This is Required Viewing, where I cultivate video essays blah blah blah INTRO NOT FINISHED This edition’s video is titled “Greed is Destroying the World,” published by Drew Gooden.

Subjects: Economy, AI, wealth distribution and class disparity

Mild language, contains paid promotion

This video has been lauded (in its own comment section) as a mandatory watch for anybody with internet access. My bias is that the video narrates the majority of anxieties I have struggled with for the past several months, and its comprehensive summary of issues that we all should think deeper about makes up for my inability to put them into words. “Greed is Destroying the World” affirms that the blame that has been pushed on the shoulders of the public for existing in a consumerist society has been misplaced.

The current hottest topics of the economic climate are addressed in this video, beginning with the AI bubble, its potential to burst and its current detriments on both the environment and American people, segueing into how the boom reflects a dangerous level of wealth accumulation in the highest class of society, an issue that is much newer than most would think.

While Gooden addresses these topics with a clear message in mind, he makes it clear that the problems at hand are not necessarily partisan. Discussed near the conclusion of the video is how the media writes a narrative to push a certain agenda. Whereas many analyses would have you believe that the solutions to our issues come from us versus the opposite side of the political spectrum, Gooden emphasizes that the solution starts with the people pushing back against a system that not only allows for the current terrible conditions to play out, but for the few individuals running that system to endlessly spin it in their favour.

“When a rich person makes a shady deal to screw over the working class, people will joke that ‘they just need the money to buy their fourth yacht!’ and yet I don’t even think it’s that. They could buy a thousand yachts and still not run out of money. They don’t want to spend their wealth, they just want it to get bigger. What they have is a disease; they have been scourged with the blight of insatiable greed, cursed with an endless pursuit of wealth that will never bring them true happiness.

“I would almost feel bad for them, if they weren’t actively destroying the world in the process.”