Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. If there isn't enough gold to back a currency in a growing economy, wouldn't that be deflationary rather than inflationary?
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  2. "Russian raw materials extraction depends on foreigners" According to the research of Thomas Sowell, this was true even under the Soviet system.
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  3. Peter's description of Mélenchon is good, but it's hard to beat Winston Churchill on Charles de Gaulle -- “He looks like a female llama who has just been surprised in her bath.”
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  4. He's trying to normalize this. Or, he doesn't like the fact that Tucker Carlson predicted this and he didn't.
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  5.  @BlobThoughtsMTG  No. Excitement for Trump is through the roof.
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  6. Data shows that it was not "overhyped".
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  7. Student loans were a mistake. Discourage every kid you meet, from taking them on.
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  8. Apparently the most common reaction among subjects of the Milgram Obedience Experiment was laughter.
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  9. "Canada has imported a whole new population, so they don't have to reinvent their economic model just to preserve their society" What about the people that argue that if you import a whole new population, you haven't preserved your society? What if, and see if you can follow me, Peter, what if ONLY ECONOMISTS would rather replace their entire population than have to go to the trouble of reinventing their economic model??
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  10. Checking in 4 months later -- "This is still Russia's war to lose" - Peter Zeihan
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  11. "Well, I'm done with Twitter... But I'm still going to be on Twitter" - Basically any Lefty Twitter addict.
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  12.  @enmass90  Yeah, it was much, much smaller, and less well-informed.
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  13. "It makes sense to make a bloc out of the West, culturally we have the same roots" That would mean returning to those roots. Expect to see mass re-migration, or even outright Reconquista, from traditional European countries.
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  14. I'm old enough to remember when the 2008 election was supposed to be Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani.
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  15. Peter Thiel has pointed out that in the last fifty years or so, innovation in the material world has ground to a screeching halt, with the only innovation we've seen being in the realm of bits. Getting the smartest people back onto the factory floor, is likely to open up innovation again.
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  16.  @mikehansen233  I'm considering it. If you limit the money supply but the supply of goods and services goes up, that's deflationary.
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  17. Step 1: Buy large stakes in various companies Step 2: Force activists for Leftist causes onto their boards, who will reorient the company towards ideology rather than profit Step 3: Buy politicians, who will pass legislation that advantages companies following those Leftist ideologies (and hurt companies with a good business plan) Step 4: Profit
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  18.  @robt1401  "Hey, there's a pit here. Be careful not to fall in" says the voice from the bottom of the pit.
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  19. Is Russian tradition, reaching back to Stalin and perhaps beyond.
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  20. No. He is Establishment. He's also on the rainbow spectrum, so culturally he's Left.
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  21. To be fair, it's probably a net positive for us for now that he interacts with those sorts, there are some insights into their thinking that leak out through Peter from time to time, that would never get carried in the legacy media. The more he parrots Establishment talking points though, the lower his signal-to-noise ratio gets. Peter needs another good deep dive into some more huge data sets, to get his head right again.
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  22. Wow. Way to push The Narrative(TM), Peter. California is screwed for a number of reasons, many of which really are based on bad decisions they've made. - Dehydration -- California is already at just about carrying capacity as far as water is concerned. Water is too heavy, necessary at such enormous volumes, and California too isolated, to significantly increase supply. The Southwest is in the same predicament; it has nowhere to go but down, from here. Unless Humboldt County dredges their Bay and starts being growth-friendly, California is as big as it's ever going to get. - Got Woke, Went Broke -- California, being so isolated from the rest of the country by a huge mountain range, increasingly convinced of its own rightness because of its billionaire status, and more than a little weird in the first place, became increasingly out-of-touch with the culture of the rest of the country. This disconnect caused Hollywood to destroy itself at the box office. See: Disney, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Lord of the Rings. - Utterly incompetent governance -- Or rather, far better at accruing power, than at wisely using it. California House Speaker Willie Brown, the most important politician no one has ever heard of, gathered so much power he basically ran the state for decades. This, in accord with corrupt and ineffective Leftist policies that ranged from unsustainable to self-destructive, funded by the tech boom. Nancy Pelosi took lessons from him, about what kind of power a Speaker could have, ossifying the Federal government as well. Kamala Harris is Vice President (indeed, has a political career at all) specifically because Willie Brown thought she was attractive, to put it delicately. Gavin Newsom is an empty suit full of platitudes and policy ideas that have turned out disastrously in every jurisdiction he's gained power in, starting with San Francisco and spreading out to the state at large. - Tech is mined out -- Moore's Law hasn't been true for most of a decade now. This means that big new crazy ideas remain crazy, rather than becoming feasible. Another set of advances could bring another several branches of fruit into "low-hanging" territory, but there have been several "next big things" that simply haven't panned out.
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  23. Yup. YouTube is not great either, algorithmically. You have to get a good list of Subscribed channels, and curate your "recommended videos" aggressively (excluding channels that routinely lie to you, and videos you aren't interested in) to get YouTube to give you useful content. Also, NEVER go to the front page, and ALWAYS scroll down through a few dozen videos when you search, to make sure you're not just getting what Algo wants to feed you.
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  24. Because de-banking dissidents, stamping out freedom of speech, and confiscating weapons because the population is getting uppity, doesn't qualify as an "issue" to you?
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  25. "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them" - attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, 1848
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  26. Did you catch Peter's argument at the beginning of the video, when he said that labor cost differentials were key to success? California being home only to the very rich and very poor, is his ideal state.
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  27. That's incredibly offensive. Peter's sharper than the two of them put together, unless Trump Derangement Syndrome takes him down (which it might.)
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  28.  @ThePrikly  William F. Buckley tells the story of being booked by his agent to speak at a small college. He arrived on a private flight, at a small nondescript private airport. He gave his speech and flew home again, never knowing where he had spoken.
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  29. Just looking at a map of "good guys" and "pirate-type bad guys", there's a conspicuous lack of "bad guys" between the US and Japan / Korea, US and Australia / NZ, US and England, and really the entire Western Hemisphere. The pockets of pirates and other bad actors seem to be Malacca, Hormuz, and Somalia / Bab el Mendeb, which mostly serves to isolate India. It seems to me that a lot of the impact here only lands if India fails to make the jump from where it is now, to a regional power capable of fielding a navy that can secure those choke points. If Peter ever reports the headline, "Navy of India moves carrier group to secure the Straits of Hormuz", and he does so with the assumption they will actually be effective there, that's the first step to securing all of the choke points around the Indian Ocean.
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  30.  @MicroSBs  Er, most Americans want their Reps to actually bring their constituents' interests to a vote on individual issues, rather than squandering that information by forcing party-line (or worse, uniparty) omnibus bills.
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  31. That's the sneaking suspicion that the powers-that-be in Beijing are listening too, and disapproving of your actions.
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  32.  @Whatsupwiththisname  I hear you can buy San Francisco's Union Square for cheap these days, although cleaning up after the socialists (and Democrats, but I repeat myself) would be a bit of a job.
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  33. "The Chinese know that all they have to do is flatter Trump during negotiations, after which they can just ignore everything that they just discussed" ... Doesn't that say more about the (in)competence of subordinates who are supposed to follow up on policies set by Trump, than it does about Trump himself?
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  34. Peter is basically an access journalist -- he has to say what the administration and its strategists want him to say, or they'll cut him off from his information feeds.
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  35. Aren't soy and alfalfa part of a crop rotation to keep the soil productive, though?
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  36.  @pathkeepers  Peter is in the Strategy community, which is intelligence-adjacent. And especially now that he's got influence, they're clearly feeding him information they want to get out there. It's still fascinating to listen to him on these subjects, for insight into the ruling classes' assumptions and preferences.
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  37.  @tileavenue6911  There's nothing wrong with an American knowing what team he's on. He won't risk his reputation too much, though -- hedging his commentary on the Ukrainian conflict, saying "It's still Russia's war to lose", he's distancing himself from the Information Warriors who think that Baghdad-Bob-like control of The Narrative(TM) automatically leads to victory.
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  38.  @dphitch  The only thing the government has to do is get out of the way. Regulatory hurdles drive both the costs and the lead times. Those hurdles are entirely self-inflicted. More than that, they are deliberately designed to keep nuclear from being part of our energy mix, rather than any legitimate safety concerns. All this, in spite of the fact that even sunny, windy, green-obsessed places like California rely completely on their legacy nuclear plants to keep the lights on. If they'd kept up a steady pace of building new ones, the blackouts and brownouts of previous decades simply would not have happened.
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  39. He's at his best when he has actual data to back him up. This is not one of those times.
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  40. Peter, why in the world would Europe stop supporting native agricultural productivity, when the global trade system is supposed to be on the verge of collapse?
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  41. The solution is cultural. Deeply religious demographics are still having kids, and they can inspire even the non-religious to have families too (as in Israel). It's almost as if being anti-religious is a mistake.
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  42. "Navigating around" the Red Sea involves the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Suez Canal, a bit more than 200 nautical miles' worth of detour. It's why so many countries (including China) have foreign military bases in Djibouti, to handle piracy at the south end of the Red Sea in the straits called the Bab el Mandeb. These straits are about 15-20 miles wide, of which the middle 5 miles or so are suitable for tanker shipping. On the southwest shore of these straits is Djibouti. On the northeast shore is... Yemen.
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  43. "A president that asks and tries to learn" Ladies and gentlemen, the conclusion of someone in the strategic consulting business regarding his favorite kind of president. Cue surprise.
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  44. Only it seems like the House of Saud's response is, "Who're you calling lesser?"
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  45.  @SignalCorps1  Listen to his talk at the beginning of the video about "labor cost profiles" again. He is explicitly arguing that industry performs best when income inequality is highest.
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  46. Living his best life? The middle-aged guy that gets on the Internet and warns everyone about demographic collapse, and yet has no children is living "his best life"?
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  47. You skipped something there -- what, exactly, are Independent voters (who are massively conservative-leaning at this point) wanting to avoid, with Trump? If most of the "independents" you talk to are government bureaucrats who are (jusifiably) afraid Trump is going to come in and fire most of the DC expert class (much to the benefit of everyone else in the country), you might be talking to an unrepresentative sample of independents.
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  48. People do think for themselves. What they're thinking is, "Supporters of Ukraine lied through their teeth about who blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, so we should take everything else they say with just a pinch of salt. Or more."
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  49. Peter's an interesting person to listen to, because he's a very clear window into what the Establishment thinks. What worries me, is that everyone's right -- we think that Trump will win far and away a majority of votes in this country, and Zeihan is right that Trump will lose the election.
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  50.  @janitorizamped  He's normalizing it by providing context. He wants us to say, "We are brilliant and aware people. [Meh] We know that this kind of thing is inevitable in this kind of situation [it isn't]. This is just something that we're going to have to expect for a while." That's called "normalization".
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