[00:00:00] Jacob Shapiro: Hello listeners, and welcome to a very special episode of Geopolitical Cousins. joining me on this episode of the podcast besides Cousin Marco and myself is Peter Zeihan and Matt Gertken. these conversations were filmed over the course of the entire day of June 15th, at Matt's house in Taos, New Mexico.
I apologize that it took us a little while to produce it. it's a long story that has to do with a video editor in Nepal and lots of other things that are not interesting. It's also, rare for us as this was, really the first time as the cousins that we decided to do something in person, so we wanted to line up the video editing, with the audio editing as well.
if you haven't checked out our YouTube page, by the way, you can find this video on YouTube. the audio content will be the same, but since we were all in person, I think it actually does add something. part one, the prompt for this, the, the prompt for this episode was how does the world end in the next 10 years, which was perfectly suited, for Peter's appearance and also challenged me and Matt, and Marco to come up with our own versions of how the world ends in 10 years.
Peter obviously, the best at all of this and us, going at him. I hope that the episode is as rewarding for all of you as it was for us. I think I've said this a few times on the podcast, analysis can be a very lonely space. when you're doing good analysis, it usually means that your opinions, seem a little out there and seem a little wacky.
They only seem clairvoyant, after what you've said comes to pass. and it also means doing a lot of work by yourself, a lot of reading by yourself, a lot of research by yourself. and it was really nice to talk to other analysts, who have been in geopolitics for 15 plus years and talk about how the world has changed and how has our work changed or not changed, or how has AI affected it or not affected it, things like that.
so thank you to Peter, thank you to Matt, thank you to Marco, thank you to the video editors and the audio editors that helped us out here. Without further ado, we hope you enjoy these episodes. Cheers, and we will see you out there
Okay. Very special. Peter, thank you for joining us. I don't know if anybody else is getting, a weird sense of deja vu. I don't remember the last time- It's creepy ... the four of us were around a table or talking to each other.
[00:02:15] Marko Papic: I think it was probably 2000... I'm gonna say 2010.
[00:02:19] Jacob Shapiro: Probably. Roughly, yeah.
That window.
[00:02:21] Marko Papic: Yeah, so 16 years ago. 15, 16 years ago. Oh. This is the reunion. Peter- Peter was my very first ever boss- I'm
[00:02:29] Jacob Shapiro: so sorry ...
[00:02:29] Marko Papic: in the private sector. In the private sector.
[00:02:32] Matt Gertken: Same here.
[00:02:33] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[00:02:34] Matt Gertken: Well- In fact, w- in fact, when Peter offered me the job and I said, "Oh, I don't know, I've got this other..."
He said, what do you wanna be when you grow up?"
[00:02:42] Jacob Shapiro: And I was, like, 24 years old. and, Peter was an established entity at Stratfor, then you guys were already senior analysts when I came as an intern. My first job, I apologize, Peter, 'cause for a while as an intern, my job was to come into your office and bang on the door and say, "Where is your piece?
You haven't sent in your piece yet." I remember. I- Very sorry. It was not my choice. I was just doing... I was following orders. You were thrusted around. Yeah. Nor-
[00:03:06] Peter Zeihan: were you following orders- I was ... or were you not? It's all good. There's a deep joke in there that we're not gonna explore.
[00:03:09] Jacob Shapiro: We're not. Yeah.
all right. So for this first session, we're gonna talk, we're gonna keep it mainly geopolitics. We'll wax philosophical and sentimental at the second. and we thought, what better way to get the band back together, than to talk about how the world is gonna end for the next 10 years? So aggregators, we are not saying this is what is going to happen.
We are not saying the end- I'm fine. you, yeah, you might. Yeah. But yeah, the, we're not saying the end of the world is nigh. These are- Yeah ... suggestions. every- everybody can caveat to their
[00:03:37] Marko Papic: own- The book title, I believe, is This is the Beginning of the End.
[00:03:39] Jacob Shapiro: And, yeah.
[00:03:39] Marko Papic: The Beginning of the End is the book title.
The
[00:03:40] Peter Zeihan: End of the World is Just the Beginning.
[00:03:42] Marko Papic: Sorry, is just the beginning. Yes. So as far as Peter's concerned, he's already answered this question. We can move on.
[00:03:47] Jacob Shapiro: That's true.
[00:03:47] Marko Papic: The world has already ended. But
[00:03:49] Jacob Shapiro: we can go through some s- very specific scenarios- ... of how it's all gonna happen. So but for the next 60, 75 minutes, we're gonna get dark and twisty.
So the first... And we're gonna try and hit three questions. We're gonna try and hit, how does the world end in 10 years? We're gonna ask each, everybody to say, how will you be wrong in one of your core views over the next 10 years? And then the least expected, most likely thing that we think is gonna occur over the next 10 years.
So that, that's our run of show here for this first part. I will start with Peter, obviously. Peter, how is the world going
[00:04:19] Peter Zeihan: to end in the next 10 years? There's so many options. All right, short version. I do deglobalization and demographics, so very short version. The world as it exists today, global trade as we understand it, was a security paradigm the Americans built to fight the Cold War.
we bought an alliance, and then we did not invest our economy in it because then it wouldn't have been a bribe. So every manufacturing supply chain, all of globalized agriculture with fertilizer coming from here, equipment from there, demand here, production here, all of that is possible because of the American security guarantee.
And the United States is no longer capable politically and militarily- to guarantee that any longer, and we have seen that. I think the first real exposure was with Yemen, of all places, which I loathe, because you had every missile defense system that we have that is mobile, and they couldn't even protect shipping in the Red Sea, much less someplace that mattered to anyone.
And we've certainly seen in the most recent war with Iran, we've now used half of our global supply of interceptors. We can't do another Iran fight at all. that's piece one. Piece two, when globalization happened, people started taking manufacturing and services jobs because everyone could specialize for the first time.
All those jobs are in town, and when you move from the farm into the city, you have fewer kids because they're no longer an economic asset. You play that forward 80 years, and it's not that we're running out of children on a global basis. That happened in the '80s. We're now running out of 50-year-olds, and if there's no one to purchase the product, there is no trade So it doesn't really matter now where you poke the system hard.
You could do it in tech, you can do it in ag, you can do it in finance, you can do it in energy. We're now at a point where the system is so vulnerable and so overexposed and so interconnected and so fragile that you start a cascade of events, and there's a really real concern right now that we're gonna hit global operating minimums for oil processing before the end of the summer, and that's more than enough to do it.
So we might not have to wait 10 years, and that's just... That's the proximate current event. There's plenty more out there.
[00:06:43] Jacob Shapiro: What does, it look like when something like that happens? Like- for energy specifically? Yeah.
[00:06:47] Marko Papic: Mad Max. Canisters and cannibals. Canisters
[00:06:50] Peter Zeihan: and cannibals. oh, I wish it was gonna be that nice, 'cause that assumes that there's a supply of it somewhere that you can put in a canister and then on a bus.
[00:06:57] Marko Papic: In unused cars.
[00:06:58] Peter Zeihan: Yeah,
[00:06:58] Marko Papic: exactly. You suck out the gasoline from, the ones that were left over. Oh my
[00:07:02] Jacob Shapiro: God,
[00:07:02] Peter Zeihan: that would be brilliant.
[00:07:03] Marko Papic: You haven't seen enough zombie movies. There's more hunger than
[00:07:05] Peter Zeihan: option. No, it's, If you're gonna take the energy route specifically, liquid fuel is what allows global transport to happen.
It's what allows regional transport and local transport in most cases to happen. We can talk about why EVs aren't gonna work writ large, separate topic. you remove the mobility, and there is no trade. There's really not even regional distribution even within a major country. Now, keep in mind, with everything you poke at, there's different highs and lows based on the country.
So the United States is now not just a net exporter of oil, but we export 5 million barrels per day of a refined product, so that gives the United States a lot of options that nobody else has. But what we would gain there, and maybe with agriculture, we would suffer immensely on the manufacturing side.
[00:07:53] Marko Papic: Tech.
[00:07:54] Peter Zeihan: Tech re- well, tech re-
[00:07:55] Marko Papic: Semiconductors ...
[00:07:55] Peter Zeihan: tech requires everybody.
[00:07:57] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[00:07:57] Peter Zeihan: There is no tech without global trade at all, especially on the higher end. But on the energy question, if you can move, that's great, but if you can't fix or replace anything, it's a different world for you, too. You might, not descend like other countries.
Other countries, if the oil situation goes away, for many of them, that also means the agricultural system goes away, and you're now talking about de-industrialization, and every population on the planet uses industrialized agriculture to exist in its current form. So we're talking about, for a lot of places, some sort of neo-Dark Age sort of situation where a 50% reduction in the population is probably one of the more positive cases.
[00:08:42] Marko Papic: But so just to be clear, like the, the catalyst for this, let's leave out the oil.
Sure. the disruption of core moves. Let's just say everything's fine. Yeah,
[00:08:50] Peter Zeihan: that's
just, the one that's on my mind at the moment.
[00:08:51] Marko Papic: Yeah, that's right.
[00:08:52] Peter Zeihan: Yeah.
[00:08:53] Marko Papic: so you're saying the catalyst for this scenario is just, like demand slowly falling off the cliff?
Yeah. Like global final demand just gets-
[00:09:05] Peter Zeihan: That is one of them, yes. And then- Keep in mind that the de-globalization break and the demographic break, while they're related in cause, it doesn't matter which one happens to shatter the whole thing. It's just really unfortunate that it's, they're happening at the same time.
We're gonna have- But they're
[00:09:20] Marko Papic: cor- correlated, in many ways, right? Oh, yeah. Demand for de-globalization.
[00:09:23] Peter Zeihan: In many ways. I'm just saying that- Yeah ... one of them can completely break and the other one hasn't broken yet, and we still end up in the same general place. on the demographic situation, we all know Japan is the oldest, fastest aging country in the world.
[00:09:37] Marko Papic: Yep.
[00:09:38] Peter Zeihan: maybe not.
[00:09:38] Marko Papic: South Korea too, right?
[00:09:39] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. actually, the Japanese have improved their lot, but it's still pretty bad. Yeah. Anyway, 2025 to 2035 was always gonna be the decade where the majority of the advanced world and a significant minority of the developing world ages past Japan. So this was always the last 10-year period.
It's just we're overachievers and we're doing it early.
[00:10:04] Marko Papic: Interesting.
I would have thought more fireworks, This is a very like- Oh,
[00:10:07] Peter Zeihan: no, we can get that. if you're gonna go to war to get something and interconnection is how you make it work What does the war achieve? So Russia's one of those weird countries where if it actually wins everything it hopes to do in Ukraine and then repeats it in Poland and the Baltics, it actually solves some of its geographic problems and demographic problems even.
But like China, you import everything and then you export to everywhere. What war can you possibly launch that will help that?
[00:10:37] Marko Papic: No, that, that's interesting. we can talk about ideology overcoming economic interest though, right? Fair. So that's- Gotta love-
[00:10:43] Peter Zeihan: But
[00:10:44] Marko Papic: no, a little bit of that going on right here.
but I, think it's interesting because there is something that you're saying that I think resonates with me. One of the reasons that we got, World War II, in many ways, was the Great Depression, and- Sure ... there was, like, massive disinflation. And so I'm just thinking,
[00:10:59] Peter Zeihan: Disinflation? no, just deflation
[00:11:00] Marko Papic: deflation. Yeah, deflation, like negative prices. And you're, basically explaining a world where there's two things that are happening at the same time. Deglobalization, but let's, double click on exactly what that means. I think that we are rushing towards the 2030s where there's wanton deflation.
Because part of deglobalization is rebuilding supply that's just in case, as everyone likes to talk about. It's not just-in-time inventory. So we're creating these redundancies of goods, and in, critical goods, not critical goods. no. but it's funny you say that because your other side of the...
We actually don't need that. Well- If demand, if global d- final demand is collapsing, you don't actually need just-in-time inventory, right?
[00:11:47] Peter Zeihan: yes and no. I buy your deflation thesis, but I think it's also a sev- fairly inflation thesis at the same time.
[00:11:53] Marko Papic: at the beginning it is. Lots
[00:11:54] Peter Zeihan: of,
[00:11:54] Marko Papic: lots of- Because while you're building...
no. i- in the, run-up, everyone's trying to build a semiconductor fab now. No, I- So that's
[00:12:01] Peter Zeihan: inflationary ... I hear you. Just keep in mind that if you go back to the '20s and the '30s, you're talking about a very different supply chain system that maybe had two countries involved.
For sure.
[00:12:07] Marko Papic: Yeah,
[00:12:08] Peter Zeihan: Now, high-end semiconductors is 60.
[00:12:10] Marko Papic: Yep.
[00:12:10] Peter Zeihan: No, for sure. And if you pull one out...
[00:12:14] Marko Papic: But what I'm getting at, what I'm getting is we're trying to solve for that problem.
that is a problem that everybody knows, right? it's in The Economist. Yeah. the fact the supply chains- Oh.
You know what
[00:12:23] Peter Zeihan: I mean? Sorry, just the way you said that was funny.
[00:12:24] Marko Papic: I know.
[00:12:27] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, I don't read it more anymore either.
[00:12:29] Marko Papic: since '21, but the, the point is everybody knows this. We're all rushing. So I'm trying to get, the way that this actually would happen, and I think the way it would happen is that right now we're trying to solve a problem, which is that interconnected supply chains are vulnerable.
What we're not... What we're missing, and where you actually bring something new to the table, is that but demand is gonna collapse too. So we're gonna h- we're gonna happen to live in a world five, six years from now where we've built all this supply for some sort of an event that may not ever happen.
We suddenly have all this unnecessary supply, but demand actually starts getting collapsed. Yeah. So why is that bad? Deflation is bad.
[00:13:10] Peter Zeihan: It's horrible. Just keep in mind-
[00:13:11] Marko Papic: It's bad ...
[00:13:12] Peter Zeihan: that things aren't gonna line up that cleanly. So you can have individual countries or, for lack of a better word, alliances of countries that have a self-contained supply system- that you might get some deflationary events in there because of oversupply for that population. But in places where you've got the massive, supply chains that span multiple continents, doesn't really matter what happens because an intermediate good is of no use unless you have access to all the other steps.
So you can have massive deflation in particular steps and still inflation when it comes to finished goods.
[00:13:44] Marko Papic: That's right.
[00:13:45] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. We'll get the worst of all worlds.
[00:13:46] Marko Papic: No, I see that, but I'm even... I'm, I've, e- I'm even saying, let's be optimistic- about your pes- about your pessimistic view. And like- Yeah,
[00:13:51] Peter Zeihan: I haven't even given you the downside yet.
[00:13:53] Marko Papic: But I, I-
[00:13:54] Peter Zeihan: This is my base case.
[00:13:55] Marko Papic: My downside is just deflation is, politically unsustainable, right? For most societies-
[00:14:01] Peter Zeihan: I wouldn't say unsustainable. Deflation cause a break in the political system.
[00:14:05] Marko Papic: Yes.
[00:14:06] Peter Zeihan: Yeah.
[00:14:06] Marko Papic: even if we don't get... You're saying, look, complexity. This is like, what's it, what was the name?
Homer Dixon wrote The Ingenuity Gap.
And this is very similar to what you're saying. there's the s- the world's become overcomplicated. We don't even know how it works, and supply chains became extremely over-professionalized, overcomplicated. But I'm just saying even if you don't get that one thread breaking, the fact that you're introducing the demographic comp- component from a demand side leads us down a path that will make the 2030s kinda look like the 1930s.
Too much deflation, too much political polarization. I hope it's that good. I don't know if that's good. that's-
[00:14:48] Peter Zeihan: it's again, it's the two supply chain steps versus 2,000.
[00:14:52] Marko Papic: Yeah. The
[00:14:52] Peter Zeihan: degree that we have to fall back to get to a point of equalization is extreme compared to what it was then.
[00:15:00] Marko Papic: deflation I think is written. I expect it. So I think after the initial inflation, I think we're getting... That's where we're headed
[00:15:07] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, you're also assuming at a degree of continuity that allows to build us that industrial plant, and, industrial construction spending in the United States is at the lowest it's been for a while.
we are currently de-industrializing at the fastest pace in my life right now. So we're, that specific concern isn't on the table at the moment. Are there, are there- I would love to have that concern.
[00:15:29] Jacob Shapiro: Are there relative winners and losers in this scenario? Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
[00:15:32] Peter Zeihan: So who,
[00:15:32] Marko Papic: who,
But then it's not the end of the world, though.
we need, humanity ends.
[00:15:37] Peter Zeihan: Oh. Is that... Is... Was that the scale we're after? I, I- You can go as dark as you want ...
[00:15:42] Marko Papic: you, yes, I'm going that way.
[00:15:43] Matt Gertken: You're saying, the end of the current world system.
[00:15:45] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, the end of the world system that currently supports roughly eight billion people, Yeah, and that- Best- ... that's sad enough ... best case scenario, we lose a billion, and a half. Best case scenario, three quarters of the population of the world takes a step back technologically, and globalization breaks into a series of regional systems with regional powers that hopefully don't fight one another too much.
[00:16:07] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. So your best case scenario is basically Thanos, snaps his fingers and, half of the- ... half, of all of us is gone. I'd go worse than that. I'll just- Yeah ... I would darker. You went really dark.
[00:16:16] Peter Zeihan: this is- I would- ... this, again, this is my mid case.
[00:16:19] Jacob Shapiro: what, is your worst case?
let's plumb the depths and then ask Marco to give us even more darkness.
[00:16:25] Peter Zeihan: you guys know the revolution in military affairs? You guys know that term? Yeah. '80s, early '90s, we started applying digital technologies to military stuff. We got satellites and cruise missiles and GPS and all that. We're now going through the second generation, where you can load a decision tree into a military platform, at the moment a drone, and you fly it off.
You're in control of it until it gets to a certain point, and then you release it. And with the tech that we have today, and when I s- say we, humans, it can then follow a route- Thanks for clarifying ... until it finds its target. '
[00:16:56] Marko Papic: Cause, aliens.
[00:16:57] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, it's just, this is, the US doesn't have this, to be clear.
This is what the Ukrainians have developed in just the last couple of months. the technology required to make that will survive this fallback. There's nothing about that needs global supply chains at all. And so you can see military force being democratized. At the same time, what supports the normal way of life goes away.
And today, remember, these drones didn't exist four months ago at all.
[00:17:29] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:17:30] Peter Zeihan: Those drones have a range of about 700 miles, and the Iranians have already deployed a few of them, so any physical infrastructure within 700 miles of a potential foe you basically need to write off
[00:17:44] Marko Papic: So that's where I like that one.
Yeah. So now we're getting like, you know-
[00:17:47] Peter Zeihan: Again, base case ...
[00:17:49] Marko Papic: like Houthis Well,
[00:17:50] Jacob Shapiro: and, you can apply it to other things too. Like it's one of the things that keeps me up at night, the democratization of all these technologies- that suddenly a kid in their mom's basement can use because there's no responsibility on it.
[00:18:01] Peter Zeihan: But you gotta look at the supply chain that allows it to exist, and if that is durable in a de-globalized scenario, then you've got- That's key ... something you can really worry about.
[00:18:10] Marko Papic: Yeah, especially like when you start thinking about pr- potential actors that start using this, you can't just say they'll get it from Ukraine."
no, they're gonna have to build this themselves. Yeah, this is book two, by the way.
[00:18:20] Matt Gertken: Yeah. Yeah, but the chips though. The, I don't understand the, component there because that is international, as you pointed out.
[00:18:26] Peter Zeihan: Sure. extreme ultraviolet technology developed by ASML. They're the only country in the world that makes the lithography machines.
They're about the size of a bus. You use them to etch the chips. They're the only ones who make 'em.
[00:18:38] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:18:38] Peter Zeihan: And so any chip that you have, little over simplification, that is seven nanometers or smaller in the etching has to use EUV, and anything that uses EUV has at least 100,000 supply chain steps, of which there are 2,500 companies involved who only make one product...
I'm sorry, 4,500 companies involved that only make one product for one end user.
So you remove a few of those, and the whole thing stops, and this is touching 60 countries. So we're going to lose all of that. if we rebuild the supply chain in a more demographically stable, geopolitically stable area, that's a 30-year program 'cause it took us 60 years to do it the first time around Dumber chips that use direct ultraviolet, older technology, there are a number of companies that do it.
The Chinese do it, and the Chinese suck at semiconductors. that level of technology, with plenty of exceptions, is pretty durable to a de-globalized scenario. and these new memory drones that I call them all use that tier, and not even the advanced part of that tier.
So we've got this new technology that is potentially very, very destructive, that is probably gonna remove Russia as an energy exporter this year, and then God knows what it's gonna do to the rest of the front once they turn, the Ukrainians turn their mind at something else.
That's gonna go global easily, Best guess is that the hits on US, military assets in the Gulf during the Gulf War, which the US has really been playing down, were all these memory drones. Because once they make... Once the drone gets in the area, it looks around, it makes a decision once, and then it goes.
You can't jam that. Your only option is physical interception, and that's here. That's now.
[00:20:28] Marko Papic: but that does work though.
[00:20:30] Peter Zeihan: It works very well.
[00:20:31] Marko Papic: No, what I mean is, physical interception does work.
[00:20:33] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You can still potentially shoot it down. You just, need to get- You just need interceptors, which we don't have anymore.
we do. They're too expensive, and we spent them, and, there's ways to intercept them with like-
[00:20:38] Marko Papic: We,
[00:20:43] Peter Zeihan: we,
have used less- Why not- Half of our global supply.
[00:20:45] Matt Gertken: why not counter-drone?
[00:20:46] Peter Zeihan: The country that is leading in counter-drone is Ukraine, and the United States is not cooperating- Yeah ... on building out the
[00:20:53] Marko Papic: systems. what I'm just saying is, it is a solvable problem. Like-
[00:20:56] Matt Gertken: but can the United States go and capture the people that we need in order to do that?
Because I would imagine they could.
[00:21:01] Peter Zeihan: we're actually very good at capturing people now. I don't know if you saw that. Maybe. So the in- t- for an interceptor drone system- The Wernher von Braun strategy. Yeah ... to make sense, you're probably going to need five or six drones fired for everything you're trying to take down, and that makes it very easy for the attacker to just send concentrated against a single target.
I don't wanna say it can't work because it hasn't been invented at scale yet. But that seems to be the weakness as to where we are, that the Ukrainians have already identified. because they've brought some of their interceptors, which are about the size of a duffle bag. You can just tote 'em wherever you want, and their hit rate is maybe half of, say, a PAC-3 out of a Patriot system.
But they've only got a range of about 20 kilometers, and they're fairly slow. But this is- So you only get one shot at everything coming in. Yeah. So you have to take lots of shots. I'm not saying it can't be improved, but the offensive curve is so much steeper right now.
[00:21:56] Marko Papic: But that's what I actually think is, very interesting because on one hand, the drones can't occupy territory.
[00:22:03] Peter Zeihan: Absolutely not.
[00:22:05] Marko Papic: like- But they're
[00:22:05] Peter Zeihan: really good at de-occupying territory.
[00:22:07] Marko Papic: That's right. That's right, and I think, And also, it basically means that you don't wanna put all your eggs in one basket, i.e. aircraft carriers, Arleigh Burke destroyers. there's all sorts of, platforms that America has that are just very expensive.
The war becomes, cheaper.
[00:22:22] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, now, one thing we do have going for ourselves, ships specifically, ships move, and so you're never gonna hit it with a Shahed because Shaheds, you give a progr- you program a destination to it, and it goes to it. The ship has moved by then. The only tankers that were hit during the Iran war were the ones that had been at anchor for three or four days- Yeah.
No ... and said, "Oh, it's still there. Send one." how long that will last is unclear.
[00:22:45] Marko Papic: your point is that they're memory drones. They can actually do a decision tree and choose-
[00:22:49] Peter Zeihan: but- but you have to get it to the general area first.
[00:22:52] Marko Papic: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:22:52] Peter Zeihan: And when you're talking about a ship, you're talking about not having much of detection radius 'cause it's on water.
for example, the Ukrainian acoustic signature system on their border for picking up Shaheds as they come in, that means that they get a warning of 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes, and they can concentrate their defense on the vector. You can't do that on water. And so you just, because the ship moves.
Now, that might change, and one of the things we're seeing in the Black Sea is they now have these, the Sea Babys- Sea drones.
[00:23:22] Marko Papic: Yeah ...
[00:23:22] Peter Zeihan: with a range of 1,500 kilometers, so they can loiter.
[00:23:24] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[00:23:25] Peter Zeihan: And if they combine that with the memory drones- They haven't proven they can do it yet.
[00:23:31] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[00:23:31] Peter Zeihan: And the problem is just geography.
'Cause like a ship that's on the water, a drone that's on the water just doesn't have much of a detection radius. You need to pair it with something else.
[00:23:38] Marko Papic: Yeah. what I was getting at is that in particular when you start talking about sea drones, it, makes things like blockades more effective.
But interestingly, all this also makes offensive operations less effective. Not more. you can destroy- How you can destroy things.
[00:23:51] Peter Zeihan: Ver- yeah. Okay.
[00:23:52] Marko Papic: You're,
correct about that. But you still have a problem, right? If you're fighting somebody else who has the same technology, occupying land becomes very
[00:24:01] Peter Zeihan: difficult.
Very difficult, yeah.
[00:24:03] Marko Papic: Which is, interesting 'cause it freezes the world.
[00:24:05] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. I wouldn't call that defensive though. I would just call that, what's the old Roman term? The march. A zone where no one- Yeah,
[00:24:11] Marko Papic: nobody- ...
[00:24:11] Peter Zeihan: can effectively hold.
[00:24:13] Marko Papic: But what, I'm getting at is that it's a world where the weak, shall inherit, the meek inherit the world.
Because, you can defend yourself from stronger powers, and it actually becomes very difficult to have these, territorial ambitions in this world. That's what you're- It's very
[00:24:30] Peter Zeihan: difficult to hold it, very easy to make it so that nobody else can.
[00:24:33] Marko Papic: Yep.
[00:24:33] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:34] Marko Papic: It's area denial. that's what drones ultimately are.
[00:24:36] Peter Zeihan: Basically everything looks like Chechnya.
[00:24:38] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[00:24:39] Peter Zeihan: Yeah.
[00:24:41] Jacob Shapiro: can I ask you one thing, and then I'll s- I'll start, batting around. But you said the Ch- the Chinese suck at semiconductors. Yeah. I j- I wanna ask you a little bit about that because Huawei was left for dead. They're still around. They announced that thing to great fanfare, Tao's law.
We don't need Moore's law anymore, we got Tao's law. can they be good enough to
[00:24:57] Peter Zeihan: compete? Oh, sure. yeah, yeah. No, it's like the idea of stacking chips instead of it getting smaller, that makes a lot more
[00:25:03] Marko Papic: sense. and also, like your point is, seven nanometer chip and below, whatever, this is a world of 20 to 40 nanometer chips- Yeah
which Chinese
[00:25:11] Peter Zeihan: dominate. The Chinese, I would argue, can go up to 28 nanometers- Yeah ... by themselves pretty well. Now, keep in mind that the purification required for a lot of materials they still can't do, so that's, not a blanket statement, but it's, they're pretty good at that level.
[00:25:25] Marko Papic: But this is what I think is really important to understand, and this goes back to our conversation earlier, while we were waiting for Peter.
I think that the amount of technology you need to effectively become relevant geopolitically is actually much lower than people think.
[00:25:43] Peter Zeihan: Sure.
[00:25:44] Marko Papic: even AI systems. when you're talking about decision trees, this isn't like... This, it's more complicated for you to ask ChatGPT to do an interior design on your kitch- kitchen remodel- Yeah
than for a memory drone to choose. Don't get me
[00:25:58] Peter Zeihan: used to ChatGPT.
[00:25:59] Marko Papic: No, exactly. and to your point. And it's a world where, I think overemphasizing the, tech stack that's at the top 5% is a mistake.
Without... sorry. You can keep emphasizing if you want. No, I'm,
[00:26:17] Peter Zeihan: not disagreeing.
[00:26:17] Marko Papic: I'm thinking. But the middle matters. The middle matters. Yeah. this is my point. everybody thought... the Biden administration was obsessed about restricting Chinese access to five nanometer chips, and it's like, who cares? Wars are fought between 20 and 40. And then some three-star general that probably can't even fire up their Outlook will tell you, "Yeah, but future wars are actually won with five nanometer chips."
Yeah. Well- And then Peter Zeihan shows up, he's like, "No, actually, future wars will be fought with spears and these drones." But this is how- And that's
[00:26:43] Jacob Shapiro: the point ... this is how fast things have changed, but we're not fighting wars like we did even during the Biden administration when they were doing those things.
I mean- Yeah ... at least from my point, the, the ground has
[00:26:50] Marko Papic: completely changed But the level of technology you need is not, it's less than what you have in your smartphone. Sure, yeah. That's kind of the point.
[00:26:55] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. keep in mind that the United States dominated military activity in the, let's call it 30 nanometer to whatever the high end is- Yeah
for 30 years. And so we've become used to that being the norm. Yeah. But that's not today's technology. That's yesterday's technology. Yeah. So of course other countries are moving into that, and a lot of them are moving into it in a different way than we did it.
[00:27:15] Marko Papic: Yes. Yeah. that's where incumbency hurts,
[00:27:18] Peter Zeihan: that and we were always fighting from the other side of the planet. Exactly, yes. So it was always about range and precision. For people in the Eastern hemisphere, it's not.
[00:27:26] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. Okay, Marko, how is the world gonna end in-
[00:27:29] Marko Papic: I'm, gonna end the world. I'm not going for this, like- Oh
Dark Ages thing. whatever. Dark Ages was so fun. de Camero, read that if you want to see how fun it was. so look, where do I wanna go? I wanna go to nuclear war. Like- Oh, okay ... I'm j- I'm just gonna work with what's, in front of me. Peter is, the fancy, Japanese fusion Mexican chef who's bringing all these new ingredients.
I'm just gonna stick, like-
[00:27:56] Peter Zeihan: Stick with the basics ...
[00:27:56] Marko Papic: yeah, I'm gonna go with pasta and meatballs, baby, and I need a lot of nukes to blow up. So that's what I need, right? So how do I get that to happen? I'm gonna, I'm gonna say history rhymes, right? And so I need, a global power to, be on the brink of collapse- and I need it to incentivize, a scramble. Yeah. Sure. So I need a sick man of Eurasia. And I know I'm gonna... I'm getting a lot of nodding heads here. I know where
[00:28:23] Peter Zeihan: this is going. Ant imagine what you're talking about. I, feel like I do.
[00:28:26] Marko Papic: it was you... It's, you were my first boss, Peter. this is going exactly where you know it's going.
So look, what caused World War I, right? It took, 80 years to happen, but it was the sick man of Europe. It was the Ottoman Empire, basically creating a power vacuum, right? When you create power vacuums, it, sucks other countries in. And, I think the biggest-
[00:28:47] Peter Zeihan: I'll probably disagree with that assessment, but continue
[00:28:49] Marko Papic: But, the biggest power vacuum out there, territorial vacuum, is Russia.
Yeah. The
[00:28:55] Jacob Shapiro: heartland
[00:28:57] Marko Papic: Yeah, exactly. Macinder.
[00:28:58] Peter Zeihan: I hate that.
[00:28:59] Jacob Shapiro: I know, I do too, but it's, hard to-
[00:29:00] Marko Papic: It is. It is real ... bear
[00:29:02] Peter Zeihan: it. It is not hard. Anyway.
[00:29:04] Marko Papic: Look, the thing is Russia's got, a lot of problems on its hands. First of all, Peter just basically, articulated why they are legitimately losing the war in Ukraine.
[00:29:15] Peter Zeihan: At this moment.
[00:29:16] Marko Papic: At this moment. things could change, but, I find it very fascinating, by the way, I'll bring this up later too, that Vladimir Putin could only mobilize once in December of 2022. That was the only time he attempted it. That tells you everything you need to know about the social, stability and the political acumen, and the political support for the regime, quite frankly.
that political support was based on a quid pro quo, like I get to conquer half of Ukraine or more, but nothing happens to you domestically. you will, your life will be just the same as well. You can go to the same grocery stores that Tucker Carlson loved, And, eat the same crumbly- Such a fuckwit.
[00:29:54] Jacob Shapiro: I- I will never forget him going through the grocery store and pointing at the brown bread- The bread. The bread ... and being like, "Oh, my God. This is amazing." The bread. Listen to- It's like, "Dude, come over. I'll bake you a sourdough loaf." Yeah. this is not hard. no.
[00:30:04] Marko Papic: by the way, you can do, you guys can do that at his barn.
[00:30:06] Jacob Shapiro: I would love to. Tucker, I'm, here, man. You want some bread?
[00:30:09] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[00:30:09] Jacob Shapiro: I'm here.
[00:30:10] Marko Papic: But listen, my point is all of this is collapsing, and if you study history of Russia- people think Russians are very good at war. They're not. They're good- They're very
[00:30:20] Peter Zeihan: good at tolerating pain Suffering.
[00:30:22] Marko Papic: And they're very good at when they get invaded, right?
You just- Yeah, withdrawing ... you got huge, supply lines. That
[00:30:28] Matt Gertken: sounded mean. It was mean.
[00:30:30] Marko Papic: You've got supply lines, so you can-
[00:30:32] Matt Gertken: No, you have winter and you have space
[00:30:35] Marko Papic: On offense, I struggle to remember an epic offensive war that Russia or Soviet Union or Russian Empire won. it's a struggle.
You gotta go back in time. So-
[00:30:47] Peter Zeihan: it's...
[00:30:48] Marko Papic: And it happens after every single time they're on offense. I
[00:30:51] Peter Zeihan: disagree with a lot of your founding points, but I think we're gonna get to the same conclusion.
[00:30:55] Marko Papic: Look, every time that I can remember that Russia went on offense, Crimean War, the original one, Alexander II came in, 'cause Nicholas I might or might not have committed suicide.
[00:31:05] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, but that was a tech gap. The other side was industrialized, the Russians weren't. Of course they're gonna lose that
[00:31:09] Marko Papic: one. Doesn't matter. But doesn't matter why they lost. My point is what comes after the losses.
[00:31:12] Matt Gertken: yeah.
[00:31:12] Marko Papic: This is where I'm
[00:31:13] Matt Gertken: landing the plane. And also t- very important here, is that th- there was a reform movement in the wake of the Crimean War.
That's what I'm getting at. If you don't have a leadership that is reform oriented, then that decision-making might not-
[00:31:24] Marko Papic: Alexander II
[00:31:26] Peter Zeihan: Even in this little touch and go, yeah. Yeah.
[00:31:26] Matt Gertken: Alexander.
[00:31:27] Marko Papic: Alexander II emancipates the Serbs, right? The second one that I can think of is 1905 with the Japanese. Yep. That was the beginning of the Duma.
[00:31:34] Peter Zeihan: Industrialized versus non-industrialized.
[00:31:36] Marko Papic: But again, what- And the beginning
[00:31:37] Peter Zeihan: of communism
[00:31:38] Marko Papic: right there ... what, exactly. 1916, 1917 was s- seen as a war of imperialism. Offensive war, they didn't have to fight that war. That was a war of choice. Boom. Communism. You go fast-forward to Afghanistan, what happens?
Fall of the Soviet Union. Chechnya, fall of Yeltsin. Ukraine, fall of Putin. After every single failed offensive operation, domestically they, suffer. So I think that the part of my forecast that's easy to kinda make is that I think that there is disruption coming to Russia. that's, where I'm, like, that.
Now, why does it go nuclear? first of all, you need a lot of nukes to end the world, and Russia has a lot of them. I know. It's obvious. You're looking
[00:32:17] Peter Zeihan: at the candidates. Okay, I get it.
[00:32:19] Marko Papic: Yeah, and Russia's in a state of disarray.
[00:32:22] Jacob Shapiro: wait, but you have to vary more. How many hydrogen bombs would you actually need to destroy the entire world?
Define destroy. make city, make every city with over two million people uninhabitable
[00:32:33] Marko Papic: I don't know.
[00:32:33] Matt Gertken: Probably a
[00:32:34] Marko Papic: lot
[00:32:34] Peter Zeihan: If you're gonna use city flatteners, you'd need at least 10,000.
[00:32:37] Matt Gertken: 10,000. Okay, so the Russians are like what, halfway there?
[00:32:40] Peter Zeihan: Yeah.
[00:32:40] Matt Gertken: Well, more than halfway, but mo- I think mo-
[00:32:42] Peter Zeihan: I think- I'd still call that the end.
I think- Is
[00:32:44] Matt Gertken: it? Yeah,
[00:32:45] Peter Zeihan: I was gonna say, I think the- Like I'm willing to give him wiggle room on that detail.
[00:32:48] Matt Gertken: I think the Strategic Air Command, when they did this with Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson, every single time the conclusion was that the radiological disasters- It'd be awful ... associated with it w- would kill upwards of 500 million, 700 million people.
Yeah,
[00:33:02] Peter Zeihan: you take out 10 spots with city flatteners in just the United States, you throw us back 30
[00:33:06] Marko Papic: years. And by the way, you can feel free to stack our doom scenarios. So Peter's point is like look, we're... we got no operating margin here in global supply chains. Give me one nuke, Like there you go.
[00:33:18] Peter Zeihan: Oh, let, me, stack on your problem with some additional problems. the countries that normally- develop nuclear arsenals are the ones who don't think they can win a conventional fight.
[00:33:28] Marko Papic: That's right. Yeah,
[00:33:28] Peter Zeihan: And with the United States going all woo-hoo on strategic issues, we now have Finland, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Romania openly debating not whether, how- Yeah
to get a nuclear arsenal.
[00:33:41] Marko Papic: That's right.
[00:33:42] Peter Zeihan: So when we do get to the point that the Russians get a little twitchy, there'll be some other people twitchy there with them. if I was to put a, a stab in the map, there is no version of Ukraine that can ever be secure so long as the Russian cities of Belgorod and Rostov-on-Don are continue to be physically connected to the rest of the Russian Federation.
Those are the two, transport hubs that are being used for the entire military operation. So if Ukraine does manage to push forward and push through this, they will continue pushing until those two cities are no longer a problem. And that- Plus
[00:34:17] Marko Papic: Belarus on the north as well.
[00:34:19] Peter Zeihan: you might as
[00:34:19] Marko Papic: well-
[00:34:20] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, Belar- Belarus is different.
it's much more roundabout. I'm not suggesting that it couldn't fall in it, but these two cities have to go, one way or the other. And now you're talking about a physical invasion of the motherland, and that's a very different political conversation for Moscow.
[00:34:33] Marko Papic: And by the way, I don't even... that's one scenario.
The other scenario is just that the countries around Russia, once, once the sclerotic political system starts to erode, there's plenty of countries around Russia that may want to participate in its dissolution. Finland,
[00:34:48] Peter Zeihan: topless.
[00:34:48] Marko Papic: the Europeans- China ... the Europeans are on one side, China, Turkey- Yeah.
Yeah ... And so anyways, I, fear that over the next 10 years, the biggest geopolitical issue is actually going to be this weakness of Russia. I can even see a world where us in the West, we're actually propping a regime in Moscow, in, which happened with the Ottoman Empire, by the way, in order to ensure that it's an operating, vacuum filler so as not to allow others to come in.
[00:35:18] Peter Zeihan: I,
find that unlikely, primarily because the Trump administration has gutted all the people who are capable of thinking that way.
[00:35:26] Marko Papic: things come and go. Like- But those, those people,
[00:35:28] Matt Gertken: yeah,
[00:35:28] Marko Papic: those are replaceable ... yeah, I
[00:35:29] Matt Gertken: mean- That's just
[00:35:29] Peter Zeihan: a rotation
[00:35:30] Matt Gertken: of
[00:35:30] Peter Zeihan: personnel I hope
[00:35:30] Marko Papic: so. five years- I really hope so
in five years you don't know what, what goes on, but what you can say is that, if a vacuum is a problem, right? If it's a problem. Yeah. Like- And by the way, what's great about your thesis is, you're setting up a stage for the rest of the world, for the rest of us. the supply chains are at risk.
Sorry, I gotta open up this a little bit more. I'm s- like, the name-
[00:35:50] Matt Gertken: For this next statement, just
[00:35:51] Marko Papic: Ma- makes my comment sexier, but also the mic. It's the mic. It's the mic. My point is, look, we're already... We got no real like slack when it comes to supply chains. If you suddenly lose like 20% of world's nickel production, and by the way, you don't need collapse of regime in Russia for this to happen.
Look at the output of oil or nickel or any other commodity out of Russia in the '90s. It's not like Russia completely collapsed. It still had the Duma, it still had the president. It was still, Yeltsin was running around and they had elections, And yet, look at what production of all the things the world needs Russia to do, look at what happened to it.
It didn't do well. Halved. Halved all of it.
[00:36:34] Jacob Shapiro: I'm gonna inject, my joke here for a little levity. These two heard it earlier, so Peter, you're, gonna really be my guinea pig here. So Vladimir Putin dies- and he goes to hell. and he's the... And so sorry, Vladimir. and he's in hell. He, gets released for good behavior for a, night.
'Cause the bar is low. Exactly. Okay. So, they let him go to Moscow and do whatever he wants for a night. So he goes to a bar in Moscow and orders a vodka, and he starts asking the bartender questions. The first question is, "So is Crimea still ours?" And the bartender says, "Yes, Crimea is ours." He goes, is the Donbas still, ours?"
He says, "Yes, the Donbas is ours." And then he works up courage. is Kiev still ours?" And he says, "Yes, we have Kiev. That'll be eight euros, please
So
[00:37:18] Matt Gertken: actually, but there's something important about that, which is that- Yeah ... and I think this complements what you're saying, but you, I don't know that you would take this approach, but the EU as a concept needs to expand. It needs to take border territories that could be a problem, and it needs to absorb them, and Ukraine has been an example of that.
But obviously they ultimately did want to take Belarus and others. And in a period where Russia is receding, there's, probably going to be a continued impetus for Europe to expand, and the reason for that is to absorb those dangerous territories. In other words, rather than dangle out the, this no man's land as an enticement to Russia to be aggressive because they're weak and crumbling and lashing out, it would be better to absorb them and continue this sort of forward march of the European project.
[00:38:08] Peter Zeihan: the digestion of the unstable territories.
[00:38:09] Matt Gertken: And that's the thing, and but the, but conventionally, the industrial capacity of Europe is so much more superior to Russia's that conventionally they're weaker, and then that pushes them into a sort of like Mosc- like a Muscovy or like a, a core, a, a nuclear-armed but very s- very weakened state that's losing its strategic depth to an entity that actually could succeed ultimately, maybe not in bringing Russia into the EU, but effectively neutralizing and setting up a puppet
[00:38:38] Jacob Shapiro: government.
Yeah. I'm, gonna say this tongue in cheek, you can hear German geopolitical theor- theorists from the 1930s saying the answer to the Russian question is Lebensraum. Yeah, we, have, we need aggressive European expansion.
[00:38:49] Matt Gertken: we, solve this question. Yeah. no, and it's the thing that no one would think about.
They, also, and let me just say- Yeah ... for those who are saying, yeah, but Europe is old and they're not aggressive," but look, Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler, you have plenty of examples of this- It's not accidental ... like you would say, revealed preference that Europe- No ... wants to invade Russia.
They do. They always have.
[00:39:05] Marko Papic: But you know what? I, don't even think- Look what Poland
[00:39:08] Matt Gertken: was trying. They even-
[00:39:08] Marko Papic: It doesn't have to go ... they, were, they were- Oh, yeah. No, the West had to pull Poland back in like 1921. that, that's a, the post-World War I conflict between Poland and the Soviet Union is like unbelievable.
But what, all, I would say is like we don't have to go that far. I just think, you know-
[00:39:22] Matt Gertken: Like you said, it's a power vacuum
[00:39:24] Peter Zeihan: let, me-
[00:39:25] Marko Papic: Yeah ...
[00:39:25] Peter Zeihan: nudge yours a little bit. The EU in its current form has no future primarily because of globalization and demographics.
They're an export union now.
They've aged out from being a consumption-based system. But everything else you said I agree with completely, which just means that the evolution of the EU is not a financial, monetary, economic trade union. It's a military political union, and that's a different beast.
[00:39:48] Marko Papic: I would argue it's been that for, the last 10 years.
that's why- They're, they've
[00:39:52] Peter Zeihan: been moving in that direction.
[00:39:53] Matt Gertken: and we know that they've made, mentally or psychologically the mili- the shift to wanting strategic autonomy and- Yeah ... military capability. The
[00:39:59] Peter Zeihan: question is how do you get from here to
[00:40:00] Matt Gertken: there? but what's interesting is that it points in a direction that could be reminiscent of Stalingrad.
because y- you, ultimately, you want the Caucasus as well.
[00:40:09] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. It als-
[00:40:10] Matt Gertken: And Russia's always willing to fight over that.
[00:40:12] Jacob Shapiro: It, also points in- Oh ... the direction of imperialism-
[00:40:14] Matt Gertken: Yeah ...
[00:40:15] Jacob Shapiro: in Sub-Saharan Africa.
[00:40:16] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:40:17] Jacob Shapiro: that's...
[00:40:17] Matt Gertken: But how- but, no, but that would actually be a good thing in this situation because rather than Europe exploiting the collapse of Russia, we'd have Europe exploiting North Africa, and nobody cares.
What
[00:40:25] Peter Zeihan: I think is what he's saying is they're equal opportunity.
[00:40:28] Matt Gertken: Ha.
[00:40:29] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. And if you look at the European empires So really the only question is in this specific scenario whether the Brits come along or not.
[00:40:36] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[00:40:36] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:40:37] Marko Papic: My, my point is also I think that we're staring at a world not far off into the future, I think next five years, where, stability of Russia becomes really critical to the West.
Agreed. And, like I always joke with, some of my clients and so on when, I say something they say, I don't see that happening." Non-linearity is, built into geopolitics. we have a guy who was member of Al-Qaeda on Christiane Amanpour in CNN giving an interview in a tie. You know what I mean, this is-
[00:41:03] Jacob Shapiro: Not just a tie, a $300,000 watch I believe.
[00:41:06] Marko Papic: And a... great taste.
[00:41:07] Jacob Shapiro: He's made it. He's made it.
[00:41:11] Marko Papic: if you said to somebody in 2002, "Hey, a former Al-Qaeda militant will be running a country in the Middle East, and we will welcome him," you would have said, "Come on, bro.
you can't go that far." I literally think that, whatever comes after Putin in Russia, it will be disarray, and that disarray will be the greatest risk to humanity.
[00:41:33] Matt Gertken: Yeah, no.
[00:41:34] Marko Papic: That's what I'm getting at.
[00:41:35] Matt Gertken: I think it's a valid theory because if you look at where Hitler came from, it... The belief was that if Hitler had access to nuclear weapons, that he would have ordered their use, and I think that's a legitimate theory.
That's coming from Churchill, but, his behavior aligns with that constantly offensive response to negative-
[00:41:50] Peter Zeihan: Yeah ...
[00:41:51] Matt Gertken: information in the field.
[00:41:52] Peter Zeihan: I
[00:41:52] Matt Gertken: think- And-
[00:41:53] Peter Zeihan: Go ahead.
[00:41:53] Matt Gertken: no, I'm just saying that w- if you look at where Hitler came from, and then psychologically, you're talking about this, the darkest corner of the German Empire produces an essentially fanatical ideology that actually winds up in the height of power with access to the mi- the, m- the military, the mi- the metal.
It means-
[00:42:10] Jacob Shapiro: I love that you just called Austria the darkest part of the Of German Empire ... German
[00:42:14] Matt Gertken: Empire. no, but specifically, no, because- I, think
[00:42:17] Jacob Shapiro: you meant
[00:42:17] Marko Papic: time.
[00:42:18] Matt Gertken: Time. no. No, but specifically- They're
[00:42:19] Jacob Shapiro: very offended, by the way. But to, but to- Any Austrian who's watching is not happy about that ...
[00:42:22] Matt Gertken: every Austrian who's watching knows that there's a little finger- They know
of Austria that juts out near the very-
[00:42:27] Marko Papic: That's great. Three out of four of them are Serbians, but go ahead.
[00:42:29] Matt Gertken: But it's also- Like- But it's also social class, right? He was from the lower middle class- and they were getting, they perceived that they were declining in their social status. And what I'm saying is-
[00:42:39] Marko Papic: Yeah, for sure.
Yeah ...
[00:42:39] Matt Gertken: that in a world where, many of the Russian elites who are saying that we should coopt or collaborate with Europe, we should reverse Putinism, we should collaborate with Europe and just re- backtrack and abandon everything that Putin was doing, but you're going to have this virulent faction of, holdouts who believed in the war and believed in everything that Putin told them, and actually are still technically in power too because- Okay ... because they c-
[00:43:05] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, I'm gonna break with you on that part. Yep. I agree with the rest. Putin built the current elite-
based on whether or not he believed they believed what he believed in.
and whether or not he could completely manipulate anything that he said and did.
[00:43:22] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:43:23] Peter Zeihan: the last time someone was admitted into that elite was before I met you two.
[00:43:27] Matt Gertken: Yeah,
[00:43:27] Peter Zeihan: So the youngest of them are in their mid-50s now.
[00:43:29] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:43:30] Peter Zeihan: And they're now just dying because they're old.
And the total elite now is barely over 100 people. Oh, no, no- Or just blown up,
[00:43:36] Matt Gertken: but, the point is we're not gonna be able to predict who this individual is. The point is, that the individual who emerges as the strong man-
[00:43:43] Peter Zeihan: to
[00:43:43] Matt Gertken: re- retain order.
[00:43:43] Peter Zeihan: so what we're talking about is if Putin were just to vanish tomorrow- Yeah ... they'd all kill Igor Sechin, 'cause he's the only one of the 100 that has any ambition. Yeah. And then they would argue among themselves who was gonna be in charge.
And they'd probably run it by committee. It would be inefficient. And then we'll have some backstabbing, and that number gets whittled down pretty quick. but these are the people who hold all the levers of power.
[00:44:02] Marko Papic: That doesn't sound stable to me.
[00:44:04] Peter Zeihan: It's not, For your scenario to happen, which I think is the right way to think about it- is this group is incapable- Yeah, it gets to me, which- ... of running an aggressive policy. Exactly. Yeah,
[00:44:14] Matt Gertken: I
[00:44:14] Peter Zeihan: agree with that. they can do a carbon copy of Putin- I think Matt meant that ... but
[00:44:17] Matt Gertken: that's it. but here's what
[00:44:18] Peter Zeihan: it is- Which means we get somebody from the outside- Yeah, no, that's what I think-
who looks from a regional- Yeah ... point of view and then grows out. Okay,
[00:44:23] Matt Gertken: that could-
[00:44:23] Peter Zeihan: No ... and we're all of a sudden in 1920, '21 again.
[00:44:25] Matt Gertken: but here's the thing. Okay. That's right. But so that would- That's what I worry about ... we can broaden the discussion out- Yeah ... 'cause we're not gonna know the individuals, but what we know is that there will be a deal with Europe and the West, and it will be a betrayal of Russia in the way that Germany felt, the Ger- the Nazis felt that Germany had been betrayed at Versailles.
[00:44:41] Peter Zeihan: So that's-
[00:44:41] Matt Gertken: That's the key.
[00:44:42] Peter Zeihan: but I think what- But with nukes.
[00:44:44] Matt Gertken: Exactly.
[00:44:44] Peter Zeihan: Which then goes back to yours- Yeah ... which means the nukes will be used, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna be used against Ukraine or Britain first. No, internally. They're gonna be used internally. Yeah, but, that's what I'm getting at.
What Peter just referenced
[00:44:54] Matt Gertken: was- But wait, why would you want the radiological disaster in your own- 'Cause you'd
[00:44:57] Jacob Shapiro: rather have that than the Chechens running to Moscow.
[00:44:59] Peter Zeihan: Exactly. you're talking about people who are not from the power structure. Yeah. They're talking about people with a regional outlook.
And I'm not saying that they won't nuke anyone else. I'm just saying if you start going back to the Red versus White and the civil wars of Russia, the degree of barbarity they've always been willing to bring on one another- has always been higher- So
[00:45:17] Marko Papic: let's double click on that ... than people on the outside.
Yeah, let's double click on this. And they have
[00:45:18] Peter Zeihan: nukes.
[00:45:19] Matt Gertken: But, what you
[00:45:20] Marko Papic: would- 'Cause that's key ...
[00:45:21] Matt Gertken: okay,
[00:45:21] Marko Papic: That's key. like this ha- by the way, this happened in the '90s, just in a very, like- Yeah ... civilized way. like various parts of, Russia were not, for all intents and purposes- Under
[00:45:32] Peter Zeihan: Moscow's control
[00:45:33] Marko Papic: yeah. and, we're not talking Chechnya, we're not talking Dagestan, we're talking about, Tatarstan.
[00:45:37] Peter Zeihan: Yes.
[00:45:37] Marko Papic: We're talking, you know-
[00:45:39] Peter Zeihan: Yakutsk ...
[00:45:40] Marko Papic: parts of Russia where there's Russians living. And and then, okay, so the '90s weren't really barbarous, but the Red versus White was. That was that 1920s, early 1920s period where if you superimpose that kind of conflict, I think in today's con- Context, that starts looking very bad
[00:46:00] Matt Gertken: I, but I think if Russia's collapsing internally, and they're embroiled internally, and even if they're using nukes in a, civil war, which I find hard to believe, but let's say, right?
But I still don't think that gets us to the end of the world. You're right. I think what you need is you need Europe- That's correct ... to expand.
[00:46:15] Marko Papic: Yeah
[00:46:15] Matt Gertken: And Russia to be conventionally being defeated by Europe and facing the, eternal Russian nightmare, which was to be absorbed by Europe.
[00:46:23] Peter Zeihan: I would just argue it can be both.
[00:46:25] Matt Gertken: Yeah. It ca- it can be both. But the
[00:46:26] Peter Zeihan: point- Russia's perfectly capable of internal- I just need nukes to be used, guys ...
[00:46:29] Matt Gertken: Russia's a huge country. Yeah, Can't we
[00:46:29] Marko Papic: just
[00:46:30] Matt Gertken: agree
[00:46:30] Peter Zeihan: on
[00:46:30] Matt Gertken: nukes
[00:46:30] Marko Papic: were
[00:46:30] Matt Gertken: used?
[00:46:31] Peter Zeihan: But that's,
[00:46:31] Matt Gertken: but-
[00:46:31] Peter Zeihan: I have great confidence. But,
[00:46:32] Matt Gertken: what I'm getting at is that you will have, you, do have a clear pathway that we can all identify, which is for a, a ideologically perverted leadership to restore order.
[00:46:42] Peter Zeihan: It doesn't even have to be ideologically perverted. it- It can be doing what is logical for, I
[00:46:48] Matt Gertken: don't know, Minsk. no. I don't wanna- Because using, using- This
[00:46:49] Marko Papic: dog is dead yeah. I think
[00:46:51] Matt Gertken: we've killed
[00:46:51] Marko Papic: it.
[00:46:51] Matt Gertken: It's probably dead. Okay. I'll, ta- can I take a second? We both agree there's many
[00:46:54] Peter Zeihan: ways to get there that are mutually
[00:46:55] Matt Gertken: reinforcing- So that's right
and really bad. So I just-
[00:46:57] Jacob Shapiro: And,
we're doing great. So Matt? Yeah. How does the world end in the next 10 years?
[00:47:00] Matt Gertken: All right. Look, first of all, I was going to go down a similar route, and I have to say- Go ... something about linearity. no. I've got something more.
[00:47:07] Jacob Shapiro: Okay, good.
[00:47:08] Matt Gertken: Linearity, because it is true, and I think those of us who've actually, been embroiled in geopolitics for a long time, we know that you don't want to fall into that trap of just projecting things forward, but we have a 10-year time horizon in this discussion.
[00:47:20] Marko Papic: Oh, that's true. Yeah.
[00:47:21] Matt Gertken: Which does force a certain amount of linearity, and that's why I think you were right to point to Russia, because-
[00:47:25] Marko Papic: It's im- ...
[00:47:25] Matt Gertken: on a 10-year timeframe, actually things probably will be somewhat linear. The, it's gonna be non-linearities within a, a general trajectory that we can observe.
Okay But what I would say about going back to World War I and World War II is it's not just the power vacuum. The emergence of a power vacuum at the same time as the emergence of an expressive power, which was Germany attempting to unify and create a continental empire. So they wanted to exploit the vacuum, and the only power that can fill that role is China.
Now, so th- now everyone's gonna think, oh, okay, now we're gonna start China hate hour, right? But that's not what I'm doing. I'm not, saying that... So for example, I wouldn't say that Chinese leadership shows the characteristics of Russian leadership where they could become ideologically fanatical within the next 10 years.
Why not?
[00:48:09] Marko Papic: Maybe.
[00:48:09] Matt Gertken: They could.
[00:48:10] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[00:48:10] Matt Gertken: But what I say-
[00:48:10] Marko Papic: No, we're, we're-
[00:48:11] Matt Gertken: What I would say-
[00:48:12] Marko Papic: Don't defend it
[00:48:13] Matt Gertken: Yeah, Don't just do it to us. What I would, say more of is just the enormity of the capability. w- we've talked somewhat, in previous sessions about this, but, industrially, manpower, and there's all kinds of imbalances.
I'm not gonna
[00:48:27] Jacob Shapiro: poke at
[00:48:27] Matt Gertken: it- Yeah, you don't have to go- Take the whole idea apart. Yeah, exactly.
[00:48:29] Marko Papic: There's different ways to hate on China, and I think Matt and Peter- But, like- ...
[00:48:33] Matt Gertken: are like disagreeing here. Yeah, No,
[00:48:35] Marko Papic: but- Certain flavor.
[00:48:36] Matt Gertken: But, let me say what we can observe is that this China, the Communist Party China, ab- has been absorbing the buffer states gradually, piece by piece, and it was, it was Tibet in 2008.
It was Xinjiang in 2011. It was Hong Kong in 2019. There is a methodical recreation of a Chinese empire. Taiwan is obviously the missing piece, et cetera, but I'm not saying Taiwan causes world war. What I actually think is more likely is simply that Russia is going through this. China is attempting to absorb Russia as effectively some kind of satellite state and solve its resource problem.
But what interestingly what this creates is a dynamic that when China takes Taiwan, and however they do it, the problem is that Japan and South Korea panic, and they go nuclear. And so then what we have is a world where you're reviving all the ancient animosities between China and Japan, and then the final ingredient is the decay of deterrence.
So this connects with either your scenario or my scenario- is that we always talk about the post-World War II environment as one where, trade is expanding, globalization, and so nobody has any wars. But there was also the belief that there was a revolution caused by nuclear weapons that created strategic stability so that nobody was going to actually use them, mutually assured destruction.
And what we're seeing with the advance of technology, first of all, countries are willing to fight wars, including by attacking nuclear powers. But second of all, they might innovate new technologies that enable them to attack the second strike response. So all I'm saying is that if you create a powder keg in Asia- With knowing that there's a battle over influence in Russia, knowing that, there's going to be a battle between the US and China over Taiwan, you create an overall context of a powder keg, but you're simultaneously losing strategic or nuclear deterrent.
That to me is like a, it's a World War III scenario. I don't know if it's an end of the world scenario. World War III would be bad enough for me.
[00:50:34] Marko Papic: I'm glad you brought it up.
[00:50:35] Matt Gertken: Fair.
[00:50:35] Marko Papic: Yeah. I'm glad you brought it up, Matt, because I was, afraid we were all gonna go, super sexy and super weird.
And then no one was gonna, point out that, China and the US don't like each other. Yeah, the obvious. the obvious. And we should spend some time talking about that as well. I think, Yeah, we do have a 10-year time horizon. This isn't 100, right? it's interesting to me, though, that you're trying to fit what's happened over the last 10 years into the paradigm of Chinese expansionism.
I struggle to agree with that- necessarily. I don't really see it. Xinjiang and Tibet were part of China. Like- Yeah ... they suppressed, domestic sort of angst. I don't see that as- Or you mean- ... qualifying ...
[00:51:21] Matt Gertken: Hong Kong and-
[00:51:22] Marko Papic: Oh, even Hong- Or Xinjiang ... even Hong Kong, honestly.
Like-
[00:51:24] Matt Gertken: Yeah ...
[00:51:25] Marko Papic: I was in Hong Kong in, March. You know- Yeah ... whatever. it's fine. Yeah, True. So I don't see that as rising to the level of, the way Japan's progressively went, Korea, Manchuria,
[00:51:37] Matt Gertken: But the, point I would make to this is that we often- Well- If w- if we...
There's the World War II paradigm, where you have a madman or a fanatic.
[00:51:44] Marko Papic: that's
[00:51:44] Matt Gertken: what I was getting at. But the World War I paradigm is actually perfectly rational people.
[00:51:47] Marko Papic: I agree with you.
[00:51:48] Matt Gertken: Perfectly rational countries, all whose interests happen to be colliding at the
[00:51:51] Marko Papic: same time. What, I was getting at-
[00:51:52] Matt Gertken: Yeah
[00:51:52] Marko Papic: is that, it's interesting. 10 years is both short, so I understand you're, like, you want some linearity.
[00:51:59] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:52:00] Marko Papic: but I also think it's long enough that, the current regime in China may evolve.
You may have somebody who counters what's going on w- in the United States of America with President Trump.
Maybe China's ready for a little bit more of that kind of European-style nationalism, and that's where you add a little bit of, hot cayenne pepper into- Yeah ... your brew that gives some spice to it.
[00:52:21] Matt Gertken: Yeah, and, actually- And- Actually, I can be a lit- ... it gets worse ... I can be a little bit more specific.
if we want to. first of all, I think the US is more likely to be led by a Democratic and an internationalist administration that actually does wanna defend Taiwan. Second of all, I think, yeah, you're, you
[00:52:35] Peter Zeihan: know- I
[00:52:35] Matt Gertken: have
[00:52:35] Peter Zeihan: no idea.
[00:52:35] Matt Gertken: Yeah, we don't know. Yeah,
[00:52:36] Peter Zeihan: no.
[00:52:36] Matt Gertken: The other thing is- The parties
[00:52:37] Peter Zeihan: are gone ...
[00:52:38] Matt Gertken: the other thing is Taiwan itself, I think they'll probably have a leadership change in 2028, and I think they'll actually engage in a four-year negotiation with China that will look like a very positive environment, where they're negotiating a trade deal.
[00:52:50] Marko Papic: It looks like it's going that way.
[00:52:51] Matt Gertken: Yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing. W- when it comes to giving over their service sector, they won't do it, even the Guomindang. So what that means is they're not gonna let China run their telecommunications or their banking or their tech or any of these domestic or legal services.
You name it, they're not, they don't want China to actually run Taiwan. So in around 2032, when you have the Taiwanese election, the whole question will be, do, do the people of Taiwan want to, approve, effectively, referendum on this new big trade deal with China? And I think Guomindang might win or might lose, but I think the point is that w- when we get to 2033, we're gonna find out that the Guomindang is not going to give the crown jewels.
And at that point, I think China could turn in a much more aggressive direction because they will have seen that even when the Guomindang is back, even when they negotiate a trade deal, even when they do all the things that they're supposed to be doing politically, they still don't actually control Taiwan, and that's where it goes in a much-
their security architecture then I think we have a problem in the 2030s Go for it, 'cause I know you're gonna shred
[00:53:59] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. le- let's start with the military equation- Yeah ... 'cause I think that's the simplest. the South Koreans have developed a new drone, just two months ago called the Zaydan that basically uses their version of DRAM instead of the cheap NAND, and it is, has a decision tree with 10,000 steps So it's the closest thing to a fully autonomous system we're probably ever going to get.
And to think that the South Koreans and the Taiwanese are not comparing notes with the Ukrainians every single day.
[00:54:27] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[00:54:28] Peter Zeihan: So if you're talking about five years plus from here, the Taiwanese military will be able to easily defeat anything that the Chinese throw at them without any help from us.
they'll just nuke them.
[00:54:42] Matt Gertken: they could do that. If that is the
[00:54:43] Peter Zeihan: solution, that is the solution. Yeah. I
[00:54:44] Marko Papic: mean- But also, wait a minute. Let, let me push back on that. I've been hearing people say, "China's on the brink of collapse," and then suddenly their EVs are running around and they're, good.
you made a point earlier that the, the drones that are really good, like the bar is really low. Yeah. the Ukrainians are making these, as they go from like a van on the- next to the, trench.
[00:55:07] Peter Zeihan: Yep.
[00:55:09] Marko Papic: China seem... if there's anything China's good at, it's, making- Doing it at scale
consumer electronics. You know what I mean? so-
[00:55:16] Peter Zeihan: But the South Koreans, as tech friendly as they are of sharing, the high-end DRAM they won't.
[00:55:20] Marko Papic: Oh, no, 100%. Yeah. I agree with you, but, can't you overwhelm? Okay, so fine. the, the super-
[00:55:26] Peter Zeihan: just remember any version of Taiwan falling requires a sea invasion, and there's just no way.
[00:55:31] Marko Papic: No.
[00:55:31] Peter Zeihan: There's just no way if those drones are powerful enough, and they will be within two years. I'm
[00:55:34] Marko Papic: guessing, like-
[00:55:35] Matt Gertken: But remember why the US didn't invade Japan, it was the same dynamic. They nuked them instead. And, the idea that,
[00:55:40] Peter Zeihan: like- Also, if the idea that China can mobilize and Taiwan will not have enough time to build a couple of dozen nukes is silly.
[00:55:48] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, that's true.
[00:55:49] Peter Zeihan: So- but that's- Okay ... if the Chinese are gonna get to that point, not only does a sea invasion- Well, same with Japan ... fail, they lose Beijing and Shanghai and Hong Kong.
[00:55:55] Jacob Shapiro: I'm gonna put my neck out here, and I know I'm gonna get negative comments for this, but I feel- Spirit ... I, feel like the question is, actually, I agree with you on the capacity.
It's about whether there's Taiwanese will to do so. The thing about the
[00:56:07] Peter Zeihan: Ukrainians- If the Taiwanese... And the only way- Yeah ... the Chinese can mobilize is to basically send a call out to everybody. They can't miss that. They will know with weeks of advance notice. They probably need four days to make a nuke.
[00:56:19] Jacob Shapiro: No, I agree with you on the capacity. The question is whether if and when China makes that mistake, 'cause I think it would be a strategic mistake, is there a Zelensky who is out in the streets of Taipei being like, "We're ready. Come on down"? Well- Or is it gonna be, "You know what? We don't wanna go through all this death and destruction"?
Yeah,
[00:56:34] Peter Zeihan: there's as files are raised that can go. But when it becomes clear that troops are getting on ships and starting to sail, we'll be- It doesn't matter. We get to the nuclear war. Yeah,
[00:56:43] Matt Gertken: yeah.
We still get to nuclear war. let's
[00:56:43] Marko Papic: just
[00:56:43] Matt Gertken: say check. Check. But I'm gonna, but I'm gonna step back one more time though because the nature of the question, like what I'm saying that we need to be more humble about our ability to forecast, and just say that, in 1910, or if you're Norman Angle and you're writing about, how every-
[00:56:57] Marko Papic: There will never be a
[00:56:58] Matt Gertken: war
[00:56:58] Marko Papic: again.
There
[00:56:59] Matt Gertken: will never be a war again, and then it so happens World War I happens, right? What you would want to do is not identify specifically that the Archduke of Ferdinand is gonna get assassinated. What you would wanna do is just observe the complex.
[00:57:09] Marko Papic: no, but, Matt, actually, actually- You're 100% right, but bad example.
You know why?
[00:57:17] Matt Gertken: Why?
[00:57:18] Marko Papic: 'cause number one, don't fuck with the Serbs.
[00:57:19] Matt Gertken: Yeah. that
[00:57:21] Marko Papic: was- Oh,
[00:57:21] Matt Gertken: no. No ... that was in the decaying- No ... that was in the decaying
[00:57:23] Marko Papic: Ottoman Empire But what am I getting at? No, I, I, that was a joke. I
[00:57:25] Jacob Shapiro: think you don't just have TDS DS, I think you have post-traumatic Serbian disorder.
Yes. I think every single-
[00:57:29] Marko Papic: Post-traumatic Serbian But what I'm getting at, no, actually, if you had asked someone in Europe in 1878 what would start the war, they would've said Bosnia and Herzegovina. this was a problem, right? Yeah. this was constant problem. And so, you're absolutely right. we're all sitting here trying to figure out the way the world starts, and it might be, like, the obvious one.
It's Taiwan. Yeah. to your point.
[00:57:52] Matt Gertken: Or in other words, it's the absorption of a territory.
[00:57:55] Marko Papic: it's absorption- Because what- But it's, also the ob- the most obvious territory everyone was obsessing about. Yeah, yeah. since 1878, they were- Exactly ... holding congresses in Europe- Yeah ... trying to figure out how the Ottoman Empire, who's gonna have- Exactly
this piece of territory? Austria, Hungary, Russia, this, Serbia. and then it ended up being like, "Oh, shit, World War I started in Sarajevo." who knew? Yeah. no, everybody knew. Yeah. Everybody knew for 30 freaking years, we knew that's what was gonna happen.
[00:58:16] Matt Gertken: yeah, no.
[00:58:17] Marko Papic: that's to your point.
[00:58:18] Matt Gertken: Yeah, I think that's fair. and the, and, again, the issue is that Taiwan... I always try to d- tell people that Taiwan is Cuba if the Confederate Army had relocated to Cuba and then taken the nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union. You know what I mean? that's what Taiwan is. if, it has to be, this war is very likely to happen because- Robert E.
[00:58:39] Marko Papic: Lee with nukes. I'm
[00:58:40] Matt Gertken: seeing it ... yeah, ex- you see what
[00:58:41] Marko Papic: I'm saying. he would've been a gentleman about it,
[00:58:42] Matt Gertken: So what I'm, but what I'm saying is that this perspective, this is not an arbitrary... The reason why it's an obvious conflict is because it's a territory that needs to be re- resolved.
[00:58:50] Marko Papic: No, I don't think you have to sell it.
Yeah. I think we're, sold.
[00:58:52] Peter Zeihan: No, I'm not.
[00:58:53] Matt Gertken: No.
[00:58:53] Marko Papic: You're not
[00:58:54] Peter Zeihan: sold? No. I've never thought of the Tai- Taiwan war- You think
[00:58:56] Matt Gertken: they'll just be able to defend themselves effectively?
[00:58:57] Peter Zeihan: no, th- that's what I think now. Yeah. I didn't think this two months ago- Yeah ... 'cause the technology was not going in that direction.
Now I'm just like, "Holy shit, this is so easy." no, but before this- I was, definitely didn't think there was going to be a war. China's the most dependent upon glob- the globalized system of any country on the planet. And Australia now has the offensive firepower to end China's connection to the world.
So does Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, the United States, India, Iran, Pakistan. Yeah, but
[00:59:28] Marko Papic: that's where Russia actually becomes really
[00:59:29] Peter Zeihan: critical for China. It does, but it's not enough. It's all their It solves some of their
[00:59:33] Matt Gertken: storage issues. Yeah, it may not be enough, th- but what I would always just say to that, though, is that wars have always started because a nation is pursuing an objective.
I hear you. Not because they did a rational, holistic, Kantian assessment- fair ... of where it
[00:59:47] Peter Zeihan: would rest. And and I'll g- I'll get to that in a minute. yeah. I'm getting there. Yeah. So 80% of their energy's imported.
80% of it's from the Persian Gulf, and we're seeing some wobble this year, but that's, a lot.
80% of what they use to grow their own food is imported
[01:00:02] Matt Gertken: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:00:03] Peter Zeihan: 80% of their national income comes from exports Yeah.
[01:00:07] Matt Gertken: Well-
If,
the- 20% of their income comes from
[01:00:10] Peter Zeihan: Let me rephrase that Yeah Their hard currency earnings. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. which is not is important as GDP, but-
[01:00:16] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[01:00:16] Peter Zeihan: Anyway, bottom line is all of this is dependent upon- All along
the, the world being permanently accessible. Yeah. But any conflict with Taiwan ends that.
[01:00:24] Marko Papic: But hold on a second. Peter, wait. Wait. You're revealing, vulnerabilities of China- that I think, you know-
[01:00:31] Matt Gertken: Would speak to insecurity.
[01:00:32] Marko Papic: Exactly, and that, reduced rationality- But Taiwan doesn't
[01:00:35] Matt Gertken: solve any of it
[01:00:36] Marko Papic: doesn't matter.
Neither did Bosnia and Herzegovina for Austria-Hungary.
[01:00:40] Peter Zeihan: the- If I could, they could bully their way and it would just go
[01:00:42] Marko Papic: away to the point of non-linearity and just, if, this goes sideways domestically, the... What we're really getting at is that- Let me, go to 30,000 feet.
A lot of these scenarios require almost like an absence, not of rationality, but absence of reasoned th- thought. Because, if you sit down and reasonably say, there's this new technology that now the Taiwanese have. we don't want to mess with that," what ends up happening is you need...
The reason that I start my scenario with Russian, post-Ukraine political disaster is that you r- you need to introduce a level of, nationalism, of passion- Yeah. Of non... and that's to your point-
[01:01:25] Peter Zeihan: So, here's my thing. That's where- Eight, almost nine years ago now, this was part of the regular briefings to Xi.
He realized deeply w- at every level why a war with Taiwan would be the end of modern China.
[01:01:37] Marko Papic: Yeah. Yes.
[01:01:39] Peter Zeihan: Eight years ago is when he got rid of his last advisor. Yeah. So it's entirely possible that after eight years of imbibing nothing but rancid propaganda that he wrote himself, 'cause he's now written more than 300,000 pages of it-
[01:01:51] Marko Papic: That's impressive.
Literary
[01:01:52] Peter Zeihan: I, I know. It's like I've got f- four books done- You have four books out ... two on the way, and I can't even imagine 300,000 pages in 15 years. Deep Seek, I probably,
[01:01:59] Jacob Shapiro: Deep Seek was probably invented
[01:02:00] Peter Zeihan: to- Deep Seek helped him. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, the, the point being that this guy is, has been operating in a Trump style information vacuum for a decade
[01:02:10] Marko Papic: now.
But you don't even need that. you can have changes in leadership. I- You know, there's also, like-
[01:02:15] Peter Zeihan: yeah, but see, and that's- no, no, you cannot- No ... because he has done what to the CCP what Trump is currently doing to the Repub- Republican Party. Yeah, but like things change. There's no recruitment
[01:02:23] Marko Papic: mechanism.
There's Acts of Da- God, dog
[01:02:25] Peter Zeihan: Acts of Dog. There's, it's- Acts of Dog. Acts of Dog. Yeah. If something to happens to Xi, they have to start over.
[01:02:30] Marko Papic: But that's the point. Yeah. I think that-
[01:02:33] Matt Gertken: I, actually, if we want to be realistic about it, I would say that 10 years is pushing my argument. I do think it's the, the, the series of negative events that have to happen, makes it hard for me to see this happening in 10 years.
But 2036 is the earliest that I could put this sort of a conflagration, because I can imagine debt deflation, social unrest, the, the Taiwanese, like the point I made about Taiwan not giving up its technology or social ser- sector, and then ultimately, erosion of nuclear deterrence and the acquisition of Russian resources.
All those things combined can create this toxic brew.
[01:03:13] Peter Zeihan: Fair, but I think your Russia scenario is far more appropriate for China in that timeframe than the
[01:03:18] Matt Gertken: opposite.
[01:03:19] Marko Papic: by the way, just to be clear, this is not necessarily, you don't have to... The whole point of this exercise is, less than 50% probability-
[01:03:27] Matt Gertken: Yeah
[01:03:28] Marko Papic: but let's go.
[01:03:29] Matt Gertken: Yeah. But- it, probable enough that it's worth talking about. That's- But you just were implying that China would collapse.
[01:03:34] Peter Zeihan: Shanghai Academy of Sciences is now internally saying that they're missing over 100 million people under age 45. They're debating whether the missing millions is now between 300 and 500 million We're not going to have a worker base within 10 years
[01:03:48] Marko Papic: That's okay.
Robots, drones-
[01:03:49] Matt Gertken: But, and, but- ...
[01:03:50] Peter Zeihan: AI That only works if there's consumption on the other side.
[01:03:53] Matt Gertken: But, here's the thing, though.
[01:03:54] Peter Zeihan: But I- that's, they need globalization
[01:03:55] Matt Gertken: But you know better than anybody, though, Peter, the male-female ratio is gonna be- Awful, awful ... So it could be that even though you're losing, I, I don't I, I can see where you're about to say my-
[01:04:04] Marko Papic: I'm,
like rearing to go at
[01:04:06] Matt Gertken: this I know.
I don't like demographics or destiny either. However, I would just say that-
[01:04:11] Peter Zeihan: Just say, aside from the fact that they are
[01:04:13] Matt Gertken: Well, anyway, insecurities. I think- Now
[01:04:15] Peter Zeihan: there's a lot of color and texture that can be debated, but they are
[01:04:17] Matt Gertken: I think the point we can draw from- More hands
[01:04:19] Peter Zeihan: are gonna come up. I can feel it.
[01:04:20] Matt Gertken: Yeah, But no, but the, the point we can draw from this, though, is that China's insecurities, your view is that China's insecurities will prevent them from being aggressive. I would be more with what Marco said, where I think it's their insecurities that could push them to be aggressive.
[01:04:31] Peter Zeihan: sure, and if they go that path We're looking at not just a strategic feat, but a depopulation event that is unprecedented in human history.
But they- Which is awful.
[01:04:41] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:04:42] Peter Zeihan: Yeah.
[01:04:42] Matt Gertken: But they didn't-
[01:04:42] Peter Zeihan: I'm not sure it's awful, though. like-
[01:04:44] Marko Papic: it's certainly
[01:04:44] Matt Gertken: awful if you're Chinese.
[01:04:45] Marko Papic: No, I don't think so. Like-
[01:04:47] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. What? What? '
[01:04:48] Matt Gertken: Cause y- you mean 'cause the economy's collapsing is what
[01:04:50] Peter Zeihan: you're saying? it's like they're not gonna be able to have food.
[01:04:53] Matt Gertken: I don't know.
[01:04:53] Peter Zeihan: They'll do half bad. No, actually, actually-
[01:04:55] Matt Gertken: actually, they have enough rice. they just can't have meat if they-
[01:04:58] Peter Zeihan: No, but, if you depopulate- But
[01:04:59] Matt Gertken: the soybeans they import, so they can- then grow their own ...
[01:05:02] Peter Zeihan: if you, take their fertilizer plus the inputs for their fertilizer, you're- But why would they-
gonna get by with 20% of what they have ... but why would they go away? And this is the most fertilized- Look ... land on the planet after Brazil. If-
[01:05:10] Matt Gertken: I thought they were self-sufficient in grains.
[01:05:12] Marko Papic: No, listen. they do import more food than everyone else. But, like- yeah,
[01:05:14] Peter Zeihan: but it- ... if you
[01:05:15] Marko Papic: depopulate, you need less imports, so it's actually easier to feed your population.
Second of all, like- When we look
[01:05:19] Peter Zeihan: at
[01:05:19] Marko Papic: it ... look at Japan. Like, when was the last time you were in Japan?
[01:05:23] Peter Zeihan: It's been a hot minute.
[01:05:24] Marko Papic: And were you worried about anything while you were there? It's awesome. There's nothing wrong with Japan. 'cause, yeah. We've been
[01:05:30] Peter Zeihan: hearing- 'Cause you're in the cities.
[01:05:31] Marko Papic: No, but it's not just that.
Even, in the rural areas, there's nothing... depopulation is a problem actually, I think, in a non-globalized world. In a globalized world, the problem that you're de- describing, which I agree- If you
[01:05:44] Peter Zeihan: have the ability to export the imbalances, sure.
[01:05:46] Marko Papic: Yes, and I agree with you. what you're defining is this is global.
It's, it's a global demographic issue. Yeah.
[01:05:53] Peter Zeihan: So we can- And China now, by their own admission, is furthest along, further than Japan.
[01:05:57] Marko Papic: I just think that's maybe the best thing that's happened to China. Yeah. It's, it becomes easier- Okay ... 'cause it
[01:06:04] Peter Zeihan: becomes whatever- I'll jump ahead to the next question real quick.
yeah. the potential error in my argument- Okay ...
[01:06:09] Marko Papic: is that we have never been here before.
[01:06:12] Peter Zeihan: N equals one. Yeah, I agree. I've said this many times. That's true. That's true. And so when you're looking at the specifics of how the demographics play out-
[01:06:17] Marko Papic: With
[01:06:18] Peter Zeihan: the technology making ex- educated
[01:06:20] Marko Papic: guesses-
I don't know ... whoa, whoa, let me double-click on that. Yeah. one of the greatest things that happened to Western civilization was the Black Plague. Now, I'm not saying that I would love to see millions of people die. However- You'll be in France ... however, what it h- what, the Black Plague did to Europe is it created a power vacuum from the perspective of feudal lords and serfs.
Suddenly you could say, maybe you shouldn't have the right to tell me who to marry or how many kids to have on my plot of land, 'cause you need me to grow food for you and
[01:06:45] Peter Zeihan: your
[01:06:45] Marko Papic: knights." Yeah.
[01:06:45] Peter Zeihan: And it set off the expansion or the demand for skilled labor-
[01:06:49] Marko Papic: That's right ...
[01:06:50] Peter Zeihan: for increases in efficiency.
Urbanization, all
[01:06:51] Marko Papic: this stuff.
[01:06:51] Matt Gertken: And by the way, that's when The Decameron was written, during that period. Yeah. Just to be clear.
[01:06:56] Marko Papic: What, did I say originally?
[01:06:57] Matt Gertken: no, I'm just saying it wasn't outdated. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah. The middle class is emerging, wages are go- real wages are going
[01:07:03] Marko Papic: up. And they needed some entertainment, baby.
And you can, yeah, you can pay for more- You know what I mean? super subtle humor here. But look, what I'm getting at is- Kind
[01:07:10] Peter Zeihan: of slow burn. Yeah.
[01:07:11] Marko Papic: What I'm saying is there's also that, there's technologies we haven't had in the past that could replace output of humans. And I'll let you- I'm sure you've s- been told that before. And the second one is exactly what you said- Yeah ... which is that everyone who points to the problem of depopulation points to N equals one, which is Japan Like to your point, like we don't know what this looks like because the one time it's happened is Japan, and quite frankly I gotta tell you not that many things are going wrong in Japan.
[01:07:38] Matt Gertken: No, but- Which is- But, h- but let me add to it though. Japan is a post- getting nuked by the United States, Japan, which is allied with the United States and has a strategic security.
[01:07:49] Jacob Shapiro: At the moment.
[01:07:50] Matt Gertken: Yeah, But what I mean is w- we can't believe that depopulation or deflation will always lead to the same effects in different countries.
And what, I would say with China may fit a more aggressive or extroverted
[01:08:02] Marko Papic: model. I know, but you can't, we can't give Peter both sides of the argument.
[01:08:06] Matt Gertken: No, but
[01:08:06] Marko Papic: I, I- Peter can't get both drones are a really big deal and they're huge, and depopulation is a problem. clearly what drones point out is that you don't need to mobilize people to go fight a war.
[01:08:18] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, I think- Or you need to mobilize people to hold territory.
[01:08:21] Marko Papic: okay, fine, but they, have shown that they don't really want, other than Taiwan. look- Yes ... all, I'm saying is, like-
[01:08:29] Matt Gertken: Yeah ...
[01:08:29] Marko Papic: drones are clearly a, an example of what I'm saying, which is technologies we're inventing right now, and then you got AI, robotics, are allowing you to depopulate peacefully and gracefully, if you will.
[01:08:39] Matt Gertken: Yeah, and, if that's true, by the way, then China probably won't be aggressive, and they won't go and do a lot of the crazy things it would-
[01:08:44] Marko Papic: Because they'll need all the imports that Peter has identified- Yeah ... as a critical- Yeah ... strategic constraint on them. Yeah.
[01:08:49] Jacob Shapiro: Like- Yeah, unless you can build the Cylons and then, this is all moot.
But I'm glad you said that because it, it relates to the scenario that I wanted to, bring up, because I think we haven't been here before. And I, wouldn't take it back to the, Black Plague. I would take it to modernity, 'cause modernity has always been about the more. We need to produce more for more people, for more consumption.
And for the first time in modernity, we need to figure out how to keep a standard of living while producing less for smaller numbers of people, and this literally hasn't happened for centuries.
[01:09:17] Peter Zeihan: Ever, or at least not since 1500.
[01:09:18] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah. And, certainly not in the sort of modern context. So when I start thinking about how the world ends in the next 10 years, the thing that I would pose to you, and I'm actually surfing on some of what you're talking about, which is I, my, this is my aggregators.
This is not my base case. Yeah. It's the death of the nation state. Oh. The nation state was built out of the combination of nationalism and industrialization- Oh,
[01:09:38] Peter Zeihan: I can build on that ...
[01:09:39] Jacob Shapiro: and, everything else. And it's gonna go away, and instead, right now the periphery doesn't look like nation states.
It looks like, we were talking about this earlier, it looks like South Africa, where you have elites in gated communities and governments that don't actually function, and basically slave labor classes who don't have the promise of stability or employment or anything else like that, and we have this pleasant fiction.
Now, that's all on the periphery, and us in the West, we like to comfortably import our cobalt and our resources and have everything that we want from all this and pretend that the core is fine. I already talked about the Cylons. This is where it's, like I'm riffing now off of a foundation, that the empire, the center of everything, goes away.
And instead of a state that controls things, you have a hollowed-out state which doesn't have power. To the extent it does have power, it's to pr- protect the oligarchy or the oligopolies. You have elites in gated communities who don't care about society anymore. You have young people who have no attachment or meaning to that state anymore because they're not in factories rubbing shoulders with their counterparts, meeting new people, and going to the bar and having beers.
They're in their basements talking to ChatGPT or Claude or whoever else. And when you get that sort... This is, I think, is why kids don't have irony these days. we can't do satire anymore because our politicians are beyond what we could satirize. Yeah. it's impossible for comedians to do anything with s- with what we have.
And this is where I do get spooky, 'cause I don't think it's World War III and nuclear weapons. I'm thinking, so what happens in this hollowed out sort of state of being where the nation state is no longer there and no longer organized?
[01:11:06] Peter Zeihan: We,
can have both.
[01:11:07] Jacob Shapiro: we can have both. Yeah. Give me my nukes, mother- it'll happen because the elites will just start firing things at each other- I would make it an elite thing.
[01:11:14] Marko Papic: Wait, whoa,
[01:11:15] Jacob Shapiro: whoa,
[01:11:15] Marko Papic: land the plane. Land the plane. Let him finish. Let him- Land the plane. Yeah ...
[01:11:16] Jacob Shapiro: yeah, but just the last point of it is- what's... How
[01:11:18] Marko Papic: do
[01:11:18] Matt Gertken: we-
[01:11:18] Jacob Shapiro: so what happens when you get a coronal mass ejection that knocks out all the utilities in the United States and there's no functioning government?
I
[01:11:27] Marko Papic: thought we couldn't do space stuff anymore. No, he's, b- he's got-
[01:11:29] Jacob Shapiro: Oh, I thought that was the rule. He's got the rule exception. Space is part of... What happens when we get a, a pandemic and we can't mount an Operation Warp Speed?
[01:11:34] Marko Papic: No, but he had an excuse. He had an exception.
[01:11:36] Peter Zeihan: No,
[01:11:36] Jacob Shapiro: no, I did. He had an exception.
No, but I'm starting with the geopolitics. Yeah, he did. Yeah, I agree. I'm saying it, it's not like it's any one thing. I agree. I like it. Is it rising sea levels? It made it better. Is it droughts? All these things are gonna keep happening to us, and our capacity to respond... Because I've, actually come to the conclu- it's not gonna be a pandemic if we're organized, 'cause we can figure out how to solve a pandemic.
We can solve climate change. We can solve all this stuff. What we can't solve is if the state has no ability to function- Yeah, no, that's- ... and nobody gives a crap ... it's
[01:11:59] Peter Zeihan: gonna be so much worse.
[01:12:00] Jacob Shapiro: that's- Okay.
[01:12:02] Peter Zeihan: You go, "Riff" ... every economic system we- That's good, though. Lack
[01:12:04] Jacob Shapiro: of hands ...
[01:12:04] Peter Zeihan: every economic system we have, capitalism, European style socialism, command communism, corporate fascism, all of them are based on what you just identified and that pie gets bigger.
The idea that there's more people, more interaction, more trade, more technology, more finance, back to more people. That loop has defined the last 500 years. Now, it took us 250 of those years to figure out those four models, and I wouldn't say that we perfected them until the 20th century That loop's broken.
We're no longer in a world of more.
[01:12:37] Jacob Shapiro: No.
[01:12:38] Peter Zeihan: And last time, it took us 250 years plus a couple world wars to figure out what the four models were gonna be.
[01:12:45] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:12:46] Peter Zeihan: That's all gonna g- be going on at the same time as everything else that we've discussed today.
[01:12:50] Matt Gertken: Wait, but there's still something I'm missing 'cause, Marco made the point about the know-how, the productivity enhancements persist.
[01:12:58] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, so you gotta- No, they don't. You g- you gotta
[01:13:00] Matt Gertken: lock down- So you're saying the population, the people are shrinking. I get that. But then why wouldn't the remaining people use the surplus productivity?
[01:13:06] Peter Zeihan: Because we've moved past that. The whole idea of the information revolution is that information isn't something that exists in a book or in a thumb drive or in one person's hands.
It's a living thing that requires thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people to make it work.
[01:13:20] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:13:20] Peter Zeihan: And when you break those connections, that knowledge stops, 'cause that's how knowledge works now. And so when we s- break the globalized system, whether it's because we have one country that is throwing a fit or one country that is disintegrating or changing the economic model, we're all gonna take a big step back, 'cause it really does take almost all of us now And then you start messing with ideology on top of that?
[01:13:48] Marko Papic: yeah ... '
[01:13:49] Peter Zeihan: cause we will have it.
[01:13:50] Marko Papic: Yeah. I, look, I'll... One question I have. Just one? No, I, li- I like, this was an exercise to end the world,
[01:13:59] Peter Zeihan: We're on topic.
[01:14:00] Marko Papic: We're, on topic. I, just think that, one, I think, problem with your argument... there's two, I would say.
One is, pop-
[01:14:08] Peter Zeihan: I
[01:14:08] Marko Papic: knew it was more than one. there's two. There's really two. Just population growth, flat lines, demographic
[01:14:14] Jacob Shapiro: reverse- Marcus, don't start doing what George would, where he would do three things, and then he would only get to two, and never, do the
[01:14:18] Marko Papic: third. I, do that all the time, by the way.
Actually,
[01:14:20] Jacob Shapiro: a lot of people do that. there's
[01:14:22] Marko Papic: three points
[01:14:22] Jacob Shapiro: here.
[01:14:22] Marko Papic: I do that. I had three great points, and then somebody interrupted like this- ... and now I forgot them. That's
[01:14:26] Jacob Shapiro: all right. I'm, here. The, the world is ending. I'm trying to throw in some jokes so people don't, like- yeah ... light themselves on fire
[01:14:31] Marko Papic: accidentally.
No. But let's take the US economy right now. let's take the US economy right now. 20% of Americans are consuming 50%. one- I thought it was more than that, but
[01:14:42] Peter Zeihan: anyway, please continue.
[01:14:42] Marko Papic: More than that. Yeah. Sure. if population starts declining, it doesn't necessarily mean that demand goes down as well.
[01:14:53] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, but you're describing a different economic model, and that's fine. Yeah.
[01:14:56] Marko Papic: it's one that- that's where our heading- ... a lot of us have brought up ... but what that's called, I don't know. But yeah. Yeah. it's
[01:14:59] Peter Zeihan: called, like-
[01:15:01] Marko Papic: it's affluence. It's called affluence, right? ... a case you have to economy, I
[01:15:05] Matt Gertken: thought it was affluence. Each household gets more and more stuff, right? or feudalism. Well- Because
[01:15:08] Marko Papic: if,
[01:15:08] Matt Gertken: the productive means- Or it's
[01:15:09] Jacob Shapiro: called feudalism.
[01:15:11] Matt Gertken: it depends. If, if-
[01:15:12] Marko Papic: To its extreme, yeah. sure. But the point is, all I'm saying is that the demand does not have to egregiously collapse be, in this-
[01:15:20] Matt Gertken: The, the demand collapses in the feudalistic scenario because the middle class gets hollowed out and doesn't have any spending power because of inequality.
and, and-
[01:15:27] Marko Papic: Again, we've been living through this in six, eight years, and growth in the US d- consu- consumer, consumer spending is,
[01:15:36] Matt Gertken: whoop Yes, but what economists have argued is that if real wages had kept up with productivity, GDP would be even larger.
[01:15:43] Marko Papic: Even larger, I agree. But that's a different-
[01:15:45] Matt Gertken: Yeah, a different thing.
But I'm just saying you could see the-
[01:15:48] Marko Papic: But there's a way... Before I forget the second. So the first point I'm saying is, even if population growth and demographics declines, you can still have the affluent continuing to d- to demand goods.
[01:15:58] Matt Gertken: Exactly, yeah. That
[01:15:59] Marko Papic: keeps globalization going. The... Or, not a 10 out of 10.
I agree with you. That's, those days are gone. The second thing is you said you had a counter to the technologies, right? Because what I see right now is, idiosyncratically, not really connected, we have robotics became better, the drone technologies, stuff like that, and then you have AI as well, all coming in at the same time.
You have to have a pretty negative view of those technologies, like almost a Luddite view, to say that they will not
[01:16:28] Matt Gertken: It's a question of timing. But those technologies had been developed during the period in which the demographic trends you're talking about had already started.
[01:16:34] Marko Papic: But I don't think it's, but I don't think it was on purpose.
We just-
[01:16:36] Matt Gertken: No,
But-
[01:16:36] Marko Papic: We did it ...
[01:16:38] Peter Zeihan: okay. So maybe large language models didn't exist in a meaningful way just eight years ago, and then all of a sudden it's the thing. They're not the only type of AI. Yep. There's machine learning- Yep ... there's video and audio creation. Every type of AI that's in the top 20 categories, with the exception of machine learning, is r- dependent on those high-end chips.
So all of that stalls or goes back. Now, it doesn't happen like that. From the point that the system breaks, and it'll be pretty obvious, 'cause it's an input throughput thing. From the, 'cause from the point that you design a chip to the fa- to the point that you can actually have an intermediate chip that can then be incorporated into a product- No, I get that
is three to four years. and so you're gonna have the throughput that's going through the system for at least 12 months to produce the last batch of chips, and then those will get tested and incorporated into systems over the next six to 12 months.
[01:17:29] Marko Papic: No, I, get that. But what I'm getting at is that your system that you built does require a shock.
And the reason I say that is because demand itself flailing is not enough of a catalyst.
[01:17:43] Peter Zeihan: I think it undermines the entire economic existence of trade.
[01:17:46] Marko Papic: I know, but, not necessarily. Again, like we've had a very strange economic reality in the last six years where like the 20% are continuing to consume more and more, like without-
[01:17:56] Peter Zeihan: Fair.
Fair. And, we're entering a period where the state is going to consume more and more.
[01:18:00] Marko Papic: In order... And like in tax, maybe the proceeds. what I'm saying is like you're saying like, "Yes, Marco, but the technologies you're relying on to replace humans are brittle." And I'm saying you are correct, but then you do re- require a shock to expose that brittleness,
[01:18:15] Matt Gertken: But you guys gotta help me out with this, just, and I think some who are watching might want. 'Cause if the number, if the supply of workers is declining, working age population, then the value of each of those workers increases, right? So real wage should increase. Should. Now, they should then be able to consume and acquire more things.
That's the affluence that we're-
[01:18:33] Marko Papic: But that has to replace the decline in labor-
[01:18:35] Matt Gertken: Yeah ...
[01:18:36] Marko Papic: itself. You know what I mean?
[01:18:36] Matt Gertken: Yeah. But which, but that, isn't that just shuffle, isn't that just sorting to different industries so that if healthcare is a booming industry because we're taking care of a declining baby boom generation.
But after that, healthcare is less of a growing, but then now more and more people are going into these supply chain and logistical type of jobs you're talking about in order to buy- In
[01:18:55] Peter Zeihan: theory, assuming the shock doesn't happen- Yeah ... or is in the future, in theory, this will be very, good for blue collar workers.
[01:19:02] Matt Gertken: That's what I mean. Yeah.
[01:19:02] Peter Zeihan: That- Because the industrial expansion that has to happen, those are the jobs.
[01:19:05] Matt Gertken: It... and the logistical, the supply chain.
[01:19:10] Peter Zeihan: It'll look very different
[01:19:12] Matt Gertken: I'm just not clear on what, if there's a shrinking population why that working age population, whatever given size, would not fill the role necessary for the supply chain that's necessary to feed that
[01:19:23] Jacob Shapiro: aggregate demand it, but, yeah, I know it depends on your scenario not coming true, but isn't the answer to that all the technologies Marco's talking about is making it so those people will not be more affluent?
Well- Because robots and everything else are gonna replace all those things. You're not gonna need those people
[01:19:35] Matt Gertken: Yeah. and okay, so yeah, so you're, so in, in other words, we are back at a political question because if, it's feudalistic and there's no redistribution, then you're correct, then they won't have more spending power
[01:19:44] Peter Zeihan: Yeah.
If you can-
[01:19:45] Matt Gertken: But, if there's redistribution, they will have more spending power. And you- and all, and the demographics should help them with spending power because there's fewer workers, so they should-
[01:19:52] Peter Zeihan: If you can technologically- Should have more- ... magic away the need for workers and production, then you've also technologically magicked away the existence of consumption.
Everybody forgets about that half of the equation
[01:20:04] Marko Papic: Again, like the last six years though, like what, I just can't get over is like we've had the hollowing out of some of the things you're saying, and yet consumption's held up because- Yeah.
[01:20:15] Peter Zeihan: I, think of the moment that we're in right now like subprime in 2005,
[01:20:19] Matt Gertken: 2006 Yeah
[01:20:19] Peter Zeihan: We're seeing- Yeah,
[01:20:20] Marko Papic: so you're saying it's not real
[01:20:21] Peter Zeihan: we're struggling.
I know it's very- yeah ... it's very real, but- Yeah ... we're, if you wanna use the term late stage capitalism, that might apply here
[01:20:28] Matt Gertken: yeah. but that to me is very convincing, but the, the part I'm not understanding is how you get from, let's say you get through this cycle- and you get through.
Now on the other side of it, you have a new demographic makeup But the knowledge of how to produce the amount of goods required for the amount of people is still existent. The knowledge persists.
[01:20:50] Peter Zeihan: yeah. I, was just in Rome.
[01:20:52] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:20:52] Peter Zeihan: And one of the many, things I found fascinating is when the population dropped from a million people where they were half slaves to 50,000 people where none of them were slaves, everyone forgot how to do everything.
[01:21:05] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[01:21:06] Marko Papic: That's why...
[01:21:07] Peter Zeihan: No,
[01:21:07] Marko Papic: that's why
[01:21:07] Peter Zeihan: I go back- And,
[01:21:08] Jacob Shapiro: and-
[01:21:08] Marko Papic: Yeah ...
[01:21:09] Peter Zeihan: they weren't doing EUV.
[01:21:10] Matt Gertken: but the market should, the market... Let me be clear that the market should calibrate this. The wage should go up for people to do those jobs you're talking about in attractive ways.
[01:21:17] Marko Papic: It depends. Peter's, ex- example is a good one.
there was... That didn't happen. Market didn't clear in, when Rome collapsed. I do think that there's something of, that we're all landing on almost, which is that there is no linearity in geopolitics. Things reverse. That'd
[01:21:32] Peter Zeihan: be so much easier if there was.
[01:21:33] Marko Papic: And yeah. But our jobs- We wouldn't have jobs if- Yeah, we wouldn't have jobs, yeah.
it would be a STEM discipline if there was. But I also just think that, things do go in reverse, and I would really recommend... This was, like, a bestseller I think in the '90s or early 2000. ta- it's Homer Dixon's Ingenuity Gap. Ingenuity Gap. And it's this idea that, it's... The world's really so complicated that you pull on one thread, as Peter said.
We could go in reverse on some of these things, and I think that's, yeah, that's a really... We're... Interesting concept to think of because most are, of our viewers, even if they're sad about the state of the world, most of them have seen nothing but Better life, over the course of the last 10, 20 years
[01:22:17] Peter Zeihan: Oh, and if you wanna have a real fun thing, the, second most complicated supply chains in the world after high-end semiconductors is green tech.
[01:22:26] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:22:27] Peter Zeihan: Okay.
[01:22:28] Matt Gertken: So
[01:22:28] Peter Zeihan: get ready for coal and wood.
[01:22:29] Matt Gertken: Yeah, But wait a second, though. is it correct then to say that the... What we should be paying attention to, like monitoring this-
would then be the, like the edu... I guess it would be the f- a combination of education and free markets, right? Because in the past, there's been all kinds of challenges.
Why were they solved? It was just 'cause people were hungry, they were working hard, they were coming up with ideas. Now, if you take away their ability, the ingenuity gap or whatever, if you take away their ability to innovate, to solve problems so that they can feed and buy things, then you have...
That's when you have massive failures. But as long as people are still free enough to pursue their interests, then you usually tend to evolve out of problems.
[01:23:13] Peter Zeihan: we're getting a little philosophical here, but I would argue that most of the solutions we've come up to most of our problems in the last 35 years is by, been by making the system overall more complex to bring out more efficiencies.
that, that's not going to be an option, I would argue. Yeah. All
[01:23:27] Jacob Shapiro: right, I think we should start to land the plane.
[01:23:29] Peter Zeihan: If, and if anything, it's going to complicate and deepen- Yeah ... the break when it happens. I
[01:23:33] Jacob Shapiro: see. I see. Yeah. Let's start landing the plane on session one. maybe rapid fire. So how will you be wrong on one of your core views?
this can relate to the Fed thing- I think I already did that ... or anything else. You did that one. And then also least expected, most likely thing to occur. So maybe we do a little rapid fire. We'll start, Marco, and go this way down, and each do it, and then we'll talk
[01:23:52] Marko Papic: again. we're, right now we're talking about, core view, how is it wrong?
[01:23:56] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. One of your core views, how is it wrong?
[01:23:58] Marko Papic: Yeah.
[01:23:59] Jacob Shapiro: And what is the least expected, most likely thing to occur?
[01:24:04] Marko Papic: actually-
[01:24:05] Jacob Shapiro: Something, that you have high conviction on
[01:24:07] Marko Papic: Do you want me to do both at the same time?
[01:24:08] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I think we should both-
[01:24:09] Marko Papic: Rapid fire?
[01:24:09] Jacob Shapiro: L-
let's all do rapid fire at
[01:24:10] Marko Papic: the same time- All right.
[01:24:11] Jacob Shapiro: and then we'll pick it up at our, yeah ...
[01:24:12] Marko Papic: we just spent, an hour and a half talking about this before Peter was here, and, so my least expected thing that will happen, that I believe will happen, is your how the world ends.
Which seems like a pro.
[01:24:25] Jacob Shapiro: It does to me, yeah.
[01:24:26] Marko Papic: So I think that the, the nation state is going to erode massively, philosophically, ideologically, structurally, secularly.
this rear guard action by states to ban kids on social media, good luck with that. they'll find a-
[01:24:42] Peter Zeihan: It's a fascinating experience
[01:24:44] Marko Papic: It's, fascinating
[01:24:44] Peter Zeihan: Experiment, excuse me.
[01:24:45] Marko Papic: Experiment. Yeah. so I think the nation state is going to, weaken. How are we gonna measure that?
I think it's gonna be difficult to do that, but I think, rise of, s- sclerotic policymaking, legislative activity, just, basically inability to really control the institutions that mattered. these institutions, everybody thinks nation state collapses because it just doesn't exist anymore, or, it's a, it's an orgy of violence.
It can also just happen where, the, nobody cares that the Holy Roman Empire has been here for 1,000 years. Like- yeah, sure ... the, the emperor, let me write back to him. So that's the first. the second thing, was-
[01:25:26] Jacob Shapiro: How to be wrong on a... W- what is a core view of yours that could be wrong?
[01:25:30] Marko Papic: So a core, core view of mine, which, I use to forecast what's going on in the world is that world is multipolar. It doesn't mean that there's one country that... It doesn't mean that all countries are equally powerful. Actually, we have one country that is still the most powerful country in the world, which is the US.
but that power doesn't go as far as it used to, to effectuate, like- Yeah ... reality. so I think for that view to be wrong, I think, something has to reverse that. Either China and the US rise up and create the bipolar system, which most people love because it's very mathematical. It's easy to theorize.
Game theory is easy to do. the national security establishment of the United States of America loves this 'cause they can pull the playbook, and it's like, "Oh, we know how to win this thing," so I actually don't think that's likely, largely because of a lot of problems, with China that Peter has laid out in all his research.
so it would really have to be America reassert its dominance, And I think that, I think you can point to all the technological things that America's really good at, and you can make an argument that, the US exploits AI and those technologies better than the rest of the world, for whatever reason.
[01:26:47] Peter Zeihan: There's a number of reasons to expect that's already happening.
[01:26:50] Marko Papic: Exactly. And I think you have to hang your hat on technological dominance, which both seems like a cop-out, but it's like reality. America has been technologically dominant for the past, I would say, since 1930s.
And there's also 100 years of history where that's been the case. And it starts scaling up into technologies that we haven't really talked about, quantum- fusion, all that stuff, and just- That's a good one. Yeah, that's right, Derek. I know, you talked about quantum before yourself.
And, fusion, other things, like just that we don't see coming down the pipeline. and then, yeah, and then the world is not actually multipolar. It's a unipolar world, and there you go. I'll be wrong. Okay.
[01:27:32] Peter Zeihan: To Peter. I think we've actually both, hit both of mine already.
[01:27:35] Jacob Shapiro: Okay.
[01:27:36] Peter Zeihan: most of my work is taking the things that most people think will never happen 'cause they've never even thought about it.
It's yeah, this is actually the majority likelihood. if I wanted to make it just a little bit worse-
Please ... Turn up the dial ... combining ours, there is no example in world history of a country going through a rapid shift in economic paradigm peacefully, with one exception, South Korea, 'cause that's, they're weird.
and but they were living under the threat of war the whole time. Everyone else who has done it, it's, there's either been severe internal disruption- often ending in a civil war, or some sort of external conflict. If you look at all of the major wars from the last 200 years, there is a very, strong economic- Yep
angle that involved one of the isms.
[01:28:26] Jacob Shapiro: put.
[01:28:26] Peter Zeihan: And if all four of our currently understanded isms are under threat and are not a- applicable to what we're gonna be in just a few years, there's no way we go through that transition peacefully.
[01:28:38] Marko Papic: by the way, I 100% agree with you. I'm a little disappointed none of us talked about isms at all.
That's usually where Matt Birkin comes in.
[01:28:46] Matt Gertken: Yeah. I'm, no, I'm going there.
[01:28:47] Marko Papic: Oh, you're going. Okay. Yeah, I
[01:28:48] Matt Gertken: can take it.
[01:28:48] Marko Papic: but, Okay, I'll save the other one. No,
[01:28:51] Matt Gertken: but what were you gonna say?
[01:28:53] Marko Papic: I was hoping to Jacob, given that he really likes pandemics. this is his thing. Whee. He loves talking about this.
But
[01:28:59] Jacob Shapiro: I, don't really like pandemics. I just, they're so not easily preve- we can just prevent them, and we're doing absolutely nothing to do it. Yeah. It's just a great soggy that we could make this much less worse, and we're choosing not to.
[01:29:09] Marko Papic: I thought where you were gonna go, with the end of the world was combining that with combining a lot of things we're talking about in terms of technology becoming cheaper, more accessible.
one of the things that's becoming really accessible is lab engineered pathogens. Yes. That are, like, super engineered to particularly target specific ethnic groups, things like that.
[01:29:30] Jacob Shapiro: No, I sat with it. I think the rejoinder is that, yeah, but the technology works the other way, so you can find the cure for it relative- not, relatively easily.
we had a vaccine for COVID within two, three weeks. Now, we had a whole regulatory process and everything else, and I don't wanna get into the vaccine politics, but Moderna had the vaccine designed in three weeks.
[01:29:48] Marko Papic: Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
[01:29:49] Jacob Shapiro: we have this
[01:29:49] Marko Papic: Ebola outbreak. it was the batch. It was creating the batch, right?
Yeah.
[01:29:52] Jacob Shapiro: We have this huge outbreak. MRMAs.
[01:29:52] Marko Papic: No, those, you don't
[01:29:53] Peter Zeihan: have to do the batch with mRNA. You hit a button. You're done.
[01:29:56] Marko Papic: No, but you gotta make it and, give it to people. like- Oh, the, manufacturing process.
[01:30:00] Peter Zeihan: The manufacturing process. But it's not like the flu shot with the egg
[01:30:01] Marko Papic: mixture.
no, not like that. You don't have to grow anything. No, you don't have to
[01:30:04] Jacob Shapiro: grow. Okay. Or even with Ebola. It's, it's me
[01:30:05] Marko Papic: terrible- Oh, so we don't have to worry about
[01:30:06] Jacob Shapiro: this. Okay, cool. It's gonna ... different locations will have to. But look at this Ebola outbreak. It's gonna kill, tens of thousands of people.
It's absolutely terrible, and the WHO has said within six to nine months they'll probably have a vaccine Cool. that's awesome. that, a, a pandemic is not gonna wipe us out if in six months we can have a vaccine to this thing, Okay. so that's why I went a different direction. Cool. And wh- and why I went on capacity, because you need state capacity in order to do that.
I
[01:30:34] Peter Zeihan: like that.
[01:30:34] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I see that. If it's just gl- if it's just... Sorry, Peter Thiel. If it's just Peter Thiel in his new estate in Argentina being like, "La-la-la-la-la," we're not gonna have the vaccine for it. Have you ever met him? He's a freak show. I have not met him. Oh, my God. But I'll also bake you sourdough bread if you want me to.
Anyway, to Matt.
[01:30:48] Matt Gertken: So actually, w- maybe we can come back to ideology. M- it is something I like to talk about because I do think ideas matter, even though I'm also probably more on the structural side. as a geopolitical type, following from all you guys, I do have a tendency to go for structural explanations, but I think that at critical junctures, individuals have enormous impact.
[01:31:07] Peter Zeihan: Like right now.
[01:31:08] Matt Gertken: Yeah, So anyway, but leaving all that aside and what I would say is the United States is the center of the global system still. It's preponderant even if it's a multipolar system. And if the US succumbs to civil war, maybe because of economic change or maybe for other reasons, it could be ideological, b- but, huge tensions, extreme polarization in the US, if that happens, it's gonna have massive ramifications globally.
So I think it is important, but I just don't think it will. Yeah. I don't think the US is facing a civil war. again, there's some ma- there's some easy things you could say, like for example, just as long as you have real GDP growth of 2% and people are generally doing pretty well- It's a good ball. Yeah, it's, it's a good ball.
Anyway, so there's ways in which the US just constantly has political dysfunction, but it never really detracts from the overall economy, and so we don't end up fighting over it. We don't end up fighting for food, for example. But the one thing I would say is So my explanation for this has been there's a generational change.
once that generational change is done, which I really think will be emblema- emblematized by the 2028 election, not because the change will entirely be completed, but just because the candidates in that election will both be younger than the baby boom generation. So what-
[01:32:22] Peter Zeihan: Younger than 80. Yeah,
[01:32:24] Matt Gertken: young- yeah, young- Hopefully.
Hopefully. Yeah. don't- Yeah, I think they will, and the thing is- Hopefully ... but that's just an emblem, and what you enter into is a period in the 2030s where there's, a new consensus forming with these... Now, I don't think these younger generations, Gen X, millennials, whatever, I don't think they're any better or smarter.
But they are younger, so they might be better at problem-solving. They also might be better at compromising depending on what
[01:32:48] Marko Papic: happens. there's also time horizons, I think you would say. they might have longer time horizons.
[01:32:52] Matt Gertken: Yeah. So where I would- Just- but I'm just giving the... all this as background as in other words, I tend to write and tell people that the 2030s, the US is actually gonna be declining from extreme polarization.
The- it's gonna be entering into a generational change that's actually somewhat optimistic in the sense that we won't be ruled by octogenarians who are, like, ideologically or just nonsensically driven-
[01:33:14] Jacob Shapiro: Lost their mind.
[01:33:14] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:33:14] Jacob Shapiro: No, it'll be millennials trying to bring the '90s back.
[01:33:18] Matt Gertken: and, the specific-
[01:33:18] Jacob Shapiro: There are worse things that could happen.
[01:33:20] Matt Gertken: and the sp- exactly, because- Yeah ... the specific point is that they will, listen to their advisors on trying to build a bigger tent for voters or trying to create faster economic growth. So anyway.
[01:33:30] Peter Zeihan: Wild concepts.
[01:33:31] Matt Gertken: So where I would be wrong is if that's completely baloney, if, in other words, that the MAGA, the Make America Great Again, or a backlash, maybe a left-wing backlash that's populist, but a- if the polarization is broken by one ideological extreme triumphing so that the 2030s is an ascendancy of an, extreme ideology, which then could actually infect the economic capacity of the country.
if MAGA had some great triumph, maybe they really could shut down immigration substantially enough that we'd have a s- really significant slowdown in economic growth, and then that would breed further political problems. Or if the left wing came, maybe they would overly redistribute wealth and they would disincentivize investment, and we would backtrack.
So what I'm saying is, for me, I think we're actually entering an era of depolarization and probably continued prosperity, generally speaking.
[01:34:23] Peter Zeihan: I give that an 83.67% chance of being correct.
[01:34:27] Matt Gertken: Ah,
[01:34:27] Peter Zeihan: nice.
[01:34:28] Matt Gertken: there you go. '
[01:34:29] Peter Zeihan: 'cause this is not the first time we've done this.
[01:34:31] Matt Gertken: But then to answer the que- the way it would be wrong would be if, in fact, we are at some kind of, Roman interval.
[01:34:36] Peter Zeihan: This is our- Yeah ... this is the sixth time our political system has reshuffled. Yeah. Usually what happens is a new force, whether it's one of the old ones changing or merger of a third force, emergence of a third force, takes over for a decade, and you, at a minimum, get 10 decades, or you get, 10 years of more or less political stability.
[01:34:52] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[01:34:53] Peter Zeihan: But that one other time- Yeah, that one other time ...
[01:34:54] Jacob Shapiro: was the
[01:34:55] Peter Zeihan: Civil War. Yeah.
[01:34:57] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. Okay, I'll, close this out. my highest conviction view that could be wrong is I assume energy will be deflationary by the 2030s, and there's a whole lot of ways that could be wrong. Maybe I'm underestimating demand from AI and all these technologies.
Maybe green technologies is just not there and renewables is gonna cap. Maybe we'll have a small modular reactor disaster in China and nobody's gonna touch nuclear again. maybe climate change does something. Maybe, we n- we get a huge hurricane that knocks off, American production or something like that.
But I have generally assumed that one of the reasons I'm more optimistic about the 2030 is I think energy's gonna be cheap And I think it's gonna be a race between countries to see who can have it cheapest. and if you have cheap energy, maybe that blunts the edge of some of the negative forces that we've talked about.
But there's all sorts of ways that could be wrong. And then I, for the thing that's most likely to happen, I wanted to go off the wall, like Korean unification or something, but the whole prompt is that it's likely to happen.
And so I'll just close on, I think in t- I think on the battle between states and AI companies and tech companies, the state wins.
[01:35:55] Peter Zeihan: Oh, easily. Yes.
[01:35:56] Jacob Shapiro: I think the nation-state probably does die, but I think in its ashes comes... And maybe it'll be s- something sinister, maybe it'll be something better, I don't know. but the state is not going to relinquish its c- its claws. So these ideas that, AI is gonna be out there, the individual's gonna do everything in their basement, it does scare me.
but I think the state will, control the men with guns and will eventually, put this to rest. There will,
[01:36:17] Peter Zeihan: be a reckoning at some point.
[01:36:19] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[01:36:19] Matt Gertken: Okay, now wait a second though. I wanna pick on that. Please. So in other words, you're saying that the 19th century model of the nation-state is dying, but the state itself will prevail.
[01:36:29] Jacob Shapiro: The state has- It'll be a new
[01:36:29] Matt Gertken: form of state.
[01:36:30] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, it will have to transform itself in order to exert control because its old ideological-
[01:36:34] Peter Zeihan: Yeah, and that'll look different on a
[01:36:36] Matt Gertken: case-by-case basis ... metis might be- and is, in your model is a medieval model it, or like a feudalistic model?
[01:36:40] Jacob Shapiro: To Peter's point.
That's, an option.
[01:36:42] Peter Zeihan: Case, ca- case-by-case basis. Or we'll invent something new for the circumstances of the time. Yeah. 'Cause we've, demographically, we've never been here before.
[01:36:47] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:36:48] Peter Zeihan: We're in unpr- we're in
[01:36:49] Jacob Shapiro: unprecedented
[01:36:49] Matt Gertken: territory. And is the state, in that case, is it personal, like it used to be with kings and dynasties?
Or is, do you think that there's- Well, no, is there a dy- ... an impersonal solution to the thing that you were raising?
[01:36:58] Peter Zeihan: I, think, I think- Like- ... the tech bros, to grossly oversimplify it, are going to make their bid, this is book three, are gonna make their bid for control, and there will be a countermove by the state.
And that fight is gonna wreck so much shit. Yeah. That's book four.
[01:37:17] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. and, to a point that you made earlier about sports, like, and Trump sort of began this. we talked about this on a podcast months ago now, like TMZ now moving to Washington for an office to cover politics. Trump is the first celebrity reality TV show president.
Who are we gonna put our faith in? It's gonna be a celebrity, or it's gonna be some sports star, somebody who actually unites everyone without having any depth. It's
[01:37:39] Marko Papic: kind of the plot of Idiocracy, but
[01:37:40] Jacob Shapiro: just- and the good version- ... the good version of this is Ronald Reagan ... sure. The good version of this is- Yeah
somebody who uses his celebrity to surround himself with- Uses his power for good ... or Kennedy. Yes. J- J.F. Kennedy or something like that. By the way, just- and the bad version of this is-
[01:37:52] Peter Zeihan: We,
know.
[01:37:53] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:37:54] Marko Papic: Look, if I had to pick between the state and any emerging technology, you gotta pick the state. that's been the case throughout history.
There were a few moments when it was like touch and go, and the state always won. the, you, you just- You are gonna love book
[01:38:06] Jacob Shapiro: three.
[01:38:06] Marko Papic: The, the, the, by the way, the- no, I think- ... the most obvious one is, the, what is it, the East India Company trying to run India.
[01:38:12] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah. But, but- But the state did not win in the Age of Revolution in many places.
the American Revolution, the French Revolution- no, wait a second ... we tore down the old- No, but
[01:38:20] Marko Papic: we rebuilt. We,
[01:38:21] Jacob Shapiro: yeah ... we, built new things. I think we need to- But the state failed.
[01:38:23] Marko Papic: But, it wasn't like a d- it wasn't a- Corporate entity or technology that came. And by the way, we think of AI and, Magnificent Seven as these incredible corporates, but, think about, East India Company or Hudson Bay Company, like- Right
owning land and- Yeah ... and armies, right? And they always succumb, succumbed to the state, And I think that's- But
[01:38:44] Peter Zeihan: on the way out, wow, was there a show. Yeah. For sure.
[01:38:48] Marko Papic: Yes. Yeah, but that, that's
[01:38:50] Peter Zeihan: why. There's gonna be a show.
[01:38:51] Marko Papic: It's gonna be a show, yeah.
[01:38:52] Peter Zeihan: Yeah. It's gonna be a
[01:38:52] Matt Gertken: show. It always is. if they have means.
but again, it's something you said earlier I thought was really interesting was, like, that some of these companies might actually have drone armies or robot armies or something.
[01:39:02] Peter Zeihan: Let me give you something that's very real.
[01:39:04] Matt Gertken: Yeah. there you go.
[01:39:06] Peter Zeihan: 80% of the satellites in orbit right now are owned by one company, controlled by one person.
Do we really think that's not a strategic question?
[01:39:12] Matt Gertken: Yeah,
[01:39:13] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[01:39:15] Matt Gertken: Yeah, I'm very much on the state side about this too, but I think we should recognize that they're states and some of them may be dissolved. and- But the state as an organizational principle is gonna be very hard to get rid
[01:39:24] Jacob Shapiro: of.
and maybe today's cartels become tomorrow's states or- and- ... maybe other paramilitary.
[01:39:29] Peter Zeihan: As all four of us have now said, not all places are the same.
[01:39:33] Jacob Shapiro: Yeah.
[01:39:34] Peter Zeihan: and, So maybe this corporate event can have a very different impact in a place like Saudi Arabia versus the United States. Yeah.
[01:39:41] Marko Papic: And to Peter's point, I think that what's interesting is the showdown is going to come, Because I think that's clear. The showdown always comes. That's what, There Will Be Blood is about. There's a lot of, like-
[01:39:54] Matt Gertken: Yeah ...
[01:39:55] Marko Papic: there's a lot of literature and stories, whether it's energy barons, the railroad barons, you just go back, there's always a showdown.
It always comes.
[01:40:04] Matt Gertken: Yeah.
[01:40:05] Marko Papic: And, again, going back to the Kevin Spacey quote from The House of Cards, "You may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns." I think that's always, been the critical difference.
[01:40:21] Matt Gertken: Yeah. Interesting.
[01:40:24] Jacob Shapiro: All right. I think we put a pin in it here and we'll come back for session two if we've got the stamina for it, but-
[01:40:28] Peter Zeihan: 100%.
Yeah, let's, let's- Of course we do ... well into it. We gotta go pee. Yeah, I gotta pee. I gotta pee. Are we gonna do the second one sober? What's the plan?