China’s Collapse, America’s Rise, and What Comes Next — with Peter Zeihan

Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical strategist and founder of Zeihan on Geopolitics, joins Scott to discuss why he’s bearish on China, bullish on U. S. demographics, and skeptical of AI. Follow Peter @ZeihanonGeopolitics. Algebra of Happiness: good friends, hard truths. Help us plan for the future of The Prof G Pod by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:29Scott Galloway?

  Episode 351. 351 is your echo covering northeastern Massachusetts. In 1951, the United States passed the 22nd Amendment, limiting presidents to two terms. In other news, Taylor Swift has purchased back her entire catalog. So just some quick data here. Taylor Swift has about 300 songs about men breaking up with her and zero songs about giving a good blowjob. You do the math.

• 1:57Scott Galloway?

  Ah, love that. Go, go, go!

• 2:08Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 351st episode of The Prop G-Top. I'm at that point in my life where I've become a bit self-destructive and I'm looking to offend people. Anyway, I'm here at the Diplomat. What's the Diplomat? It's a fairly, I'd call it a four-star, that's being generous, hotel in Hollywood, Florida, where I spoke this morning to Nielsen IQ. And then my plane has been delayed three hours, so I immediately offered the tech team 100 bucks to find me a Mac computer laptop. And I'm here, recording a podcast in this very glamorous room. It's got an ocean view, which is pretty nice, although it's been kind of 85 degrees and storming. It is hurricane weather here now. By the way, folks, Florida, check the weather before you come here. It loses about 110% of its charm when it's not nice out.

• 2:51Scott Galloway?

  It's just kind of the south minus the charm when the weather isn't good here. But here I am, here I am, at the Diplomat Hotel. Just spoke, and then I'll head to the airport, I'll go to New York, then I go to Detroit for Summit, which I'm excited about. I'm in Detroit in 17 years. I went there in 2008 during the crisis to meet with a bankrupt General Motors. What was I doing there? I don't know, they were interested in digital IQ. Why was I there? Why was I there? I don't know, but I remember thinking, this is a pretty depressing place. Although supposedly it's making a comeback. Supposedly it's making a comeback. Dan Gilbert has renovated or rejuvenated downtown, and a lot of people, young people, are moving in. I'm excited to go there and see, see what the sitch is, see what the situation is in Detroit. Detroit. Anyways, anyways, with that, with that, I'm excited about our guest, Peter Zion, the geopolitical

• 3:36Scott Galloway?

  analyst, who makes a series of provocative predictions, many of which are wrong, but hey, as someone who gets them wrong a lot, I like that he kind of inspires a really interesting conversation. We've been trying to get this guy on the pod for a good year now. He's sort of a internet celebrity, eye celebrity, there you go. We discussed with Peter China's looming collapse, the future of the US-led global order. And those are both pretty big assumptions. I don't know if our producer has drank the Kool-Aid. I wonder if she was talking to Peter for too long before she wrote the script here, and whether AI and automation could reshape geopolitics. Anyways, with that, with that, from the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, here's our conversation with Peter Zion.

• 4:22Scott Galloway?

  Peter, where does this podcast find you?

• 4:24Speaker 04

  I am at home, just above Denver.

• 4:26Scott Galloway?

  By the way, thanks for being here. We've wanted you on for a while. You've been vocal about China's impending collapse. Why do you believe that? How do you, what are the dynamics that are setting up for China's collapse?

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Well, let me give you the two big ones, and there's a lot of small ones. Number one, this is the most trade-dependent country in human history. They import 75 to 80% of their energy. They import 80% of the stuff that allows them to grow their own food. They are the world's largest importer of food. They import all the raw commodities. They need to make their manufactured products. And then they export most of those manufactured products. So something happens to trade for any reason. They're the first ones to go and the ones that fall hardest. That is something that theoretically could be managed with a good diplomatic core, which I might add, they don't have. But the other problem is demographic. When you industrialize and you move from the farm to the city,

• 5:21Speaker 04

  your birth rate drops because kids go from being a free source of labor to simply a cost. And China industrialized and urbanized more quickly than any country in human history. And on top of that, they had the one-child policy. So from the point that the process really got going in the 70s to 1990, their birth rate dropped by two-thirds and fell below the American birth rate. And it's only dropped since then. And today, all of the major cities have birth rates that are less than one-quarter of replacement level. So the American birth rate is now more than triple that of China. It's been going for so long that they now have more people aged over 53 than under.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  And within the next few years, they simply won't have a consumption base, a workforce, a tax base, or consumers at all.

• 6:13Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, one of the things, there's a lot of catastrophizing trying to justify investments for bringing onshoring US manufacturing that we couldn't survive in a shooting war with China. But I think I read somewhere that China's out of business if you manage to cut off their their energy supply, that they're actually quite vulnerable to any sort of external conflict. Your thoughts?

• 6:30Speaker 04

  I would argue that if there's any meaningful conflict in China, we don't simply have a break of the Chinese military, which by the way, doesn't have range. So for them to beat us in a shooting war, we have to go to them. If we want to destroy them, we just need a few destroyers in the Indian Ocean basin to interfere with shipping and that's it. It's over. We're actually looking at the disassociation of China as a unified industrialized nation-state within the decade. And before Trump came in, I would have said that would probably have been about eight years. If we take a much more aggressive position on trade, it's going to be a lot less. That doesn't mean we won't feel it. You don't remove the world's largest industrial base from the math and not feel it. But for us,

• 7:13Speaker 04

  it's something we can grow through. For them, we are literally looking at the end of the Han ethnicity this century.

• 7:19Scott Galloway?

  Just to steel man this, isn't potentially the tariffs in America sort of tearing up the post-war alliances and a lot of nations, I think, no longer looking at us as a reliable partner. Do you think there's an opportunity for China in terms of new trade agreements? Or I just saw for the first time that more people globally see China as a force of good than the US. Isn't this potentially an opportunity for China for new markets?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  As a rule, I ignore what people say and look at what they do. This isn't the first time that American politics have made us less popular around the world. And I'm not willing to suggest that there aren't some short-term opportunities here. But the bottom line is that China doesn't have enough people under age 50 to consume, and so the product has to go somewhere. It just gets dumped in other markets. And as we have seen with the EV issue in 2024, as soon as the United States put on tariffs to block EVs from swarming into the American markets, everyone else did some version of the same if they had any sort of auto industry. So what we're seeing right now is the first stages of that. The Chinese are losing access to the American market. They're trying to dump everything

• 8:25Speaker 04

  everywhere else. And we're now starting to see those secondary waves of tariffs forming. So it's a nice thought, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it in the long term.

• 8:35Scott Galloway?

  They must be playing with the ultimate poker face though, because my sense is they've basically told Trump to pound sand. And if they were as vulnerable as your data suggests, don't you think they'd be more amenable to some sort of big, beautiful deal?

• 8:46Speaker 04

  A couple of thoughts to that. Number one, this always had a limited runway. And so any deal that they were able to strike, say, today, they'd still collapse within the decade. So is there a deal that would allow them to persist throughout that time without losing their sense of self? I'm not sure that's true anymore. It might have been 10 years ago, but not now. Second, it's unclear to me how much Xi is actually aware. He has so purged the system, most notably the bureaucracy, that the bureaucracy no longer even collects data that they think might result in numbers that Xi doesn't want to hear. So they just don't collect it at all. So the idea that Xi has a deep understanding of the reality

• 9:28Speaker 04

  of the world, or even his own country now, that's flawed. It's just not true.

• 9:33Scott Galloway?

  The new book, I think it's Patrick McGeat, talking about Apple essentially upskilling China and as a result, creating a pretty robust advanced manufacturing capability in China. And Tesla, you could argue, doing maybe the same thing that some of that has leaked to BYD. It strikes me that they have built this incredible supply chain. You don't, you don't think that pulls them out? You don't think that's their saving grace?

• 9:59Speaker 04

  No, I mean, that certainly helps. But we're not at a point where tech transfer would help here. I mean, if you don't have workers, you don't have workers. It really is that simple. In the case of Tesla, Tesla made the same mistake that most manufacturers in the United States made, is they thought they could set up a system where their intellectual property rights would be protected. And then the competitors, BYD, for example, set up a plant across the street and hired exactly the same people. So they'd work one shift at Tesla, copy everything they could, work one shift at BYD, install it all over there. We've seen this story over and over and over again in pretty much every manufacturing sector. Apple, a little different. Apple, it's an assembly story. Most of the parts that are, that matter for Apple are made somewhere else and everything comes together

• 10:44Speaker 04

  in China. It's just like the semiconductor sector at large has 30,000 pieces, they come together at Taiwan. And now Apple has to basically figure out a new model for bringing everything together. And it's not clear they can achieve the same scale anywhere else in the world. So we will probably be taking a few year break from having iPhones.

• 11:05Scott Galloway?

  This was Patrick's point, that the notion that an iPhone domestically manufactured in the US would cost $3,500, he said it might as well cost a million, that we're just literally not capable of it, a million or a thousand, a thousand individual.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  The $3,500 assumes you've already built the infrastructure.

• 11:22Scott Galloway?

  Right. And his, his point was it would be easier to recreate the Manhattan Project than try to figure out a way to produce a million iPhones a day.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  No, Manhattan Project was easy, that was just a few dozen dudes basically running a few gamma ray experiments.

• 11:34Scott Galloway?

  That doesn't make for a good film.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just, it's like modern, I mean, this little guy, I mean, there's 1,800 pieces in this and each of those pieces has their own supply chain. One of the things that we forget when we talk about electronics is it's not just like eight pieces, it's 800 plus pieces, each of which have their own components. Computing today, Highland Electronics today, requires the entire planet and people focus on the United States and China and Taiwan, it's not those are unimportant partners, but for example, there's a single company in California and another one in Germany that make very, very small pieces for the manufacturing process that don't even go into the chips, but without them, none of it happens. And there's 30,000 failure points like that.

• 12:19Scott Galloway?

  So you would not be long Apple stock right now? You said a couple of years without iPhone?

• 12:23Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, every time the new phone comes out, I buy a backup because I'm preparing for the day that this just stops. But no, it's like there's, there's no way that Apple comes out of this without a few years of no product.

• 12:36Scott Galloway?

  What do you, so you're obviously bearish on China, who are you bullish on?

• 12:40Speaker 04

  If you were willing to dial the clock back to October, I would have been bullish on the United States on all cylinders. We've got the best demography, we've got the best infrastructure, we have the best educational system, we're more than self-sufficient in energy and food. We had some gaps, all of them related to the manufacturing sector, and really that was it. One of the problems that I've got with the Trump administration right now is it's basically cut off our ability to access the precursor stuff that we need in order to build out our industrial plant. So Trump likes to focus on steel and aluminum, not that those aren't important, but it's more than that. It's turning raw chemicals into processed chemicals that can then be built into the manufacturing system. It's about a copper smelter.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  There is a thousand things that happen in the processing world that the United States doesn't have that we need first if then we're going to build out the industrial plant. And Trump has basically made that impossible in the midterm.

• 13:37Scott Galloway?

  So does this all present an opportunity for Europe?

• 13:40Speaker 04

  In the short term again, but their demographics, while not as terminal as the Chinese, are still pretty bad. The Chinese are aging faster than anybody else. And by the end of this decade, they will have the oldest average age of any country in the world, including Japan. But the Germans and the Italians and the Dutch are not all that far behind. So we are in the final years of them having a value-added manufacturing system as well.

• 14:05Scott Galloway?

  Can a lot of these problems be solved with immigration, though? In terms of, I love that you focus on demographics, but can't some of this work, labor force and aging population be solved with immigration policies?

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Based on whose numbers you're using and how you define Hispanic, because that's a problem here in this country, somewhere between one-third and one-half of the American birth rate is either immigrants or children of immigrants. And so that's a non-trivial factor. The problem's timing. So if you can incorporate immigration into your political culture and so have a dribble coming in year in, year out, so that those people can be assimilated, then yes, immigration absolutely can be part of your solution. But if you have waited, waited, waited, waited, waited until everyone's old and then open the doors, then you've got a very different situation. So take the German example right now.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  There's roughly eighty, eighty-two million Germans, but the average age is now over fifty. So for them to just hold where they are, they need to bring in two million people under age twenty-five every year for the next twenty years, just to hold the line. And that means you've brought in fifty million people and all of a sudden, the Germans are no longer the majority in their own country. That triggers a series of political consequences that I'm not sure the Germans can deal with. You want to do that in China? You need an order of magnitude more. And the world, to be perfectly blunt, only can provide those migrants from one place. India. Wouldn't that be a hell of a thing?

• 15:38Scott Galloway?

  So if, and there's a lot of logic here, that a youthful workforce is a productive workforce. Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, who demographically has set up the best?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  There is a mix of countries. Now, I must underline that all of these countries are aging faster than the United States. The faster you go through the urbanization and the industrialization experiences, the faster your birth rate collapses, and the US really is an outlier in that. But Mexico, Indonesia, India, those, and Turkey, those are the big four that look really promising in the future, which isn't to say they don't have their own complications. All of these countries have problems with rule of law, for example. All of them have problems with infrastructure and electricity and education. But these are the problems you would expect for countries at their stage of evolution.

• 16:30Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 16:36Scott Galloway?

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• 17:21Scott Galloway?

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• 17:36Scott Galloway?

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• 18:47Scott Galloway?

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• 19:55Scott Galloway?

  So, big news over the weekend with respect to Ukraine taking out 40 strategic bombers from the Russian air force. It felt, I mean, I thought it was just incredible. I've been watching that video over and over. Maybe with the exception of the Pedro operation against Hezbollah, I think this will go down as one of the decade's great sort of, I don't know, military operations. Curious to get your thoughts on the operation and how you see the Russia-Ukraine conflict progressing and unfolding.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  The technology of what they used was not particularly new. It looks like what the Ukrainians did is built a bunch of sheds, put them on a bunch of flatbed trucks and just drove them to their destination. And when they got within a certain distance that was pretty close, these were not long-range drones, they just abandoned the trucks, remotely operated the roof hatches, and the drones flew out and did their thing. It was maybe somewhere between 100 and 150 drones is what most of the reports are saying. And it took out long-range strategic bombers who were designed to carry nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to target either extreme Western Europe, North America, or the sea lanes in between in case of a war with the United States. So while these craft could have been used,

• 21:06Speaker 04

  have been used to target Ukrainian targets, the location of the bases in places like Murmansk and Arkutsk, these are places that were designed to strike the United States with weaponries that were designed to strike the United States. And so in one day, Ukraine did more to secure American national interests than any ally has ever done since 1945. That is going to resonate in Washington.

• 21:34Scott Galloway?

  That's a really interesting insight. So you're saying this is more a psychological blow or a... Well, let me ask you this. Do you think, do you think the Americans were behind this?

• 21:44Speaker 04

  If you had asked me that a year ago, I would have said, would it really be hard to imagine this happening without the Americans behind it in some way? With today's political environment and how things have gone, particularly as Vance becomes more and more ingratiated into the defense community, ingratiated, wrong word, intertwined, I don't know.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  I have a clearance, but you know, need to know and all that. I can't just go through the archives in the Defense Department whenever I'm in Washington. But it's difficult to imagine something of this caliber getting signed off by this White House. So this was, again, didn't use any fundamentally new technologies. It was just audacity and it was amazing.

• 22:25Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it really was. So give us your view of the state of play in terms of on the ground there and how the conflict, you know, who's winning, who's losing, how you see it playing out?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Well, the problem is in part demographic. The Russians are facing something similar to the Chinese, just not on as steep of a descent. They know they only have a few years left that they'll have enough men in their twenties to even attempt to use military tactics to adjust their world. And they feel they need to get to something closer to the old Soviet boundaries if they're going to be able to defend themselves. Right now, they've got wide open frontiers that are about 3,000 miles long. If they can get into central Poland and Romania, that shrinks down to about 500 miles. They feel that's more manageable, the right. Unfortunately, that means they have to conquer all or part of a dozen countries that collectively have a population that's larger than theirs. And Ukraine isn't the

• 23:16Speaker 04

  first post-Soviet war. It's the ninth, and it won't be the last if Ukraine falls. So from the Russian point of view, they outnumber the Ukrainians in any fight somewhere like three to five to one, which means that any fight where the Ukrainians don't kill three to five as many Russians as they lose of their own people is a fight that technically the Ukrainians have lost because their demographics are very similar to the Russians. So by the numbers, the Russians very much are wearing down the Ukrainians. The problem with projecting how this war is going to go one way or the other is that the technology is changing so quickly. None of the weapon systems that have dominated the battlefield in 2025 existed

• 23:56Speaker 04

  in 2021. And we are now in, I think, our 17th turnover in terms of drone technology in Ukraine and our 11th in Russia. The Russians aren't innovating nearly as quickly, but they also can draw upon legacy equipment out of North Korea. Lots of drones out of Iran and then lots of industrial plant out of China. So this is a type of war that mixes what we thought we understood with things that are completely new and it's taken us in a lot of really strange directions. I mean, it looks like the Russian military, which used to be an entirely artillery force, can barely even use artillery anymore because the Ukrainians can target it before the shell even drops. Counter battery has gotten that good in this new acoustic drone detection age. So I don't know.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  By the numbers, still Russia's war to lose. By the numbers, NATO needs to get ready for the next phase because that involves seven NATO countries now, but it's anyone's guess because the goalposts keep moving.

• 24:52Scott Galloway?

  Other than drones, what are some of those new battlefield technologies?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  One of the things that the Ukrainians set up early in the war was a series of basically microphones along the border. So whenever the drones, because they were, if you remember the Shahed drones out of Iran are really noisy. Whenever the drones started to come in, they could basically get picked up on multiple phones and figure out what the vector was and where they were going. And so you could activate air defense on the other side. The Ukrainians have now turned that into a counter battery fire, which is spectacular. The Ukrainians have combined drone technology with rocket technology to make rocket drones that have a range of 1100 miles they can hit within a couple of meters of their target. So we're seeing really, really cheap developments that are outperforming anything that was in the Russian arsenal before.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  And that applies to us too. A Ukrainian drone jammer, which is the only reason that Ukraine is still there this year, which forces the Russians to use fiber optic drones, is now about one tenth the cost of what the US produces and performs an order of magnitude more effectively.

• 25:57Scott Galloway?

  And so if you were advising the US and Europe, your general, what I think you said before was that if, if Ukraine falls, it's only a matter of time before there's a, there's a next conflict. Where do you see that next conflict emerging? Would it be Poland? Where would it be?

• 26:14Speaker 04

  It will depend upon the tactical situation at that moment, and a lot can change between now and a hypothetical Ukrainian fall. But the Russians know they have to reach the Vistal River, and that's in central Poland, cuts through Warsaw. They know they have to be at the Baltic Sea, so they are the three Baltic Republics, and they know they have to reach the Danube, which is the north, will include the northeastern sliver of Romania. So which one of those the Russians would go for would be shaped by the tactical situation at the moment they felt the need to pull the trigger, but they need all of that territory. And now that Finland is in NATO, they would definitely go for Finland as well if they thought they could pull it off. I would guess they would do the Baltics first because it looks, from the details, the simplest,

• 26:58Speaker 04

  but the tactical math changes pretty rapidly.

• 27:01Scott Galloway?

  And you think they have the economy and the war machine? I mean, my sense of all of this is it's kind of defang them a bit. You think they still would have the capacity to wage more war?

• 27:10Speaker 04

  If you had asked me that a year and a half ago, I would say that a very real concern that they simply don't have the capacity to carry it forward, now I'm not so sure. So few of the legacy weapon systems that the Russians started this war with are still being used. This is a drone fight now. Something like 70% of the casualties over the last eight months have been first-person drones. It's a different math now. Artillery, tanks, jets just don't mean as much as they used to in the current context. I just underline that we are very early in this transition, and guessing what these weapon systems are going to evolve into over the next five years would be as foolhardy as guessing three years ago that we would have ended up in some version of where we are today. This is all very new, changing very rapidly.

• 27:54Scott Galloway?

  My sense is that it's always the stuff you're not worried about that gets you, and I don't think we were that worried about India and Pakistan till recently. What's your take on the situation there?

• 28:05Speaker 04

  Well, the Americans love to ignore India and Pakistan because there's obviously no solution. You've got two countries that don't like each other on a border that is not economically important, which means they can piss back and forth over the line however much they want. And until a nuke gets used, no one in the rest of the world really cares. So unfortunately, or fortunately, based on your point of view, that assessment is broadly accurate and has not evolved in any real war. It goes to nukes very quickly because neither of them have the capacity to really hurt the other side in any other way. The Thar Desert is there. Kashmir is broadly worthless. You're talking about glaciers and empty mountainsides.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  So they're fighting over an idea, which means that it can be trumped up or tamped down based entirely on domestic politics. And unfortunately, earlier this year, they both had a vested interest in plumping it up more than it needed to be. Whether or not the current ceasefire will hold, that is also a question of internal domestic politics.

• 29:10Scott Galloway?

  So both of us predicted that Biden would be reelected. What do you think we got wrong?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Technically, he didn't run, so you know.

• 29:17Scott Galloway?

  Fair enough.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, when I did my postmortem, my general idea was that for the first time in modern American history, in two elections in a row, the independents flipped. So the way it worked before is every time we had a fresh elections, the independents would vote for the other guy. They're notorious for having buyers remorse. But when it came to Trump, they changed their mind because Trump basically said, "Your vote doesn't matter, so I don't care about you at all." And their response was basically, "Hold my beer." And the independent vote in the United States, the 10% of Americans who really are independent, did continue to turn against Trump, actually turned more strongly in this most recent election.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  But everyone else went the other direction. Every single voter demographic, 49 of the 50 states shifted towards Trump, which blew away any significance for the independent vote.

• 30:15Scott Galloway?

  And what do you see going on here? I mean, you talk a lot about other nations and geopolitists. What do you, what do you think are the undercurrents in the US that led to? I mean, I was shocked by this, this election. I didn't, I not only didn't see Trump winning, but I didn't see him winning as soundly. Any themes that you think are emerging out of the US that kind of go against conventional wisdom?

• 30:40Speaker 04

  First, let's not overplay it. Trump, or Trump beat terrorists by the same margin as Biden beat Trump. So it's really only a 3% switch in the, in voter preferences in the right places. Electoral system mucks up the analysis, but really it wasn't nearly as tidal as a lot of people would like to think it is. The second issue is more historical. We have a first past the post, single member district system, which is a really technical way of saying that you vote for one person who represents a specific geography and a specific group of people. You're not voting for an idea or a party on a national basis. You're voting for a district.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  And what that means is we intend to have really, really big tent parties that are not driven by ideology with a lot of factions within them. And those factions get more or less powerful based on changes in demographics, or technology, or trade, or security, or culture, or immigration, thousand different issues. But every once in a while, about once or twice a generation, the changes become so significant that the factions that are under the tent don't just rise and fall within the tent, they jump out of the tent, or maybe jump into the other tent. And that's what's going on right now. It's the sixth time we've done this as a country. We will get through it, but it's really awkward because all of the old rules have gone away

• 32:06Speaker 04

  and the new rules are not in place. So I would argue that in this last round, the Democratic Party died. I'm not sure they're going to come back. But the Republican Party died too. It is MAGA now. And MAGA doesn't have a wide enough base to win an election. So we've got two things that call themselves parties that can't possibly win. It's just a question of who can lose more. And last time, the Democrats pulled out all the stops.

• 32:35Scott Galloway?

  So staying on the US, talk about the US as a little bit like saying Europe and that is there are just different regions and cultures and economic bases in the US. Who, where in the US or which regions do you think are poised to be the biggest winners and losers?

• 32:52Speaker 04

  From deglobalization?

• 32:55Scott Galloway?

  Deglobalization, AI, whatever big themes you see in the US.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Let's put AI to the side because that's not going to happen for such that later. We need to double the size of the industrial plant and for that you need workers, you need green space, you need infrastructure and you need a regulatory structure that is friendly to the investment. You put all those together, you're basically looking at an area that starts roughly in Norfolk and Richmond in Virginia, comes down through the South into Texas and then up through the Rockies to maybe Denver and Salt Lake City. So down from, from the West, from the Mountain West down into Phoenix, over through Texas, then up to the very, very southern tip of the mid Atlantic. That's the section that can most benefit from where we are.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  The problem that all of these areas are going to have is first and foremost electricity. If you're going to double the size of the industrial plant, that means you need at least expand the grid by half and we now need to do that without the Chinese and that will not be cheap and that will not be quick and that will not be easy. But until we do that, none of the rest of this matters.

• 34:00Scott Galloway?

  But it's all based on a premise that we need to further expand our industrial base. Economy has done really well moving more to a services base. Why is an industrial base so important to the US's future?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  There's the national security component to it. Trump is not making that up, but more importantly, the Chinese system is tying and we need to prepare and that means if we want stuff, it needs to be made somewhere else. Does it all need to be made here? No. And the wider the net that we throw, the more countries we bring into whatever the post-globalized order happens to be, the easier and faster this will be. We cannot do it in anything less than a 20 year timeframe without Canada and especially Mexico. So when Trump in his first term renegotiated NAFTA and basically we got the guy who was calling Mexicans rapists, all of a sudden being the Mexicans' best friend in trade talks, I was really optimistic because if you take the most.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Rightist, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner aspect of the American polity, which is Trump, and you make that friends with Mexico, that's a pretty bright future, but we're kind of up in the air again.

• 35:13Scott Galloway?

  So you talk a little bit about Mexico, what are your thoughts on Latin America, specifically Brazil?

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Uh, well, Brazil is its own beast. Uh, the demographics are very rapidly aging and they haven't built out the industrial plant that they need for what's coming. Their agriculture and industrial system are the highest cost producers in the world, which only works if the Chinese are paying for everything. So when China's strong, Brazil is strong. You remove China, all of a sudden Brazil looks really bad. Uh, they've also lost a lot of their industrial plant to the Chinese. Uh, under Lula last time, uh, he invited in the Chinese to do a lot of joint ventures, which from the Chinese point of view, as we come in, we build a joint facility, we steal all of your technology, we take it home and then we drive you out of business on a global basis. And there's just not much left in Brazil at this point.

• 35:59Scott Galloway?

  So, we talked a little bit about demographics and some of the countries you think that are not well positioned. If you're, if you're the US, is it, and realizing it's a global world, is it, you talked a little bit about the importance of the US-Mexico relationship. What about US and Canada? Are there other allies we should be focused on, um, developing stronger partnerships with?

• 36:22Speaker 04

  We already have free trade deals with Central America, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Korea, functionally with Taiwan. If the Brits can ever figure out what happens after Brexit, we'll have a deal with them as well.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  That's the core, and that's a great starting point. If you were to add one more big thing, I would say Southeast Asia. The demographics are pretty good, the industrial plant is already pretty good, they're very well positioned to pick up anything the Chinese drop. They are a bridge to India, which is a non-insignificant power. But the biggest thing I like about Southeast Asia is we're already friends courtesy of our relationship with Australia and New Zealand, and they have a big consumption base. So this is already a billion people with a demographic that is very primed for consumption. It's exactly the sort of partner that you would like to preserve as the broader world breaks down.

• 37:17Scott Galloway?

  I brought up AI and you said it's not going to happen. Say more.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Sure. So there's about 30,000 parts that go into your typical semiconductor, not counting the things that do the manufacturing, like say the lithography systems that came out of ASML in the Netherlands. So functionally, you've got 50,000 failure points in that sector. Right now, everything that we're running a large language model on requires a chip that is roughly seven or six nanometers or smaller. And the newer chips that we're making for AI are roughly two nanometers and have encoded cooling into them. We don't have those yet. That's what they're working on building, hopefully getting out onto the market within the next couple of years.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  If we can't make those high-end chips, if we can't do anything with extreme ultraviolet, which is how pretty much everything under 12 nanometers is made now. We have to go back to an older, simpler technology called deep ultraviolet. And that would suggest that the only chips we're going to be able to make at scale are going to be 14 nanometers or bigger. So we will need five times as many of those to fill the data centers to get the same compute power. And that will take four to five times as much power in order to operate the center. So we're looking at a 95% reduction on a cost basis in order to run AI models that we had last year. ChatGPT 4.0, that won't be able to work at all, but ChatGPT 3.0, probably.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  So that lasts until such time as we rebuild the supply chain in a more demographically stable, geopolitically stable zone. That'll take 20 years.

• 38:57Scott Galloway?

  A lot of what you said the last few minutes, it kind of bubble up to the need for a dramatic increase in our power grid or ability to produce electricity. Which of these energy technologies are you most bullish and bearish on?

• 39:11Speaker 04

  I want them all because it's like we're past the point where we can pick a winner and that'll do it. We're, we have to do so much so fast. So number one, we're not going to retire anything. I don't care if it's coal. We don't have the option anymore. If we're going to still have manufactured product, we have to do it here. We have to do it with the grid that we have. It's, it's kind of like the military going into Iraq. You fight with the military you have. The idea of transforming it into something hypothetical and in the future is gone. In addition, when in solar, while we do have some of the world's best wind and solar acreage in the Southwest for solar and the Great Plains for wind. Two thirds of the cost of a solar or wind facility is has to be financed because it's all upfront construction.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  It's not a subscription model like it would be for coal or natural gas, which means unless the geography is really, really, really good for installation, we're not going to do it anymore because we've seen capital costs increase by a factor of four in just the last five years. That won't come down until we have another generation that ages into the capital class, which is typically people aged 55 to 65. Those are the people who are saving for retirement. That's 70% of all private capital. We've been relying on the baby boomers until now, but now they're two third retired. And so the capital just isn't there for the green transition to happen at all. I would love for nukes to be part of the equation, but we still haven't built a prototype

• 40:36Speaker 04

  for a fourth generation nuclear power plant or a small modular reactor. So we're stuck with a third generation and the regulatory structure for that is very strict. And as a result, we've only built one in the last 50 years. So we're looking at mostly coal and gas, a sprinkling of solar and wind where it makes sense. And after that, we have to be creative. We'll be right back.

• 41:06Speaker 00

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• 42:06Scott Galloway?

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• 43:17Scott Galloway?

  We're back with more from Peter Zein.

• 43:21Scott Galloway?

  I'm fascinated by you because you, as much as almost anyone I know, have created... I had never heard of you three, four years ago, and now you've developed this personal brand. I'm gonna take that as a compliment. Well, you didn't run for elected office, you're not an athlete, you've basically have kind of built this incredible brand around very provocative predictions. And I make a lot of predictions. And quite frankly, you get a lot of yours wrong, but you always inspire an interesting, you catalyze an interesting conversation. And I think that's why people are really drawn, because even with stuff I think, well, that can't happen, it gets you thinking. I would just like to know more about you. Like, what's your origin story? How did you get, how did you get to this point?

• 44:04Speaker 04

  It's not all that exciting. I was just always the kid who had to figure out why things worked the way they did. And so, like everyone else who was interested in international affairs, I went to Washington for my first year out of grad school and hated it. I was there for 10 months, it was nine months too long. And then I ended up working for a private intelligence company slash media company for 12 years, where I ended up being their global generalist, kind of putting everything together into a tapestry. And then 12 years ago, I left that company, now I do this.

• 44:39Scott Galloway?

  And what is this?

• 44:40Speaker 04

  I help companies and entities, usually at the local government level, figure where global trends are going and the problems and the opportunities they're going to have in front of them in the not-too-distant future.

• 44:50Scott Galloway?

  So is it like a Green Manol, or a, you know, what's it called, Eurasia Group?

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Eurasia Group is more focused on the here and the now and the government decision-making apparatus. Not that that's not important, but that's not what I do. I focus on the longer-term trends of geopolitics, trade, security tech, and of course, demographics. Tell us, you know, this is going to be the big picture that you're going to deal with. But if you want to know what happens next Tuesday, talk to Ian Brimmer.

• 45:17Scott Galloway?

  And do you connect that to Alpha? Do you get hired by hedge funds to try and come up with investment names?

• 45:22Speaker 04

  I do get hired by hedge funds and financial houses a lot. I do not do tactical trading advice, though.

• 45:28Scott Galloway?

  Got it. And I'm curious, Peter, do you have kids?

• 45:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:33Scott Galloway?

  No kids?

• 45:34Speaker 04

  No, I'm part of the problem.

• 45:36Scott Galloway?

  You're part of the problem? And are you worried about kids being born generally? And how do you feel about the prospect of this, the next generation of America?

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Well, if you're in the United States and you have any, any opinions about when the United States should be the most reliable way to make that happen is to ensure the existence of the next generation and instill them with your values. So I will never tell people to not have children. We're not going to face an energy crisis. We're not going to face a food crisis. Our financial crisis is going to be something that is mild compared to the rest of the world. Our challenge is to build. As problems go, that's not bad.

• 46:16Scott Galloway?

  Where do you find inspiration? Do you have any go to sources in terms of media? Where do you spend your time trying to get insight?

• 46:22Speaker 04

  As technology has evolved, the entire media sector has basically removed more and more eyes and fingers from the process and automated everything. So there aren't a lot of people left in global media or national media to basically do the smell check. And so we've replaced it on a global basis with opinions. And that is definitely part of the problem in our political space right now. It's just there's no incentive on any side to actually put forward something that has been checked.

• 46:51Scott Galloway?

  If someone, I would think a lot of people look at Peter Zein and think, I want to be you. It seems to me like you have a pretty cool life.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  There are a lot of my dreams that go with it. I'm not sure it's all it's cracked up to be.

• 47:03Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, but at least the perception, I don't know what the reality is, but the perception is you lead a very interesting life. You do interesting work. You're doing what you want to do and you make a really good living. And I think a lot of young people would like, would like to be Peter. Curious if you were helping someone develop a business plan to become a thought leader, develop a strategy firm, a geopolitical advisory firm, in terms of basic strategy focus, and specifically which platforms to try and weaponize, you strike me, I feel like you were invented for TikTok. You're just, you have these very provocative, concise-

• 47:38Speaker 04

  Just to be clear, I'm not on TikTok.

• 47:40Scott Galloway?

  You're not?

• 47:41Speaker 04

  No.

• 47:42Scott Galloway?

  Oh, well, I stand corrected. Where do I see, I see you everywhere. Where am I seeing you? YouTube?

• 47:47Speaker 04

  I'm on YouTube. We have a Patreon page, which is our primary distribution for subscribers. But yeah, we're in a lot of places, but never, never TikTok. That'll never happen.

• 47:57Scott Galloway?

  Well, let's go there. You are worried about your being on TikTok.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I would never do it. So let's start with the devil we know, Facebook, Meta, whatever you want to call it. So whenever you post something on Facebook, whenever you have Facebook on your computer, even if it's not open, unless you've deleted it and logged out, Facebook is capturing every keystroke on your computer. And they use that information to bundle you into like groups of roughly 10,000 with similar demographic structures, similar economics, similar political leanings, maybe similar kinks. There's dozens of tags. They put you into a group of 10,000 and then they actively market you to scammers based

• 48:44Speaker 04

  on what sort of fraud they think you will fall for. And there are those, there are two conventions a year, one in Vegas, one in Germany.

• 48:50Scott Galloway?

  Isn't that consumerism? Didn't you just describe American capitalism?

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Tobito, Tobito. But they actively do it. But when they do it, they anonymize your data. So they become user 123, for example. All that data is there. The people can still target you personally, but they don't have like your name. TikTok doesn't anonymize. It's your name, it's your social security number, it's your entire credit history, and that gets sold on. So yeah, I will never, ever be on TikTok.

• 49:18Scott Galloway?

  But let's back to, we're starting Yosemite Geopolitical Advisory Group. What has worked really well for you? What mistakes have you made? If you were advising, if you were investing your own money and wanted to advise a group of young men and women to launch a similar firm, what's worked really well for you?

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Well, everything that we do is custom. So we figure out the world from the client's point of view before we say anything. And then we put it against the backdrop of deglobalization and strategic shifts and demographics, and we see what is relevant to them. It is difficult to imagine anyone else replicating what we do without having 20 years of experience in the background, building that baseline. We actually spend probably about half of our time looking for things that prove the baseline wrong. So because we base everything off of that. Does that mean that what I'm doing is not replicable? Not necessarily, but it does mean moving forward, it's going to be a lot more difficult. Because when you get to the point where globalization really does break and we're

• 50:19Speaker 04

  really close to that, like an entirely new baseline is going to have to be invented for a world where all of a sudden the old rules don't play. And the stability that has been the backbone of all economic development over the last 75 years is going to turn into something completely different, a lot more random, a lot more disruptive. Uh, I'm not sure it's a great time to be getting into my business on a strategic level, but the number of tactical applications, if you can take a narrow view, I think are our legion in the world we're about to be in.

• 50:52Scott Galloway?

  And if you were going to start your business over, would you do the exact same thing or would you have a different focus?

• 50:58Speaker 04

  I'd learn to weld and I'd learn Spanish.

• 51:00Scott Galloway?

  Say more.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  Sure. I mean, we need to double the industrial plant. Spanish is the number two language in the United States. Mexico's our number one trading partner, will be at least for the rest of my life. The fastest way to get six figures is to speak Spanish and have a trade.

• 51:14Scott Galloway?

  And as we wrap up here, I just want to do a kind of a lightning round here. Name an influencer, influences in terms of education or people in your life early on that really shaped who you are.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  George Herbert Walker Bush. Well, he was the, he was the president of the most important inflection point in modern history. He was taking us from the Cold War to whatever was next. And he tried to get us to have a conversation with ourselves about what should we do with globalization? What should we do with this alliance? The greatest alliance in human history and a system that generated the fastest economic growth ever. How should we reshape it for a post-Cold War era? And what sort of world do we want to leave for the next generation? So of course we voted him out of office.

• 51:58Scott Galloway?

  It's funny, you don't hear that many people talk, uh, speak about him that is glowingly or is, is in that kind of singular fashion. And where does Peter Zion invest? Like, where do you put your money?

• 52:09Speaker 04

  I'm not a finance guy. I'm certainly not a CFA, so I can't really give you any tactical advice.

• 52:13Scott Galloway?

  It's just an investment, it's not investment advice. I'm just curious, if to the extent you're willing to disclose it, where do you put your money?

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Well, I'm in, I'm in flux right now, just like the United States is. If you go back to October, everything, everything that I had was in US midcap because those are the companies that have the combination of fundraising plus access to rule of law, demographic trends, production, everything that goes along with urbanization that we need. I liked products that were energy intensive because we have the cheapest energy. I liked where the demand profile is driven by demographics. We had the best in the rich world. And if that end product could be exported, I really liked it. But in the last three months, the policy has basically punished anyone who wants to invest in the United States. The Trump administration's policies are actively discouraging investment.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  We've now had, as of today, 133 different tariff policies since January 20th. And as long as the goalposts keep moving, no one knows what to do. So construction spending has just stopped. And until we get to the other side of this, I don't know where to put my money.

• 53:23Scott Galloway?

  And just as we wrap up here, best piece of advice you've ever received?

• 53:27Speaker 04

  Go long. It's like, I was told by my advisor when I was in grad school that, you know, you could, you're at the age where you're going to screw up and that's fine. Go long, hit hard. And if you have to change tack in a year, fine. I had a number of people after him who tried to talk me out of that. And if I, every time I listened to their advice, I regretted it.

• 53:51Scott Galloway?

  Peter Zine is a geopolitical strategist and founder of Zine on Geopolitics. Before launching his own firm in 2012, he spent over a decade at the geopolitical intelligence company Stratfor. Peter, I really appreciate you coming on. We've been trying to get you on for about a year. I'm, I'm so sort of impressed by you have these data-rich, provocative, really kind of courageous, out there, often wrong predictions, but you, you inspire a conversation. And I think that's really important. I really enjoy your work and just appreciative that you took the time to join us today.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  It's been my pleasure.

• 54:39Scott Galloway?

  Author of happiness, good friends and hard truths. The most successful people, everyone has a certain amount of bad judgment in their life. I have a really close friend who's just got the most remarkable judgment. Any room, he asks the right questions, a baller professional, a great friend, helping take care of his parents, just the kind of guy you'd call and ask about anything and he'd give you a reasoned take and you think, God, this guy is just so impressive and has such good judgment. Takes all of his bad judgment and throws it into his relationships. It's a shit show with respect to his life partners, picking just low-character people who are bad for him. And everybody has a certain amount of bad judgment, everybody.

• 55:23Scott Galloway?

  And hopefully you have friends that not only serve as conduits for a good time and connections and making memories, but are also willing to ask hard questions and present hard truths. When I started an e-commerce incubator, I was going to put my consulting from Profit into the incubator such that we had it all under one roof. And the, one of the board members of my e-commerce incubator said, Scott, do you really want to do that? Because if this doesn't work out, granted, his motivation, his interests were to, for me to have everything in this thing, but he said, if it doesn't work out, you lose everything. Whereas why wouldn't you maintain that diversification? And so I didn't put Profit into Brand Farm, which basically shut down in the dot com

• 56:07Scott Galloway?

  or the dot bomb implosion, and I would have lost everything. Instead, I had Profit, which I sold a few years later and got, after I split my proceeds with my partner, my ex-wife, I got three million bucks. But three million bucks was a lot of money for me, you know, in the, in the odds, such that I could start a new life in New York. And this was because a friend just saw something that I didn't see. I have, on a few occasions, said to somebody, you're in a shitty relationship. What are you doing? What are you doing? I had another friend about to leave an amazing job at AOL where he was making millions of dollars a year in his 30s and said, oh, me and my wife have decided we're going to go to Europe for a couple of years and just be vagabonds. I'm like, don't be a fucking

• 56:50Scott Galloway?

  idiot. Do you think it's easy to make this kind of money? Go to Europe when you're 40 and you're worth 20 million, not 3 million. You're going to give, you're at the home of the bobsled right now, believe it or not, that was AOL in the 90s, making a shit ton of money, but you've decided you're sort of vogue and cool. I'm like, you're not that granola. You like money as much as all of us. And I presented that to my friend Greg, and he listened and they stayed. And by the way, they are really grateful because what they found is, all of us found out was when this dot bomb hallucination came to an end, it's really hard to make money. While we believed in our 30s, we were masters of the universe, we found out, wow, making money is really hard. And if you're making money, you know, be careful what you give up. Is money everything? No, but it's a lot in a

• 57:35Scott Galloway?

  capitalist society. Is your friend about to get married to someone? I have had friendships kind of come off the tracks because I've said to people, I don't think you should get married. I don't think this is a good fit for you. And what I have found is over the long term, the friends who do it in a generous, nonjudgmental way say, have you really thought this through? Are your friendship might take a hit in the short run? You're drinking too much, boss. You're drinking too much. You're, what the fuck are you on? The last two or three times I have a good friend in New York, last two or three times, I don't know if he's on ketamine, I don't know what he's on. I'm like, you're disappearing to the bathroom, you come back, you're skittish. What the fuck is going on with you? And that

• 58:18Scott Galloway?

  was a very uncomfortable situation. And by the way, that person has not reached out to me since then. And here's what I know is going to happen in a couple of years. This person is going to say, thank you. I've had people save me from myself. Hard truths, hard uncomfortable moments done in a generous, loving and nonjudgmental way. That is what it means to be a good friend. It is very hard to read the label from inside of the bottle and good friends will help you see the obvious and are willing to have those uncomfortable conversations. Are, do you have a friend, a real friend where you need to express friendship and illuminate a hard truth for them?

• 59:00Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

• 59:26Speaker 06

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• 59:57Speaker 07

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.