Pod Insights Making Sense with Sam Harris #447 — The Unraveling of American Power About this episode Sam Harris speaks with Peter Zeihan about Trump's second term and its economic and geopolitical consequences. They discuss Zeihan's failed 2024 election prediction, the unprecedented unraveling of American power, Trump's tariff policies, the AI bubble, deglobalization and supply chain vulnerabilities, China's demographic and economic collapse, the degradation of military readiness, Trump's incompetent foreign policy team, Steven Witkoff's role as a Russian propaganda conduit, Melania Trump's unexpected effectiveness as Ukraine's unofficial ambassador, the 28-point peace plan and its $100 billion bribe, the repatriation of kidnapped Ukrainian children, and other topics.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Sam Harris? Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:36 Sam Harris? I'm here with Peter Zion. Peter, thanks for joining me again.
0:39 Speaker 01 Hey, it's great to be back.
0:41 Sam Harris? Well, so first, you've been on the podcast several times, and most people will have heard about you, seen you somewhere, if not here. But remind people briefly what you do, what's your day job when you're not doing podcasts like this?
0:52 Speaker 01 My job is to take demography and geopolitics and use it to paint a picture of the future and then show how it matters to the people who happen to be in front of me. So most of my clients are in the world of finance or manufacturing or agriculture, some sort of economic association or business, and I help them navigate the crazy that is to come.
1:12 Sam Harris? Speaking of predicting the future, and actually on points that matter, at least to me and a few of us, last time you were on the podcast, you told me that there was no way that Trump was going to win the 2024 election. So I have to ask you what the fuck happened right at the top here.
1:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, fair enough. Sorry, I slept that day. My general feeling was that it was going to be America's independence that decided how things were going to go. Not people who said they were Republican or independent, but really were Republicans and everything but name, but the actual 10% of the electorate that splits their vote. Because they had decided the last seven elections, so it felt pretty safe to me. And in the post-election polls, it looks like that group decisively voted against Trump.
1:56 Speaker 01 Everyone else shifted, however, with one exception, Washington State. Every state in every demographic shifted substantially towards Donald Trump and allowed him to win with the margin that he got.
2:08 Sam Harris? Well, how would you rate his second term so far? We're going to talk about tariffs and foreign policy and supply chain and specifics like China, but what most concerns you? What have there been any pleasant surprises? How would you, how would you rate the last 10, 11 months?
2:25 Speaker 01 I usually try not to be critical of presidents in their first terms because, you know, they're, they're learning. It takes time for the policies to kick in. The world doesn't move on a dime. Second term is different because they should have learned from what happened in their first term. And by that measure, it has not gone well. Most of the stated aims of the Trump administration, things like reshoring manufacturing, increasing its defense position have actually taken the country in a significantly different direction. And I have not seen an unraveling of national power on the scale since the Soviet breakdown. So, so far, very impressed with how much damage is being done.
3:05 Speaker 01 This is some combination of Zimbabwe, Argentine economic policy, maybe with just a dash of French statism thrown in.
3:14 Sam Harris? All right. So let's talk about the unraveling. What are you seeing? Because so over right of center in, in Trumpistan, I can imagine many people believe that the tariffs are working. We're onshoring American manufacturing. We're building up our manufacturing base. Jobs are going to be returning as a result of all this. We have China right where we want her. And it's really just a picture of American strength. I mean, you know, Trump is the kind of guy you just can't screw around with. Finally, we have a president like that. How are you not seeing this?
3:49 Speaker 01 Let's start with the tariffs. When you do a flat tariff and you tax things at the border, no matter what they are, you need to break down manufacturing into two broad categories. First, you have your simple products, things like plastics or furniture textiles, where there's only a half dozen manufacturing supply chain steps. And in a high tariff environment, it's relatively easy to relocate some of those steps within the tariff wall. So we are seeing significant build out in the United States for things like furniture and glue and paints and all of that kind of stuff. More complex manufacturers, the hundreds or thousands of steps are very different. So here is automotive, aerospace, electronics, computing. When there are thousands of steps and you only produce, say, half of the steps in country,
4:34 Speaker 01 you have to pay the tariff every time an intermediate product crosses the border. And the end product ends up costing significantly more. So, simple math, it's easier to take the steps that are within your tariff zone, move them outside of your tariff zone, and then you only have to pay the tariff once. So what we're seeing right now is a steady deindustrialization of the value-added, high skilled, labor-intensive jobs, and instead replacing them with much lower value-added jobs and things like plastics, or maybe things that are automated because our labor force is too much. So we've seen contraction in the manufacturing sector for the last six months. And the number that I pay attention to the most right now is it called industrial construction spending. It's a data point put out by the Federal Reserve, and it's been negative since tariff day.
5:19 Speaker 01 So people are finishing the industrial projects they had started before April, but no one's really launching much that's new.
5:27 Sam Harris? So what are you expecting to see in the economy over the next 12 months as a result? I mean, is this synonymous with inflation, what you just described?
5:36 Speaker 01 Well, if you go back to before April, we knew we were preparing for the fall of the Chinese system. We were preparing for the end of globalization. We knew we needed to expand our industrial plant, probably needed to double it, and probably needed to increase the power plant by 50% to go with that. There's no way you do that on anything less than a 40-year timeframe without a lot of inflation. And I would argue we needed to do it in the next five to six years. So inflation was already part of my forecast. But now we have deindustrialization going on on top of that. And so if we can't turn this around and get back to building things again, and that requires a very different federal policy. We're going to enter a period where we're going to lose the products from abroad. At the same time, we no longer are producing very many of them here.
6:21 Speaker 01 So we have to still go through that industrial build out, but now against a backdrop of goods shortages. So the debate now is, do you want high inflation plus productivity? Or high inflation plus a goods shortage? Neither of these are pretty.
6:36 Sam Harris? So obviously, there's been a huge build out with respect to data centers for AI.
6:41 Speaker 01 And progressing.
6:42 Sam Harris? Yeah, that's the one thing that is, has been a bright spot for the market. You know, it remains to be seen whether it's a catastrophic bubble in the end, but.
6:52 Speaker 01 It's definitely a bubble, let's be clear. Whether it's catastrophic, yeah, who knows?
6:56 Sam Harris? Yeah, I mean, and it can be a bubble. I mean, we should be clear. It can be a bubble without AI itself being a bubble, right? I mean, there could be this over investment in a build out, even if AI is in fact the future, right?
7:07 Speaker 01 Well, there's a lot of unknowns in that statement, so I don't want to, I don't want to overly come down on one side or the other. 15 years ago, 10 years ago, people were aware of large language models, but I don't think there was anyone in the AI space who really thought that LLMs were the thing that was going to break open. And here it is. So expecting the model we're on right now to be what we use in five years or 10 years or 15 years is a bit of a stretch from my point of view. Technology doesn't go in a straight line like that. Also, LLMs require a massive amount of processing compute capacity with graphics processing units. And GPUs are the most advanced chips that humans make, and GPUs cannot be made without a fully globalized system.
7:48 Speaker 01 So I actually look at today's build out like this is great because every data center needs power to go with it. We need the power regardless. And if we're entering a world where globalization breakdown breaks down, we won't be able to make the GPUs. So anything that's installed now is all we have. So while I'm not a believer in the trajectory that we're on, I have no problem with any of the steps we're taking right now.
8:10 Sam Harris? Do you think we're in the process, however gradual, of onshoring our dependence on Taiwan? Or is that not in the cards?
8:18 Speaker 01 No, there's 100,000 manufacturing steps for high-end semiconductors. The fab facility is an important one. It's an uninvitable one, but there's another 40,000 that are like that. And once you actually have your fab facility, the next step down is testing and packaging, incorporating into components. We do very little here. I'd argue that's much more important. And on the front end is the design and the logistics. We do do that. That's the highest value-added part of the process. So this obsession with fabs is actually taking one of the lower value-added steps that's most capital-intensive and putting it at the center of the conversation. And that's just bad reasoning from my point of view.
8:59 Speaker 01 We should be focusing on things that are downstream, closer to the end consumer, if you're worried about national security.
9:05 Sam Harris? Well, say, I want to talk about national security and foreign policy and talk about China and Central America, South America. But just to close the loop on this, what do you think if this process of what you're calling deindustrialization continues apace for the rest of Trump's term? What are you expecting to change over the course of four years?
9:26 Speaker 01 I mean, there's so little with this administration that goes a straight line. So that's a really loaded question. Key thing to remember is that Donald Trump still hasn't fleshed out the government. He fired the top several thousand positions, filled very, very few of them, and then surrounded himself with a cabinet that has very little technical experience in anything. So if you think back to Obama, we had a cabinet that was all academics that had never done anything in the real world. Now we have ideologues who have never done anything in the real world. So to expect to get good advice going to the president, even if he was open to hearing it, is pretty thin. And we've now had major policy changes on drug policy, on illegal narcotics, on the
10:07 Speaker 01 Red Sea, on Israel, on Ukraine, on vaccines, on terrorists, because, and I quote, "It's what I feel." We get no straight lines on that. And so you can imagine what's going on in the business community. Right now, this is the reason why industrial construction spending is falling. No one knows what policy set is going to be tomorrow or next month or next year. And without some degree of continuity or some degree of guide, everything is up in the air and everything is on hold. So if this sort of ambient chaos holds and we just hit our 600th tariff change since January 20, no one's going to put money to put anything in the ground because they don't know if it's going to be worth their time.
10:45 Sam Harris? So what's going on with Venezuela and Mexico? I know you focused on cartel violence. Yeah, yeah. Trump has obviously been threatening to deal harshly with the cartels. I think it remains to be seen what he's intending with respect to Venezuela. But how do you view our ramping up hostilities on both those fronts?
11:07 Speaker 01 Well, let's start with the understood reality on the ground. Venezuela is a very weak state where the state security services have been so focused on crushing political deficits for so long that they've lost control of large tracts of territory. And so some of the cocaine smugglers in Colombia have now used Venezuela as a way to get their stuff to the wider world. It's a minority. It's less than 10% of the flow. Most of it still goes north into Central America and ultimately Mexico, especially Mexico before coming north to the border. But there is a flow that goes through Venezuela. I'd argue most of that flow eventually goes into Europe as opposed to coming to the United States, but it is real. And there is a degree of collaboration among members of the Maduro government in facilitating those flows.
11:51 Speaker 01 I don't know if calling it a cartel is the right term. That implies a degree of overarching control that probably doesn't exist, but it is a problem. So anything you want to do against Venezuela on a state security point of view, there's an argument to be made there. However, the Trump administration has yet to brief Congress about any of the details. So none of the intel that supposedly identified the ships has ever been shared with Congress. And what I'm hearing from the military is that there really wasn't any ever. And that's before you consider the legal implications of some of the specific decisions. We had both Trump and Hagseth brag about Performing war crimes the week of Thanksgiving because if you take out an enemy combatant
12:36 Speaker 01 and they've been completely disarmed of any sort of offensive capability and then you shoot them, that's a war crime. Every treaty the United States has ever signed on international law codifies that. And so now they're backtracking. It's like, well, maybe that's not what we meant. In addition, we now have the USS Ford down there, which is our top supercarrier badass piece of military equipment. And it was only on the Monday after Thanksgiving that Trump convened a national security meeting with the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, to begin the discussions about what the goals in Venezuela are. So to this point, the policy has been, let's shake some sabers and see if Maduro will just leave.
13:21 Speaker 01 Now they're starting to have the early discussions about what the policy might be. Very much horse on the wrong side of the cart.
13:29 Sam Harris? Yeah, it's remarkable that the, these kind of extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Caribbean is, I mean, it's being kind of roundly condemned, but on its face, it seems like it's, has to be in violation of some law or past practice because, I mean, we don't even kill drug smugglers when we catch them and convict them of drug smuggling. I mean, that's not a capital offense. And yet now we're simply annihilating people who are alleged to be smuggling drugs and we have been shown no evidence that that's even true. And as you just pointed out, there's this recent case of this really patent war crime
14:11 Sam Harris? where we bombed the boat. Now people are scrambling in the water and we bombed them again, just to make sure everyone is good and dead. I mean, that is a, just a unambiguously a war crime. But I mean, the whole idea that we can be just killing people who are suspected of smuggling drugs. Well, has that been a past practice? Is that in line with any of our laws?
14:34 Speaker 01 Certainly not officially. I'm never going to say that it wasn't done because there's a lot of happens with covert action in Latin America that, you know, maybe is distasteful, but is not technically illegal by US laws. And the really the limiting factor here is the War Powers Act. So that was something that was put in place by Congress bipartisan in the aftermath of Vietnam, passed by a two thirds vote, president vetoed it. It overcame the veto. It was like the biggest overcome of the veto that we've ever had in modern history. Every administration since then, including the Trump administration, has said that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. It's an unconstitutional check on presidential authority, but it has never come up to the courts.
15:14 Speaker 01 And Congress since then has never called the president to account. So either the president has presented his case after 30, 60, 90 days to justify, and then Congress votes to authorize the military action. That's, for example, how Iraqi freedom happened. Or the president is done within 30 days and folds the situation down. This is the first time that the War Powers Act has been directly challenged over that 30 day threshold. But Congress has done nothing. And unless and until Congress actually decides to act, technically it's legal. Doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean it'll work.
15:53 Sam Harris? Congress has been sitting on its hands on virtually every question. What about Mexico? What's happening with our posture vis a vis the cartels? And, and what are the implications of that?
16:05 Speaker 01 This, this is actually more of a Biden administration question than a Trump administration question. Under the Biden administration, a significant amount of progress was made at cracking down on the Sinaloa cartel, which for most of the last 15 years has been the most powerful organized crime group, not just in Mexico or in the United States, but in the world. And there was a general agreement that it was the most effective of the drug smuggling organizations because El Chapo ran it as business. But El Chapo was eventually arrested and has now been put away. And combine that with the effects of the last five years prosecution of his old organization. His sons basically running the place like Uday and Kuse. If you remember, those are Iraqi assets. And has it been two years?
16:50 Speaker 01 Is it only a year relatively recently? One of Los Chapi. That's one of El Chapo's sons convinced the guy who was the chief accountant of the organization to get in a plane and fly to El Paso.
17:01 Sam Harris? Yeah, yeah.
17:02 Speaker 01 To look at some real estate.
17:03 Sam Harris? Yeah.
17:04 Speaker 01 And the DEA was waiting. So we basically had a shattering of the organization at the top and there is no longer one Sinaloa cartel. There's like a dozen and they're fighting one another. That sounds great, but the second largest drug trafficking organization in Mexico in the world is called the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and they are an order of magnitude more violent. And now they are the most powerful entity and they are taking over a lot of former Sinaloa territory. So by taking out the big bad, we've helped inadvertently to create a new big bad that by many measures is a lot worse because Sinaloa, their kind of guiding idea was you don't shit where you sleep. You bribe local law enforcement so they're on your side.
17:47 Speaker 01 Jalisco, their idea is that the shit is the point. And so the first thing they do when they go into a new territory is shoot the mayor, shoot the police chief, randomly shoot a bunch of people in town so everyone knows who's in charge. And so nobody stands against them. Different model, lot more violent, not as effective in the long run, but it generates a lot more activity that we are now seeing, among other things, in the murder rate in Mexico.
18:11 Sam Harris? So has the Trump administration done anything new on that front? I know he's said that he wants to send in SEAL Team Six to deal with the cartels. Have we done anything that's actually changed our posture with respect to them?
18:24 Speaker 01 Not hugely from my point of view, and I don't see that as a reason to love or hate the Trump administration. The core problem is demand-driven. As long as Americans like their cocaine, you know, this is going to happen. And we've discovered that if you take out the kingpins, in the case of the Sinaloa, you create a more fractious environment where there's a lot more competition. That's, for example, one of the reasons why fentanyl has risen. Cocaine requires a supply chain that involves a half a dozen different countries. And it takes about four man-hours between the fertilizing, the growing, the processing and the smuggling for every dose of cocaine. Well, fentanyl, you can buy a bunch of precursors on the open market, make a batch of a million doses in your garage in a week,
19:06 Speaker 01 and it takes four man seconds to get the fentanyl in. So we've, by cracking down on cocaine to a degree, we've inadvertently created a new product set. And taking out cartel leaders will have absolutely no effect on that. And one of the things we've ironically seen with the border is by stopping the flow of the legals, it's made it very, very, very easy for all the drug smugglers to just ship stuff in containers. So again, I don't blame Trump for that switch. This is one of those things that as long as people want narcotics, there is going to be an economic pipeline of some form for it.
19:44 Sam Harris? What do you know about the recent pardoning of the former president of Honduras, who was a convicted drug smuggler? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.
Previous #446 — How to Do the Most Good Next #448 — The Philosophy of Good and Evil Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
