Hello friends, welcome to my video about starters. Now this is not a super well-known book series, so I think the best way to introduce you to it is by just reading you the summer. Callie lost her parents when the Spore Wars wiped out everyone between the ages of 20 and 60. Her and her little brother Tyler go on the run, living as squatters with their friend Michael and fighting off renegades who would kill them for a cookie. Callie's only hope is prime destinations, a disturbing place in Beverly Hills run by a mysterious figure known as the old man. He hires teens to rent their bodies to enders, seniors who want to be young again. Callie, desperate for the money that will keep her, Tyler, and Michael alive, agrees to be a donor. But the neurochip they place in Callie's head malfunctions and she wakes up in the life of her renter, living in her mansion, driving her cars, and going out with a senator's grandson.  Now if that sounds silly, that's because, yeah, it is. Having, having read the whole series, it's, it's pretty silly, yeah. And you might have heard of it just because of the Spore Wars thing. You know, like, I know it's become a little bit of a meme in some circles for people to just mention the Spore Wars offhand because they've heard of these books but don't know anything about them.  And starters is a world where the oppressed victims are literally just teenagers, like literally. The, the put upon group of people in the world are starters who are people under the age of 20, like, my goodness, man, that's, that's kind of ballsy, you know, because the young people literally, they all had their parents die in the Spore Wars, they legally aren't allowed to work, and if they don't have any guardians looking after them, which usually is their grandparents, then they are forced into these places called institutions, which are basically just orphanages, and they're run more like prisons than anything. And now, even their bodies aren't their own, like even then, they, just to survive, they are forced to literally sell access to their flesh and blood, and they are oppressed by enders who are old people, and I don't know, I don't have much else to add right here, so let's just do a summary, and then we'll get into all the analysis, I guess, so spoilers ahead from here, let's go. Hey guys, they were out of Snickers. So we start with Callie visiting prime destinations and deciding whether or not she wants to sign up to be a renter, and this is a year after the Spore Wars happened. Basically, there was already a conflict, and then during that, China released some spores that were supposed to kill everybody. However, they did develop a vaccine, and the most vulnerable people, who are those over the age of 60 and those under the age of 20, were given a vaccine, and only a couple of people in between those ages who are just called middles got it, and then the rest of them died, so there's a couple of middles left, but not very many, and honestly, starters and enders is kind of a stupid, those are both stupid titles, but calling someone a middle, that sounds like somebody who's comfortable being a top or a bottom. Also, people live a very, very long time in this world, like at one point Callie sees a man and says that he's about a hundred years old and describes that as being not that old, so people pretty regularly live to be like 120, 130 in this world, and after the death of her parents, Callie is now homeless, and she's squatting in an abandoned apartment building along with her younger brother Tyler and her friend Michael.  Now, the first two rentals go okay. Like, she wakes up afterwards, and she has these mysterious cuts and bruises on her, but overall it goes okay, and each of these rentals lasts a couple of days, and she's unconscious throughout it, and she's supposed to only have three rentals, and then her period is up, and the third one, though, which is supposed to last about a month, she wakes up partway through, and she's just in a nightclub hanging out with some other people, and she tries to figure out who rented her and what is going on, and from there, what I can only describe as a series of events follows from there, because everything that happens in this series, it doesn't tie together very well, it's really just a series of flimsy justifications to have Callie put into difficult situations, which she then has to find her way out of, so eventually we find out that the woman who was renting Callie actually started dating a wealthy boy named Blake, who is around Callie's age, and Callie, while pretending to be the other lady, grows kind of attached to Blake as well, and then we learn that the woman renting her is named Helena, and she is a wealthy ender, and Helena winds up telling her that prime destinations is not going to actually pay her when her final rental period is up, that they're going to keep her around forever and keep renting her out to other people, and eventually, renters are also going to be available for permanent purchase, so like, you know, old people can just have their real bodies sitting somewhere being medically taken care of, and then they just take over the body of a young person and get to be young again. Now, before actually getting, you know, taken on as a renter, Callie and everybody else gets cosmetic surgery to give them, you know, perfectly smooth skin and nice hair and everything, and some wealthy kids really wanted that cosmetic surgery, but their families wouldn't pay for it for whatever reason, so they used fake identities and then became renters so that they could get that, but then they went missing, and it turns out that, again, yeah, that this is how Helena found out that people are being permanently bought, and they're never getting out of there, and her granddaughter, whose name is Emma, was actually one of them, so that's why she met up with some other people who have been working against prime destinations and is working against them, and specifically, she took Callie's body so that she could assassinate a senator who has been working with prime destinations. Yeah, the senator in question is Blake's grandfather, so that's why she's dating him, she's trying to get close to the senator. Now, again, Callie really isn't anything special, so I'm not sure why she got chosen specifically, or if she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but whatever. Now, they cannot remove the chip from Callie's head because that would kill her, and that's actually evidence they used to show that, like, yeah, these things were meant to be permanent, and so she gets it modified, that way the two of them can just communicate back and forth, like almost telepathy, and so Helena tries to get her to help, and Callie's like, no, no way, but then Helena is found and killed pretty quickly after, and then what I can only describe as some things happen, like, again, none of it really makes sense, none of it ties together. I can cut out like 60% of these books, and the story still makes sense, trust me, and so Callie, who again has been missing at this stage for a couple of weeks, her friend Michael is desperate enough to need money after she disappeared, that he also becomes a renter, and so he gets taken by a buyer, and when Callie runs up and sees him, he sexually harasses her for a bit, and then afterwards she is caught and sent to an institution, and Tyler is most likely taken by prime destinations, and the institution is bad, and she's there for a little while, and it like, super sucks, I guess, and while she's there, she meets a girl named Sarah, who has a heart condition. Now, Sarah and Callie do work together to escape, however, they're about to be caught, and so Sarah has to run off and cause a distraction, and the guards hit her with tasers, and because of her heart condition, she dies, like, she is killed. So after escaping, Callie goes and meets up with some of Helena's comrades, they broadcast a message to the country, letting people know what's going on, and then they go off and they raid prime destinations, rescue some of the people there, and they confront the guy who runs it, who is just called the old man, and hasn't shown up in person up until this point. He is a dude who, for whatever reason, wears this weird electronic mask that obscures his face, and then he flees in a helicopter, and then later Callie finds Blake, and he doesn't recognize her because it turns out that when she was talking with Blake, he was actually being controlled by the old man the whole time. Ew, so yeah, this guy that she was kind of falling in love with was just an old man in the body of a teenage boy, that's a weird thing to think about really, and it turns out that the old man was inhabiting Blake's body, he was essentially holding him hostage in order to make his senator grandfather work with him, like it turns out after this, once they rescue Blake, the senator actually turns out to be on their side, and he's pretty reasonable. And apparently Helena altered her will at the last minute, so now after Callie is able to rescue her brother, she inherits all of Helena's possessions and her money, and one of Helena's friends named Lauren agrees to sign on as Callie's legal guardian, like she's not gonna actually try and tell her what to do and be her mom or anything, but it just is a way to prevent her from being sent to an institution, and then Callie vows to find the old man, and she vows to find Helena's granddaughter Emma, and then the book ends. And then the second book, which is the last one, is called Enders, and it starts with Callie trying to use her new wealth to help homeless kids nearby, you know, she's like bringing them food and everything as, doing as much as she can, and the people who had the chips put in their heads by prime destinations are no longer being rented, and people decide to just call them medals, for some reason, like, we don't, we don't need a name for that, you know, we don't need to capitalize a noun for everything and call it world building, you know, we can just call them people who used to work for prime destinations or former renters or something, you know, it's, it's weird, but also the old man is still talking to Callie through the chip in her head, and she also hears a voice which sounds like her father, which doesn't make sense because her father's dead, and also the old man can make the chips randomly explode, like, to show this off, he has somebody blow up in the middle of a mall and kills some people. So after a couple more events, Callie runs into somebody who is named Haydn, it's spelled almost like Haydn, but it's pronounced Haydn, I don't know why, and he tells her that he is the old man's son, and Haydn is about her age as well, and he wants to help her take him down, and Haydn has a bunch of money and a bunch of connections, so they decide to work together, and Callie like sort of starts falling in love with him too as they're working together, because obviously, and also Michael, she's been kind of in love with Michael this whole time, I don't know, like, we'll get more into that later, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and while they're going around doing this, they are captured by a man with a leopard tattoo who we later learn is named Dawson. Now Dawson experiments on them and experiments to see what their chips can do for a bit, including trying to control them while they're still conscious, because you know, again, normally when they get someone else takes control of them, it's like they fall asleep, and then they just wake up afterwards with no memory of what was happening, but Dawson is doing experiments to see if they can remain conscious and aware of what's going on while somebody is controlling them and forcing them to do things against their will, and at first it works, but Callie does also learn to resist by, as the book puts it, she imagines a blue line from her controller to her, and a gold line from her to her controller, and then she's able to reverse it. It's, I don't know, it doesn't, it's weird. It's just weird future sci-fi tech, okay? This is many decades in the future by now. I just don't think about it too much. Now, after a while, Dawson lets them know that he is actually working for the government. It's basically just a secret portion of law enforcement that operates outside the law, which is suspicious, but okay. That's suspicious. That's weird. Also, Callie's father is alive. We get confirmation that he is alive, because it turns out he was actually a scientist who was working on the technology that was used in the chips that control people, and he was kidnapped by the old man, but they somehow faked his death during the Spore Wars. Now, I just want to say this was not mentioned at all in the first book. Like, there was nothing saying that Callie's father was a scientist in the first book at all. This is 100% a retcon. Let's be clear. She also runs into Helena's granddaughter, Emma, and she's like, oh great, I found her, but then she dies very quickly after her, so that just kind of leads nowhere. And also around this time that we get in several twists around here, we learn that the old man is not Haydn's father. Haydn is the old man. You see, like, when she saw Haydn, or when she saw the old man wearing that crazy mask and everything, that was just Haydn in disguise. Like, he was trying to pretend that he wasn't a teenager. So he had the mask.  He had lifts in his shoes. You know, he was trying to look different. Now, you might realize this is the same twist from the first book where she realized that Blake was actually the old man and now she's wearing that Haydn is actually the old man. This is the same twist, but it's okay. You see, Haydn did create prime destinations, but it wasn't just to make money. He was planning to, yes, make money from the business, but also, like, take all of his customers and keep them in, like, comas, not quite permanent, but almost permanent, and then drain their bank accounts and use all their money to lobby for changes and make life better for starters, you know, stuff like ending the institutions and replacing it with school, getting rid of the laws that tells them they can't work and that they have to have a legal guardian, otherwise they get arrested, you know, stuff like that. Now, the real bad guy, the one who kidnapped Callie's father and is doing bad stuff with the chips and everything, that is Haydn's father, but he's not the old man. He's not the one that was in charge of prime destinations. I'm just going to call him the bad guy, because let's be honest, none of us care what his name is. It doesn't matter. He's just, he's the bad guy. That's all there is to him. He's the one that is, you know, making metals explode randomly and he's also trying to use the technology to do other nefarious things. So they wind up going out to his compound, which is hidden out in the desert somewhere, so that they can find Callie's father and put a stop to everything. However, they are captured by the bad guy pretty quickly. And I guess the timing was very fortuitous here because he just happens to be running an auction where he is showing off the technology to some prospective buyers. And he mostly, he mostly talks about how it could be used for assassinations, you know, like he could take over someone's mind and force them to take out business rivals and stuff like that. That's the main thing he focuses on.   And to demonstrate the control, the bad guy actually has her stripped down to her underwear and danced around in a provocative manner in front of this crowd of people. And this got a little dark, didn't it? Don't worry, nothing else happens. But this scene is really horrifying and gross, but like, it's supposed to be, you know, like this scene really does hammer home how awful it would be to not even have control of your own body. And so scenes like this do make it clear that these books had a lot of potential and they could have been something cool, but pretty much all the details need a lot of work. Also at this stage, it is a man inside of a girl's body. So I guess it's now a trans allegory or something. I don't know. It seems like lazy YouTubers always either would say that it's woke trash because the main character's a girl or they would say it's queer coded. Like those takes are both very, very stale by now. So the bad guy gives Callie a gun and tries to make her kill her own father. But due to her training from before, she is able to not only resist the compulsion but reverse it. And so she takes control of the bad guy for a little while. And using his body, she orders the guards to put away their weapons and they're confused, but they do it.  So Callie is reunited with her friends and family. The day is saved and everything is great. The last real scene from the story is Callie confronting the woman who ran the institution that she was in for a bit in the first book. And the woman just straight up admits that she was selling kids to the bad guy for experimentation and to be sold as renters and stuff. And it was $10,000 per kid, which I guess inflation doesn't exist because again, this is decades in the future. So you think $10,000 wouldn't be that much, but whatever. And then while they're talking, she actually grabs a letter opener and stabs herself with it. And then she calls out for help. And she's like, help, help, Callie stabbed me. But it turns out Dawson was watching through Callie's eyes the whole time. So he heard her confession and he knows Callie didn't do anything. And so the woman just gets arrested. And then the end is with Callie and the others working with Dawson trying to figure out how to prevent the technology from being abused. There's a few moments of hope. And then Callie's like, yeah, let's make the world better and then it ends. So the thing about dystopian fiction is that it has to comment on the real world in some way. Otherwise, it's not really a dystopia.  And starters almost makes a point about the real world. You know, it doesn't, but it comes kind of close because many of you watching this are really young. And so you probably are aware that the cost of living has risen exponentially in the past couple of decades. And at the same time, wages have fallen significantly from when our parents and grandparents were around. And as life expectancy has risen more and more, young people are increasingly being shut out of government, business, and even more of our income is going to stuff like social security and pension funds, which in all likelihood, we're never going to benefit from. Like in the US, the social security is going to be insolvent in about 10 years unless they change something. And on top of that, they are increasingly making horrible, short-sighted decisions that they won't live long enough to feel the consequences of, e.g. ignoring climate change. Or hell, another good example of this would be the US was in Afghanistan for about 20 years. And by the end of that war, there were soldiers over there who were not even born when the war started. Because again, it lasted 20 years, and some of the youngest soldiers over there were 18 or 19. The more time goes on, the more it starts to feel like we are always paying for the actions of our elders and that we really are just tools to be used and discarded by them. And Starters almost does something with that, you know? Like it almost stands up and says, hey, they've taken everything, now all that's left is to literally buy us and use us as vessels for their own pleasure. And again, that almost could be something. Like again, the scene where Cali is forced to strip and dance in front of people is horrifying. And with more scenes like that, I think this book could have really been powerful. But the combination of the world being nonsensical, the plot being all over the place, the main character girl needing to be the center of things, and the happy ending kind of ruins it. And what that all comes back to really is the tone. Because this should be a dark, disturbing story. And there's like one or two scenes where it is. But for the most part, it seems like everyone in the world is completely oblivious to the horror of the world. At one point, Cali and some other renters see an advertisement for, you know, being able to buy people's bodies permanently. And Cali snaps at one of the other renters and says that buying somebody's body would be like killing them, because you know, they're essentially put to sleep forever.  And I just, no one who would be okay with buying another person and shutting their mind off forever would be unaware of what they were doing. And they wouldn't suddenly become sympathetic to their, to the plight of the people that they'd be doing it to, simply because somebody said that it was bad. Like, if all of their society was just sick, and there had been a severe moral decline from where we are today, then, you know, that would make sense. But then most people would just not see this as a big deal. And because that's not the case, that means the villain is, it's not society. It's literally just this one bad company run by this one guy. Or so we think. The company turns out to be run by a good guy, but there is still just one bad guy. There's no plot about overthrowing an evil government, like in most of these crappy, dystopian young adult novels. In fact, the government is actively helping them at the end. Prime Destinations wasn't like an evil corporation that was doing everything. It was a front for fixing the world. And I don't really have a good place to put this, but it doesn't make sense for people. The whole renter thing just doesn't make sense. You know, because people under the age of 19 legally cannot rent and they cannot, or excuse me, they cannot work and they cannot rent or buy housing. So even if Cali got all this money and was like, you know, paid under the table or whatever, she wouldn't really be able to do anything with it. The only evil things in this world are Haydn's dad and a couple of mostly anonymous billionaires. And at first it seems like these people are just using the starters for their own pleasure, you know, which is really bad. But then at the end, the bad guy just hypes up the technology by saying you can use it for assassinations, you know? So I feel like you could literally just take this same plot and put it into today's world and just have it be, it would make about as much sense, you know? You wouldn't need all of society to shift around it in order for it to make sense. And that's not really a dystopia. Also, this world is technically post-apocalyptic. Or at least the United States is technically post-apocalyptic because the Spore Wars only hit here and then everyone else closed their borders to make sure the spores didn't spread.    Like, it's just everything is exactly the same except a bunch of the people, of all the middles died. I hate referring to them that way, but the people between the ages of 20 and 60, most of them died. Most of the books take place in Los Angeles and the surrounding area and it doesn't feel like the charred remnants of a city or anything.   There's a huge divide between rich and poor people. The boundaries between people's minds and bodies are being broken down and start to lose coherence. Like, it feels like a cyberpunk story and not in a bad way, but that just doesn't make sense with the whole spore wars thing happening. You know, like, if a huge chunk of the population died all at once, then society would collapse. Like, it just would. Like, all the people who keep things running dying would cause some issues down the line, let's say. And because the spore wars barely feature into anything, it would have been substantially better if they weren't there at all. You know, like, this story would make a lot more sense if the war didn't happen and Callie was just made homeless after her dad died. You know, literally everything else would be the same. And so this isn't a dystopia. You know, it's just not, even though it's trying to be, and it's not post-apocalyptic, so what is it then? And I'm not sure. I think this weird, unfocused world building stems from a lot of people's complete inability to realize that things can't continue the way that they are forever.  Like, they can't imagine in their minds of, okay, this just slowly breaks down.  And so I get the feeling that if in this world the spore wars hadn't happened, everyone would be humming along happy as a clam except for one evil guy who is up to no good. And I don't know, it just makes me feel like dystopias can't be created by people who don't have an understanding of the real world. There is nothing to say about most of the people here.  Everything is told from her first-person perspective. She is a teenage girl who gets wrapped up in things that she didn't want to get wrapped up in. She loves her brother. She loves her dad. She loves Michael. She loves a couple of boys, really. That's it. And that's all I can think of.  And so at first she kind of seems like a completely personalityless blank slate. However, credit where it's due, she does things. You know, the story is changed and the direction of the story changes based on her actions and her choices. And at the end, she helps to save the day, but she doesn't do it herself.  So that's good. But at the same time, she isn't really special in any way. She is just the body that Helena chose to try and assassinate the senator with. So she just winds up getting caught up in things by pure coincidence. But then she also winds up being the best person for that position because she can reverse the control of the chip, which no one else seems to be able to do. And she also can work with Haydn and he trusts her and she trusts him. But I don't know, even in spite of all of that, who is Callie? Who is she? What drives her? What sort of dreams does she have? I really couldn't tell you. It feels like she popped into existence a year before the story started when she first became homeless, and then it feels like she fades away into nothingness after the story ended. So she doesn't feel like a hero, but she also doesn't feel like a normal person that just got swept up in all of this. And she also doesn't feel like an empty vessel that's just there to deliver the story either. So it feels like she's trying to be all three at once, which is very strange. I don't think I've ever seen that before. But even if she had just been stupid or annoying, she would be a lot less of a mess than trying to do all of this at once. Like, to be honest, I think I would rather she was just a blank slate, as for the other characters. I mean, again, there's really not a lot to say about them. Like, her dad just sort of pops up in the second book in order to give her a personal connection to the bad guy. And speaking of the bad guy, why exactly is he evil? Like, at one point, Callie just straight up asks him, why are you doing this? Is it just for money? And he says, yes. Like, there is nothing else to him. Also, he was only introduced three quarters of the way through the last book. So we get barely any time with him. Good job, guys. That's great.  He's not a representative of some sort of awful system. He is just an evil, powerful man who wants more power. And I'm not saying that you can't do a villain like that, but you have to do, you know, something with them. You have to give us some time with them. You have to give them a little bit of personality. Maybe give them some sort of motivation or some sort of depth. Otherwise, they fail as a villain on a personal level. And that's what the bad guy does here. He fails on a villain as a personal level, and he fails as a symbol of any other sort of message that this book might have tried to send. And to be honest, the one character in this that I had any sort of attachment to at all was Sarah, you know, the girl from the institution who died and had a heart condition. Like, she was willing to die so that others could escape. And she's really only there to, you know, help out Callie and then make her feel bad sometimes when she thinks back and remembers it. But, hey, I felt something. You know, everyone else here just occupies a role in this society, but they do it very poorly because as I explained earlier, this society is nonsensical and not in a deliberate way. You know, Michael is homeless, but for the most part, he doesn't act like he's starving or desperate or anything like that. He's just, he's like, I don't know, hallmark homeless, where you're just a normal person who lives outside, I guess. I don't know. Haydn is somehow a teenager that set up a massive company and planned out a whole scheme involving bank fraud and political lobbyists. Again, he's like 18, but and he managed to do all this. But he had to be a teenager so that Callie could fall in love with him. Now remember, Starters was written back when authors of young adult novels tried, for the most part, to have age-appropriate love interest for their main characters.  Like they just, they just do that and they see no problem with it, I guess. And then we have Helena, who is an old woman who became an assassin for some sort of anti-corporate slash anti-government group somehow. Like we know her motivation for it was that her granddaughter went missing, but we don't know anything else about how she, you know, became the person that they turned to for assassination. Dawson is some sort of government agent that shows up to help defeat the villains at the end. Like he, but he needed teenagers to help him somehow.  So Callie sort of falls in love with Blake in the first book, only to find out that he was actually the old man. And she's also sort of in love with Michael throughout all of this.  He's just, he's generally creepy and sexually aggressive towards her. And again, this is one of the scenes that does kind of drive home the horror of the situation because like her friend is gone and this guy is wearing his skin. And at the beginning of the second book, there is a thing with her where she seems to feel weird about, you know, falling in love with the old man, even if she didn't know it was him at the time. And it seems to be maybe working towards something, but nothing ever comes of it because it turns out the old man is actually a hot teenage boy, so she doesn't need to feel weird about it. But then between Callie and Haydn, there's really nothing even resembling chemistry, you know, like just, here's two good-looking people of a similar age. They are kind of in love now, I don't know. And like, the thing is, I'm sure there have been plenty of people who rented bodies and then had sex or began relationships using those rented bodies, like, hell, again, in the first book, Blake and Helena were doing that. And this could have added to the horror or the injustice of the situation and it could have left everyone involved with weird confusing feelings that they don't know what to do with. Like, there's a lot of directions you could go with this, whether you're trying to be like dramatic or comedic or whatever. And none of those directions are taken, you know? And like, the thing is, if this just wanted to be a regular romance, then fine. But there's almost no regular romance in here. Like, I know I'm devoting an entire section of this video to it, so you'd think there would be, but there's really not that much. Like, by the end, I couldn't even tell you who Callie is in love with or if she's in a relationship with anyone. Like, I think she's in love with Blake at the end, but also he's barely in the second book. So maybe she's in love with Haydn, and I'm not sure how she feels about Michael. Like, I don't know why they would have a love triangle without having a resolution at the end. Or I guess it's not a love triangle so much as a Pentagon, because you have Callie, Blake, Michael, Haydn, and if you count Haydn as the old man as a separate one, then, you know, there's five. But yeah, by the end, there's no confession of love. There's no big kiss or anything. It's just, it seems almost like it's forgotten. And it kind of seems like the author didn't want the romance there, and if that's the case, then why did she include it? My first thought was that, you know, she put it in there to make it sell. Like, either that was her own idea, or the publisher really wanted her to do it, or something. I don't know. But at the same time, maybe this is something the author wanted to put in there. Like, maybe this was her vision. And if it was her vision, why didn't she commit to it? And if it's not there to, if it's just there to sell, like, if they think it'll make it appeal to a broader audience, then same story. Like, why, why not commit? I don't know. Like, why is there a romance here at all? I couldn't tell you. It's okay. I got it. Now, I know that's a pretty vague thing to say, but like, bear with me for a bit. What is Starters? You know, if I had to sum it up in just a sentence or two, how would I do that? Like, what is the emotional core of this book series? And I thought about that for a while, but I came up completely blank.  You know, it feels like someone dumped some paint, paint onto a canvas, and then pretended that the resulting mess was purposeful.  That's what I wanted to do. Who was this written for? What is it trying to be? You know, is it trying to be an action-adventure story? Because if that's the case, it fails because it doesn't have a whole lot of action-adventure stuff in it. Is it trying to be about a girl in difficult circumstances who finds love and falls in love? Well, if that's the case, it fails because it doesn't have a whole lot of romance or anything in it. Is it trying to be a social commentary or satire? Well, then it fails because everything here is completely ridiculous. Like, is it trying to be something else? Like, I couldn't even begin to guess at what that something else would be. And if so, so if it's trying to be that something else, it failed at that. Like, I don't know if I've ever read a book series with this much of an identity crisis. I really don't. So what is starters? I can't tell you.  Starters feel so much like something that could only ever possibly exist as part of a trend. You know, not necessarily something that's bad, but just something that is very clearly trying to cash in and get some of that sweet, sweet Hunger Games money, you know? And that's why it feels like so many different things while also not really feeling like anything. It's not trying to be anything. It's grabbing random pieces and trying to assemble those pieces into the shape of what we've seen before, e.g., you know, the Hunger Games and other popular young adult dystopias. And from a distance that might work, but up close the differences become really, really stark. You know, when you first heard about starters, whether it was at the beginning of this video or even earlier, you probably would have just assumed it was yet another one of these, you know, Hunger Games ripoffs, but it really isn't.  And so at the very least, I can say that it's unique. It's trying to rip off something much better, but its incompetence accidentally made it different. So, yeah, that's the main thing I have to say about starters. Like, it wasn't good and it wasn't entertainingly bad, but I do feel like I got something out of it. I don't know what that something is, but I got something out of it. And, well, that's something, I suppose. Oh my goodness, I love all of you so much. If you want your name on here, then consider donating to my Patreon page.  And if you don't feel like doing that, then, you know, just like the video, comment, subscribe to the channel. That, you know, all that stuff. Goodbye.


Ending the pain caused by narcissists. It's no secret that narcissists cause us a lot of pain. They cause a lot of damage and destruction to our lives. And they leave us alone by ourselves to pick up the pieces, to make things better again on our own. And the problem we have is that once someone has abused us, once someone has exploited us, taken advantage of us, we end up looking to them for the answer. We end up expecting them to save us from the very damage that they have caused. We expect them to make things better. This is what is known as the trauma bond, as many of you may know. The narcissist has traumatized you.  They've made your life difficult. They've affected your health and well-being. And it's really affected you. It's brought you down. Many of you are experiencing anxiety and depression. Many of you are suffering from financial difficulties. Many of you are isolated from your family and friends. You spend all of your time alone. There's no one that you can turn to for help. And you expect validation from the narcissist.  And, yeah, I get it. They've hurt you. They've caused problems for you. They've discarded you. So you're expecting some form of retribution. You're expecting something in return for the difficulty and inconveniences that they have caused to you. And with a normal person, that is perfectly understandable. You may expect them to be there for you. To fix the damage that they've caused. To end the pain. To provide you with emotional support. Yeah, you may expect a normal person to do that. But let's be real here. We're talking about narcissists.  You have to remember that this is the same person that did all of those things to you. And now you're expecting them to make it better. You're expecting them to heal your wounds. Which is something they're never going to do. The reason why you ended up in this situation in the first place is because they lacked consideration for you. Because they were preoccupied with their own self-interest and needs. And if you're seeking validation from the narcissist, they're just going to give you breadcrumbs. They're going to give you the bare minimum just to keep you coming back. To keep you holding on. To keep you expecting something that they have promised to you in the future. The future faking. But I can tell you right now, whatever they've promised you, you are not going to get that. I don't care what it is. If it's a marriage, children, maybe you're planning to buy a home together. You're planning to take trips abroad. It's not going to happen. It's future faking. And it works very well with the trauma bond. Because the whole point of the trauma bond is that you're expecting some relief from the pain and trauma. From the very person who did that to you. And it's crazy when you think about it.  To help make things better for you? Of course you wouldn't. You would do anything you can to avoid that person for the rest of your life. Because you already know they mean you know well. And yeah, I get it though, because a lot of these narcissists that people are dealing with, they are covert. They play their role. They put on an act as though they're there for you. They're there to help you to make your life better when in actuality they're just using you. It's hard for a lot of you to accept. But I've said it so many times in my videos and I will say it again. They do not love you. They do not care about you. If they did, they would not be doing those things. They would not have deliberately hurt you time and time again. If someone loves you, breaking you would break them. So let's talk about ending the pain. We've talked about how not to end the pain. Going back to the narcissist, seeking validation, that's going to prolong the pain. That's going to intensify it. If you want to end the pain caused by narcissistic abuse, you need to self-reflect and go within. You need to heal yourself. You need to... depend on yourself. And yeah, I know it's easier said than done. After all of the things they said to you, they targeted your self-esteem. They made you feel like you're not good enough for anyone or anything. They made you feel so small. I get that. Makes you feel like you can't make it on your own.  But you can. You can do it. I've dealt with narcissists myself on many occasions.  They made my life more difficult than I ever thought I could imagine. But time and time again, I climbed out of the ditch that they dug for me. And I know that you can do that as well. I know that you are all capable of it. The true test of a man is not about how much you accumulate throughout your life.  The true test of a man has nothing to do with that. None of that stuff really makes you a man. The true test of a man is understanding that life can be hard.  You're gonna struggle. You're gonna experience difficulties. You're gonna go through the trials and tribulations whether you like it or not. But what really tests you is whether or not you can get back up and try again. Like despite everything they threw at you, everything they said and did to you.  You still keep going. Even if you're crawling on your hands and knees, you're still doing it. And at the end of it all, you can say, you didn't break me. Look, I'm still able to do what I need to do. And that's really what it's all about. Thanks for the donation, new mess. I appreciate it. Yeah, that's really what it's all about. It's not about just moving through life in an effortless way with no problems, with nothing going wrong. Anyone can do that. That doesn't make you a strong person. You've got to go through some difficult things. And when you get back up again, you've got to play strength. That's what makes you strong. And that's really what ends the pain as well. Yeah. There may have been some tough times in the past. People may have said and done some things to you. But it's about looking forward to the future. Realising that you have something ahead of you. Something to look forward to. And you need to connect your love, passion and enthusiasm into that. You may have had a lot of love and enthusiasm for the narcissist. But that didn't result in anything beneficial for you. It ruined you. It destroyed you. It did. But that doesn't mean that that love and passion is a bad thing, no. It's a good thing if you put it in the right direction. If you put it towards the right things, then it can manifest into something beautiful. It's not just about having good, clean, positive energy. That's one part of it. But it has to be directed into the right place. You can water a dead flower all day, every day. For months, you can give it all of the sunlight in the world. It's not going to make a difference. That flower is dead. But if you water a seed and you give that seed sunshine, one day it's going to grow into a beautiful flower. You really need to think about where you invest your time and energy. Are you investing it in things that are no good for you? I mean, following narcissistic abuse, many people turn to alcohol, drugs, casual sex, these things are not helping you. So, you need to direct your energy to the right things, the right people. When you're going to reap the rewards, then you will get to enjoy the fruits of your labour. But, as I said, it has to be invested in things that are reciprocal, where there is an equal exchange, because otherwise it's just going to drain you. It's going to hurt you. It's going to break you down over time.  But at that point you have no one to blame but yourself, because you've been through it once before, twice before, however many times, and by that point you should know. You should know who is not deserving of your time and energy. You should know that now. And yeah, I get it, I know sometimes they can put on an act, they can mislead us. But as soon as you do know, as soon as you identify it, you see the bread flags. You've got to get yourself out of there.  Let me put it like this, right? Let's say you've been with a narcissist for one year, two years, five years. Look back throughout that time. How much change have you seen? What have you gotten out of it? How much have you invested into it, of yourself? Are you prepared to wait that same amount of time to see the same amount of progress? I guess the answer is no. Many of you do want to cure this, but it's something you're going to have to accept. No one is coming to save you. No one is going to do the work for you and make your life better. Help you heal. No one's going to come and do that. People don't care. They're too worried about their own lives. And that's what you should be doing too. You should be focused on your life.  That person is you. You just have to take the steps to make it happen. You are the person that you have been waiting for. And no one else is going to be that for you. Go ahead and try and see that I'm right. I promise one by one they will all let you down at one point. They will all disappoint you. No one can be better than you. No one can be better for you than you. That's what I tell myself every day. And it's true. And I want you all to know that people can be the icing on the cake. They can compliment you and your life.   You must become the best version of yourself. And of course it's not all about you. It's not all about you just doing everything for yourself and just forget about everyone else. Of course not. I want to be the best version of myself so that I can share it with other people. I want to give the best of myself to you. I want to see you all thrive and live in your best lives. That's why I do this. That's why I've been able to put out these videos every day for over four years because there's nothing greater for me than being the person that I never had in my life. When I was going through tough times all of those things I had to go through with a narcissist and no one was there for me. I couldn't talk to anyone. I was alone for two years. And yeah, I wish I had someone there for me. And I want to be that person for you. And I know that I am for many of you. I hope that my story inspires you because eventually I realize that no one was going to make it happen for me. No one was going to come in my pain. No one cared about what I was going through. And that doesn't mean that everyone's a narcissist. It just means that people have their own lives. They've got their own things to worry about. Just like many of us, we can't be there for other people because we're going through our own things. It's just how it is sometimes. But honestly, the best thing you can do is to end your own pain. To heal yourself. To validate yourself. There's no better feeling in the world. Stop depending on the narcissist. I know many of you are financially dependent on them. And you are really putting yourself in a dangerous position by doing that. Because at any moment they could take it away. And then you're stuck. I know you all saw that TikTok video I posted recently. I know we don't know the full story of that. But it seemed as though one of them was financially dependent on the other. And yeah, they ended up in a very difficult situation. So make sure you're able to take care of yourself. Make sure you have your own job. There's nothing narcissistic about that. I mean, yeah, it's nice when someone wants to take care of you. But that is actually what narcissists do. Narcissists come into your life and they want to control you with money. They keep you dependent on them financially. Because that's how they keep you stuck. They know that no matter what you'll keep coming back to them for that. This video is about finding your own strength. Your independence. That's how you end your pain. When you're able to make yourself happy. You have purpose in your life. You give your life meaning. You have passion and enthusiasm for your future.  So yeah, put yourself in that position. Astro Girl says, my heart physically hurts sometimes, but you're right. I'm so sorry to hear that Astro Girl. But I understand at some level what you're going through, because I believe I've been through a similar experience myself. And I know it's not nice. And it's not just heartbreak. It's so much more than that. When you're dealing with a narcissist. I mean, that's someone you thought you could depend on. You trusted them. And they betrayed you. It's like they ripped out your heart. And then they snapped all over it. That's how it feels. And yet we're expecting them to come back and fix our broken hearts. We have to fix ourselves. No one else is going to do that. As I've always said, practice mindfulness. Meditation. Go for a walk in the park or by the beach. Listen to some relaxing, uplifting music. Maybe while you're having a bath. With bath salts, essential oils. Practice deep breathing. Watch my videos whenever you can. Because that will drive it home to you about the narcissist. And why they do what they do. And why they're never going to change. It's important to remember that. Take away your hope. They'd love you to hope and hope. Forever and ever. For the rest of your life. They would love you to do that because that's how they control you. That's how they keep you stuck. But I'm telling you to take away your hope because nothing is going to change. The only way that things are going to change is if you take action. Otherwise you're going to experience the same thing for the rest of your life. I know many people have been stuck with narcissists for 40, 50 years in a marriage. So yeah, take away your hope. They will use that against you. They like to use the future faking. They will promise something in the future in order to get what they want from you in the present. So yeah, that's why it's so important to focus on ending the pain yourself. So that you don't get trapped. You don't get stuck further into it. You free yourself by depending on yourself. And you will see that they don't like it.  They can't control you then. Just at this park here, you can see all the trees or the leaves have changed colour. Red, brown and orange. It's very cold out here but it's nice to come out for some cool air. It's refreshing. So yeah, continue to watch the videos. I upload new videos every day to drive at home so that you remember what they do, why they do it and why they will never change. And I also offer one-on-one coaching sessions as well. So if you would like to talk with me one-on-one, you can book a session with me right now. Just head to the website. It's narcsurvivor.co.uk. Other than that, that's all I've got to say for this video. And I'd just like to thank you all for taking the time out of your day to be here with me and support my content as always. So yeah, if you enjoyed it, please hit the thumbs up button down below and I will talk to you in another one very soon.


Good to be able to get out there and do a little bit yesterday. Yeah, kind of felt like a stranger. I didn't get up in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, it felt good to get out there yesterday. How do you balance that, Derek, with still dealing with a little bit of an injury?  How do you make sure you're balancing that the right way? Just make sure I'm doing the right things to get back to 100% and listen to the trainers, listen to the coaches. And when I'm able to get back out there, just go back out there and do what I need to do. Cool to be, I know you don't play for the awards, but cool to be recognized as a school holder this year. And what do you think of your hers? Oh, yeah, man, I was very excited. I appreciate everybody voting, taking any time out of their day to vote for me. So I can have the opportunity, all the Titan fans. I'm sure Alabama fans voted, everybody back home. I'm thankful for everybody who voted for me and gave me the opportunity, so. You hope that you don't play in that game and that this team can get by and you can be playing somewhere else throughout the week after? Yeah, I hope we're further down the road than Florida when they get around that time. Relish this opportunity to kind of, because you guys came in together at Alabama. Do you guys relish this opportunity that maybe you can go against each other? Yeah, I haven't talked to him, you know, in a little while, but I'm sure we'll catch up after the game and stuff like that. So it's going to be cool to go against him again. You know, he was at Tennessee, they got a chance to play against each other. So yeah, it's going to be pretty cool. I guess there's a scenario where the Texas game could be more important in the game, what would you do if somebody told you, hey, we want you to sit this one out? Would you probably not be on board with that, or what's kind of your thought process right now? Uh, focus on the Saints, focus on the Saints, when we get the time. And you know, playing these guys, they're a great team. So just focus on the Saints, not the other scenarios, focus on the Saints.


Now, we are going to discuss one of the most celebrated mechanisms of mechanism design with transfers and this is known as the VCG mechanism named after the inventors Picri, Clark and Groves. So, this is a mechanism which is also known as the Clark's pivotal mechanism. This belongs to the class of Groves class of mechanisms. So, how is it belonging to the Groves class? If you look at this specific HI theta minus I function, remember that we had all the mechanisms in the class of Groves essentially satisfies the allocative efficiency property that is all of them are actually trying to maximize the sum of the valuation of all the agents by picking their allocation. The only difference in different mechanisms in the Groves class is in their payments and that is distinguished by the choice of the HI theta minus I. The payments were HI theta minus I minus sum over the valuation of all the agents at that efficient allocation of theta I theta minus I and when agent J is type is theta J and this is summed over all the J which is not equal to I and this will be the payment of agent I. Now, based on different HI theta minus I, you can get different mechanisms and different payment rules and in the case of the Clark's pivotal rule or the VCG mechanism, this is going to be the max over all the agents' valuations, the max over the sum of the valuations of all the agents except agent I. So one another way of interpreting this is as if the player I is now removed from the whole system, it is not participating in the mechanism anymore and we are trying to maximize the sum of the valuation of all the agents except agent I and what would have been the maximum value that is given by this HI of theta minus I. So therefore the payment under the VCG and we are going to denote that as PI VCG of theta I theta minus I is given by this following expression. We have the maximization with respect to and alternative which is maximizing the sum of the valuation except agent I and the subtraction part, the second part of the expression remains the same, it is the same efficient allocation. So notice that here agent I is actually present and it is choosing that alternative. So the mechanism is choosing the alternative or the allocation in presence of agent I but we are just looking at the sum of the valuation of all the agents except agent I. So this difference is essentially the VCG payment. Now one thing we can immediately notice here is that here we are looking at the sum of the valuations except agent I in both these cases and in the first expression we are trying to pick the alternative that maximizes the sum of the valuation, pick the allocation which maximizes the sum of the valuation. So no matter whichever other alternative you pick, in particular even if that is the efficient including agent I. Now when we are looking at the agents, all the agents except agent I, this is going to be suboptimal. So this will be the maxima and this expression will be less than or equal to that value. So we can conclude that this expression, the payment here is actually non-negative that is given by this expression here, payment under VCG is always going to be non-negative which means that it is no subsidy. Remember the definition of no subsidy that we mentioned in the last module and because it is no subsidy that is asking. So it is not paying any of these agents, they can either make some positive payments or they can make zero payments but it is never giving, the mechanism is never giving any subsidy to any of these agents. This is automatically going to imply that it is also no deficit because if you take the sum of all these payments they are also going to be non-negative. Now let us come back to the interpretation of this payment rule. So what is happening here is that you are looking at the sum of the value of the other agents when agent I is not present and then subtracting it out from the same sum of the players of sum of the value of the other players when agent I is present. So this is one way of interpreting this thing and what this mechanism is doing is you can in some sense think of as if the if you are if you are not present then other players who are possibly getting some better evaluation because of your presence they are getting something less than what they could have got if agent I was not present. So this difference is essentially the marginal damage that this agent I is creating on the other agents and this mechanism is just asking that agent to compensate that. So that is one way of actually interpreting. If you ever forget the actual expression this is the way you can actually reconstruct the the payment formula that is the interpretation of the payment part but you can also interpret the utility under this BCG mechanism in which case we are just taking the sum the valuation of that agent at this efficient allocation and subtract out the payment then if you reorganize the terms you can find out that the first term will be the sum of the valuation of all the agents including agent I at that efficient allocation and back because this is the the social welfare maximizing allocation this term is going to be the maximum social welfare in presence of and this second term if you just look at it it is maximizing the utility in the world when agent I is not present. So it is the maximum social welfare in absence of agent I. So the utility that each agent gets is the marginal contribution of I to the social welfare. Let us discuss a few examples to understand the how the BCG mechanism works. So the first thing is the very old example of single object allocation and here the type is the value of that object for that player if that object gets allocated to that agent so theta I in that case is nothing but the value of that agent and if that agent does not get this item then its value is 0. So that is the setting. Now let us look at the expression of the BCG payment and try to understand what it means so what will be the BCG payment for this kind of a setting. So as before the allocation because BCG mechanism is nothing but a mechanism in the class of gross class of mechanisms the allocation rule is the efficient allocation rule allocatively efficient. So the object because this is single and indivisible object it goes to that agent who values it the most. So when all the agents are reporting their types whoever has the highest type the item goes to that agent. Now if we look at the payment that this particular agent makes we are first looking at if that agent was not present what would have been the sum of the value of all the other agents. Well now if that agent is not present then it will go the object will go to the second highest bidder because that is the maximum bidder maximum valued agent in the rest of the game. So this sum of the valuation is going to be the the value of the second highest bidder second highest valued agent and when agent i is present if we look at the agent is that agent i is getting these objects so assuming that agent i is the winner that agent is getting the object so the valuation of all the other agents is essentially going to be 0. So therefore this term for that winner is going to be 0 and this term is going to be the second highest bid. So if we go back to the previous example where the there are four agents which we discussed in the previous module they had these values and their allocation was so the efficient allocation would have been to give the item to this agent 1 and that agent will pay mean the payment and the VCG payment will be 9 which is the second highest valuation in this case. And all the other agents will pay 0 because from the same expression we can see that if agent i was not present so suppose now we are considering another agent i which is not the winner. So for that if that agent was not present nothing is going to change still in this summation the highest valued agent will have that object and its valuation will remain the same. So for instance for the second agent here this maximization with respect to all the other agents except that agent is going to be 10 and even if when this agent was present this this valuation the sum of the valuation of all the other agents was 10 because when it was present the efficient outcome has actually given the object to this agent the sum of the valuation of that agent was 10 and everybody else as well 0. So you are both these terms are essentially the same for all the losing bidders so the losing agents who are not getting that object so therefore their valuation their payment under VCG is going to be 0. Now since we have called this mechanism a pivotal mechanism let us ask this question that what is pivotal in this VCG payment. Let us look at the this example to understand this point here on the on the rows we have different players A B and C and suppose there are three alternatives three allocations that are possible either it is a football ground which is going to be built or it can be a library or a museum so this is the example where the the city planner or the municipal corporation is deciding whether to build any of this and each of these agents have a certain value associated with each of these outcomes so for instance player A does not get any value if the football ground is built it gets a high value if library is built and moderate value if museum is built for player B something different happens so what would be the outcome in this case so you know that the outcome under this VCG mechanism is going to be the efficient allocation so we are going to take the sum of each of these columns some of the valuations of each of these columns and whichever maximizes that will we are going to pick that and it's easy to see that if you pick museum then the sum of the valuation is maximum which is 150 for everything else it is going to be smaller. Now let us look at so that is the outcome so the museum is the the allocation decision what will be the VCG payment so in order to find the VCG payment for player A we will first have to remove agent A from the system and see what would have been the optimal value or the sum of the maximum sum of the value for all the other agents so if agent A is removed then we are left with these numbers only and we see that in that case building football is the one that maximizes the sum of the values so 105 will be the sum of this two numbers the valuation of all the other agents which is giving this number and when agent A was present at that situation the outcome was museum and that was giving a valuation the sum of the valuation to be 100 for the other two agents so this difference between these two things is essentially the payment that agent A is supposed to pay under this VCG mechanism similarly if you do the similar exercise for player B so then you are going to remove that player B you can see that in that case library would have been the outcome so 1.2 would have been the sum of the values of all the other agents when agent B is not present and when it is present again this will be 50 and 50 so that is the sum of the valuation of all the other agents when agent B is present so this difference is essentially the payment that it is making now when you come back come to this third agent that is agent C here something interesting happens so you see that whenever agent C was is removed the outcome does not change so the maximum value is still going to be 100 for the for the other two players and that is going to be the maximum none of the other things can actually overshoot that value so therefore the and when agent C is present then also the outcome is museum so the sum of the values of the other agents are actually remaining the same so we are going to say that this agent C is a non-pivotal agent so what is pivotal whenever you remove that agent from the system the outcome changes if that happens then we are going to call that player is a pivotal player because because of its presence the outcome was something different and because of its absence the outcome changes but C is not like that even if it is not there the outcome does not change so this mechanism is essentially not charging any money to the non-pivotal agents so that is why it is called the pivotal mechanism so let us look at another example of combinatorial allocation so we are in this case selling multiple objects so suppose there are two objects one and two so either it can be so none of these objects could be sold if only one can be allocated and two can be allocated separately or the bundle of one and two can be allocated together now the agents might not have a kind of linear valuation that is it is might not be additive so it's a value for one so let's say when can that happen I mean the sum of these values the the valuation of the bundle is not exactly equal to the sum of the valuation of those individual items in that bundle this can happen if there are complementary objects so let's say you have a shoe pair of shoes one is left foot of that shoe and the other one is the right foot if you combine them together you have a high value but individually they have very low value so similarly there could be situations where this might not be the the valuation maybe smaller than the sum and you can you can think about this this kind of situations that is why it is called the combinatorial valuations agents can have different values for different combinations of these objects so let us assume that this table is essentially showing that what is the value for agent one and two for this different bundles and very naturally when nothing is allocated the valuation is zero so here and later on we are going to use some shorthand notation because this is an independent private value whenever we have this valuation of A this is the the alternative of the allocation A under this type theta i this valuation will sometimes be written in a shorthand with this theta i of A which means the same thing it's a value of that agent when the allocation A is chosen okay so under this setup the efficient allocation you can you can verify this because you can give this item to agent two and this item to agent one and that will maximize the sum of the valuation of all the agents this is the efficient allocation let's say that allocation is called the A star allocation now what is what is VCG payment in this case so what we have to do to compute the first part is that we'll have to remove agent one but if agent one is removed then the best thing that you can do is to give the entire bundle to agent two which gives you this valuation of 14 and when agent A is agent one is present what is the valuation that the other agent gets under that allocation under that efficient allocation that is going to be nine so this difference is essentially the payment that agent one is supposed to make and you can see that because it's a true valuation for its own allocation is going to be six so six minus five is going to be the payoff so you can also calculate the payoff separately so similarly when you remove agent two from the system then the best thing is to give the entire bundle to agent one and that is going to be the the sum of the valuation of all the other agents minus when it is present what is the valuation that the that agent one is getting that is going to be six here and that difference is essentially the six which is going to be the VCG payment for this agent two and similarly you can calculate what is the payoff and the utility of that player


This study found that the technical efficiency of HIV aid spending has improved over time, but there is still room for improvement. Countries that are more efficient in converting their spending into outputs include those in Europe and Eastern and Southern Africa. These countries have seen the greatest improvements in efficiency since 2010. Additionally, countries with higher gross national income, human development index, lower HIV prevalence, and lower out-of-pocket expenses tend to be more efficient. This article was authored by Kasim Malal, Gerard Joseph Abu Joud, Charles Byrenji, and others.


Hey, this is Brett and this 2016 Chevy Silverado 2500 double cab short boxes stock number 12547Z. We're here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and used heavy-duty truck headquarters. This 2016 Chevy Silverado has the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel engine. It has the LL engine in it, which is 397 horsepower. It's combined with the Allison 6-speed automatic transmission. This truck has been fully safety down and inspected by our service shop. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this truck is 100% ready to go. We're going to go inside underneath, start it up, take a look under the hood in this video. Tungsten metallic is the color and we shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second. So if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smart phone or television, I highly recommend turning them on right now because it is your best way to check out the quality, condition and options of the vehicle before seeing it in person. And if you like the video and how we do things here at Summit Automotive in the upper right hand part of the screen is a subscribe button to our YouTube channel. Click that and then click the bell notifications and you'll get updates every time we do videos here at Summit Auto. This one comes with the 20 inch polished aluminum rims and it has Goodyear Wrangler SRA LT265-60R20 tires and they have right around half the tread left on them. Frame and underbody is in very nice condition other than a little bit dusty. Didn't see any major corrosion or anything. Front fender looks good. Projector lamp headlamps, factory fog lights. Comes with a Trail FX grill guard. No major dents or dings on there. The grille is in nice shape and the hood is in very nice condition as well. Didn't see any major dents or dings on that. Passenger side front fender is in excellent condition. And the passenger side front rim, no major scuffs or scrapes. Tungsten metallic, one of my favorite Chevy colors. It's got a lot of metal flake to it. It's really a cool color. And as you go down this side the truck, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle. You can see the truck here, the truck, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at. Before you even get here, so when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises. And you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. And if this video helps you make that decision, let your salesman know that you saw the video that it was helpful and that Brett sent you. Back rims in excellent shape and the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. Frame and underbody is in excellent condition. I mean there's absolutely no corrosion on that frame. For 2016 this is really, really good. And it has all the remaining factory exhaust. Hasn't been altered in any way. Cab corners, lower rockers are all in excellent shape and it does come with the factory chrome step bars. Down the rest of the side of the truck looks really good. Z71 off-road suspension package. Rear bumper is in nice shape. Rear bumper steps back up parking sensors. Full towing package which includes the receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring. And the tailgate is in very nice shape. The only thing I saw is the top pad here's got just a little bit of damage on it. But to use truck in those pads could probably be easily swapped out. The box is in excellent shape. It has fifth wheel bed rails and a seven pin wiring back here. And the bed's in really nice shape, spray and bed liner. Tailgate shuts nice and solidly. And as you go down the driver's side just as clean as that passenger's side. No dents or dings on the box. And for full disclosure this back rim is in excellent shape as well. Down the rest of the side of the truck looks pretty good. You do get the telescopic tow mirrors built in directional signals, LED side lights. They telescope out like so and fold in like that.  There are no rips, there are no tears on the seats. They're in really nice shape. You do get a power driver seat. The truck smells very clean inside. I don't think it's ever been smoked in. You get weather tech floor mats as well.  You get the Z71 trim on the doors and you also get the Z71 instrument cluster. We'll check out the miles and the radio and everything that this truck has to offer on the interior. 30,829 are the miles.  Comes with the leather wrap steering wheel, Bluetooth and information center controls on the right, cruise controls on the left, and you get audio controls on the back. Six speed Allison automatic transmission with the optional tap shift. You get the Chevy MyLink radio AM FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on here. Also as a projection manager, we can project your cell phone to the screen via Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. So if you have a nav system such as Waze or Google Maps, project it right to the screen. It's like you have nav on the screen as this one does not come with a factory nav. CD player, climate controls, power pedals, stability control. That's for your cargo lamps. It's also how you put your LED side lights on, parking sensors, downhill assist control, and a factory exhaust brake. Now this one does have a 110 volt, 150 watt plug-in right there and a 12 volt power point. Passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition, no rips or tears on there. Once again, truck smells very clean inside. I don't think it's ever been smoked in. And the headliner is in a very nice condition. You do get power sign rear window button, home link buttons for your garage door security systems and line systems and map lights right there. On-star and SOS buttons in the mirror. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll start it up and take a look under the hood. The back seats are just as clean as the front seats. Latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have. Power sign rear window with the built-in rear defrost and those seats are in great shape. Side current and airbags and they fold up like so for extra storage and you get that weather tech floor mat back here which keeps your carpeting looking like new. Bottoms of the doors all look really good. And we'll start it up and take a look under the hood. There are those LED side lights I was telling you about. They are ultra bright. At night it's really nice. They light up the side of the truck good. Starts right up. No check engine lights or anything like that. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. And hopefully from this HD video you will have been able to verify the quality and condition of this truck all the way around inside and out. Under the hood we have the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel LML engine. 397 horsepower. Runs very smooth. Once again this truck has been fully safe. An inspector by our store to shop has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this truck is 100% ready to go. There's your emissions sticker. And I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint. That frame is amazingly clean on this thing. Clean all the way around too. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half tons, three quarter tons, one tons. You name it we got it. Go to the website right there www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at www.summitauto.com. And if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to www.youtube.com. So I have Summit Auto. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. Click the bell notifications. We'll get updates on the videos we do each and every day here at Summit Auto. In fact in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on the upper left. A link to more Silverado 2500 truck videos like this with the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website on the lower left. And a link to one of our latest YouTube videos on the lower right. Click those. Check this out. We're super excited to help you with this ultra clean. 2016 Chevy Silverado 2500 Double Cab Short Box LT1 Z71 in tungsten gray metallic. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. The term super cloud is somewhat new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years. Early last decade, when NIST put forth a definition of cloud computing, it said services had to be accessible over a public network, essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the cloud conversation. Now a guy named Chuck Hollis, who was a field CTO at EMC at the time, and a prolific blogger, objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. Now in that post, he showed a workload running both on-premises and in a public cloud, sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner. What later became known more broadly as hybrid cloud. That vision, as we now know, really never materialized, and we were left with multi-cloud, sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is what Hollis laid out, i.e. the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience is what SuperCloud is all about. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we share what we hope to learn from SuperCloud 22 next week. Next Tuesday at 9 a.m. Pacific, the community is gathering for SuperCloud 22, an inclusive pilot symposium hosted by theCUBE and made possible by VMware and other founding partners. It's a one-day single track event with more than 25 speakers digging into the architectural, the technical, structural, and business aspects of SuperCloud. This is a hybrid event with a live program in the morning running out of our Palo Alto studio and prerecorded content in the afternoon, featuring industry leaders, technologists, analysts, and investors up and down the technology stack. Now, as I said up front, the seeds of SuperCloud were sown early last decade. After the very first re-invent, we published our Amazon Gorilla Post, that's seen in the upper right corner here, and we talked about how to differentiate from Amazon and form ecosystems around industries and data and how the cloud would change IT permanently. And then in the upper left, we put up a post on the old Wikibon Wiki, yeah, it used to be a Wiki, check out my hair, by the way, no gray, that's how long ago this was, and we talked about in that post how to compete in the Amazon economy. And we showed a graph of how IT economics were changing and cloud services had marginal economics that looked more like software than hardware at scale. And this would reset, we said, opportunities for both technology sellers and buyers for the next 20 years. And this came into sharper focus in the ensuing years, culminating in a milestone post by Greylock's Jerry Chen called Castles in the Cloud. It was an inspiration and catalyst for us using the term SuperCloud in John Furrier's post prior to re-invent 2021. So we started to flesh out this idea of SuperCloud where companies of all types build services on top of hyperscale infrastructure and across multiple clouds. Going beyond multi-cloud 1.0, if you will, which was really a symptom, as we said many times, of multi-vendor, at least that's what we argued. And despite its fuzzy definition, it resonated with people because they knew something was brewing.  Take a listen to how he framed it. Please play the clip. Is VMware the right company to make the SuperCloud work? Term that Wikibon came up with to describe the taking of discrete services, such as RDS from AWS, Cloud, compute engines from GCP and authentication from Azure to build SaaS applications or enterprise applications that connect back to your data center. Is VMware's cross-cloud vision, because it is just a vision today, the right approach, or should you be looking towards companies like HashiCorp to provide this overall capability that we all agree, or maybe you don't, that we need in the enterprise? Comment below your thoughts. So I really like that Keith has deep practitioner knowledge and lays out a couple of options. I especially like the examples he uses of cloud services. He recognizes the need for cross-cloud services and he notes this capability is aspirational today. Remember, this was eight or nine months ago and he brings HashiCorp into the conversation as they're one of the speakers at SuperCloud 22 and he asks the community what they think. The thing is, we're trying to really test out this concept and people like Keith are instrumental as collaborators. Now, I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that not everyone is on board with the SuperCloud meme. In particular, Charles Fitzgerald has been a wonderful collaborator just by his hilarious criticisms of the concept. After a couple of SuperCloud posts, Charles put up his second rendition of SuperCloud, a fragilistic XPL adosus. I mean, it's just beautiful. But to boot, he put up this picture of Baghdad Bob asking us to just stop. Bob's real name is Mohamed Saeed Al-Saaaf and he was the Minister of Propaganda for Saddam Hussein during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he made these outrageous claims of US troops running in fear and putting down their arms and so forth. So anyway, Charles laid out several, frankly, very helpful critiques of SuperCloud which has led us to really advance the definition and catalyze the community's thinking on the topic. Now, one of his issues, and there are many, is we said a prerequisite of SuperCloud was a super Paz layer. Gartner's Lydia Leong chimed in saying, there were many examples of successful Paz vendors built on top of a hyperscaler, some having the option to run in more than one cloud provider. But the key point we're trying to explore is the degree to which that Paz layer is purpose built for a specific SuperCloud function and not only runs in more than one cloud provider, Lydia, but runs across multiple clouds simultaneously, creating an identical developer experience irrespective of a state. Now maybe that's what Lydia meant. It's hard to say from just a tweet and she's a sharp lady so and knows more about that market, that Paz market than I do. But to the former point, at SuperCloud 22, we have several examples we're going to test. One is Oracle and Microsoft's recent announcement to run database services on OCI and Azure, making them appear as one. Rather than use an off the shelf platform, Oracle claims to have developed the capabilities for developers specifically built to ensure high performance, low latency and a common experience for developers across clouds. Another example we're going to test is Snowflake. I'll be interviewing Benoit Dajaville, co-founder of Snowflake to understand the degree to which Snowflake's recent announcement of an application development platform is purpose built for the Snowflake data cloud. Is it just plain old Paz big whoop as Lydia claims or is it something new and innovative? By the way, we invited Charles Fitz to participate in SuperCloud 22. Any decline saying in addition to a few other somewhat insulting things. There's definitely interesting new stuff brewing that isn't traditional cloud or SaaS but branding it all SuperCloud doesn't help either. Well, indeed, we agree with part of that and we'll see if it helps advance thinking and helps customers really plan for the future. And that's why SuperCloud 22 is going to feature some of the best analysts in the business in the great SuperCloud debate. In addition to Keith Towns and Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research and Sanjeev Mohan from former Gartner analysts and principal at Sanjeev Mohan participated in this session. Now we don't want to mislead you. We don't want to imply that these analysts are hopping on the SuperCloud bandwagon but they're more than willing to go through the thought experiment and mental exercise and we had a great conversation that you don't want to miss. Maribel Lopez had what I thought was a really excellent way to think about this. She used TCPIP as an historical example. Listen to what she said. So if we think about what we're talking about with SuperCloud and what Keith just mentioned, remember when we went to see TCPIP and the whole idea was like, how do we get computers to talk to each other in a more standardized way? How do we get data to move in a more standardized way? I think that the problem we have with multi-cloud right now is that we don't have that. So I think that's sort of a ground level of getting us to your SuperCloud premise. And Sanjeev Mohan has some excellent thoughts on the feasibility of an open versus de facto standard getting us to the vision of SuperCloud, what's possible and what's likely. Now again, I don't want to imply that these analysts are out banging the SuperCloud drum. They're not necessarily doing that, but they do, I think it's fair to say, believe that something new is bubbling. And whether it's called SuperCloud or multi-cloud 2.0 or cross-cloud services or whatever name you choose, it's not multi-cloud of the 2010s and we chose SuperCloud. So our goal here is to advance the discussion on what's next in cloud and SuperCloud is meant to be a term to describe that future of cloud. And specifically the cloud opportunities that can be built on top of hyperscale compute, storage, networking, machine learning and other services at scale. And that is why we posted this piece on answering the top 10 questions about SuperCloud, many of which were floated by Charles Fitzgerald and others in the community. Why does the industry need another term? What's really new and different? And what is hype? What specific problems does SuperCloud solve? What are the salient characteristics of SuperCloud? What's different beyond multi-cloud? What is a super pass? Is it necessary to have a SuperCloud? How will applications evolve on SuperClouds? What workloads will run? All these questions will be addressed in detail as a way to advance the discussion and help practitioners and business people understand what's real today and what's possible with cloud in the near future. And one other question we'll address is who will build SuperClouds and what new entrance we can expect? This is an ETR graphic that we showed in a previous episode of Breaking Analysis and it lays out some of the companies we think are building SuperClouds or in a position to do so. By the way, the y-axis shows net score or spending velocity and the x-axis depicts presence in the ETR survey of more than 1200 respondents. But the key call outs to this slide in addition to some of the smaller firms that aren't yet showing up in the ETR data like Chaos Search and Snarburst and Aviatrix and Clumio. But the really interesting additions are industry players, Walmart with Azure, Capital One and Goldman Sachs with AWS, Oracle with Cernar. These we think are early examples bubbling up of industry clouds that will eventually become SuperClouds. So we'll explore these and other trends to get the community's input on how this will all play out. These are the things we hope you'll take away from SuperCloud 22 and we have an amazing lineup of experts to answer your question. Technologists like Kit Colbert, Adrian Cockroft, Mariana Tessel, Chris Hoff, Will LaForest, Ali Goatsey, Benoit Dajaville, Moudou Sudhakar and many other tech athletes, investors like Jerry Chen and Insik Ray, the analysts we featured earlier, Paula Hansen talking about go-to-market in a multi-cloud world, G Rittenhouse talking about cloud security, David McJanet, Baskar Gorty of platform nine and many, many more. And of course, you. So please go to thecube.net and register for SuperCloud 22. Really lightweight reg. We're not doing this for lead gen. We're doing it for collaboration. If you sign in, you can get the chat and ask questions in real time. So don't miss this inaugural event, SuperCloud 22 on August 9th at 9 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you there. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. Thank you to Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hoef is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. He does some really wonderful editing. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.volante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dvolante. Comment on my LinkedIn posts. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next week in Palo Alto at SuperCloud 22 or next time on breaking analysis.


Hi, how are you doing? This is Richard and we have a RichTV Live with our very special guest. It is Ben from Pure Extracts. How are you doing today, Ben? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing good. How are you enjoying the conference so far? Fantastic. A lot of interesting companies out today. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. It's been an interesting year in the cannabis sector.  Thank you very much. Pure Extracts is a large-scale extractor. We extract cannabis, making a host of oil-related products, formulating for the beverage, vape, capsules, edibles area, growing industry with 2.0 coming online. The host of companies, the LPs, need additional capacity in the extraction business. We were previously a great market producer that's turned to the legal market. We've already lived through 2.0 on the black market side and now we're here to help companies on the 2.0 side. Well, you guys are in a very hot sector because out of all the companies in 2019, two of the best, MetaFarm Labs, Valens GrowWorks, both extraction companies. So are you similar to any of these companies? If you have to compare yourself to another extraction company, is there another company you can compare yourself to or are you guys unique? We're unique and the same. Same breath. MetaFarm and Valens are very similar to us. Mart-scale extraction business, both doing custom formulations and extractions, both for their LPs and selling product under private or white label. So very much the same. Where we differed a little bit is we were in that business long before they were in existence and we were in that extraction knowing what sells to the public in the great market. So we have a little bit of a different edge from MetaFarm and Valens. We were in business for a couple years before it was legalized from a 2.0 perspective. So we have a little bit more market data on what the consumer would want. So that's a little bit of a differentiating factor for us. Okay, now our investors are worldwide in over 60 countries and they love to invest in undervalued, underappreciated, underexposed hyper growth opportunities. Obviously this is a hyper growth sector. If an investor was looking at your company and they were wanting to invest, what would you say to that investor? Well, I would say this. Pure extract is a value play. We are going public in March, so on the CSE. We've looked at the market and we understand what a difficult market it's been over the last year and you have to provide value to investors and you have to show by execution of the management team that you can build a business, a profitable business. I come from a large-scale cultivator. I was the CEO of Natura Naturals. We sold at Tilray in February. So building value for the shareholder is this table stakes today and I think from our perspective, we put our money where our methods. We didn't overprice this from a valuation perspective. We want to build the equity on the back of our revenue and profitability. So you guys are going public in March? Yes. So have you already organized your share structure? Can you explain a little bit about your share structure? Maybe how much insiders are holding and what your issue note standing is? Sure. There'll be about 70 million shares outstanding. The management owns about 10%. The shares have a very strong walk-up structure, so the founders and whatnot are very much in the boat for the long term. From that perspective, we are raising $10 million. We are in the market right now. It's actually going fairly well in a tough market, which is great. We'll be public in the March timeframe, both on the CSE, and then we'll do an aim listing subsequent to that. AIM listing, okay. And what is 2020 going to look like for your company? We're excited about 2020. It's for us, some of the cultivators, they didn't have such a good 19 in 2020 doesn't look as bright. For us with 2.0 rolling out, the C is our oyster for lack of a better word. There's a host of opportunities for us to produce both in the edible market and the tolling market. There's a lot of LPs that don't have that expertise and don't have the capital to do that. We have the expertise being in this business for several years before in my previous experience running a large-scale LP. So we feel good about 2020 and 2021. Fantastic. If there was anything that somebody wanted to know about your company that maybe someone doesn't know, is there anything you could you could tell the investors that are watching? Like, you know, it's something that makes that maybe it would be a surprise or something you guys are working on or some type of a joint venture or M&A's or anything like that? Any surprises? Anything that you're working on, secret weapons? We'd like to know if there's anything crazy coming. I would say we're always working on very interesting JVs and product development. That's you know our differentiating factor. The nice thing is we were in this industry previously. We're very dialed into the U.S. market and we're bringing brands up from the U.S. you know to do white label and joint venture you know with us and that's that's kind of table stakes of differentiating our business from our competitors like balance and metafarm that you know growth area with brands coming from south of the border and across the pond that we can develop within Canada and grow the Canadian market. Eventually the regulations will come off on advertising. You'll be able to differentiate your brand a little bit but you have to get them here and get them established and that's you know our secret weapon you know and you'll find out who it is when we hit the market in March. I love it. Now I've been watching this sector since 2017. I remember watching the cannabis sector in Canada the market cap on marijuana index was like 200. It went up to over 1,000 now it's back to 200. We are the lowest we have been since 2017. The entire sector despite the fact that companies are profitable despite the fact that their revenues are all-time highs despite the fact that we have more stores despite the fact that we've been legal for over a year everything keeps getting bigger but yet the sector keeps shrinking. What do you think about that? Like what is what is someone who's about to open up a business in a sector that's been collapsing thinking about this industry when realistically as an investor we know it can only go up from here. That's right so I think we're at the bottom. I think the market the market was oversold the LPs really built too much hype around it's we're going to build it and the people will come versus I'm going to build a profitable business that has fundamentals with a management team that can execute versus I have the biggest greenhouse where I have the biggest production and that that was you know not now they got the biggest amount of debt exactly well or they have the biggest amount of production nowhere to sell it that's right so it's just been a but at the same time you're probably happy because they were able to make all those mistakes so you don't have to a hundred percent and even better for our from from my segment because we're an extractor you know the market price of dry cannabis has fallen you know very steadily over the last few months so my input costs continue to erode the tolling amount because there's a lack of tolling folks out there our tolling amount that we charge is pretty constant so we have a perfect storm right now for the extraction business so in the segments you know core LP that's a grower it's a tougher market for core extraction with 2.0 coming on and the host of new products that are coming to market you know we have a very nice opportunity to capitalize on those products you know being rolled out because we're going to provide the oil input for those products that's perfect guys this is a new company they're going to be going public in March keep your eye on the prize stay tuned this has been the CEO of Pure Extracts thank you so much for being here today I wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavors our entire community be watching very closely and hopefully you guys hit all your objectives and achieve all your goals I really appreciate it and stay tuned thank you so much have a nice day guys thank you