I think that Peter identifies interesting possible chains of events and they are worth knowing about.

I think Peter projects unwarranted — prophet level — certainty on both his predictions and his rationalisations about why things in the past happened as they did. For those subjects interesting to me, it was easy to find more qualified sources which disagree with Peter.

This seems like the standard conventional doom-and-gloom that someone is always selling, because there is a market for it. And sometimes they are even right. If WWIII breaks out, yeah, things will get bad. There was always something in the past that "experts" were warning about. There was the population crisis mass starvation worries in the 70's, nuclear war in the 80's, peak oil was going to disrupt the 90's, Y2K was going to cause a great depression in the 2000's, climate change, etc. At one time, the crisis of the day was that China was going to be overpopulated, but now it is because of underpopulation. If you want a more high-brow tech related "the end is near" scenario, why not be more worried about AI? Just think how most people are at least somewhat immune to the advertisement / mass persuasion techniques of today. But what happens when there is an army of bots with the equivalent of 1/10/100/1000 human minds working to sway each person on an individual level of various political things? Will we have time to muster a suitable defense if the offense comes on rapidly enough?

Zeihan is not a doom-and-gloom prophet, in that he doesn't conclude the next decades will be terrible. He only says that they will be challenging for the people who will live in them, and extremely interesting for analysts like himself (some of the events that are coming have no precedence in history, so they will be super interesting to watch and analyse if nothing else).

Zeihan is similar to Taleb in that both have an interesting idea worth reading about, but then proceed to write a bunch of nonfiction paperbacks you might see being sold at the Hudson News at the airport. No shame in them making some money selling paperbacks at volume but take the details with a grain of salt.

Zeihan uses geography and demographics to make some solid observations, but then proceeds to project far into the future. The world and human behavior is too complex to say anything that definitive based on just geography. I think Zeihan is best used as someone who has a paradigm worth adding to your tool belt but maybe not listening to his predictions verbatim.

To use an example you mentioned, rare earth mining. There are other nations with rare earth lodes and China has passed its peak of the market share of rare earth production.

One trick when evaluating a claim is to consider how markets will respond and whether that incentive can be picked up by another nation.

Another reality is that random extreme effects change the course of history all the time and many can’t really be predicted by geography. One of Zeihan’s big predictions is that the US will return to isolationism and European unity will weaken. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seemingly shocked both trends backwards. Is that a temporary shock or part of a bigger trend? I would be hard pressed to predict either way.

I'm in the same boat as you, discovered him when the Ukraine war started (which he had predicted in his first book). He seems to make a lot of sense, but his predictions break a lot of the trends or status quo we're used to.

I've read his first 2 books and if you listen to him now it's the same general idea, just more detailed and in-depth because it's book length, of course. He does predict that Russia will attack Ukraine in there (I think that book came out in 2012 or so?). He also makes a lot of other more vague predictions that I don't think have a chance of coming true, e.g. various inter-European wars and annexations in a struggle for resources and local control. But none of those are as specific as "Russia will attack Ukraine within the next 10 years."

He has predicted some pretty out there stuff, like China collapsing within 10 years, Germany's economy collapsing within 2 years.

Guess we'll see. He's entertaining for sure :)

I like that he pays attention to big picture stuff like demographics, and has been pointing out for a long time that china's population will fall, which we now see that it is. But he goes too far and makes such confident, dramatic predictions that I find hard to take seriously. He seems to think that populations like China will simply disappear with a couple of decades, like they can't just start having more children at some point? Why not? A lot of his predictions are based on the idea that the US will stop guaranteeing global marine trade. This hasn't happened, there's no indication that it's going to happen, and I don't think I've seen a justification for it at all, but he talks still as if it's going to happen any day now. Still overall an interesting and entertaining thinker, I watch his YouTube channel.

Since history is like weather and climate (accurate short time predictions are nigh-impossible, accurate long term predictions are possible), he's banking on long-term predictions. But just like with the climate, the exact trajectory by which the system arrives at a changed climate is unpredictable.

With climate and weather, the mechanisms are well understood, with human history, the mechanisms are subject to change and are changing all the time.

(Edit: So as far as mechanisms are cited, e.g. Neon for lasers, I personally don't give much credence to it, the more specific the mechanism is)

I've watched every single video of his in the last year. (Long covid, nothing else to do, nor the energy)

He connects a lot of pieces that otherwise don't make sense to a mapper like me. I know he's not right about everything, but he seems to have a reasonably good handle on things. A far better handle that I've seen before.

Of course he's got blind spots, and doesn't know all the details, so reality is bound to deviate from his predictions, as it likes to do for us all.

I don't think any of this is hyperbolic. I think anyone with a Stratfor subscription has known about most of these economic facts for months.

Given that Zeihan used to work at Stratfor the similarity in arguments and style are not surprising. I wouldn't call the style hyperbolic exactly but there is definitely a pattern of undue certainty, sweeping conclusions and geographic/demographic determinism. Entertaining for sure. Makes you feel like you're in a top secret briefing room.

>Makes you feel like you're in a top secret briefing room.

For those who are actually in top secret briefing rooms, I wonder what, if anything, there is to counteract that same type of feeling. That this is the best data and the smartest people in the world giving recommendations, so of course we should take action. It seems like there could/should be some sort of memento mori type mechanism to pass down through the generations, that, yes, dear leader, you might see more because you are standing on the top of the highest hill around. But you can't see everything. And while you are looking to the north, you are not looking to the south. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do something.

Germany already took enormous amounts of immigrants from Syrian war. Now they "benefit" from Russian-Ukraine conflict. I think there will be zero/null shortage of the workforce there. The country is still desirable target for immigrants. Instead Germany problem may be lack of natural resources, they relied heavily on cheap commodities from Russia. Probably they will try to go back to business as usual as fast as possible to restore their competitiveness.

China: just as government introduced one child policy it may introduce 2 or 3 children policy, saying e.g. that with 2 children you will get an apartment for free or that childless ppl have to pay 50% tax rate... So far China is not a consumption society, so decrease in population will not translate to a huge decrease in consumer spending. Instead they still rely on exports as engine of the economic growth. Introducing sanction against China by EU & US may be a greater hit than demographics.

Probably we will have to find ways to produce e.g. batteries without rare earth metals. New deposits where recently also found in Sweden.

No government will risk famine in their own country to support "rich countries sanctions". Certainly neither India nor China will. Poor countries will buy regardless if the wheat comes from Russia or Ukraine, not buying means starving a lot of people and social unrest.

Time to build neon producing facility in the west...

I think the current situation will be remembered as a small local conflict, just as Vietnam war, first gulf war and hundreds of other conflicts. Despite propaganda both sides (NATO, Russia) do not want to go to the full scale conflict (see NATO and Russia behavior after a missile have fallen on Polish border). Some EU politics still want to talk with Putin (Macron), some countries (Hungary) want Russia to actually win. My country (Poland) went "full panic mode", mostly because populistic government tries to use this conflict to boost their chances of winning an election coming in September.

As for Taiwan there was already a serious conflict about that island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis Looks like we have a replay of that today. Just as south korea wants to avoid war at all costs (because the war will be on their territory), Taiwan want to also avoid war at all costs. China wants to unite with Taiwan on peaceful terms, otherwise we would see missiles flying over the island a long time ago.

Overall I believe Chinese government is kind of "brute gentlemens" or maybe even merchants, while Russian gov are just brutes. Nevertheless as long as Russia and China do not pull from stuff like fight with global warming, WHO (US shame on you) there will be no WWIII. Do let media panic and propaganda get to your heart.