Life After Globalization (Peter Zeihan) - 2021 Land Investment Expo

it's been my pleasure to hear peter zion speak and to read his writings i love your simple job description he tries to explain to you how the world works i'm surprised you're only limited to yourself to an hour on that uh he's got a lot to talk about globally but also a lot to talk about domestically his knowledge of demographics economics and politics as well as technology security and energy will give you an unprecedented perspective on agriculture and the industry as a whole ladies and gentlemen peter zion from morrison colorado and as i recall a marshalltown iowa native all right thank you hey everybody it's been two years but i'm back uh it's been a crazy last 13 months and i'm going to say a lot of things that are probably going to upset all of you today uh so i want to start with something simple something that can unite us something that we all agree on so let's start with politics now the american political system oh i'm getting some feedback here i'll move back the american political system is designed on a first-past-the-post system which is a fancy way of saying that if you want to win the seat you don't need to get 50 of the votes you just need one more vote than the other guy and what this does it encourages our parties to be big tent parties with lots of members because it's all about getting one more and so we get three sets one for the republicans one for the democrats and then swing voters in the middle this is how we have run things since our last political reshuffling in the 1930s but for those of you who have not been in a coma for the last five years you may have noticed things are breaking down so let's start with republicans the business community likes reliability we haven't had that the national security voters actually preferred hillary clinton to donald trump because she was the only member of the obama administration who had some concept as to how the world worked evangelicals looked at trump like you're on your what 17th affair that we know of one with a porn star so they had a split the pro-lifers know that donald trump had been an ironclad abortion rights supporter for 30 years the fiscal conservatives couldn't look at his tax returns this caused problems but it was messier on the left i mean black americans they loved barack obama and what's not to love a 40-something black dude from chicago loved him hillary clinton was a 60-year-old white chick who'd already lived in the white house not interested the socialists oh i gotta say i gotta admit i love senator bernie sanders he's just so reliably and delightfully out of touch all the time he hated clinton and to the degree that people who supported him showed up to vote at all four years ago most of them voted for trump the unions despise free trade they like trump on merits pro-choicers had the opposite issue with donald trump of the pro-lifers because they saw him flipping sides and then in the middle the catholics just looked at both sides and wanted to take a shower and here's where we actually ended up four years ago the lines got blurred factions were in motion which means that the old way of thinking of right versus left no really no longer really applies to this country so let's look at this from a different point of view two by two matrix if you're at the bottom you think the government should play a role in regulating social morals if you're at the top you want the government out of your personal life if you're on the right you want the government out of your wallet and if you're on the left side economic liberals you think that the government should play some sort of role in managing the economic system and that requires taxes and of course if you're in a corner you can combine these so if you're in the top left a social liberal and an economic liberal you look forward to the glorious day when all private property has been confiscated we're all wearing government-issued gunny sacks and if you're in the bottom right an economic and social conservative you think that the food the food stamp program is bad for character building and in fact starvation is probably the way to go here are swing voters here's our traditional liberal alliance and here's our traditional republican alliance okay everybody got that i'm gonna put everything up at the same time and now let's go through where we are today first things first donald trump brought a political group out of the cold the populists have always been the red-headed stepchild of the republican coalition they've always been in the background they've never had a nominee they've never even get into the cabinet they've been treated as a vote bank and donald trump ended that and so we got upwards of 15 to 20 million voters who hadn't voted in the last five elections who suddenly showed up that's why hillary lost and they are now in numerical terms by far the single largest component of the republican party and so the republican party today well actually i should say this the republican party on january 5th had more voters in it than it ever has in history what about the fiscal conservatives george w bush ran six of the eight largest fiscal deficits in the history of this country since world war ii only to be topped by barack obama only to be taught by donald trump and that's before coronavirus they don't have a horse to back anymore trump didn't like it when they tried to make something happen and so he kicked them out of the party they're no longer represented in congress they are not in his administration and they are not in existence in the republican party leadership national security conservatives were treated very badly under donald trump they were treated as political props we will hear from the from excuse me we're gonna hear about that i have a feeling here in about an hour between the way that they were treated between the pardoning of contractors who were convicted of murder uh between the various ways that the donald trump administration has pushed people out whether it's mattis or somebody else you know we're talking about an entire institution the military the intelligence communities law enforcement who no longer feels that the president has their back they also have been kicked out of congress they also have been kicked out of the administration they also have been kicked out of the party they're swing voters now too the business community social mores have evolved a lot in the last decade issues like inequality issues like environmentalism are getting into boardrooms and when we had eight years of obama and four years of trump where nothing was really done on either of these issues the business community realized that they had to work with urban centers to push these issues along themselves and just like the fiscal and the national security conservatives they butted head with donald trump i think of those three groups as kind of the the math and maps crowd of the republican party and just like the national security and fiscal conservatives they're no longer represented at any level of governance it's not all bad for the republicans by any stretch because the populist by themselves added more voters than the republicans lost with these three factions and trump's not done unions membership tend to be socially conservative and that has manifested hugely in the last few years for example the president of the all cio was in the oval office publicly extolling the benefits of nafta too with donald trump on the day that donald trump was impeached by the democrats in the house the first time not the second time second time's not till tomorrow they switched we saw it in the voting numbers catholics catholics have kind of followed the evangelicals down the path towards deeper social conservatism but unlike the evangelicals who were able to maintain their position as a single block the catholics had a really sharp split and on one hand you had catholics who went in a more secular direction who are almost like lowercase c now they're so secular and on the other hand you have a group of catholics that are practically evangelical with their social beliefs it's a smaller core but is far more reliably pro-trump republican the real surprise for a lot of people are the hispanics hispanics and particularly mexican-americans second generation mexican americans define themselves as gringos they see themselves as white they are the most socially conservative voting bloc in the united states and trump won them over time and time again trump actually captured most of the border communities in arizona new mexico and texas the issue that they are most conservative about immigration they like the wall they want ice to have power the only type of immigration that mexican americans support is family reunification and only for their families nobody else and trump carried it this today is the republican party a social conservative core without the math and maps crowd now things obviously are going differently with the democrats they haven't just lost the unions in the hope of getting the hispanics they've kicked out deliberately kicked out the socialists biden repudiated every single major socialist policy push during the debates he brought barack obama out of retirement to put some bullets in the heads of a few people's political careers but really the big thing is kamala harris she's a freaking d.a she has put a lot of people in prison and the socialists loathe her and of the 700-ish appointees that biden has announced so far not one of them is from the socialist camp and they're furious they probably should be now i'm sure some of you are like what about portland well let's talk about portland now this is exactly what it looks like this is darth vader in a dress riding a unicycle playing a flame throwing bagpipe portland is not normal you should never look to portland as an example of anything but portland portland is no more representative of the united states than disney world is in fact if you think of the black life matter movements you know it dominated the news for a big chunk of last year right everyone talks about how big they were but you know if if you eliminate the very first week of them when it all started and portland we never had a single day where we had more than a hundred thousand people protesting nationwide usually it was in the low single digits of thousands it's not that it's not important it's not that we should ignore it but it wasn't this giant movement that we all thought we'd just been in lockdown for coronavirus and we're just you know looking for anything to take up our time so this is where we are social conservative core a democratic coalition is a little all over the place or that's where we were until january 6. now in my opinion most of the media has collapsed as a functional institution in this country we're not getting the facts we're not getting the context we need to put those facts into a perspective so of the many many stories that came out on that day i want to focus on one the capitol police officer who died he was murdered he was hit in the head bashed a skull in with a fire extinguisher a different person then drug him out and threw him into the crowd where he was beaten to death one of the people who beat him used a pole that had the american flag attached to the other end we also know that the president was fully aware of the type of the quality of people that he was attracting to washington and we also know that he danced literally danced in the west wing when he found out that the capital had been stormed now i'm sure we're all going to take our own lessons from this but for purposes of today and this conversation i want to focus on one specific thing the republican party no longer owns the law and order topic and that changes things because the political faction most obsessed with that topic is this one they have supply chains they have staff they have assets and if they can't rely on the president for law and order then they are in the wrong party and if you look at the folks that joe biden is nominating for his cabinet almost all of them are strongly pro-business this may well be the face of the new democratic party now i don't want anyone to get too excited or too dejected this hasn't gelled yet we are year five in a transition process that historically takes eight to 12 years and it's not like it's just us politics evolve with economic trends and technology and demographic shifts in geopolitics and in the last generation we have struggled through the end of the cold war massive wave of globalization the rise of the digital age and now probably we're on the verge of a massive deglobalization shift of course we are going to do our politics [Music] differently think of france three years ago their equivalent of the democrats and republicans both imploded at the same time they are still picking through that wreckage we will get through this this will be our seventh political overhaul this is not the end this is merely a transition now transitions are painful they're awkward they're loud they're messy this is no exception but we will get through this and whether this excites you or makes you drop into despair now is the time to act because this hasn't set yet we still have at least a couple more years and especially if you consider yourself a business voter or a fiscal voter or a national security voter and you want to still be a republican now is the time to take your party back because believe it or not the folks in that circle not all of them want to grab a canister of bear spray in a confederate flag and march on the capital and kill a cop there's an uproar in that community right now about what has happened and they could really use the math and maps crowd again okay so that's where we are let's talk about where we've been at the end of world war ii the united states was really the last last man standing so we drew our allies together and pitched an idea for a new age we will guard all civilian trade everywhere in the world and in exchange we get to write your security policies we bribed up an alliance to fight the cold war and it worked but the cold war ended 30 years ago and the question now is what's next well if you want to maintain a global order if you want to maintain a global system global peace you have to do one of three things actually you do three or three things number one you have to have a political culture that agrees that a global system is a good idea i would argue that that was already on the rocks well before donald trump ever entered the white house and with the events of january 6 i would argue that our political culture needs time to heal and that will take time let's let's assume for just a second that joe biden is the guy and he will be able to magically bring us all together and into a new age of american leadership how long do you think that's going to take like an hour six months two years more time than he has it's what year and a half it's going to take time in the meantime no one's managing the global system okay so if we don't have the political culture what else number two global interests well we've never had that as a percentage of gdp the united states remains the least involved economy in the world for us globalization was a means to a security end we pay you to stand with us against the soviets we never invested our economy in it because then it wouldn't have been a bribe it would have been extortion so one and two both gone what's the third one you want to maintain a global system you need a global military footprint and that's gone this is total u.s troop deployments around the world year by year we now have fewer troops stationed around the world than at any time since the 1920s folks it's over and if you're betting on globalized exchange for anything in your life you should be prepared to write it off that's the geopolitical side now let's talk numbers now this is a standard demographic profile children at the bottom young adults mature adults retirees at the top men on one side women on the other this is mexico this is what we call a consumption-led demographic because whenever the bulge in your structure is below roughly age 40 it's all about kids and cars and college and homes and spending it's what drives modern systems and when american business leaders and american political leaders look at a demographic like mexico we like what we see two big reasons first they're young mexico consumes more than it can produce they buy a lot of american imports second there's little competition the things that people who are 40 and under are good at are not the same things that americans tend to be good at so mexico excels at low and mid-range manufacturing and assembly that's not what we do we do the high-end we do the design so the propensity for trade between mexico and the united states is huge and it's growing and they became our number one trading partner in 2019 and that is a position they will not give up in our lives this is a partner and this is not the koreans had a baby bust 50 years ago that they have never recovered from and now it's too late this is a terminal demography but for the moment they can make it work because when you have a lot of people in your 50s and early 60s folks that have been on the job for 30 40 years they're very high value added hugely productive but they're going head-to-head with the american worker and there aren't enough koreans in their 20s and 30s to purchase everything that is produced so they have to export it in a globalized system this can work if the us lets it now from roughly 1980 to roughly 2015 the world was in kind of this perfect balance most of the world was either consumption-led like mexico today or export-led like korea today and the trade was flying fast and furious because the americans made sure it could we patrolled the sea lanes for everyone we left our markets open that was the deal of bretton woods at the end of world war ii but as i'm sure we all know this is data from 2000 yes 2000. as i'm sure we all know 20 years later we are all 20 years older and the math no longer works we've passed the peak most of the advanced economies are past the point of any hope of demographic recovery they've aged too much they can't have kids anymore and developing countries are aging faster than the developed ones did the brazilians for example are aging at six times the rate of aging here in the united states now here our demography isn't great but it's certainly not awful because our baby boomers did something that none of their cohorts around the world did they had kids no the millennials for all their many many many oh so many faults have something that their cohorts around the world don't have they freaking exist and their consumption today is driving the american system and their investment later will drive the american system it's not perfect but it is by far the best in the world let me give you an idea of scale what i've done here is i've stacked up the world's top 50 consumption-led economies by gdp us is the big blue bar here's where that stack is going to be 10 years from now now this is absorb assumes zero growth which i realize is not fair i'm just trying to give you an idea of relative bulk here are the world's export-led systems china today is the world's fastest aging society apparently the one child policy worked a little too well and so they have already aged past any hope of being a consumption-led system they are enjoying a moment in time right now when they're an export-led system and that was going to end this decade anyway and then here are what i call post-growth systems countries that have already aged past the point of no return already have more retirees not just than children but then working adults and here's what it's going to look like in 10 years the economic structure that we have lived in our entire adult lives is already gone we will never recover to where we were at the beginning of 2020. it is mathematically impossible it's not trump it's not trade it's people let's talk covid what we've got here is new infection seven day moving average in per capita terms so the numbers are broadly cross comparison the united states is that blue line near the top united kingdom is the pink one and what we've got here are the world's six largest consumption-led systems so the us the uk france advanced economies all facing degrees of lockdown all facing constrained consumption the three developing countries brazil mexico and india similar systems similar problems and the reason i kept india on here despite the fact that it looks like it rubs out coronavirus is it hasn't they just stopped testing and so their numbers look great but their hospitals are a freaking disaster before you get too cocky you've done that in iowa yes your cases are down by two-thirds in the last two months so is your testing so we don't know and the number there for the united states represents some version of that trend nationwide point being data for the advanced economies is undoubtedly understanded by at least a factor of three for the developing world probably at least a factor of ten but the takeaway here is much more simple any time you are in a prolonged health lockdown consumption suffers and anytime you're in a prolonged trade conflict manufacturing production resources that's been going on now for a year so the consumption-led economies of the world are offline which means that the export-led economies have no one to sell to and 2022 was kind of the magic year when most countries flip that's only a year away which means it's already over the world will never go back to consumption levels that we saw at the beginning of last year not in our lives there is good news i would like to introduce you to william shakespeare no joke that's actually his name he was the second person in the united kingdom to get the pfizer vaccine now the pfizer vaccine has some downsides it has to be stored at negative 70 which requires dry ice and it takes two shots roughly a month apart but a week after pfizer came out we got the modern vaccine it still needs two shots but it can be stored in a commercial grade freezer so we already have more doses of the moderna vaccine in circulation and distribution than we had of the pfizer one that's great just around the corner we've got the astrazeneca or also known as the oxford vaccine also two shots but it can be stored in a refrigerator and in the united kingdom they already have more doses of that out than the other two put together we'll probably go through the certification process in this country for the oxford vaccine by the end of the month certainly by the end of february and then we'll have three but the one i'm holding out for is the johnson and johnson because it only takes one shot and it can be stored in a fridge this is the one that most of us are probably going to get it should inshallah come out in february and we can start inoculations with it in march what this means is we are looking at everyone in the united states who wants to get vaccinated being able to get vaccinated probably by june 1st which means we can use the summer to regenerate the economy and by the time we get to september we can be going again on all cylinders there is an end in sight it just isn't soon enough to save the trade system if you're in the united states that's fine if you're in the rest of the world 2021 has gotten up to a bang-up start i'm already trying to return to sender and it's not done it's just getting going 2021 from a geopolitical point of view is most likely to be far worse than 2020 if you can imagine that there's three things for this crowd i kind of want to underline first of all the best bit of good news you will have all year the top right we are going to have a trade deal with the united kingdom now that the uk is no longer in the european union they are no longer benefiting from things like the common agricultural policy that means almost their entire agricultural sector is going to go under i don't know if you guys knew this but british food sucks and as terms of whatever the trade deal is with the united states u.s farmers are going to get access in addition as terms of that deal they're probably going to lose preferential access from europe so you're talking about two-thirds potentially of the united kingdom's food intake is going to have to be resourced that can't help but benefit american agriculture second the woman in the bottom right that's catherine ty she's going to be the new us trade representative now i don't know how many of you are familiar with the existing one robert lighthizer he's kind of a hard ass bare knuckle negotiator very disturbingly good at his job this isn't her she doesn't have the gravitas she doesn't have the experience she's a former well she's a current congressional staffer she's never been in charge of a large team she's never led a negotiation that should tell you everything you need to know about the biden administration's trade policies there are no new negotiations there'll be one with the uk they'll do some stuff on the edges i think with the chinese and that's it no new deals but the deals we have korea japan canada mexico and soon the united kingdom that's half the american trade portfolio it's not a priority what she is is a trade lawyer they will sue the pants off of everybody so if you're representing farm credit or any sort of agricultural conglomerate or organization of farmers and ranchers get to know her very well she is eager to sue everyone just make sure you get on our good side before you need our help third is china one of the last actions the trump administration is taking on its way out the doors to normalize relations with taiwan as much as possible catherine thai is taiwanese and the biden administration has already made it very clear that the tariffs are going nowhere in fact they'll probably go up in fact they're going to work with every government they can in the world to try to bring more and more pressure to the chinese now whether or not you think this is going to work or not is not the point the point is that the chinese are going to flip their they're going to be very upset at the biden administration for every reason imaginable and to think that this relationship is going to get better before before i'm sorry it's going to get much worse before it gets better assuming it gets better and the chinese have made it very clear politically and in their purchases that for the foreseeable future they will only purchase american products no matter what they are when they have outsourced i'm sorry run out of sources from everywhere else it happened this year with soy and with pork and with corn and yes right now purchases are high but that's because they drained the entire world of everything else first it's a political decision they are preparing for an internal lockdown and this is one way they can insulate themselves at least a little bit so for ag sales for the next year or two i wouldn't get too comfortable one final thing since you're not all in agriculture i just want to talk about what americans themselves are doing what we've got here is not a population density map it's an urban planning map and the cities are color coded by the number of directions that they can expand physically cities that are in blue or in green can expand in almost every direction those that are in red or in orange are starkly limited in fact those in red can't expand physically at all so if they want to add more people they have to go up and going up is expensive right now the united states is going through its greatest internal migration since the gis came home from the war three things are driving this first the baby boomers the largest generation we've ever had are nearing retirement they don't want to shovel snow sorry iowa and so they're moving into warmer climates second the millennials are discovering that after they've had their great urban experience that they can't afford to raise their children in a midtown apartment so they are moving to some place that they can have a yard and third because of coronavirus no one wants to live where they are dependent on mass transit all the cities that have good mass transit are the ones with circles around them so people are moving south and people are moving west to get to places that have lower costs of living lower costs of expansion and where car culture makes more sense if you're in one of those green or blue cities in the south or the west expect land prices to go up because people are going to need the space okay i deliberately left a lot of time for questions because i'm sure i kicked over all the hornet's nests and so yes uh we're gonna open it up we also for those of you who are online you have a chat function that you can send your questions in please keep the invectives to a minimum or just send them directly to my comment site on my on my website that'd be great sometimes they make for great drinking games okay we also have a couple of microphones right up here now don't be shy i realize there's a lot of iowans here uh channel your inner chicagoan and feel free to rake me over the coals it's totally fine please we've seen a lot of uh you're saying we're still in transition worldwide so we've got our obviously our dc stuff going on what are the other major g20 countries that we should be looking at that kind of volatility that says the french us and you're talking political churn yeah dramatic political oh well i mean dramatic but not just slight but sure sure you talk about the implode of the french and all these other yeah the french don't have a functional opposition or a functional ruling party right now it's really just macron and a bunch of sycophants in the parliament i don't mean that it's a bad thing honestly when the french really do get their stuff together they're kind of scary so i'm not i'm fine with this but it does mean that france's ability to function internationally are kind of limited i like to say that we americans learned all of our bad habits from our parents so the british system oh my god what a disaster um if you can imagine bernie sanders as a nazi that was the former leader of the labor party uh in uh britain and they it'll take them a decade to recover from that so they don't have a functional oppositional party boris johnson has some things about him that i find really interesting and positive but to get to be premier he basically wrecked his party not as badly as donald trump did to the republicans but kind of in the same vein so we're going to have very unstable governments in the uk for the foreseeable future figure at least the next five years especially once the terms of a trade deal with the united states come out that's going to piss off a lot of people but they have no options what about angela angela merkel god she's been trying to retire for six years uh every time she does she picks somebody to follow her up and then they kind of look under the hood and realize all the problems that are coming to germany and they quit so she's now on her fourth potential replacement uh the guy who's most likely to take the job if it were to happen right now and who knows whether it will a guy by the names of um spawn spawn um he's he's a gay ultra nationalist which is kind of a weird combo even for germany i'm not saying he's going to get the job but he's in the lead right now but the point is the social democrats in germany have collapsed and the christian democrats are so organization just discombobulated that angela is really the only one so there's no clear movement there we haven't had the political crisis yet because angela hasn't left but as soon as she does wow japan we've gone back to revolving prime ministers canada has a guy who has a great sock game as prime minister but honestly it's probably only a matter of time before his vice premier knifes him in his sleep uh have i left out anybody important i mean italy's italy uh vladimir or medvedev oh sorry i thought we were talking about the real countries okay uh yeah vladimir um every he's kind of like angela he's tried to train up some replacements every time and then they start acting all russian on him and then they vanish so he's another one of those that'll be there until the end of his days and you know as we saw with yeltsin probably another decade after that perfect the russians keep inviting me to visit and i keep saying no please uh appreciate your comments you said earlier about having with all the political trouble around the capital this last several days of where america is at that take time to bring healing to that um just would be really curious about your thoughts related to what's taking place in the last several days related to the parlor application basically where google and apple and private lay health business which have the right to really do what they want to do as a company sure came in and basically said we don't hear that voice we're just going to we're just going to cut it off um i'd like to hear it commentary [Music] i did ask for awkward questions um let's start by laying out what has happened and what has happened while you guys have been here today uh since noon uh mastercard and american express said that they're not going to process payments for anyone who supported electric election g certification so if you want to give money for example to ted cruz and and this is the sticks you're gonna have to send them cash because citibank has said the same thing we have a broad repudiation by the business community of everything that happened on january 6th and that's one of the reasons i'm thinking that the business community really is going to jump ship they're they're furious they're scared hard to argue now a lot of people are concerned that big tech is liberal true they're also concerned that this is broad coordination almost a conspiracy of big tech to push conservative voices out not true tens of thousands of companies and business associations repudiated trump on the 6th and asked for vice president pence to remove him from power using article 25. this is not a small sliver this is almost everybody will the rage last we'll see but biden would be a fool if he tried he didn't try to take advantage of this now the official reason that big tech is giving for all this d platforming is that they saw violence ahead of time they told the fbi what they knew but the violence happened anyway and then they looked at their platforms again and they saw more violence coming with specific plots in all 50 states specifically to target the inauguration everywhere that's why they shut it down amazon web services when they shut it down within minutes schematics were circulating on parlor about how to tac attack amazon server farms so i find this justified what i don't like is who's making the decision the way us law exists currently something called section 230 in the interco or the telecoms decency act of 1996 says that anything that is discussed anything that is posted and shared on any social media any internet platform whatsoever that the people operating the platform summer suffer no criminal liability no matter what it is so for example video of the capitol police officer was murdered the entire process of the murder was documented and uploaded that's not illegal and certainly they're not criminally culpable for hosting it but that doesn't mean that the companies wanted to and that's why they're acting now the only institution that can change what is allowed is congress and congress you may have noticed for the last decade has been um rather feckless so until such time as congress actually does congressional things it is entirely up to the companies of the united states to decide what is permissible in the public sphere and what is not i am not comfortable with that but until congress acts it is really the only option so to underline political violence is bad in any form in any advanced country we should stomp that out wherever we can i think silicon valley in the short term did the right thing but in the long term it is up to us and congress to figure out what we will allow i don't think anyone here thinks that celebrating the killing of a cop is something we want on that list fight will the day come when we will have to prove we have had the covet vaccine to travel either domestically or abroad yes but it's not going to take too long we should have mass vaccinations finished in this country before the summer we should also know by the summer how long the vaccination will last but yes uh i and i don't think it's just gonna be about travel uh you already need to prove that you're clear before you can travel internationally to almost anywhere uh so it's not really a shock but most employers are going to require proof of vaccination the alternative is to basically live in our houses forever and i really don't want to do that this is the first i mean i usually spend 250 275 days a year traveling for work this is my first in-person event since march i'm ready for this to be over and you know sign me up uh this is these these vaccines are the most field-tested medical product in human history each one of them individually and we already have four so i'm really not worried about side effects there has not been a death from anywhere in the test we actually had more deaths in the placido group which i find hilarious does that mean there are not going to be side effects no of course there's gonna be side effects it's kind of halfway between a flu shot and a tetanus shot from what we know so far i can live with that please got a few questions from the people online great first one what are you projecting for major regional wars in the world over the next five to ten well there's a cheery topic uh without the united states we are going to get countries that are going to raid shipping for this reason or the other reason so for example last week iran hijacked a south korean oil tanker us did nothing because we don't care anymore and as that happens we should expect to see a maritime conflict up and down the persian gulf to northeast asia supply run because it's so vulnerable i expect the the most shooting to happen in the persian gulf between the iranians and the saudis and then in the western pacific between the japanese and the chinese and whoever they can line up to be allies which means most of them are going to be on the japanese side i'm also concerned about the russians doing one last ditch last gasp expansion before their demographics collapse and that puts them head-to-head with the germans so i mean that's kind of the more history changes the more it stays the same to a certain degree i don't expect any of this to bleed over into the western hemisphere there really aren't any territorial disputes and the local powers in the western hemisphere trade with each other in a more constructive and less predatory way primarily the united states mexico and canada so i'm not worried here i'm worried there next question peter what are you most optimistic about and what is your most fearful to you uh let's start with optimistic i think the two sectors they're going to do best in the united states over the next 30 years are petrochemicals and agriculture petrochemicals because we have an energy supply that is heavy on the inputs for the petrochemical sector particularly high quality crude oil and natural gas and so we have the lowest cost structure anywhere in the world with no security problems agriculture because we've got the land we've got the cheap inputs because of petrochemicals it actually rains in the united states which is a nice touch compared to some agricultural zones and if you look around the world the other bread baskets that are out there most of them can't compete can't maintain output in a world where transport becomes constrained in some way about 80 percent of the calories that are produced in the world are produced with imported inputs so any interruption to transport hits them on the production side and on the export side and that's just not viable so i don't see countries like brazil or russia being significant agricultural exporters over the long haul in a world where security breaks down but for you guys no problem at all now that story is different based on what the product is i'm far more bullish on things like soy than say pork but that's kind of the general story as for what i'm concerned about in a world where the united states is not watching the world secondary powers will rise and 10 15 20 years from now we are going to go back into the world without allies and a lot of the things that we could lean upon others to help us with during the cold war we will have to do for ourselves and that i lay squarely at the feet of not just donald trump but barack obama and george w bush and bill clinton we have let all of our allies degrade we've gone from having over 100 firm allies in the world to three that was a mistake and we will pay for that in due time but not soon probably should have ended on the positive all right you guys have been great everybody take care stay safe

Channel: PeoplesCo

Views: 31,900

Rating: 4.2806416 out of 5

Keywords: Peoples Company, Land Investment Expo, Land Expo, Peter Zeihan, globalization

Id: kch4Z1GpNOQ

Length: 49min 0sec (2940 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021