Does Anyone Else Feel Like Everything Has Changed?

foreign [Music] [Applause] s everything felt different than it does today perhaps it was just the warm naivety of childhood but I think it was actually something else the internet emerged and Unleashed access to information upon the world the middle class dream was alive and well there was some level of Faith whether that be in our institutions God or ourselves but in the 28 years that I've been alive that warm naivety has turned into a cold lucidity the internet has exposed our dark side for all to see the middle class dream has been pronounced dead and I've been hard-pressed to find a single soul who Harbors any amount of faith that we are headed anywhere except in the wrong direction [Music] what is happening to us in order to answer that question we'll need to enlist the help of some brilliant thinkers fortunately for us I have them here in the form of their thoughts on a page these particular Works fit together like parts of a puzzle a puzzle that if solved can tell us where we've been how we got here and where we're headed from these works I've been able to glean three keys that I would like to explore together [Music] the first of these Keys is strewn about this yard underneath the snow a leaf given up by its Branch as a chill grips the air imagine I had never seen this happen before imagine that I only knew trees which had green leaves and had no knowledge of the Turning of Seasons this might be rather alarming to experience in that case and I probably wouldn't know how to act appropriately but fortunately I don't have to worry about that because I have something that helps I have the first key memory in their seminal work the fourth turning William Strauss and Neil Howe lay out a shocking Revelation just like the leaves change due to the seasons so too do we these Seasons or turnings is how and Strauss call them take place over a period of about 20 to 25 years and four of these turnings like our Four Seasons completes one big cycle which they call a seculum but punctuating the end of one of these large Cycles is something rather dramatic and concerning crisis in the same way that a forest fire clears the way for New Growth how and Strauss see the crisis as an inevitable part of the cycle that enables the future to change its course the most alarming thing about this theory if it is correct is that we are currently in the belly of the period in which a crisis occurs you see going all the way back to the 1400s these 80 to 100 Year Cycles have repeatedly played out ending in a crisis typically surrounded by War and destruction more recently since the Revolutionary Wars of the 1700s about 72 years later the United States would enter into a Civil War and then again like clockwork about 81 years later the world would be engulfed in World War II finally another 76 years later and while do I really have to remind you about the situation that we currently find ourselves in it's Eerie it's troubling to think that our lives might be bound to this Cosmic wheel of sorts that predestines us to experience a Calamity every 80 years or so how do we explain this is it really due to something like these cycles of time or to the generational turnings described by Howe and Strauss we can't know for sure but I would suggest something a little more simple memory you see when I look back on the history of the time around the Great Depression or World War II it appears more like a story to me than it does reality history is an abstract notion it feels like it's outside of ourselves because we did not actually experience it so I think if we're being honest with ourselves the only ones who truly understand history are the ones who lived through it and at this moment in time someone who is about 20 years old today at the time of World War II would be somewhere around 100 years old today I think that this is a particularly dangerous moment in time just because of the fact that most of the people who lived through the Great Depression or World War II are no longer with us today our living memory of these tumultuous events is pretty much gone that means the people in positions of power today have no real understanding of the darkness of these times and they risk plunging Us in again once more before proceeding to the second key I would like to take a quick moment to thank today's sponsor for helping make this video possible Masterworks if you are considering like I am that the future ahead of us may look a lot different than a recent past then it might make sense to look into alternative investment ideas take art for example the type of art that costs six seven eight figures and hangs in a museum this asset class has been a historically reliably positive performing class for quite some time now but the problem is ordinary people like you and I don't have that kind of money laying around that was until Masterworks changed the game here in the same way that we buy shares of Apple instead of the entire company Masterworks will buy an entire piece of artwork but then securitize it split the ownership up into shares that you and I can then purchase and then in the future Masterworks will attempt to sell the artwork for a profit at which point you would receive your proceeds of said profits of course it's very important to say that past results do not guarantee future returns and this type of investment is more speculative than traditional asset classes it's also very important to do your own research before making any Investments with all that being said if you'd like to learn more about Masterworks you can check out the link in the description down below to gain Priority Access to their platform thank you so much for sponsoring this video our second key can be best described using a term from the ancient Greeks gnosis in Hellenistic times gnosis meant knowledge but not just any type of knowledge it was knowledge of an elevated degree today we have seemingly Limitless information at our fingertips and yet we seem to be less informed about some of the most important aspects of our world we can name Pete Davidson's last couple girlfriends but we can't name the four most important materials that our world relies upon those being ammonia Plastics steel and cement according to vaclov schmill the author of how the world really works vaclav has a towering intellect and admittedly most of his work reads like a textbook but this particular book is much more accessible it as promised provides a sobering account of how the world really works and shows just how foolish so many of our actions are today in fact in one of my recent videos I told the story of an Italian farmer named Francesco who abandoned the use of chemical fertilizers in favor of growing purely organic a few people in the comments were critical of that idea and they rightly so pointed out that fertilizers play an immensely important role in agriculture according to vaclov without ammonia the main nitrogen-based fertilizer we would not be able to feed 40 to 50 percent of the world's population suffice to say the organic agriculture movement is very well intentioned but unfortunately it is just today at least nowhere near remotely possible to sustain the world's food supply that way if that were not surprising enough vaclov also makes a startling observation about the environmental cost of producing grains and vegetables relative to meat a full kilogram of roasted chicken on a dinner plate requires at least 300 milliliters of oil to produce after taking into account all aspects of production including transportation and cooking now based off of those numbers how much oil do you think it takes to produce a kilogram of bread I was surprised to find out it's at least 210 milliliters of oil and even more surprisingly a tomato produced in Spain at the largest covered production site in the world and then purchased in Scandinavia would require 650 milliliters of oil per kilogram so that's just considering the input of oil but also when we take into account nutrition here we can see that we are getting much much more nutrition from a kilogram of chicken than we are from a kilogram of bread or a kilogram of tomatoes so from a fossil fuel standpoint and a nutrition standpoint chicken seems to actually be more green than a lot of grains and fruits and vegetables and yet it would appear that almost no one knows this information I had no idea why is that vaklav suggests that part of the reason we seem to have lost our gnosis is because we increasingly interact exclusively with black boxes take our phones for example we know perfectly well how to make a phone call how to open an app or just otherwise tap our finger to accomplish many different tasks but what percentage of us actually have a real understanding of how this phone does what it does five percent of us one percent of us isn't that a bit concerning so many of the things that we interact with on a daily basis and basically depend Our Lives upon seems like almost no one knows how they actually work how can we ever hope to have productive conversations about the future of our world if we don't even know the basic components of how our world works finally our third key is related to that which makes the world go round money one book I keep returning to lately is Ray dalio's latest the changing World Order and the reason I keep coming back to it is how eerily it seems to be forecasting our current predicament seemingly drawing inspiration from the fourth turning dalio also submits a theory revolving around something he calls the big cycle but instead of generational turnings or 80-year circulums dalio's big Cycle takes place over roughly 250 years and the completion of a cycle doesn't just simply Mark a crisis it marks the complete and total change of world powers if we go back over the last 500 years or so we know that the Dutch Empire was largely in command of the global economy around the 1600s eventually though the British would overtake them and reign supreme in the 1800s but then following World War II America has been the dominant power for over 100 years now of course just because we can find a pattern in the past it doesn't not mean that the future is necessarily bound to the same Destiny but what is particularly troubling I think is the economic circumstances under which these great struggles for power take place and perhaps the most glaring example today is the massive wealth disparity between the rich and the poor this economic circumstance creates fertile ground for populist movements to gain traction and extreme leaders to take hold who promise to solve the problem and so as I read these books and similar works I can't help but experience some validation in the way that I've been feeling lately in many ways the world is a better place than it was yesterday just judging by objective measures but I can't help shake the feeling that something is off and perhaps terribly so and therefore I have to ask the question does anyone else feel like everything has changed

Channel: Stephen Antonioni

Views: 3,623,735

Keywords:

Id: REId8lfmmhI

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022