Hey James What it's time to do the review come on. Oh, uh, okay cool. Let's uh, let's get started then Wait, it's it's that easy. You're just you're just doing it Well, what did you want me to do? Do you want me to cry and scream? No, no, no while you drag me away and force me to do the review because that seems kind of Overplayed by this point. Don't you think I mean That's been around ever since YouTube has been a thing. I Mean I just thought you'd put up more resistance than that. I Did you want to just do some cringy sketch where I got a couple of people together and Came up with this bizarre way of explaining how bad this book was before I even started the review because I mean I don't even have two people to work with this. Okay, we're not two people talking This is just me talking to myself, but I cut it together and editing so it looks like two people Matter of fact, I didn't even change my shirt for your half. Okay. I just put a jacket on over it That's how lazy I'm being right now. I mean At the end of the day, it's just a book.  Well, look, do you want to get started or not? Well, yeah, I'd love to get started right away But I filmed this half first. I have to wait for you to go. Oh Oh This is true allegiance by Ben Shapiro This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long so Ben Shapiro for for those of you who aren't familiar with him I envy you because he is an extremely right-wing political commentator who is known for things like advocating the ethnic cleansing of palestinians uh Claiming that if schools teach his children about lgbt people, he's going to shoot somebody Claiming that the u.s. Military should be allowed to kill civilians Having a bizarre obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and being a climate change denier just overall he's kind of a piece of shit and um I would go into a lot more detail about that, but honestly I don't want to that much and honestly this one clip Kind of encapsulates how shitty he is much better than I could ever hope to So let's say let's say for the sake of argument that all of the water levels around the world rise by Let's say five feet and it puts all the low-lying areas on the coast underwater Right, which is let's say all of that happens. You think that people aren't going to just sell their homes and move Just one small problem Sell their houses to who ben fucking aquaman Now a lot of you have probably already seen that and normally I wouldn't play other people's content like that But I just I feel like h-bomber guy just said it so much more succinctly than I ever could So go check out that video and his channel if you haven't but uh, you know the point is at one point Ben Shapiro wrote a book. It's called true allegiance and It's not very good. So here's the summary America is coming apart an illegal immigration crisis has broken out along America's southern border There are race riots in Detroit a fiery female rancher turned militia leader has vowed revenge on the president for his arrogant policies And the world's most notorious terrorist is planning a massive attack that could destroy the united states as we know it Meanwhile, the president is too consumed by legacy seeking to see our country's deep peril Brett Hawthorne is the youngest general in the united states army and he's stuck alone behind enemy lines in afghanistan He's the last lost soldier of a old war fighting to stay alive and make it back home But will he be able to stop the collapse of america in time? So from that you can pretty clearly tell that yeah, this is meant to be some sort of a contemporary Thriller story. Okay. There's going to be like political intrigue. There's going to be spy stuff There's going to be action It's not that hard to figure it out and that is definitely what this book tries to do um, it also tries to be Propaganda and it's not particularly good at it. But you know, we'll get into that as it goes on I think we've done enough so Let's just let's just start reading. Let's go to the prologue new york city By the time jennifer colier hit the george washington bridge It was already almost nine a.m. Rush hour. The bridge had turned into an enormous parking lot Jennifer looked out at the sea of red lights before her stretching all the way into new york and side There had to be 30 000 cars on this bridge all of them moving two miles an hour Jennifer glanced at her watch inside She was on the west side of the bridge and she could see it's two enormous stealing case towers looming before her In her passenger seat her daughter julie briefed softly sleeping Jennifer glanced at her watch again 903. Come on. She muttered which is when she heard it the bridge groaned It was a loud low groan that made the car vibrate julie woke up. What was that? She asked drowsily the groan died away Nothing said jennifer probably just a plane overhead go back to sleep Mommy the bridge groaned again. This time it was longer more drawn out Jennifer felt the brake pedal vibrate beneath her foot Mommy that's not a plane said julie. Why'd awake now the groaning continued booming from beneath them The bridge was undulating slightly up and down now julie could see the cables of the suspension bridge Oscillating like the strings of a guitar Mommy what's going on julie cried cars ahead were honking now Urgently pleading for those at the front of the bridge to hurry up a few cars Were trying to ram their way through the traffic pushing other cars towards the edge of the bridge The honking and crashing combined with the burgeoning low roar made jennifer's headache pound The driving rhythm of her blood surging through her temples Was kind of confusing to read but okay Then the bridge's roar stopped again The people ahead of jennifer kept honking panicking trying to get off the bridge After about 30 seconds the honking seemed to die down a little bit julie's wide eyes grew wider She was staring at a crash on the other side of the divider the flames sleeping from the engine of a smash toyota Jennifer could see a man's arms hanging lifeless out the window jennifer reached up and gripped julie's arm It's okay, baby. She whispered wetting her lips so Quick question there if this if the cars are packed bumper to bumper How did how was there enough room to have a crash that bad because normally for a crash that bad you have to be going fairly fast Okay, then time seemed to stop the noise of the traffic went silent jennifer eyes opened in horror The bridge before jennifer tilted sideways the 604 foot tower before her began to lean almost gracefully to her right Jennifer screamed, but it was drowned out in the ear splitting cracking noise Hundreds of thousands of tons of steel twisting and bending and grating on each other the sound of a million airplanes all crashing at once julie Jennifer looked to her left as she heard the steel cable shriek stretch on the other side of the bridge She locked eyes with an elderly man driving a silver lincoln continental behind him She saw one of the enormous metal cables snap clean and slither wildly back and forth like a beginning fly fisherman's messy cast Look out. She shouted at the man He couldn't hear her but he turned to follow her eyes the cable ripped through the lincoln slicing its occupants in half vertically A jet of a jet stream of red following in its wake splattering jennifer's windshield In front of her the road itself began to tilt cars slid horizontally towards the railings bath time play things of an angry god So yeah, it goes on like that for a little bit longer.  Now. This is a pretty amateurish mistake uh to do at the beginning of your book because A lot of people here start your book off with a bang start it with something to get your audience invested and they immediately assume okay action sequence, but Well, that's kind of hard to care about that if it's with characters that we haven't seen before and in this particular instance Jennifer and her daughter die so we never see them again and it's like well Are we supposed to care that much because? We really don't and in fact, uh the book flashes back after this because it goes to part one which is before the attack and then later the attack will happen and the story moved on past that but It's kind of hard to care about the attack at all when nobody that we know or care about as readers Died during it or was hurt during it and no none of their loved ones died during it either. So Like right off the bat. This is very amateurish and that's not even getting into the shitty writing itself Like all the various metaphors that he uses It's just it's just clumsy and clunky So now we start off again in chapter one with another action sequence Brett Kabul Afghanistan Brigadier general Brett Hawthorne looked at his m9 magazine and cursed to himself empty He was sat up against a mud brick hobble in the city's poor part of town Even in Kabul there was a large income gap and felt the sweat trickled down cold between his shoulder blades He hadn't been alone for years Generals always had a personal security detail, but things had gone hellishly wrong Hawthorne was a bear of a man 6 3 in his bare feet and 215 pounds in his underwear with a graying blonde crew cut and a face carved of granite But he had plenty of smile lines. He just didn't like showing those to people unless he knew them so Those of you who don't know Ben Shapiro is short And I wouldn't normally make fun of him for that partially because I'm not a big dude either Like I'm taller than him, but like I'm I'm still a pretty small guy and partially because like it's just A bit mean spirited to make fun of something someone for something that they can't help like that, uh, but one Ben Shapiro is a piece of shit, and I don't feel bad about anything I say about him and two He clearly has a complex about it Uh, so I'm gonna start a counter Every time that a character is introduced as being big We're gonna put it on screen So rather than Trying to get us invested in that action sequence Which we were just introduced to the book instead goes into a very long flashback where it just explains brett's entire life Like literally from the moment he was a kid Up through his school years him joining the military meeting his wife His whole career up until this point which kind of went to shit And that's why he was here and then it goes into the specifics of the day before Where there was an attack and that's why he's in this current position.  He's just He's just a ultra badass normally, but in this case there's a couple of dumb things like for starters It has an introduction With him and his friend derrick and it says derrick taught him how to talk his way out of situations and the thing is that it happened because He went to an all-black school in a middle school or high school. I don't care enough to check uh, and this other really big black kid thought that Uh brett's called him the n word which i'm not gonna repeat it on camera But I get the feeling that ben had a real Just way too much fun typing it down. But anyways He thinks he called him that and then derrick who is also black came up and just acted like a fucking weirdo and started singing And then the other guy backed off which I don't see how that taught brett how to talk his way out of situations And you would also think that by bringing it up it would become important to the story later And it doesn't and then it goes into how he met his wife On one of his rare off days brett found himself at charleston's bustling city market The shops were heavy with traffic rain outside had forced everyone into the covered complex of artists hawking their pictures and crafts He was wearing his citadel uniform standing out conspicuously among the women in their summer dresses And the men in their jeans and seersucker sport coats reluctant to run back out into the rain He leaned against a bookcase No loitering cadet The voice was musical for some reason the image of a woodwind came to mind A southern woodwind since her accent sang of long summers and lemonade Now I know it's not uncommon for male writers to write Women as being attractive and they do it in kind of a cringy way But nonetheless That's particularly dumb So then it goes through his uh military career and it says by kosovo He was a captain on september 11th. He was a major a major who by simple coincidence knew posh toe Which for those of you who don't know that's a language which is fairly commonly spoken in afghanistan But we don't get any other explanation for how he learned posh toe Like it doesn't say he knew somebody and he learned from them It doesn't say like he thought that afghanistan was going to be a trouble spot So he purposely went out of his way to learn it. It doesn't say anything like that. He just knows posh toe and granted sometimes you just pick up shit like that, but For languages, I could believe it if it was something fairly commonly spoken in the u.s Like if if he learned spanish because like he lives in texas So if he had just learned spanish by osmosis I'd find that very believable and if he learned something like i don't know german or italian or french Those are also like fairly common. So it wouldn't be that weird for him to know it, but posh toe Really, he just knows that So then it goes into how Brett thinks that the president screwed up the war The deal for the military bases was all but dead.  So This is him just straight up saying that In the books universe as well the other characters not only agree with him But his way of looking at things is the correct way of doing things like apparently it's smart To kill civilians because you know, that's not a great recruiting tool for the taliban or anything just Cool So then it has this weird moment where Like he's showing a camera crew from cnn around and they have to specify that it's from cnn because those guys aren't explicitly right wing and therefore their opinions are all bad, but uh, basically That he's showing some camera crew around and then a child strapped to a donkey with a bomb on it Uh comes up near them and the taliban is nearby about to set it off and brett saves the day by pulling out his handgun and shooting The cell phone which was going to set off the bomb which disables it and then saving the kid from the donkey so he's just you know, a big damn hero and that part Look, I get that this is a thriller and that the main character is supposed to be a major badass like I'm not I don't have a huge issue with that.  I don't think But then it also shows that a pretty huge portion of the afghani population is apparently on their side and that they also want the u.s. military gone and So it just seems to me that like Why would you bother sticking around if that's the case because like You're clearly not ever going to Get it into a situation where the afghani government can stand against the taliban on its own and be a u.s. ally So it seems like you're just sending sending all these people over to die and using up all this money and equipment just to Try and prop up a puppet regime And this isn't even really what I think about the real world.  But that's also how we leave him. That's the end of the first chapter So we started an action sequence We went away from it went through this whole long flashback explaining this man's entire life and why we should agree with him because he has the right politics and then It just ends I guess it's supposed to be a cliffhanger, but it's not a very good one So then we get our introduction to president prescott in washington dc We simply can't pay for it, sir White house chief of staff tommy bradley was standing over the president's desk in the oval office a chief of budget papers in his hand Crumpled wrinkled papers covered in red notes the numbers just didn't add up and president mark prescott didn't care Listen to me. Tommy said the president my reelection relies on our ability to secure funding for this action You know that I know that the polls show it. We don't have a choice in the matter Tommy gritted his teeth He knew prescott was right the president had been dropping precipitously in the polls His critics blamed his policies for widespread inflation and unemployment Prescott was deathly afraid of becoming jimmy carter and he was right on the precipice of having his worst fears realized When mark prescott ran for president, he didn't know what he'd be inheriting He was no babe in the woods. He was a hardened ideologue a product of the chicago machine The hand-picked protege of the power brokers, but he hadn't quite contemplated the nature of the country He'd be handed once elected. Okay, so That whole thing about the power brokers that never gets brought up again But I find it interesting because it's like Ben is admitting That there are people who work behind the scenes to try and influence American elections like even if it is on paper at least a democracy There's a lot of shit that works against that and I just want you to remember that he talks about the power brokers And just keep that in mind as it goes on because it like it makes prescott and his ilk seem like The bad guys, but seriously just just remember So then it explains how prescott is trying to help the country because it's in a deep economic Spiral down. It's not doing good. And so he's trying to Make a big uh program that will or actually he's done a lot of different programs But he's trying to make a big one which will like yes it.  And then as he's explaining it he decides it'll be called the work freedom program Prescott's work freedom program Everyone recognized the value of freedom But what did that mean other than the right to a job? Freedom meant nothing if you couldn't put bread in your children's mouths at night and america was a country of workers Freedom was work and work was freedom work freedom simple easy repeatable genius You're really fucking subtle ben You know just compare all of your political opponents to nazis I'm sure that's something you're okay with when they do it to you And then prescott is like going on camera and explaining it to you know the american people and i'm sorry if i'm jumping around a bit but There is a lot of like littler bits of info in the middle that i don't really have time to get into But he says i know he said weirdly that some of my political opponents would like to call this plan irresponsible I know they sling around words like socialism He framed the word with his fingers and marxism and redistributionism and they hope to scare you with those words And i find that fascinating because that is the first not the last in this book by a fair margin But the first point where a character says something fairly reasonable But it's Framed as though they're saying something crazy like he's saying that his political opponents Just use socialism and marxism and all that to describe anything they don't like and Yeah, that's kind of what happens So prescott finishes telling everybody about that and then we go to the next chapter which introduces another character and Like i know ben was trying to write this like sprawling political thriller like he was trying to write this Huge story Which has a whole bunch of different angles to it that intersect and interconnect in interesting ways, but You're not george double r martin. Okay, you can't do that george double r martin You can't even really do that very well it it takes a very skilled author to be able to pull that sort of thing off and You're not because throughout the majority of this A lot of these characters are just doing their own thing And it does come together at the end, but in a very unsatisfying way that could have been handled Some other way and i'm realizing that this is a pretty short book. Most copies are 272 pages The one i'm reading on here is a little bit longer, but that's because it's you know on phone smaller screen whatever but And then i'm realizing that's pretty short and He probably just needed to fill up space because he didn't have much plot So this new character is named soledad central valley california The swat team didn't expect the first time she brought them cookies. Nobody brings the swat team cookies Do do i even need to keep going like i feel like those two sentences sum up how shitty the writing is in this uh, so I honestly find soledad's parts of this book the most uh Well boring for lack of a better word like i don't like using that too much because It doesn't say much, but yeah, it her parts are just really boring. So basically she's just a rancher in california her water supply got cut off by the epa because they're trying to protect fish and She had to Basically let one of her workers go or all of her workers really But there's one in particular that the book focuses on named emilio and emilio had a son named wan And then they had to move to los angeles where he got a different job And then wan got killed by some game members and so soledad blames the government for Wan being dead and for her not being able to pay her bills and all that and so basically long story short She builds a bomb and then sets it off in front of the epa's offices in california So one of the major characters of this book is a terrorist and it goes to great lengths trying to say like Oh, no, she did it when nobody was there. So nobody got hurt or anything like There's no way to guarantee that you very well could have killed a lot of people doing this But it just tries to reassure us. No, no, she's not a terrorist She was forced into this by the government and the problem is i'm pretty sure the taliban Felt the exact same way. I'm pretty sure the people who blow up that bridge feel the exact same way But I guess they're fighting for political beliefs that ben Shapiro disagrees with so they're bad But soledad is fighting for political beliefs that ben agrees with so she's good And again, it goes to great lengths to explain.   I don't know. It just they don't really explain it that well But anyways now crawford looked confused. Levan's smile never faltered. It's shakespeare He said it means you'll learn to trust me crawford laughed loudly this time. Then he looked at levan curiously Quoting dead honkeys. He twinkled you might be useful yet Ben I mean this sincerely.   Again, ben.  They they don't talk like that, but anyways, um Yeah, and kid has a toy gun and cop shoots him and kills him And apparently this was all set up by levan in order to Spark a conflict he he was set up to Make people angry and the thing is that there is security footage of this Which shows it at just the proper angle so you can't see that the kid did reach for his fake gun And that the cop just shot him And we as the audience know that the kid was reaching for the fake gun But the rest of the world doesn't Okay, so as this goes on, I know I keep saying this but as this goes on I really want you to keep in mind that from their point of view The cop just shot the kid for really no reason Even in the land of make-believe where ben can control everything that happens He still accidentally winds up reinforcing the belief of a trigger happy murderous cop It's just it's kind of beautiful So then we go to another character, but this one we already sort of had introduced to us This one was named ellen and she is brett's wife And she lives in texas and she works for the governor of texas specifically She works for border patrol. Well, she doesn't work for border patrol But she is working a lot with them at this point in time So it starts off with several pages of her just kind of Wining about how The border is open now because the president told them not to deport unaccompanied minors which Automatically equals crime Like that's weird because it says don't deport unaccompanied minors and then it immediately goes to Okay Yes, so there's drugs and rape and all that coming over the border now And there's no way to stop it which is Dumb, I don't know and then her and her friend are driving along in a helicopter is stopped in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere And apparently it's a bunch of cartel members And they just start screaming at her in spanish Still she didn't move ellen had time for one thought Oh, shit before the mexican pointed the carbine at the truck and fired a burst through the windshield The first bullet missed vivian, but the second caught her directly in the face Her head slammed back against the seatrest to the back of her head splattering One moment her pretty face was staring directly at ellen the next there was no face Just a mess of tissue and tendon and bone and blood But what about the third bullet?  It's certainly not for economic opportunities. In fact, that's actually Approved in fact that fewer immigrants come in during times of economic downturn and more come in when the economy is on the upswing And less come in when mexico's economy is on the upswing or when other countries where they come from Their economy is on the upswing. So it really doesn't make sense from that regard. So maybe they're just fleeing violence and in that case Well, it seems needlessly cruel to not let them in at that point and All i'm gonna say on that is that if people were fleeing more from mexico, i'm sure ben would say no, don't let them in But if they were fleeing from let's say the holocaust or the holodomor I get the feeling he would feel differently about that and It's not hard to guess why So i'm almost 40 minutes into filming this and i'm like Barely a page and a half into my notes and i have like six pages. So We might have to go into overdrive for this and i'm gonna have to skip over a lot of little things that i want to talk about but You know what other people have Read through this as well and honestly like i was able to get it free from my library. So just check it out yourself You're really that curious but basically next we go to brett back in afghanistan and he manages to not die He has a broken arm by the way, which kind of After this opening sequence they mentioned that it's broken a couple more times, but it never seems to bother him. So They really didn't need to put that in there.  But anyways, uh, he finds the dude's briefcase and he opens it up by guessing a stupidly basic, uh combination And then there's a bunch of coordinates in there and apparently One of the coordinates is in iraq Brett knew what it meant Brett had known of the cia's discovery of weapons of mass destruction in iraq for years Everyone on the inside had known The media had reported that the government had lied that somehow all the world's greatest intelligence agencies had been dead wrong But that wasn't the case Hussein had smuggled some of the weapons out of the country to syria Others had been buried in the desert beneath those coordinates and now they were in iran Thanks to ambassador burgaard frederick veldkoff veldkoff.   Well Trying to justify it, uh, what was it six 2016?  This is shepiro's propaganda So it goes back to press god. It has a bunch of high Mighty political sounding dialogue with him and another character and then he's talking to the governor of texas You could send me some troops to the border is what you could do. I'm sure you saw in the news about my staffer Prescott kicked off his shoes put his feet on the desk. Yes, sir. I sure did He found himself accidentally blurring into a drawl of his own when he talked with the rednecks tragic just tragic Not sure what anybody could have done about it You could have done something about it. You still can it's an act of war It's not an act of war governor if it's not by a foreign government a pause than the storm Horseshit, mr. President.  She edged her way past one burly linebacker of a man Wearing a cowboy hat and a gun which was perfectly legal in the state That was reason enough for ellen to love the lone star state There wouldn't be any ranting shootings in this capitol building anytime soon Even if the media made it seem as though every civilian with a gun represented a threat to public safety Okay, again treating the media as though it's one entity when it clearly isn't and to I'm not against guns at all. In fact, I think that's one of the very few areas where Shapiro and I will agree politically I think guns are cool and I think they have their uses But the idea that a normal person would stop a mass shooting Is kind of dumb because if you're in a crowd and you just hear gunshots and you just start shooting at the people You think are doing it suddenly you're gonna have 18 people all shooting each other rather than just one or two and Look, I don't wish that was the way things are, but that's how people act. We're dumb in crowds She showed the guards her id and they waved her through two knocks on the door And she stood across from one time republican presidential candidate and four time governor Bubba Davis after a stint in vietnam back in the late 1960s Davis a big bear of a man burly and fun-loving had come home without a job So it basically explains Bubba's backstory there where He was just a successful businessman who got a loan from his father-in-law. I'm sure that had nothing to do with it Um, but and then he you know became part of the texas state legislature And then he himself became the governor of texas But what I find interesting about this is that he's clearly the good guy here Okay, like this entire book he's shown to be in the right and you know in a difficult position, but doing his best But you know, he was a businessman who just decided to get into politics And remember earlier how it said prescott was handpicked by the power brokers Who does ben think the power brokers are And then it brings up a bunch of bullshit about how like environmentalists are lobbying against oil Fracking and shit and apparently they're also funded by the saudi governments It's a good thing that oil companies never ever lobby So then it goes back to soledad in her, you know, weird siege thing and basically a swat guy breaks into her house And says hey, I'm defecting. He basically just says that in as many words I want to help you escape blah blah blah and then uh As they're leaving some gunshots get fired and the militia and the swat team starts fighting In the distance the cavalry was coming Soledad soldiers at least a dozen bearded gun toting men on their steel horses riding directly towards the swat lines She could see it in the distance pickets hog charge Sorry just looking for an excuse to read that line. Uh, basically she just escapes and it's really dumb and boring So it goes back to levon in detroit and again It reiterates that the only evidence of the police shooting is that he killed a kid And the only foot it shows that he was not justified in doing it Okay, and then it goes into a bunch of stuff about how The history of detroit and how it got to this and how apparently staffing up the police department is controversial And so they weren't able to hire more officer whatever and then we go to muhammad in tehran. Iran Today's attack has ensured that the crippled and weakened infidel giants that was the united states will never rise again The emptiness and degradation of that perverse country has been wiped away and the glorious reign of Allah has begun Those that rejected Allah followed vanities and Allah has destroyed them and it goes on for a while like that It's actually a different guy Ashimi or ashami.  I'll I'll I'll give one point in Shapiro's favor.   The rules don't apply to america That's a very common theme in this book actually so then we go to part two collapse and this is just after the terrorist attack at the bridge that was at the prologue and It doesn't really do a great job of explaining that. Okay. Yeah, this is after it because this book doesn't have a good timeline in general I don't know if it happens over the course of months or just a couple of weeks, but it's confusing So they do that, you know hostage video thing with bret and he sends a morse code message by blinking and ask them to send in an airstrike But the president decides not to send in an airstrike because you know That could kill a lot of innocent people and start a war with iran and iran is you know A sovereign nation that has control over its own territory Which I feel like that's something that ben should understand because he's making such a big deal about The american border needing to be closed. Why does that not apply to other people? Oh, right. They're not americans. They're not special But you know anyways, uh, they send in and You know like a spy special ops team to save him whatever you would call that and Here's that They crept down the hallway visibility no greater than 10 feet ahead to the sides ran door after door a light flashed on Behind one of the doors an old woman suddenly thrust it open one of the operatives sprang forward grabbing the handle and easing it shut Police he bellowed in farce hoping the rest of the apartment dwellers could hear him stay in your home She nodded terrified and let the lock click home in tey ron questioning the police would have been foolhardy Now I find that interesting because again He's admitting That the police can be corrupt and overly violent But only other people's police like if black people in america are complaining about police brutality Then oh, no, that's not real. They're just being whiny, but Other people doing it suddenly it's different So basically bret gets rescued and he's actually kind of Pissed off about being rescued.  I know i'm damn sorry about it, but i'm not the governor of new york I'm governor of the republic of texas and my first duty is to this state We give up these troops. We might as well let bret scott open the border officially to the cartels and smugglers They're the only thing standing between us and a full-scale invasion again Kids coming through isn't an invasion and criminal organizations as bad as they are Aren't an invasion either. They're just criminal organizations.   So there's that The only thing that's really interesting in this chapter is at the end when soledad is talking to one of the militiamen I always say the best defense is a good off offense So does clobbits when your force is small concentrated and hit them where they weak Who are they the same people who shut down your farm the same people who attacked you those people are americans It isn't american to do those things america means more than being born here.   It's like the prosecutors are saying no no Because reasons like she doesn't even give a reason for it really. She's just like this isn't murder or manslaughter. It's yeah, he's fine and uh It's like it bet is accidentally showing off how corrupt police and prosecutors are So then it goes to bret and he's looking for muhammad the kid that uh was with ashami And who he actually saw when he was uh captive and he's going to You know an airport and asking for records and he's saying Yes, i'm looking for an arabic young man the official hemdenhard. I'm uncomfortable with that sir.   We can't be angry or hating each other We need to find the people who did this yes, but we also need to rebuild and come together as americans And that's another thing which is fairly reasonable But painted as a crazy person saying it. Okay, whatever And then it goes back to ellen and bubba davis and it's talking about how the media day after day ran with the story A president calling for love and unity and a southern secessionist governor looking like george wallis Never mind that david had stood with the marchers of the civil rights era.   Yeah, those were good people fighting for their rights and I just wonder what Shapiro thinks of black lives matter. I don't have to wonder.  Logic straight dude I'm sorry. I don't want this to be like just a political thing.  There's no other reason for it Whatever let me get to part three the end of the beginning which is a stupid name So then bret continues investigating on his own, but he's also being followed so he has to Lose his tails in order to you know be able to investigate properly And so he's just wandering around the hotel trying to lose him Instead of exiting at the lobby level he continued sprinting down into the basement area He'd planned for this eventuality ever since he arrived at the hotel in afghanistan He'd acquired the useful habit of locating exits and scoping out his location He knew the maze of hallways and doors in the hotel basement and he quickly navigated them waiting long enough to ensure He'd lost his pursuers when he emerged onto the street. He found himself alone And just that's it That is the most unsatisfying action sequence. I have ever read Like it's literally just yeah, I I lost them because i'm that cool like even with people like james bond and batman who are just So cool. They never lose. We still know how they did it So bret meets up with his old friend derrick who got mentioned at the beginning Only now derrick is called hasan because he converted to islam at one point and um Okay, uh, and they just apparently hasan is like a an informants in mosques like he talks about people he thinks are Radical and might have terrorist sympathies to the fbi, which okay, that's fine And uh, they just mentioned another guy named anjan omari or anjem omari.   There's that and then bret gets away from prescott and he goes back to his friend hasan slash derrick and he's dead bret knew the apartment wasn't empty the door would have been closed had the killer had time to leave They wouldn't want the body discovered too quickly that would give away too much information bret quickly turned towards the bedroom as he did he saw a large black masked figure out of the corner of his eye So bret kills the guy because he's just that awesome and then he leaves and ellen is in new york now And she's talking about how there's just so many military people all over the place that she feels safe With armed men and women everywhere. She didn't feel nervous.  So it's like Hey, there's an actual callback and an actual setup for something But it doesn't make any sense big terrorist attacks are not easy to pull off. They're extremely difficult That's why we don't have them very often and so the idea that people could actually plan and successfully pull off two of them Is um Well, it's stupid So press god is giving another speech, which is like 80 of what he seems to do in this book and um, it has him How do I put this? He has the quote most racially diverse troops behind him So they all show up on camera and it's clearly shown in this book as a manipulative tactic Which it is and it is kind of you know Underhanded maybe not underhanded, but like it's stupid and it tries to give off a false impression but I just want to point that out because that's the exact same shit donald trump does now and Well, I just don't think that ben would find it nearly as manipulative And I know he claims to not like donald trump, but uh, he also Seems to agree with everything he says ever so Yeah So soli dud actually comes to this event and is in the crowd and she manages to smuggle in a 3d printed gun so it doesn't have any metal on it and uh, she You know is trying to assassinate the president like she's gonna try and get close and do that and brett sees her And This happens he responded instinctually gun He shouted grabbing at her hand before she could respond He'd rested control of it from her But she managed to pull the trigger firing uselessly into the air the crowd around them panicked Moving a thousand directions at once women falling to the ground men trampled on the stage secret service agents jumped onto prescott to protect him Then hustled him off stage as sirens began to wail and screaming broke out and mouse brett realized he was holding the gun a split second before he felt a large man jump on his back Slamp him to the ground So yeah, ellen, uh goes on air force one with the president and with um, omari the Imam that i mentioned earlier and he is as they're flying they're flying like you know right over new york he is muttering in arabic and apparently She finally realizes that mohammed the guy from earlier brought him a bomb It was the weapon of mass destruction that iraq made it's a small nuclear weapon because You know that they would totally not have used that if they're being invaded whatever.  You know, they're just too pc to racially profile So it's not that they're just confused by what's going on or that they're shocked by what's going on And people tend to freeze up in difficult circumstances. It's obviously because of that damn political correctness But at the same time if you say anything bad about israel, you're an anti-semite So bomb goes off ellen is killed along with hundreds of thousands of others And so we get to the epilogue Washington dc Good evening my fellow americans the former governor of michigan looked directly into the camera She spoke from the east room of the white house. The tears in her eyes were genuine. She forced them down I know many of you may not know me few americans bothered to learn the name of the vice president of the united states But my name is allison martin and Okay, that that that sequence isn't too bad, but like Why did you introduce her as the former governor of michigan rather than just saying the vice president like?  They came from somewhere deeper Where? Where do your rights come from? I i'm genuinely curious where you think they come from like because people have a lot of different philosophies on this And you could say something interesting here, but you decided not to because in your mind It's just so patently obvious and anyone who disagrees with you deserves to be shot So yeah, just uh, soledad manages to rescue brett from prison and then It's sequel baits. It just says yeah, let's go to texas and she admits she's a terrorist now So but she also says the government made me a terrorist.  Okay, like I knew going in that it would be propaganda But I didn't realize it would be such bad poorly put together obvious propaganda like What the shit dude one of the reviews I read of this calls it hamfisted But like honestly even that's giving it way too much credit because as I was saying this whole thing is just so transparently hypocritical like America has to play by different rules than other people and when we do it, it's okay But when bad guys do it there it's because they're bad Like it's just it's so up its own ass and so circular in its logic that it's not even good propaganda Like the people who already believe this shit like your uncle who shares racist shit on facebook would probably love this book But it's not gonna convince anybody new so it's just I don't know and they're like I said, there's a lot of small things in the pros that I just ignored Because I didn't have time for them and they just weren't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things But overall it's just a very poorly put together book like there's so many different uh Plot lines, which don't intersect that well or only come together at the very end And they didn't really need to be there like soledad Didn't have anything interesting to do in the book and she didn't have anything important to do until the very end and she probably could have been replaced with another character that Was actually with Brett the whole time or most of the time and it would have worked better and The sequel bait ending. Hopefully there's never a sequel, but If I had to Say anything positive about this book I would say that one or two of the action sequences kind of work And it's really not that long, you know, like I said, it's a fairly short book And I I got done with it in like two days or two and a half days And the pacing is pretty good, too Like there was no there were very few sequences like that opening flashback sequence with Brett was out of nowhere and stupid But Other than that, there really weren't any sequences that felt unnecessary or dragged on like everything was over with pretty quickly. So that's That is a positive.  He doesn't he's not just a racist.  I love you guys and all the other names on here if you want to like be able to vote in polls to determine what kind of contents I make or if you want to I don't know just get early access to my contents or Other stuff or just want to support me at all like check out my page, please And if you can't do that then you know subscribe Rate the video comments on the video so that it shows up and I've talked long enough my throat hurts. Bye


There's so many people queuing up outside to come in. And as I said, this match being played in the backdrop of India-Australia friendship and collaboration. And to the Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, and Srinatharinder Modi, Prime Minister of India alongside the two captains. They're expected to announce even closer friendship in the days to come. That friendship will end in about seven or eight minutes and then recommence at closer play. They went round the ground in an open motorcade today to rousing cheers. Australian Prime Ministers over the years have known to have a great affinity with cricket starting from Sir Robert Menzies all the way down. So is Yondubu Narendra Modi. Never short of wishing the team well. Must be a big moment for a lot of those players. It's always good when your head of state wants to, when the Prime Minister wants to come and see you play. This reminds you on the field itself, Australia. As I said a little while ago, Australia unchanged. India just the one trade. There will be batting first on the surface. That is pretty different from some of the surfaces we've seen so far. But a nice little cultural program for a brief while before the play started. And now the two teams will line up in the presence of their respective Prime Ministers for the National Anthem. It's always a very special moment if you're out on the field for it. So let's join the two teams with the National Anthem. And so to the cricket. India versus Australia. 75 years of friendship. It was to Australia that independent India first sent a cricket team out. November 1947, that first test match in Brisbane that India first played under the banner of India. Now a little over 75 years later here in Ahmedabad, they will take on Australia once again in a test match that will decide how the series ends. Will it be 3-1? Will it be 2-2? We don't like draws these days. Not your head, it's alongside me. So Sunil Gavaskar will hear from them very shortly. As the two Prime Ministers find their way to where they're going to sit to watch.


So I want to point out that with this LU factorization, we accomplish it only by doing forward phase replacement operations. What if you can't roll reduce your matrix using those? There are some generalizations to the LU factorization I want to put out for you. So for example, if you do have to do an interchange, whether it's one interchange or 5,208 interchanges or whatever number, right? All of those interchange matrices can be combined together to form a permutation matrix. And so there is a so-called PLU factorization, which the conditions on L and U are exactly the same thing here that the U matrix is a echelon matrix. And if it was square, it would be upper triangular. That's why we call it a U. The matrix L here would be a unit lower triangular matrix that encompasses all of the replacement operations you did in the forward phase. And then P right here is going to be a permutation matrix, which basically we just stick all of the interchanges together in one matrix. And we can get this PLU factorization. So if you have to, whoops, if you have to do a interchange, you can get this PLU factorization, which I want to admit to us that if you slap in a permutation matrix in terms of solving the associated linear system, it's not going to make much of a difference whatsoever. It's not going to affect the factorization by much. So it's a very benign thing to add to it if you have to do interchanges. Now, what if you wanted to do, what if you wanted to do a scaling of some kind, right? An alternative idea is to also have the so-called LDU factorization, which the LDU factorization, as the name might suggest, it has L, which is a unit lower triangular matrix. It has U, which is going to be a echelon matrix, but it also has this matrix D in here, which D is going to be a diagonal matrix, which the diagonal matrix basically keeps all of the scaling together in terms of the row operations we did here because to get the unit lower triangular matrix, we do not need to have any scaling whatsoever. Now, if you did scaling, you can factor them out of the matrix L to make a unit lower triangular. Or in fact, if we wanted the leading entries of the matrix U to be one, we could also factor out factors and make a diagonal matrix. So if we wanted both L and U to have units, have ones in those pivot positions, then we could accomplish that by having a diagonal matrix. So you get this LDU factorization. The last thing to consider here is, there is, you can put all of these things together, and you can get a PLDU factorization. So in the most general sense, every matrix can be factored as a PLDU factorization here. And that's because the permutation matrix P encompasses all of the interchanges. The diagonal matrix D will encompass all of the scaling you have to do. The matrix L is gonna unit lower triangular, it has all the forward replacement matrices there. And then U is this echelon form, which could be upper triangular if it's a square, mind you. And so every funk matrix could have this type of factorization. Now that's a little bit more overkill than what I'm necessarily expecting from this series. So we're gonna focus on the LU factorization, but I did want you to be aware that there are generalizations that allow for these higher type of factorizations to incorporate the diagonal and permutation matrices we talked about previously in this lecture.


I now want to introduce you to Alison Kyo and we've worked together for a long time. Alison studied physiotherapy in UCD and then did a master's in sports and exercise medicine in Trinity. She then came back to do a PhD in UCD and then afterwards started working in the Insight Centre. She worked on a lot of different projects and insights over a number of years related to digital tools and their use in innovation and healthcare pathways and also in promotion of activity and she's also very interested and you'll see from some of the work and Alison was involved in some of the previous work that we spoke about that a lot of her work is involved in the exploration of strategies around marathon running and she was involved in the paceman project. Alison has just recently started a new role as a lecturer in healthcare innovation in Trinity so unfortunately we would be losing her and although she's not involved in running and as a sport Alison is an international hockey umpire so some of you may already be familiar with her and thank you very much for doing this today because you're dashing to the airport immediately for a hockey engagement so over to you thank you. Thank you thanks everyone for being here today it's always a challenge to to follow off on Barry and his great work but I'm going to do my best and go through some of the evidence that we have from existing literature within the area of marathon training um if anyone can't hear me as we go through just raise your hand shout at me as we go um today I'm just going to go briefly into the the evidence that we have um in existence already some of the challenges that face marathon runners when it comes to training we'll then go and look at what the evidence and the published literature says what type of studies exist in this area some of the characteristics of them before looking at what the results of some of them are so one of the studies that have taken place that have tried to predict or alter marathon training times or marathon times based on training and then finally very briefly look at some of the practical things that we can consider at the moment based on the evidence that we have in existence so we all know the kind of the fable of marathon running um has come back from Greek times when the messenger arrived having run 40 kilometers and then drops dead on arrival but marathon running has obviously um come leaps and bounds since then and we all know it in its most recent format um since the 1896 Olympics but really it has exploded in the last couple of decades particularly since the 70s where we now have over 5000 marathons happening a year with over two million participants happening globally and this is big business now we have an awful lot of people that want to do their very best that don't want to get injured and that want to cross that finish line on time so how do they train to make sure that all their time and effort and money and commitment pays them dividends a cursory glance at the internet will show the abundance of information that exists out there and it can be really confusing particularly for people who are just starting off with marathon running or their first marathon running um where do they go youtube instagram scientific literatures experts books the the the amount of possibilities there is endless um and you know you don't even have to look at the likes of Strava or Garmin or anything at the moment to see that we also have like experts who have decades worth of experience that can claim that they know how you should best run your marathon so where does someone start um you know how do they know which strategy is going to work best for them and where do they even begin on picking all of this information because it's absolutely almost kind of like a a paradox of choice happening here and unfortunately the result at the moment is a lot of people are facing this jigsaw puzzle that they just don't know how to get the pieces together that fit them best and and this I suppose is where the science comes in because what science does is has it has a hypothesis we have um a plan or something that we think is going to happen and so we can then manipulate different variables to test whether our idea is true or not if we look at experts they have decades of um I suppose you know free living experience under their belt and they have knowledge around period periodization around physiology but the two things can't be compared one isn't necessarily better than the other but we can definitively state that expert opinion is the same as what a scientific um evidence and hypothesis can show us so and that's where I suppose we were looking at the science because there's lots of different studies that exist out there where people have tried to change different pieces of people's training and then have come up with a result as to how effective that was or not but as a single study we don't learn an awful lot but when we collectively put them together and pool them we can learn an awful lot more and so that's what we were looking to do with a study that we um uh completed a couple of years ago by 2019 now at this stage so we did what's called a systematic review and a systematic review is where we systematically look at all the published scientific research that exists um we extract the information that is relevant to us so for us it's looking at people who have run a marathon who are over the age of 18 and who have reported something to do with their training strategies in the run up to that marathon and then what we did was we pooled them together to say what can we learn from this literature as a collective more than we'll learn from looking at them as individual studies and so what we did was we well we did our systematic review when we found that we had 85 articles that fit our um criteria so that's an immediate flag that despite the popularity of marathons um we actually don't have an awful lot of research in the area of training that has been published most of the research that has taken place has taken place with male runners over 75 percent most of it has taken place with recreational runners and most of it has taken place within the US so again that's a little bit of a flag that we have a biased sample here that the evidence that we have around marathon training sways us towards this cohort of people in particular so as we're going through just kind of keep that in mind in terms of the studies that exist um most of the studies interestingly only really looked at tweaking one or two variables whereas we know from our own kind of um training practices there's so many different things that we can look at when we um go to train for a marathon so the fact that they're only looking at one piece again is a little bit of a limitation but what was also interesting is this this research spans across five decades but over 40 percent of it has actually taken place since 2010 but despite the relative newness of this uh research only five percent of the marathon training research at the moment lists GPS as one of its methods so the majority of research is completely basing its opinions and its recommendations of self-report data okay somebody saying what they did and how they did it but what we did was we took out all the information that existed because we needed to understand well what is in existence at the moment and to pool it together and to make a um reasonably accurate estimate of effectiveness we had to include or only include training variables that had been reported in 10 studies or more so effectively if they're not within 10 studies we can't really um accurately say how much of a role that they have to play um in training so even though there was an awful lot of variables we actually were only able to look at seven and say what influence have these seven had on marathon performance subsequently also when we kind of look at it we ideally would have liked to have pooled them together so say if we take uh average weekly training distance plus longest um training run and say what's the difference between focusing on them versus just looking at uh the longest training run we weren't able to do that and the reason we weren't able to do that is because of that self-report data when there's a lot of differences in how people report something it becomes very tricky for us to definitively state this is what happened okay so there is again a little bit of a limitation there with this but these are the seven training parameters um that were listed in 10 or more studies and interestingly all of them are are influential to marathon performance so we can see there in the brackets at the end there's the range of what was reported but that or squared number is the one that's kind of most important for us to look at the closer that is to one the more predictive it is subsequently of um marathon training so effectively for all of these we have significant um changes in essence if you increase or improve your performance in each of these seven variables you will subsequently decrease your marathon performance um or finish time okay so but we can see um the or squared up at uh no point eight there is maximum training distance of one week average training uh weekly training distance is point seven they are more predictive than something like um our number of sessions a week when it comes to training but what does this mean for us practically we were able to kind of work backwards a little bit and particularly focusing on those who want to do will say a four hour marathon time we were able to turn around and say that there are certain parameters that they should look at in terms of their training volumes so if you're a for a person that's looking to to finish in four hours um your average weekly training distance should be about 44 kilometers you should do about four and a half hours of training a week and you should not go over 63 kilometers in one week in your training block your pace should be about 97 percent of your planned marathon um pacing strategy and the longest training run interestingly should only be about 27 kilometers now this is just for people who are looking to run four hour marathons there's a lot of people that think the 32 kilometers is what we should look at but the evidence that is in existence at the moment for four hours would suggest that you don't need to do that that a 27 kilometer run is the longest thing that you need to do now again the evidence and the kind of the the availability of the numbers wasn't there for us to be able to extrapolate this into two hours two and a half uh we were only able to confidently look at this for four hours but it's still a kind of an indication of the types of thresholds that we could look at if this research develops further but probably the biggest thing for us from this um literature review that we did is the limitations that are in existence at the moment despite the popularity of marathon running we can see that there's not a lot of evidence in existence out there at the moment that has been published and so this is in a way exciting because there's an awful lot more for us to learn and there's an awful lot that we can't necessarily be confident in that work like what Barry is doing can can help and that we can look at further so big cautious point of the day is if someone turns around and tells you I can definitively give you a training program that will guarantee you a three hour training or a finished time they can't based on the evidence that we have at the moment and that's not to dismiss expert opinion but it is to give a little bit of I suppose a warning signal that we don't actually definitively know an awful lot about this as a topic yet similarly some of our limitations again as I've kind of already highlighted are that you know we still need to know an awful lot more about people outside of the US and about women runners in particular I can skip over that one we've kind of covered that so the big takeaway from this study is linked to what Barry is doing and also what you'll hear from Kira is the potential for high volumes of data for us to get meaningful insights as to a what people are doing but then to learn from what people are doing and plan as to how we can change that in the future so if we know that the majority of runners are doing x number of kilometers in their training runs and we want to know the influence of changing that by 10% or whatever we need to know what they're doing and then we can start planning it and then start tweaking it further and some of our studies that we can look to do in the future may be able to benefit from people interacting with the likes of Strava or Runkeeper or potentially in the future even pairing with them to start doing studies like this but at the moment this is very much an area that is growing and that is potentially very exciting for us to look at so that was a very quick whistle stop tour for me I hope I've given you a little bit more time back but a takeaway from this is that really at the moment the evidence suggests that there's really only seven key training behaviors that have been shown to be effective in terms of marathon finishing time at the moment so if you tweak those seven variables and you improve your performance in them you will improve your marathon finish time but this is absolutely still a growing area use the likes of Strava more that gives us the data to use and that we can learn more of this from and be very cautious if someone promises you a definitive finishing time thank you