the past century or so has been a bit of a blitzkrieg of progress from horse and
buggy to passenger trains to the family car to everyday air travel
from the abacus to adding machines to desktop calculators to smartphones
from iron to stainless steel to silicon laced aluminum to touch sensitive glass
from waiting for wheat to reaching for citrus to being handed chocolate to on-demand guacamole
our world has gotten cheaper and certainly better and most definitely faster and in
recent decades the paces of change and achievement have accelerated further
we've witnessed the release of more than 30 ever more sophisticated versions of the iphone in just
15 years we're attempting to shift wholesale to electronic vehicles at 10 times the pace
we adopted traditional combustion engines the laptop i'm tapping this down on has
more memory than the combined total of all computers globally in the late 1960s
not long ago i was able to refinance my home at a rate of 2.5 percent it was stupidly awesome
it isn't simply about stuff and speed and money the human condition has similarly improved
during the past seven decades as a percent of the population fewer people have died in
fewer wars and fewer occupations and fewer famines and fewer disease outbreaks than
since the dawn of recorded history historically speaking we live in an embarrassment of riches
and peace all of these evolutions and more are tightly interwoven inseparable but there's a
simple fact that is often overlooked they are artificial we have been living in a perfect moment
and it is passing the world of the past few decades has been the best it will ever be
in our lifetime instead of cheap and better and faster we're rapidly transitioning into
a world that's pricier and worse and slower because the world our world is breaking apart
i'm getting ahead of myself in many ways this book is the most quintessentially me
project i've ever done my work lands me squarely at the intersection of geopolitics
and demography geopolitics is the study of place exploring how everything about us is
an outcome of where we are demography is the study of population structures
teens act different from 30 somethings versus 50 somethings versus 70-somethings i weave together
these two disparate themes to forecast the future my first three books were about nothing
less than the fall and rise of nations about exploring the big picture of the world to come
but you can only speak at langley so many times to pay the bills i do something else my real job is a
sort of hybrid public speaker slash consultant the fancy marketing term is geopolitical strategist
when groups bring me in it's rare that they want to ruminate over the future of angola or
uzbekistan their needs and questions are closer to home and their pocketbooks wrapped up in a series
of economic questions about trade and markets and access what i do is apply geopolitics and
demography to their problems their dreams their fears i peel out the appropriate parts of my big
picture and apply them to questions of electricity demand in the southeast or precision manufacturing
in wisconsin or financial liquidity in south africa or the nexus of security and trade in
the mexico border region or transport options in the midwest or energy policy during the turn
of american administrations or heavy industry in korea or tree fruits in washington state
this book is all that and more so much more i'm once again using my trusty tools of geopolitics
and demography to forecast the future of global economic structures or to be more accurate
there's soon to be lack thereof to showcase the shape of the world just past the horizon
this decade was always the decade when we were going to pass the tipping point because this is
the decade when all the younger countries become they age past the point of reconstitution and all
the older countries age into mass retirement so whether you're looking at from an american
point of view a globalization point of view or demographic point of view this was always
going to be the last decade kovitz sped it up by two years and the ukraine war is a hard stop
we're never going back to 2019. i just understand that the world that we've been living in for the
last 70 years especially the last 30 was this just magical confluence of unrelated events the age
structure that was relatively young or relatively balanced and a geopolitical picture that was safer
than it had ever been and both of those are coming to the end we're entering into a fundamentally new
era where countries are going to have to sink or swim more or less on their own if you're in the
western hemisphere that's going to be a lot easier than the eastern hemisphere and if you're in north
america it's going to be easier than south america so the us is going to come through this looking
pretty good different and i don't mean to suggest the road forward is a straight or a non-bumpy one
but we'll be fine uh if you're looking for more to follow especially as regards to the
ukraine war because that's all anyone can talk about these days the website is www.zeihan.com
and you can sign up for a newsletter right on the front page the newsletter is free it will always
be free right on and i would encourage people to obviously check out the new book the end of
the world is just the beginning but the older books as well disunited nations was one of the
uh not easiest in terms of uh being simple but just a page-turner that i flew through i
definitely recommend this united nations to folks and we'll link that all in the show notes for this
episode but uh peter before i let you go i'd like to to give you the mic one final time to
issue an actionable personal challenge to the audience sure uh we because the newsletter is
free we're actively soliciting donations for a group called afiya the afia foundation afya
foundation.org they are providing medical assistance to the refugees of the ukraine war
so far we've got about six and a half million ukrainians have fled
their homes and there's another almost 7 million internally displaced within ukraine
that are probably going to have to evacuate as well within the next couple of months so anything
you can give would be hugely appreciated and here we are providing all of the royalties from all of
the sales of all of the formats of all three of the books accidental absent and disunited
nations to affia for at least until june 1 and at that point we'll see where the war is
them
you