Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan coming to you from Colorado. today is our latest entry in our ongoing series of things I do and don’t Worry about. And this one is both has to do with trans oceanic cables, which connect the continents in terms of the internet, we basically have a highly sequestered and fragmented system in North America, South America, Africa, Western Europe, Asia and South Asia and Southeast Asia.

all of these things are barely linked together. And to the degree that they are, that goes through a series of cables that go through predictable routes. So obviously, North America and South America are separate from the rest of the world by the Pacific in the Atlantic Ocean, but they’re also separated from each other, with the, Panamanian isthmus being the only point of connection.

And there’s a section called the Dorian Gap that has no roads, no rail, no pipe, no power. in terms of separating Europe from China, the Russian space has become a lot less reliable of late. And so while there are still cables across that zone, they’re not nearly as capable, as reliable as they used to be. There’s no connections between the Middle East and Africa because it goes through Israel, and that’s a connection that cannot be made.

and then South Asia and Southeast Asia have reasonable connections. Southeast Asia and China have reasonable connections. but the Himalayas stop any direct connections between South Asia and, say, China. And then, of course, countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are either literal islands or functional islands. So it doesn’t take a particularly genius to find these cables and cut them, as the Houthis have already shown that they’re willing to do for some of the connections between southern Asia and Europe.

They’re routes that go through the ocean, through the Gulf of Aden, through the bad el Mandeb and the Red sea before crossing Suez and going on to Europe. so we’ve got this fractured system of 5 to 8, based on how you draw the line for connectivity systems that are linked by just a handful of cables. So it doesn’t take much genius to basically breakdown international trade in services.

the only way you could get things if the cables go down is something like Starlink, which is less than 4% of international traffic. Now, that said, that is hard to disrupt because there’s hundreds of Starlink satellites with more going up every week. if we ever get into a situation where the United States is in an information war where targets that transmit information being targeted, you can guarantee that Starlink is going to be nationalized.

As one of the first acts of the U.S government. We’re not there yet, thank God. Anyway, that’s the part I do worry about. The white part of don’t worry about is if we ever really are in a hot war with the near pure power, say for example, China. it’s not just would be disruptors like the Houthis who know where these cables are.

The U.S. government knows where each and every one of them is. In fact, they’re on maps. So if we get to a situation where there’s kind of a mass hacking attack from China, all we have to do is go out and cut the cables, because, let’s be honest, if we’re in a real war, the last thing that Washington is gonna be concerned about is whether or not internet connectivity and emails going back and forth across the Pacific at a high speed.

So this is something that is very easy to disrupt. And as long as you’re interested in a world that works together, that’s bad. But if we ever get to the point where it’s obvious that the world is not working together, it’s good because it means it’s easy to bring down in a matter of just a few days.

Good morning from a frigid Colorado. It’s a balmy zero degrees this morning. And today, I want to tell you a tale of three companies and the state of the semiconductor industry from a technological and production point of view. Now, if you go back to the world before 2017, the technology of the day was something called deep ultraviolet, which was basically a way of producing microchips and intel.

The American technological giant was the world leader by pretty much any measure, and they had gotten a little cocky and they’d gotten a little bit lazy. So they would design chips two or three or four models out, but would only produce the next one up because they were so far ahead of everybody else. They didn’t feel the need to jump steps.

So they would use the EUV and they would make a chip that was marginally better than the one before. And then at the end of the year, no one was had caught up. So they do it again and again and again. And they do this for like 15 years. I mean, they’re very good at what they do, but they could have pushed the technological envelope a lot more if had they chosen to.

In part, that was because of the nature of the technology. The problem with it is you have to kind of make micro adjustments and physically adjust the equipment for each type of chip. And you have to do that manually and physically. And so with every design, you had to do it all over and with every machine in a fabrication facility, you would have to do it independently.

So no new chips from different machines are going to be quite exactly alike. And it generated a relatively higher loss rate from the final semiconductors than what we have today. And so generated a little bit more waste. But again, they were the industry leader. No one was close. Well, they were always had their eye on the future, however.

And so they invested in new technologies that would take them beyond the EUV, one of which is EUV, extreme ultraviolet. And the company that developed that technology is ASML out of the Netherlands. And back in 2016, ASML thought the stuff was ready to go. So they’re providing demonstrations for Intel, showing them how this technology is better. You can not only get more nodes on a chip and get to smaller and smaller nanometers, but it’s all digital.

So you kind of type in what you want to the machine over the course of a few days to a few weeks, and then the machine doesn’t actually have to be physically manipulated in the way that DV did. Now what that would mean is you’d have a higher success rate and more efficiency. But back in 2016, Intel was like, I don’t think this technology is quite right and we’re the industry leader.

We’re going to give it a few more years. Well, ASML not very happy with that. Marketed the technology to everybody else and a company decided to take the plunge. That company is TSMC out of Taiwan. And when we get to 2017, TSMC suddenly hits the ball out of the park and proves that EUV is ready for mass application and over the next couple of years very rapidly overtakes Intel because they have a shorter turnaround time for their chips and they can make chips with smaller nanometer sections.

It isn’t until 2022 or 2023 that Intel finally makes its first extreme ultraviolet chips. So TSMC in Taiwan has been the industry leader now for several years now. We’ve had a kind of a reverse in the roles. Now ASML, the Dutch have another another new technology called high numerical aperture, whose physics I’m not even to pretend to understand.

And they have marketed again. And this time Intel is the one that’s behind. And they’re kind of desperate and kind of hungry. And TSMC is the one that’s resting on their laurels. So the first delivery of those new machines, the high end chips, went to Intel in the second week of January of this year. And Intel expects two things.

Number one, they plan to overtake TSMC using the EUV technology in 2024, hoping to get down to two nanometers. Right now, the industry lead is at about three nanometers and that’s a TSMC product. And then next year they hope to leapfrog even further, provided that these new high end machines work, which will, you know, we’ll find out pretty soon.

Anyway. That’s where we are right now. In terms of the overall geopolitics, it’s pretty straightforward. Right now, 90% of all I hand chips are made by one company, TSMC, in one city in Taiwan, it’s a high concentration. But if Intel working with ASML can pull this off, all of a sudden we will have facilities in the United States that are working on the higher end stuff with some of the first facilities that are going be going online outside of Phenix and Columbus, Ohio.

So stay tuned because the geography of these chips is about to evolve pretty significantly if high works. And if not, we’re still stuck with Taiwan, it could be worse.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from New York. I know normally people don’t like it when I do a video from my hotel room, but I’ve got a view of the cathedral right here, so I figured maybe we’d make an exception the day I’d stay here and talk about distribution channels and specifically why I’m leaving Twitter completely

So three things. First of all, I used to love Twitter because it provided me access to firsthand information in places that the mainstream media, for whatever reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t go. The best example I can give you is the Ukraine war. As technology has become more important in global media, the number of people who were employed in that space has dropped.

And so there’s a lot fewer eyes and fingers touching any particular story that has one of the reasons why we have a lot more opinion in our news than we used to. And a lot less fact checkers. Your editors, fewer people see anything. And so when something new starts up, especially when there’s something new, is kind of neo violent and dangerous, there just aren’t enough people within the existing media landscape to redirect in this case to either side of the front line in Ukraine.

And so Twitter was where individuals who had personal contacts in the area could provide information. And sure, there’s a lot to vet, but the point is, it was a source of information. Now, when the Ukraine war began, the old Twitter management went through and purged Russian bots from the system, which all of a sudden opened up Twitter to be glorious in any number of venues because it was no longer being spammed by disinformation.

It was not to the same scale. But then Elon Musk came in and as part of his commitment to free speech, he destroyed all content moderation and allowed encouraged the bots to come back in force. And so now I would say on my feed, my curated feed, it’s about 90, 95% misinformation. And so I’ve gone from spending an hour to thumbing through Twitter, getting a feel of what’s going on in the world, to spending 12 hours and having no idea what’s going on because it’s just crap.

So I’ve stopped. The second big issue has to do with interaction. Now, part of the thing that was wonderful about old Twitter is the people who were providing that firsthand information were accessible. And, you know, not to put too much of shine on it, but when you’ve got 100,000 or more followers, those people tend to pay attention if you ask them a question.

So for me, it became free information gathering and I could engage with conversations with potential sources as well as just normal viewers about what was going on. And it gave me ideas of what to do, for example, for these videos, because you guys could interact with me, you could access me, and vice versa. Well, that stopped basically the things that are in the for you category, a mention by you has disappeared from my feed.

And over the last six weeks I have had seven interactions with all of you combined. Now, if you want to spare me with porn bot that gets through and if you want to launch a crypto scheme and see if I’ll fall for it, that gets through. And if it’s a porn themed crypto scheme that absolutely gets through. But it’s gone from being one of the most rewarding parts of my job to just complete a time suck and a waste of everything that I do.

So that’s gone. And then there’s third is Elon Musk himself. What a wanker. It was one thing when he would blindly parrot whatever piece of Chinese propaganda came across the screen. And another thing, when he started doing the same thing for Russian propaganda and then Iranian propaganda. But of late, he’s gone down the white supremacist road in the anti-Semitic road.

And it’s almost like Musk has revealed to the world that in reality he’s not a green or a businessman. He’s just an unapologetic apartheid era, white South African, which apparently is exactly what he is. And so I’m done. I will still be using Twitter as a distribution channel for the videos. For those of you who are somehow able to find some sort of use for it, probably the crypto pros.

But for everybody else, I would just underline that the fastest way, the most reliable way to get the videos is to sign up for the newsletter w WW dot z e i h a incom slash newsletter sign dot com slash newsletter, which is always the first place that the video goes before Twitter, before YouTube, before everything else. So just sign up direct.

We will never share your data with anyone and the video remains free. Okay, that’s it. I’ll see you around. I’ll still be checking in on Twitter every few weeks to see if anything’s changed because, you know, God, it certainly can’t get worse, is my thinking. But then it keeps getting worse. But who knows? Maybe we’ll have a change in management.

Maybe we’ll have a change in policy, and it’ll be some version of what it used to be. But until then. Newsletter. All right. Ticker.