Table of Contents
- The World Is About to Change—And Most People Aren't Ready
- The Biggest Story No One's Talking About
- AI Won't Save Us (From the Real Problem)
- The EV Fantasy
- The Echo Chamber Effect (Presidential Edition)
- The Copper Problem
- What Actually Matters
- The Uncomfortable Bottom Line
- What This Means For You
- The Challenge
The World Is About to Change—And Most People Aren't Ready
I came across this interview with Peter Zeihan—geopolitical strategist, demographics nerd, and professional doom-predictor—and it completely rewired how I think about the next decade.
Most of us consume news like it's weather updates.
Trade war here. Election there. New AI breakthrough. We treat these as isolated events.
Zeihan connects the dots in ways that make you realize: everything is connected, and the connections are breaking.
Here's what I learned.
The Biggest Story No One's Talking About
China isn't just slowing down. It's disappearing.
And I don't mean that dramatically. I mean it literally.
The Chinese government recently discovered something terrifying: they may have overcounted their population by 100 to 300 million people. That's not a rounding error. That's the entire population of the United States—potentially never born.
Here's how it happened: Local officials got paid per immunization given. So they lied about the numbers. Local governments got subsidies based on school enrollment. So they inflated the counts. For over 25 years, the lies compounded.
The first accurate headcount? When those "kids" were supposed to start paying taxes. And they didn't exist.
The takeaway: The data you trust might be built on incentives that corrupt it. This applies everywhere—not just China. Company metrics. Social media engagement. Economic forecasts. Always ask: Who benefits from this number being high?
This is the Cobra Effect in action btw!
AI Won't Save Us (From the Real Problem)
Here's what Silicon Valley doesn't want you to hear: AI can't solve demographic collapse.
Yes, AI is transforming white-collar work. Paralegals? In trouble. Data analysts? Concerning. But the actual worker shortage isn't in coding or content creation.
It's in welding. Plumbing. Electrical work. Manufacturing.
"Robots don't pay taxes," Zeihan points out. "They can't raise kids. They can't consume products."
Even if automation could maintain production levels, economies need consumers. They need taxpayers. They need young people having children who will become the next generation of workers and buyers.
AI solves for efficiency. Demographics determines whether there's anyone left to benefit from that efficiency.
The EV Fantasy
"Any country where EVs aren't subsidized, there are no EVs," Zeihan says flatly.
The math doesn't work. To transition the US to majority EV by 2050, we'd need every scrap of lithium, copper, cobalt, and graphite from the entire planet—and no one else could have any.
Worse: In many places, EVs are net dirtier than gasoline cars. Because the electricity has to come from somewhere. If it's coal—which it often is—you're not saving the planet. You're just moving the pollution.
Chinese EVs are lighter (and kill more pedestrians in crashes), so they break even faster on carbon. American EVs, with our safety standards and heavier builds? The math gets ugly.
The Echo Chamber Effect (Presidential Edition)
Here's a terrifying detail: Xi Jinping has written 30,000 pages of ideological treatises in the last 10 years.
Think about that. That's roughly 8 pages per day. Every single day. For a decade.
"That doesn't leave a lot of time to govern," Zeihan notes. "And when you eat nothing but propaganda all day, it kind of messes with your head."
Xi has systematically removed advisers who might challenge him. The last real one was seven years ago. Now he's surrounded by yes-men, fed a steady diet of his own ideology, with no corrective mechanisms.
This is the Curse of Knowledge meets the Echo Chamber Effect at a civilizational scale.
The Copper Problem
Ask anyone about critical minerals and they'll mention lithium or rare earths. The unsexy answer? Copper.
Want to expand your electrical grid? Copper. Want more industry? Copper. Want green tech, EVs, or data centers? Copper, copper, copper.
The US needs to consume roughly 12 times as much copper over the next 30 years as we have over the previous 30—just to double our industrial plant.
The ore comes from Chile, US, Canada, and Mexico. The processing happens in China and India.
We can mine it. We just can't keep it.
What Actually Matters
Zeihan's framework cuts through noise by focusing on fundamentals:
- Geography: Rivers, coastlines, mountain ranges. These don't change.
- Demographics: Who's having kids, who isn't, and what that means in 20 years.
- Resources: Energy, food, critical materials. Not what we want, but what we need.
- Trade routes: Who can access whom, safely and reliably.
Most analysis obsesses over leaders, policies, and news cycles. Zeihan asks: What does the map tell us? What does the age pyramid tell us? What does physics tell us?
These fundamentals explain more than any political hot take.
The Uncomfortable Bottom Line
America doesn't win the next era because it's brilliant. It wins because everyone else is in worse shape.
- China's demographic pyramid is inverted beyond repair.
- Europe has aging populations and fragmented energy security.
- Russia is burning through its future in Ukraine.
The US has food, energy, young(ish) demographics, two protective oceans, and friendly neighbors.
It's not a victory. It's a slower decline than the alternatives.
What This Means For You
You can't control geopolitics. But you can control how you think about uncertainty.
First-principles thinking: Don't accept narratives. Trace systems to their foundations. Where does the energy come from? Who pays for this? What happens when the incentives change?
Second-order thinking: Then what? If China's manufacturing collapses, what happens to supply chains? If the grid can't expand, what happens to AI data centers?
Scenario planning: The future isn't a single path. It's a probability distribution. Which worlds are you prepared for?
Focus on fundamentals: In your career, relationships, and investments—what's the equivalent of geography and demographics? The things that don't change quickly, that constrain everything else?
The Challenge
This week, pick one assumption you've accepted without questioning.
Maybe it's about AI. Maybe it's about your career trajectory. Maybe it's about the economy.
Ask yourself:
- What would need to be true for this assumption to hold?
- What's the incentive structure behind the information I'm consuming?
- What are the second-order consequences if I'm wrong?
Most people won't do this. They'll keep scrolling, keep consuming headlines, keep assuming the future will look like a slightly modified present.
The world is shifting beneath our feet. The question isn't whether change is coming. It's whether you'll see it before it arrives.
Watch the full episode here -
