Shadowing Practice: Where did all the minimalists go? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Ten years ago, minimalism went viral and in the span of one month took over the internet.
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The idea captured the attention of people all over the world.
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Marie Kondo had your mom's friends arguing about whether their spatulas brought them joy, and my documentary Minimalism went on to stream over 100 million times.
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"Our next guests are pioneers of the minimalist movement." "Minimalism." "Minimalism." "Minimalism." "Minimalism." Everyone was talking about it, especially white people.
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But as quickly as it climbed, it was gone.
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So I'm starting a series on this channel exploring what happened.
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I'm covering the criticism, the aesthetic, the scary trends, and our never -ending pursuit to find meaning.
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"Consumerism is a symptom in many ways of these other things going wrong." This isn't a rehash of old ideas.
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It's a look at what's changed, whether minimalism still has a place, and a look at why things seem to have gotten so much worse.
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This video is sponsored by Squarespace.
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More on them later.
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Thank you.
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So at the end of the documentary, there is this very big buildup.
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It is sentimental, if not a little bit heavy -handed.
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But really the idea behind it is this story of optimism.
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It's that David might beat Goliath, minimalism might defeat consumerism.
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But that's not exactly how things played out.
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Levi Hildebrand has spent the past few years doing deep dive videos into everything that's broken with consumer culture.
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The Stanley Cup craze, the LeBubu phenomenon, the psychological tricks companies use to get you to spend money you don't have on things you don't need.
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Like, you talk so much about consumerism and a lot of these wild trends that happen.
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How bad has consumerism gotten over the past 10 years?
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but I think it has actually been an exponential growth curve post -COVID.
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It's like we just got an injection that I don't think we could have ever predicted.
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Something about the combination of isolation, social media addiction, and the sort of fracturing of our social circles because of all those things,
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it just led to more consumerism.
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The problem is still there, morphed into something else.
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It's so much easier to consume now.
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Now it's one -click purchases instead of Black Friday sales.
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TikTok and Instagram and all of these other platforms are
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so good at plugging into the human brain's desire for more
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and the dopamine hits and the fears and the fear of missing out and we're fighting against the current, like a really strong current,
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whereas in the swim up against pretty easily.
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Now it's a raging torrent.
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It's hard to fight against that as individual minimalists.
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We're always at this crossroads between wanting to be well -meaning and having to recognize that we live in a capitalist society.
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I think minimalism is like one of the only guiding philosophies that's come out in like recent memory
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that tapped into something that I think people really want, which is like, - Rules.
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Yeah, we just, we don't have any guidance.
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And minimalism for a second gave us something like that.
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- Second, just one little second.
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No, and for some people, it still does a It's a caveat.
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I spoke with Juliette Schor, economist, sociologist, and one of the original voices of the documentary
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that I think was most influential in helping us understand the problem with our culture. Is this okay?
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It might be a little bit bright.
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Is that a light on you?
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Right there.
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I asked her why minimalism wasn't able to fix the world.
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Yeah, so 10 years on, minimalism has helped inspire millions of people to live with less stuff and to find purpose in their lives.
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But apparently it wasn't enough to fix all of the problems in the world and excessive waste and conspicuous consumption.
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Why do you think minimalism wasn't enough?
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Well, I don't think a cultural movement, which is what I would classify minimalism as,
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is going to ever be enough to really transform society.
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And part of it has to do with the fact that over this 10 years,
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there's been an intensification of one of the key underlying trends that drives consumer dynamics,
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and that's inequality.
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consumption, where there isn't a lot of debt, etc., they tend to be much more equal societies.
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Does it just come down to capitalism because it's just all about profit at all costs?
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It's about just making as much money as possible?
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So I don't think that it's just capitalism.
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I mean, you have capitalist societies where people are quite frugal, where they save a lot.
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You can think about the Japanese.
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I mean, they're a very high -saving society.
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For hundreds of years, like a really strong sustainability ethic.
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I mean, they're not perfect, but in comparison to the United States, which is really an outlier on the scale of how,
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quote -unquote, consumerist it is, it's also just so much more unequal than...
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places like Japan or much of Europe.
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This argument that more inequality leads to more consumption is one
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that we didn't touch on in our documentary and a point that I've rarely heard in discussions around consumerism.
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But it explains a lot.
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Because when it comes to inequality, few countries do it quite like America.
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Most people know there's wealth inequality in the US, but they underestimate how bad it actually is.
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So when surveyed, Americans thought wealth should be dispersed like this.
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It's not a perfect distribution of wealth.
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It's definitely not communism.
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It gives incentives for people to work harder for a better outcome without leaving too many people behind.
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But here's what wealth inequality looks like in reality.
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The poor and the middle class are barely distinguishable.
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And the top 1 % and even the top 0 .1 % have so much wealth that it's hard to imagine.
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People are working really long hours.
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They're working more than they ever have before.
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They're making less money than before.
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Why does that cause them to buy more stuff?
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Well, they're not necessarily making less money.
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Less and less of it is going toward ordinary people.
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More and more of it's going to the people at the top.
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There's a real range there, which is the higher up you go in the income ladder, the more of that productivity growth you're seeing.
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So you've got that widening distribution, the people at the bottom increasingly scraping by,
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but you've got a big group of people in the United States who are not earning less.
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you know, maybe it's the top 20 % or so.
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They are earning more and they're spending it.
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Billionaires, and now a trillionaire, own fleets of private jets, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on yachts.
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Space tourism has become a hobby.
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Some weddings now cost an estimated billion dollars, with private performances from the biggest celebrities in the world.
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This spending by the wealthiest triggers what economist Robert Frank called "expenditure cascades." As the top earners pull further away, everyone below feels the ripple.
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to keep up and lower income families go into debt just to access the basics like a car repair, groceries, health care, and utilities.
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Homeownership has become one of the biggest signs of just how unequal things have gotten.
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Housing costs have outpaced household income by a huge margin.
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Once a symbol of the American dream, owning a humble single family home has become out of reach for so many.
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- There was a moment.
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Maybe a year ago where I was standing in the grocery store, in the soup aisle doing some financial calculus in my head over whether I could afford
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Lentils and toilet paper and I just thought to myself This isn't life.
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This is a slow motion hostage situation.
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Then I got home and I opened Instagram and some tech bro was talking about leveraging your time to increase your value.
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And I'm thinking...
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Dude, I just leveraged my dignity for some off -brand beans.
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So, Wealth inequality isn't just about billionaires hoarding yachts.
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It's about that weird sinking feeling that somehow Despite everything you've done right, you're still losing.
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I've seen a lot of the criticism and pushback that minimalism has had.
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A few years ago, we released our documentary for free on YouTube and the comments started piling in.
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One of the most upvoted comments among them said, there is a difference between choosing to live a minimal lifestyle
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while being actually able to afford much more
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and being compelled to live a minimal lifestyle due to not being able to afford much at all.
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I agree.
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These are two to solve for an unbalanced and unfair system.
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The problem isn't people deciding that they want less than their peers because they know that it won't make them any happier.
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The problem is the system itself and the fact
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that we should have never gotten to a place where someone has a trillion dollars
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while someone else is choosing between toilet paper and lentils.
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Maybe it's my algorithm, but I've gotten the sense
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that people are starting to become fed up with a system that's making the rich richer
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while leaving the rest of the population behind.
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In many societies across the world, effort doesn't come close to equaling fair outcomes.
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As one YouTube comment put it, "If working hard got you rich, the donkey would own the farm." These outcomes didn't happen by accident.
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This is how the system was designed to work, and it's gonna take something much bigger than minimalism to stop it.
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So I've been making YouTube videos for over nine years now.
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I know I'm very old and I've been able to do this sustainably
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because I partner with brands who create products and services that I actually use.
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Enter my sponsor for this week's video, Squarespace.
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So when I was first getting started out, I could just have a simple landing page up to collect emails for my newsletter.
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So glad I did that, by the way.
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You're also supporting my channel, so it means a lot.
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You might be wondering why minimalism has faded into the background.
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If it was so helpful for people, why isn't anyone talking about it now?
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I think there are two reasons it's no longer a big part of the cultural conversation.
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First, there was this huge viral moment where lots of people were talking about it for the very first time.
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Some people loved it, other people hated it.
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It made for a really good conversation around the dinner table.
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But the novelty of it kind of wore off.
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That's not to say that people don't still find it helpful and there aren't more people as interesting of a headline.
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But there's another reason that I think is even more important why it's not talked about as much today.
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And that's because there is so much other stuff to worry about.
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Even the problem of overconsumption just seems...
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In my opinion, it seems like a small problem, compared to these other problems now that we're having with authoritarian governments, social media, AI.
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Like, these problems now seem to even outpace the problems of "Oh, like we're spending too much on Amazon." It's almost like
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that problem has just like gone into the background because there's like we're having an existential crisis.
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in so many other areas.
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Yeah, I would agree.
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We call it a poly crisis in academia, poly meaning many.
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just many different crises.
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And of course, there's also the climate crisis and the ecological crisis, which in addition to all the others that you mentioned.
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This sort of goes back to my point about a purely cultural movement can't solve those things.
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I mean, consumerism is a symptom in many ways of these other things going wrong.
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It's a symptom of an increasingly unequal society in which power is out of balance,
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in which ordinary people are losing power to elites and large corporations.
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And inequality is a key result of that, in which those elites have captured the state and so people are disempowered with respect to their government.
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steps you think that we should be taking to start to bring about more equality in the system?
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Well, there's sort of two pathways.
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I think we need both of them.
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One are the things that are now much more on the agenda, at least in some of the blue states,
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which are these millionaire or billionaire taxes and kind of redressing the regressivity in the tax system since the first Trump administration,
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just a massive redistribution of wealth toward the wealthy.
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But the other part of it is getting an economy
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that works more fairly instead of like the market works in a certain way
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and then the government has to come in and redistribute because it just, you know, it's giving way too much to some people and not enough to others.
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We got to change that because a purely redistributive system is not really sustainable.
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You want those market outcomes to be a lot fairer to begin with.
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Putting in some limits on, say, CEO pay, building power for ordinary people,
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building power for workers in unions is really key.
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building the power of community groups as well,
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and democratic power, so we can also make laws to to cure the fact that we have these monopolies.
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So we've got this small group of very powerful corporations that just has too much market power.
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You know, it used to be when a corporation got too powerful, it got broken up because it would Abuse consumers and workers.
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We think about the period after the Second World War, I mean, it was imperfect in many ways.
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I mean, I think the racism and the sexism were really key to the negative parts of it.
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But the positive parts where we had really high levels of social capital involvement in public life.
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It was a period where the government was becoming more, not less democratic, in which working people had gained a lot of power.
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called the Great Compression.
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When inequality lessened over a period of decades, many good things came out of that,
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including that meaning and purpose that you're talking about.
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People were not working nearly as many hours.
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They were not in debt.
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To that same extent, material aspirations were in balance, much more in balance, and it just,
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you know, yielded a better life.
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I think there are two main reactions to the system that's been created, especially when it comes to those who feel like they've been left behind.
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Many are feeling angry.
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They're voicing their opinion, they're protesting, and trying to fight for change.
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But there's also another reaction I've noticed.
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It seems that people are becoming numb to it all.
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I think it's very easy to be disillusioned now when it comes to consuming intentionally to embracing something like minimalism.
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When we see these billionaires having these multi -million dollar weddings
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and the amount of excess that we see at the top 1%, let alone everybody else.
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It's like why like why should we care about sustainability?
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Like why should we care about you know these things
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that are you know helping to create a better future like when the future the present is burning down?
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Oh man, this is genuinely a hard one to Mm -hmm.
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to figure out day to day because yeah, like I think we've slid backwards on a lot of really important stuff.
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Like we don't care about the planet.
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as much anymore.
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We don't care as much about where things are made.
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I would say we've even stopped caring as much about the quality of the things that we have.
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You know, because everything seemingly is sort of degrading around us.
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It's distressing and I think the response to that distress is apathy.
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Most cases people go, "Oh, this is so terrible.
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Oh my god, I just can't, I can't, I can't handle it."
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And then you go and you buy yourself a Stanley water bottle or you keep going to Starbucks or whatever it is.
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You just go for the comfort and that's what convenience culture and consumerism is sort of relying on is this habitual
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a subconscious or unconscious loop that you get in to soothe yourself when everything's falling apart.
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The beauty of minimalism is that it gives you something in return.
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Saying you should buy this thing because it's sustainable, that's a really hard pitch because you can't see the value of it.
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It's like, okay, I bought this bamboo toothbrush, it's more expensive.
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and it functions the same.
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It's hard to see why that's important to do, but with minimalism, you don't have too many things in your house.
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You don't have to spend quite so much time cleaning everything.
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Or you don't have so much clutter in your mind because of the things that you don't have in your house.
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And so there's a bit more of a practical application, I think, that people can grasp onto.
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That's why I think it's not going to go out like a little poof of smoke,
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like a lot of the trends that sort of it gets lumped into.
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Minimalism offered a personal solution to a systemic problem.
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It was enough to help a lot of people.
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If you're watching this video, I'm guessing these ideas helped you in some way or another.
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But maybe it was never meant to fix the world or correct society's injustices.
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The reality is that minimalism is just a tool.
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As I talked with Josh about the limitations of minimalism, he referred to it as a hammer.
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It's not a religion, it's not even an ideology.
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It is a tool that I use similar to the way that I would use a hammer, but I use that tool to create more space in my home, more space in my calendar,
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more space in my life so I can make room for what's important.
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A hammer is a good metaphor.
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It can help us with individual tasks inside our home.
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It gives us utility and control and has a real applicable purpose.
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But if you want to fix these broken institutions, that's going to take something much bigger.
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Something like a wrecking ball.
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Like a metaphorical raccoon ball.
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Not like a real one.
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If you look historically, it's often after a system breakdown,
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after a real crisis that we can get new structures, it's really hard to get them without that, I think.
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It has to get so bad that people will say enough's enough.
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It took the Great Depression to get Social Security and the New Deal, you know.
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So I am optimistic.
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I think we're gonna come out on the other side with a much better society than the one we have.
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Well, I hope so.
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Go ahead.
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Thank you so much for your time today.
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Thank you.
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So two quick things before I go one that's selfish
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and another that's about you and this series first if you like the graphics in this video Thanks.
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I like them too.
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I'm really proud of them I've been working with my friend Chris who's an amazing motion graphics designer
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and we're actually building a tool to help other Creators
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and people who make videos make graphics this good and so
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if you want to learn more about that then join the waitlist at
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Editkit .co the second thing I wanted to mention and this is about you and about the series channel, but I'm making this series
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as we go as in i have not started writing episode two i guess
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that creates a bit of pressure on my part
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but also it's quite exciting because i get to bring you into this process
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and so i want to hear from you who are the people
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that you want me to interview what are the ideas
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that you want me to cover um what are the problems and challenges
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that you're facing yourself jump into the comments let me know make sure you you like the ones
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that that are resonating with you that way i see them rise single person mentions my new sweater.
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I'm done.
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I'm not going to make another video.
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I'm going to quit YouTube and I'm not going to look back.
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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección
Este vídeo tiene 276 frases y 3612 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 22:27. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 161 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. El 83 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés; conviene repasar el resto antes de empezar.
Vocabulario clave de este vídeo
15 palabras del vídeo que vale la pena aprender, con su pronunciación y significado:
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| inequality sustantivo | /ˌɪn.ɪˈkwɑ.lɪ.ti/ | desigualdad |
| documentary sustantivo | /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/ | documental |
| outcome sustantivo | /ˈaʊtkʌm/ | resultado |
| ordinary adjetivo | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | ordinario |
| consumption sustantivo | /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/ | consumo, consumición |
| hammer sustantivo | /ˈhæmɚ/ | martillo |
| publish verbo | /ˈpʌblɪʃ/ | publicar |
| symptom sustantivo | /ˈsɪm(p)təm/ | síntoma |
| earn verbo | /ɝn/ | ganar, granjear |
| helpful adjetivo | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | servicial, adyuvante |
| capture verbo | /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/ | capturar |
| solve verbo | /sɒlv/ | resolver, solucionar |
| elite sustantivo | /ɪˈlit/ | élite, elite |
| increasingly adverbio | cada vez más | |
| domain sustantivo | /ˌdəʊˈmeɪ̯n/ | dominio |
Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| break up verbo | separar, cisionar | |
| burn down verbo | incendiar, arrasar | |
| fall apart verbo | despedazarse, desintegrarse | |
| figure out verbo | averiguar, captar | |
| get off verbo | bajarse | |
| get over verbo | superar, sobreponerse a | |
| go ahead verbo | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | venga, adelante |
| go out verbo | salir |
Pronunciación a tener en cuenta
El hablante usa 84 contracciones y formas reducidas, como don't, I'm, they're. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.
- Los sonidos de “th”: wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, aesthetic /ɛsˈθɛ.tɪk/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, pathway /ˈpæθˌweɪ/, authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/
- Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: consumption /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/, publish /ˈpʌblɪʃ/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/, addiction /əˈdɪkˌʃən/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɪʃ/
- Palabras largas — cuida el acento: inequality /ˌɪn.ɪˈkwɑ.lɪ.ti/, documentary /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, utility /juːˈtɪlɪti/, sustainable /səˈsteɪnəbəl/
Cómo practicar con este vídeo
- Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
- Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
- Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como inequality, documentary, outcome.
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — una acción que empezó antes y continúa | I've been making · I've been working |
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | has spent · has actually been · has helped |
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | is sponsored · should be dispersed · being compelled |
| Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa | want, which is · movement, which is · States, which is |
¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.