The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Future of Tourism: Part 1 || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

If you've followed me for a while, you'll know that I take my travel very seriously. Unfortunately, it seems that my work keeps crawling its way into my personal life, because deglobalization is changing tourism as we know it.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-future-of-tourism-part-1

Hey all, Peter Seine here, coming to you from Arches. Today, since I'm on vacation, kind of. We're going to talk about tourism, the places you need to go while you still can. We are going through a period of massive economic change globally, where demographics are basically smashing the old model before you even consider what's happening in the United States with de-globalization and populism. And the end result is there are a lot of countries that people like to think that they want to visit that aren't going to be options for much long. So the point of this video is to give you an idea of where you should prioritize because

time is very, very limited. Alright, quick reminder of what everybody is up against. With de-globalization, global trade is obviously going to collapse. That reduces access to things like finance and energy and food products. And so you're looking for long-term stability for a place doesn't have the beauty that you're after, physical or culture, whatever happens to be, but has the ability to maintain a degree of stability itself. Big part of this is going to be when China collapses, which is not far off. A lot of the Chinese money that has been flooding into specifically the developing world

to fund things is going to go away. Keep in mind that a lot of things that Chinese have funded were never funded before because they were not necessarily great investment options. The Chinese view money as a political good. That's why their money supply is so huge. Anyway, first country we have to talk about is India. India is a country that overall, I think, is going to come out on the positive side of the decrease. globalization trend, but India is a big place with over a billion people. And to think that they're going to go through a massive industrialization process that's going to double their industrial plant and adapt to the collapse of China as a source of consumer goods and collapse

to the international trade system, which has allowed them to reach out without massive social upheaval, is being overly optimistic. India will still be there. India is actually probably going to be entering one of its greatest growth periods in its history. And India has been around a long time, but there are going to be a lot of growing pains, and that's going to generate a lot of social stress, which is going to change the profile of what you would do for tourism in India. Next up is Brazil. Brazil has a lot more exposure to the trends that are coming. It's a very high dollar producer for agricultural commodities because it needs so many inputs, most of which come from a different continent. So if anything happens to globalization, they lose access to those

inputs on a reliable basis, and a lot of the land goes to follow because it just has no innate fertility. In addition, they had suffered a double blow from the Chinese. Number one, they're one of the top investment targets for the Chinese who are trying to get that agricultural product to China, and without that investment, you should expect infrastructure spending to basically come to a standstill. And secondly, back in the 2000s, under the Lula government, the Chinese formed all kinds of joint ventures with the Brazilians, which basically meant that they went into Brazil to set up joint production facilities, but they stole absolutely everything that wasn't locked down, most notably the intellectual property, took it back to China, produced it at a bigger scale and drove all of

Brazilian industry out of business. So Brazil today has basically become a two-horse economy. High cost agricultural product, high-cost industrial inputs such as iron ore, all of it underwritten by the Chinese, that all goes away, which means that Brazil will have to absolutely invent itself again, that's going to be at best a 30-year process. And in the meantime, the social breakdown and the economic breakdown that is going to plague the country is going to be immense, meaning that there aren't going to be a lot of places in Brazil that are really worth going to. But the Coca-cabana right on the beach is kind of the quintessential expression of Brazilian economic inequality. You basically have these really, really rich pockets that will still be beautiful and they'll be

surrounded by slums. For those of you have been to Brazil before, you notice that that is not exactly a new concept, but it's going to become much more concentrated and the disparities would be much more obvious.