in the West?
55:31 Speaker 01 If the technology is not ready and if Westerners are not living in places where the technology can be applied in a way that actually drops your carbon, putting up a solar panel doesn't make you green, putting up a solar panel that reduces your carbon footprint, that makes you green. And most people who live in the West don't live in a place where that is true.
55:51 Chris Williamson? I think that's one of the reasons why there is a lot of criticism in the UK around the sort of green movement, that we've had a very vociferous government pushing hard toward this as an outcome that they want. And a country that really doesn't seem to be particularly well suited for most of the technologies. Like, you mentioned Toronto's sort of one-fifth of the amount of sun. I have to assume that the UK is maybe even worse. We have to go down, we have to go south in order to get to Toronto if you fly from the UK. We're further up.
56:25 Speaker 01 Believe it or not, Lundby actually gets a little bit more sun than Toronto, but like
56:30 Speaker 01 Glasgow though, god, no.
56:32 Chris Williamson? Yes, and I was from three hours away from Glasgow, so yeah.
56:35 Speaker 01 Now, wind, offshore wind in the North Sea is brilliant. Look at Norway. I mean, Norway has been subsidized, you know, I don't want to suggest that they're not, but they get over half of their electricity from wind now. Now, because of the dispatchability issue, they're probably pretty close to peaked on that. They probably can't do much more.
56:53 Chris Williamson? What's dispatchability?
56:55 Speaker 01 The ability just to flip a switch and more electricity surges into the system. You can't do that with green tech at all. You can do it with batteries, but batteries are not good enough to store more than a few minutes of power on a grid level for most places. So, the first half for the Danes was easy. The second half, I have no idea how they're going to do that.
57:15 Chris Williamson? How interesting. What is, what's an important mineral? What's the most important mineral that no one's paying attention to?
57:24 Speaker 01 I mean, it's really unsexy, but copper. It's like, you want to expand your grid, you need copper. You want to do more industry, you need copper. You want to do anything with green tech, you need copper and you need a lot of it. The United States wants to double the size of its industrial plant. The United States, in order to do that, needs to increase its grid by half. That means we need to consume about 12 times as much copper for the next 30 years as we have for the last 30.
57:49 Chris Williamson? Why does that come from? Where is most of the copper in the world?
57:52 Speaker 01 The only country in the world that has what you would consider maybe surge capacity to increase output on anything less than a five-year timeframe is Chile. The Atacama Desert. Number two is the United States. Number three is Canada. Number four is Mexico.
58:08 Chris Williamson? But that's for the US then, that all of it is.
58:10 Speaker 01 That's great, but that's the ore. Then you got to turn it into copper metal. That's China and India.
58:17 Chris Williamson? So you can't keep it domestically and then convert it over here?
58:22 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, we could. We've chosen not to. But, and you know, it's not a new technology. This dates back to like the early 1800s. You basically heat it up, you boil off the sulfur, you heat it up some more, you purify into metal, and then you turn it into other things. There's nothing that to stop us from doing that, except for the cost, the footprint, the pollution, these are real things. And to this point, America has chosen to just let someone else do it.
58:49 Chris Williamson? Isn't an interesting Ouroboros thing that in order to be able to increase the capacity of the grid, to be able to move to something like nuclear, which would be a cleaner fuel, you need to do something which on the front end would look like pissing out more pollution into the atmosphere and would cause an awful lot of protests because look at these big, we shouldn't be doing our copper ore at home. Look at the big black clouds. It's perspective, being able to see over big timelines is a, is, is tough.
59:17 Speaker 01 One of the many, many, many, and that assumes it works. And the green technologies that we have right now, don't. So spending $30 trillion or whatever the most current number is to achieve net zero in the United States by 2050, assumes these technologies actually do what they say they're going to, and we already know that they don't. We have plenty of math to prove that.
59:39 Speaker 01 This is why I'm really big on physical chemistry because we need to find new ways to do things and we don't know what chunks of the land on the planet we're going to need access to to make those technologies work until we've built some of them.
59:52 Chris Williamson? Yeah, this one is based on gadolinium. This one is based on whatever the fuck.
59:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, until we know the answer to that question, we don't know how to prepare.
1:00:03 Chris Williamson? How fascinating. What do you think? What do you think the biggest surprise in energy is going to be over the next decade or two? It seems to me, at least based on what you're saying, the technology that is promised is not able to deliver that which it is promising. So will the surprise be disappointment or will the surprise be an actual surprise?
1:00:25 Speaker 01 It's going to be one of each. Let me give you the bad and then the good. First, first the bad. We're, we're very close and we have been very close for three years to a significant break in international energy markets, whether it's the Russian stuff going away or something happened in the Persian Gulf or something happened in Malacca or something happened to China. The production of vast volumes of crude is going to fall away. And the consumption of vast volumes of crude is going to fall away for demographic and geopolitical reasons. And I can't tell you which one's going to happen first. I can tell you that whichever one does happen first will then lead to the other one. And shit will get real in a lot of places very, very quickly. And for those of us who still want electricity, we will
1:01:08 Speaker 01 then basically have to fight to get access to the fossil fuels that will allow us to have it. And that will look different in every part of the world. Second thing, at some point in the next decade, our physical chemistry is going to improve to the point that we have a new idea that we will then want to apply, whether it's in generation, transmission or storage. I don't know. One of the three, maybe more than one. That will generate a completely new arms race in order to access that technology and apply it. And whoever can figure that out leaves the old problems behind. I mean, the petroleum age was a was a mess. I understand why people would like to go beyond it. The
1:01:51 Speaker 01 green age, if it happens with today's technologies, would be worse. But that's not going to stop us from trying to invent something new. And as soon as we do, maybe it's a capacitor, maybe it's a battery, maybe it's power peaming. I don't know. We start with a completely new set of goals, needing a completely different set of materials and different concentrations, and that changes the geography of what we are concerned about. So we might 10 years from now be more obsessed with Bolivia than we right now are with Saudi Arabia and Iraq. All depends on where the technology goes.
1:02:27 Chris Williamson? Well, it's interesting. America was obsessed with Bolivia for a little while, but for a different type of substance that they were exporting.
1:02:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:34 Chris Williamson? Clemens are back in the game. We're good. Bring back those days. Um.
1:02:37 Speaker 01 Don't do cocaine. Sorry, just had to say that.
1:02:39 Chris Williamson? That's okay. That's a statement that needs to be made unless it can power an electric vehicle, in which case, has anyone tried that? Who knows?
1:02:46 Speaker 01 I'm sure somebody in New York has.
1:02:48 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Um, global, so this increasing reliance globally, because if you're going to increase capacity, it means that you need to coordinate more and you need to be more reliant. I didn't, I totally didn't realize the fact that just because you have the raw material doesn't mean that you can process it where it is, it can be sent away and then come back. So global supply chains are more important than ever. Been a few years since we spoke. What's happening with the state of global supply chains? I've heard you say that they don't survive without a global security guarantor and that that era is over.
1:03:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. Right now, the ore comes from one place. It's primarily processed in China. It's sent to a third location to be purified to a degree that you can then actually use it. And then it gets turned into an intermediate product. So step one, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, that second, that first processing step that's done in China, that has to be done somewhere else.
1:03:44 Speaker 01 If we don't get that right, we don't get to try at anything else.
1:03:48 Chris Williamson? What about the rest of the global supply chain, global food systems, other stuff like that? What else has changed?
1:03:54 Speaker 01 Uh, I've been pleasantly surprised about global food systems. The sanctions against the Russians have not yet impacted the fertilizer supply system. And fertilizer as a category is like 11 different kinds, but fertilizer as a mass category, Russians are still the world's largest exporter. Without that, there is no food production in Brazil at all. And it looks pretty dicey in the Middle East, North Africa, and especially the South Asian zone. We haven't had that problem. In the meantime, the Americans continue to spin up more and more nitrogen fertilizer because that's primarily made from natural gas. And the Canadians continue to spin up more and more potash fertilizer because they've got that in Saskatchewan.
1:04:37 Speaker 01 So we're seeing other suppliers come into the system. They realize that it's a race and so far that's working out. Long term, still a real problem, but we're not facing the acute crunch that we were. Trump's tariffs are pushing manufactured goods for agriculture at the other direction. Basically oversimplifying here, but the more complicated the manufacturing supply chain happens to be, the more steps there are, the more players. If you have a high tariff system, it pushes your steps out into somewhere else. Because otherwise you're paying the tariff every time something crosses your border.
1:05:20 Chris Williamson? Yep.
1:05:21 Speaker 01 And so easier to take the handful of the steps that you do and do them somewhere else and just pay the tariff once when the thing comes in finished. For simple manufactured products that only have a half dozen steps or so, that tends to come to you because that's easier to collate. So when it comes to things like plastics and textiles and furniture, Trump's tariffs have reshored manufacturing. But when it comes to aerospace and computing and electronics and automotive, it's pushing stuff away. And agriculture equipment is definitely in that second category. So we're seeing John Deere, for example, has already cut more jobs in the last 10 months than it did in the previous 20 years.
1:06:05 Chris Williamson? Wow, I did not know that.
1:06:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's it's getting pretty bad in the Midwest right now.
1:06:11 Chris Williamson? Shipping disruptions, how big of a deal is that?
1:06:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, right now, the Asians realize that this is where their bread is buttered and they're going out of their way to get along. Uh, the Chinese have not interrupted any shipping. In fact, they've even leaned on the Houthis and the Iranians uh to stop fucking around in the Red Sea. Because they realize they're the ones that would be most screwed if that gets broken.
1:06:37 Chris Williamson? Hmm.
1:06:39 Speaker 01 So far, good news.
1:06:40 Chris Williamson? Yeah, well, you mentioned, you mentioned Russia, the uh, the last time that we spoke, that was, that was sort of front page news. What is happening with the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Is it entering a new stage at the moment?
1:06:54 Speaker 01 Every three months, we're in a new stage. Uh, we're in something called the Second Revolution in Military Affairs, which is applying digital technologies to warfare. Uh, the first phase was in the 1980s and 90s when the United States started making things like smart bombs and cruise missiles. Now it's going on to much cheaper platforms because uh low-cost semiconductors are ubiquitous around the world. And anyone can make a drone. And so we've got Ukraine, which inherited part of the old brain trust from the Soviet missile and aerospace things. Combined with a country that's desperate to survive, combined with these new inputs that they can bring in from abroad and making thousands of drones a day. So every three months, there's a new page. Uh, first it was single-person drones.
1:07:40 Speaker 01 Then it was jamming. Then it was drones with missiles. Then it was water-based drones. Then it was mass drones. Then it was Shahed drones. And it was Shahed drones that could do a limited amount of target selection. Now, uh, it's something called the, the octopus drone, which the Ukrainians are just starting to use, which is a drone interceptor.
1:07:59 Speaker 01 It's a new day every day, and I have no idea how this is going to play. I can tell you with the technologies that existed pre-war, exactly how this war would have gone.
1:08:08 Chris Williamson? Hmm.
1:08:09 Speaker 01 Those aren't the technologies that are being used in the war anymore.
1:08:13 Chris Williamson? Isn't that so interesting that all of the dangerous assumptions people had about modern warfare, all of the predictable, I mean, war is unpredictable enough, but when you apply the growth curve of technology to warfare, you just end up with, I mean, that weird evolution between offense and defense that we saw happen. Well, drones have come out and this is better than using a Hellfire missile. And then instead of using that, you get a net and these drones are defeated by a net. And now the drones have a little thing on the front that cuts the net. And now the nets are made of this material.
1:08:53 Chris Williamson? And now there's an EMP that blasts them out of the sky. And now there's, I mean, the pace of innovation with kinetic consequences is, it's mad. It's been absurd.
1:09:06 Speaker 01 Right. But this is why it's called the revolution in military affairs. If you go back to roughly 1935, the technologies we were using then, up until 2022, with the exception of the introduction of the jet, really hadn't changed. It was guns, it was artillery, it was tanks, it was ships, it was subs, it was helicopters. The jet was the only one that was introduced, and that was introduced late in World War II, 1944. We've had more technological evolutions in the last three years, just in Ukraine, than the rest of the world combined has had since 1960.
1:09:45 Chris Williamson? Wow.
1:09:47 Speaker 01 So the rules, we don't know. We are only in the very, very early stages of developing the weapons, much less the doctrine, much less being able to play that against a battlefield. And we are very fortunate in the West that the Ukrainians will want to partner with us, because they are doing in real time, the sort of experimentation that is costing lives, that if we were doing this in a broader conflict, would have already claimed a million people.
1:10:19 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I was gonna say, I wonder how many countries are watching Ukraine and Russia almost like a lab.
1:10:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, the last time something at this scale happened, a major conflict in which people were watching, it was either the Crimean War or the American Civil War, because those were the two conflicts where industrialized technologies first really hit the field, whether it was a Gatling gun, or penicillin, or the railway.
1:10:47 Chris Williamson? And people are watching and thinking, well, this is a good explainer, a good sandbox for us to observe what these new technologies are going to be like. How are these?
1:10:58 Speaker 01 Say I'm dark.
1:11:00 Chris Williamson? Well, look, I mean, I'm not saying that Russia and Ukraine is being used as an experiment for the rest of the world to watch, but that's what the people who are not invested in it directly will be, will be thinking, right? Look at this. Look at, look at, look at the way that this goes forward. I, that seems to me, I was interested in what the most dangerous assumption about modern warfare was, but the, the, the assumption that it is predictable, or that it follows any of the rules that have been established in the past, seems to be a pretty fucking good one.
1:11:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. Now, we still need energy, we need, still need food. When you're talking about drones, you need electricity specifically, so that adds another layer of things to it. But yeah, the rules are changing very quickly.
1:11:40 Chris Williamson? What conflicts are more important than Ukraine at the moment?
1:11:46 Speaker 01 At the moment, that's really the only one that matters, because that has the nuclear question because of the Russians, that deals with the Northern European plains, so automatically draws in all the Europeans. It has the issue of uniting Eurasia under a single power, so the Americans get interested. And then, of course, the Chinese are providing the industrial base that's necessary for the Russians to carry out the war in the first place. So everyone's involved in some way. It is by far the most critical one out there. We'll probably have a few new ones in the next few years. Whenever you break the economic model, politics gets all wonky, and security issues naturally bubble up from that. And that's before you consider technological change. So, you know, maybe we figure out what the next energy technology is, we have something fresh to fight over in a world
1:12:31 Speaker 01 where all of a sudden oil is not as reliable. It's one of many ways this could go.
1:12:35 Chris Williamson? Hmm. What about South China Sea stuff? That was big deal for a while.
1:12:40 Speaker 01 I have never found that sexy, never. It's just, I just.
1:12:46 Speaker 01 It's ringed by hostile countries, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia. It's not that deep, so subs don't play a big role. The energy in it, the reserves are not all that interesting. And the sand islands that the Chinese have built are, as the name suggests, built of sand. And so the Chinese have already stopped stationing aircraft on them because the runways aren't functional.
1:13:14 Speaker 01 And if you see this as a naval projection issue, projecting through an area rung but ringed by a half a dozen countries who hate you. You put a few of the new tomahawks that the United States is developing that are truck mounted and you can't do anything with that except for lose ships. And even if you could secure it, you've now made it one seventh of the way to the Persian Gulf. Big fucking deal. The Chinese are boxed in. I've never found the South China Sea interesting.
1:13:42 Chris Williamson? Wow, I've seen so many video documentaries and stuff talking about these land grabs that.
1:13:48 Speaker 01 Breathless, breathless.
1:13:50 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, this is, you know, it's this sort of odd geopolitical red tape loophole, which is permitting China to expand the size of its country by saying, this is us and this is us and this is us. And it's slowly going to engulf the entire South China Sea.
1:14:07 Speaker 01 When public relations is your strategic policy, it's not a very good policy. If you want to take it seriously, the Chinese have to conquer Vietnam first, then we'll talk.
1:14:19 Speaker 01 Because if they don't control the coast, there's no point in controlling the water.
1:14:24 Chris Williamson? Surely, based on your theory about China being in a lot of shit over the next decade and a metric ton of shit over the next 50 years, is there not the potential for them to do something desperate? Whatever that means, silly, more aggressive, more predictable?
1:14:44 Speaker 01 I won't rule it out, but there's nothing that they could do that would fix their underlying core problems. They can't change their geography. They'd have to conquer the entire first island chain to have a chance to project beyond. And even then, they're not going to have a two ocean navy because there's only one. Um, they're not going to solve their demographic problems with a war. The only country where you could maybe turn enough people into slaves to round out your demographic structure would be India. Himalayas are in the way. Independent of the fact that that would be really hard. Uh, so there's nowhere they can go. Uh, the resources aren't within easy reach. The demographic situation requires Star Wars style cloning. And the strategic situation can't be solved with a navy that is anything less than five
1:15:29 Speaker 01 times the powerful power of the American Navy, and they're nowhere close. They have a lot of ships, but whenever you see like a tonnage per tonnage comparison for a ship, keep in mind that their ships suck and are a lot heavier. So a 40,000 ton Chinese carrier and a 40,000 ton American carrier. This one is an order of magnitude more powerful than this one. They're slower, they can't maneuver, they need too much fuel. Uh, before you consider things about the hardware that they might launch.
1:15:59 Chris Williamson? Okay. That does not necessarily preclude them from doing something silly or something kinetic or aggressive.
1:16:08 Speaker 01 Exactly. Just purely out of desperation, shape the environment on their way out the door. I can't rule it out, but generally countries don't die that way. There has to be something that they think that they can achieve. The reason that I don't dismiss it completely is that Chairman G has basically gotten rid of all of his advisors. Uh, his last real one was seven years ago now. And when you eat nothing but the propaganda all day, you know, it kind of messes with your head. I mean, this is a guy who has written 30,000 pages of ideological treatises in the last 10 years. That doesn't leave a lot of time to govern. And it may be that his mind is just mush now and that yes, he pulls the trigger.
1:16:50 Speaker 01 Uh, it's not a very satisfying explanation, but that's really the only way I see it happening.
1:16:55 Chris Williamson? Yeah, wow. Wow. It really does sort of go to show the the issues of intense isolation. You know, it's one of the reasons that supposedly Japan has a particularly unique culture, which is what happens if nobody's allowed to leave or enter for half a millennia. And look at this, it's formed into this place that's as close to an alien planet as you can whilst staying on Earth. And isn't that interesting? But it also doesn't have the corrective mechanisms for stress testing your ideas. If all of the people around you and all of the country around you basically is sort of
1:17:35 Chris Williamson? a yes country, like a yes men, you can end up with some pretty squirrely ideas that you start believing, I suppose.
1:17:44 Speaker 01 That's one of the reasons why I really like countries like the United States or Germany or Australia or Brazil, because the states have as much power as the national authorities. And so you get a lot of policy experimentations on everything from labor policy to tax policy to culture policy throughout the entire system. And we make some bad decisions, no argument. But we also make some good ones and then we learn from one another.
1:18:10 Chris Williamson? Which which country is quietly becoming a greater power than most people might realize, do you think?
1:18:17 Speaker 01 Mexico. If Mexico was located anywhere else in the world with the industrial plant that it is, we would already talk about it as being more powerful than Germany or France. But all that trade relationship was with the United States, so excuse everybody's perspective. Doesn't mean that they don't have very real problems. They do. But as an industrial power, they're already massive.
1:18:40 Chris Williamson? What is their advantage?
1:18:43 Speaker 01 They're right next to the United States. So you've got the technology, you've got the infrastructure, you've got the the consumption base, and they can complement what they do with what we do. It's a great relationship.
1:18:55 Chris Williamson? Wow, so it's literally a trickle down effect. Yeah.
1:18:58 Speaker 01 That's a little harsh. Mexicans are very good at what they do, too. But if Mexico hadn't been to the next next to the United States, it probably wouldn't have the trade or economic half that it has. But if you could take this somehow and move it somewhere else, yeah, massive, massive.
1:19:14 Chris Williamson? Wow, okay.
1:19:17 Chris Williamson? When it comes to alliances, tenuous ones, which is, what's the one that you're concerned about in terms of fragility? What are the alliances that you think are more fragile than they seem?
1:19:29 Speaker 01 Let me give you two, one that's up and coming and one that I thought we had solved, and now I'm not so sure. So up and coming is Vietnam. Huge population, very young, excellent educational system, 40% of their college grads are STEM, and they're now at a higher average technical skill set for their workforce than the Chinese are, and they're now trying to catch up with the industrial workforce, or sorry, with the industrial infrastructure. Long term, they're absolutely going to be a top five trading partner for the United States unless we absolutely muck it up. They're fascist, so we have to keep that in mind. Just because they're good at what we need them to be good at doesn't mean that they're
1:20:09 Speaker 01 wonderful people. Their government's kind of goo-hoo. The other one is Japan. Now, Japan is a country that I used to be concerned about because it was another naval power. Most of the resources they need are not local, so they have to go out and get them. And in a world where the United States cares less about globalization, that means that the Japanese, by default, have to be more aggressive. That doesn't mean a fight is inevitable, or much less imminent, but all of a sudden, it is a possibility. And the Japanese, under Trump 1, came to the United States to cut a deal on the future and basically signed a deal that was mixed economic and security needs, and basically gave in to Trump on everything
1:20:50 Speaker 01 they cared about. And so they thought that if they could sign a deal with Donald Trump, that they were in, because he was the most reactionary, erratic American president we've ever had. And they're like, if we can cut a deal with him, we're good, reasonable. Trump 2 comes along, badmouths the deal that Trump 1 cut. And all of a sudden, the Japanese are in the wind again. The difference between eight years ago and now is now the Japanese have two super carriers that they didn't have eight years ago, and all of a sudden, they are a naval superpower, and they were already the second most powerful naval power in the world. And so now it matters a great deal if this relationship falls on the rocks.
1:21:35 Speaker 01 So hopeful. The Japanese would rather have a deal than not have one. But a lot of hard work was done by Trump to get that deal and it worked and it stuck and then he burned it.
1:21:47 Chris Williamson? Trump versus Trump.
1:21:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:50 Chris Williamson? Peter, you're great. I love speaking to you. It's great to get an update, apocalyptic as it may be.
1:21:54 Speaker 01 Welcome.
1:21:55 Chris Williamson? Let's bring this one into land. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you've got going on?
1:21:58 Speaker 01 Zion.com, Z E I H A N dot com. That's where you sign up for the newsletter and the video logs and the Patreon system. And there's a new book in the works. It'll be out in about a year.
1:22:06 Chris Williamson? Fiction one. Congratulations.
1:22:07 Speaker 01 Fiction. Yeah. The end of the world. Fiction. Hopefully.
1:22:12 Chris Williamson? Awesome. Peter, I appreciate you, mate.
1:22:15 Speaker 02 Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order.
1:22:43 Speaker 01 1-800-CONTACTS.
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