I know this is a super long video, but there's really just too much to cover. I could've spent hours on this subject. Anyway, if you want to watch another 40-minute long video covering the entire US War in Afghanistan from beginning to end, you can check it out here on Nebula: bit.ly/3B05iUU. You can watch that one for free, and if you want to watch some of the other 15 episodes I have in the Modern Conflicts series, the best way to get access is just by signing up for the Nebula/CuriosityStream bundle for $14.79 a year here: curiositystream.com/?coupon=reallifelore New episodes in that series are releasing every single month on Nebula! Thanks, Joseph
@@sargonassarg4356 I hope your joking, Biden is an utter joke. You believe the news networks with their “MAGA extremists” push is pathetic. The US and the world are doing worse since Biden has taken office ffs.
21:55 I remember someone once saying that, while the US has many great allies, their staunchest, most reliable allies are the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
In addition to that, Canada and Mexico. Canada is one of our greatest allies and while our relationship with Mexico isn't quite as stable, we really have no worries of being invaded by a foreign army through our northern or southern borders.
And the top allies from the US POV are the ones that act as bastions to guard the far shores of those oceans - NATO, Japan, Korea, Australia, dare I say Taiwan.
It makes total sense that any downfall of the United States would not come because of an external threat owning to its geographic, geological or geopolitical strengths, but instead because of its domestic weaknesses. The Roman Empire collapsed from within.
We are a super spoiled society that has resorted to fighting each other out of boredom. Most we have ever been united was ww2 been going down hill ever since
The radical left, the Big pharma, industrial complexes, the Tiktok subversion, the destabilization by the CCP and Russia, are all threats that everyone needs to wake up to and ostracize.
@@frenchonion4595 Thank propaganda and the political parties that intentionally divided the ppl so they can be busy fighting each other as a distraction so the elites can get away with stuff like corruption and dishonesty
You could have also mentioned the easy access to vast deposits of coal, copper and iron in Appalachia and Great Lakes which allowed for the quick and early industrialization of the region. And that even the parts of the county without navigable rivers (i.e. the southwest) has a vast mineral wealth to make up for it.
Also, the majority of the country is flat, making it easier to build roads, infrastructure and train rails. In a mountainous country, building this kind of transportation infrastructure can cost three or four times more, plus the seasonal weather causes less damage to infrastructures (this is an advantage of all countries with seasons). In an equatorial country, where one day can be sunny, another rainy, others cold or hot, these changes in weather and temperature severely punish the infrastructure, making it even more costly to build and maintain.
To be fair, if you get an nearly an entire continent as your country, with only allies and oceans sorrounding you, your geography tends to be pretty OP *Edit:* to all those saying Australia, I'm not counting it because it doesn't nearly have as much variety in biomes and natural resources. It's more one big island than a real continent. The Americas have every natural resource in one self contained landmass.
@@oriontigley5089 thanks for the explanation. It’s kind of confusing because “over powered” means that something/someone is weak and less powerful than others. So maybe it means “overly powerful”? That would make a lot more sense to me, because USA is rather quite powerful 🤔
@@JosieCote When used as a verb, sure. But in this case, it's used as an adjective. I've never heard of anyone associating "over powered" in descriptive contexts with weakness. I've always compared it to words like "over clocked" and "over charged" I believe the original etymology comes from Video Game slang, where a player character would be unfairly "overpowered", as in given too much power by devs in comparison to others, thus making the game unbalanced.
I question if the civilisation start point in North America would still have inevitably turned into a global dominant super power (as you mentioned at the start of the video) if it were split into many countries like in Europe. I would argue that the geopolitical movement turning North America into the one nation is by far the greatest advantage.....complimented by a great piece of land.
Very doubtful, especially if it was split into different countries with different languages and cultures. That's what's baffling about people calling for secession nowadays: They don't realize how vulnerable a fractured USA would be and how many benefits of being one nation would go down the drain, but the US's enemies are very aware of it and like to stoke the flames of discord.
Changing the civilization start point would just dramatically change so much. But i can see one constant being a strong power or two centered around the Mississippi throwing around a lot of weight
@@julioalvarez9650 I think the exact opposite. For the sake of cultural coherency and less conflict, I think the USA (and Canada) should break up into 4-5 countries. Each country would have their own sovereignty but also their own cultures and specialization. One single administration for 325 million people is untenable.
@@Simboiss Generally speaking, a single administration over a larger amount of people is more stable than smaller divisions. It is more likely to be moderate in its social, political, and economic policies because it is harder for an extreme faction to dominate a larger population than a smaller one. It is also much less likely to be invaded and taken over by an outside power. The US government under its current constitution is at the top of the list for oldest continuous governments currently in existence, and if you look at longest uninterrupted forms of governments in historical times, most of them are the largest states/empires of their time.
I've seen videos talking about the various high speed rail systems in Europe and how they stop at the border and you have to use trams or local links to get from one contry's high speed to the next - it prevents them from having a continental world class high speed rail system which they could if they had a single regulatory agency and bidding/contracting system and funding mechanism/subsidies
Eh we're good thankfully our superstructure is robust to take on several nukes and recover while fighting a world war As for internal issues I don't see it really topping a brute force approach like a world war
And another takeaway is that earth is basically water world and thats a good thing because we dont have to live with populations we dont like and the oceans seperating us also serves as a superhighway which still allows us to trade and we dont gave to pay a road crew to pave the ocean irs just automatically there all we need to do is build the boats
The North Sea coast in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark also has barrier islands similar to the US. Except that Long Island alone is three times larger than all the Frisian Islands combined.
Two things. 1) On the topic of agriculture: during the Cold War, after the development of imaging satellites, the USSR thought it was nigh impossible for a geographic place to have so much agriculture, as it was so unlike anywhere else in the world. They had a number of theories, but one that contributed to Soviet policies was that several farms and rural towns were deception, and were actually biological weapons research facilities. This caused the USSR to overspend on biological warfare research in order to outdo what they thought was a massive US advantage. When in reality, the Soviet bio-warfare program was quite a bit more advanced than the US's. 2) Even if a foreign military managed to land ground forces on US soil with millions of soldiers, the US has ~40% of the ~1 billion firearms in the world. ~70% of US adults have fired a gun, including more than half of those that have never even owned one. That's a bit beyond the geography topic of the video, but worth pointing out as an aside :p
YUP. even if they could wipe out our government and military, what followed would be the biggest, longest, bloodiest guerilla war of all time. Could you imagine? There’s actually declassified Soviet files that talk about this, and even they came to the conclusion that the US is unconquerable
Sadly most of the gun lunatic Americans are so vulnerable to misinformation they already support traitor trump and would support a joint Sino Russian invasion of America
When I was a teenager one of my first stories was about a Latin American Hannibal/Napoleon persona who unites a huge part of Central/South America and then invades the US with surprising success and asymmetric tactics. He relies on support from disaffected political groups within the US to maintain his lines of supply and threatens to take the Mississippi and Great Lakes, splitting the nation in two. Instead of pouring resources into those areas he gets bogged down in the South (trying to take Texas and Florida) and he fights a Pyrrhic retreat back to Mexico City. I still think effort would ultimately fail much like Hannibal's own, for much of the same reasons. US Navy and Air Force allows the US to give up a lot of territory and hit you in the flanks when you overstretch.
Not to mention that the geography of the US is extremely hostile to invading armies the Pacific Northwest is mostly forrests and mountains. The Southwest is mostly vast empty desert. The south is predominantly forrests and/ or swamps. The north east is fairly forrested, and the Appalachians in the area as well. Finally, the north is mostly wide open plains which means any potential invasion is not going to have anywhere to hide from the Air Force.
I work on the Mississippi River in Louisiana, they have a lot of traffic that comes through every day, it's just so remarkable to see so many ships and cargo moving along the big river.
The US geography is simply too good, it's so blessed with having the most arable land on the planet along with it's overall geography and access to bodies of water coast to coast making it almost impossible to attack
@@juzoli Is it, though? America's heartland is still basically the center of its' entire industrial base. And shipping by boat is infinitely cheaper than shipping by any other method in the world, as the video points out. The Mississippi will never NOT be important. How the hell was it more important a hundred years ago, at a time when shipping out our food and industrial resources to the entire world was not yet a thing?
Just thinking out loud (and I'm Aussie)... maybe one of the reasons why the USA has done well is because it was a (mostly) united country? Europe also has great natural resources but they've just fought with each other the last thousands of years?
Yeah that's a pretty good point. All the power we have from the geography would be useless if we weren't so united. But at the same time that unity wouldn't be as impactful in a less geographically rich area. So, I guess it's which ever you find more valuable
@@johngutwald8454 Talking from the Northern mid-west (North & South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin) point of view, we have a vast majority of everything you need. Lumber, Coal, Oil, Gold, Iron ore, and some of the best soil for farming on Earth, etc...
Oh yes... the (mostly) unified country aspect is every bit as important as the resources, Mississippi River basin, etc. So are other things... like NOT being communist/socialist.
There's no doubt it was instrumental to our nation's development. If it was divided, say France never sold the Louisiana purchase & it survived potential subsequent wars, they would own have owned from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, partly controlling the river. This along with a portion of the oil & gas fields in parts of Texas & Oklahoma & that field located up along the Canadian border, plus all the great farmland in the west/upper midwest like Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, the Dakotas & part of Minnesota. That alone would have been a powerful country unto itself.
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Another enormous boon is how quickly the USA was established as a single united entity. If the USA's history had been as long as Europe's, it would be as divided and multilingual as Europe, fractured into a myriad of states unable to even speak to each other. Having a common language across the continent is a MASSIVE boon. When I first went to the USA from the UK, the first relief I had was that I could speak the language. It's a total nightmare going anywhere else.
@Tilveran Good overlooked point. Also, the system where states could have some of their own policies that made them less likely to break away. (civil war notwithstanding).
not excatly. the reason why Europe has so many language is because of its geography. linguistically speaking geography and isolation are what causes languages to develop and change. while at the same time in modern times the US is more diverse and multilingual. the US doesn't have an official language for a reason. and there's maps that show the 2nd and 3rd most spoken language in each state. and on another note majority of the world is bilingual or multilingual. so the odds that someone in another country speaks English or another language that you do are pretty fair. so to say that a united language is also what made the country what it is today is only partly true.
@@Roxadus460 re: “the US doesn’t have an official language for a reason.” Okay, sorry but the official language of the US is English. It’s required at the federal level for all government business. It’s also required for private citizens in order to function and prosper in American society. If you move here, learn it.
@@randallturner9094 OFFICIALLY the US does not list a national language. The CIA World Factbook and other government sources confirm this. English is the de facto language of the country, meaning it’s not official in a legal or legislative way, but in a “everyone just knows it” unofficial way.
@@NoneofYourBusiness667 re: “not official in a legal or legislative way” - are you serious? Oh, there’s just a bit of legislation involved. You’re required to learn English to become a US Citizen, comrade. “Officially”. For a reason, as you put it. 🙄 The CIA factbook and all those “other government sources” are REQUIRED, by law, to be in ENGLISH, gomer. Officially. Dude, you’re basically dishonest. “Does not list a national language.” You’re arguing semantics. You’re a liar. And worse, frankly, but that’s off-topic and it’s too much work to do a proper fisking.
Don't forget about Alaska and Hawaii's importance for military, resources, and research: both states are considerably well placed far from the lower 48, but are also either gigantic landmasses naturally defended by extreme cold and mountainous terrain with tons of coal and gold in Alaska, or is isolated from the rest of the world in the heart of the Pacific Ocean in volcanic islands making for a perfectly placed Naval harbor or space research labs in Hawaii.
It takes eight hours to fly from Fairbanks Alaska to Born Germany, over the pole as the condor airlines ad used to say. Alaska’s anchorage international airport was a major hub before the fall of the Soviet union, which led to the opening up of Soviet airspace.
General purging said something to the effect of heating that controls Alaska controls the world. What he meant by this is that it’s location in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land is, makes it so you can go from a place like Fairbanks to almost anywhere quicker than you could across the Atlantic or pacific. By quicker I mean less mileage sorry flat earthers.
Demographics for hard times that are coming, America and Canada have the energy, food and mostly the resources, but Europe is in trouble, Asia mostly China is going to be desperately challenged!😮 China, imports energy, food and most resources! Belligerent attacks on trading partners, zero sum game of Chinese CCP, that's not working?
Alaska coal? ROFL. Yes, it has coal, technically. So? Compared to rest of USA it may as well not even be mentioned. Gold? Not worth mentioning. Yes, a pittance of gold. Copper, NG, and other minerals could be mentioned though.
i knew USA is amazingly diverse geography, & when i had small talk with a co-worker, i was like, "this country is massive", what i really meant was its got every climate, every geography, every everything, that other countries can dream of. what continents have, but not every countries have
edit: dear Americans. I get it, you have rainforests. I think at this point the entire population of the Mid-West has replied to tell me how wrong I am. For the record, and this is on me, I should have clarified that America doesn't have any *tropical* rainforests (like the Amazon, as an example). But I have learned there's more than one type of rainforest, so silver linings. hasn't got rainforests
This video showing the vast waterways within the continental US should have been made decades ago and shown in the US schools. There are too many of us here in the US who have zero knowledge of the river systems and their strategic importance. Well done putting this video together.
"The Americans are a very lucky people. They're bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish." - Otto Von Bismarck
That’s why they partnered with seals to protect their oceans. Of course, they often get thrashed around by orcas, but I heard that a team of them killed osama bin laden. That’s crazy. 🦭
We always talked about the importance of the Nile or the Danube in school, but we really should have been talking about the Mississippi this whole time.
Well, unlike the Nile the Mississippi doesn’t flow in the middle of a freaking desert and unlike the Danube it isn’t soaked in blood over thousands of years of international strife. Yes, the Mississippi may be the greatest river in terms of navigation and commerce, but its history other than the civil war is rather boring. Not too much drama to where the Nile and Danube have epic stories surrounding it.
YEAH BUT WERE RUNNING OUT OF LAND WE NEED TO COLONIZE ANTARTICA BECSUSE OR WE WILL ALL BE PUSHED INTO THE OCEAN IF YOU MADE A KOWLOON WALLED CITY TO FIT 7 BILLION IT WOULD BE THE SIZE OF RHODE ISLAND
I’m an American, my wife and I live on a 60’ sailboat. We sailed from Cincinnati, OH to the Mississippi delta during COVID and ended up just continuing on up the coast and into the intercoastal waterway back to the Great Lakes. It’s a trip called the Great Loop. It was the most interesting trip we’ve ever made. I was blown away by all the infrastructure. We’ve sailed the Med and Caribbean and the Loop was easily the most logistically simple trip we’ve ever done.
I want to do the great loop. Its craczy how nautical our land nation is. Way nore than places like mongolia. Plus we have alaska and hawaii so if you leave from the west coast you have entirely different options its a wholleee lotta freedom i can go to all thes eplaces without showing a passport or even an ID unless I get caught in violation of a law. If yiu try to go from britain to spain thsyre going to ID you. Its a whole different world. Theyll just search you for no reason just because. Im usa i can go from arizona to michigan to florida to texas and no one bats an eye
@@censored4christ162 We are leaving for Hawaii (and then onto Nuku Hiva and Hiva Oa) from San Diego on Friday. But it is a much more difficult passage logistically. You should definitely do the Loop. Its an absolute blast.
You are very fortunate. Good for you. Boating is very expensive; consequently, those who own boat and decide to live on the boat is because it is very expensive to own a boat in addition to owning a house. Ownership of most big durable items requires insurance and maintenance; thus, it becomes a lifestyle and a owner needs to develop maintenance skills unless one is very, very wealthy. However, I wish I could at least once in my life travel the United States riverways and coastal-ways and the Great Lakes.
I am a tugboat captain on the Mississippi and Intracoastal Waterway, so I’ve known this for a long time. The leaders of our industry are always baffled that more Americans don’t know how important our waterways are to our economy. Great video.
They don’t teach it in school, I learned all this from this video at the age of 27. I also live in Arizona, so we don’t really think about rivers that much here.
I always knew how historically important the river system was to our economy, but I wasn’t aware of the sheer scale (I always assumed the coastal ports, railways and interstate systems were the main factor in the modern day) or how relevant it still is until this day. As a “coastal elite” surrounded by business people I always hear about coastal ports when it comes to logistics and rarely, if ever, about the Midwest and when I do it’s mostly in reference to trains and trucking.
Basically the opposite of Australia. Our biggest river, the Murray, was only discovered in the 1800s and is so shallow at its mouth that ships can't enter from the sea.
@@chungusmaximus526 Everything about USA is ridiculous. Part 2 to this video here: "How The US Should Have Spent The Afghanistan War Budget" by 'Second Thought'.
Australia still has some of the best geography and is effectly an island continent, and has large amount of almost every resource. Its location is probably arguably better moving forward past the 1900s and into the 2100s in the world. As mentioned a river system like the USAs is also a weakness, now at the moment/ in our life time's the usa is good, but things won't always be like they are now. Bad management can also effect a nation look at Argentina for an example.
@@brianlong2334 dude the US and Australia are on so fondamentally different planes this isn’t really an apt comparison I’d say the US has truly become one of the worlds great civilizational states. Over the course of their history they’ve built not just a state, but a country, not just a country, but a nation. And not just a nation but a civilization. Unmoored by ties of blood or faith or ancestry but bound by an Ideology, the most dominant political ideology of the Post enlightenment world. There’s an Americanism to the way the people of that continent live that makes them more comparable to say China than to most regular countries. Although I fear they might be tearing it apart.
My father told me this fact. America's real longest war was the conflict against Indigenous Americans, called the American Indian Wars, which most historians characterize as beginning in 1609 and ending in 1924 or 313 years, mainly over land control.
Thats like a hundred separate conflicts against a hundred separate foes spread out over hundreds of years with lots of stops and starts and a lot of other things going on. Its really not accurate to call that one continuous conflict, although you might lump it together as a planned genocide
little by little , one or two tribes at a time. some we bought land from , made friends with, married them, made truces, made treaties, and some kept thousands or millions of acres of land... now are citizens of our nation as well a s keep thier sovereign tribal nations. they are still great warriors fighting for this country in the military. this land is their Mother, so they say. it's ours too if we've been here for many generations. we admire them and thier arts, wisdom, etc , they were a worthy foe back in the day. Glad we are at peace now all of us including all those tribes with each other. We are just their white brother, they are our red brother. i heard one of their sages say we need to keep our tech in check. i know that's true.
I remember moving cross country from west to east as a kid. I was absolutely *floored* by the sheer size of the Mississippi River. It is *insanely* wide
I randomly started looking at the waterways in America... It's honestly broken af from a infrastructure standpoint. We can get goods basically anywhere with these systems. Crazy. Also, imagine what would happen if we found a huge cobalt area.
Unfortunately our current government policies make this harder than need be. If only we got rid of the Jones Act and made a continental version of Conrail.
I have been to all 50 united states and over 6000 towns and cities and almost all of the nation parks. This country is crazy from a geography standpoint. It is absolutely amazing that we where able to cross that on foot, wagon and horse only a few centuries ago. It is very hard to believe.
@@troyjusticecabrera7284 That is such a incredibly hard and complicated question. I'm actually not sure I could answer. I really like Florida but I've been here most of my life so my bais of Tampa FL is high. I think a better question would be what are you looking for in a city. How big do you want it. Do you want steeples for miles like new York, or something that isn't too grown. What night life's are you looking for. What laws are you concerned about exc.
The thing that made me truly appreciate that North American geography is absurdly favorable was the metric for steel production capacity immediately before World War 2: if I remember correctly it was vastly in the lead, potentially as much as every other combatant combined. And so long as the US keeps control of the Western Hemisphere, there is essentially no power on Earth that could win a war of conquest over the USA (which doesn't involve reducing the continent to rubble first).
I believe the majority of the steel was produced in the Hoover mason trestle located in Pennsylvania. It located right by the Appalachian mountains and on the Lehigh river.
It’s been modeled that the US could fight conventionally against the rest of the world, simultaneously, on many fronts, and still win. It was demonstrated that logistics, the Navy, overseas bases/ballistics, surveillance, & self reliance on resources are the pillars of modern warfare. By surgically crippling adversarial capacity to wage war through disruption of fuel and supply chains to deployed militaries & their homelands, the only option is to sue for peace. The US has a lot of vulnerabilities, but all out conventional warfare isn’t one.
@@carladams9345 "Her"? --Please provide more context. I'm all for flex & un-gendered usage in the English language, but when I talk about "Peter," the "guy" in my earlier sentence, and then you just reply with reference to "Her" that makes me start troubleshooting the possibility that TH-cam is misplacing your comment in my message-feed; or that maybe you don't grasp basics of the English language; or that you're an idiot intentionally trying to make basic communication difficult by essentially lying when you knowingly refer to Peter Zeihan as a woman. And if YOU specifically, stranger on the internet, have never heard of something, well...GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND
Incredibly factual, and conclusions as fair and reasonable as any I've read or heard. Thank you so much. We are all starved for this kind of reporting.
I’ve not seen many of your videos, but so far I’ve never seen you take a side, or demonize one side of a conflict, you simply give us the facts, and I thank you so much for that!
I feel like there’s a pretty obvious right and wrong. I’ll give you a hint, as an American, there is zero question why our country is so dominant. It’s the same reason monopolies become monopolies. The USA doesn’t care about anyone besides it’s own well-being and the pockets of the elites.
140 years ago, Mark Twain wrote extensively about the history of the Mississippi basin and how it was utilized and developed via emerging technologies of the time.
Logged in to Nebula about an hour ago to see if there were any new uploads to Modern Conflicts and was pleasantly surprised to see the latest video. After watching that I jumped over to TH-cam to see if there was anything new here and got to enjoy even more great content! Thank you for your amazing work!
Your content is some of the rare stuff that makes me excited to have the internet again, like when it was newer when we were younger. This is quite literally, the content I signed up for(your work as a whole, not just this particular video). Thank you for bringing some joy and knowledge into my life.
As an immigrant to the US, I have to say this land is a miracle to exist in every sense of the word. Not just geographically, but it is very rare to have had such a brilliant group of founding fathers fight and win one of the very few successful revolutions in history, and established such a well-rounded republic on top of it (and yes, I know they owned slaves and yada, yada, just like everyone else in that era- it still doesn’t detract from there accomplishments). That said, I hope this wonderful nation of cultural diversity is able to get over its political, culture, gender, and ideological wars going on at the moment. Perhaps this country was so blessed with good geography that over time people lost there sense of appreciation for the land they were born in, and begun to fight over useless arguments. Too much of that can lead even the most powerful empires down a hole - I just hope we come back to our senses before it happens here.
Couldnt agree more, I think that the reason for all these ideological problems is directly from just how good americans have it. First world problems, gotta have something to be mad about
I’m so glad you love it here. It’s great to see someone born outside the US that doesn’t hate it just for the stereotypes. It is the greatest country in the world, and I’m glad you’re here with us🇺🇸
@@imdarling17 American exceptionalism strikes again, an empire sustained on the oppression, interventionism and bloodshed provoked against the global south. You live in a bubble, no wonder the rest of the world largely regards Americans as exceptionally ignorant, including Europe.
*Another thing not mentioned besides the United States river system* is the fact that the U.S. has the world's largest road and rail network of any country on Earth. The United States has 4 million miles of roads that span across it today. And it has 140,000 miles of freight railroad track that spans across it as well. So you have the world's largest road system, the world's largest navigational river system, the world's largest railroad system, and the world's largest airplane and airport industry to move goods all across the U.S. and abroad. It's a whole ecosystem of transportation that the U.S has. 🙂
@@cripple9860 Go look up the dynamics of passenger/freight rails -- they are directly competing with each other. The reason for passenger rails being no good is because they use the same rails as freight trains and freight takes priority over passenger rails. And often, there is only a small window of time allotted to passenger trains to run so when the time is up -- no more rides for the day. Only freight.
Road and rail systems are not mentioned because this video focuses on natural geographic features contributing to the USA's strategic and economic strengths.
@@BAPK1602 It's a trade off between freight or passenger rail. The existing infrastructure works so well with freight that we might as well stick with it. In order to have high speed rail, you'll need completely new infrastructure to support it. Which is simply not justifiable considering there's not a big enough population density except for very certain parts of the country; the east coast, parts of the Midwest, a Texas triangle, and the Pacific Coast? Most of the country is just too big and empty for high speed passenger rail. Once you hit that 500 mile mark, you might as well fly. If you look at places with efficient passenger rail networks, you'll see that odds are, they're very densely populated.
5:30 Don't forget economies of scale! Ships are one if the few modes of transportation that becomes more efficient the bigger it gets. The more stuff you can put on a boat, the cheaper it is to ship per unit. Whereas work land based transportation, the bigger it gets, the more engineering problems you encounter and the more expensive they get to fix, a bigger ship mostly just means spreading the operating costs out over more cargo. Physics is actually on our side on this one.
Not only does a larger volume mean cheaper per unit shipping costs, but the longer (bigger) a ship is the faster it can go before the wake it produces starts to really create a lot of drag, so they can either use less fuel or can move the goods faster. The economies of scale benefits just compound and compound with ships.
I can't thank you enough for making this video on American geography, Real Life Lore. It's currently my favorite thing on TH-cam and should be required viewing in every American high school. Great job!
I think its key for Americans who are intent on amplifying our internal differences to understand how weak we are when we are split apart. Our strength comes from our unity and connectedness across the continent. Our differences are not that important, our prosperity is assured and we can have a century of prosperity and peace if we just remember how important we are to each other. Consider how much our dissolution as a nation would benefit our mutual enemies, and you start to reconsider the motivations and allegiances of those who openly call for these things.
Would be nice for the US to continuesly stay in power and dictate world politics huh. Because yall definitely are good with politics and not being evil.
@@HowIsAsh if you did not intend sarcasm, I read it in anyways as it should be. The US isnt evil. MAN IS EVIL. power corrupts completely. Whoever has it, will follow in US steps. No question.
You need to highlight the Panama Canal as well. This marval even though no longer under US control allows free shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific effectively increasing the ease of trade from the Mississippi basin & intercoastal to the Western coast.
It wouldn’t exactly be difficult to take over the Panama Canal by force if necessary. I still think Carter made a mistake turning it over. I’d be ok with Panama and America co-owning it together.
@@Kaiserboo1871 , You have to remember that Carter is a Socialist Liberal Democrat. The ONLY aim of that Party is to gain political and social power. If it comes at the expense of the United States , well.....
@Kaiserboo1871 You may be right, but, what you think or feel "OK about" the issue, is: totally -->>irrelevant; since, who are you; anyhow-???? When you talk like that you communicate 1 thing: disgusting arrogance!!!. Why do you think that you are so darn important-????!!!!!!!!!!.
When discussing the Great Lakes as a transportation route, there was simpler engineering at an earlier time that provided a large portion of present-day capabilities. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825 and connected eastern Lakes Erie to the Hudson River, and thus the port of New York City and the navigable connections between Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan. The first version of the "Soo" Locks were completed in 1855, adding access to Lake Superior
And there's the Great Lakes' route through to the St. Lawrence Seaway and VS. So, e.g., Chicago has a water route to the Atlantic. And all the betweens and links such as the Ohio river to Mississippi River.
Not to forget the canals linking the Chesapeake to the Delaware and the Delaware to the Hudson, which of course led to the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes! Of course, one could also continue north from the Hudson entrance to the Erie canal, heading upstream the Hudson River to the Champlain canal, then heading across Lake Champlain and downstream to the St Lawrence Seaway. One could travel from Duluth to Norfolk VA via Albany NY, then head north to Montreal without ever facing an open sea. Those canals sure changed things. A lot of iron ore moved from the upper Midwest to smelters, foundries, and plants throughout the eastern US, helping the US economy to boom. I suspect you know that, but other readers might not know that. :-)
This video has done more to help me understand American history and politics than any one source of information ever has. Thank you for helping put the pieces together. Wonderful video.
Did this video help you understand why Biden's energy policies are historically stupid? Do you see a correlation between what is happening to the American economy today and the economy during the 70's oil embargo? It's like the democrats, and every voter who voted for him, have never read a history book🤓
This is the longest I have actually watched a video without skipping any part, I always loved history and this is amazing! Edit: watched got corrected to watered for context
I was a Geography major in college nearly 20 years ago. I learned SOME of what you covered in this video, but not all of it--and only piecemeal. I've never heard such a clear, thorough explanation of how the USA's geography has influenced its prosperity. You do marvelous work! I followed your link to Nebula and subscribed. Thank you for the wonderful content!
Check out “How the States got their Shapes”… I think you would like it. It was on the History channel about ten years ago. It’s an awesome series like this video but broken down by all the states boundaries and how they came to be defined.
The country's so op they had to nerf it with an education system that makes 16% of the population believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows Edit: the comment section makes the Russia-Ukraine war like a tea party, enter at your own risk
I remember those days of energy insecurity. Foreign policy was dominated by the Mid East, as were our wars and headlines. Now it's all just like a foot note in a history book. Thanks for covering the shale revolution. It really has changed the face of US geopolitics and I feel like no one really realizes that or gives it the credit it deserves
This brings me back so many memories of the geopolitics lessons I used to attend. Sometimes it's not just the size of the territory but also where it is located, which reminds me of the strategic locations the British Empire used to own during its maximum expansion.
Lol...Wuz this USED 2 OWN, English? Falklands, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Ascension...You may not have the Suez, A.T.M. but British bases are sitting upon a large swath of Cyprus nearby the Suez. You just need to own Singapore again and U instantly win at Super-Strategic Tiny Island BINGO
@@czdaniel1 Montevideo could easily have been yet another such strategic point. It was captured and occupied by the British in 1807. Would have been a South American version of Halifax!
Ok, major historical oversight about the opening of the Great Lakes to global commerce. While it is true that the St. Lawrence Seaway, which was completed in the 1950s, opened the Great Lakes to trans-oceanic commerce, the lakes themselves have been opened to global shipping since the 1850s. This development was made possible thanks to the completion of the following projects: The Erie Canal in the 1820s (Albany to Buffalo), The Illinois and Michigan Canal (connected Lake Michigan with the Illinois River via Chicago) completed in 1848, and the Soo Locks (Connecting Lake Superior to Lakes Huron and Michigan) in 1855.
And even without the full Seaway trade was still possible, just using smaller vessels and either older canals or offloading cargo to bypass rapids. And after the seaway a ton of hydroelectric power became available to both the US and Canada. (The Moses-Sounders dam in Massena/Cornwall has 2 separate generation plants that combine to about 2GW of installed capacity) I assume the rest of the greatlakes region also have several GW of capacity from dams along the watershed (like how much of the niagra river doesn't go over the falls, only enough to be pretty as a tourist destination/heritage site).
As an additional note sailing vessels stayed in commercial service longer on the Great Lakes than basically anywhere else in US because the lakes were so navigable. Steam tugboats were used to get these sailing vessels up the Detroit River across the St Clair flats and up the St Clair River.
I come from a Minnesota farm south of the twin cities. The Mississippi river is a mighty river indeed. Fuels everything, home to so many bald eagles. Been the head waters of the Mississippi river aa few times, nice area to hike. America is an amazing country and living here is kick ass. From that small farm in southern Minnesota to a software engineer this place lets you become anything you want. Family migrated here and in 1 generation we went from farmers to engineers, still got plenty of farmers in the family though. Never going to give that farm up.
I'm from Central Minnesota myself. My favorite thing about the headwaters of the Mississippi is just how humble it all begins. A normal person can jump across it. I've seen it multiple times where it's not more then a foot deep. It's really humbling to be reminded that the only reason the Mississippi is so big is because of all the other rivers that flow into it, 1 of which I myself live on currently. It truly would be nothing without all of the other rivers and lakes the feed it water.
I saw a Bald Eagle driving southbound in Texas' Rio Grande valley. Long strait open highway with VERY WIDE open medians between the North & Southbound lanes. The Bald Eagle swooped down to the deck, landed among the grass & shrubs in that wide open median space. I'm told it was probably a Mexican bald eagle that I saw, which is a little smaller than the American Bald Eagle you see around the Mississippi
So does culture. The culture the USA inherited from GB, Netherlands, and Ancient Greece/Rome allowed it to loosely yet cohesively aggregate this land into a protected economy. I also think way too much direct links between Iraq and the the attack on the US by Al-Qaeda. There is far more complexity than that linkage and the thought that the US brought that on its own house is hyperbolic to outright untrue. And to us in the USA the disaster of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, rather than our military actions, is the nightmare
Speaking of sea ports and their economic impact. I’m fascinated with a proposed Gulf of California to Laguna Salada to Salton Sea canal. Mexico’s president said that there isn’t enough benefit to Mexico to follow through with the bi-National agreement he signed. Maybe if the Laguna Salada project was expanded into sea port infrastructure it would get done. Btw. The Laguna Salada is below sea level for dozens of miles and the Gulf of California tides are 9 feet high where the proposed canal begins.
Geography shapes a people more than anything else. And people shape the places they live. In this way, the quality of a society is largely dependent on the quality of it’s people
North America isn't a prime spawn point for pre-agrarian societies due to the lack of domesticable livestock (for labor and milk), but it is the best expansion point the closer you get to the Industrial age. If what you said was true, then the Americas would have never been colonized by Europeans.
@@PassportAdam agriculture allowed for dense urban living in close proximity to livestock, which gave Europeans generations to build immunity against zoonotic diseases like smallpox and plague. Without beasts of burden you don't get dense cities and close animal/human contact.
If the Norse had permanently settled North America, all that livestock would have arrived earlier. The Amerindians would still have been hit with Old World diseases such as smallpox, but 1) probably less so than they did and 2) had more time to recover their numbers and build immunity after the initial upheavals. They'd have also probably not been forced off their land, or at least not so much. In one or more places, we'd likely have seen a synthesis of Scandinavian and the myriad Amerindian cultures, especially in the Northeast. Similar to Imperial Japan, one or more Amerindian nation-states would have adopted European weapons and technology and rapidly modernized, then gone about conquering other countries. By now, at least the eastern half of North America would be demographically more Amerindian with a European-descended minority (a la South Africa) and a plurality of Norse-speaking mestizos. The Euro-descendants would look mostly Nordic, but they'd be culturally, religiously, and linguistically very different from their cousins back in the old country. What of language and writing? I'd like to believe that while the nations of Northern Europe would switch to the Latin alphabet following Christianization, the Norse newcomers and their Amerindian compatriots would still write in the runic alphabet. Just as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets have their own variations for different languages, so would the Futhark script have its own variations to accommodate sounds that exist in the Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and other languages but not in Old Norse and whatever descendant language(s) it'd spawn in North America. There'd be exceptions, though. Take the Mikmaq, for instance. They had their own hieroglyphic system pre-contact. If that writing system continued to develop apace, I'd like to think it would have developed in a more stylized fashion akin to Chinese characters. Same with the Mayan writing system--the glyphs would have become more stylized over time to the point of bearing little, if any, resemblance to how they originally looked. As for the Norse side of things, one of two things would happen with a population of Old Norse-speaking people plopped into North America and left there for multiple generations for a thousand years. Their language might still resemble Old Norse, albeit with loanwords from the various Amerindian language families, but still be mutually intelligible with the other North Germanic languages. Or their language may diverge so far as to be unintelligible with other such languages. But they won't speak Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish because identical vocabularies aren't going to occur twice. Religion? Unlike in the America we ended up with, a Norse America would probably be more pagan. If Christianity took hold in North America at all, it'd be a minority religion at most. We'd probably see Norse pagan holdouts fleeing Christianization and bringing their old ways with them. Said pagans forcibly converting Amerindians and making them worship Odin, Thor, Freyja, and all them? Don't bank so much on it. I've never heard of a pagan person imposing their beliefs on anyone else. I've only heard of Abrahamic religions (namely Christianity and Islam) doing that shit. The only exception I can think of is Hindu nationalists simping for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, going after their Muslim countrymen. North America's religious makeup would be a cornucopia of various pagan religions with a Christian minority at most. Not only Christianity, but also any Abrahamic religion would probably be a minority as well. The most hardcore Christians? They'd be seen as a fringe movement, almost exclusively European and not taken seriously by most people. All things considered, one or more nation-states that grow out of a Norse colonization would still end up in the same position as the U.S. is in now. North America has the best geography for any civilization to spawn and thrive in, even if that civilization has to play the long game to do it.
Simple fact is that geography aside, it was easy to colonize North America as Native Americans were tribal, easy to exploit differences among tribes and lacked a single leader.
I'm embarrassed to admit that this video taught me a shit ton of facts I didn't know about my own country... and I've seen a lot of these coastlines, too.
I live on the Chesapeake, and I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that it has more coast line than India. Like I straight up called BS when I first heard that.
A few years ago I was really into reading about the US's water management and freshwater canal systems so I *knew* about most of this, but seeing it on a map is something else. Thank you!
the Bakken field saved my dad from a lot of debt. He was on heavy debt and decided to risk it and he moved there himself but we stayed in Idaho. Once he made enough money we moved there with him. we bought a house. eventually he got a better job offer and we moved to Iowa. The ND oil boom saved my family that I can guarantee.
I’m an engineer in Texas and used to travel up to ND to support the Bakken fields. I always tried to make my trips between May and September, first to avoid the cold and second to get a break from the Texas heat. I’m glad the Bakken gave your family a solid opportunity
You mentioned Western Canada being more integrated with the Northwestern United States than the rest of Canada; the same thing is happening to Northern Mexico. The dry top half of Mexico is more economically, infrastructurally, and culturally affiliated with the Southwestern United States than it is with the wetter bottom half. So I think the US is slowly _eating_ its neighbors.
Demographically, is Mexico who's eating the US southwest. Mexican people will surpass whites, blacks, asians and will be the majority group in the next decades (at least in the southwest). Economy is another story, but the demographic tendency is irreversible.
@@ivann.1916 The American Southwest has _always_ been majority Hispanic. Meanwhile, Mexicans from the northern _estados_ are mostly employed either across the border or in factories owned by American companies, and consume more American media, speak more English, and use more American money than the Mexicans farther south. There’s also more roads and railways connecting the northern estados to the southern states than there are connecting them to the southern estados. Northern Mexico is slowly being pulled out of Southern Mexico’s sphere of influence and being pulled into America’s. People from Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila have more in common with people from California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, than they do with people from Mexico City, Veracruz, Oaxaca, or Tabasco.
Was so curious if Mississippi river carries that much volume so I searched it up. The global cargo volume was 1.85 billion Tons in 2019 and the M. River carried 500 million tons in 2021. That's 27% of the GLOBAL cargo volume! Insane.
I grew up in the twin cities mere blocks from the Mississippi. There's a constant stream of barges coming up and down at that point. And thats at the northernmost industrial point.
@@billhicks6449 live up in Cloquet near Duluth, the twin city and Duluth represent the ends of each of their grand water networks, and I would imagine a lot of the land traffic in Minnesota comes from cargo being transports between those two cities.
Wow. I've never looked at the world through this lens before. This is like the Rosetta Stone to geopolitics. Thank you for this well made and enlightening documentary.
I studied ancient history at university. I had something of an epiphany when my professor began explaining history from the perspective of economics. We often think of civilizations by their monuments, art, or battles they fought. But all that glory is rooted in the strength of its economy.
One other minor critique of your analysis: Although I agree that New Orleans is critical to US commerce, even if it was destroyed or captured US commerce would not shut down as you have stated that the Mississippi basin is also connected to the great lakes and trade could be rerouted through there to reach the Atlantic. It would suck but the US heartland would still be connected as an oceanic port.
The thing with North America is it just keeps getting better and better not only do we have all these terrific waterways, but when the New Englanders and New Yorkers realized they were going to lose political and economic power to Louisiana they built the area Canal, and all sorts of railroads crossing the country and that good old protestant fashion with nature doesn’t obey you you simply whip the shit out of it and make it do your bidding. Do you know back when men or men, and not ruled over by foreigners and usurpers. Hell, they even kick their own, English countrymen out of the country and get rid of their own king, calling him a foreigner, because he was from Hannover Germany. He didn’t put up with the kind of shit we put up with today they were ready to go to war, over a penny in taxes if they did not feel represented today, we let them steal elections from us and do nothing. New wine and a full belly take away the heart.
i immigrated to the USA year 1987, im now a naturalized US citizen. i will always love this country. its the land of opportunity as long as you're not lazy
@@gokuformanvsfood And its literally any non cis het white people. Its fucked. This country is (supposed to be) for everyone who wants equal opportunity. OP immigrated legally, and is a legal citizen. Yet people like Jimmy will still scream "REEE YoU DoNt BeLoNg HeRe, gO hOmE" as if this isnt their home. BTW, I hope you're enjoying being an America @M.J.R.
@@thedarkmajesty1773 that's pretty hilarious, Mexico annexing the usa. 400000000 guns in the hands of the American citizens might have something to say about that
For sure the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian mountains act as a barrier and the Great Lakes so the middle would be most protected unless they invade through Mexico but they would not even reach us cuz Mexico would already alert the USA
I believe I had read that nearly every biome on earth exists within the US border with a few exceptions such as tropical rainforest (Florida gets close being subtropical)
Excellent!!!! The narrator speaks English clearly and distinct, full of VALUABLE content. Never heard any documentary more straight to the point.... And useful I'm a subscriber !!!! You are going to be close to me at all times.
I live in South Mississippi, and I understand why we have huge naval shipyards here and military bases and training camps everywhere in the Southeast. My dad lives about 30 minutes from Ingalls, which builds a lot of naval ships, including the destroyer class that my father used to help build.
3:00 I disagree. Resources and terrain are not enough to lead a country to be a economic power. Take Argentina, my home country as example. We also have a vast surface of arable land, with capacity to feed 400 million people. The second largest reserve of gas in the world. The largest lithium reserve. The largest aquifer (Guaraní). And the list goes on… We were the richest country per capita in the world by the end of 19th century. 1/3 of Latin America GDP at that time. And look at us now. We are not even a shadow of what we were, what we could be. Terrible governments, ideologies and corruption led what many wrongly call a “rich” country (just referring to its resources) to a poor one. Resources could be nothing without a good administration. The US were lucky to be a British colony. Had them be a French or Spanish colony, their fate could've been very different.
Ok first usa has the gold and it’s one of the best farming country to exist and it’s one of the most oil producers in the world. It can support its self on its own
I think Geography is the potential a country has; Argentina still has that in it, but the UK and Argentina's bad government pushed it back down. I think if Argentina got away from their colonial heritage that it could definitely return to being rich, but it needs time and a lot of work to get there.
It might have been noted by others already, but the river theory is one of the reasons why Africa has been so slow to develop. With the exception of the Nile, there are no easily navigable rivers penetrating Africas interior.
@@mrkrabs622 Africa did develop great civilizations. And the greatest civilizations in the regions you mentioned did grow around a navigable river. Historical revisionism is pure garbage.
@@mrkrabs622 yes because the technology 3easily spread from the nearby dominat powers like the greeks or persians. Egypt is almost completely separated from the rest of africa besides the Nile making trade of technology slow (plus Egypt was one of the most authoritarian states in the bronze age) It wasn't really till the iron age any great civilizations existed.
Africa has no winter season to speak of. Surviving winter on a regular basis requires long time planning, working together to preserve food for the tough season. Besides, Africa has surprisingly few native species suitable for agriculture or animal breeding. Cow species were savage animals, as for horses - try taming a zebra for riding or draw a cart. These factors make it difficult to develop a homegrown economy, not even very worthwhile to invade like what happened to Europe in several occasions. African weather can be every inch as harsh, though drought and heat can be escaped by trekking. Reckon most of ancient African empires depended upon trade with Arabia, India, where agricultural development had taken a higher flight. Basically the strongest Asian tribes have been chasing out the weaker ones, which then developed new skills in other parts of the world, whereas Africa kind of stuck in the old ways.
Well the waterways are definitely a huge huge benefit but you have to remember had our country not been consolidated on under one power it could not have been completely utilized imagine if the United States have been broke up into like four sections with the French holding one section the English holding another section Spanish holding another section and the Germans or Russians or somebody holding the four section this would have limited the benefit of the Mississippi and meant that this area would have been at least for 100 years under continual conflict. Had not one authority taking control of the riverways the true benefit of this would not have been realized.
@@cablefeed3738 It's MORE likely that we would have ended with the strife of Europe 1700's-1900's, instead of something like the EU. Remember, it took two World Wars AND a cold war to result in the EU. As for the modern US-Can friendship (peace) that's almost certainly due to those same two world wars, AND the common cultural heritage and language... and also by actual blood-ties (Yes, I know about the French heritage of Quebec, but THAT is balanced between Quebec and Ontario, already, purely internally.)
Huh? Current rivers in Europe that are comparable to the Mississippi and similar rivers have been used for trade for literal thousands of years without problem unless war broke out or embargos placed. European nations understood the importance of trade and keeping trade flowing into other countries regardless of political differences for thousands of years. This is such a large and baseless assumption I'm struggling to even understand how you can claim something like this without significant evidence.
It's also important that, for almost two centuries, America was geographically separated from any other superpower and rarely fought wars on home soil. They were practically unscathed by WWI and WWII, so afterwards they modernized while other countries were rebuilding from the ashes. Modern technology brought this to an end, though.
@@huntclanhunt9697 What do your call a fight between two countries where your capital city, Washington DC, gets burned to the ground by a combination of ground & naval forces? Is the History Class completely optional in your High Schools?
@@EvilDaveCanada A war that actually mattered leaf, don't make me get out the rake. A devastating war with actual impact on the nation rather then what can be a minor skirmish that didn't amount to much of anything Closest the US got to seeing the horrors of war was during Shermans march to the sea in their civil war. Considering how gladly they inflict these horrors worldwide we can be certain their population literally cannot even comprehend it anymore and even then the civil war was rather tame But for US education, it's not just history that's optional, math, geography. Pretty much every class TBH. Their standards for education are a joke to most of the world. Keep in mind most of these savages generally say yes to should we invade X nation and can't even point it out on a map Alongside drinkable tap water I swear in some aspects the US is a third world nation
This is both a boon to the US and a pitfall. We never had to rebuild which saved us costs, but we are also becoming infrastructurally outdated since we rely on old systems that were never broken.
I drove across the country and as you drive from the appalachians to the great plains to the rockies the geography really makes you feel like the midwest is in the middle of two castle walls. And you cannot help but ponder how any adversary would be able to cross those mountain ranges if the roads were guarded/ destroyed.
Just revisiting old videos. I remember seeing this channel a few years ago but I'm so happy the content has shifted more to geopolitics and world economies. It's incredibly informative, unbiased, and causes me rethink a lot of political narratives around past and current events where the full story isn't being told. I've gotten to the point of treating this and Nebula like my world news source. Only problem is not being able to get this great content more frequently. But that's okay. I'll rewatch old content and look for videos I haven't seen.
- Basically a continental fortress, isolated from any threat with geography that would be an invading force's nightmare. - Incredible amount of natural resources. - Modern starting point, from a beginning as self-sufficient colonies. Yeah, it really isn't fair.
Then why didn't the American Indians dominated the world? They've been here 10x longer than the US Americans. It's not so much about the territorial advantage as the people and ideology. Another example of this is Israel being surrounded by enemies in the middle of desert yet managed to survive and thrive more than their neighbors.
@@The15iceiceice15 You've answered your own question. Both were sponsored by empires, and had a starting point in the modern era. The Mississippians didn't have gunpowder or the Industrial Revolution, but the US was basically a custom-built nation that gained independence in the midst of a technological spike. Yes, ideology played a role (in that it fostered industry and the settlement of a vast territory), but as I pointed out in my original comment, the US had the technology to build an empire. I hoped this cleared up any confusion.
@@dionadair8195 Great answer, and I'd further add that the reason that native Americans did not have the technology the Europeans had was that the basic plants and livestock needed to develop the sort of large scale sedentary agriculture that we saw arise in the middle east 10,000 years ago simply didn't evolve there in a usable way until later. There aren't many large livestock native to the Americas, which is a serious handicap, and the llama alone cannot make up for not having sheep, pigs, bovine, etc. Thus, Mesoamerica wasn't able to build it's first true cities until several thousand years after Mesopotamia had gotten the ball rolling.
@@The15iceiceice15 A little off subject of what you're talking about, but I wonder, if the Europeans never arrived in the America's weather or not the natives already in the Northern section would have survived long, as the Aztec's were slowly moving in? I wonder if, eventually, the Northern natives would have met a similar history, along the same time, but from the Southern American's?
The thinking game, the Chinese chess so the speak, is the board game Go. It's target is to slowly surround the opponent, than strangle it slowly. I don't like China much, but I can see them developing that strategy by slowly taking over the dominant Western role in financing major projects all over Africa, Asia, Latin America, even Eastern Europe. With their free trade & neoliberalism ideology, the West has handed over the focal points of economy, production and finance, to China and Arabia, to a lesser extent. We'll see whether the West can develop the kind of longer term strategic thinking, a central feature of Western development before WW2. The thinking behind all "Third Way" ideology of the nineties ( Blair & Clinton) seems to have been blind to the effect of turning over such important part of economy to China and S/E Asia. That strangling job has only just begun. Putin's war is just a preliminary exercise, aimed to sort out how strong get the West still is.
Growing up in St. Louis gave me an appreciation for the Mississippi-Missouri River system as an economic powerhouse. I'd argue that St. Louis is the most strategically viable location for the US capital, given its location at the joining of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and its central location. Gabaret Island and Choteau Island are easily defensible, and should New Orleans fall into enemy hands a location on the Mississippi-Missouri would allow this hypothetical St. Louis capital to still reap the benefits of the 4th largest river system in the world. Historically, before the invention of phones and the internet, St. Louis' location is ideal. Information could be sent quickly to and from any tributary of the Mississippi to the capital. Had St. Louis been developed as the capital of the US, it would also be an ideal railway hub. I may be a bit biased
Perhaps a bit but it's very logical I wanted to buy the Kentucky loop exclave, get the Army Corps of Engineers to flood proof it and move the capital there - it's not St Louis but I wanted to build a city from scratch and to keep its population only government, no residents as was intended all along
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@@johnperic6860 My point was that any such city placed at that strategic geographic point would eventually constitute a transcontinental US' center of population.
Good example: Coal was shipped from Duluth, MN all the way to New York through ships that go through the Great lakes and the rivers. That's one of the ways how US was able to manufacture so many airplanes and war machines and have them ready to ship to Europe during WW2. The world is blessed that the US was founded by visionaries and built by hard working people. If China or Russia had what the US has, the world would not be the same.
@@sargonassarg4356 there were A LOT of people who weren't slaves that built America and slavery itself didn't provide as much money for the US %/gdp as people think it did. Don't minimize the hard work millions of Americans have put into our country.
@@chunkmen Such as the Chinese immigrants who built your railroads? Or the Italian mobs who created Las Vegas? It's funny that you downplay the slave trade as just an anamoly while simultaneously benefitting from the foundation it has built for you and yours.
I love all your videos. I’am a fan and , I’am river towboat pilot that pushes large barge tows across all of our nations waterways so this video really peaks my interest. No trolling I promise. Vidalia is not where the old river control structure is. It’s Morganza. The locks that connect the Mississippi River to the Atchafalaya and the Red river are Old river locks in Lettsworth,La. Vidalia,LA is across the Mississippi River from Natchez, Ms. There is just the Mississippi River there, no control structure. Vidalia is about 35 miles upriver from the control structure. 46 miles upriver of the lock. The control structure is where the Mississippi wants to go, but doesn’t thanks to the USACE. The rest of the video is very well done, informative, and Interesting. As are all your videos.
Dude, you're speaking about a subject that totally needs more attention. The Mississippi river is one flood away from being captured by the Atchafalaya. It would ruin new Orleans, baton rouge, and all the ports of south Louisiana.
I'd say it'd be a pretty good idea to become energy independent..... by nuclear energy. Seriously the best energy source, the US has more than enough Uranium, and Thorium to be transmuted into Uranium. We could call it, "Atoms for Peace" or something.
We were energy independent 2 years ago. Biden changed us from the worlds number 1 energy producer/ energy exporter. To a country now begging Venezuel, Russia, opec, and Saudi Arabia for oil. So sad what’s been done to our country.
The US should have a very small tax on oil, the money would be exclusively to develop fusion power. Unfortunately it would be impossible to keep the government from squandering it on bullshit or keeping the tax small when they wasted all of the money originally in the fund.
Ukraine thought so too, then russia attacked. US may be way harder to attack like this but terrorists were capable of doing it. This reason along with tornadoes and earthquakes makes it very cautious about choosing the place for nuclear plants.
8:48 About the louisiana purchase, I assume people are familiar with it, but just in doubt: It wasn't "the french foolishly sold a land nearly four times its own size for nothing" as the tone implies, no nation is that stupid/kind. The situation was the US was desperate to acquire New Orleans and was ready to do just about anything for that, up to try taking it by force; meanwhile France recently acquired all of Louisiana on paper only. It was indefensible, so they actually made the US buy it, effectively turning a scrap of paper into money and saving face, instead of trying to hold on to it and losing immense amount of men, money and clout, dumping that problem on the US instead, for whom it ended up working out so really everyone got their fair share.
Napoleon also needed the funds to support the army he had in conquering Europe, his mindset was more closer to home than abroad in the New World where the French haven’t had the best of luck. From losing Canada, getting malaria, and the difficulty for the French to get to the long voyage to New Orleans to actually travel to explore the land, it was a money pit that was more problems if they kept any longer.
It was also because of the Haiti Revolution that happened with the slave rebellions against french powers. France knew it was losing its power and control in the western world, and it saw no need for the Louisiana anymore (planned to use it while in control of Haiti for economic development) , so they gave the land to the US at a price, to which at some point didnt matter to them because they needed some kind of money to support and aid their losses.
@@Wihf I see that now, I feel like he could have mentioned that upfront. Like, I'm pretty sure most of this is a word for word copy of full paragraphs from the book. It's a very interesting topic of course, so it's cool seeing folks getting access to this info from TH-cam, I just would have been more clear that this was basically a summary of those books.
It freaked me out when you told me the embargo on Cuba never ended. In the US, we are taught about the crisis and including the embargo placed in Cuba, but it never explicitly said that the embargo never ended, so I just assumed that the embargo was lifted when the missiles were removed. Boy was I wrong. Had to pause this video and jump into the online rabbit hole for half an hour
The US empire has a tendency to never forgive any country that asserts it's own sovereignty over the empire's attempts to meddle within it's affairs and overthrows whatever neo-colonial puppet regime the empire had installed in their country in order to pillage it's resources keep the local population under control, and it especially can't forgive or make peace with any country that successfully creates the threat of a positive example for viable alternatives to the empire's global "free market" capitalist hegemony and its "rules-based international order" that it's forcibly imposed upon the world in order to serve it's own interests at the expense of everyone else. It will do anything it possibly can to infiltrate, destabilize, subvert, starve, fund minoritarian insurgencies and astroturfed protest movements within, or provoke a response from such uncooperative countries, and will manufacture or just outright fabricate whatever pretext is necessary in order to make themselves look like the good guy's while doing so. Cuba is just one country among many dozens who have become targets of the empire for refusing to bend the knee and allow their governments to be subverted by the US state department, their natural resources to be plundered by US corporations, and their populations to be systematically exploited and pillaged. Now that we're well into the 21st century and the US has been doing this all over the world for well over 100 years, that list of targeted countries has started to band together in a global alliance of resistance that cumulatively outnumbers and overpowers the empire and it's satellite states not just militarily and economically, but diplomatically as well. The crumbling yet arrogant and entitled as ever US empire has condemned itself to eventual isolation and collapse with it's own insatiable greed and brutality with it's treatment of other countries around the world, and sadly it's own population is largely clueless about what it's happening and what it's own ruling class has perpetrated upon the rest of the global population.
I both agree and disagree. Huge natural resources, great rivers and ONE country over the whole thing are indeed huge advantages. For example, look at Africa. Even more wealthy in natural resources but split among many different countries. I would say though, there are other societies that could have started in North American and NOT been as successful. Successful, but not as much. It is the US freedom ideology that allowed the natural resources to be put to work so well, combined with private property rights, the Protestant work ethic and the patent office for inventions. That said, I really, really enjoyed this presentation. Thank you!
Amazing to think of it this way! And not that it makes too much of a difference on the sheer scale and versatility of the area, but the east coast barrier islands stretch well past the Chesapeake, covering Delaware, New Jersey, and Long Island where they seem to stop.
I feel like the hurricanes from the Atlantic are the reason for said barrier islands, since once you get to New England, where the barrier islands stop, you experience a significant drop in hurricane frequency. After all, the barrier islands from long island were made that way
Yeah he def missed that one ... And it's the mostly heavily populated area in the country so suprised he missed it! One of these on just Manhattan would be great
@@topspot4834 maybe not Manhattan but ny harbor as a whole, i live only 50 mi. From there and it would be great to see how exactly NYC came to be the megacity it is
I know this is a super long video, but there's really just too much to cover. I could've spent hours on this subject. Anyway, if you want to watch another 40-minute long video covering the entire US War in Afghanistan from beginning to end, you can check it out here on Nebula: bit.ly/3B05iUU. You can watch that one for free, and if you want to watch some of the other 15 episodes I have in the Modern Conflicts series, the best way to get access is just by signing up for the Nebula/CuriosityStream bundle for $14.79 a year here: curiositystream.com/?coupon=reallifelore New episodes in that series are releasing every single month on Nebula!
Thanks,
Joseph
I apologize for spamming in your former video. I am a disgraceful troll. I am a changed man now.
Would love to support you and sign up but no option for paypal. :(
Finally I Could Do Something For 40 MINUTES!
Hi 😁 ur vids are cool
but super good! thanks joseph
As a Canadian, I am incredibly thankful to border the USA. Despite its problems, I can't think of a better neighbour we could possibly have.
Soviet Canuckistan is a socialist hell.
Canada will be a future American territory. Same with Greenland.
@@sargonassarg4356 I hope your joking, Biden is an utter joke. You believe the news networks with their “MAGA extremists” push is pathetic. The US and the world are doing worse since Biden has taken office ffs.
The USA is also lucky to have a small, friendly, stable neighbour to the north.
Aww... Sad Denmark here.
21:55 I remember someone once saying that, while the US has many great allies, their staunchest, most reliable allies are the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Great quote
In addition to that, Canada and Mexico. Canada is one of our greatest allies and while our relationship with Mexico isn't quite as stable, we really have no worries of being invaded by a foreign army through our northern or southern borders.
And the top allies from the US POV are the ones that act as bastions to guard the far shores of those oceans - NATO, Japan, Korea, Australia, dare I say Taiwan.
@@theax40 the geography of the north and southern borders would make it a logistical nightmare anyways.
@@theax40 Canada is the US's bitch. Not even worth calling an ally. Its basically wordplay to say theyre two different countries.
It makes total sense that any downfall of the United States would not come because of an external threat owning to its geographic, geological or geopolitical strengths, but instead because of its domestic weaknesses. The Roman Empire collapsed from within.
We are a super spoiled society that has resorted to fighting each other out of boredom. Most we have ever been united was ww2 been going down hill ever since
@@frenchonion4595 yea I wouldn't be surprised if the people of the USA got manipulated into voting for an another country's leader.
Yes, i can see it very clear that American society is rotting and hard to make happy family.
The radical left, the Big pharma, industrial complexes, the Tiktok subversion, the destabilization by the CCP and Russia, are all threats that everyone needs to wake up to and ostracize.
@@frenchonion4595 Thank propaganda and the political parties that intentionally divided the ppl so they can be busy fighting each other as a distraction so the elites can get away with stuff like corruption and dishonesty
Man I thought I loved America. This guy sounded thoroughly awestruck throughout this entire video.
Well it's AI, but yea.
@ No way. Too nasally.
You could have also mentioned the easy access to vast deposits of coal, copper and iron in Appalachia and Great Lakes which allowed for the quick and early industrialization of the region. And that even the parts of the county without navigable rivers (i.e. the southwest) has a vast mineral wealth to make up for it.
Also, the majority of the country is flat, making it easier to build roads, infrastructure and train rails. In a mountainous country, building this kind of transportation infrastructure can cost three or four times more, plus the seasonal weather causes less damage to infrastructures (this is an advantage of all countries with seasons). In an equatorial country, where one day can be sunny, another rainy, others cold or hot, these changes in weather and temperature severely punish the infrastructure, making it even more costly to build and maintain.
among us
among us
@@MsGazpugh among us
i swear the founding fathers made a deal w/ the devil or smthng. The US has vast amounts of every single profitable and essential resource like how?
To be fair, if you get an nearly an entire continent as your country, with only allies and oceans sorrounding you, your geography tends to be pretty OP
*Edit:* to all those saying Australia, I'm not counting it because it doesn't nearly have as much variety in biomes and natural resources. It's more one big island than a real continent. The Americas have every natural resource in one self contained landmass.
yeah, especially having an equally as big country thats hard to invade due to the snowy terrain as your ally and the uk n stuff too
What does OP mean?
@@JosieCote "OP" stands for "Over Powered" in this context, though it can also mean "Original Poster" on online forums.
@@oriontigley5089 thanks for the explanation. It’s kind of confusing because “over powered” means that something/someone is weak and less powerful than others. So maybe it means “overly powerful”? That would make a lot more sense to me, because USA is rather quite powerful 🤔
@@JosieCote When used as a verb, sure. But in this case, it's used as an adjective. I've never heard of anyone associating "over powered" in descriptive contexts with weakness.
I've always compared it to words like "over clocked" and "over charged"
I believe the original etymology comes from Video Game slang, where a player character would be unfairly "overpowered", as in given too much power by devs in comparison to others, thus making the game unbalanced.
I question if the civilisation start point in North America would still have inevitably turned into a global dominant super power (as you mentioned at the start of the video) if it were split into many countries like in Europe. I would argue that the geopolitical movement turning North America into the one nation is by far the greatest advantage.....complimented by a great piece of land.
Very doubtful, especially if it was split into different countries with different languages and cultures. That's what's baffling about people calling for secession nowadays: They don't realize how vulnerable a fractured USA would be and how many benefits of being one nation would go down the drain, but the US's enemies are very aware of it and like to stoke the flames of discord.
Changing the civilization start point would just dramatically change so much. But i can see one constant being a strong power or two centered around the Mississippi throwing around a lot of weight
@@julioalvarez9650 I think the exact opposite. For the sake of cultural coherency and less conflict, I think the USA (and Canada) should break up into 4-5 countries. Each country would have their own sovereignty but also their own cultures and specialization. One single administration for 325 million people is untenable.
@@Simboiss Generally speaking, a single administration over a larger amount of people is more stable than smaller divisions. It is more likely to be moderate in its social, political, and economic policies because it is harder for an extreme faction to dominate a larger population than a smaller one. It is also much less likely to be invaded and taken over by an outside power. The US government under its current constitution is at the top of the list for oldest continuous governments currently in existence, and if you look at longest uninterrupted forms of governments in historical times, most of them are the largest states/empires of their time.
I've seen videos talking about the various high speed rail systems in Europe and how they stop at the border and you have to use trams or local links to get from one contry's high speed to the next - it prevents them from having a continental world class high speed rail system which they could if they had a single regulatory agency and bidding/contracting system and funding mechanism/subsidies
My main takeaway is that America is America's only threat. Our downfall only comes from within
What’s going to happen?
Khruschev said the same thing.
Eh we're good thankfully our superstructure is robust to take on several nukes and recover while fighting a world war
As for internal issues I don't see it really topping a brute force approach like a world war
And another takeaway is that earth is basically water world and thats a good thing because we dont have to live with populations we dont like and the oceans seperating us also serves as a superhighway which still allows us to trade and we dont gave to pay a road crew to pave the ocean irs just automatically there all we need to do is build the boats
The North Sea coast in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark also has barrier islands similar to the US. Except that Long Island alone is three times larger than all the Frisian Islands combined.
And the Dutch once colonized it.
@@draphotube4315 uh cool no shit
Long Island ,NY , is bigger then most European Countries
😆
@@TheGecko213 No it's not. Belgium is 10 times bigger.
@@TheGecko213 67 times smaller than UK.
10 times smaller than Belgium
Two things. 1) On the topic of agriculture: during the Cold War, after the development of imaging satellites, the USSR thought it was nigh impossible for a geographic place to have so much agriculture, as it was so unlike anywhere else in the world. They had a number of theories, but one that contributed to Soviet policies was that several farms and rural towns were deception, and were actually biological weapons research facilities. This caused the USSR to overspend on biological warfare research in order to outdo what they thought was a massive US advantage. When in reality, the Soviet bio-warfare program was quite a bit more advanced than the US's.
2) Even if a foreign military managed to land ground forces on US soil with millions of soldiers, the US has ~40% of the ~1 billion firearms in the world. ~70% of US adults have fired a gun, including more than half of those that have never even owned one. That's a bit beyond the geography topic of the video, but worth pointing out as an aside :p
YUP. even if they could wipe out our government and military, what followed would be the biggest, longest, bloodiest guerilla war of all time. Could you imagine? There’s actually declassified Soviet files that talk about this, and even they came to the conclusion that the US is unconquerable
Sadly most of the gun lunatic Americans are so vulnerable to misinformation they already support traitor trump and would support a joint Sino Russian invasion of America
When I was a teenager one of my first stories was about a Latin American Hannibal/Napoleon persona who unites a huge part of Central/South America and then invades the US with surprising success and asymmetric tactics. He relies on support from disaffected political groups within the US to maintain his lines of supply and threatens to take the Mississippi and Great Lakes, splitting the nation in two. Instead of pouring resources into those areas he gets bogged down in the South (trying to take Texas and Florida) and he fights a Pyrrhic retreat back to Mexico City. I still think effort would ultimately fail much like Hannibal's own, for much of the same reasons. US Navy and Air Force allows the US to give up a lot of territory and hit you in the flanks when you overstretch.
@@travelhog lol🤣
Not to mention that the geography of the US is extremely hostile to invading armies the Pacific Northwest is mostly forrests and mountains. The Southwest is mostly vast empty desert. The south is predominantly forrests and/ or swamps. The north east is fairly forrested, and the Appalachians in the area as well. Finally, the north is mostly wide open plains which means any potential invasion is not going to have anywhere to hide from the Air Force.
I work on the Mississippi River in Louisiana, they have a lot of traffic that comes through every day, it's just so remarkable to see so many ships and cargo moving along the big river.
First reply
It is much less important today than a hundred years ago.
The US geography is simply too good, it's so blessed with having the most arable land on the planet along with it's overall geography and access to bodies of water coast to coast making it almost impossible to attack
@@juzoli Is it, though? America's heartland is still basically the center of its' entire industrial base. And shipping by boat is infinitely cheaper than shipping by any other method in the world, as the video points out. The Mississippi will never NOT be important. How the hell was it more important a hundred years ago, at a time when shipping out our food and industrial resources to the entire world was not yet a thing?
Even better is how much traffic can go through Louisiana and how the corruption can make it so poor.
Thanks!
I’d say North America In general is geographically incredible. Canada has 20% of the world fresh water and is rich in valuable minerals.
That stat is amazing. Also, I don’t know if fresh water was ever as important as it is now. So many are running out of it.
*only 5 percent is habitable. 95% is useless.*
🇨🇦 > 🇺🇸 always. And I'm not Canadian.
@@mangos2888 Pfft. I’m American and i’ve never even been to Canada, yet I like Canada more
@@saturn6563 Then go there
Just thinking out loud (and I'm Aussie)... maybe one of the reasons why the USA has done well is because it was a (mostly) united country? Europe also has great natural resources but they've just fought with each other the last thousands of years?
Yeah that's a pretty good point. All the power we have from the geography would be useless if we weren't so united. But at the same time that unity wouldn't be as impactful in a less geographically rich area. So, I guess it's which ever you find more valuable
Can you list all of these natural resources or make a list of the natural resources?
@@johngutwald8454 Talking from the Northern mid-west (North & South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin) point of view, we have a vast majority of everything you need. Lumber, Coal, Oil, Gold, Iron ore, and some of the best soil for farming on Earth, etc...
Oh yes... the (mostly) unified country aspect is every bit as important as the resources, Mississippi River basin, etc.
So are other things... like NOT being communist/socialist.
There's no doubt it was instrumental to our nation's development. If it was divided, say France never sold the Louisiana purchase & it survived potential subsequent wars, they would own have owned from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, partly controlling the river. This along with a portion of the oil & gas fields in parts of Texas & Oklahoma & that field located up along the Canadian border, plus all the great farmland in the west/upper midwest like Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, the Dakotas & part of Minnesota. That alone would have been a powerful country unto itself.
"Rivers are basically free to use." Every civil engineer hearing this immediately starts to twitch in disbelief.
@@viper2148 True 😂
@@kentuckyfan0619 I made one about Qatar Going to make more soon fam💯 it’s in the works
@@kentuckyfan0619 gotchu bro preciate it 💯
And every indigenous person when they heard "given to the United States."
What do you mean by that? Not challenging you at all, I have no expertise in this area, I am genuinely curious.
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Another enormous boon is how quickly the USA was established as a single united entity. If the USA's history had been as long as Europe's, it would be as divided and multilingual as Europe, fractured into a myriad of states unable to even speak to each other. Having a common language across the continent is a MASSIVE boon. When I first went to the USA from the UK, the first relief I had was that I could speak the language. It's a total nightmare going anywhere else.
@Tilveran Good overlooked point. Also, the system where states could have some of their own policies that made them less likely to break away. (civil war notwithstanding).
not excatly. the reason why Europe has so many language is because of its geography. linguistically speaking geography and isolation are what causes languages to develop and change. while at the same time in modern times the US is more diverse and multilingual. the US doesn't have an official language for a reason. and there's maps that show the 2nd and 3rd most spoken language in each state. and on another note majority of the world is bilingual or multilingual. so the odds that someone in another country speaks English or another language that you do are pretty fair. so to say that a united language is also what made the country what it is today is only partly true.
@@Roxadus460 re: “the US doesn’t have an official language for a reason.” Okay, sorry but the official language of the US is English. It’s required at the federal level for all government business. It’s also required for private citizens in order to function and prosper in American society. If you move here, learn it.
@@randallturner9094 OFFICIALLY the US does not list a national language. The CIA World Factbook and other government sources confirm this. English is the de facto language of the country, meaning it’s not official in a legal or legislative way, but in a “everyone just knows it” unofficial way.
@@NoneofYourBusiness667 re: “not official in a legal or legislative way” - are you serious? Oh, there’s just a bit of legislation involved. You’re required to learn English to become a US Citizen, comrade. “Officially”. For a reason, as you put it. 🙄 The CIA factbook and all those “other government sources” are REQUIRED, by law, to be in ENGLISH, gomer. Officially.
Dude, you’re basically dishonest. “Does not list a national language.” You’re arguing semantics. You’re a liar. And worse, frankly, but that’s off-topic and it’s too much work to do a proper fisking.
Don't forget about Alaska and Hawaii's importance for military, resources, and research: both states are considerably well placed far from the lower 48, but are also either gigantic landmasses naturally defended by extreme cold and mountainous terrain with tons of coal and gold in Alaska, or is isolated from the rest of the world in the heart of the Pacific Ocean in volcanic islands making for a perfectly placed Naval harbor or space research labs in Hawaii.
It takes eight hours to fly from Fairbanks Alaska to Born Germany, over the pole as the condor airlines ad used to say. Alaska’s anchorage international airport was a major hub before the fall of the Soviet union, which led to the opening up of Soviet airspace.
General purging said something to the effect of heating that controls Alaska controls the world.
What he meant by this is that it’s location in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land is, makes it so you can go from a place like Fairbanks to almost anywhere quicker than you could across the Atlantic or pacific. By quicker I mean less mileage sorry flat earthers.
Also you can’t forget the monopolistic corporations that took over and fucked our social systems leading us down an endless capitalist path!🔥💯👍
Demographics for hard times that are coming, America and Canada have the energy, food and mostly the resources, but Europe is in trouble, Asia mostly China is going to be desperately challenged!😮 China, imports energy, food and most resources! Belligerent attacks on trading partners, zero sum game of Chinese CCP, that's not working?
Alaska coal? ROFL. Yes, it has coal, technically. So? Compared to rest of USA it may as well not even be mentioned. Gold? Not worth mentioning. Yes, a pittance of gold. Copper, NG, and other minerals could be mentioned though.
i knew USA is amazingly diverse geography, & when i had small talk with a co-worker, i was like, "this country is massive", what i really meant was its got every climate, every geography, every everything, that other countries can dream of. what continents have, but not every countries have
edit: dear Americans. I get it, you have rainforests. I think at this point the entire population of the Mid-West has replied to tell me how wrong I am.
For the record, and this is on me, I should have clarified that America doesn't have any *tropical* rainforests (like the Amazon, as an example). But I have learned there's more than one type of rainforest, so silver linings.
hasn't got rainforests
@@KountKristyl and soon nowhere will
@@starlight4130 Sadly true
The size of Western Europe with a population to match
@@starlight4130 no, thankfully, contrary to belief rainforest soil actually is NOT fertile. Not for what we want to do with it our farmland
This video showing the vast waterways within the continental US should have been made decades ago and shown in the US schools. There are too many of us here in the US who have zero knowledge of the river systems and their strategic importance. Well done putting this video together.
LOL speak for yourself.
"The Americans are a very lucky people. They're bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish." - Otto Von Bismarck
@@Goober_80 Joke's on them-- America has the water stones.
@@seanmcgrady8688 the fish evolve at level 20 without water stones
I mean and we’re arguably pretty close with both despite what the divisive media makes it seem
That’s why they partnered with seals to protect their oceans. Of course, they often get thrashed around by orcas, but I heard that a team of them killed osama bin laden. That’s crazy. 🦭
@@Goober_80 Wait until Canada starts arming polar bears 😂
Incredible that people already have something to say about a 40 minute video 10 minutes after it was released
It was posted on Nebula yesterday. So many of us have already seen it and maybe they just want to comment on what they say yesterday?
That's crazy bro
@@Eagledelta3 Ah good to know about 👍
@@Eagledelta3 Possible but usually it's just people who want to immediately comment based on their initial perception of the video.
All us nebula subs just itching to comment.
We always talked about the importance of the Nile or the Danube in school, but we really should have been talking about the Mississippi this whole time.
Well, unlike the Nile the Mississippi doesn’t flow in the middle of a freaking desert and unlike the Danube it isn’t soaked in blood over thousands of years of international strife. Yes, the Mississippi may be the greatest river in terms of navigation and commerce, but its history other than the civil war is rather boring. Not too much drama to where the Nile and Danube have epic stories surrounding it.
@nole 89 eh, they're all three important, just for different reasons. U.S. education just frequently fails to teach economics beyond specific events.
Talking about the Mississippi river would involve hours of talking about Mosquitoes.
@@mrbisshie - And the Army Corps of Engineers.
History in us schools never cover Liberia. It's astounding that they do not, especially with so much race politics
Voice over guy is competing in a word-stress competition.
Right?
YEAH BUT WERE RUNNING OUT OF LAND WE NEED TO COLONIZE ANTARTICA BECSUSE OR WE WILL ALL BE PUSHED INTO THE OCEAN IF YOU MADE A KOWLOON WALLED CITY TO FIT 7 BILLION IT WOULD BE THE SIZE OF RHODE ISLAND
NO YOU DELETED MY COMMENT
MILLIONS
@@magnol1a_ MILLIONS WHAT
I’m an American, my wife and I live on a 60’ sailboat. We sailed from Cincinnati, OH to the Mississippi delta during COVID and ended up just continuing on up the coast and into the intercoastal waterway back to the Great Lakes. It’s a trip called the Great Loop. It was the most interesting trip we’ve ever made. I was blown away by all the infrastructure. We’ve sailed the Med and Caribbean and the Loop was easily the most logistically simple trip we’ve ever done.
I want to do the great loop. Its craczy how nautical our land nation is. Way nore than places like mongolia. Plus we have alaska and hawaii so if you leave from the west coast you have entirely different options its a wholleee lotta freedom i can go to all thes eplaces without showing a passport or even an ID unless I get caught in violation of a law. If yiu try to go from britain to spain thsyre going to ID you. Its a whole different world. Theyll just search you for no reason just because. Im usa i can go from arizona to michigan to florida to texas and no one bats an eye
@@censored4christ162 We are leaving for Hawaii (and then onto Nuku Hiva and Hiva Oa) from San Diego on Friday. But it is a much more difficult passage logistically. You should definitely do the Loop. Its an absolute blast.
You are very fortunate. Good for you. Boating is very expensive; consequently, those who own boat and decide to live on the boat is because it is very expensive to own a boat in addition to owning a house. Ownership of most big durable items requires insurance and maintenance; thus, it becomes a lifestyle and a owner needs to develop maintenance skills unless one is very, very wealthy. However, I wish I could at least once in my life travel the United States riverways and coastal-ways and the Great Lakes.
@censored4christ162
Please Note: A, Partial Listing of: your copious Typo Errata:
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3.: *Mongolia;...
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5.: *Hawaii;...
6.: *options.It's;...
8.: *freedom.I;...
10.: *these places;...
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12.: *Britain;...
13.:*Spain;...
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16.: *In the U.S.A.;...
17.: *I can go from;...
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Dude, that's incredible! I'm honestly quite jealous! 😂 Happy for you though. Keep livin' the good life!
I am a tugboat captain on the Mississippi and Intracoastal Waterway, so I’ve known this for a long time. The leaders of our industry are always baffled that more Americans don’t know how important our waterways are to our economy. Great video.
damn, tugboat captain, that sounds like a pretty nice job
They don’t teach it in school, I learned all this from this video at the age of 27. I also live in Arizona, so we don’t really think about rivers that much here.
I always knew how historically important the river system was to our economy, but I wasn’t aware of the sheer scale (I always assumed the coastal ports, railways and interstate systems were the main factor in the modern day) or how relevant it still is until this day. As a “coastal elite” surrounded by business people I always hear about coastal ports when it comes to logistics and rarely, if ever, about the Midwest and when I do it’s mostly in reference to trains and trucking.
Also, The Great Lakes contribute to the US being a powerhouse also. It is the largest freshwater system on the planet.
@@xxxBradTxxxya learn in AP US history
Basically the opposite of Australia. Our biggest river, the Murray, was only discovered in the 1800s and is so shallow at its mouth that ships can't enter from the sea.
Oh really, Murray? **SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC INTENSIFIES**
@@chungusmaximus526 Everything about USA is ridiculous.
Part 2 to this video here: "How The US Should Have Spent The Afghanistan War Budget" by 'Second Thought'.
Australia still has some of the best geography and is effectly an island continent, and has large amount of almost every resource.
Its location is probably arguably better moving forward past the 1900s and into the 2100s in the world.
As mentioned a river system like the USAs is also a weakness, now at the moment/ in our life time's the usa is good, but things won't always be like they are now.
Bad management can also effect a nation look at Argentina for an example.
@@brianlong2334 dude the US and Australia are on so fondamentally different planes this isn’t really an apt comparison
I’d say the US has truly become one of the worlds great civilizational states.
Over the course of their history they’ve built not just a state, but a country, not just a country, but a nation. And not just a nation but a civilization.
Unmoored by ties of blood or faith or ancestry but bound by an Ideology, the most dominant political ideology of the Post enlightenment world.
There’s an Americanism to the way the people of that continent live that makes them more comparable to say China than to most regular countries.
Although I fear they might be tearing it apart.
That’s why the US managed to have 14 times Australia’s population in a similar land area
My father told me this fact. America's real longest war was the conflict against Indigenous Americans, called the American Indian Wars, which most historians characterize as beginning in 1609 and ending in 1924 or 313 years, mainly over land control.
Thats like a hundred separate conflicts against a hundred separate foes spread out over hundreds of years with lots of stops and starts and a lot of other things going on. Its really not accurate to call that one continuous conflict, although you might lump it together as a planned genocide
little by little , one or two tribes at a time. some we bought land from , made friends with, married them, made truces, made treaties, and some kept thousands or millions of acres of land... now are citizens of our nation as well a s keep thier sovereign tribal nations. they are still great warriors fighting for this country in the military. this land is their Mother, so they say. it's ours too if we've been here for many generations. we admire them and thier arts, wisdom, etc , they were a worthy foe back in the day. Glad we are at peace now all of us including all those tribes with each other. We are just their white brother, they are our red brother. i heard one of their sages say we need to keep our tech in check. i know that's true.
@McFish-ts5jj 😂😂😂
I remember moving cross country from west to east as a kid. I was absolutely *floored* by the sheer size of the Mississippi River. It is *insanely* wide
Yes me too! Never seen anything like it.
I grew up next to it.
The Rio Grande was not so grand in my estimation. It's a large stream.
I'd love to drive across country and see it someday. Check out the Great Lakes to. Even more so after this.
@@johnbainbridge9034 the Rio Grande is hardly a river anymore. It sometimes goes completely dry by the time it reaches El Paso
I live in Memphis so... yea it is a big ass river.
I randomly started looking at the waterways in America... It's honestly broken af from a infrastructure standpoint. We can get goods basically anywhere with these systems. Crazy.
Also, imagine what would happen if we found a huge cobalt area.
Unfortunately our current government policies make this harder than need be. If only we got rid of the Jones Act and made a continental version of Conrail.
@@TheSpecialJ11 What's the jones act?
There is in Minnesota but has been protected from mining as its part of millions of acres of national forest/ recreational canoe water lands
@@TigerWave01 Thanks!
@@TigerWave01 Most of the people who gripe about the Jones Act are Hawaiians. 🏖
I have been to all 50 united states and over 6000 towns and cities and almost all of the nation parks. This country is crazy from a geography standpoint. It is absolutely amazing that we where able to cross that on foot, wagon and horse only a few centuries ago. It is very hard to believe.
If I were to ask you, which state would you say has the best/most beautiful city? In your opinion. And which state is the best/most beautiful as well?
@@troyjusticecabrera7284 That is such a incredibly hard and complicated question. I'm actually not sure I could answer. I really like Florida but I've been here most of my life so my bais of Tampa FL is high. I think a better question would be what are you looking for in a city. How big do you want it. Do you want steeples for miles like new York, or something that isn't too grown. What night life's are you looking for. What laws are you concerned about exc.
Recently went out to the midwest and I was in awe at the beauty and was wondering how tf did people cross these mountains on foot
This is Eden
It'll be the same with the galaxy.
I'm from America and I approve this video. Quite an epic production. Keep at it
This was my entire 8th grade history class condensed into around 40 minutes with a better step by step explanation
I can tell you were not paying attention in class.
@Iosinyhrhalways someone else’s fault mentality
@@fernandosapiens3871knowing the American education system, it might as well be true
Kudos to your 8th grade history teacher. I shudder to think what most kids are being taught in history classes today.
I concur with your insight and add the observation of what a waste of time and money is modern education.
The thing that made me truly appreciate that North American geography is absurdly favorable was the metric for steel production capacity immediately before World War 2: if I remember correctly it was vastly in the lead, potentially as much as every other combatant combined.
And so long as the US keeps control of the Western Hemisphere, there is essentially no power on Earth that could win a war of conquest over the USA (which doesn't involve reducing the continent to rubble first).
I believe the majority of the steel was produced in the Hoover mason trestle located in Pennsylvania. It located right by the Appalachian mountains and on the Lehigh river.
There's a time after WWII where the US literally produced half of everything in the world. It's production capacity is insane when it's needed to be.
I don't it's possible for another to "win" by turning North America into dust, as by doing so they themselves would certainly also get obliterated.
It’s been modeled that the US could fight conventionally against the rest of the world, simultaneously, on many fronts, and still win.
It was demonstrated that logistics, the Navy, overseas bases/ballistics, surveillance, & self reliance on resources are the pillars of modern warfare. By surgically crippling adversarial capacity to wage war through disruption of fuel and supply chains to deployed militaries & their homelands, the only option is to sue for peace.
The US has a lot of vulnerabilities, but all out conventional warfare isn’t one.
“Vastly in the lead”
Your content is well researched and sequenced brilliantly.
Search: Peter Zeihan on TH-cam and thank the guy who actually did the work
So amazing I love the movie 😍😍
@@czdaniel1 was going to say this, thank you not enough mention
@@czdaniel1 never heard of her
@@carladams9345 "Her"? --Please provide more context.
I'm all for flex & un-gendered usage in the English language, but when I talk about "Peter," the "guy" in my earlier sentence, and then you just reply with reference to "Her" that makes me start troubleshooting the possibility that TH-cam is misplacing your comment in my message-feed; or that maybe you don't grasp basics of the English language; or that you're an idiot intentionally trying to make basic communication difficult by essentially lying when you knowingly refer to Peter Zeihan as a woman. And if YOU specifically, stranger on the internet, have never heard of something, well...GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND
Incredibly factual, and conclusions as fair and reasonable as any I've read or heard. Thank you so much. We are all starved for this kind of reporting.
I’ve not seen many of your videos, but so far I’ve never seen you take a side, or demonize one side of a conflict, you simply give us the facts, and I thank you so much for that!
He does a great job at making his videos. I've watched a bunch of his videos.
I feel like there’s a pretty obvious right and wrong. I’ll give you a hint, as an American, there is zero question why our country is so dominant. It’s the same reason monopolies become monopolies. The USA doesn’t care about anyone besides it’s own well-being and the pockets of the elites.
140 years ago, Mark Twain wrote extensively about the history of the Mississippi basin and how it was utilized and developed via emerging technologies of the time.
That is the most boring thing I have ever read in my entire life
And, what better reading could there be about this than Twain? 😊
If you go up to Minnesota you can walk across it. I forgot the place
@@kidfox3971 You mean about Twain, or about where to walk across?
@@diane9247 Everything, I unironically killed myself while reading the above comment.
Logged in to Nebula about an hour ago to see if there were any new uploads to Modern Conflicts and was pleasantly surprised to see the latest video. After watching that I jumped over to TH-cam to see if there was anything new here and got to enjoy even more great content! Thank you for your amazing work!
Jumping into Nebula isn't wise, no oxygen or water. Amazing you survived
@@robertbones326 bro mightve just saved me my friends convinced me to go nebula diving later today 💀
@@robertbones326 damn that's my weekend ruined
Cool video. I can’t do the hyperbole/delivery of it, but it was an informative video for sure.
Your content is some of the rare stuff that makes me excited to have the internet again, like when it was newer when we were younger. This is quite literally, the content I signed up for(your work as a whole, not just this particular video). Thank you for bringing some joy and knowledge into my life.
Beautifully said
Definitely one of the rare youtubers where you watch every single thing they put out because it's all so high quality.
Well said
As an immigrant to the US, I have to say this land is a miracle to exist in every sense of the word. Not just geographically, but it is very rare to have had such a brilliant group of founding fathers fight and win one of the very few successful revolutions in history, and established such a well-rounded republic on top of it (and yes, I know they owned slaves and yada, yada, just like everyone else in that era- it still doesn’t detract from there accomplishments). That said, I hope this wonderful nation of cultural diversity is able to get over its political, culture, gender, and ideological wars going on at the moment. Perhaps this country was so blessed with good geography that over time people lost there sense of appreciation for the land they were born in, and begun to fight over useless arguments. Too much of that can lead even the most powerful empires down a hole - I just hope we come back to our senses before it happens here.
Couldnt agree more, I think that the reason for all these ideological problems is directly from just how good americans have it. First world problems, gotta have something to be mad about
I’m so glad you love it here. It’s great to see someone born outside the US that doesn’t hate it just for the stereotypes. It is the greatest country in the world, and I’m glad you’re here with us🇺🇸
Well said. Absolutely well said.
@@imdarling17 American exceptionalism strikes again, an empire sustained on the oppression, interventionism and bloodshed provoked against the global south. You live in a bubble, no wonder the rest of the world largely regards Americans as exceptionally ignorant, including Europe.
@@angelxxsin I’m showing patriotism towards my fellow Americans, you obviously watch CNN too much
*Another thing not mentioned besides the United States river system* is the fact that the U.S. has the world's largest road and rail network of any country on Earth. The United States has 4 million miles of roads that span across it today. And it has 140,000 miles of freight railroad track that spans across it as well. So you have the world's largest road system, the world's largest navigational river system, the world's largest railroad system, and the world's largest airplane and airport industry to move goods all across the U.S. and abroad.
It's a whole ecosystem of transportation that the U.S has. 🙂
Forreal, while U.S. passenger trains leave much to be desired, our freight train system is unmatched.
All the reason we are so perfect to be, is the main reason China has been trying to steal America from with in !!!! Why we need to guard our Backs !!!
@@cripple9860 Go look up the dynamics of passenger/freight rails -- they are directly competing with each other. The reason for passenger rails being no good is because they use the same rails as freight trains and freight takes priority over passenger rails. And often, there is only a small window of time allotted to passenger trains to run so when the time is up -- no more rides for the day. Only freight.
Road and rail systems are not mentioned because this video focuses on natural geographic features contributing to the USA's strategic and economic strengths.
@@BAPK1602 It's a trade off between freight or passenger rail. The existing infrastructure works so well with freight that we might as well stick with it. In order to have high speed rail, you'll need completely new infrastructure to support it. Which is simply not justifiable considering there's not a big enough population density except for very certain parts of the country; the east coast, parts of the Midwest, a Texas triangle, and the Pacific Coast? Most of the country is just too big and empty for high speed passenger rail. Once you hit that 500 mile mark, you might as well fly. If you look at places with efficient passenger rail networks, you'll see that odds are, they're very densely populated.
Simply the best educational video I've ever seen on TH-cam. Incredibly amazing!
5:30 Don't forget economies of scale! Ships are one if the few modes of transportation that becomes more efficient the bigger it gets. The more stuff you can put on a boat, the cheaper it is to ship per unit. Whereas work land based transportation, the bigger it gets, the more engineering problems you encounter and the more expensive they get to fix, a bigger ship mostly just means spreading the operating costs out over more cargo. Physics is actually on our side on this one.
trains also work that way. it could be that all forms of transport do if they are in a line.
Not only does a larger volume mean cheaper per unit shipping costs, but the longer (bigger) a ship is the faster it can go before the wake it produces starts to really create a lot of drag, so they can either use less fuel or can move the goods faster. The economies of scale benefits just compound and compound with ships.
@@andrewjensen7454 That I didn't know, but makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Amazing
I learned a lot from your statement.
I can't thank you enough for making this video on American geography, Real Life Lore. It's currently my favorite thing on TH-cam and should be required viewing in every American high school. Great job!
Facts.
I think its key for Americans who are intent on amplifying our internal differences to understand how weak we are when we are split apart. Our strength comes from our unity and connectedness across the continent. Our differences are not that important, our prosperity is assured and we can have a century of prosperity and peace if we just remember how important we are to each other. Consider how much our dissolution as a nation would benefit our mutual enemies, and you start to reconsider the motivations and allegiances of those who openly call for these things.
How about FUCK NO. Any American who calls himself a Socialist can go to hell.
No wonder the global elites want to divide and conquer us. We the people need to stand as one.
It feels like a monumental uphill battle when so many of our elites in power appear to be compromised.
Would be nice for the US to continuesly stay in power and dictate world politics huh. Because yall definitely are good with politics and not being evil.
@@HowIsAsh if you did not intend sarcasm, I read it in anyways as it should be.
The US isnt evil. MAN IS EVIL. power corrupts completely. Whoever has it, will follow in US steps. No question.
Hands down the best documentary channel on TH-cam🏆
You need to highlight the Panama Canal as well. This marval even though no longer under US control allows free shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific effectively increasing the ease of trade from the Mississippi basin & intercoastal to the Western coast.
It wouldn’t exactly be difficult to take over the Panama Canal by force if necessary.
I still think Carter made a mistake turning it over.
I’d be ok with Panama and America co-owning it together.
Panama and Suez Canal are by far the biggest man made structures to improve global trade. I agree that it should have been covered
@@Kaiserboo1871 ,
You have to remember that Carter is a Socialist Liberal Democrat. The ONLY aim of that Party is to gain political and social power. If it comes at the expense of the United States , well.....
@@Captainaceguy00
*covered.
@Kaiserboo1871
You may be right, but, what you think or feel "OK about" the issue, is: totally -->>irrelevant; since, who are you; anyhow-????
When you talk like that you communicate 1 thing: disgusting arrogance!!!.
Why do you think that you are so darn important-????!!!!!!!!!!.
When discussing the Great Lakes as a transportation route, there was simpler engineering at an earlier time that provided a large portion of present-day capabilities. The Erie Canal was completed in 1825 and connected eastern Lakes Erie to the Hudson River, and thus the port of New York City and the navigable connections between Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan. The first version of the "Soo" Locks were completed in 1855, adding access to Lake Superior
And there's the Great Lakes' route through to the St. Lawrence Seaway and VS. So, e.g., Chicago has a water route to the Atlantic. And all the betweens and links such as the Ohio river to Mississippi River.
Not to forget the canals linking the Chesapeake to the Delaware and the Delaware to the Hudson, which of course led to the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes! Of course, one could also continue north from the Hudson entrance to the Erie canal, heading upstream the Hudson River to the Champlain canal, then heading across Lake Champlain and downstream to the St Lawrence Seaway. One could travel from Duluth to Norfolk VA via Albany NY, then head north to Montreal without ever facing an open sea. Those canals sure changed things. A lot of iron ore moved from the upper Midwest to smelters, foundries, and plants throughout the eastern US, helping the US economy to boom. I suspect you know that, but other readers might not know that. :-)
This video has done more to help me understand American history and politics than any one source of information ever has. Thank you for helping put the pieces together. Wonderful video.
Did this video help you understand why Biden's energy policies are historically stupid? Do you see a correlation between what is happening to the American economy today and the economy during the 70's oil embargo? It's like the democrats, and every voter who voted for him, have never read a history book🤓
This is propaganda.
@@l.w.paradis2108u jealous?
@@ESkog Why? Is the producer married to someone I'm in love with?
@@l.w.paradis2108YES
This is the longest I have actually watched a video without skipping any part, I always loved history and this is amazing!
Edit: watched got corrected to watered for context
I love watering videos.
@@butter7734remember to fertilize that subscribe button
Ah yes, my favorite pastime, watering videos
Same
Getting me hyped about geography is hard to do but wow. The amount of positive fun facts in this video is unmatched.
Search . ' The Geopolitics of World War 3 . '
Really governments can be bought and traded just like modern-day slave trade
Check out Atlas Pro. Everything he produces is based on geography basically and most is his vids are facinating.
I was a Geography major in college nearly 20 years ago. I learned SOME of what you covered in this video, but not all of it--and only piecemeal. I've never heard such a clear, thorough explanation of how the USA's geography has influenced its prosperity. You do marvelous work! I followed your link to Nebula and subscribed. Thank you for the wonderful content!
Check out “How the States got their Shapes”… I think you would like it. It was on the History channel about ten years ago. It’s an awesome series like this video but broken down by all the states boundaries and how they came to be defined.
The country's so op they had to nerf it with an education system that makes 16% of the population believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows
Edit: the comment section makes the Russia-Ukraine war like a tea party, enter at your own risk
At least thats something we can change. Geography is fixed.
Where do you other 84% think it comes from?
Just to clarify, not brown cows, they must be chocolate cows.
Lol is this real ? 😂
That's because more weight is put on fairy tales like the Bible than real education.
Did bro use the CIV 6 resource icons in the animation? Haha Great video!
Yeah i noticed that too lol
I remember those days of energy insecurity. Foreign policy was dominated by the Mid East, as were our wars and headlines. Now it's all just like a foot note in a history book.
Thanks for covering the shale revolution. It really has changed the face of US geopolitics and I feel like no one really realizes that or gives it the credit it deserves
I know. Cutting off the Gulf states will have profound global implications.
Too bad Biden only want fossil fuels from OPEC as he has been attacking domestic production.
I think the iraq war is still going on g
I Agree, the US geography is very blessed, that it makes other countries especially China and Western Europe quite jealous of it's strategic location
@@nathanseper8738 They'll be fine though, there's a lot of customers in East Asia and India
This brings me back so many memories of the geopolitics lessons I used to attend. Sometimes it's not just the size of the territory but also where it is located, which reminds me of the strategic locations the British Empire used to own during its maximum expansion.
Lol...Wuz this USED 2 OWN, English?
Falklands, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Ascension...You may not have the Suez, A.T.M. but British bases are sitting upon a large swath of Cyprus nearby the Suez.
You just need to own Singapore again and U instantly win at Super-Strategic Tiny Island BINGO
@@czdaniel1 Montevideo could easily have been yet another such strategic point. It was captured and occupied by the British in 1807. Would have been a South American version of Halifax!
Ok, major historical oversight about the opening of the Great Lakes to global commerce. While it is true that the St. Lawrence Seaway, which was completed in the 1950s, opened the Great Lakes to trans-oceanic commerce, the lakes themselves have been opened to global shipping since the 1850s. This development was made possible thanks to the completion of the following projects: The Erie Canal in the 1820s (Albany to Buffalo), The Illinois and Michigan Canal (connected Lake Michigan with the Illinois River via Chicago) completed in 1848, and the Soo Locks (Connecting Lake Superior to Lakes Huron and Michigan) in 1855.
I was thinking something more like the 1850's!
And even without the full Seaway trade was still possible, just using smaller vessels and either older canals or offloading cargo to bypass rapids.
And after the seaway a ton of hydroelectric power became available to both the US and Canada. (The Moses-Sounders dam in Massena/Cornwall has 2 separate generation plants that combine to about 2GW of installed capacity) I assume the rest of the greatlakes region also have several GW of capacity from dams along the watershed (like how much of the niagra river doesn't go over the falls, only enough to be pretty as a tourist destination/heritage site).
As an additional note sailing vessels stayed in commercial service longer on the Great Lakes than basically anywhere else in US because the lakes were so navigable. Steam tugboats were used to get these sailing vessels up the Detroit River across the St Clair flats and up the St Clair River.
The great lakes and Erie Canal paved another way for great trade
It’s important to note that the US has two friendly neighbours.
Great vid
I come from a Minnesota farm south of the twin cities. The Mississippi river is a mighty river indeed. Fuels everything, home to so many bald eagles. Been the head waters of the Mississippi river aa few times, nice area to hike. America is an amazing country and living here is kick ass. From that small farm in southern Minnesota to a software engineer this place lets you become anything you want. Family migrated here and in 1 generation we went from farmers to engineers, still got plenty of farmers in the family though. Never going to give that farm up.
Farmington?
You don't live close enough yo diversity.
I'm from Central Minnesota myself. My favorite thing about the headwaters of the Mississippi is just how humble it all begins. A normal person can jump across it. I've seen it multiple times where it's not more then a foot deep. It's really humbling to be reminded that the only reason the Mississippi is so big is because of all the other rivers that flow into it, 1 of which I myself live on currently. It truly would be nothing without all of the other rivers and lakes the feed it water.
I saw a Bald Eagle driving southbound in Texas' Rio Grande valley. Long strait open highway with VERY WIDE open medians between the North & Southbound lanes. The Bald Eagle swooped down to the deck, landed among the grass & shrubs in that wide open median space.
I'm told it was probably a Mexican bald eagle that I saw, which is a little smaller than the American Bald Eagle you see around the Mississippi
@@preussianblau5595 the shield
Awesome video. I majored in economics and always felt like geography was overlooked. It truly sets the stage for evolution & adaptation.
Honestly
So does culture. The culture the USA inherited from GB, Netherlands, and Ancient Greece/Rome allowed it to loosely yet cohesively aggregate this land into a protected economy. I also think way too much direct links between Iraq and the the attack on the US by Al-Qaeda. There is far more complexity than that linkage and the thought that the US brought that on its own house is hyperbolic to outright untrue. And to us in the USA the disaster of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, rather than our military actions, is the nightmare
Speaking of sea ports and their economic impact. I’m fascinated with a proposed Gulf of California to Laguna Salada to Salton Sea canal. Mexico’s president said that there isn’t enough benefit to Mexico to follow through with the bi-National agreement he signed. Maybe if the Laguna Salada project was expanded into sea port infrastructure it would get done. Btw. The Laguna Salada is below sea level for dozens of miles and the Gulf of California tides are 9 feet high where the proposed canal begins.
Geography shapes a people more than anything else. And people shape the places they live. In this way, the quality of a society is largely dependent on the quality of it’s people
Me too, just graduated. I think a course titled Economics of Geography would be really really interesting and useful general knowledge.
North America isn't a prime spawn point for pre-agrarian societies due to the lack of domesticable livestock (for labor and milk), but it is the best expansion point the closer you get to the Industrial age. If what you said was true, then the Americas would have never been colonized by Europeans.
Well also disease wiped out 90% of the pre existing population
Smallpox bud
@@PassportAdam agriculture allowed for dense urban living in close proximity to livestock, which gave Europeans generations to build immunity against zoonotic diseases like smallpox and plague. Without beasts of burden you don't get dense cities and close animal/human contact.
If the Norse had permanently settled North America, all that livestock would have arrived earlier. The Amerindians would still have been hit with Old World diseases such as smallpox, but 1) probably less so than they did and 2) had more time to recover their numbers and build immunity after the initial upheavals. They'd have also probably not been forced off their land, or at least not so much. In one or more places, we'd likely have seen a synthesis of Scandinavian and the myriad Amerindian cultures, especially in the Northeast. Similar to Imperial Japan, one or more Amerindian nation-states would have adopted European weapons and technology and rapidly modernized, then gone about conquering other countries. By now, at least the eastern half of North America would be demographically more Amerindian with a European-descended minority (a la South Africa) and a plurality of Norse-speaking mestizos. The Euro-descendants would look mostly Nordic, but they'd be culturally, religiously, and linguistically very different from their cousins back in the old country.
What of language and writing? I'd like to believe that while the nations of Northern Europe would switch to the Latin alphabet following Christianization, the Norse newcomers and their Amerindian compatriots would still write in the runic alphabet. Just as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets have their own variations for different languages, so would the Futhark script have its own variations to accommodate sounds that exist in the Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and other languages but not in Old Norse and whatever descendant language(s) it'd spawn in North America. There'd be exceptions, though. Take the Mikmaq, for instance. They had their own hieroglyphic system pre-contact. If that writing system continued to develop apace, I'd like to think it would have developed in a more stylized fashion akin to Chinese characters. Same with the Mayan writing system--the glyphs would have become more stylized over time to the point of bearing little, if any, resemblance to how they originally looked. As for the Norse side of things, one of two things would happen with a population of Old Norse-speaking people plopped into North America and left there for multiple generations for a thousand years. Their language might still resemble Old Norse, albeit with loanwords from the various Amerindian language families, but still be mutually intelligible with the other North Germanic languages. Or their language may diverge so far as to be unintelligible with other such languages. But they won't speak Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish because identical vocabularies aren't going to occur twice.
Religion? Unlike in the America we ended up with, a Norse America would probably be more pagan. If Christianity took hold in North America at all, it'd be a minority religion at most. We'd probably see Norse pagan holdouts fleeing Christianization and bringing their old ways with them. Said pagans forcibly converting Amerindians and making them worship Odin, Thor, Freyja, and all them? Don't bank so much on it. I've never heard of a pagan person imposing their beliefs on anyone else. I've only heard of Abrahamic religions (namely Christianity and Islam) doing that shit. The only exception I can think of is Hindu nationalists simping for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, going after their Muslim countrymen. North America's religious makeup would be a cornucopia of various pagan religions with a Christian minority at most. Not only Christianity, but also any Abrahamic religion would probably be a minority as well. The most hardcore Christians? They'd be seen as a fringe movement, almost exclusively European and not taken seriously by most people.
All things considered, one or more nation-states that grow out of a Norse colonization would still end up in the same position as the U.S. is in now. North America has the best geography for any civilization to spawn and thrive in, even if that civilization has to play the long game to do it.
Simple fact is that geography aside, it was easy to colonize North America as Native Americans were tribal, easy to exploit differences among tribes and lacked a single leader.
Thanks
I'm embarrassed to admit that this video taught me a shit ton of facts I didn't know about my own country... and I've seen a lot of these coastlines, too.
Welcome to America dude. It's huge.
And welcome to the American school system. It‘s lacking.
Maybe if you didnt have to worry about getting shot in class then the teaching quality would be better, not so great america anymore
I live on the Chesapeake, and I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that it has more coast line than India. Like I straight up called BS when I first heard that.
😐
A few years ago I was really into reading about the US's water management and freshwater canal systems so I *knew* about most of this, but seeing it on a map is something else. Thank you!
the Bakken field saved my dad from a lot of debt. He was on heavy debt and decided to risk it and he moved there himself but we stayed in Idaho. Once he made enough money we moved there with him. we bought a house. eventually he got a better job offer and we moved to Iowa. The ND oil boom saved my family that I can guarantee.
Saved alot of us my friend
I’m an engineer in Texas and used to travel up to ND to support the Bakken fields. I always tried to make my trips between May and September, first to avoid the cold and second to get a break from the Texas heat. I’m glad the Bakken gave your family a solid opportunity
As a military service member, the opening of this video gives me goosebumps, need it played to me every morning
Thank you for your service!
You mentioned Western Canada being more integrated with the Northwestern United States than the rest of Canada; the same thing is happening to Northern Mexico. The dry top half of Mexico is more economically, infrastructurally, and culturally affiliated with the Southwestern United States than it is with the wetter bottom half.
So I think the US is slowly _eating_ its neighbors.
So far from God, so close to the US
"America, F Yeah"
Demographically, is Mexico who's eating the US southwest.
Mexican people will surpass whites, blacks, asians and will be the majority group in the next decades (at least in the southwest).
Economy is another story, but the demographic tendency is irreversible.
@@ivann.1916 The American Southwest has _always_ been majority Hispanic.
Meanwhile, Mexicans from the northern _estados_ are mostly employed either across the border or in factories owned by American companies, and consume more American media, speak more English, and use more American money than the Mexicans farther south. There’s also more roads and railways connecting the northern estados to the southern states than there are connecting them to the southern estados.
Northern Mexico is slowly being pulled out of Southern Mexico’s sphere of influence and being pulled into America’s. People from Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila have more in common with people from California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, than they do with people from Mexico City, Veracruz, Oaxaca, or Tabasco.
The Northern Mexican states that border the US are the wealthiest in Mexico apart from CDMX area.
Was so curious if Mississippi river carries that much volume so I searched it up.
The global cargo volume was 1.85 billion Tons in 2019 and the M. River carried 500 million tons in 2021. That's 27% of the GLOBAL cargo volume!
Insane.
I grew up in the twin cities mere blocks from the Mississippi. There's a constant stream of barges coming up and down at that point. And thats at the northernmost industrial point.
I gotta visit sometimes fascinating!
Part 2 to this video here: "How The US Should Have Spent The Afghanistan War Budget" by 'Second Thought'.
@@billhicks6449 I’m from mn too
@@billhicks6449 live up in Cloquet near Duluth, the twin city and Duluth represent the ends of each of their grand water networks, and I would imagine a lot of the land traffic in Minnesota comes from cargo being transports between those two cities.
Wow. I've never looked at the world through this lens before. This is like the Rosetta Stone to geopolitics. Thank you for this well made and enlightening documentary.
Read “The Accidental Superpower” by Peter Zeihan
Read "Guns Germs and Steel." It goes a long way in explaining why the world's most powerful nations developed where they did.
Yay, 128th like!
If you enjoyed this look up Peter zeihan he is a geopolitical analyst the information he puts out is extremely important and informative
I studied ancient history at university. I had something of an epiphany when my professor began explaining history from the perspective of economics. We often think of civilizations by their monuments, art, or battles they fought. But all that glory is rooted in the strength of its economy.
One other minor critique of your analysis: Although I agree that New Orleans is critical to US commerce, even if it was destroyed or captured US commerce would not shut down as you have stated that the Mississippi basin is also connected to the great lakes and trade could be rerouted through there to reach the Atlantic. It would suck but the US heartland would still be connected as an oceanic port.
You are oh so very smart
True, it wouldn’t wipe out the mississippi river trade line but it would definitely cripple it substantially
the problem with this theory is that much of the production/refining capability is also located on the mississippi.
I think another issue is if New Orleans was somehow captured, we’d have no way to defend the river if someone uses it to attack upstream
The thing with North America is it just keeps getting better and better not only do we have all these terrific waterways, but when the New Englanders and New Yorkers realized they were going to lose political and economic power to Louisiana they built the area Canal, and all sorts of railroads crossing the country and that good old protestant fashion with nature doesn’t obey you you simply whip the shit out of it and make it do your bidding. Do you know back when men or men, and not ruled over by foreigners and usurpers. Hell, they even kick their own, English countrymen out of the country and get rid of their own king, calling him a foreigner, because he was from Hannover Germany. He didn’t put up with the kind of shit we put up with today they were ready to go to war, over a penny in taxes if they did not feel represented today, we let them steal elections from us and do nothing. New wine and a full belly take away the heart.
i immigrated to the USA year 1987, im now a naturalized US citizen. i will always love this country. its the land of opportunity as long as you're not lazy
Or a marginalized group. See the other comment for reference.
@@justicebrown1077wow they really did just give you an exhibit A right there😂
@@gokuformanvsfood And its literally any non cis het white people. Its fucked. This country is (supposed to be) for everyone who wants equal opportunity. OP immigrated legally, and is a legal citizen. Yet people like Jimmy will still scream "REEE YoU DoNt BeLoNg HeRe, gO hOmE" as if this isnt their home. BTW, I hope you're enjoying being an America @M.J.R.
@@justicebrown1077 that person is obviously trolling. You gonna cry?
@@justicebrown1077you can be successful in a marginalized group if you don’t let it be an excuse.
When you add the varied biomes within America. Any invader would need to have the gear for nearly every kind of terrain to get through.
@@thedarkmajesty1773 that's pretty hilarious, Mexico annexing the usa. 400000000 guns in the hands of the American citizens might have something to say about that
For sure the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian mountains act as a barrier and the Great Lakes so the middle would be most protected unless they invade through Mexico but they would not even reach us cuz Mexico would already alert the USA
I believe I had read that nearly every biome on earth exists within the US border with a few exceptions such as tropical rainforest (Florida gets close being subtropical)
Does the US have Tundra?
Like the European invaders who conquered what is now known as the United States of America?
Excellent!!!! The narrator speaks English clearly and distinct, full of VALUABLE content. Never heard any documentary more straight to the point.... And useful
I'm a subscriber !!!! You are going to be close to me at all times.
I live in South Mississippi, and I understand why we have huge naval shipyards here and military bases and training camps everywhere in the Southeast. My dad lives about 30 minutes from Ingalls, which builds a lot of naval ships, including the destroyer class that my father used to help build.
I lived in Gulfport for a year last year when my ship was being built.
A1
3:00 I disagree. Resources and terrain are not enough to lead a country to be a economic power. Take Argentina, my home country as example. We also have a vast surface of arable land, with capacity to feed 400 million people. The second largest reserve of gas in the world. The largest lithium reserve. The largest aquifer (Guaraní). And the list goes on…
We were the richest country per capita in the world by the end of 19th century. 1/3 of Latin America GDP at that time.
And look at us now. We are not even a shadow of what we were, what we could be. Terrible governments, ideologies and corruption led what many wrongly call a “rich” country (just referring to its resources) to a poor one.
Resources could be nothing without a good administration. The US were lucky to be a British colony. Had them be a French or Spanish colony, their fate could've been very different.
The U.S. is nowhere close to being a poor country, the Median Household Income is Top 10 in the whole world
He is calling argentina poor bro not america
Ok first usa has the gold and it’s one of the best farming country to exist and it’s one of the most oil producers in the world. It can support its self on its own
@@arthurrytuz4855 The post you replied to is about Argentina.
I think Geography is the potential a country has; Argentina still has that in it, but the UK and Argentina's bad government pushed it back down. I think if Argentina got away from their colonial heritage that it could definitely return to being rich, but it needs time and a lot of work to get there.
It might have been noted by others already, but the river theory is one of the reasons why Africa has been so slow to develop. With the exception of the Nile, there are no easily navigable rivers penetrating Africas interior.
Asia and the majority of Europe has this problem also, yet they developed great civilizations, unlike Africa.
@@mrkrabs622 Africa did develop great civilizations. And the greatest civilizations in the regions you mentioned did grow around a navigable river. Historical revisionism is pure garbage.
@@mrkrabs622 yes because the technology 3easily spread from the nearby dominat powers like the greeks or persians.
Egypt is almost completely separated from the rest of africa besides the Nile making trade of technology slow (plus Egypt was one of the most authoritarian states in the bronze age)
It wasn't really till the iron age any great civilizations existed.
They've got bad ports, that's their biggest limitation
Africa has no winter season to speak of. Surviving winter on a regular basis requires long time planning, working together to preserve food for the tough season.
Besides, Africa has surprisingly few native species suitable for agriculture or animal breeding. Cow species were savage animals, as for horses - try taming a zebra for riding or draw a cart. These factors make it difficult to develop a homegrown economy, not even very worthwhile to invade like what happened to Europe in several occasions.
African weather can be every inch as harsh, though drought and heat can be escaped by trekking. Reckon most of ancient African empires depended upon trade with Arabia, India, where agricultural development had taken a higher flight. Basically the strongest Asian tribes have been chasing out the weaker ones, which then developed new skills in other parts of the world, whereas Africa kind of stuck in the old ways.
The "OP" acronym should be defined in the title since google offers the definitions "Surgical Operation" and "Military Operation".
I hate when gamer lingo makes it into serious things
@@zeldamaniac3188 OP stands for Over Populated ?
Totally agree with you. What the **** does the title mean, please?
overpowered
OP is overpowered
Well the waterways are definitely a huge huge benefit but you have to remember had our country not been consolidated on under one power it could not have been completely utilized imagine if the United States have been broke up into like four sections with the French holding one section the English holding another section Spanish holding another section and the Germans or Russians or somebody holding the four section this would have limited the benefit of the Mississippi and meant that this area would have been at least for 100 years under continual conflict. Had not one authority taking control of the riverways the true benefit of this would not have been realized.
No but it probably be close we'd end up with an AU which would be very very powerful
@@cablefeed3738 It's MORE likely that we would have ended with the strife of Europe 1700's-1900's, instead of something like the EU.
Remember, it took two World Wars AND a cold war to result in the EU.
As for the modern US-Can friendship (peace) that's almost certainly due to those same two world wars, AND the common cultural heritage and language... and also by actual blood-ties
(Yes, I know about the French heritage of Quebec, but THAT is balanced between Quebec and Ontario, already, purely internally.)
Huh? Current rivers in Europe that are comparable to the Mississippi and similar rivers have been used for trade for literal thousands of years without problem unless war broke out or embargos placed.
European nations understood the importance of trade and keeping trade flowing into other countries regardless of political differences for thousands of years.
This is such a large and baseless assumption I'm struggling to even understand how you can claim something like this without significant evidence.
Think of how railways would have developed without the benefit of having a unified source of technology
@@michaelmerck7576 what do you mean by this? Railways were started in Europe in Britain during the industrial revolution.
It's also important that, for almost two centuries, America was geographically separated from any other superpower and rarely fought wars on home soil. They were practically unscathed by WWI and WWII, so afterwards they modernized while other countries were rebuilding from the ashes.
Modern technology brought this to an end, though.
Not yet. We still haven't had to fight a war on our soil. Closest would have been 9/11, which while tragic, was hardly the same damage as a war.
@@huntclanhunt9697 What do your call a fight between two countries where your capital city, Washington DC, gets burned to the ground by a combination of ground & naval forces?
Is the History Class completely optional in your High Schools?
@@EvilDaveCanada
A war that actually mattered leaf, don't make me get out the rake.
A devastating war with actual impact on the nation rather then what can be a minor skirmish that didn't amount to much of anything
Closest the US got to seeing the horrors of war was during Shermans march to the sea in their civil war. Considering how gladly they inflict these horrors worldwide we can be certain their population literally cannot even comprehend it anymore and even then the civil war was rather tame
But for US education, it's not just history that's optional, math, geography. Pretty much every class TBH. Their standards for education are a joke to most of the world. Keep in mind most of these savages generally say yes to should we invade X nation and can't even point it out on a map
Alongside drinkable tap water
I swear in some aspects the US is a third world nation
@@huntclanhunt9697 Civil war??
This is both a boon to the US and a pitfall. We never had to rebuild which saved us costs, but we are also becoming infrastructurally outdated since we rely on old systems that were never broken.
I drove across the country and as you drive from the appalachians to the great plains to the rockies the geography really makes you feel like the midwest is in the middle of two castle walls. And you cannot help but ponder how any adversary would be able to cross those mountain ranges if the roads were guarded/ destroyed.
Just revisiting old videos. I remember seeing this channel a few years ago but I'm so happy the content has shifted more to geopolitics and world economies. It's incredibly informative, unbiased, and causes me rethink a lot of political narratives around past and current events where the full story isn't being told. I've gotten to the point of treating this and Nebula like my world news source. Only problem is not being able to get this great content more frequently. But that's okay. I'll rewatch old content and look for videos I haven't seen.
- Basically a continental fortress, isolated from any threat with geography that would be an invading force's nightmare.
- Incredible amount of natural resources.
- Modern starting point, from a beginning as self-sufficient colonies.
Yeah, it really isn't fair.
Then why didn't the American Indians dominated the world? They've been here 10x longer than the US Americans. It's not so much about the territorial advantage as the people and ideology. Another example of this is Israel being surrounded by enemies in the middle of desert yet managed to survive and thrive more than their neighbors.
@@The15iceiceice15 You've answered your own question. Both were sponsored by empires, and had a starting point in the modern era. The Mississippians didn't have gunpowder or the Industrial Revolution, but the US was basically a custom-built nation that gained independence in the midst of a technological spike. Yes, ideology played a role (in that it fostered industry and the settlement of a vast territory), but as I pointed out in my original comment, the US had the technology to build an empire.
I hoped this cleared up any confusion.
@@dionadair8195 Great answer, and I'd further add that the reason that native Americans did not have the technology the Europeans had was that the basic plants and livestock needed to develop the sort of large scale sedentary agriculture that we saw arise in the middle east 10,000 years ago simply didn't evolve there in a usable way until later. There aren't many large livestock native to the Americas, which is a serious handicap, and the llama alone cannot make up for not having sheep, pigs, bovine, etc. Thus, Mesoamerica wasn't able to build it's first true cities until several thousand years after Mesopotamia had gotten the ball rolling.
@@The15iceiceice15
A little off subject of what you're talking about, but I wonder, if the Europeans never arrived in the America's weather or not the natives already in the Northern section would have survived long, as the Aztec's were slowly moving in?
I wonder if, eventually, the Northern natives would have met a similar history, along the same time, but from the Southern American's?
The thinking game, the Chinese chess so the speak, is the board game Go. It's target is to slowly surround the opponent, than strangle it slowly.
I don't like China much, but I can see them developing that strategy by slowly taking over the dominant Western role in financing major projects all over Africa, Asia, Latin America, even Eastern Europe. With their free trade & neoliberalism ideology, the West has handed over the focal points of economy, production and finance, to China and Arabia, to a lesser extent. We'll see whether the West can develop the kind of longer term strategic thinking, a central feature of Western development before WW2.
The thinking behind all "Third Way" ideology of the nineties ( Blair & Clinton) seems to have been blind to the effect of turning over such important part of economy to China and S/E Asia. That strangling job has only just begun. Putin's war is just a preliminary exercise, aimed to sort out how strong get the West still is.
For those like me searching for the meaning of OP here it is
Op- overpowered!
Thank you.🤩
Thank you!
Thank you!!
You found the Easter egg! 2:26
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm kinda annoyed when abbreviations are used without prior definition.
I loved geography and maps as a kid. This kind of content makes me so giddy, I’m sure I annoy everyone I talk to about it.
*Love this channel!*
I love how how you use the resource icons from Sid Meier's Civilization VI in these videos when talking about resources.
Growing up in St. Louis gave me an appreciation for the Mississippi-Missouri River system as an economic powerhouse. I'd argue that St. Louis is the most strategically viable location for the US capital, given its location at the joining of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and its central location. Gabaret Island and Choteau Island are easily defensible, and should New Orleans fall into enemy hands a location on the Mississippi-Missouri would allow this hypothetical St. Louis capital to still reap the benefits of the 4th largest river system in the world. Historically, before the invention of phones and the internet, St. Louis' location is ideal. Information could be sent quickly to and from any tributary of the Mississippi to the capital. Had St. Louis been developed as the capital of the US, it would also be an ideal railway hub. I may be a bit biased
It's also no coincidence that St Louis is the major US city closest to the gravitational center of population.
@@jacobbernard1393 one day St. louis will be our Paris
Perhaps a bit but it's very logical
I wanted to buy the Kentucky loop exclave, get the Army Corps of Engineers to flood proof it and move the capital there - it's not St Louis but I wanted to build a city from scratch and to keep its population only government, no residents as was intended all along
The Hog Rider is a fast ground troop with medium hit points, low damage, and the ability to jump over enemy Walls. He is unlocked from the Spell Valley (Arena 5). He is a quick building-targeting, melee troop with moderately high hitpoints and damage
@@johnperic6860 My point was that any such city placed at that strategic geographic point would eventually constitute a transcontinental US' center of population.
Good example: Coal was shipped from Duluth, MN all the way to New York through ships that go through the Great lakes and the rivers. That's one of the ways how US was able to manufacture so many airplanes and war machines and have them ready to ship to Europe during WW2. The world is blessed that the US was founded by visionaries and built by hard working people. If China or Russia had what the US has, the world would not be the same.
" The world is blessed that the US was founded by visionaries and built by hard working slaves".
Fixed that for you.
@@sargonassarg4356 Who could forget about all those poor slaves working in the Minnesota coal mines during WW2?
@@sargonassarg4356 there were A LOT of people who weren't slaves that built America and slavery itself didn't provide as much money for the US %/gdp as people think it did. Don't minimize the hard work millions of Americans have put into our country.
@@sargonassarg4356 all that cotton built up our industries lmao🤣🤣
@@chunkmen Such as the Chinese immigrants who built your railroads? Or the Italian mobs who created Las Vegas?
It's funny that you downplay the slave trade as just an anamoly while simultaneously benefitting from the foundation it has built for you and yours.
I love Canadians. Oh and by the way, what a great episode. man. I had no idea great job. I need to join nebula, thank you.
Leave your sex life out of it.
I love all your videos. I’am a fan and , I’am river towboat pilot that pushes large barge tows across all of our nations waterways so this video really peaks my interest. No trolling I promise. Vidalia is not where the old river control structure is. It’s Morganza. The locks that connect the Mississippi River to the Atchafalaya and the Red river are Old river locks in Lettsworth,La. Vidalia,LA is across the Mississippi River from Natchez, Ms. There is just the Mississippi River there, no control structure. Vidalia is about 35 miles upriver from the control structure. 46 miles upriver of the lock. The control structure is where the Mississippi wants to go, but doesn’t thanks to the USACE. The rest of the video is very well done, informative, and Interesting. As are all your videos.
Dude, you're speaking about a subject that totally needs more attention. The Mississippi river is one flood away from being captured by the Atchafalaya. It would ruin new Orleans, baton rouge, and all the ports of south Louisiana.
I love how he uses Sid Meier's Civilization resource icons for crops and materials
Bro I used command F to find this comment
I'd say it'd be a pretty good idea to become energy independent..... by nuclear energy. Seriously the best energy source, the US has more than enough Uranium, and Thorium to be transmuted into Uranium. We could call it, "Atoms for Peace" or something.
We were energy independent 2 years ago. Biden changed us from the worlds number 1 energy producer/ energy exporter. To a country now begging Venezuel, Russia, opec, and Saudi Arabia for oil. So sad what’s been done to our country.
The US should have a very small tax on oil, the money would be exclusively to develop fusion power. Unfortunately it would be impossible to keep the government from squandering it on bullshit or keeping the tax small when they wasted all of the money originally in the fund.
Ukraine thought so too, then russia attacked. US may be way harder to attack like this but terrorists were capable of doing it. This reason along with tornadoes and earthquakes makes it very cautious about choosing the place for nuclear plants.
@@jasonrhodes9683 fusion isn't something we should do just yet. Nuclear and solar are the ways to go
@@pumpkin3.1415 I agree. Use the stuff we have now, research better and safer power for later.
Good job - nice video. Very informative and fair.
8:48 About the louisiana purchase, I assume people are familiar with it, but just in doubt:
It wasn't "the french foolishly sold a land nearly four times its own size for nothing" as the tone implies, no nation is that stupid/kind.
The situation was the US was desperate to acquire New Orleans and was ready to do just about anything for that, up to try taking it by force; meanwhile France recently acquired all of Louisiana on paper only.
It was indefensible, so they actually made the US buy it, effectively turning a scrap of paper into money and saving face, instead of trying to hold on to it and losing immense amount of men, money and clout, dumping that problem on the US instead, for whom it ended up working out so really everyone got their fair share.
Napoleon also needed the funds to support the army he had in conquering Europe, his mindset was more closer to home than abroad in the New World where the French haven’t had the best of luck. From losing Canada, getting malaria, and the difficulty for the French to get to the long voyage to New Orleans to actually travel to explore the land, it was a money pit that was more problems if they kept any longer.
It was also because of the Haiti Revolution that happened with the slave rebellions against french powers. France knew it was losing its power and control in the western world, and it saw no need for the Louisiana anymore (planned to use it while in control of Haiti for economic development) , so they gave the land to the US at a price, to which at some point didnt matter to them because they needed some kind of money to support and aid their losses.
I see someone read "the accidental superpower", this is basically a point by point retelling of the primary chapters of this book.
Yeah most of these youtubers just rip off ideas from books and rephrase it and present it as their own.
Which is fine since most people aren't interested in reading that book anyway and he wrote the reference in the description.
@Bill Randleman if he referenced it, plagiarism is not an issue.
He credited it in the description
@@Wihf I see that now, I feel like he could have mentioned that upfront. Like, I'm pretty sure most of this is a word for word copy of full paragraphs from the book. It's a very interesting topic of course, so it's cool seeing folks getting access to this info from TH-cam, I just would have been more clear that this was basically a summary of those books.
It freaked me out when you told me the embargo on Cuba never ended. In the US, we are taught about the crisis and including the embargo placed in Cuba, but it never explicitly said that the embargo never ended, so I just assumed that the embargo was lifted when the missiles were removed. Boy was I wrong. Had to pause this video and jump into the online rabbit hole for half an hour
The US empire has a tendency to never forgive any country that asserts it's own sovereignty over the empire's attempts to meddle within it's affairs and overthrows whatever neo-colonial puppet regime the empire had installed in their country in order to pillage it's resources keep the local population under control, and it especially can't forgive or make peace with any country that successfully creates the threat of a positive example for viable alternatives to the empire's global "free market" capitalist hegemony and its "rules-based international order" that it's forcibly imposed upon the world in order to serve it's own interests at the expense of everyone else. It will do anything it possibly can to infiltrate, destabilize, subvert, starve, fund minoritarian insurgencies and astroturfed protest movements within, or provoke a response from such uncooperative countries, and will manufacture or just outright fabricate whatever pretext is necessary in order to make themselves look like the good guy's while doing so. Cuba is just one country among many dozens who have become targets of the empire for refusing to bend the knee and allow their governments to be subverted by the US state department, their natural resources to be plundered by US corporations, and their populations to be systematically exploited and pillaged. Now that we're well into the 21st century and the US has been doing this all over the world for well over 100 years, that list of targeted countries has started to band together in a global alliance of resistance that cumulatively outnumbers and overpowers the empire and it's satellite states not just militarily and economically, but diplomatically as well. The crumbling yet arrogant and entitled as ever US empire has condemned itself to eventual isolation and collapse with it's own insatiable greed and brutality with it's treatment of other countries around the world, and sadly it's own population is largely clueless about what it's happening and what it's own ruling class has perpetrated upon the rest of the global population.
Omg you have a lot of learning to do child
I think you are confounding the words embargo and blockade.
american zealots will never cede anything in the bid to retain power indefinitely.
That embargo has little to no effect since Cuba can still trade with anyone they want, even the US sends a lot of chicken to Cuba.
I both agree and disagree. Huge natural resources, great rivers and ONE country over the whole thing are indeed huge advantages. For example, look at Africa. Even more wealthy in natural resources but split among many different countries. I would say though, there are other societies that could have started in North American and NOT been as successful. Successful, but not as much. It is the US freedom ideology that allowed the natural resources to be put to work so well, combined with private property rights, the Protestant work ethic and the patent office for inventions. That said, I really, really enjoyed this presentation. Thank you!
Amazing to think of it this way!
And not that it makes too much of a difference on the sheer scale and versatility of the area, but the east coast barrier islands stretch well past the Chesapeake, covering Delaware, New Jersey, and Long Island where they seem to stop.
There are more countries are smaller and more overpowered than the U.S. I made videos on them check it out 💯
I feel like the hurricanes from the Atlantic are the reason for said barrier islands, since once you get to New England, where the barrier islands stop, you experience a significant drop in hurricane frequency. After all, the barrier islands from long island were made that way
@@SirNobleIZH great point! Makes sense
Yeah he def missed that one ... And it's the mostly heavily populated area in the country so suprised he missed it!
One of these on just Manhattan would be great
@@topspot4834 maybe not Manhattan but ny harbor as a whole, i live only 50 mi. From there and it would be great to see how exactly NYC came to be the megacity it is