Peter Zeihan

One of the things that people want to break down the trade relationships and say that it's unfair for the United States, what they forget is it was supposed to be unfair to the United States.

From an economic point of view, we bribed up an alliance.

If you remember your history, it wasn't just Britain and Germany and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Italy that were allies during the Cold War.

It was China, too, because it was all about boxing in the Soviets, and it worked beautifully.

The idea that this should be recalibrated in a post-Cold War environment, perfectly reasonable.

But if you don't want to pay people to be on your side, they need another reason to be on your side.

And so what we're seeing in American politics right now is this kind of cognitive disconnect where we still want everyone to do everything we say, but we also don't want our market open.

And that is not a viable long-term plan.

Since I talked to you last, there seems to be this reckoning that's going on in the statistical community in Canada.

Where'd that come from?

Sorry.

You picked me up right after doing another project in China.

The issue appears to be that they now believe, the statisticians now believe that the local and regional governments have been lying about their demographic data for over 25 years.

And so after Tiananmen Square, 10,000 people killed by tanks in downtown Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party said, well, that was no fun whatsoever.

Let's try to not ever have to do that again.

One of the ways we're going to make sure that happens is we discovered that there were kind of two kinds of protesters.

You had the white collar workers that just made signs and they were really easy to run over with tanks.

And then you had the ones that were kind of scary that brought wrenches and guns.

So you had white collar and you had blue collar.

So why don't we move our entire economy from a blue collar economy to a white collar economy?