Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1921 - Peter Zeihan
Uploaded: 2023-01-07T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1921 - Peter Zeihan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1921 - Peter Zeihan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1921 - Peter Zeihan

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Peter.
What's going on, man? Nice to meet you.
Right back at you. It has been a crazy year.
Yeah, it's been a crazy year for everything, right?
Yeah, it's one thing when you talk about how the world's going to be coming to
an end.
It's quite another when it's like here and now.
Yeah. Well, you've been working on this type of material, this subject matter,
for quite a long time.
So tell everybody your background.
Let's see. My background's in economic development.
It's all about figuring out what works where and why,
and why if you try the same policies in the next town over, it's usually a
disaster.
And then I worked actually here in Austin at a company called Stratfor for 12
years,
and I was their sole generalist.
So it was my idea to kind of plug everything together and figure out what the
map of the world looks like
and how if you pull a string on one side of the world, something changes on the
other side.
Well, your perspective on sort of global interactions with China and Russia and
the United States
and the energy supply and the food supply, I have not heard before.
I haven't heard it as comprehensively as I've seen you put it together.
So I'm kind of excited to talk to you about this.
So when, let's, let's, I guess we should start it with Russia.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, you, you were not surprised.
Not even a little.
No.
You expected this.
And you felt like this is inevitable and this is just something that was always
going to happen.
And it's not going to just stop at Ukraine.
No, not even remotely.
The Russian space is among the worst farmland in the world.
And so they've never been able to generate enough income to have a road network.
Everything has to be moved by rail.
And their frontiers are just huge and they're open.
And if you've got a force that can't maneuver itself, your only reasonable
defense strategy
is to be forward positioned and use geography to help you out.
So you expand until you reach mountains or oceans or deserts, and then you
anchor on either
side of those and plug the access points.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, there are two of those access points on the other
side of Ukraine.
So the Russians were always, always, always going to try to push through and
retake that
territory, territory that they had controlled for most of the last 350 years.
Unfortunately for them, in the 30, 35 years since the Soviet system collapsed,
the Ukrainians
have developed an identity.
And now they would like to be something other than a road bump.
So one of the narratives that was going around was that the reason why Russia
was pushing
into Ukraine is because NATO was moving their arms closer to the border of
Russia.
There is something to be said for that.
You just have to put it into context to really understand it.
So the Russian point of view is for us to be secure, we need to expand until we
reach
a point where invaders cannot overwhelm us.
We have to be able to plug those access points.
But to give the Russians what they want, you have to sign over the future of
Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania,
Belarus, Ukraine.
Oh, let's go on.
Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, all the stands.
Basically, the Russians, in order to feel safe, they have to be able to occupy
total populations
that are twice of their own.
And I'm sorry, but that's just not feasible.
So technically, the people who claim that NATO provoked this are correct.
NATO can't have what it wants in order for Russia to feel safe.
But for Russia to feel safe, they've got to occupy over 180 million people.
And that was never part of the game.
So what do you think they anticipated was going to happen when they started the
war?
Well, I don't think it was just the Russians who anticipated it.
Ukraine, the last war in 2014, basically rolled over.
They proved to be militarily incompetent.
They were corrupt.
They couldn't put up any sort of resistance.
Crimea fell in just a matter of a couple of days.
And I think a lot of us who are in the security side of things thought that
this was going to
be to a degree a bit of repeat.
Now, excuse me, I was probably one of the more optimistic people for Ukraine
because I had seen them develop a culture and seen them arm and train and seen
it be meaningful.
But Ukraine is still a flat country and the Russians are still one of the
largest militaries in the world.
So even I was saying that within six months to a year, this was all going to be
over.
But the Ukrainians have surprised to the upside.
And probably most importantly, the Europeans didn't just roll over and let this
happen
like they did the last seven times that the Russians have gone on the war path
since 1999.
And that's changed the game fundamentally.
And when you look at it going forward, if people didn't anticipate that the
Ukrainians were going
to be able to fight back as well as they have, and then you look at it going
forward, like,
where does this go?
Well, there's two paths here.
And the problem is we haven't seen either side fight in their full glory yet.
And until we have that fight, we really can't judge.
In their full glory, like, meaning?
Well, the Ukrainians are the underdog, but they're in the process of rapidly arming
with
more and more sophisticated equipment.
And by the time we get to May, they will have been able to do a lot of deferred
maintenance
on the equipment they captured from the Russians, which was more equipment than
they started the
war with.
And there will be 60,000 Ukrainian troops that have trained in NATO countries
with more advanced
equipment back in the field.
So, you know, we get our Athens, if you will.
On the other side, the Russians will finish their second mobilization, and they
will have
at least another half a million men in the field.
Now, they will be badly trained and badly equipped and badly led with low
morale.
But troops like that have a technical term attached to them.
Russian.
There's nothing about this war that is unique in Russian history.
The first year is always an absolute shit show.
And then the Russians throw bodies at the problem until it goes away.
And in half of those wars, the Russians ultimately win.
So by the time we get to May and the mud season is over, we'll have a more
advanced Ukrainian
force fighting a much larger Russian force.
And we will get our first real glimpse at how this is going to go.
And we should know which way it's going to break.
Now, it'll still take time because if the Russians are going to win, it's going
to take
them a year to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses.
And then they have to occupy the country, and that's going to kill a couple
million people.
Or the Russians are going to be able to completely break the logistical supply
chains that allow
the Russian troops to even exist.
And we'll have a half a million dead Russians.
And the Ukrainians will be able to push the Russians out of Crimea in the east.
And then we get to talk about the next stage, because this is just the opening
phase of what
is going to be a multi-year and perhaps even multi-decade conflict.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Welcome to Russia.
So how do you think it goes?
Like when May rolls around?
Yeah, ask me again in May.
Right now, the balance of forces clearly are edging more and more towards the
Ukrainians.
They've proven to be more adaptable.
When the Russians made it clear that they were going to do a second mobilization,
that seemed
to have broken the log jam in a lot of countries, most notably Germany.
And we now have armored vehicles up to and including some light battle tanks,
which I know all the
tankies out there are going to hate that term.
But anyway, armored vehicles that have some serious firepower are going to be
coming now.
The Bradleys from the United States specifically.
And that is a tool that the Ukrainians have not had.
So every time the Ukrainians have achieved a tactical breakthrough, they can
only push as far
as their infantry can run.
Now their infantry is going to be mobile.
And in a war of movement to this point, the Russians have proven that they're
absolutely
incompetent.
And why is that?
Part of its graft, the guy who is the defense minister, Shoigu, is he's
arguably one of the
least competent people on the planet.
But he's a friend of Putin.
And so he's been able to milk the defense department for everything.
Best guess is that he has taken a third of the budget himself for procurement
and his
flunkies have taken another third.
So very little gets to the military itself.
So it's corruption.
Huge corruption.
And that means no training.
Or if there is training, it's basically a parade.
And when you're using a force that can only supply by rail, you're completely
dependent upon trucks for
local distribution.
And that's why the Ukrainians went after the trucks with all the javelins that
they got early
in the war.
They didn't really go after tanks.
They went after the trucks.
And they've destroyed roughly 2,000, maybe 2,500 of them.
And that has reduced the Russian military to going back to Russia, confiscating
city buses and
literally Scooby-Doo vans and bringing them back to the front.
And think of a Scooby-Doo van.
Now, fill it full of artillery shells.
You know, every time you hit a bump, and that is their primary ammo supply
system now.
Because the rail system into Crimea got blown up, the Kerch Bridge, and what's
going into
the east is all under artillery range.
So they have to use truck, and they're just not very good at it.
Now, for a lot of people, the big fear is that if Russia starts really getting
desperate,
then they use nukes.
Sure.
And it would have to be very desperate.
I have never, I've not been as concerned about the nuclear question as some
folks.
Because there's really only four scenarios.
Scenario one is the Russians consider throwing one against the United States.
But we've made it very clear from our intercepts and our sharing of information
with the media
that we know exactly where Putin is at any time.
We're listening to his phone calls.
We're reading his emails.
And so he now knows very clearly that if he throws a nuke at the United States,
we're going to throw one not at Russia.
We're going to throw one at him.
And there's no version of this where he survives.
So he has tamped down the rhetoric quite a bit since last March.
Option number two, nuking Ukraine.
That doesn't make sense.
They want to occupy Ukraine.
You don't want to have your troops in a place that's a radioactive wasteland.
There may have been a case last year for nuking Poland and Berlin and Stockholm
in order to disrupt the weapons flows into Ukraine.
But after the battles of Izium and Kyrson, the Ukrainians have more Russian
gear now than they
know what to do with.
It's going to take them months to bring that all online.
There's a lot of deferred maintenance that needs to be done.
And so disrupting the weapons flows no longer is a critical issue because the
weapons are
already there.
So the only scenario I can see where the Russians would seriously consider nukes
is if Ukraine
doesn't simply win, but decides to carry the fight across the border into
Russia proper.
In that scenario, where the very existence of the Russian government is
threatened, that
would probably change the math.
But I don't find that likely without a significant shift in mindset in
Washington.
Because we're not just providing the Ukrainians with the weaponry and the ammo.
We're providing them with the intelligence and most of the steps of the kill
chain.
Without that, the weapons are of limited usefulness, especially at long range.
And the Ukrainians have no desire to rupture that relationship.
So we're talking about a theoretical that is at a minimum seven months away,
probably further.
This whole thing is such a terrifying conflict, being that Russia is a nuclear
superpower and
the history of Russian war