The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How to Work Together Like Early Rome || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

As the global order breaks apart, countries and communities that can incorporate the learnings from early Rome can weather the storm much better than others. We're talking about integrating economies, infrastructure, and security. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Rome. This is Palatine Hill on my right. Why am I talking about ancient Roman stuff? Because it's actually disturbingly appropriate to where we are today. Let me give you the history. In the pre-Roman era, there were a number of communities in the vicinity of what is today's Rome that lived on hilltops. And they were bounded either by the River Tiber or a series of boggy, marshy areas.

and so they were relatively defensible and none of them were very large. Palatine was one of them. Capitoline, ergo the name capital was another one, curile, and blah-d-da-da-da-da-br-da-b-d-d-d-d-h. Anyway, they got along pretty well because none of them had the population to conquer the others. And so after a while, they started to literally get together for parties.

And in the areas between the hills were those, flat marshy zones and they started to bury their dead there or drain them and turn them into kind of open public spaces. And one of them is this guy over here. This is Circus Maximus. We'll pick it up on the other side of the construction. So Circus Maximus, which from an archaeological point of view is by far the coolest name I've ever heard. Anyway, short version is they started to celebrate their holy festivals together and over time those festivals merged into a common identity. and eventually they came to one another's defenses. Some of the cities controlled certain trade routes.

They started to merge that and became a mercantile grouping. And eventually they decided that they got along well enough that they should build a common wall among their entire combined area. And that set the formation of what we now call Rome and eventually became the Roman Empire. And in time, those seven communities and their merger, and their collective infrastructure formed a city of a million people in the 3rd century AD, which was a level that was not matched by anyone else on the planet until London in the 1800s.

Why does this matter now? They, in essence, maximized the technologies they had at the moment, applied them to their geography, changed what they could, and in doing so, created one of the great empires in history. We're entering a period now. where the rules of geopolitics are forcing an adjustment. And just like the original seven cities of Rome, they're going to have to come up with something new to get by. There are two areas that I think are worth drawing your attention to.

The first is Southeast Asia, where you've got a cluster of a dozen countries ranging from technocratic Singapore, commodity providing Australia and New Zealand, relatively backwards, Miranmar, Middle range, Malaysia, and Thailand, who already have a series of groupings and agreements

that allow them to punch above their collective weight should they develop a political system for doing so, which they have not done. But the hard stuff, the economic integration, is already done. And unlike countries in Northeast Asia or, say, Europe, there's no history of these countries going to genocidal war with one another.

I mean, there's no equivalent of the Holocaust or World War II, or the Japanese occupations of Korea. So the bad blood that stops a lot of integration just isn't there, and the economics of it make a lot of sense. They're self-sufficient collectively in things like food and energy, which is something that most places can't really claim. So that's number one. Number two, the southern part of Latin America,

specifically the southern cone. This is an area that includes Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and the southern few provinces of Brazil. This is a zone that is in the temperate zone, and so you don't have a lot of the infrastructure annihilating heat, humidity, and rainfall that exists further north in Brazil. Basically, anything south of Rio works,

everything north, kind of sketchy. So they can feed themselves. Argentina is shown that even under some of the most destructive economic policies that humans have ever put together, they can still be a net oil and natural gas exporter, and they are the world, number two producer of shale energy.

Combined that with some of the offshore in Brazil, where they've got one of the world's best oil companies and you're at least neutral, probably strongly positive in terms of energy. And in a world where, say, China goes away and there just aren't enough manufactured goods, this is an area with actually a really solid educational base. Argentina, despite some of their policies,

has always maintained a good baseline educational system. And Brazil has a shocking volume of skilled labor for an economy of its size that is highly specialized. You all up that altogether, it really works. They've got a lot of build-out to do, but you know, who doesn't these days? So in a world where everything's breaking down, those are areas that look a lot like pre-Roman Roe. Anyway, that's it for me today.

Until next time. Wow, it's hot here. I haven't been this hot since I was in New Zealand where there's no ozone hole. Good thing. climate change is a myth, otherwise we'd be in trouble.