The video addresses the growing anxiety and panic regarding global issues, urging viewers to focus on deeper analytical trends instead of sensationalized news. It highlights Ian Bremmer's top risks report that identifies global risks based on impact, imminence, and likelihood of change in the world's operational dynamics. Bremmer emphasizes the importance of understanding these risks to prepare better response strategies rather than succumbing to unnecessary panic.

Key global risks identified in the report include water stress, generational revolutionary changes through platforms like TikTok, political tensions in the United States, arrested global development, an energy crunch due to geopolitical tensions, and regional conflicts like those in Iran. Other risks include inflation shocks, disruption of democracy through technology misuse, the authoritarian governance style in China, and the rogue state behavior of Russia amid its war with Ukraine. Each of these factors presents challenges that can lead to broader global instability if not addressed effectively.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. imminence [ˈɪmɪnəns] - (noun) - The state or condition of being about to happen. - Synonyms: (approach, forthcoming, impending)

...in ways that are unanticipated by all of the major actors in that world, government actors, the business actors and the citizens, and they're ranked in terms of impact, imminence and likelihood.

2. volatility [ˌvɒləˈtɪlɪti] - (noun) - The tendency to change rapidly and unpredictably, especially for the worse. - Synonyms: (instability, fluctuation, unpredictability)

And as a consequence, it will cause more volatility, it will lead to more political and economic change, much of which will eventually be welcomed.

3. constitutional crisis [ˌkɒnstɪˈtjuːʃənl ˈkraɪsɪs] - (noun) - A severe problem or conflict in the functioning of a government that challenges the stability of the governing system. - Synonyms: (governmental crisis, political instability, authority crisis)

So, as we look forward to 2024, the likelihood of a constitutional crisis in the United States is virtually zero.

4. fiscal outlay [ˈfɪskl ˈaʊtleɪ] - (noun) - Expenditure or the amount of money spent or allocated. - Synonyms: (expenditure, spending, disbursement)

...And an enormous fiscal outlay for from every major economy in the world to ensure that all of the people that were suffering and had their businesses closed and lost their jobs would still be able to get through...

5. asymmetric [ˌeɪsɪˈmetrɪk] - (adjective) - Having parts or aspects that are not equal or balanced. - Synonyms: (unequal, unbalanced, disproportionate)

Which means that asymmetric attacks, like cyber, like fiber, like proxy strikes, like pipeline attacks, like terrorism into NATO states, much like what the Iranians have done in the Middle east over the past years...

6. proxy war [ˈprɒksi wɔːr] - (noun) - A war instigated by a major power that does not itself become involved. - Synonyms: (indirect conflict, surrogate war, intermediate war)

...Because the reason Putin's law losing is because he's fighting not just Ukraine, but NATO. This is essentially a proxy war where the Americans and all of their allies are doing everything they can to provide the training, the intelligence, and the military support...

7. marginalized [ˈmɑːdʒɪnəlaɪzd] - (adjective) - Treated as insignificant or peripheral. - Synonyms: (disadvantaged, ignored, sidelined)

...but Iran is. That's angering the Americans, angering the Europeans...

8. ongoing condition [ˈɒnwəʊɪŋ kənˈdɪʃn] - (noun) - A continuing state or situation. - Synonyms: (current state, continuous situation, perpetual state)

2023 is really the first year that I think we can talk about global water as being the kind of ongoing condition of stress that we've already come to learn about carbon, about biodiversity.

9. unilateral [ˌjuːnɪˈlætrəl] - (adjective) - Performed by or affecting only one person, group, or country without the agreement of others. - Synonyms: (one-sided, independent, self-serving)

At the same time as that's going on, the JCPOA, the iranian nuclear deal the Americans stepped away from unilaterally

10. discomfited [dɪsˈkʌmfɪtɪd] - (adjective) - Made to feel uneasy or embarrassed. - Synonyms: (unsettled, disturbed, uncomfortable)

But many companies around the world see maximum Xi and are discomfited by it.

10 biggest world threats of 2023, ranked - Ian Bremmer

People are getting increasingly anxious about the world that we live in. I'm finding a lot of panic. People that are very online spending too much time on cable news and social media and maybe talking to their crazy uncle. This is meant to be a counterbalance to that. You can keep the uncle, but you can also spend some time thinking about deeper analytic trends of what really is an issue that's worth concerning yourself with how we might be able to respond to it, and also all the things that, frankly, don't merit the screaming headlines.

What we're talking about in the top risks report are those risks out there globally that are going to have the most likely dramatic implications in changing the way the world works, in ways that are unanticipated by all of the major actors in that world, government actors, the business actors and the citizens, and they're ranked in terms of impact, imminence and likelihood. You put those three things together and you get the top risks. I'm Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia group. And these are the top risks of 2023.

Number ten, water stress around the world. So many people think of water as a sudden emergency that needs a quick and immediate policy response. Increasingly, this is an ongoing, real time issue for everyone. Some people have too much water. Massive floods in California. Some people have too little. Huge challenges with shipping in Europe. Farmers having to consistently change the way they go about their basic productivity on a season to season basis because they do not have adequate resources to be able to plant a normal season.

This is having the biggest impact on the Middle east and sub saharan Africa. But it's a global issue. There are global responses, just like the cop summits on biodiversity and on carbon emissions. There's a cop summit on water, but no one's ever heard of it because it doesn't really do anything. It hasn't become a priority. Therefore it's not getting the resources, and therefore it's getting worse every single year. 2023 is really the first year that I think we can talk about global water as being the kind of ongoing condition of stress that we've already come to learn about carbon, about biodiversity.

Number nine, TikTok. Boom. It's not actually about TikTok. It's about the generation that has grown up on TikTok. It's the most diverse generation we've ever seen in the west. It's also by far the most activist at a young age, believing that they can do much more by getting online and by demonstrating than they can by voting. And that has much greater impact, both in terms of driving agendas that are very important to them, like on climate, like on social equity, also in terms of changing outcomes for people in positions of power.

And here I'm thinking not just about political leaders, but also about industry leaders, CEO's, bankers and the like. That is going to create big ripple waves across the global economy precisely because it's the most progressive generation. And as a consequence, it will cause more volatility, it will lead to more political and economic change, much of which will eventually be welcomed. But the getting from here to there is, of course, going to be a challenge.

Number eight divided states of America. Now, the fact that it's number eight, the United States and the US is the most powerful country in the world kind of means it almost didn't make the list, means that we're not panicking about the future of the United States. But still, divisions in the United States politically are massive, though much greater than those of other advanced industrial economies around the world. That makes it a lot harder to functionally govern. You saw this with 15 votes to get Kevin McCarthy barely over the line as speaker of the House, and he's going to have an impossible time actually holding that party together.

You also see this with inability to even address fundamental issues like improving education or dealing with immigration in the United States, even though we all know what the basic answers are. But the big positive in this risk is the fact that all of the people that were running for positions of governor and secretary of state to oversee upcoming elections, those that were claiming that this election was going to be stolen, and they had to stop to steal, they all lost. So, as we look forward to 2024, the likelihood of a constitutional crisis in the United States is virtually zero.

Number seven is arrested. Global development. For 50 years, the world has seen incredible, incredible human improvement in education, in health and lifespan, in economic growth across the world, it wasn't just a tiny group of rich people that were taking advantage. It was the emergence of a global middle class. We are now seeing that turnaround. We're seeing more people driven into poverty, we're seeing more children leaving school, and particularly a burden on women, being driven into sexual trafficking, being driven into the informal economy, not being able to experience the basic human rights that they've worked so hard to achieve over the last 50 years.

The United nations estimates that five years of human development on the planet has been lost in the three years since the pandemic has begun. And in 2023, those losses will only accelerate. There are lots of structural reasons for that. Some of it is, of course, the dangers of the pandemic. Some of it is the challenges that came from the disruptions of the russian invasion in Ukraine, all the supply chain challenges and the inflation that came on the back of it. Some of it is climate change. You put all of those things together, and global development is changing trajectory.

Number six, energy crunch. The russian invasion of Ukraine means that the Europeans are no longer getting their gas and much of their oil from Russia, one of the largest energy producers in the world. But the Europeans need their energy. What are they doing? They're spending as much as humanly possible to get the energy from anywhere else they can. That drives prices up. But it also means that developing countries that don't have access to the same deep pockets that the Europeans do are really taking it in the teeth.

So over the course of the year, the Europeans are going to experience another challenging winter, in many ways more challenging in 2023 than in 2022, because they don't have the benefits of all of that russian energy that was coming in at the beginning of the year like they did last year. But also it means that the knock on challenges for the poorer countries that are not commodity producers around the world are going to feel very great stress this year.

Number five, Iran in a corner. Demonstrations across Iran erupted months ago with the killing of Masa Amini, a young woman who was not correctly wearing her headscarf, killed by the morality police, so called in Iran. And it touched off the greatest demonstrations they've had on the ground since the 1979 revolution. And the iranian government is only repressing in response. There's no willingness to have a dialogue or compromise. No. In fact, we see increasingly, the iranian government is willing to execute their citizens with no reason.

At the same time as that's going on, the JCPOA, the iranian nuclear deal the Americans stepped away from unilaterally. The Iranians are stepping away from it, too. And they are now achieved nuclear breakout. Their willingness to engage in nuclear development, enrichment that would allow them to build nuclear weapons when the inspectors aren't there. And finally, the Iranians are Russia's best friend on the global stage. The Chinese aren't providing them with military support to invade Ukraine, but Iran is. That's angering the Americans, angering the Europeans.

The likelihood we see regime change in Iran is relatively low. And even if it were a kerr, it would probably be towards a military dictatorship, not to a democracy. It's not going to help in resolving any of these issues, but the likelihood that we see military confrontation between Iran and a new Netanyahu led right wing coalition in Israel, Saudi Arabia and even the United States. That's higher than at any point since the iranian nuclear deal was signed.

Number four, inflation shockwaves should surprise no one. That after a staggering contraction of the global economy that came with COVID the global economy basically shut down. And an enormous fiscal outlay for from every major economy in the world to ensure that all the people that were suffering and had their businesses closed and lost their jobs would still be able to get through while the economy contracted. And then the economies open up, but not at the same time.

And the shipments and ships, they're not in the right place. So what happens as a consequence of all of that? Well, people are ready to spend money. Supply chains are massively disrupted. Costs go way up and costs go way up around the world. Doesn't matter if you were Biden, or if you were the Europeans, or you were the Chinese or the Brits, the Japanese. Everyone experiencing generational levels of inflation. Overall global growth from 6% in 2021% to 3% in 2022, expecting less than 2% in 2023. That's a global recession.

The implications of that around the world will be very serious, especially given levels of present inflation. The wealthy countries have the money to be able to continue to ensure that their working classes, their middle classes, are taken care of. But the real issue is for developing countries who don't have the fiscal space to be able to make these payments to restive populations. They'll put policies in place that will only make them much more indebted dollar denominated debt, in many cases with higher interest rates that they will not be able to service, leading to collapse.

The social instability, the political instability that comes from these economic challenges on much of the developing world is at higher levels in 2023 than we have seen in decades.

Number three, weapons of mass disruption. The United States, back in 1989, when the wall came down, was the leading exporter of democracy around the world. Not always with successful outcomes, frequently hypocritically, but nonetheless, that's how the wall came down. That's how the Soviet Union was defeated in 2023. Only 30 years later, the United States has become the principal exporter of tools that destroy democracy. That's not the intention of the us government. It's not even the intention of the technology companies that have these algorithms.

It is an unintended consequence of the business model and the AI capabilities. But we are seeing the exploitation of these tools by bad actors with deep fakes in video and other tools that are used both politically and economically to achieve changes in your behavior, both in the marketplace and in politics, will pose great dangers to representative democracy, as well as the proper functioning of the free market. That's why Brazil had their January 8 events that looked an awful lot like those in the United States on January 6.

Without Instagram, without Facebook, without all of these algorithms driving all these conspiracy theories. You don't get tens of thousands of Brazilians that believe that their election was stolen and are prepared to throw away their futures in order to occupy these buildings. We're gonna see a lot more of this. Brazil's not about to fall apart, just as the United States was not. But around the world, democracies are becoming more vulnerable because these tools are being exported, and no one is able to stop them.

Number two, maximum Xi. Xi Jinping is now the undisputed leader of China. He has rid himself of term limits. He can be president for life. He has also surrounded himself in the communist party, the entire hierarchy, with only loyalists that don't have checks and balances. And as a consequence, you can make mistakes. Those mistakes can be big. They can have major implications for how the world actually works. This is not the way China was run ten years ago.

There was a lot of differentiation between hardliners on the military and people that wanted more pragmatic economic outcomes. Technocrats, the Shanghai clan, Beijing, you name it. But today, you are with Xi or you are out. We saw that with the treatment of the former president, Hu Jintao. Forced removal in front of the entire Communist Party leadership was an extraordinary display of the unique power that Xi Jinping was prepared to exercise. And every person in that room understood that there, but for the grace of God were shedden go there.

We saw that with the sudden turn from zero Covid to maximum Covid, made by a snap decision of the chinese president at the end of the year. That level of uncertainty does not just involve changing the path on Covid. It also involves treatment of technology companies, engagement in the global economy, even issues of fundamental national security.

Now, the good news. The good news is that the United States and China are not in a cold war. They don't want a cold war. Indeed, after the g 20 in Bali, Xi Jinping and President Biden put a floor underneath the relationship to ensure that it couldn't continue to deteriorate in ways that would be damaging to both countries. But many companies around the world see maximum Xi and are discomfited by it. As a consequence, they are themselves taking decisions to start to. To decouple further from the chinese economy. Unwinding globalization, decreasing global market efficiency and creating challenges for the global economy.

And number one, rogue Russia. Over the course of one year, Russia has gone from a global power standing as the most important friend without global limits, with China's Xi Jinping to becoming a rogue state, isolated from the entire group of advanced industrial economies, cut off economically from Europe, their most important trading partners, and facing staggering losses on the battlefield in Ukraine. There is no way for Putin to turn this around under any circumstances. He cannot achieve the status quo ante of February 23, before he decided to invade the independent Ukraine.

Rather, NATO is enlarging. With thousands of troops forward deployed, Ukraine has become one of the most powerful military states in the continent of Europe. The Europeans have moved away from their energy supply, from Russia, and they'll never return to it. And from a political perspective, the Russians have become seen as war criminals by the United States and all of its critical allies around the world. Russia is not going anywhere. Putin is not going to be forced out of office in the foreseeable future.

And as a consequence, the question is, what is he going to do? Because the reason Putin's law losing is because he's fighting not just Ukraine, but NATO. This is essentially a proxy war where the Americans and all of their allies are doing everything they can to provide the training, the intelligence, and the military support to ensure that Ukraine can defend itself, retake its territory, and bloody the Russians after their illegal invasion.

The Russians have taken this war thus far to Ukraine, but it's hard to imagine that it'll stop there. Remember, Russia has 6000 nuclear weapons, more than anybody else in the world. And so they feel that they have the ultimate deterrent to stop a third world war. Which means that asymmetric attacks, like cyber, like fiber, like proxy strikes, like pipeline attacks, like terrorism into NATO states, much like what the Iranians have done in the Middle east over the past years, does lead to a consolidation of the allies. We saw the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states.

You're seeing NATO becoming much stronger, but it also means much more danger for these countries going forward as well. The potential for mutually assured destruction because of accidents and miscalculations in and around the battlefield will be higher in 2023 as a consequence of this war than at any point since the cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Global, Politics, Economics, Top Risks, Social Media Impact, Generational Change, Big Think