If YOU Live In America, You NEED To See This

Do you think this is potentially the decline of the what one might call the American empire? I was I was looking at how long empires tend to last and I was before you came and there's this 2000 250 year figure which is famously popularized by

a British historian called Sir John Glubb in his essay The Fate of Empires and the search for survival. After analyzing empires from the I can't say that word. Assyrians? Assyrians.

Exactly what I said. Assyrians to the British Glubb found that despite differences in technology, geography, religion and surprisingly shared a similar lifespan and life cycle. Glubb argued that empires typically go through a predictable sequence

of stages over those 250 years. The first one being the age of pioneers, outburst and conquest, the age of conquest which is the military dominance, the age of commerce which is vast wealth creation, the age of affluence, comfort and a shift from duty to

selfishness, the age of intellect, focus on philosophy and education over defense, the age of descendants, internal division, massive inequality and collapse. So if you view the United States as an expansionist project from its very inception pushing westward across the North

American continent through its power, then the math says if you take it from 1776 to now to 2026, it's exactly 250 years old. So if you use Glubb's 2000 250 year life cycle model from 1776 to now, political scientists argue that we

are in the age of descendants of the American empire. This stage is typically characterized by deep internal political division, vast wealth inequality, massive national debt and a cultural shift away from a shared sense of civic So first of all, that's a pretty accurate description of what's happening in

the United States. However, you have just touched on something that I feel very strongly about, which is that I don't believe in historical inevitability. Interesting.

And I I think it's very dangerous. So, the idea that we are on a slippery slope downhill and we can't stop it because that's the way history is going or alternatively the idea that everything is fine and it will continue to be fine because liberal

democracy has triumphed, which is what we thought in the 1990s. Anytime you think that something is inevitable, that takes away your willingness to act. >> Mhm.

What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today. Whether the United States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make, things they say, arguments they have, you know, the degree of civic participation, not some

historical rule that some very brilliant political scientist invented. And as I said, I think this has happened before. I think we had this moment of complacency after the fall of the Soviet in the '90s. Americans and Europeans became convinced that everything was best in

the best of all possible worlds and we didn't have to do anything in particular to maintain our democracies because democracy was the best system and we just won the Cold War and it was all going to be fine. And we lost sight of the ways in which democracy

was beginning to slip and we were beginning to lose things. Is isn't that >> it was just sense of complacency and above all it was the sense of inevitability. It's inevitable.

We've won the war of ideas, the war of ideas is over and that's why we we missed the rise of Russia and we missed the the significance of China and we missed a lot of those things because we were so sure that we were just winning.

Isn't that in and of itself a cycle? It's a cycle, but my point is that the cycles aren't predictable. I mean, you can stop the cycle, you can reverse the cycle.