I don't agree with him probs on 70% of his analysis, but he definitely is a well-read, intelligent person. Intelligent well-read people can have horribly ignorant views when they get out of their comfort zones; one of my heroes and one of the most well-known public intellectuals in Turkey, Celal Şengör, is probably one of the most intelligent people I know (well even if you disagree on that, it'd be very hard to dispute his prodigious gargantuan memory) but at the same time as being very intelligent, insightful and having the best memory of anybody I know (I know a lot of intelligent people from many different countries), a lot of his views are sometimes just empirically wrong, completely dogmatically held biases and just outright falsehoods and he even doesn't entertain the possibility of those views or ideas being wrong, because he's just so sure of himself. Now I make that example to show how people having crazy, wrong or biased opinions doesn't have much bearing on their intelligence or erudition. Zeihan has many ignorant, crazy and manifestly erroneous ideas and opinions but he's a very intelligent and insightful person from whom I've learned many things, and these two things (many wrong opinions/being insightful and intelligent) are not mutually exclusive. Actually a lot of times they go hand in hand.