Zeihan is a great read if and only if you also read a wide variety of competing viewpoints to contrast against. He gets some things right but he gets a lot of things wrong too. Like any popular talking head he says what people want to hear, like "China is going to collapse with a decade". But he started saying that 20 years ago.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. His first book mentioning China wasn't even published until 2014. And given that China is in a lot of tough situations right now (looming currency/debt crisis, complete wiping of the upper government, alignment with Russia collapsing, decline in trade) he may still have the last laugh.
He also got things like the shale revolution, the Russian invasions, decline of the EU largely right.
But regardless of his predictive power, it's honestly kind of refreshing to get non-partisan (or maybe better put, partisan-agnostic) technical explanations for current events.
Zeihan is very partisan. It doesn't line up with either the current Democratic or Republican party lines, but it is extremely partisan and opinionated.
This is a good thing, it's a great antidote to those who say that the USA sucks or that the USA is losing. And it feels good to hear, which is why Zeihan is so popular.
Just don't read/listen to him in isolation. The OP asked for singular sources of news and I'm pushing back against that. Reading Zeihan is good. Reading only Zeihan isn't.
Oh, absolutely. 100%. At the end of the day Zeihan is just a single analyst. He isn't even arguably news.
Although, OP wasn't asking for a singular source of news. He just wanted a news source people read every day, and random is better. And if you are looking for one more source of news to add into a diet, I don't think it's a bad pick.
So things like "China is going to collapse" is a good hot take sound bite but he goes into way more depth in his book about population decline, how each country has a baby boomer population hitting retirement (at different paces), how those impact economics, the natural resources available in a region, etc.
Reading Zeihans latest book it feels like someone is giving you a play by play account of a game of Civilization, except its real. There is a lot of history in there about how we got to our current state with a lot of the predictions that are based on various factors. He's not saying things are certainties, more so that adding up a bunch of factors like above support his prediction.
Hot take/sound bites aren't a great source for any news, doesn't matter who its from.
