Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Ready for Mass Application

Image of the open AI logo with a wireframe brain above it

Today’s AI technology, while promising, isn’t quite ready for widespread application. I’m not talking so much about AI’s capabilities, but rather the hardware limitations and supply chain challenges that are getting in the way.

For AI to manage vast amounts of data, it’s going to need specialized chips which are still in development. So, give R&D a couple years to figure that out, and then another decade+ for production and supply chains to get sorted out. Without these new chips, power demands are going to skyrocket (because the current, inefficient chips suck up power like nobody’s business). Until those new chips arrive, the US will have to decide which industries will be getting the limited chips that are available, like agriculture, defense, or finance.

While a delay might seem like a bad thing, especially for those who are ready to let AI do their job while they’re sipping Mai Tais on a beach somewhere…it gives us time to figure out how to address all the problems with AI and what its actual impact will look like.

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Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Revere Beach, just north of Boston. A lot of you have written in asking for my opinions on AI. So here we go. Pick it apart, however you will. It’s tantalizing. So GPT and the large language models are taking us forward. They’re nowhere near conscious thought. Oftentimes, they can’t even associate their own work from previously in a conversation, with itself. 

It’s basically targeted randomness, if you will. That said, it is still providing insights and the ability to search vast databases in a much more organized and coherent matter than anything we have seen from, search engines before. So promising tech. We had a taste. It’s definitely not ready for what I would consider mass application, but, the possibilities are there, especially when it comes to data management, which, when it comes to things like research and genetics, is very important. 

However, I think it’s important to understand what the physical limitations are of AI, and that is a manufacturing issue. So the high end chips that we’re using, the GPUs, graphics processing units, we’re not designed to run AI models. They were designed to run multiple things simultaneously for graphics, primarily for gaming consoles. And the gamers among us who have logged lots of time playing Doom and Fortnite and all the rest have been the primary economic engine for pushing these technologies forward until very recently. 

It’s only with things like autonomous driving and electric vehicles that we’ve had a larger market for high end chips. But the GPUs, specifically because they run multiple scenarios and computations simultaneously, that is what makes a large language model work. Wow. Got windy all of a sudden. Let me make sure this works. 

Okay. So, GPUs, they generate a lot of heat because they’re doing multiple things at the same time. And so normally you have a gaming console and you have a GPU at the heart of it, and multiple cooling systems typically fans blowing on them to keep laptop from catching on fire. 

So if you take these and put 10 or 20,000 of them in the same room in the server farm, you have a massive heat problem. And that’s why most forecasts indicate that, the amount of electricity we’re using for data centers is going to double in the next few years, to compensate. That’s why they’re so power intensive. 

Now, if you want to design a chip that is for large language models and AI systems as opposed to, that’s just being an incidental use. You can that those designs are being built now, and we’re hoping to have a functional prototype by the end of calendar year 2025. If that is successful, then you can have your first mass run of the chips enough to generate enough chips for a single server farm by the end of 2027. 

And then you can talk about mass manufacture getting into the system by 2029, 2030. So, you know, even in the best case scenario, we’re not going to have custom designed chips for this anytime soon. Remember that a GPU is about the size of a postage stamp because it’s designed to be put in a laptop. Or if you’re going to design a chip specifically, to run AI, you’re talking about something that is bigger than a dinner plate because it’s going to have a cooling system built in. 

Not to mention being able to run a lot more things in parallel. So even in the best case scenario, we’re looking at something that’s quite a ways out. So then you have to consider the supply chain just to make what we’re making. Now. The high end chip world, especially sub10 nanometer, and we’re talking here about things that are in the four nanometer and smaller range, closer to two, really, is the most sophisticated and complicated and, proprietary supply chain in human history. 

There are over 9000 companies that are involved in making the stuff that goes into the stuff that goes into the stuff that ultimately allows TSMC to make these chips in Taiwan. And then, of course, 99% of these very high end chips are all made in one town in Taiwan that faces the People’s Republic of China. So it doesn’t take a particularly egregious scenario to remove some of those 9000 pieces from, the supply chain system. 

And since roughly half of those supply chain steps are only made by small companies that produce one product for one end user and have no competition globally, you lose a handful of them, and you can’t do this at all until you rebuild the ecosystem based on what goes wrong. That rebuilding can take upwards of 10 to 15 years. 

So in the best case scenario, we need new hardware that we’re not going to have for a half a decade and are more likely scenario. We’re not going to have the supply chain system in order to build the hardware, for a decade or more. However, we’ve already gotten that taste of what I might be able to do. 

And since with the baby boomer retirement, we’re entering into a world of both labor and capital shortages. The idea of having AI or something like it to improve our efficiency is something we can’t ignore. The question is whether we’re going to have enough chips to do everything we want to do. And the answer is a hard no. So we’re going to have to choose do we want the AI chips running to say, crack the genome so that we can put out a new type of GMO in the world that’ll save a billion people from starving to death. 

In a world where agricultural supply chains fail. Do we use it to improve worker productivity in a world in which there just aren’t enough workers? And in the case of the United States, we need to double the, industrial plant in order to compensate for a failing China? Or do we use it to stretch the investment dollar further now that the baby boomer money’s no longer available and allow our financial system to be more efficient? 

Or do we use it for national defense and cryptography? You know, these these are top level issues, and we’re probably only going to have enough chips to do one of the four. So I would argue that the most consequential decision that the next American president is going to have to make is about where to focus, what few chips we can produce and where do you put them? 

There’s no right answer. There’s no wrong answer. There’s just less than satisfactory answers. And that leaves us with the power question. Assuming that we could make GPUs at a scale that will allow mass adoption of AI, which we probably can’t anyway. You’re talking about doubling the power requirements, of what is used in the data space. Here’s the thing, though. 

If we can’t make the GPUs and we’re not going to be able to make the more advanced chips anytime soon, we’re still going to want to get some of the benefits from AI. So we’re going to use older, dumber chips that generate a lot more heat per computation in order to compensate, which means we’re probably going to be seeing these estimates for power demand, not simply double, but triple or more. 

At the same time, we get less computations, fewer computations, and generate an AI system that’s actually less effective because we’re not going to be able to make the chips at scale. So is it coming? Yeah. But in the short term, it’s not going to be nearly as fast. It’s going to cost a lot more. It’s going to require a lot more electricity. 

And we’re probably going to have to wait until about 2040 before we can design and build in mass and apply the chips that we actually want to be able to do this for real. So, believe it or not, actually see this as a borderline good thing because it’s so rare in the United States that we discuss the outcome of a technological evolution before it’s completely overwhelmed us here. 

I’d argue we’ve got another 15 years to figure out the fine print.

New Orleans Terror Attack

Photo of Bourbon Street, New Orleans

There was a terror attack in New Orleans today. An American citizen, who has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (despite its largely defunct state), drove a truck into a crowd; killing at least ten and injuring several others.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey Peter Zeihan here coming to you from New Zealand. It’s New Year’s Day. Back in the States, there was just a terror attack in New Orleans where an American citizen driving a rented truck plowed into a crowd, killing at least ten, injuring a few dozen others. He pledge allegiance to Islamic State, which is, you know, largely defunct in Syria these days. 

 Just want to put this in context. You know what it is? What to expect. 15, almost 20 years ago, the folks that represented the Islamic State at the time called upon Muslims all over the world to rise up and butcher Christians, saying that, go get a gun, can’t get a gun, get a knife and you can’t get a knife, get a car and just do as much mayhem as you can. 

Over a decade later in North America, it’s happened three times. Twice in the United States, once in Edmonton, Canada. Two things to keep in mind here. Number one, training operatives to actually do mass casualty events like, say, 911 takes time, takes resources. And when the people doing the training are in a different hemisphere and don’t control a state, it’s kind of a heavy carry. 

And so it just hasn’t happened very often. And when it does happen, it happens closer to the zone in question, like in places like Paris. Second, and I know this is going to be really radical at their core. Most people are not murderous assholes. So if you have a group who claims to represent all Muslims, who says, everyone go out and do something and you know, there’s hundreds of millions of Muslims and it happens three times. 

Math people. So is it horrible? Yep. Is it the start of something new? Absolutely not. 

TSMC’s Semiconductor Production in the USA

I’ve done a handful of videos on semiconductors and there’s a very good reason for that. The production of semiconductors and the companies involved will be under the spotlight for the next few years as the entire industry gets shaken up.

TSMC has set up chip production in Arizona, despite initially resisting relocating to the US. This facility isn’t doing the cutting-edge stuff, but it’s still producing chips on the higher end of the spectrum. TSMC has also managed to achieve a high recovery rate on these chips in Phoenix, not quite a major breakthrough but at least it reduces production costs.

Most of the chip manufacturing is automated, so the higher labor costs in the US and skill gaps relative to Taiwan aren’t playing as big of a role as expected. However, to expand the reaches of these facilities and begin development of cutting-edge chips, some major investments will need to be made. Let’s look at what Intel is doing on this front next.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the Boston Logan Airport. It is not quite five in the morning. Anyway, it’s still a decent backdrop. So we’re going to take an entry from the Ask Peter forum—specifically, could I give an update on the status of TSMC’s efforts to establish chipmaking here in the United States?

I’m happy to report that it’s actually going a little better than I thought it was going to. The very short version is that Donald Trump almost forced TSMC to relocate some of its production capacity to the United States and made it very clear that he wanted the very, very, very top end to be made here.

TSMC said, “Sure, of course, whatever,” and then proceeded to drag its feet in every possible way. Remember that the leading edge of chips these days is less than three nanometers, getting into two nanometers, and probably within the next couple of years, getting to 1.5 and maybe even one nanometer. The facilities that are under construction in Arizona have been dragged out, dragged out, dragged out, and dragged out, with, in many cases, TSMC not even providing proper architectural blueprints so far.

So there’s been construction, then they tear things down, and then they rebuild something and tear it down. They’re basically just buying time. But the first facility actually is operational. It’s just not the cutting edge—it’s like four nanometers, which is still pretty good, but it’s not the kind of stuff you’re going to probably put into an AI server farm or anything anyway.

Part of the big news that came out in late October was the idea that they’re getting a higher recovery rate from the new facilities in Phoenix than they’re getting anywhere else. While this is an important development, you shouldn’t get too excited.

The process for making the chips: you take a little bitty seed crystal, you put it into a pool of liquid silicon, and then you steadily pull it up over the course of several days to grow a crystal. That crystal ends up weighing more than a Volkswagen. It tends to be over a foot or two across and about nine feet long. I mean, it’s a little different at every facility. You get this giant ingot, and then you slice it laterally into thin discs.

You then use a combination of lithography, baking, and doping to etch those chips. You bake them to make sure that everything sticks, and then you do it again and again and again—something like 90 times. It takes a few months to make each individual sheet.

The waste is one of two things.

Number one, you have a section of the semiconductor sheet that just doesn’t work. So that would be waste. Or maybe it’s just the shape because, usually, your chips are squares or rectangles, and the disk is round. So you can have waste at the edges.

TSMC is famous for having the highest recovery rates in the industry. With its four-nanometer nodes, it’s something like 90% coherent and only 10% waste. The TSMC facility is now 94% coherent. So it is an important technological jump. It does drop the overall cost of the items you can produce, and since U.S. labor is more expensive than Taiwanese labor, you know, that’s great. But don’t get too excited about it.

Something else to keep in mind about these facilities is the labor that is necessary.

Very highly skilled? Yes. Is there a lot of labor? Not really. Most of this is automated because you’re using a lithography facility that is being produced by ASML, the Dutch company. You know, it’s automated. The whole point of extreme ultraviolet is it doesn’t require a lot of manual adjustments.

The old technology, deep ultraviolet? No, that did. When you are doing DUV, you’re constantly making changes to every individual machine for every individual run. You get much higher wastage because the chips aren’t all exactly the same. With EUV, it’s all automated. You have to do it once, and you can apply it across the entire system for every lithography machine in your facility. The chips come out much more regular. It’s kind of like an analog versus digital sort of thing.

One of the constraints we have faced with moving this stuff from Taiwan to the United States is that the labor costs more and isn’t quite trained right. But with EUV, that doesn’t matter as much as it would have with the older technologies.

Anyway, it’s moving ahead. Facilities two through five? God knows when those are going to be operational because those are supposed to be the higher-end ones. But this low-end, high-end chip of four nanometers seems to be moving along just fine. Just keep in mind that the real breakthroughs are going to be coming from TSMC this year.

If the United States is really going to get in the game of high-end semiconductors, it’s going to be using a new lithography technology called High Numerical Aperture, which is like the next generation of extreme ultraviolet.

TSMC isn’t bothering to work with that. That’s an Intel project. The Dutch company ASML has provided the technology to both companies, and only Intel has bit. That is the technology that is going to be used at the Columbus facility, which hopes to begin operations in 2026.

We’ll see.

Why I’m Worried About Fentanyl in the US

DEA photo of fentanyl on a pencil tip

When asked to list the things I worry about for the US, most of the typical geopolitical issues I discuss aren’t on that list. So, today we’re getting a bit more granular and talking about fentanyl.

Fentanyl is synthetic, cheap and easy to produce, and incredibly lethal…and that’s a scary list of descriptors. Since fentanyl is something that practically anyone can make, it’s shaking up the Mexican cartels that are used to the cocaine supply chains. As smaller factions emerge and drug manufacturing is “democratized”, the social fabric that has held Mexico together will be stretched. Should that fabric break, we could see fentanyl production move into the US.

As of now, the jump to US production hasn’t happened. And trends are showing that fatality rates are improving, thanks to medical protocols, reduced lethality of pills (because producers realized they probably shouldn’t kill their clientele), and younger users are opting for “safer” alternatives. Hopefully all of these trends continue…

In my eyes, the US doesn’t need to worry too much about the typical geopolitical issues, but the destabilizing effects of fentanyl on the US should be cause for concern.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Austin, Texas. A lot of you have written in over and over and over, asked me what I really do worry about. And so that’s the topic of today’s video. Overall, I am not stressed out about the United States. There aren’t a lot of things that can hurt us. 

We basically have a hemisphere to ourselves. Certainly the best part of the continent. And, we’re energy independent. We’re a massive energy and food exporter, and you can have entire continents catch on fire. And it really doesn’t do anything to the United States. In addition, if you factor out things like food and energy exports, the United States is only integrated with the rest of the world to about the tune of 10% of GDP, which is somewhere between one third and one fifth. 

What more traditional world powers historically have been, whether you’re talking about the British Empire or the China of today? So if things would have to go really bad on a global basis for the United States to really even have a mild problem, that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. It just means you have to look a little bit closer to home. 

I’m not talking about here politics. I’m talking about drugs. Now, the traditional story has been one of cocaine. And cocaine is, from my point of view, pretty easy to understand because it has straightforward concentrations and straightforward vulnerabilities that you would expect from an agricultural supply chain. So you grow the stuff in a specific type of climate in Bolivia and Ecuador. 

In Colombia, you harvest the leaves, you dry them, you process them oftentimes with gasoline, you make a crystal, you turn that into powder, and then you smuggle the powder, by water and by air into Central American countries. And then you get on land and you go up through the various mountain corridors of Central America and Mexico until you eventually reach the U.S. border, and then you distribute it from there. 

As a rule, looking at this from an economist point of view, it takes about six man hours per dose of cocaine. And the gross is going to vary by person, but it’s going to be less than half a gram unless you just want to like, cheat death or risk death or die. 

A lethal dose is about 1.2g. So, you know, definitely cocaine is bad, but don’t do more than a gram. Okay. That is something that we understand. And there are a number of places in the supply chain where you can not interrupt it. You can try to do crop eradication at the point of source. You can try to work with third governments like Colombia to try to interdict. 

You can work with the Mexicans in order to break up the cartel network that handles distribution. Or you can go against retail distribution in the United States, by going after the gangs. These are all options, and we’ve explored all of them in the past. But none of these really work very well for the new drug, which is called fentanyl. 

Fentanyl, unlike cocaine, is not organic. It’s not an agricultural product. It’s a synthetic, a chemical process. And the process for creating is much simpler than it is for cocaine. You use a number of base materials, and you don’t really need all that many of them. And a lot of the precursors are just flat out legal. 

So what happens is in China, they make the precursors and then American citizens, as a rule, order them and they’re shipped in containers about the size of this. This is about a half a liter. And you get about six equivalent of these, and you get them to the United States. You repackage them, you take them down to the Mexican border, and then you use the Mexican postal system to ship them to wherever they need to go. 

And for the most part, these steps are legal because the precursors can be used in other materials. Once the precursors get to somebody who has a garage set up for chemical work, you basically take the equivalent of people who barely passed high school chemistry. And if you’ve got three of them in a hotplate, you can basically make about a kilogram of finished fentanyl in about a week. 

That assumes that you have relatively incompetent lab techs. If they’re not, Cramer quality, if they actually made it through undergrad, you can probably make about three kilos. That stuff then can be pressed into pills and sent north much smaller volumes involved. So remember cocaine about 1.2g is a lethal dose. That same 12. two grams of fentanyl would be enough to kill over 500 people. 

You’re talking about just a couple grains of sand equivalent is enough to kill someone, and this is why it’s become such a problem in the United States. Because instead of six man hours per dose, it’s just a few man seconds per dose. And it’s a synthetic and there are fewer places that you can interrupt it. 

Now, fentanyl has another problem because it’s so easy to get into the business because with one week of work, you can make a few million dollars. That same fentanyl, doesn’t require the huge sorts of structures, social structures, cultural structures, economic structures that are needed for the cocaine economy. 

So with cocaine, because it’s all about controlling the transit systems, the production sites, you get cartels at the point of production in points of transit, and then you’ve got the gangs and the points of distribution 

in Mexico that has created the cartels, who’ve taken a big chunk out of the transit system and then worked up and down the transit systems to control more and more territory with fentanyl. 

 That doesn’t work so well because fentanyl just needs, you know, three dudes in a garage and, you know, a mailbox. And that means that we’re seeing dozens, if not hundreds of millionaires popping up in New Mexico, organized crime groups that are largely disassociated from the cartels. Or maybe they rely on the cartels for shipping, but they don’t necessarily need to. 

It also means that fentanyl tends to be a lot more lethal, not just because it requires so much less. It’s like the individual mom and pops don’t perceive. The quality control is one of their major concerns, so they just press the stuff in tablets and off it goes. And since it takes so little to kill someone, we’ve had 100,000 people die in 2022 and 2023 from fentanyl overdoses in the United States. 

Now, in recent times, we’ve seen kind of three things happen. Number one, the cartels are starting to fracture. They’re not as powerful as they used to be. And smaller factions are getting into, fentanyl manufacture, thumbing their nose at the central authorities of the cartel leadership, regardless of where in Mexico you are. So we’re actually seeing a lot more violence in Mexico rather than less, in part because now we’ve had a kind of democratization of the supply chain system for illegal drugs in Mexico. 

Second, in the United States, we have seen fatality rates drop. A couple reasons for that. Number one, those mom and pops are starting to realize that if you kill all of your customers, they don’t buy anymore. So four fentanyl pills that have been intercepted by law enforcement, only about half of them now have lethal doses only, as opposed to 70% from 2 or 3 years ago. 

So, you know, from a production point of view, I guess there’s some quality control going in there. A second, if you are a teenager and you look at people in your 20s who are basically killing themselves with fentanyl, you know, maybe that’s not the drug for me. And, other more traditional drugs like it’s methamphetamine and cocaine are making a little bit of a comeback. 

Whether this trend has legs is something that we just don’t know. There’s so much about drugs that are a fad issue, and it’s unclear whether or not today’s, Zoomers have moved on from fentanyl, or they’re just taking a break for a moment. I don’t know what to cheer for. There. Third, because the cartels are breaking down. We’re seeing a few problems with transit. 

If you have lots and lots and lots of cartel and cartel violence, oftentimes the shipment doesn’t make it on time. But probably the biggest reason we’ve seen deaths go down in the United States is it’s not new anymore. 

So hospitals and clinics have a little bit better idea of what to look out for. And they’ve developed some protocols and some medications to help people survive overdoses. It’s kind of like how during the Iraq War, we saw a lot more soldiers live, but with horrible wounds, because medical care had improved, to deal with things like IEDs. 

So if you’re looking for something to worry about, I don’t worry so much about Trump. I don’t worry so much about radical Democrats. I don’t worry so much about Iran or Russia. Unless nukes get involved. I worry about America’s drug habits and how we’ve seen a democratization of the violence in Mexico that is breaking down the social stability of our primary trading partner. 

And if you want something a little bit more at home to worry about, let’s assume for the moment that the Mexicans succeed in driving fentanyl out of their system completely. What only takes three Japanese in a garage to do it? And those Japanese don’t have to speak Spanish. So if Mexico stops being the primary processing place for fentanyl demand in the United States, Americans are perfectly capable of picking up that baton and processing the fentanyl in anyone who has a garage and a power.

Photo by Wikimedia Creative Commons and DEA

Trump Tariffs Part 1 – China

An AI generated image of connex boxes with American and Chinese flags on them

The Trump administration is planning to impose some hefty tariffs on China. This isn’t just to reform trade practices and show China “who’s the boss”, but rather to shift industrial production away from China permanently.

Trump’s goal is to wean the US off that $500 billion worth of annual imports. This is going to be a challenging time for everyone involved; China is having their feet swept out from under them, and the US will have to find someone who can replace the Chinese (because we surely can’t do it on our own). And not to mention an unwanted bump in living costs for the Americans.

It’s not all bad news bears though. The US has enough cheap energy to help build all the processing and manufacturing it might need, but it will require significant investments, policy changes, and TIME. Trump has the right idea, but his approach is lacking a bit of the strategic depth that this will require.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today’s the 26th of November, and today we’re going to talk about the incoming Trump administration’s initial plans for trade policy.

Last night, Donald Trump texted out that he plans to levy very sharp tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China—our three largest trading partners. For this discussion, we’ll focus on the Chinese component.

We’re talking about China first because Mexico and Canada are different issues with different factors at play. First, with China: we don’t like China, and China doesn’t like us very much. The Trump tariffs, if implemented on the Chinese merchandise exports that come to the United States—roughly half a trillion dollars a year—would increase the average cost of living for the average American, every man, woman, and child, by about a thousand U.S. dollars a year.

The stuff that comes from China, like I said, is mostly manufactured goods, almost exclusively. The bulk of it falls into the electronics category, which includes computers, cell phones, cellular technology, white goods, consumer goods, and parts that can go into pretty much anything.

The Chinese have a very predatory trade system, so overall support from the U.S. citizenry is likely to be pretty high, despite the cost of this. This is a more traditional tariff goal here. The Trump administration has long wanted to reroute global trade flows, specifically where China is involved.

That means punishing the Chinese until alternatives can be generated. But therein lies the rub. No American trade policy going back to World War II has ever been very good at building that alternative system. We punish countries we think are engaging in unfair trade practices, but those punishments are usually designed to get them to dismantle those trade policies so we can return to something more fair or normal.

That is not the goal this time around. The goal here is to permanently relocate industrial plants. Simply throwing on a tariff and funneling the money to a general fund doesn’t achieve that. You also need to build a complementary industrial policy that takes some of the income and uses it to build a long-term alternative.

Here’s where the challenge and the opportunity lie. First, the challenge: the things China does, it doesn’t do by itself. It has relatively low-cost wages, especially for its mode of production. However, it’s not a very profitable industrial power. It has only managed to get to where it is now and maintain its position through a massive amount of subsidies.

If those subsidies were to go away, you would see mass de-industrialization of China, which would probably lead to the collapse of its political system. The Chinese aren’t even going to consider that, which is ultimately what a normal trade policy would aim for. To overpower that, you’d not only need a fairly steep tariff rate—much higher than the 10-25% that Trump’s team is suggesting—you’d also have to build an alternative.

When it comes to things like electronics assembly and components creation, the United States is not a very competitive player in that market. Our labor, to be perfectly blunt, is too highly skilled. The same goes for Canada and Mexico. You’d need to develop a different model, and doing that quickly is very difficult and expensive.

However, there is some low-hanging fruit. The Chinese dominate not just electronics manufacturing and assembly but also materials processing—turning bauxite into aluminum, cobalt into cobalt metal, and lithium into battery chassis, for example. This is something the U.S. and the rest of the world have largely stepped back from for two reasons:

  1. It takes up space and is environmentally damaging, leading to regulatory challenges.
  2. If the Chinese are willing to pollute their environment, exploit their workers, and subsidize the industry, why compete with them when they can do it cheaper and hand you the end product?

There are problems with that argument. The Chinese have discovered that this gives them leverage in trade talks. However, rebuilding this capacity elsewhere isn’t difficult or even particularly expensive. For example, the U.S., thanks to the shale revolution, produces a huge amount of excess natural gas and has the cheapest natural gas in the world. From that, we’ve developed the cheapest electricity in the world.

Over the last 15 years, the chemicals industry has shifted to run on natural gas rather than oil whenever possible. As of 2024, the United States is by far the largest, highest-quality, and lowest-cost producer of intermediate chemical inputs for modern manufacturing.

But it took the free market 15 years to make that happen. If we want to speed up the process for everything else, it means implementing an industrial policy that uses revenue from Chinese tariffs to help build the supporting infrastructure. This is low-hanging fruit that we need to address anyway. The Chinese won’t be around much longer, and even if they were, we wouldn’t want them to maintain the leverage they currently have.

Building up industrial plants isn’t necessarily expensive. For example, creating capacity for something like aluminum might only cost a few billion dollars. It’s not costly or time-consuming, but “cheap and quick” isn’t the same as “free and immediate.” It requires a policy to make it happen. Otherwise, the market will handle it over the next 15-20 years, but I’d argue we need to start the transition much sooner.

Once that foundation is established, we can begin tackling more difficult pieces like electronics. So far, the Trump administration has not demonstrated an awareness of this level of nuance in tariff policy. The general belief seems to be, “A tariff is good. Do it, and we win.” It’s going to take a lot more effort than that.

That’s the situation with China. The situations with Mexico and Canada are very different, and we’ll tackle those tomorrow.

Remember When…

I’m sure this isn’t a shock, but a lot of folks have asked what I think of the incoming trump administrations cabinet nominations. Before I delve in Monday’s video into the simple and forgiving world of American domestic politics, I think it would be best to review where this all began. In this special weekend edition we reach into the way-back machine and go back to New Year’s 2021 when the world seemed so different, and so similar.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

The Future of Naval Tech & War on the Seas

Photo of a US aircraft carrier on the water

The nature of naval warfare is evolving – with advancing drone tech leading the charge – but not all of the world’s navies and regions will be impacted the same.

Drones are all the rage right now, and they come in all shapes, types, payloads, and ranges. But which countries will struggle with these drones the most? The isolated nature of Russia’s fleets leaves them open to attacks, while the US Navy tends to operate away from coastlines and can unite its fleets if needed. The Persian Gulf and parts of the Mediterranean might be hotter than others, but the US has enough regional allies to keep a strategic advantage. The Chinese navy will face geographical bottlenecks (like the first island chain) that will limit their naval reach and projection power.

The US is stuffing another ace up their sleeve with its Replicator Initiative, which would allow US ships to be converted into drone manufacturing platforms. So again, drones are changing the way in which naval battles are fought, but there will be some obvious winners and losers.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everyone. Good morning from Colorful Colorado. Today, we’re going to take an entry from the Ask Peter forum. Specifically, do I worry about the primacy of the U.S. Navy in a situation where the drone technology being developed for the Ukraine war becomes more widespread? Well, let’s start by saying they’re going to become widespread. We’re only seeing something that’s barely out of the prototype stage right now.

And it is proven that in close quarters, relatively speaking, it is already more than capable of defeating an old-style surface navy. Now, I don’t want to overplay this because the Russian Navy is not great under normal circumstances, and that’s if they could all sail together into a single mailed fist. And they can’t—look at the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, and the Pacific Fleet—all of them independent, all of them having to operate under constrained circumstances.

Now, something to keep in mind about the drones. You’ve got two types: air and naval. Your air-launched drones, at the moment, can’t really carry warheads that are more than 100 pounds. And while that can certainly ruin your day or take out a tank or a building, against a ship, it’s going to be more limited in its ability to be successful.

Keep in mind that ships can move, and if you don’t have over-the-horizon visual capability, just getting the drones to where they need to go is going to be a bit of a problem. So most of the assaults that Ukraine has been launching against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet have been naval. Naval drones don’t have as much range, typically, but they can carry a lot bigger payload.

And since they’re in the water, once they get closer, there’s not a lot that the ships can do about it because they’re used to shooting up at air assets, not down at sea-level assets that are well below the angle that they can fire. So the Russians have to basically counter with small arms. And that would be true for any naval asset.

But keep in mind, there’s this geography issue. Not only are Russia’s navies sequestered from one another, but they’re also in relatively limited bodies of water that are highly contested. So, the Black Sea is obviously the issue of the moment, where the Ukrainians obviously have an outlet on the ocean that is adjacent to where the Russians would like their ships to operate.

But you also have NATO members—Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania—which have significantly more frontage on that body of water than the Russians. So if you marry these new technologies to the assets of NATO and the industrial plants of a country like, say, Turkey, then the Russians simply can’t have anything floating on that body of water at all.

The same holds true to an even greater degree for the Baltic Sea Fleet, where you’ve got NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, basically countering potential naval power. So if we ever get into a situation where there is a fight on the Baltic Sea, every ship that the Russians have will be sunk, probably within the first 72 hours.

It’s a little bit better on the Arctic, but then you’ve got the ice pack. So for a submarine, if you get below the ice pack, you’re probably okay. But Norway’s right there, and anything that’s going to stay on the North Atlantic has to go right by it, and it’s going to get sunk. And then, probably almost as bad as the Baltic, is the Pacific Fleet, which is completely bracketed by Japan.

Anything that’s going to leave from the Vladivostok area—that just leaves one base at a place called Petropavlovsk—but still, in here, which is a sub base where the subs can kind of go off and drop into a trench and hopefully evade detection. That base, which has no road and no rail connection to it whatsoever, could still operate, but that’s just one spot.

And everything basically has to be flown in to support it. So maybe, like, Russia’s—it’s just absolutely hosed. Compare that to the extreme on the other side with the U.S. Navy. We’ve got an Atlantic and Pacific Fleet that can sail through either the canal or around the Americas to unite into a single force if they want to. It tends to also be long-range-based: supercarriers, missile frigates, that sort of thing.

And so they very, very rarely engage a foe that they can see. You’re talking over-the-horizon hundreds of miles away. Well, that pretty much obviates any capability of the air- or sea-based drones in our current imagination of hitting them. Also, they tend to operate in the deep sea. They never go within sight of the coast if they don’t have to.

So there might be some bodies of water that are constrained, where operating there would be heavily restricted, where there are potential foes who could field a drone force. Places that are probably going to be a bit of a problem include, of course, the Persian Gulf. The days of having a carrier there without, you know, having to worry about it are probably gone now.

The Mediterranean could be a little constrained. But keep in mind, the entire northern coast of the Mediterranean are NATO countries, and the entire southern coast are countries that, for the most part, are favorable to the United States: Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. The one holdout is Libya, and it’s not that Libya’s hostile; it’s that Libya has basically fallen into civil war and is falling apart as a government. Everywhere else that I can already see as a possibility.

Not necessarily because there’s a lot of governments there that are hostile, but it’s becoming a stateless zone in its own way. And the Houthis are probably the best example of that. Just keep in mind that the Houthis of Yemen don’t have an industrial plant. So any weapons they fire are something they’ve brought in from somewhere else. Closer to home, the only thing to really worry about would be the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

And because there are hostile countries there, most notably Venezuela and Cuba. But if, if, if, if, if we ever get to the situation where that is a problem, a couple of things to keep in mind: Number one, most U.S. naval assets aren’t in the Gulf of Mexico, so you don’t have to worry about a base getting closed in.

And second, in the very, very unlikely situation where we have a military conflict in that area, there will be a land invasion of Cuba in a very short period of time. This is not me recommending—let me make this very clear—I think there are much easier ways to get Cuba on our side, if that’s the goal.

But a country with the population and the industrial plant of Cuba could not survive in the face of an American onslaught should it come to it. And really, that’s the only other spot where there’s a constraint. Between geography and allies, the U.S. looks pretty good. That just begs the question of what is the situation for maybe some other countries that have navies.

In the case of the United Kingdom, yes, it’s close to other land borders—the North Sea, the English Channel—they’re not that big of a barrier. But again, Norway, Denmark, France—you know, these are friendly countries, not hostile ones. And in the case of East Asia, things get really dicey. Japan’s okay because all of its ports are on the east side of the island, so they sail out and then come back to wherever they want to.

So they’re pretty much immune to this. But China—China’s got the first island chain, and any vessel that leaves China has to get by Japan or Taiwan or the Philippines or Indonesia or Singapore. Assuming the United States isn’t playing at all, that’s going to be really hard. And one of the things that the U.S. Navy is working on right now is something called the Replicator Initiative, which will turn its ships into not just combat platforms, but manufacturing platforms to produce exactly the sorts of drones that would be needed to sink everything that the Chinese have in a short period of time.

In the case of a war. Hopefully it’ll never come to that, but Replicator is supposed to be operational by the end of calendar year 2027. That’s not that far away.

The One Road Propping Up US-Mexico Trade

image of Interstate 35 running through Austin, Texas at night

Everyone grab your favorite road trip snack and pick out some good tunes, because today we’re talking about the increasingly important I-35 corridor.

Since mountainous terrain restricts rail transport through Mexico and the Jones Act makes water transport expensive and complicated, I-35 acts as a key US-Mexico trade route. This runs from Mexico City, through Texas (hitting lots of the big cities along the way), then up through Kansas City, and even connecting to other regions from there.

With Mexico’s growing role in North American trade, the I-35 corridor has become one of the most significant trade arteries in the US. While investments in rail infrastructure and reforms to the Jones Act would make transport between the US and Mexico more efficient, the I-35 and its trucks will continue to play a major role until that happens.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Austin’s hiking bike trail around Ladybird Lake, or Town Lake for those of you who haven’t been here in a while. Today, we’re going to talk about the Interstate 35 corridor, which I would argue is the most important transport corridor in the United States. The issue is one of geography.

It’s not so much that the U.S. and Mexico are each other’s largest trading partners; it’s how you connect the two. Mexico is a very, very rugged area, so doing large-scale rail transport isn’t really economically viable. If you have a one-quarter of one degree increase in the slope of your rail line, you can only handle about half the cargo, and the spine of Mexico, basically the northern middle half, is all mountainous. Most of the population, within Mexico City for instance, lives over a mile and a half above sea level. So, getting the sort of rail capacity you’d find in the American Great Plains or Midwest just isn’t possible in Mexico. That leaves us with truck transport.

In the United States, we have a similar constraint, but it’s due to policy rather than geography. The U.S. has the largest natural navigable waterway system in the world, but because of the Jones Act, we don’t fully use it. We’ve basically made it nearly impossible, quadrupling or more the cost of water transport by saying that anything connecting two American ports has to be on a vessel that’s American-owned, -built, -captained, and -crewed. This policy again pushes us toward using trucks.

And that’s where I-35 comes in. I-35 is basically the transport artery that begins in Mexico City, runs up to the Texas border, hits three cities in the Texas Triangle—San Antonio, Austin, and Fort Worth—and then goes up to Kansas City, with offshoots along the way toward the east and west coasts. Eventually, once you get up to Kansas City, there are also routes going north to places like Des Moines, Duluth on the Great Lakes, and further west toward the Canadian prairie provinces.

So, everything is essentially shipped by 20-foot container units, rather than by rail or water, which would be far more efficient. Until we figure out a solution for a road system that, in most places, is six lanes or less, we’re constrained on how much we can do within the North American system. The smart play would be to invest $1 trillion in rail infrastructure in Mexico and to amend the Jones Act so that the Mexicans could ship stuff to Veracruz and then up through the American waterway system. But until then, we’re stuck with this system—ergo, traffic at all hours.

Oh, and one more thing: I-35 is just around the bend of the river here. The second biggest, most important trade artery in North America is on the opposite side of the country, where Ontario meets Michigan. The Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, was until very recently the most important trade way, primarily because of the automotive trade, and it remains incredibly important today.

I’m not suggesting that it’s gotten any smaller—it hasn’t. But Mexico has overtaken it by a significant margin in the last ten years.

Counting (Lithium) Chickens Before They Hatch

Photo showing trucks at a lithium mine

Some new advancements in AI and geology have revealed a massive lithium deposit in Arkansas’s Smackover Formation (great name by the way). While this is good news, we still have a lot of work to do before this lithium sees the light of day.

Traditional methods of lithium extraction aren’t going to work in Arkansas, so Exxon is pioneering a chemical extraction process, which is showing promise. Again, we’re early stages in what this will look like, but it has solid potential.

This deposit might not solve the demand EV’s are bringing about, but there is huge potential to improve grid storage. This would allow excess renewable energy to be stored, addressing rising energy demands in the US. Again, this is still early on, but energy storage could be transformed by 2030.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is not only disturbingly pleasant—I mean, it’s kind of surreal—but there are more good food options within a two-block radius than in the entire Denver metro, which kind of pisses me off anywho. I’m here near Market Square, and today we’re going to talk about the new…

Well, it’s not all that new, but the popularization of the lithium deposit that was found in Arkansas. Now, like I said, it’s not new. This is called the Smackover formation, which is a great name. I want to buy a drink for whoever named it. Anyway, it’s been producing bromide for the better part of a century, so the geology is reasonably well known.

What has happened is one of the breakthroughs with AI is being able to look at the geology from new angles, and correlate it with updates in understanding for mining and geology that have come in the decades since. And they think that there’s more than enough lithium there to supply global supplies for like a factor of nine or something. Ridiculous.

Now, I don’t want to overstate this, because just because the lithium is there doesn’t mean it can be harvested. For example, 90% of the oil in the world that we are aware of will never be able to produce. It’s too deep, it’s too technically challenging, the bits are too small—whatever it happens to be. But in the case of the Smackover, in specifically the Arkansas part of it, there’s already production in this zone, and it has been for decades.

Just not for lithium. Quick review of lithium production. There are two types: you’ve got rock formations and rock mining, which is what dominates in Australia. It’s a little bit more expensive than the other method, because you actually have to pull the ore out of the ground and grind it up and process it to extract the lithium from everything else.

But it is a relatively quick way of doing it, even if it is involved. It’s rock mining, so, you know, you’re going to have all the tailings, you’re going to have all the processing issues, and all the at-long costs. It’s energy-intensive—all that good stuff. Second, you have brine mining, which is what they have in Chile.

There, there’s a subsurface water source that is rich in dissolved lithium. You pull the liquid out, you pour it into an evaporation pond, and over the next 18 months, you, you know, basically wait for it to concentrate. So it’s cheaper than rock mining in Australia, but there’s a really long lag time, and you need a specific sort of surface.

Up on top, in order to do the extraction.

So the Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest parts of the world, and the mines are about 7,500 ft. So you have a lot of sun, you’ve got a desert, you’ve got low vapor pressure, and it still takes 18 months to concentrate the brine down to something that can actually use. In the case of all, in case of Arkansas, it is a brine formation.

The Smackover. But you’re talking about a state where the highest point in the entire state is like 2,500 ft, and where the mines would be, they’re significantly lower. And you don’t have the large, flat, dry areas. Arkansas is pretty humid, so doing traditional evaporation is just completely a no-go. And if that was the only technology in play, this wouldn’t work at all.

But it’s not the only technology in play. There is a relatively new method for lithium extraction from brine, which is basically a direct extraction that uses chemical catalysts and similar things to extract the lithium from the water. Now, the concentration in Arkansas is about 300 mg/L versus 400 mg/L in Chile.

So the Arkansas deposit isn’t as good in terms of quality as a Chilean one, but there’s a lot of infrastructure in place already, and Exxon is the primary company that is involved. And, you know, Exxon doesn’t pull things out of the ground unless it thinks it can make money. And so it has pioneered this direct extraction technology in a number of test wells already on site in Arkansas.

So the only thing that has really changed is that we’ve had this new AI model saying that there’s a lot, a lot, a lot, lot more than we originally thought. And in the next three years, Exxon expects to have first commercial volumes. Now, they’re not telling us what “commercial volumes” are, so we’re going to have to wait and see.

But, one of the things that has been a limiting factor on a lot of the green transition is batteries, and I have not made any secret of my general opposition to lithium use in transport, because it’s a horrible battery chemistry. It charges too slowly. It discharges too slowly. It heats up and swells. It’s just a bad idea to put on something that moves.

But if you were to make a lot of small- to medium-sized batteries, put them in series, and just put them in a building where the heat and the swelling could be maintained or even harvested, you could use it for grid storage very, very, very easily. So this isn’t going to revolutionize the world of EVs, but it might, if it works, revolutionize the world of electricity.

One of the problems we’re going to have in the United States over the next ten years is as the Chinese system vanishes from the world, we’re going to have to expand our industrial plant. That means we need at least 50% more electricity generation than we currently have. And until and unless we can build the infrastructure to link the entire country together so that anyone can generate power anywhere and send it anywhere else—which is a tall order.

The easier patch is to put a lot of batteries in a lot of places, so that during periods of high supply and low demand—for example, solar shining during the day—you capture the extra and then use it at night. Everyone’s asleep at night. You burn your natural gas at night, when normally you would cycle. Now you just pour that energy into a power, into a battery pack, and then you use it during the day.

You know, you could use this in any possible grid if we can produce enough lithium at a low enough cost. And I have to say, between the engineering, the technology, and the geology, this does look promising. Just keep in mind: first commercial production, 2027, which means first large-scale batteries, 2030. This isn’t going to solve everything overnight, but it’s a very promising step in the right direction.

My Favorite US President of All Time Is…

Many of you have asked who my favorite US President is, so I figured I would do a video covering that. And we don’t have to go too far back, just to number 41 – George H.W. Bush.

He had the right skills for the job (thanks to experience as a congressman, ambassador, CIA director, and VP) and he navigated a changing (and globalizing) world in a way that sustained American dominance, improved the human condition, and helped manage the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Since “Poppy” lost his re-election, we’ve seen a series of narcissistic presidents, leading the US down a more isolationist and protectionist path. The window to reshape the global order is closing for now, and it will be a few decades before the US and the wider world is ready to try it again.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from D.C. That’s obviously the Washington Monument behind me, one of the handful of things not covered in scaffolding at the moment. Considering that the election is almost upon us, I decided to take a question from the Ask Peter forum on the Patreon page and answer: who is my favorite president and why?

And that’s a no-brainer. That’s George Herbert Walker Bush. If you consider he was president at the end of the Cold War and helped manage the decline of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired in our direction, isn’t that enough to make him a great president? But think about what it was he tried to get us to do.

He wanted us to have a conversation with ourselves about how we take the Cold War alliance, the globalized system, and play it forward for another generation of American preeminence, while also aiming to improve the human condition. And if you think about what he inherited, that was pretty bold, because the whole idea of globalization was that we needed a world full of allies to be on our side against the Soviet Union. To do that, we created the global structure and used our Navy to patrol the global ocean so anyone could trade with anyone else without even a military escort.

Basically, it would be like every single country won World War II all by themselves and could dictate the terms. Free commerce, and the U.S. allowed everyone to do that. Having those assets in play when the Soviet Union finally fell presented the ability to create a new human condition on a global basis, and he was the right person to do it. Not only had he just come from the White House—not just for two years as president, but eight years as vice president—he had served in Congress as an elected representative.

He’d been an ambassador to China, run the CIA, and was on a first-name basis with everyone in the world who mattered. He was the right person in the right place at the right time with the right Rolodex, asking the right question. So, of course, we voted against him, threw him out of office, and started down a parade of relatively or increasingly narcissistic leaders.

The six we’ve had since then include definitely four of the worst presidents we’ve ever had in American history. I’ll let you guys debate among yourselves who the two exceptions are. But it was a missed opportunity. And now, today, that opportunity has probably expired. The United States has not just simply turned sharply isolationist and protectionist on both sides of the political aisle, but the nature of the world has now changed to the point that doing any sort of broad reboot is not possible.

Thirty years on, we’re all 30 years older. Most countries have terminal demographics, and the moment we had to reshape everything has passed. So we’re going to have to wait another 20 or 30 years for all of this to shake out. Hopefully, at the end of that period, we will have another president similar to Herbert Walker Bush who is willing to ask us that question again.

And maybe this next time, we’ll choose to answer.