Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU,

and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

So, I think it might be an understatement to say that there's been a lot of appeable in the world lately.

And to reflect that, the bulletin of the atomic scientist has officially updated their

doomsday clock to 85 seconds to midnight.

Oh, God.

You know, it's been well past 1130 for decades now.

I know.

But this doesn't portend well for us.

I know.

I was trying to look up

when it was the worst during the Cold War and I was seeing some sources said seven minutes,

some sources said two minutes. So I don't really know what 85 seconds exactly is supposed to mean.

It means code red. It means take out those old posters from the Cold War era when they're telling you what to do in the event of a nuclear strike and brush up on it.

It's like that meme with the guy sitting in the room and it's on fire and he's just saying, I'm fine.

Everything is fine.

Cool.

All right.

Well, state of the world right now.

Everything's fine.

We're fine. Yeah, there's a lot of different things that we could talk about going on right now. Today we're going to talk about Iran, which recently experienced a huge wave of protests that were so significant that the government actually shut down

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