I can’t believe we’re here again. Most believe the United States is within hours of launching our own attack on Iran, if we haven’t already. It’s a catastrophic return to the evils of the Bush administration. It’s pretty clear we’ve learned nothing. Today’s video is an attempt to help people learn something. Though on a day like today, it’s hard to see why I bother.
Wow, I guess I’ve been doing this a little while. Ten years ago this month, this channel had an early success with a video entitled “3 Reasons China Will Never Rule The World”. A lot has happened over the past ten years. In a discord chat earlier this month, MFF’s social media manager Loga suggested I update that decade old video. Today’s video is my attempt to do exactly that. Am I still as skeptical of claims of Chinese power in the age of Trump? Check out today’s video to find out.
I could see a lot of people not liking what I did with this video. It’s pretty likely that I’ll have more to say about Israel and the horrors it’s inflicting on its neighbors in the coming months. But before I dive into that, it’s important to understand why Israel is allowed, or even encouraged to be the worst version of itself possible. There are a lot of weird conspiratorial, antisemitic theories out there, that serve to exonerate Washington, DC. It’s not a Jewish plot though. It’s a very clear, very obvious strategy executed by our government. Israel may be uglier, but it’s not that different from what we’re doing in Ukraine and Taiwan. Hell, even Biden makes the connection, as I’ve pointed out in earlier videos. I think most serious geopolitics people, which is how I see my audience, acknowledge that Israel is up to something horrible. What I suspect some in the audience may resent, is my suggestion that the cause of Taiwan and Ukraine may be tainted in similar ways.
This one was fairly straightforward. It’s easy to get caught up in the roiling clusterbomb that is US foreign and domestic policy failure in 2024. But we should be paying more attention to what China is up too. On a lot of levels China is weaker looking than they have been in decades. The upward economic trajectory is slowing, and their demographics are apocalyptic. But they are still the second greatest power in the world, and they are just beginning to figure out what that can mean. And they are getting smarter. Very quickly.
I will confess that I found this one to be a bit of a chore. I used to find Peter Zeihan’s over-the-top jingoism amusing as I poked holes in it, but after October 7th, it’s gotten a lot harder for me to watch his smug pro-American shtick. But you have to give the people what they want! And whoo boy do the people want Peter Zeihan analysis from me. This video’s predecessor, uploaded in March of 2023, is now my second most watched video ever, and my most watched video in five years. Here’s hoping that today’s video performs well. Very happy to move to other things after struggling with this video script for almost six months. Zeihan’s flaws afforded me the opportunity for some big picture rumination on the world order and the industrial revolution. I hope you enjoy the video!
Man, I’m really not a Libertarian anymore. I think this video makes it pretty clear. This video represents a lot of mental housecleaning on my part. I’m not entirely sure it is valuable, or even will make much sense to anybody else. I sure hope it does! Let me know. You may also notice a real stepping up in the amount of AI generated art I’m using. Not sure about the ethics of all that, but I do enjoy the creative possibilities…
Sometimes video scripts come easy. 6 years ago I predicted that Saudi Arabia as we know it would be done by 2030. Today I double down on that by addressing the most common objection to the idea I have gotten by far. A week or so back someone tweeted at me that Saudi Arabia was safe because people will always need oil. Within five hours of receiving that tweet I had this script written and ready to go. The world doesn’t have to give up on oil to end the Saudi royal family. We just have to use like 5-10% less of it. In today’s video I describe this simple, under acknowledged economic point, with graphs and the results of a real world experiment that Covid was generous enough to hand us in 2020.
There is nothing on the planet scarier than a bored US military industrial complex. As much fun as I have in today’s video dunking on Russia and China, I think they’re probably not quite as far down as the recent headlines indicate. But there’s a lot going on, from Ukraine to Iran, that makes one wonder if the US is going to be running out of enemies shortly. What happens then, is that the US will go looking for new enemies. One of my greatest fears, is that Washington, DC is dumb enough to go looking for those enemies in Mexico, a place we’ve had the good sense to more or less keep our nose out of for the past century. In today’s video I lay out the history behind the past century’s more hands-off policy.
I think about history a lot. And when historians look back to the beginning of this century, I’m beginning to get the sense that the only story they will be able to tell is one of US imperial consolidation. This could easily be just one part of a three-parter, but I don’t think I’m going to bother to tell the other parts of the story, because they are adequately covered elsewhere. Most know that US oil and gas is now dominant in the world, and that the US dollar is stronger than it has ever been. But few understand how much our own foreign policy disasters cleared the way for that dollar and petro-supremacy. With today’s video I lay that out…
It’s always interesting to see what it takes to go big on YouTube. In my second critique of the YouTuber Kraut, I analyze his biggest video ever, “Trump’s Biggest Failure”. This thing has racked up over four million views over the past five years. Kraut is very skilled at his medium, and is very intelligent. But I think it’s very telling that his most successful video, by a factor of four or so, is so very standard in its views. It’s more compelling and fun in its presentation, but this video on China is basically a Pentagon briefing or a Cable news special in its content. I wonder if there’s a broader lesson there?
I hope you enjoy this latest “YouTube Drama” video. Stuff like this keeps the channel ticking over so I can produce less popular but more worthwhile content.
