yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What The U.S. Need to Do?


less than 1m read
·Nov 8, 2024

And you've studied how empires rise and how empires fall over the past several hundred years. You've said that generally speaking, empires collapsed for three main reasons. The first is debt, the second is internal conflict—so you know, polarity within a nation—and the third is external conflict.

Is the American Empire in decline? The American Empire, since 1945, was the dominant empire, almost singularly the dominant empire. The American Empire is in relative decline; it has been in relative decline. That's not a subjective interpretation; that is using measures of share of world GDP, share of the military, quality of education, and so on. It is in relative decline.

Each of the three factors that you described is very, very relevant. I should say that I discovered two more. Acts of nature—droughts, floods, and pandemics—have killed more people than wars and changed more orders than any of the first three I mentioned. And then, of course, man's inventiveness and technologies have also created big, orderly changes.

So, all five of those are at work in the United States. If I was to say one thing that is most important, that one thing is how we are with each other. In other words, the capacity to deal with all of those things in a way that is both smart and doesn't produce fighting. If we produce fighting, we'll have a terrible, terrible set of circumstances. If we can rise above that, we can be very effective. So the number one thing is how we deal with each other.

More Articles

View All
Why Do We Play Games?
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Why do humans play games? Whether it’s a video game or a board game or a physical game, like soccer - or football. I don’t have to put the ball in the net to survive, and, even if I did, why would I invite a goalie and another …
Should Warren Buffett Buy Tesla Stock?
[Music] Uh no, I think electric cars are very much in America’s future. Well Warren, if you think that, would you consider potentially buying some Tesla stock? No, there has been a lot of speculation recently that Warren Buffett is in fact investing in…
Warren Buffett gives advice on calculating the intrinsic value of a company
This is Phil McCall from Connecticut. I wondered if you could comment on a subject I don’t think you like to talk about very much, which is intrinsic value and the evolution over the past 10 or 12 years of going to off and on, but giving us investments an…
The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the Aliens?
Liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the Edge of Time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe. On December 25th, 2021, NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble has pro…
Estimating division that results in non whole numbers
So let’s think about something a little bit. What do you think 17 divided by 2 is going to be? Well, you might immediately realize that it’s not obvious what you need to multiply 2 by in order to get to 17. There’s no whole number that I could put here th…
15 Reasons Persuasive People Always Get What They Want
No matter how hard you work at something, if you don’t know how to persuade people, you’re never going to get what you want. Hard work falls flat without the driving force of persuasion. Good persuasion skills beat hard work any day. That’s why a charisma…