How the System Actually Collapses: Charlatans, Dollar Collapse, and Pinker's Optimism

• 1:09:43The next 50 years will see charlatans, hucksters, and conmen rise to power as they fight over the scraps of a collapsing empire.
• 1:10:08With an insane military still in place, a war with China is not beyond the realm of possibility for these people.
• 1:10:25Harvard and Yale graduates are products of a system that rewards conformity and discourages genuine discourse.
• 1:10:49The rise of the far right and far left offers people an alternative option, though probably not a better one, giving the illusion of action.
• 1:11:12The dollar losing its status as the reserve currency will likely be a major economic event that marks a real turning point.
• 1:11:49Steven Pinker and optimists point to statistics showing poverty reduction, lower infant mortality, and medical breakthroughs as reasons for a rosy outlook.
• 1:12:48Biotech is entering morally questionable territory, and pure efficiency as a guiding principle will lead to serious problems.
• 1:13:15Implanting chips in people's arms for medical tracking exemplifies how market efficiency ignores ethical concerns.
• 1:13:42We have not kept the republic that Ben Franklin warned we had to maintain.
• 1:13:55Over the past 100 years, advertising, television, movies, and music have been used to desensitize and control the population, leaving people lost without their phones.
• 1:14:21Lose your phone and you enter a Kafkaesque nightmare where you're trapped and told you made purchases you don't remember.

Steven PinkerSlavoj ŽižekBenjamin FranklinTerry Gilliam