The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1370: Peter Zeihan | North American Solutions to a Breaking World Order

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

War is getting cheaper, supply lines are in danger, and the old order is cracking. Peter Zeihan explains why it's breaking and what North America can do.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1370What We Discuss with Peter Zeihan:War just got cheaper, not less lethal. A drone costing double-digit dollars can now pick its own target, fly hundreds of miles, and destroy gear guarded by $4 million interceptors. Ukraine fires hundreds a day, and the edge that made piloted systems king is shrinking by the week.America blew through half its Patriot interceptors in the Iran war and can build only about 70 a year — refilling the stockpile is a 15-year math problem. The result: a broad drawdown of US power across the Eastern Hemisphere, because we can no longer afford to defend it.The real crisis isn't losing cheap gadgets — it's losing the building blocks. Roughly 80% of the world's steel, copper, lithium, and cobalt is processed in China. Break that system before a replacement exists, and we lose the materials that make the things that make everything else.AI isn't floating safely above the mess. Its best chips lean on about 9,000 companies and 100,000 production steps, so one broken link stalls the whole thing. Stack that on China's demographic freefall — a white-collar generation apparently never born — and 'fragile' undersells it.The way through: deepen North American integration — lock in NAFTA with Mexico and Canada and rebuild industrial capacity at home. Mexico's plants are largely built and Turkey is rising fast. The path exists; it just takes the discipline to stop dismantling the fix first.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Ground News: 40% off unlimited access Vantage subscription: groundnews.com/jordanBetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordanCash App: Get $10: Download app, use code Bitcoin10, and send $5 to a friend in the first two weeksK12: Learn more at k12.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the story of secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional special operator, real-life pirate or astronaut. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, and psychology, and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show, war is getting cheaper, not less destructive, not more

civilized, just cheaper. A drone costing thousands of dollars can now make limited decisions on its own, fly hundreds of miles, and destroy equipment protected by $4 million interceptors, which is excellent news for defense contractors and slightly less excellent news for everyone else. Peter Zion is back to explain why Ukraine's rapidly evolving drone war may be rewriting the rules of combat, why America has burned through so many missile interceptors that it may no longer be able to project power the way it used to, and why the crisis in the Persian Gulf could take down East Asian manufacturing long before most people realize their Amazon order is the least of their problems. Because if China breaks before

anybody rebuilds the processing capacity to replace it, we're not merely losing cheap electronics. We're losing the copper, steel, aluminum, lithium, and other materials required to manufacture the things that manufacture everything else. We'll also examine why advanced semiconductors depend on thousands of companies and roughly 100,000 production steps, why artificial intelligence may be one of globalization's most fragile creations, and what Peter believes could still prevent the bleakest version of this future. Spoiler, Mexico might help save us. Your LED flashlight may also survive, so at least you'll be able to see how screwed we are. Here we go with Peter. Peter, are Iran, Ukraine, and China, three separate crises, or are we kind of looking at one

global systems crisis from three different angles that people can't separate because we're just reading the news? At the moment, they're still separate, but, you know, I might change my mind by the time it takes us to record this video, so who knows? Got it. Let me give you the connections real quick. Economically, the Persian Gulf crisis, China is by far the country that's getting hurt by that the most. The only reason it's not really obvious to everybody is the Chinese have stopped sharing

data with anyone on anything. So we really don't know the status of the reserves or their flow-throughs or the refinery system. We have a little glimpse at the re-exports of a refined product, and that's about it. So if this isn't resolved, really the entire East Asian manufacturing system fails, of which China is the biggest piece. The Ukraine angle, we are going through a revolutionary and military affairs. This is the second phase. The first phase was back in the 90s when we started. started putting digital technologies with military tech. We got satellite communications. We got cruise missiles.

Cool stuff. Now, the costs of the new generation of technologies is so low, like in double digits of dollars, that you can put a low-grade memory chip on a drone with some really basic optics. And when the drone gets over its potential target zone, it can look at what you've loaded into that memory chip. Play through a decision tree.

Match targets. Pick a target itself without you doing. anything, and then it goes. And once the decision-making is on board, it can't be jammed. And so we're seeing the Ukrainians literally firing hundreds of these things a day. And we know now that in the first phase of the war back in March, the Iranians had some proto-versions of these drones. And the drones that actually hit U.S. military facilities were probably using these memory drones. Well, that was almost six months ago now, which means the Iranians probably have hundreds, if not thousands of them now. Right. Jeez. Wow. So you're programming this thing to say hit anything that looks like

a person wearing a green uniform. Yeah. Basically, you give it a rough map and some silhouettes to look for. You load in a bunch of pilot data. And then you rank order what you're after that day. So target number one might be the distillation column off of a refinery. Number two might be a fuel truck. Number three might be a power station. Number four might be a tank. And if you can't see anything the first category, it'll go for the second, then the third, and the fourth, or whatever. And these are getting more sophisticated by the week, because the first of these only came out in February. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So, and you don't need like a 4K, 360-degree camera with a bunch of, I don't know,

LIDAR on this thing. You just need the most basic. I get stuff off Alibaba for my kid that's like a little drone ball that you throw to a friend. And it's pretty cool. And it floats well, it doesn't have optics on it. But I mean, it's like $6. So if you were to spend, spend $60 and you were making a million of them at a time or whatever, 100,000 at a time, you could put some explosives on there. Even the ones I buy that are really cheap can still lift, maybe if you put two of them together, could still lift a small enough payload that if it blew up next to your head, it would be lights out, right?

So it wouldn't take out a tank. We have not yet gotten to the point that people are using microdrones on the battlefield to target people. Those are still, for the most part, first person drones that are controlled through a digital tether, but it's not far away. Yeah, I don't see how it could be. I mean, the technology exists is probably just kind of expensive or maybe their preferences to destroy material instead of personnel for now. At the moment, if you've got a fiber optic drone, so it basically has a spool of fishing line beyond it, that can't be jammed either. And at the moment, that is the cheapest way to

target an infantryman. But if this technology continues to the evolve, then you can just let out 20 of them, they'll fly over there, look for a soldier. And if they can't find any, they'll fly back land, you know, once that becomes cheaper, that's what we'll do. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. A lot of people think, oh, once they have drones, all of our fighter jets and Patriot Interceptor missiles are obsolete because they won't fight wars like that anymore. That doesn't sound right to me because you do different things with those tools. It's a different layer and it's changing how the weapons are used. So as a rule, I tend to agree with you, but something to keep in mind is that since 1989, there's really only been one large military industrial complex in the world that's been American, and most of our

allies buy our equipment. And what we're discovering now is a lot of these new technologies are really effective at destroying some of these types of equipment in certain environments. So, for example, using drones against a Patriot missile battery. You can super saturate very quickly, and the United States at any given time only has a few thousand Patriot Interceptors. Well, in the environment that we're in now, where we just blew through half of those in the Iran War, We're now no longer giving the Ukrainians any because we can only make like 70 of them a year. Jeez. So do we really think that we are ever going to export Patriot missiles ever again?

Right, no. Because we need them all. And so everyone else is now designing new military systems, offensive and defensive both, with these new technologies that just puts the United States in a different category, if we're better or for worse. and we're at the beginning of the end of the old system. We don't know what legacy systems will still have uses in the new system. I would assume that fighter jets are still going to be super handy. But I don't know that for a fact because we're still only in the part where a really,

really advance of these new drones is $50,000. Right. Most of them are a tenth of that. Right. So instead of spending, I don't know what a fighter jet costs, $60 million. If you got a cheap one. Yeah. So that's a lot of drones.

That's a lot of really advanced drones. So, yeah, I guess fighter jets are very specific tools. Like, I don't know, I'm not a tech expert. It's the human brain. You put a person in a weapon system, how does a degree of reach and versatility, in decision making that a drone just can't match and won't match anytime soon? But the drones keep expanding in their reach and their capability and their independent control, and that chips away at the envelope that makes a human piloted system advantageous.

Yeah, this makes sense. Okay. So people are afraid that the United States is running out. of interceptors. It sounds like that's not totally wrong. I know. It's a reasonable fear. Yeah. Guys like Ryan Macbeth say, well, they say we're running out of interceptors. We still have tons of anti-ship missiles and harpoons and things like that. So it's not like we're running out of missiles generally. We're just running out of specific kinds of interceptors. And you said we can make like 70 Patriots a year. Is that because they're really, really complicated or because we just

haven't tried to make more than 70 per year because we don't usually need this many? It's both. So one of the problems that AI drones, which don't exist, by the way, has been facing is when you take a high-end silicon-based semiconductor and you put it into a weapon system, it doesn't like heat or cold or shock or humidity or dust or vibration, which pretty much rules it out for most projects. So you have to have a different sort of chip base with gallium being one of the more popular ones that is more resilient. Gallium is a special meaty material that is produced as a by-project of aluminum. getting it refined to the degree that you can actually put into a chip requires a whole other level of infrastructure, and the only market is military. So it's a very complicated supply chain to make a very small amount of stuff of which the Patriots are one. And so expanding manufacturing of Patriots isn't just an issue of building another factory to assemble a Patriot. You have to double, triple, quadruple the entire supply chain of inputs that allows you to build that in the first place. You don't do that in six months.

That's a six-year program. So the Trump administration at the moment is in the process of getting the funding of quadrupling the Patriot production over the next four to five years. And the people who make the Patriots say that they're trying to make a, they would never use this word, but a discount version. I was going to say Patriot light, Diet Patriot. Yeah, sure. Which instead of having 95% success might only have 85% success, but it only costs $2 million instead of $4 million a shot. And that's good enough for our allies. Don't worry.

No, no, we're not going to export those because we need every single one. That's good enough for our grunts. No problem, guys. Don't worry. Exactly. Just to get back to February 28, we need like 15 years of output at this new rate. It's just not going to happen. I guess, though, if something is 80% effective instead of 95 and you launch two of them,

I'm not good at this kind of thing, but that seems okay, yeah. The standard procedure for Patriot batteries is to fire two at every interesting thing coming in any way. because they were designed not to intercept drones or piddly pissant ballistic missiles. They were designed to intercept nukes. And a 5% chance of losing your city is not good. So our burn rate will probably not change. If anything, we might be firing three, just to be sure. Yeah, holy smokes.

Okay, well, that's not reassuring. So what happens if we run out of those? Please tell me we're not just all sitting ducks going, okay, when's the next Patriot rolling off? because there's some drones coming in. We must have other ways of shooting things down other than Patriots, right? We do. We've got the THAAD

when we've used a greater percentage of those as interceptors since. So they face basically the same problem. That's a supersonic interceptor that doesn't even have a warhead. Just the kinetic hit was enough. Those are our two big systems, and they're both good for in-theater

and for intercepting ICBMs. Before we get to that point, assuming for the moment, that we don't just make colossively bad decisions on the national level, and let's just put that in a box for the moment. Before we get to that point, we just won't use them in theater defense for military operations. We will relocate everything to the homeland, except for very specific cases where we need to

protect a very specific military asset. Okay. Like a base in Saudi Arabia kind of thing? A very specific base, sent common gutter. That would be the only one in the Persian Gulf region that qualifies right now. Wow. Okay. So what do we do with our other bases just sort of leave them there to rust and move the equipment out? Yes. Wow. We're talking about a broad scale evacuation of American power in the eastern hemisphere. We don't. don't have the power to defend it anymore. That's crazy. That's crazy. So what happens to these Gulf countries that basically have palace guard armies and then just decided that if we give the U.S. a couple billion dollars a year for gear, they're going to protect us. Well, the steady state

where nothing else changes is pretty bad for them, obviously, because then you can basically have an army armed with toothpicks come in and knock them over. But it's not steady state. As the Ukrainians are showing, the rules of the game are changing, the goalposts are moving, and every state in the Persian Gulf, and every front and second-line state in NATO against the Russians, has already broken ground on mass manufacturing facilities to make Ukrainian drones at scale. So it's entirely possible that two years from now,

every ally we have is not going to be buying meaningful military equipment from the United States because it's just not applicable anymore and we won't deliver anymore. And they'll be going with a completely new set. What that looks like, God knows, because the first of these new drones aren't even six months old yet. Right. And just this morning, the Ukrainians hit a target in Siberia that was 1,100 miles from the front. With a drone?

With a drone. Wow. The technology is evolving so quickly that to guess what the new order of battle needs to be is kind of a stretch. But we do know that the Americans now burned through so much of their hardware that they consider to be important. the interceptors, that they can't project power like they used to. And so everyone is having to make do with what is on hand, and you can either design your own new fifth generation fighter jet, which is a 10-year process, and then get a half a dozen of them in year 11. Or you can work with Ukrainians and have 100,000 drones in under a year. Wow. It's not a complicated decision.

So are we going to have NATO drones, EU spec, US, Ukraine spec drones that just get, there's a million of them? This is maybe creaking open that little box, that we put that question into, but the United States is not participating in this drone buildout. Oh, right. Because Trump doesn't like Zelensky. Yeah.

Well, we'll have to play catch up after that administration is over because it doesn't really, yeah. Well, that's a different political box. I'm not sure that's possible either. Yeah, I mean, that's crazy. So are we just building our own drones, or are we just like, ah, we don't need those. We have other stuff.

Yeah, I don't mean to suggest the United States is not in the drone game. We are. In fact, we're the ones who initiate it. So like The Predator, for example, fantastic platform, same with the reaper, But they're 20 years old. And they were based on the idea that you have an unbreakable digital tether to the platform.

You control it in real time. These new drones can make limited decisions by themselves. Different type of mechanic. It's a little bit more similar to the old-skite Tomahawk, where you program in the target ahead of time and it uses GPS and reach the terrain to get to where it's going. But more sophisticated now. In the case of the United States, we don't face. a threat that is forcing us to innovate in the way that the Ukrainians are. Yeah, no one's invading the United States.

And everyone who borders Ukraine thinks of themselves as the next target because they are. And so they're doing everything they can to push these technologies for as quickly as possible. Do you think the U.S. could license interceptor manufacturing to Europe and Ukraine or no? No. I mean, we had the Trump administration go from informally in favor of that to informally against it in the last few days. The official reasons are IP theft and leakage, makes sense, or that the Ukrainians might be able to make the Patriots better and cheaper than we do? Reasonable concern. But the real thing is that we just need every single one ourselves. The United States will always prioritize national missile defense over any other military

project that have going on in the Eastern Hemisphere. And that means we need at least another 2,500 interceptors as quickly as possible. That's the sum total of all of our projected production for at least the rest of this decade and probably well in the next. Jeez. Wow. Okay. Since the last time you were here, which I don't know, let's say it's a year ago. Who knows?

I've slipped since that. Yeah. What development has forced the biggest change in your mental map? I know before we were kind of talking to Iran wasn't a thing. Ukraine probably had more or less just entered whatever phase it is where they're in their stalemate looking kind of thing. I mean, it's been a while since you've been here. What is the most dramatic change?

because China hasn't done much other than threatened Taiwan, which they were doing before. We have the Iran conflict, obviously. Did that surprise you that we went into Iran? I was curious if you thought that was going to happen or not. Yeah. Let me give you three. Let's start with Iran since that's the one you've pointed at. Yeah.

Every American president for the last 30 years has heard the Netanyahu pitch, because Netanyahu's been at the head of the political system in Israel for that long. If you attack Iran with us, it'll be over. in four days will be regime change, it'll start to look like Wisconsin, maybe you can offer its statehood. And it's always been unmitigated bullshit. And every president until this one has seen through it, and every president until this one has had advisors who have seen through it. But the Trump administration has put the analysts and the advisors from the NSA in a box and won't talk to them. It's shut down the State Department for all intents and purposes. Half of our ambassador role positions are still unfilled. And the defense

Department is now headed up by an ideologue who couldn't find his ass with both hands. And so Trump was like, this sounds great, let's do it. And so within four hours of Netanyahu leaving the White House, the carriers were dispatched. That's all the attention that was given to the decision. Wow. And the position has always been, we can't overthrow the government. It's ruled by the Mullas. There's over 10,000 of them, even if you take out the entire leadership council, it doesn't matter. In fact, the ones that have risen to the top are the moderates. They're the ones who are willing to talk to us. You mean that before we killed all of them, the moderates who were at the top? Yeah, exactly. We killed all the moderates and now we've got the really nasty ones at the top.

Great. Number two, it will be run by the IRGC, which is the paramilitary arm of the government. We really don't want that. That's where we are now. We do not have the interceptors and the naval capability and amphibious capability necessary to secure the entirety of the Persian Gulf and especially the Strait of Hormuz. So we're probably going to be looking at an energy closure. We have that now. And on top of that, we've burned through most of our interceptors. So this conflict is going to go down in history as the moment where the United States lost the ability to influence the Eastern Hemisphere. It never occurred to me that we could have an administration so out of touch with reality that we would do this on purpose. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So I always thought

the United States was going to back away from the Eastern Hemisphere because it wanted to, not because it had to. And that changes the trajectories a lot of things and a lot of places that have nothing to do with the Persian Gulf. Like what? Are you talking about China and Taiwan? Well, we still have somewhere between 10 and 13 million barrels of crude offline, which means we've been drying down global reserves at that rate now for five months.

We're at historical lows. We haven't had this level of crude in the system since we started building up reserves in the 1970s in the first place. How that is not manifested as a price shock, kind of surprises me. But it seems that everyone I've talked to in oil market is like, well, the outcome of what you're describing is so bad, it won't happen. Yeah, that seems logical. It's a really bad bad. Because really bad things never happen simply because they're so bad. They can't possibly happen. Because Iran has demonstrated that it can hit the terminus points of

every bypass pipeline out of the Persian Gulf. So we're nowhere near the worst case scenario. That's still the future. Right. That takes the East Asian. manufacturing system down with it, that severs North America from global energy market, so you actually get a three-part shock. We're at the beginning of this unraveling, nowhere near the end. So that's piece one. So let me pause you right here. So if this kind of energy crisis is going to screw over the East Asian manufacturing market,

which is going to suck for everybody, people are thinking, ah, China can't make anything, who cares? That means no more Amazon prime for everything overnight because... That means no more a lot of things. Yeah, no more a lot of things. But I'm talking about what the people want, which is free crap delivered within 24 hours so you don't have to wait instant gratification. But this seems like then China is heavily incentivized to try and figure out how to stop this Iran thing. And what we're seeing is something

I've been underlined for a long time. China has no influence outside of East Asia, except for money maybe. And the Iranians are clearly not monetarily driven. They have billions of dollars in frozen, hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen assets. And they basically are taunting us by saying, so what? We'll just wait you out. That's crazy. This is a culture worth 5,000 years, a cultural muscle tone. That doesn't mean we have to like it. Yeah. It's just, it's durable. So if the East Asian manufacturing base goes down and then China, are they going to suffer a massive economic crisis? Because of that, I would imagine if they can't make things like this, they're in deep, deep, deep trouble. And then everyone will go, aha, that's why America did this. Those smart

bastards are playing 5D chess, which is. Well, that brings us to the second issue. I never had the belief that Trump was a Republican, much less a pro-business Republican. But it never occurred to me that he would be so random in his policymaking. We've now had over 8,000 tariff changes under Trump, too. And every week we get new regulatory shifts that make no sense that were not announced ahead of time. And technically are illegal, so they get immediately challenged in the courts. And collectively, it's added up to be the most hostile business environment in the United States in my lifetime. and it's reduced business uncertainty to the degree that industrial construction spending,

which is the money that people dedicate to things that are actually putting into the ground, actual building of industrial plant. It's dropped every month for 16 months now. So it's reduced certainty, not reduced uncertainty. A lot of uncertainty now. Yeah. So we are seeing de-globalization accelerating at the same time the United States is de-industrializing. If anything, we need to be sprinting in the opposite direction.

We need to double the size of the industrial plant, especially if we think the plan is to break China. Instead, we're doing the opposite. But it seems like you mentioned the energy crisis might actually break China without a replacement in place anywhere. Yeah, absolutely. It's like if you're going to break everything, make sure you're ready for it. And we're literally doing the opposite. So besides not being able to order, I don't know, my sonos speaker stands overnight because they're not being made anymore. What's the actual real consequence that people will care about for more than a few days?

days. Cheap stuff, that's a bummer. What else can't we get that we actually need? The United States is the largest importer of manufactured product, but we also have an incredible industrial plant, although it is now being actively weakened. Our short term, a short term, I mean two to three years, is that the processed materials that we use to build things, steel, copper, lithium, cobalt, just to name four, about 80% of that processing, is done in the PRC. And so if that is broken without a replacement system, we don't have the building blocks that we need to then build out our industrial plane.

Okay. So, man. It's not that it's cheap products that won't be able to make. It's that it's products that won't be able to make. There's very, very, very few things where we have an indigenous supply chain for the base materials in North America. It's basically we just can't make, we're going to run out of everything, essentially. Wow. The discount Patriot may only cost $2 million per shot. In case that's outside your impulse by budget, today's sponsor has another option.

We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Ground News. We've all had this happen. Somebody drops the story in the group chat. Everyone reads it. Somehow everyone walks away with a different version of what happened. That's because the same event can be framed very differently depending on what a news outlet emphasizes, leaves out, or wants its audience to take away. Like the recent news of Jared Kushner's plan to meet with a Hamas leader,

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We don't earn a commission directly from sales, but when companies see that people respond to the ads on the show, they're more likely to continue their partnership with us. So if you decide to sign up or buy something, please use our code. It's often Jordan, but please double check on the deals page at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. It is a double win. You get a great deal and you help keep the show thriving. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now, back to Peter Zion. For people like me who just, you know, think, okay, at first glance, you know, that's going to be a bummer. I'll just change my consumption habits. When we say everything, we mean what, you can't get tires for your car anymore? Like, where's the first crack where everybody goes, what do you mean,

I can't do X? What do you mean there's no fruit? Well, I mean, there's no fruit. Well, I mean, that's part of the problem. The things are changing so quickly and so randomly in this country that it's really hard to give you like a hit list of what's going to go down. But if China does break, no copper means no electronics, no steel means no cars, no aluminum means no electricity. Okay. It's like things like transformers aren't going to be made in the volume that we need on a global basis, much less on national basis. We're sprinting towards a break in what made globalized manufacturing function. And while I've always been saying that we need to get away from globalized manufacturing because it's just too vulnerable, I always assumed that that would go hand in hand with us building

out what we need here to be prepared for that. Right. Reshoring or onshoreing, I guess. Exactly. And with the limited exception of AI data centers, we're not building any new industrial plant. I see. So we'll have AI tell us exactly what to do, and then we'll go, except we can't do it because we don't have any copper. Thanks for the idea, though. There's going to be another problem. problem. AI won't survive de-globalization either. It's the most complicated supply chain out there. I'm just saying that's the only place we're actually building something. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm kidding. It'll be going, hey, I need more electricity and we'll go about that. We don't have any of that anymore. I don't want to rest my hopes on artificial intelligence, but it is very good of designing more efficient products and processes. And so we're going to need that as long as it lasts. Yeah. Oh, man. That's brutal. And this is all because China can't get oil from the Middle East. Is that essentially the reason? There are a number of reasons why the Chinese are doomed. That is one of them.

The trade war could have done this itself. It's probably going to happen before long anyway for demographic reasons. The Chinese bet was always of a limited duration. Right. It's great while it lasts. It's not going to last much longer. Demographic reasons being no one there is getting married and having babies at the rate that they need to be. Yeah.

And now, according to the newest data, it sounds like they stopped actually 30 years ago. Yeah. But they're no longer sharing data with us, like you said, on anything. So we don't really know. The demographic data to their credit, I'm not sure credit's the right word, they never had. They've gone back and they've realized that all their demographic data from the last generation is basically falsified. And they're trying to get a grip on how bad the problem is. They really don't know. Wow. I was there recently. I asked people what the population of China was. And some people said, oh, 1.4, 1.5. And other people were like 900.

And I was like, okay, so do you just not know? And they're like, well, we hear this, but other people just say it's that. So there's this weird sort of undertone of like, the government says 1.3, 1.4, but it's probably less than a billion. And it's, that's a big difference. I mean, that's like a 33 plus percent difference in what you think your population is. That's like saying the U.S. either has 200 or 300 million people. Who knows? That's a huge number of people that you just don't know if they exist or not.

Yeah. You remember Tiananmen Square? Yeah. The short version is that after Tiananmen, the Chinese government realized that Blue collar workers, when they protest, they bring like wrenches. And they could literally physically disassemble a tank. Whereas white collar workers bring like pocket protectors and they're really easy to run over. Right, right. So for a number of reasons that CCP made the decision to move from a blue collar manufacturing economy to a white collar services economy. But from the point that they made that

decision, they had to then change the educational system and the people had to grow up and go through it. And the first year that they were expecting the first big batch of white collar workers to hit the market was 2019, which was when COVID hit. Right. And they didn't get out of COVID until 2023. So 2024 was their first year where they thought they would see in the data that the tax receipts would explode from this new generation. And tax receipts went down. It turns out that the generation was never even born. Oh, man. And it took them 30 years to realize that. So now they're basically running out of people under age 40. That's really, really dire. And people here wonder why that's not happening is because we have a ton of immigration, which a lot of people maybe don't love, but that's what's keeping America young. And until recently, the United States did have the highest birth rate in the rich world as well, because we have a lot of elbow room. But between COVID and the political shifts in this country on both sides,

people are a lot less optimistic than they used to be. They're less willing to have kids. And then you throw the immigration crunch on top of that. So we now have a birth rate that is among the lower end, probably about 1.4 poor woman, but that's very, very recent. For the Chinese, they probably had those numbers in the 80s. Wow. Oh, my gosh. That's really dark to think about. I mean, whether you're rooting for China to fall or not, I mean, it seems like we're so intertwined that you can't really just root for one team anymore. You kind of have to root for everybody to be at least moderately successful

or go down slowly enough that you can do something about it instead of just unplugging the machine. And that's one of the reasons why the Iran War made my number one, because it looked for there for a hot minute. Like, is this it? Yeah. Yikes. It seems like we're in like six different objectives, right? Oh, we got to destroy their nuclear program. We got to keep the straight open. We need to restore deterrence. We need to weaken the IRGC. We need to change the regime or at least change their behavior. Those are six different wars. Which war are we actually in right now? We were never in any of those. Remember, this decision was made in four hours and there is no national security team. Trump says what Trump thinks and there's no one to catch him. The NSA has

been sidelined. The state department has been sidelined. Military analysts have been sidelined. And the defense secretary is an idiot. So it's just Trump. And now, as of the last 48 hours, Trump hates Israel. So, uh, okay. If you're looking for a resolution to this, this should tell you everything you need to know. Of all the negotiations that have happened so far in the last six months, Americans have only been present for two days. So we're just not trying to end this? We're not even negotiating with them. So what is going to happen? Because I hate the Iranian regime. They've got to go, but obviously we can't just bomb them out of existence. How do we get out of this giant mess? If I was to guess, Trump is at the stage of just declaring victory and leaving

the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in Iranian hands. To be perfectly blunt, I don't think we've got the military capacity to impose a different solution. That ship sailed back in February. It doesn't look like we can. Yeah. So if the straight closes to anybody but who Iran likes to deal with, the Chinese can then get oil, right? Best case scenario for the world in that environment is that the Iranian tolls, because that's what it is, are of a level that imposes a functional tax on the world, kind of like what Trump has done, but does not crunch economic activity so much that everybody collapses. Right. Wow. But that is a decision that would be made in Tehran, not here.

And that's going to make that regime quite wealthy, I would imagine. I mean, if everybody has to pay. One of the dangers of making predictions in this world, which is one of the reasons that I've backed away from a lot of mine, is it so many things are changing so quickly. And the bedrock that allows you to project forward has cracked. You can't assume that one change will be allowed to exist in a vacuum. Because once Iran does that, other countries are going to react in different ways. I'd actually say it could get worse than what you're thinking

because as soon as Iran can show that it can get away with that, we're going to have something very similar in Babelam, on the Babelmendeb, on the opposite side of Arabia, we're going to have something like that in Turkey. We're going to have something like that in Denmark with the Danish Straits. We might even have that in the Sea of Japan with the Koreans. We're going to be looking at all of these international waterways, suddenly having tax regimes.

Because North Korea will just say, look, we're going to shoot a... No, no, no, not North Korea? Oh, South Korea. Okay, really? They're just what going to say, hey, if you don't pay the toll, we're going to take your engine now? Because they control the street. Wow. We're looking at a fundamental changing of the human condition on an international basis

because the Trump administration has destroyed the old order, not replaced it with anything, and now demonstrated that the United States does not have the military capacity to protect American interests in the entire hemisphere. So everything becomes a local conversation without the Americans at the table. that's going to go a thousand different ways that I can't predict. Wow, this is crazy. Do you think the Iranian regime is more or less stable? I mean, we replaced Ali Khomeini with another Khomeini.

Ali Khamini, Jr.? Yeah, so the regime got decapitated, but it has a bunch of, like you said, there's 10,000 heads waiting to take its place. You're using the word regime. You're using the right word. This is not a normal institution. This is a group of literally 10,000 people who see the world more or less through the same lens, and it really doesn't matter who the personalities at the top are. Yeah. What's crazy is this

Islamic Republic was founded in opposition to monarchy. So I guess they don't have to worry about legitimacy problems, having a father to son's succession because no one's going to say anything. Also, you have an army with a million people that was designed to occupy its own population, first and foremost. And you have the IRGC with 600,000 men under troops who, their first job, before they go out in target countries through regime change, the first job is to shoot protest. So I don't want to say this can't fall because the Iranian government has fallen twice in the last century. It can fall, but it's very durable. Yeah, wow.

There's a lot to juggle in both hands here, right? To balance in both hands, I should say, because strong regimes typically don't kill 10,000 to 40,000 of their own people, right? It looks like control from a distance, but it also looks like an absolutely terrified government that thinks they're going to lose control at any moment if they don't take massive, drastic action to How do you tell the difference between those two things? It depends upon how broad the basis. So, for example, on the case of the Russian system, the elite is only about 100 people. And so if Russia were to do to its population with the Iranians have done, I'm pretty sure they would be gone by the end of the weekend.

Remember Progazan or progozen? Pergosen, yeah. So when he marched on Moscow, he made it a thousand miles. He wasn't stopped. No military commander under Putin's government helped him or stopped him, which tells you everything you need to know about. the true loyalty of the arms of force of the Russian government. They obey the guy who's in charge, but they're not willing to actually suffer for him. And so that's a very fragile system, brittle.

That's not what we have in Iran. In Iran, we have an entire class of people who are in leadership positions who are part of the regime, all of the Mullahs. And it's a society where religion is one of the most powerful pillars. So to root that up, you need a societal uprising significantly strong. than what brought it to power back in 1979. Because back in 1979, it was kind of like Russia today. It was the guy at the top, the Shah, and his...

Savak? Yeah, Savak. The Secret Police. And then a cluster of people that basically helped him loot the country. That's not the situation we're in today. The one that we're in now has a much broader base, and that base controls most of the tools of power. Yeah. So the IRGC, so Savak, I don't know how many people they had, but it wasn't 600,000.

And it was a more traditional intelligence. system. It didn't carry out repression on the scale that the IRG is capable of, which doesn't mean that the IRGC wasn't somewhat based on it. For people who don't know, IRGC is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. They're like both the Palace Guard army and the intelligence wing and the, they basically a parallel, almost parallel government army that's job is to keep the regime in power, the MOLA's in power. So kind of combine the covert capabilities of the CIA with the domestic law enforcement of the FBI and the numbers of the National Guard and make them in control of electricity, energy,

and the nuclear arsenal. Right. So it's hard to relate that to anything in any other country because we don't want that and we never do. From our point of view, if you want to be in a democracy, it's bad idea.

Yes, bad idea, exactly. So, and then Savak was the secret police under the Shah, who was the king of Iran back in the day before the Islamic government took over. I just want to decode acronyms for people who are like, wait, what the hell are you guys talking about? No, I appreciate that. So has Iran just discovered the cheapest possible way, or actually been forced to discover the cheapest possible way to tax the global economy without having to defeat the United States?

Because we talk about China, but I feel like it's fair. We should talk about the rest of Asia because people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos Vietnam are also like, hey guys, we also exist. They're not getting oil. I have friends over there that are like, oh, you thought a tank of gas was expensive last year. let me tell you, if you can find it, you know, in this area now, it's 80% more expensive or whatever. So I think something like 80% of the oil and 90% of the liquefied natural gas pass through Hormuz to Asia, ship traffic can't bring it over anymore or might not be able to bring it over without a tax. I mean, what happens to the rest of Asia, not just China?

Best case scenario is prices triple. Oof. We'll have to have some degree of demand destruction because you remove the Persian Gulf. He removed one and fifth of global energy. I mean, right now we're at one-tenth, but that's assuming the war doesn't heat up again and knock another tenth out. This is an area that will have to compete for those barrels and those molecules with other parts of the world that are still able to get it out. And remember, we haven't gotten to my number three item yet because it's not all coming. It's like the Persian Gulf is only one area that's giving us an energy crisis.

We've got another one that's going to happen in just a few weeks. Which is the Ukraine War. The Ukraine War. Why would that give us an energy crisis? The third big thing are these new drones that are able, capable of limited decision-making. and the Ukrainians have chosen for various reasons to primarily target the energy complex in the Russian space. In the Russian space, I see.

And in the last month, they've hit over 100 shadow tankers on the Sea of Izav and the Black Sea. So in a not too distant future, we're looking at a 80% maybe shut off in Russia's ability to export crude. And unlike the Persian golf fields, which are large and shallow and easy to develop from a technical point of view,

Russia's aren't. They're remote. They're dependent upon physical infrastructure the Russians can't build much less maintain, and the Ukrainians are incessantly targeting that. So that's another five million barrels per day that's going to go offline real soon and never come back. I see. You mentioned shadow tankers. I think people don't know what those are. So these are obviously oil tankers that ship oil from Russia to another place, but they are what, transponder of secretly operating ghost tankers that are supposed to be invisible because they're under sanctioned?

A normal ship is going to be registered. It's going to have an insurance policy if anything goes wrong with the vessel or if they have a collision or if they have a leak. And that means they sail with their transponder on so that things like search and rescue can access them. Shadow tankers can't get that insurance because the states are under sanctions. So they get a cheap insurance policy from the country that's operating them, Russia in this case. And then whenever they're sailing an area where being seen is a problem, they turn off all

their transponders. Well, because of all of that, most of the shadow tankers are in excess of 20 years. old. A lot of them predate some of the safety developments that the world put in in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez crisis. You can remember that back from the 80s. Yeah, remember that. The driver was drunk and hit something and leaked a gazillion gallons of oil into wherever that was. About a quarter million, I think was the end number roughly. Oh, my God. Well, there's a number of problems for this. Number one, while you might be able to hide from somebody who's looking for transponders, ships are not fast. And in places like the black

sea, they're all either going to a port or to Istanbul, because Istanbul is where the Turkish Straits are. So you know where to look for these things. Exactly. So what the Ukrainians have been doing is spending $25 a day, buying commercially available satellite photos, finding the tracks, and then sending drones and hitting them, a hundred of them so far. They've shut down several of the cargo runs, and they're basically making it so that the repair bills for the remaining ships is so high that that's cheaper just to decommission them. And it's putting the Russian in a position of where we actually now have to pay out on those insurance policies. And now we have one that's literally sinking off the coast of Oman that had a million barrels

on board. And it's probably going to break up within the week. Really? So there's currently a tanker, a shadow tanker from Russia that will eventually leak a million gallons of oil off the coast of Oman. So, you know, that's three or four Valdez's based on whose numbers you're using. Wow. And once that happens, and it becomes apparent that the Russians aren't going to pay restitution to the Omanis, you're going to be. have a much more aggressive enforcement regimen by the wider world on the shadowed fleet, regardless of what the Ukrainians do. Right. That's smart of the Ukrainians to do this.

It's an environmental disaster, but it's basically, it seems to me, Peter, and I don't follow this as closely as you do, it seems to me that we sanctioned Russia, and then they came up with a shadow fleet of all these tankers, and everyone went, eh, I'm tired. I don't want to, that seems really hard and it's someone else's problem. And now it's, oh, these are a massive environmental hazard to possibly us, I suddenly care about this sanctions regime now. Is that kind of what we're looking at? And the Ukrainians are making that happen. I mean, I think you're giving everybody else a little bit too much crap. Too much. Too much credit. Because there was no way to quickly replace Russia's position in global energy. But now we're in a

position where we have to replace the entire coast of Oman. Russian crude, Saudi crude, Kuwaiti, Kut, Khathari Kru, all at the same time. Yeah. No. Yeah. No, that's not going to happen. No, it's not going to happen. And also, Oman is, I haven't been there, but my friend went there and he's like windsurfing. Oh, it's beautiful. It's going to be messed up for a long time if a million gallons of crude oil start washing up on the coast of Oman. That is dependent on things like sea currents, so I really can't comment on that. My knowledge, we've got some offshore islands that are picking up crude right now, but the mainland hasn't been hit. I just don't know enough about the flow there. Yikes, this is going to be such a mess. This is going to be such a mess. I don't know how you, how do you clean something like that up? with Iran launching drones at ships. In the open ocean, you can't use skimmers because it's too rough. Right, okay. So you just wait for nature to do its thin. Wow, you just let that oil sink to the bottom in chunks and hope it stays there, basically.

I mean, well, remember, oil floats on water. Doesn't heavy crude sink? I thought heavy crude sank to the bottom. Over time, it will bond with various particulates and eventually sink, but for a very long time, you're going to have a big sheen on a large volume of territory. Okay. For some reason, I thought unrefined product just sank. I don't know anything about petroleum.

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of different grades of crude. The Russian crude that's in this is probably Ural Sauer, so it will probably glom onto things and sink faster than, say, shale crude out of the United States would, but I'm not sure that's a lot of comfort. Yeah, no, especially. Oh, don't worry, guys. Only a quarter million of the gallons will be on the top. The rest of it will sink.

Like, okay, not the comforting words that I thought we were going to have. Wow. So, okay, what a freaking. mess this is. How do you get oil out of, like you said, Kuwait, the Gulf states, Oman? I mean, they have to also use the Strait of Hormuz, so they just pay Iran to not blow them up when they do it. There has to be a political deal between Iran and anyone who wants to use the strait. That's the environment we're about to be in. Crazy. Oh my gosh. How much disruption is necessary before the economic effect becomes comparable to just closing the whole straight? I mean, that's a great

question because the goalposts on that have really evolved. It used to be in the United States when we got to the equivalent of, say, today's prices, about $100 a barrel, that that would be enough to generate an energy-induced recession, if not depression. Yes. But, you know, that was in the 70s. Now, the United States is not as much of a manufacturing power, more of a services power. We become, on a GDP per barrel basis, significantly more efficient, maybe three times what we were then. And we've outsourced a lot of the energy-intensive aspects of modern life to other countries. China being one of those. As one of the things that the Trump administration has always been hammering is we need to bring the manufacturing back. But remember, the manufacturing

is the more energy-intensive part of this process. So you can have a global energy-intused depression from this, which is probably where we're headed, where individual parts of the economy I mean, individual countries actually could do reasonably well. The problem now is the second order effects. So if you crash, for example, as we were discussing earlier, the Chinese with an energy crisis, that affects everyone who uses manufactured goods, which is... Everyone. Everyone.

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it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Peter Zion. When I was in China recently, every car was electric. It's crazy. I was there 10 years ago, and you couldn't, it thought it was winter? I said, are we in a different hemisphere? It's winter.

No, that's just a giant smog cloud. No one here has seen the sun for a decade. Oh, my God. And now it's e-bikes, e-motorcycles. Every car was electric. I saw a gas car, and I remember hearing an engine and going, oh, that's kind of weird. And the driver of our car was like, yeah,

an old car. And then another guy had a gas car and the driver said, oh, look, basically he said, look, that's a sports car from an enthusiast, right? It's like a Ford Mustang kind of thing. And the guy deliberately wanted a gas car because it was so different. This is just in a tier five city in China. I think a lot of people are going, oh, China's not going to break. Half their grid is alternate energy sources. They'll just step it up with solar and wind and, I don't know, nuclear. They're not going to have an energy crisis. That doesn't necessarily work in manufacturing, though. When you want to power a car, that's one thing. If you want to build a smelting.

It doesn't necessarily work in anything that's more on transport than personal transport. I see. Okay. The larger, the vehicle, the more torque you need, the less EVs work. Also keep in mind that while their buildout for solar and wind is very real, it is largely in places where the people don't live. I see. China from Shanghai down actually is some of the lowest solar quotient in the world. On the coast there?

Yeah. Oh, wow. Where the bulk of the population is. You have to go into the interior to get to the good winded solar territory. So it's a transmission issue, which is a different sort of complication. Again, I'm not saying that their alternate buildout isn't real and that fuel switching hasn't happened. But we're probably talking about less than a million barrels per day equivalent. Oh, wow.

That's my any other country's standard a lot. But this is a country that at the last good data we had was using 14 million barrels a day. Yeah. What is that? 7% or something like that, 8%, whatever. I'm not great at the math of the table. top my head, but it's not super meaningful. It's not nothing. It's actually very impressive, but it's just the absolute number that they have to compensate for is massive. I'll tell you,

it was nice walking around a city with absolutely no car or other exhaust. I could enjoy the cigarette smoke that everyone puffs out without the interference of having to inhale diesel fuel or the car exhaust. What breaks first, though? Gasoline markets, electricity generation, fertilizer, petrochemicals, or cooking fuel, in Asia, sorry. What breaks first? Probably petro. Okay. The United States is unique in that we use natural gas for most of our petrofetstock,

natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas, basically propane, putane. Everywhere else in the world, they use oil, and they use naphtha, they use naphtha to make their petrochemical products. And so you remove the oil and all of that goes. Gasoline and diesel and things like that are eminently packageable and transportable. So there's always going to be an import option for those before you get to anything that allows them to salvage their refining and their petrochemical systems. I mean, they're all going to go.

But if you're looking for an order, petrochem is probably first. Yikes. Okay. And keep in mind that the Chinese massively overbuilt their petrochemical system so they could dominate the gasoline and diesel markets of everybody else in East Asia. Right. So if you're in Australia, for example, you are like optimally fucked. You might, on the numbers, be net energy independent, but that's because you imports a lot of your petrochemical and fuels from the Chinese.

And if the Chinese have a choice of fueling themselves or fueling you, what do you think they're going to do? And that's part of the bind that a lot of Southeast Asia is in right now. Yeah, that's, oh my gosh, this is crazy to me. There's so many moving parts to this that are pretty scary, I would say. I've been a critic of previous administrations, whether it was Trump or Biden or Obama or Clinton. or W, that they weren't willing to shake up the system to get the U.S. ready for what's next, but I get it. Disentangling that?

It's a mess. Yeah. Now we're going to do it at speed. Do we have to worry about Iran getting nukes? Because we can't get their enriched uranium. We can't destroy the knowledge that they have. We can destroy their centrifuges, but they can also just build stuff deep enough underground where we'd have to use a tactical nuke to get it.

I don't think a tactical nuke would do it. Maybe not. Before the war, this system was disenfewges. dispersed over 100 sites. Supposed we hit a lot of them really hard, but a lot of them, we just destroyed the tunnels. The Iranians might not be Taiwan when it comes to technology, but they know how to dig. And so all they have to do is dig it out. And so a year after the U.S. abandons the region, yeah, they'll have a nuke.

This is 1940s technology. This is not hard. Yeah, yeah. And there was a belief among the Mullahs before the war that having a nuke will invite an attack. so let's not build a nuke. Let's build a nuclear program and be six months away from having a nuke. They've been six months away for having a nuke for 25 years. Deliberately, though, right?

Deliberately, yeah. Because people laugh and go, oh, I've heard this for 25 years. They're not close to having a nuke. No, they're deliberately really close. They're just not crossing the Rubicon because they don't want to get bombed. But oops. Now they've been bombed. And now they know that that strategy will not work with the United States. So the only solution is to have a nuke.

We've basically forced them to do what we really, really, really did not want them to do. Yes. And this is also something that was a regular talking point out of the Defense Department and the CIA and the NSA for the last 30 years, which is one of the many, many, many reasons why no previous administration pulled the trigger on the war. Yeah, okay, because this was just a foregone conclusion. They will end up getting a nuke and there's nothing we can do about it. So let's just status quo is actually better despite what people say in speeches. What is Israel going to do? Because they can't have Iran having nukes. Are they just going to keep bombing tunnels on their own? They don't have the military capacity to do it without the United States. And the United States no longer has the military capacity to do it.

Yeah. So if you want to talk about a really interesting political conversation between Jerusalem and Tehran, that's the next chapter of this. I don't know what that looks like yet. But keep in mind that the Israelis already have a functional alliance with Saudi Arabia. and Saudi Arabia is the power that brought us al-Qaeda. And so I can absolutely see the Jews getting full-throatively behind Islamic terrorism. We should say the Israelis before I get 7,000 emails about that. Yes, we can say, wow, that's going to be interesting.

So we're going to have the... A possibility. Okay, okay. Again, we're in the place where the bedrock has cracked. Lots of weird shit's going to happen. The views presented on this episode of the Jordan Harbinger show are not necessarily representative of Jordan Harbinger LLC, Jordan Harbinger himself, or of the show or team thereof. They are exclusively from this guy Peter Zion who, I don't know, man. Anything could happen.

He just showed up. Well, I'm just asking questions. Isn't that what all the grifters say on the internet when they say something that's really, really, really provocative? I'm just asking questions. We're not allowed to ask questions. I'm pulling a Tucker Carlson defense here. Actually, that just made that a lot worse. Never mind. Okay. Moving right along. Is China more or less likely to invade Taiwan now that the United States is busy, has sheer interceptors, but also they saw that maybe this is a really bad idea to screw things up in the world economy? I mean, it's a bit of a black box. The Chinese do not have enough amphibious capacity to do a meaningful landing of Taiwan without absolutely wretched casualties.

I mean, easily, easily a half a million dead. Wow. Also, something to keep in mind, German Jit has purged every part of the system to the point that it knows. longer functions. And he's now working on the military. So like the equivalent of the joint chiefs in China, the Central Military Commission, it's only got two people now, Xi and an inquisitor. And that's it. So the idea that you can purge the entire leadership of an institution and not impact its function, Xi has killed or gotten rid of all of his advisors. He's basically become what Trump is about to become. So it's entirely possible that he doesn't realize what he

doesn't realize anymore. I see. So I won't rule it out, but wow, I can't think of a faster way to destroy the PRC. Really? So Taiwan could be China's Iran, but with an amphibious assault instead of a bombing campaign. Yeah. So, I mean, at a minimum, it would gut the military capacity of the PLA. The Chinese army. And that assumes no other country gets involved. And there are now a number of countries that have the military capability and the positioning to basically destroy all of China's ability to import and export anything. With drones. Well, not even, that's before you figure put it in drones.

I see. We gave the Australians mid-range cruise missiles that they can launch from their mid-range fighter bombers. They can shut down the Strait of Malacca now if they want to. So India, Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. They could all end China in a couple of the days if they want to. The question is how would everybody respond to a Taiwanese invasion? I don't think it would go very well.

And then you're talking about a country that imports 80% of their energy by water and 80% of their inputs for food by water. The disaster that would unfold over the next 12 months would just be historically apocalyptic. Right. So they could essentially get blockaded and then starve to death if countries decided to act. In a very short period of time. Oof, that's really... A decade ago, you understood that. But it's been eight years since he got rid of his last real advisor.

So who knows what he thinks now? You see these tanky comments? Tankies are like authoritarian regime supporters that think they're communist. They say things like, yeah, he's getting rid of corruption. Look, he just fired 27 generals. Those guys were all in the take. But to me, it looks like coup proofing, a loyalty purge, et cetera. That's what it looks like.

That's exactly what it is. Does that mean that all of these people were angels? Oh, God, no. No, they were probably all on the take and also competent because they worked there for 30 years in the military. Even if they're not fully competent, they're capable of doing the basics, and now the Chinese don't even have that. Really? I see. Okay. So does the purge tell us anything about what she believes was wrong with the PLA, the People's Liberation Army? So this is the Chinese military. Does that say anything about what he believes was wrong with it or just that he was afraid of it?

I think it's just, it's the last one. He's purged every other part of the country. He started with the regional governors. Then he went to the local governors. Then he did the bureaucracy. Then he did the CCP itself. Then he did academia. Then he did the press.

Then he did the business community. All that's left is the military. So he's basically made his entire country non-functional in any sort of crisis situation. And now we're courting crises. Do purged militaries? I don't know historically at all. Do purged militaries become more cautious or just dangerously obedient? Dangerously obedient, probably the gold standard for that is Stalin and what he did to the Red Army on the eve of the Soviet invasion.

He got rid of all of the generals because he didn't trust them, put in political apparatchiks. And then when the defense intelligence people started bringing him assessments on what the Germans were planning, he just started killing them because he didn't like the reports. Jeez. Actually, when Operation Barbarossa happened, it was about five days, I believe, before Stalin admitted that it actually was happening. It took cities vanishing from the map before he realized that it wasn't a lie made up by his political opponents. That's totally insane. I guess now there's other ways to get information, but that is crazy to think about. He'd shoot the messenger, then he'd send another messenger to find out who'd say, yeah, it's real.

He'd come back. He'd shoot that guy and send another one in five days. These people are mentally ill. Okay, so an army full of loyalists, they salute really enthusiastically, but that probably doesn't mean they can cross 100 miles of water under fire on the way to Taiwan. That is the guess. Independent of the fact that the Chinese really don't have the amphibious hardware for that. Yeah, it seems like I read that Chinese air activity around Taiwan has fallen, but naval and coast guard pressure is up. And you always see those videos of like ships from China spraying Filipino fishermen and trying to figure out how to increase the hold they have over the South China Sea. Is that really what it's called or is that just what China calls it?

Actually, I don't know. Lots of people call up the South China Sea. You're okay in that one. All right, cool. Yeah, so that to me seems like are they just realizing that they can't do a full amphibious invasion, they can't just bomb the place, we already know that that doesn't work. Could they blockade Taiwan? Would that work? You'll love this.

This is a great example of how when you get rid of the people who know how to run a military, the people who are left, just do what if they think looks good. So the current Chinese plan, as demonstrated in the last couple of drills, is to take their new carrier and put it to the southeast of Taiwan in case of war to do the blockade. Okay, number one, carrier, horrible choice of a blockade military asset. Number two, that puts it beyond close air support from the mainland, which means that the Philippines could take out the carrier. Wait, why?

Because it's just mostly unprotected and... It's completely exposed. That would be talk about an upset. That's like... So whenever I see these Taiwanese encirclement drills of Badoo and I look at what's where, I'm like, oh my God, there's nobody who knows how to row a boat in charge of this. Yikes. My God. What would Taiwan have to do that Beijing could use as a pretext for war? Just existing? Is that enough, essentially?

That's enough. Yeah. Okay. She's made it very clear that existing is the red line. You don't think they can blockade Taiwan. You think that that's just not possible? Oh, I think they can devastate Taiwan. But Taiwan without any help can basically set the Chinese back militarily 20 years, even if they fall. And that assumes nobody else is involved. And if anyone is going to get involved, the Japanese are, And the Japanese Navy may be smaller than Chinese, but it's far more capable with far more power projection. Wow. So what does Japan do? Just say, hey, we need semiconductors too. Knock it off. Taiwan's semiconductor is not going to survive de-globalization.

So explain this. For people who don't know, most of the world's semiconductors, what is it, like 90% come from Taiwan? No, no, no, nowhere near that. It's less than five. Less than five percent? Yeah, less than five percent. Come from Taiwan? Okay, so semiconductors, think of them in nanometer, the size of the transistors. and a smaller size means you can pack more on the chip. So the chips that we're using for artificial intelligence are all two, three, and four

nanometer right now. Those are the best we can make. And from one until seven, you need a specific type of technology called Extreme Ultraviolet. The lithography thing. That technology. Yeah. And the supporting technologies enabled it to function. And the broader manufacturing supply chain to make those high-end chips has 100,000

steps and 9,000 companies. and half of those companies only make one product for one end user. Now, roughly 90% of the processing chips in that category are from Taiwan. Yeah, okay. That's what I'm reading. That's where the fabs are. That's not where the supply chain is. Okay.

Most of that is outside of Taiwan. Some are better than China. Some is in the Netherlands. We do all the design. Yeah, that UV machine is from like the Netherlands, right? Yeah, the EUV machine itself is from the Netherlands. but that thing has 30,000 supply chain steps. It spans the world.

Anyway, the bottom line is, without a globalized world, none of that happens. So it seems like we would want to keep that particular system running. So you either have full globalization or you don't have those chips. That's your decision. Oh, my gosh. Or, you know, you spend 20, 30 years rebuilding that supply chain in different places. We have always in the United States focused on the fabs. The fabs are an important part of the process, but they're not the most advanced by far.

What's a fab? a place that makes the semiconductor, so it's a factory. Yeah, it takes all of these pieces, puts them together, etches a disk of silicon to make a raw semiconductor, which is then taken somewhere else for polishing an integration into hardware to make an intermediate good that eventually makes it into your computer or your phone or whatever. So it's an essential part, but so are all the others. Right. Yeah, it's crazy to think about, like, oh, you need this advanced part,

you need this advanced part, you need this advanced part. Hey, but we can't get this one metal that goes on the outside of the board, and, well, none of the boards work until we get that. Oops, where's that from? Congo. Crap. Take that multiplied by 5,000. That's the modern semiconductor problem. Now, under or over 7 nanometers, 7 nanometers and more, uses a different technology called direct ultraviolet, and the supply chains for it as a rule are much simpler. So there's a lot of versions of those chips that will survive declobalization.

Certainly not all of them. Great. So my flashlight will still get you. Good news, guys. Your LED flashlight might still work. You'll be all right. You'll be cool. You can see in the dark when we don't have electricity.

Well, for example, cars. Most of the chips that go into cars are less than seven. Most of them are like 28. Cars or like electric cars? Because I don't know. My Tesla's got a touchscreen. Electric cars have at least $1,000 of the low end and at least $1,000 of the high end. So yeah, those go away for sure.

Okay, interesting. I'm back to riding around my lawnmower or go-cart around the neighborhood. My God. This is just really, is there any good news that we can share? Well, if you really like drones, the chips that are used in these new drones are all like 28 nanometers or 15 nanometers at most or bigger. Yeah. So they will continue to be iterated and improved even as globalization breaks.

This is just absolutely wild. Good news. Your LED flashlight may still work. Bad news. It'll be illuminating the lawnmower you now commute to work on. We'll be right back. Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It is specific and practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and relationships in under two minutes just about every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It is a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Peter Zion. What do you think is going to end up happening with Ukraine in terms of the war with Russia? It seems like, look, everybody online says, oh, there's a stalemate. Russia constantly tries to throw men to the meat grinder. They get, I don't know, 15 meters of space in any given day or week, and then it goes back again. It also looks like, but this is just from news coverage, the tide might be turning now that Ukraine says, well, we're just going to keep blowing up oil refineries until you guys have enough pain that you stop trying to roll into us. I'm going to say a series of very controversial things here because, you know, that's new for me. Great. Let's draw a line on February 1st.

Until February 1st, the Russians were winning. Any battle in which the Ukrainians do not inflict an 8-to-1 casualty ratio on the Russians is a battle the Russians won. Wow. Because Russia is so much bigger and has so much more of a stockpile from the Cold War and so many more people that that 8-to-1 number is what is required to overcome the demographic imbalance. And with a couple of successions, the Ukrainians have never been able to hit that number. They are now.

Because now with these new drones, it's not so much that Ukrainians have more drones on the front line, although they do. It's that they're using these memory drones to destroy the supply chain system 300 kilometers behind the front line. And so reinforcements can't arrive, food can't arrive, fuel can't arrive, ammo can't arrive. And so when there is a fight, the Russians are on the back foot logistically in every possible way. and they get obliterated. They may still be gaining ground, but now, for the first time, the cost of that is over that 8 to 1 ratio. The question is, is whether or not the Ukrainians who now have a technological advantage

of drones can leverage that long term and start to leverage that into other areas. So in the last five months, we've seen the Russians focus their military industrial complex, not on tanks or artillery for the first time, but on ballistic missiles. Because at the moment, the Ukrainians have no answer for that. The Patriots are gone. They will never be part of the equation again. And we have yet to have a counter-drone system that can take out a ballistic incoming. And so the last few weeks, we've gone from the Ukrainians intercepting like half of the ballistic missiles to none. And so the Ukrainians know that right now the Russians are making about 70 every kind of their frontline missiles a month.

The Russians are probably going to try to expand that by a factor of 10 within a year because they're putting all the stuff they used to put in tanks into that. Right. So Ukraine has to destroy those facilities that make those and also figure out a way to send a drone up against a ballistic missile and take it out before it hits Keev. I don't know if that's possible. But there's been a lot of things that have happened in the last six months that I didn't think was possible six months ago. So God knows. That's right. Yeah. I mean, they have water-based drones and everything. And then, of course, you've got the general degradation of the Russian industrial complex going on at the same time. So we really are in a fundamentally new conflict here. I mean, this war has changed several times in the last five years now. But in the last six months, all of the rules have shifted.

All of the players have shifted. And so at the same time, we expect the Russians to suddenly be fielding a lot of these missiles is also when all of those joint production facilities are about to come online. So Ukraine might not be launching 500 drones a day. They may be launching 15,000. It's like, I don't know how that plays out. Right. It's are there going to be a ballistic missiles raining down on Ukraine to the point where that turns the tide, or are there going to be drones raining down on every major city in Russia to the point where people say, what the hell, man, I thought you were to, we got to get out of this. Or both. Why not? Porcena los dos. But we need to watch us very closely, because what we're seeing is this new drone technology evolving an environment where basically if you have an industrial facility within six or 800 miles of a foe. Of a foe. Of a foe. Of a what? Of a foe. What's that? F-O-E. Not an acronym.

Oh, a foe. Oh, God, I thought it was an acronym. Even after you said not an acronym, I thought, what acronym is you talking about? Okay, enemy. Got it. Sorry. Yeah, if you're within six or eight hundred miles, your industrial plant is vulnerable now. Right.

And, you know, if you look around the world, you know, that's Germany, east. That's all of Japan and Korea and Taiwan. That's all of industrialized China. It's like we're entering this situation where most of the populated zones of the eastern hemisphere that have industrial plant are all of a sudden by these new rules vulnerable in a way that they've never been. before. Wow, this is all quite alarming. What is one geopolitical danger? The public is dramatically overestimating. Well, I mean, all things China, but that's kind of passe from my point of view. And I

would say all things AI. Okay. AI is a flash in the pan from an industrial point of view because we're not going to be able to maintain it. The Chinese are on borrowed time already. So anything that you're doing to prepare for the world where the Chinese dominate everything is kind of a wasted effort. Why can't we maintain AI just because of the electrical... The supply chain system. We're not going to be able to make the chips. And once a chip goes into an AI chassis and a data center, it runs constantly, and it burns out in four to six years. Gotcha.

From the point that the supply chain breaks will probably be getting new inflow for about a year from what's already in the system. Because once you start work on the chip, you already have everything for it to bring it to completion. It'll take a year for that system to run out. And then you're looking at four to six years and it's all gone. Why would this, I know we talked about this extensively in your last appearance, but why would the supply chain for this break from Taiwan and other places? Why wouldn't we be able to continue getting chips for AI, for example? Take your choice. There could be a Taiwan war in which Taiwan burns. There can be a trade war in which China breaks. That's the raw materials that go into the system. The Japanese could have a political evolution in the direction of, oh, I don't know, a Yakuza Nazi merger, which is exactly what's happening right now. And they could remove the photo masks from the system. In Europe, we could have the Germans get involved with the Russian. to a higher degree and that takes out the laser structures that make EV work. Maybe the natural gas field under the Netherlands decompresses like it's been doing for the last

30 years and we lose ASML in the EUV system. Maybe we have a problem with Turkey and we lose the tungsten. Maybe we have a problem with Congo and we lose the cobalt. I mean, there's endless vulnerabilities here. All just very fragile. Yeah, exactly. To keep it going, you need the United States to maintain the military structure that allows global trade to happen.

And the political willingness to do that, we don't have either. We don't really have that anymore. Yeah. And by the way, you can't just say Yakuza Nazi merger in Japan without maybe explaining that one. That's a juicy one. Sure. So after World War II, the United States found itself confronted with a lot of really interesting political systems in Europe and in Asia.

And unlike, say, when we invaded Iraq in 2003 and we rooted out all the bath and left a vacuum, we decided that we needed to work with what was still there. So we removed the emperor and his people. And what was left was the yakuza. So we used the yakuza to maintain political and strategic control of Japan for like 15 years. And of course they got into politics. And so the LDP, the one party of Japan has different factions now. You've got the one who want to go back to the imperial system when they went bonsai on the horizon and you've got the ones that are linked to the Yakuza.

The current prime minister is from the bonsai faction and most of her cabinet is from the Yakuza faction. I'd never heard of this. That seems totally insane to me. The alternative was to use GIs to patrol at the city level throughout Japan and post-war and we had the Cold War to worry about. A lot of the decisions that you make when you're under stress

determine what you're now. crisis will be. We saw that with al-Qaeda. We saw that with China. Maybe we'll see that with Japan next. What happens when we have this particular merger? Because Japan seems right now like a global player, an ally to the West, they're anti-China. Well, I should say they've always been anti-China. That's not exactly new. What's the danger here? I mean, Nazi-Yakuza Nazi merger sounds really scary, but if it's functionally the same thing as Japan is doing now, is it that bad? Or what do you think the change is going to be? Remember, the United States can't maintain globalization anymore. Japan is one of many countries that has to make a lot of very hard decisions

about their future. And the people making the decisions have preexisting sympathies. Right. So re-arming of Japan, which is already starting to happen. Already happening. And I read an article in the New York Times about how Japan, Tokyo, especially is a hotbed of spies because they have no domestic intelligence agency. Because of us, that was our choice. We chose to force them to not develop that. Right. And the reason is because they used to have secret police that were terrorizing the population and really, really bad, like most secret police forces tend to be. And it was part of the emperor's secret police, I suppose. It was just part of the imperial system that we dismantled after World War II.

So they're going to go, hey, we need this to get rid of the spies, and then that's going to maybe turn into what a fascist secret police type of thing? Is that the prediction? One of the reasons we said you don't get to have an intelligence arm. It's certainly not an intelligence defense arm is because if they had had that, we would have probably lost control of them in the 60s. So especially if you're going to encourage, the yakuza to be part of the security apparatus, you don't want them to have meaningful

international intelligence capability. Right. So that was a conscious choice made by U.S. administrations over 70 years. But if we can't maintain the globalized structure that allows Japan to have a functional economy, they're going to have to make a lot of decisions, one of which is resurrecting or recreating an intelligence system. And that won't happen in one or two years, but it will happen. And so now you've got a country that basically has to have a sphere of influence, has to

have a blue water navy, has to have carriers, has to have an intelligence. intelligence system and is a little fascist yakuza tilted on all its decision making. I don't want to say that that guarantees a conflict with the United States, but it certainly guarantees a non-aliance. Huh. Okay. In the time that we have left, which is very minimal here, where is the positive some opportunity, this is your real challenge? Where is the positive some opportunity in all of this? Which country, region, technology, institution, whatever, is adapting faster than you expected, not merely profiting from war. Who is solving a structural problem?

Where are human ingenuity and institutional competence actually outrunning, I don't know, geography and demography and... If there is one and I'm looking, I'm unaware. Oh, crap. I mean, I'm going to fall back on my old thing that a lot of this passes North America by in many ways. We're self-sufficient and net exporters of energy and food, and that gives us a lot of wiggle room in many ways.

But we're no longer building ourselves out. for what is coming. We're going in the opposite direction. So what used to be from my point of view a bright spot, we saw explosions in industrial construction under Biden, not because of Biden, just the timing. But the business environment now is so unstable that that's all stopped. So we're just kind of waiting for the world to happen to us now. So of all the decisions still available to the United States and its allies, which single decision would do the most to prevent the bleakest version of your forecast from becoming reality? Entrenched NAFTA as deeply and as quickly as possible.

Okay. Because right now we're eyeing a world where North America has to build out industrial plant at a massive pace, double what we have. If we decide we want to do that without Mexico and Canada, then we have to triple it. And then a 25 to 30 year grind become something much longer. Which country looks maybe weak or chaotic or even irrelevant today, but will, I'll say will, likely surprise us by being substantially stronger in 2030? I'll give you two close to home Mexico, because regardless of what happens with the relationship with the United States, a lot of their industrial plant is already built. And if the U.S. merges with Mexico economically, with a NAFTA 2, NAFTA 3, whatever you want to call it, then we leverage U.S. advantages. And we're the two most demographically stable countries in our wage class, for lack of a better phrase. That can be a beautiful relationship. And if we don't do that, then Mexico has to do it on its own. And unlike most other countries in its peer class, it's already done a lot of the heavy lifting.

So Mexico's future is going to be rough for a number of reasons, drug war, for example. But from an economic point of view, it looks really good as an industrial power. In the eastern hemisphere, watch Turkey. No matter what the Middle East looks like, Turkey is the most stable power. It's got the largest army in NATO after the United States. And unlike the United States, which is leaving, the Turkans aren't going anywhere. They already have infrastructure in place to take crude from either Syria or Iraq or Russia or Kazakhstan or Afghanistan or So despite being an energy importer, they're probably not going to have an energy crisis.

And no matter who wins, the Ukraine war, Turkey will be in an arbiter position for whatever is next because they control the Black Sea access to the rest of the world. So they are at the beginning of a multi-decade boom in strategic and economic power. And from an industrial point of view, they versus Europe are kind of the same as YUS versus Mexico. So again, a lot of the hard work's already done. Wow. What is a survivable Ukraine peace agreement contain? There is no version of an independent intact Ukraine that doesn't spell the end of Russia. And there is no version of a sustainable, defensible Russia that includes an independent Ukraine.

This really is to the death. Why is that? Because Russia, I understand why you can't have Russia leave Ukraine because that would look terrible and Putin would go down. in flames, which might actually happen anyways. But why is it that we can't have Russia simply say, all right, stalemate in Dunbass, we're sticking with it. We hereby declare victory. This is totally what we wanted to do in the beginning, guys. Trust me, forget all the people that died trying to expand this particular bit of land. Forget the column of stuff we lost going to Kiev. This is all we wanted. Why can't they just do that? The Russian demographic is collapsing until the Chinese overtook them. Impressively, I might add. They had the worst demographics in the world,

So this is in many ways their last war. The Russians are concerned, rightly so, that if they can't get to a more defensible perimeter, that they won't be able to defend their territory with the military that they will have in 5, 10, 15 years. And they're right about that. The biggest chunk of that external border is the Carpathians. And the Ukrainians are to be perfectly blunt on the wrong side of the Carpathians. So the Russians feel that they have to get to the Caucasus. They have to get to the Carpathians.

They have to get to the Baltic Sea. And if they do, then instead of having roughly 5,000 miles of exposed border to potentially hostile powers, they can rely on geography to protect 4,500 miles of that, and they can just plug the gaps, the right. Okay, but who are they afraid of? Everyone. Why, though? Russia has been invaded 49 times in the last 300 years. Just because today there isn't anyone that looks like they're eyeing Russian territory.

Doesn't mean that there won't be. Except for China, which is eyeing Russian territory, which might be Chinese territory, depending on who you ask. Absolutely. But you can replace the word China with Ukraine or Poland or Sweden or Germany and have that conversation on any part of the border. Yikes. Yikes. So they have to go through Ukraine and then they also have to go through what, Poland and the Baltics? I mean. Among others, but yes. They can't even get through Ukraine, which has way less of a developed military than Poland and then the Baltic states, and all of which are NATO, all of which are probably. they see the writing on the wall. Russia's not going to catch them by surprise. Do you really think that NATO means anything without the United States? Yeah, probably not. But the people who are

delusionally thinking that Ukraine is on their own in Europe isn't really next are going to have a wake-up call if a European country is next. Don't take this as an insult because that's not how I mean it. But every westerner has had that position on Russia for 400 years. Yeah. And we've always been wrong. Wrong about specifically what? That what Russia wants to do is so unrealistic. that they won't try. Oh, yeah, you're right. It just seems insane to me. Peter, it's so bad that it couldn't possibly happen. Wasn't that what we said at the beginning of the show? That's such a bad idea that it couldn't happen and the consequences are so bad that there's no point in thinking about it because it would never happen. Because I'm thinking, okay, so they try to go through Ukraine

and it costs them 10 million more people, which they don't necessarily have. And then they're like, all right, Poland is next. Yes, they're five times, 10 times tougher than Ukraine, but we got to get to those mountains, bro. I would guess that Latvia would actually second, but your point stands. I think you're probably right. I mean, or Estonia or something like that, I don't know, but they're just going to, what, kill every Russian on the way to defending Russia? I mean, I just, I can't wrap my head around this. Keep in mind that Russia is not a nation state. It's a multi-ethnic empire, and they have a lot of people that they consider disposable. They're using them in Ukraine right now. So, oh gosh, this is just such a dark scenario. It's not a nice place.

Yikes. My God. All right, Peter Zion, always leaving us with plenty of enthusiasm at the end these. Appreciate you coming on, man. Once again, good to see you. No problem. Until next time. If you enjoyed this interview with Peter, here's a clip of a previous episode we did. We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding the breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident the U.S. is going to intervene or not, and I would argue we are not. Safety on the waves is what allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model. Less than one percent of that shipping happens on land. And that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s-style conflict and competition.

Countries are increasingly finding in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it and then producing more locally. We were moving this way before the Ukraine war, before the Chinese starting to break down, and before the German industrial model started to implode. This has just sped everything up. So we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next to next year, especially in the second half of next year, which should suggest that we're going to have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow. I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares, because I don't see a way to fix it.

The biggest loser by far is China. Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed. I think we're in the final decade of the European Union, because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model. and without the German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence. The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around. We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never going to last.

It's going to be a rough ride. So anyone who thinks this is going to be easy is wrong in every possible way. For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 781 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thanks to Peter Zion. There's geopolitics, and then there's Peter turning my inability to order Sonos speaker stands overnight into the opening scene of industrial civilization's season finale.

The central problem here isn't merely that the world is becoming more dangerous. It's that the technologies, alliances, supply chains, and assumptions underneath the old system are changing faster than governments can adapt. Cheap drones capable of limited autonomous decision-making are challenging weapons, that cost millions of dollars per shot. America cannot quickly replace the interceptors it's already used. The Persian Gulf energy crisis threatens China and the entire East Asian manufacturing system.

And breaking that system before building a replacement could leave us without the processed materials required for electronics, vehicles, transformers, electricity infrastructure, and just about everything else we assumed would continue existing because the buy now button still happens to work. Even AI isn't floating safely above this mess in a magical cloud. its most advanced chips depend on a global supply chain involving thousands of companies, tens of thousands of components, and a level of international stability we may no longer be

willing or able to maintain. The closest thing Peter offered to optimism was also the most actionable. Deepen North American integration, rebuild industrial capacity with Mexico and Canada, and stop dismantling the replacement system before the old one has even finished collapsing. So yes, there is a path through this. It's just a 25-year industrial reconstitution. instruction project requiring strategic discipline, political stability, international cooperation, and competent leadership. Piece of cake. Of course, all things Peter Zion will be in the show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six-minute

networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You could also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in geopolitics, China, Iran, or Ukraine, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.