Transcript
A (0:01)
Reggie i just sold my car online let's go grandpa wait you did yep on carvana just put in the license plate answered a few questions got an offer in minutes easier than setting up that new digital picture frame you don't say yeah they're even picking it up tomorrow talk about fast wow way to go so about that picture frame ah forget about it until carvana makes one i'm not interested car selling made easy.
B (0:26)
On carvana pickup fees may apply the us recently invaded venezuela and arrested their sitting president in the dead of night if someone did that to us i guarantee we would consider it an act of war many in the international community have said this is without question an unprovoked act of illegal aggression but what's really going on how does a country with fewer than thirty million people become the obsession of the most powerful country on earth and is this really about drugs as trump claims or even oil as so many others around the world are saying the answer is obviously not america already produces more energy than we use and we are already currently exporting our unused energy so doing this for oil would make no sense whatsoever and mexico sends us way more drugs than venezuela ever will the real reason we invaded venezuela is far simpler than people realize and far more dangerous to understand what's really happening we've got to go back in time and understand just how dramatically the world is changing right now while everyone is focused on ai as the agent of change we've lost sight of the real shift namely the post world war two era of peace and prosperity has ended we're now back in the dog eat dog world of great power politics which we haven't tasted in any real way since the berlin wall fell but we're back in the thick of that now and venezuela's catastrophic collapse under socialism turned it into a sacrificial pawn in the life and death chess game between the us and china the how of it all is going to shock you but if you don't understand what comes next is going to catch you completely and that is something that none of us can afford right now back in the nineteen seventies venezuela the country that's currently in the middle of one of the largest humanitarian crises ever as people fled the country long before the us came they used to have the fourth strongest economy in the world when measured on a per person basis now well in twenty twenty three after nearly twenty five years of socialism their poverty rate skyrocketed to over eighty percent between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty one venezuela's real gdp fell by more than seventy five percent one of the largest peacetime collapses on record venezuela also suffered one of the world's highest hyperinflation rates with reuters reporting the imf's official projection of of their twenty eighteen levels at a staggering one million percent all of that catastrophe made them a very compelling target for china's belt and road initiative and in twenty eighteen maduro officially signed on effectively inviting china into the us's backyard to understand the level of aggression that this move ultimately triggered however we have to go back even further to the nineteen sixties and talk about what happened in cuba it was a literal bloodbath that walked us all up to the brink of nuclear annihilation and showed the world just how far america would go to protect its sphere of influence and keep a rival from having weapons in its backyard in nineteen sixty one cuba had just fallen to fidel castro a revolutionary who promised land reform and freedom and like all socialist dictators before him delivered nothing but poverty and oppression but what really triggered the us was that he aligned himself with america's mortal enemy at the time the soviet union so the cia came up with a plan that seemed train a small army of cuban exiles land them on a beach spark a popular uprising and overthrow castro and in april nineteen sixty one they launched the invasion at a place called the bay of pigs it was a spectacular disaster castro's forces were waiting the cuban people did not rise up and within days the invasion collapsed the rebels were all killed or captured and castro not only survived he became convinced the united states was going to try again so he asked the soviet union to protect him and they were all too eager to comply just one year later in october of nineteen sixty two american spy planes flying over cuba spotted something absolutely unthinkable soviet nuclear missile sites were under construction just ninety miles from florida with a flight time of only minutes they could strike new york washington or chicago for thirteen days the entire world held its breath as the two nations escalated towards nuclear war the us navy blockaded cuba american forces went to defcon two which is one step away from nuclear war soviet ships steamed towards the blockade line nuclear submarines lurked just beneath the waves multiple times individual commanders on both sides were just seconds away from launching preemptive strikes that would have ended civilization finally through public and private negotiations between jfk and khrushchev a deal was reached and both nations stepped back from the brink despite the fact that disaster was averted historians overwhelmingly view the cuban missile crisis as one of the clearest modern examples of what's known as the monroe doctrine the monroe doctrine is the rule that no rival superpower can have military or strategic footholds in the americas and the us will enforce that rule violently if necessary listen at the time of the cuban missile crisis the united states was already living under the threat of soviet nuclear we missiles in cuba did not radically change the balance of power but superpowers take their spheres of influence very seriously and they will not tolerate a rival establishing a strategic foothold in their own hemisphere since the berlin wall fell in the early nineties however the us has been a solo superpower so for a long time we've just turned a blind eye to the strategic moves that china has been making in the americas with with their belt and road initiative but those days are now over for many this is going to feel like a very confusing new frontier but the reality is this is just a return to normal most people get lost in the slogans of the day that we're living in right now america first make america great again but the honest answer is those are just the surface level slogans that politicians use what's really at play is is that the world is already and always has been a very dangerous place and when two great powers collide lines are drawn there are no referees and actions are taken at least when you have action oriented leaders and love or hate trump and xi they are both men of action to actually understand what's happening now you have to understand something absolutely terrifying about history peace is the exception not the rule for most of human existence the world has been defined by conquest slaughter and power struggles between rising and falling empires genghis khan and the mongol invasions killed roughly ten percent of the entire world's population that is a level of slaughter so dramatic that global co two levels were measurably reduced in modern russia stalin created a famine that wiped out entire generations not to mention all of the people that he simply had murdered not to be outdone mao zedong instituted policies in china that led to the deaths of more than forty five million people that's not even to mention the tens of millions more that were lost to war in the twentieth century alone adolf hitler dragged the world into a war that killed roughly eighty five million people and pol pot managed to kill a staggering share of his own country in just four years history is a bottomless bottle of black pills violence domination conquest corruption sabotage murder slavery subjugation and a whole lot more great powers will do whatever they think they can get away with to advantage their own people and when two such nations collide god help us all so why are so many people so confused by what's happening in venezuela right now because briefly after world war two something changed historically wars were limited in scope by an army's ability to travel and the rate at which one human could hack another to death with a sword then world war one hit and we saw just how many people could die and quickly then that ended only for the troops to bring home the spanish flu of nineteen eighteen which killed all another roughly fifty million people worldwide then just twenty years after all of that death another eighty five million people were killed in world war two and that included hundreds of thousands of people being instantly vaporized by nuclear weapons by the end of all of that the world was just tired and broken anything for a break and so on the back of the us coming out unscathed and with a manufacturing base that turned them into the world's strongest economy the world entered an unprecedented period of stability and prosperity global trade exploded the us helped people rebuild and for a few generations in the west life got safer richer and more predictable than it had ever been before so predictable in fact that people began to believe that this was the new normal that peace was permanent that prosperity was automatic that history itself had somehow ended but it hadn't it was just waiting for us to forget and for two great powers to once again collide it happened briefly in the eighties but then the soviet union collapsed and we all went back to sleep but now there's once again another superpower and we find ourselves in cold war two point.