Digesting Peter Ziehan
I stumbled upon his work several weeks ago and am impressed.
I am not precisely sure what topic I first noticed Peter Zeihan covering, and it’s become a bit hard to tell. I’ve watched somewhere between eight and twelve hours of his work and I am officially hooked. I find a lot of similarity in the way he sees the world and my own views. Specifically he focuses on:
Food & water security.
Diplomatic & financial “soft power” applications.
Energy & transportation.
Military alliances and force projection.
Demographics.
Sense making exercises that I have been involved in have been tactical - right up close to the action, or curation oriented, where we’re selecting from among sources of varying quality. I’m self taught, so I know that I both have big gaps and that they’ll be hard to fill, because I’m an outsider and I’d need to peer inside the machine to see how things are done.
The really big thing he does that is something I was aware of, but seldom overtly stated, are the demographic aspects of every situation. As an example, I know industrialized nations all see their fertility drop to less than replacement levels, and that the post 1979 Iranian baby boomers have been dealing the mullahs fits since they reached early middle age. Any video he’s made on any region will contain information on where the societies involved are in terms of demographic data.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This area has been started because a great many things have shifted and I’m feeling out of touch, having let my geopolitics focus slide about ten years ago. I’ve learned that some things that troubled me are not going to be issues, but there are other hazards I’ve just plain missed. If you’re all checked out on this, you’re free to wander off and do something else.
Evaluating Sources:
When I started watching Zeihan’s videos I was surprised a number of times, but those were of the “Now why didn’t I think of that?” sort of response. This was the start of my demographics blind spot becoming illuminated. I did think he might be a trifle too doomerish for me, and that’s REALLY rare, given that I’m known for my jaundiced outlook on the future.
Here are some things that make me think he’s not just a crazy guy with a YouTube channel. See all those stars on those two books?
And the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning doesn’t typically let rummies give keynote speeches.
Evaluating Claims:
The most startling thing I’ve heard come out of his mouth was the estimate that China has a BILLION excess housing units. There are 1.4 billion people and that means roughly a billion homes in use, so if he is right they are 100% overstocked. Remember how ugly things got here in 2007? The U.S. had a 3% to 5% overstock.
WHOOPS …
Unlike western liberal democracies, Chinese citizens face capital controls. They only get to invest at home and that has created a truly extraordinary situation - per his fact checking, the source he was using from within China stated that it wasn’t just a doubling of needed housing, they have treble their requirements. That’s the recipe for a catastrophic unwinding.
So he’s got an extraordinary claim there and I chose to look at other sources than the one he cited. Here’s Kyle Bass, who famously called the U.S. subprime crisis in 2008. We had an $800 billion problem, he says China has a problem at LEAST five times that size.
Conclusion:
I am going to keep digging around on his assessments, but I want to … for the sake of my sanity … explain why I like him so much.
Global coverage, no blind spots.
Digestible sized presentations.
Comes back to issues periodically, keeps context.
Fulsome coverage of all important facets of issues.
Several books available.
The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization is in my Kindle and it’s 4% complete. The fact, and I am TREATING it as a fact, that China is about to go sideways hard, is a game changer. The post globalization winners will be us, if we can avoid civil war, Argentina, once the Milei madness passes, New Zealand, and a few other areas have the right mix of people are resources to at least somewhat prosper in the face of climate change.
And as China goes down, Mexico is gonna stand up, serving as the workshop of the western hemisphere. I better start brushing up on my Spanish.