We welcome you all to the special think tech lecture program and we welcome Shirley Daniel, director of the Pacific Asian Management Institute, PAMI organizer and convener of the program. And every year, PAMI presents the Paul Chung Memorial webinar lecture. The speaker this year is Tom Cooney of General Motors. His talk is entitled Transformations in Transportation, exciting innovations in the auto industry. Now, Shirley, would you be so kind as to tell us about PAMI, what it is and what it does. Thank you and Aloha Jay and everyone. The Pacific Asian Management Institute PAMI was founded over 40 years ago in 1977 by Dr Chung, who was an economics professor at the UH Manoa Shidler College of Business. Dr Chung foresaw many of the changes in global economic conditions and business and realized how important the Asia Pacific region was going to be to the US and to Hawaii. Sadly, Dr Chung was only in his 50s when he passed away over 30 years ago on August 28 1985. Dr Chung was born in Korea and came to the US for his education, earning his PhD from the Michigan State University. After becoming a professor at the University of Hawaii, Dr Chung developed the early PAMI programs around the concept of planned interaction between students, managers, and faculty from throughout the world. He invited a who's who of international business scholars from both sides of the Pacific to participate in the PAMI programs. The Dr Chung Memorial Lecture is a highlight of our PAMI program and is made possible by the generosity of Mrs K Chung, who established the Dr NH Paul Chung Memorial Lecture Fund. Over the past 30 years, in addition to this lecture, Mrs Chung has also endowed scholarships and programs in the William S Richardson School of Law, the Center for Korean Studies, and the Shidler College of Business. We thank Mrs Chung for her generous support of PAMI and the University of Hawaii. I'd also like to thank Jay Fidel and Think Tech Hawaii for helping us expand the tradition of our lecture through the Think Tech platform. Thank you Jay for your support of the University and PAMI. This year, our topic focuses on innovations in the auto industry, a particularly important topic since transportation is one of the most important factors in the national economy, and is one of the most important factors in Hawaii. As the world grapples with issues of climate change, electrification of vehicles and infrastructure needed for them will be a key element for Hawaii going forward. Thank you to all attendees for your continued support for our programs. We greatly appreciate your participation in the webinar today as we celebrate the life and work of Dr Chung. At this time, I'll turn it back to Jay to introduce our speaker, Mr Tom Cooney. Our speaker Tom Cooney is Vice President of Global Public Policy at General Motors. He oversees GM's international engagement and its partnerships with the US and foreign governments. All in support of GM's vision of carbon neutrality and an all electric future with zero admissions, zero crashes and zero congestion. In addition to these government relations duties, Tom worked on the GM Project 5 team that built and delivered 30,000 life-saving ventilators early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Before joining GM, Tom had a 25-year diplomatic career in the State Department and attained the Senior Foreign Service Rank of Minister Counselor. He was charged with affairs at the Embassy in Argentina and served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Argentina and Hong Kong. He had assignments in Beijing, Shanghai, Santiago, Washington, and was foreign policy advisor or a pay-com. As you'll see, as a result, Tom became a very diplomatic person. That said, I give you Tom Cooney, Vice President of Global Public Policy at General Motors, on transformations in transportation, something that will undoubtedly affect us all. I give you Tom Cooney. Tom? Hey, thank you, Jay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Shirley, as well. This is, I really appreciate this opportunity for multiple reasons. I have strong ties to Hawaii from my time when I was with pay-com, and that's when I fell in love with the islands. And so the opportunity to be here today and to talk with all of you is about what I'm very passionate about in the auto industry is fantastic. I also want to mention it's a great honor to be doing this with the Dr. Paul Chung lecture. You know, given that I work for General Motors, we have very strong ties to Korea. We have multiple factories, a big manufacturing footprint in Korea. I'll be there again for a visit in early October to visit with the new government. I work for international government relations and run that for General Motors, so I'm traveling throughout the world very heavily in the Asia Pacific. So it gives me a lot of opportunities to stop by Honolulu as well. As I go into the slides, there's going to be a lot of GM stuff. There's going to be a lot of GM pictures and things like that. I'm not trying to sell anybody any cars today. It's just a topic that I know best, and I think that what General Motors is doing is really emblematic of what is going on across the whole industry, lots of different automakers. So I'll talk about General Motors. I'll talk a little bit about other companies as well, but I'm really using us as an example of what's happening. And that's really significant because GM is a company that's 114 years old. When you think of Chevrolet and Cadillac and GMC and Buick, you're thinking of these great gas vehicles of the past. All of that is changing, and that is what attracted me to move from a long career in diplomacy to General Motors. So let's get going. So I chose this first slide because if you remember the Hummer 10, 15 years ago, the original Hummer, it was this big, huge beast, not good on gas at all, quite the gas guzzler. And so that is the, as you look at it, that's the left side of the picture, the old traditional Hummer. On the right side is the brand new one, all electric. I mean, it couldn't be more different. It looks similar. It's still the same kind of rugged vehicle, but it's all electric, zero emissions. It is a sea change, and this is kind of emblematic of what's happening in the industry. So, you know, it's a great vehicle and goes zero to 60 in three seconds and very quiet and uses no gas and carbon emissions free. So where is all this coming from? You know, just to put this in context, why is this happening now? There's a variety of factors.  We've got the Paris supports, various national commitments. So companies like GM want to do their part. We're making massive investments in this technology, massive. So it's, you know, it's not depending on government subsidies. It's our own, you know, skin in the game, if you will, $35 billion of investments. Volkswagen Group making very similar investments. Ford of others. Tesla obviously is all electric from the very beginning. So companies are lagging behind taking a wait and see approach, but we are, you know, we're, we're, we're all in. So the, a lot of national governments are also saying it's time we need to make this switch. For example, in California, as of 2035 in California, nobody can sell any new gas, internal combustion engine vehicles or what we call ICE vehicles, the traditional vehicles. You can't buy a new one in California. You'll be able after 2035, you'll be able to continue to drive your old one, you can't buy a new one. And then there's 15 other US states who follow California and they'll do the same thing. And there's countries around the world. The UK has a similar rule by 2035, British Columbia, Quebec, in Canada, Chile, all by 2035. Some are saying 2040, but this is, this is moving along. Other things that are happening is, is autos are no longer going to be just simply the vehicle that gets you from place to place. They're becoming like rolling iPhones at this point. The, all of our new vehicles will come with what's called an altify system. So your traditional infotainment. This is going to change as you know it. And you've probably seen that in Tesla vehicles and others. So the amount of data that's rolling across vehicles creates a lot of new issues for privacy, but it also creates new revenue streams as well. Automakers like General Motors are becoming tech companies. It is, it's not just, you know, building the four wheels and the steering wheel and going from point A to point B. So the, you know, where, where, where did we get there? What has to happen? First of all, to make EVs affordable, the cost of the battery has to come down, and it has been coming down. And that's where, you know, when I talked about $35 billion of investment, a lot of that is in battery technology. So bring changing, experimenting with the battery chemistry with the lithium and nickel, the cobalt and manganese, the graphite that goes into the battery. Everybody's got their secret formula. Everybody's got their, their mix. And nobody's got it perfect yet. And so there's everybody's working on that trying to make batteries more dense. And energy efficient, and also bringing the cost of the batteries down. And also working in very environmentally sustainable ways as well. And I can talk more about that as well. We need smart and effective public policy. We're seeing a lot of that. We've had a lot of efforts around the world from various governments just recently in the United States. The inflation reduction act includes massive investments in consumer purchase incentives. You know, consumers have to be, have to be convinced and you have to give them financial incentives to make this kind of investment. So that is included in the inflation reduction act and also manufacturing production incentives. And the US government is using this as a way to try to keep manufacturing at home as our traditional gas engine factories transform into electric factories. Governments around the world are doing the same thing, offering the same kinds of investment incentives. It's a race to try to attract these, these factories. And you can see that in Korea. You can see it in China. You can see it in Europe as well. And then of course, there's the charging networks.  Well, what were they worried about back then? Where will I get gas? What if I run out of gas out in the countryside? So that is a long transformation process and you have to build up consumer confidence and that they can go and get the energy that they need, the charge that they need, and to do it quickly. That is the federal government is making a huge investment $7.5 billion in charging networks across the United States. And companies like General Motors are also making their own investments and working with charging networks, creating joint ventures and trying to build this out to in order to reduce range anxiety. Just as a side note, all of GM vehicles going forward will have at least a minimum of 300 miles of range on a single full charge. 300 miles. So if you're in Hawaii, that's easy. You might be able to go all week without having to recharge. It depends on how much you're commuting around the island, but that's, you know, add a minimum and then bring a helmet night and charge it up again. And then of course, you know, if you pay for a bigger battery, then you'll have even more, even some of our vehicles can go up to 450 miles at their most deluxe premium value. And General Motors is we are becoming very ambitious. So we are going to be having completely electric zero emissions, light duty fleet by 2035. That's really not that far away. So 100% of our light duty fleet, which is about 95% of what we sell. And by 2040, we will be completely carbon neutral. So that means all of our facilities around the world also will be carbon neutral. And we're doing that through big investments in renewable energy for our factories, for example, and we're doing that, you know, everywhere across the world. So these are big, this is a big sea change for General Motors. This is a company that is, you know, I was a track, I'm originally from Detroit, and this is not the GM that I, you know, that I grew up with. So that's, and we're seeing these kinds of commitments from, from many other countries, companies around the world, again, some moving faster than others. And, you know, GM Volkswagen board really trying to move fast and hard into this space. This is, I've alluded to this already. I won't go into all of this in detail, but, you know, just the big numbers, $35 billion between now and 2025. So between now and next, well, I should say between 2020 and 2025, $35 billion going into electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle development down in the lower left where it says greater than 50% of product development. Last year was the first year when GM put more design and engineering investment into EVs than into traditional ICE, you know, internal combustion engine vehicles. That's huge, 114 year old company, and now more of the money is going into, into this direction. Let me also just say we're not a company that has hybrids. We don't have any hybrids we we used to, but we're all in on electric hybrid vehicles are good in the sense that they certainly are better than internal combustion engine vehicles. But there's still a combustion engine in that vehicle, and studies show that a lot of hybrid owners are still driving the vehicles on gas rather than using the electric portion. I've mentioned this a little bit that I think it's worth going into in a little bit more detail. The bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed last year is has $7.5 billion for EV charging infrastructure. So again, consumers have range anxiety, you know, gas stations are everywhere, but chargers seem to be hard to find. So this is we're going to see a major build out of charging infrastructure, kind of like going back to President Eisenhower the 1950s with the big federal interstate highway plan. This is this is analogous. This is a build out of charging infrastructure. We also have to make it the charging experience fast. So our technology now can get to an 80% charge in about 15 minutes.   So that's, you know, again, those rates continue to drop to move faster. And at the same time that the cost of the battery is dropping, which the battery is 40% of the cost of the vehicle. So if you can continue to drive down the cost of the battery, it will continue to make EVs more affordable. And then the inflation reduction act that just passed. These are huge investments. They some of the criteria in order to be able to produce vehicles that will be eligible for the $7500 consumer investment. Let me let me start there. For those who aren't aware, there will be a new $7500 incentive for consumer purchase if the vehicle meets several criteria in terms of where the battery minerals are coming from and where the batteries are assembled. And then final assembly needs to take place in North America. And so within the US MCA, the US, Mexico, Canada free trade agreement. So it's it's created a high bar Congress and the president created a purposely high bar because it wants to incentivize EV production and EV purchases, but also wants the production to be in the United States using critical minerals from the United States. Or from allied and partner countries. So we are shifting our supply chains. All companies are working to shift the supply chains as much as possible in order to qualify for these incentives as soon as possible. I can talk about that later if there's a question, but this is something that GM, my team and others got an early jump on and we're working with with lots of different companies and countries, including with, you know, thinking again of Dr. Paul Chung, we have great partnerships with a series of Korean companies, including LG energy and Costco chemical, working closely on battery production joint ventures and also the processing of the critical minerals that that goes into the battery cell packs. So, GM in Korea US and Korea, very, very important ties, or doing the same thing with a different company called SK innovation for their battery production. So, again, you know, another another US company, it's, you know, good examples of work together under the Korea US free trade agreement between between old allies. Of course, in China, General Motors has a huge footprint manufacturing footprint in China, by and large what we build in China is for China, it's not exported. And there we're also building batteries and building electric vehicles, and we're doing that with a Chinese partner called CATL. So, back to the topic of charging because this is first and foremost, you know that the vehicles are coming the products are coming. They're beautiful. They're great.  But again, it's the range anxiety and building out the past charging network. So I mentioned the the 7.5 billion that the US government is distributing to to the states. The Department of Energy is doing some of it directly but much of it is being given to the states to build out locally. But we're also making our own direct investments. This is, you know, this is a private and public sector challenge. And so we are working with a variety of companies, including one announcement, a company called pilot company, where we're putting $750 million of GM funding to charging networks across the country. I won't go into this too long. This is not a chemistry class. I feel like I've gone back to sometimes in this job, like I've gone back to high school chemistry. I mentioned, you know, so in the EV battery, the primary input materials are, as you can see on the left, left, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, silicon and graphite. Automakers around the world and also other industries are in a race to secure as much of this material as possible from around the world. Also rare earths as well. These are not rare earths, but there are rare earths that are used in magnets in other parts of the of the drivetrain for the drive units for the vehicles. So we are working with Korean companies, Australian companies, Canadian companies to secure supplies. And we've done so we feel very confident in our in our work so far. But of course we're building we're dealing with a lot of external shocks as well, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove up the cost of nickel dramatically because nickel was a key Russia was a key source of nickel. So, you know, we're seeing supply supply chain shocks around the world. A lot of the part of it we can go back to that slide. Thank you. Part of the, there's, there's the mining of the raw materials but then there's the processing. As I said, you know everybody says that you know all the all the minerals are in China. That's actually not true. All the processing is in China. And that started, you know, decades ago with the processing of batteries for consumer electronics, you know for Sony playstations and, and cameras and things like that. So the raw materials are really mined everywhere and we have some in the United States as well. Canada, like I said throughout the Americas, but processing them is is the key and China is has about 80% of that so it's never wise to to depend on on any one link in the chain. So, diversification of processing around the world is is important to do. And again, it's not going to be like China will be squeezed out of that market that industry for a long time and probably never because again we produce in China or China, but it's just creating diverse sources of the minerals in of the process minerals that's just good business. It's just period business one on one so that you're not, you know, fortunately where we were not dependent on Russian nickel, we saw those risks for forthcoming. And we started to make alternate arrangements, you know, over the course of the last year. You know, having diverse supplies is just good business all the way around. This is just an example of what General Motors is doing. Again, other companies making similar moves if they're if they're as aggressive on on electric as we are. There's some of the companies that we're working closely with LG Chem is our joint venture partner to build batteries we have for battery plants in the United States built with LG Chem under the name of Altium cells. So Altium cells, you can see there is a joint venture, and the first one just opened up and just started operating a month ago in Ohio, and several more are scheduled to open. POSCO chemical another Korean company. We are opening up a plant in Quebec, in Canada, together with POSCO to do the processing that I just talked about so they'll take raw materials from around the world and turn it into the cathode active material that ultimately goes into the cell packs at these battery plants like the one in Ohio so weird. That's just an example of the chain that we are in the process of building company like GM I can't speak for other companies but we are very unlikely to go down and become minors ourselves to actually go into such a vertical integration that we buy a mine in in nickel mine in Canada or you know a cobalt mine in in in Australia, battery recycling. This is extremely important. We don't want to build all these batteries and have them go into landfills. So every battery that we currently have, you know, we have a lot of Chevrolet bolts on the road, for example, everyone that comes back is is recycled or reused. There is, you know, a lot of so recycling. It is the technology has improved to the point where we can, you can break down an old battery. And then recycle those those minerals and use them again, these minerals are precious they have value so we want to use them again, put them back into the cam the cathode active material recycling process. So recycling is is critical. Another secondary form is we believe batteries can have a second life. So if a battery goes down to about 70% of its of its of its usage. From when it was in a vehicle, it still can can be a stationary source of power, it can be located outside of schools it can be located outside of factories. Take energy that's brought in from solar panels, for example, and then put it back into the back into the grid or put it back into that particular facility. So, you know, we strongly believe and we're working with regulators on how to ensure that batteries don't go into landfills. They're too valuable, and they have a alternate uses. These I'm going to go through really rapidly. Again, not selling any vehicles here. I just want to demonstrate. This is a wave of EVs coming from companies like General Motors. Right now on the road we have that Hummer I talked about there. We have the Chevrolet Bolt, which has been out there since 2017. That's older battery technology. Everything coming out now will have a Altium battery in it, which is much longer life, higher battery density, faster charging. So, these are vehicles that you'll start seeing next year they were just featured at the Detroit auto show. The only point I'll make about these vehicles. And in the next slide is that GM has long had a history, a philosophy of building a car for every purse and purpose that was a quote from the legendary CEO named Alfred Sloan. You know, the, you know, the MIT Sloan School of Business is named for him. We want to build for every price point. And this is really important to our diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as well. We're not just going to build luxury vehicles. So, if we go to the next slide here that you were just showing. Yeah, these, these are more expensive vehicles. These would not qualify for those new consumer purchase incentives, because Congress said a certain price point. So, a lot of the Teslas out there would not qualify a lot of the BMWs won't qualify. These two won't qualify either. The Hummer is a very expensive super truck. It can drive diagonal, actually. And then the Cadillac Lyric is a beautiful, beautiful vehicle. The price point there is $60,000. But on the previous slide, I showed you that we're coming out with vehicles. The electric equinox will be at the 30,000 range. The bolt is already below 30,000. So, we're trying to come out at a variety of price points and really have good value. Okay, and then here's a, here's the number one selling electric vehicle in all of China. This is, believe it or not, it is a GM joint venture with SAIC, which is Shanghai automotive GM and ruling, which is in Guangxi province. And Tesla sells the most EVs in China, the overall volume, but the number one selling model is the Hongguan Mini. People love it. It's very, very small. It's kind of like the size of a smart car and costs around $5,000. It can only go 100 miles on a single charge. But what people are buying it for is to be an urban getabout. So if you're running around Chengdu or China, Shanghai or Guangzhou, charge it once a day, charge it fast. And again, it's very customizable in terms of colors and things like that. This is just a little bit more about how we try to help customers with their charging network. So giving them big discounts or installing a fast charger at home. You can charge it off of your typical 120 volt plug that you might already have in your garage if you have a garage. That's fine, but it'll be slower or you can get a fast charger and GM and other companies are offering discounts to be able to install those. Which are 220 volt, much faster charging and to cut the cost. This is just really quick. When we talk about EVs, we're not just talking about passenger vehicles, but also delivery vehicles. So these FedEx and Amazon trucks, they are all going to be going electric. We launched a brand new brand called Bright Drop that you'll start seeing on the roads. FedEx, Walmart and Verizon are all early customers. So these are all electric and they come with electric vertical pallets like storage lockers inside that are also electric propelled and will make delivery much easier and package tracking much easier. Autonomous vehicles really quickly about this. They're not, they're not futuristic. They're actually here. We have autonomous vehicles, fully autonomous that are operating and actually charging for fares in San Francisco now. So if you go to San Francisco, cruise is what our autonomous vehicle subsidiary is called. You can actually get an autonomous vehicle ride and you can check YouTube and it's really happening. They're in limited hours, you know, they're rolling out slowly. So it's more like in the evening hours, they're only cleared to go up to 35 miles per hour. But they're fantastic. They've actually been operating there for eight or nine years in testing and we received approval just this year, the first company to be approved to operate. And then the other photo on that slide is a brand new fully autonomous vehicle called the origin on the right side. There's no steering wheel. There's no driver position. There's no brake pedal. There's two rows facing each other and what we call campfire seating. That's not futuristic either. That is actually going to roll out in Dubai, which really wants to be the first country in the world to have this kind of service. By the end of 2023, we'll begin a robo taxi service using the cruise origin that vehicle there in Dubai. So, thank you, Jay. And now we'll give it give it back to you. Obviously, I'm very excited about all these, all these things that we're doing and we're, we have a lot of challenges and we're trying to be ambidextrous in the sense of we're still producing great, you know, gas vehicles, all these automakers. But at the same time, we're going through the transformation to EVs. Now, thank you very much, Tom. Great remarks and you're right. It's very exciting. And, you know, it may be even more exciting than we think you talk about self driving in Dubai, if that's successful. The world will see and note. And gee whiz, it won't be very long before everybody wants one every community, every organization, every driver. So, you know, you might be able to excite the world in such a way so that things move even faster than we can imagine. So we have some questions for you, Tom, Shirley and I have both written up some questions and all the moderator questions, if you will, and this is an amalgam of all of that. The first question is, you know, you may have heard this before, as GM goes, so goes the nation. They don't say that about any other car company. So what what you're portraying is a picture of activity, admirable and inevitably altruistic, but this is a, you know, a capital corporation. We have to be mindful of GM's bottom line. Suffice to say in the world today, we all of us want GM to succeed in this initiative. But we realize the risk as capital investment, huge capital investors retooling and in the car company retooling means a lot. So yes, it sounds like there's altruism, but there's also going to be a profit motive here too. And I guess my question on that is, are you going to make money doing this, or is this such a risk that you can't say. Oh, yeah, I mean, that's a great question. It is altruistic in the sense that it's what the world needs. It's what the climate needs. It's what governments want and people's want. But it also absolutely, we think that this is a winning business model. We think that these are great vehicles that the market is ready for this move. And it's as we continue to drive down the cost of the of the battery, like I said, which is 40% of the vehicle. And with these technological advancements, yeah, we think that these will be successful, popular, profitable vehicles. We can't survive. We are publicly owned. We have shareholders. We have markets. So we absolutely have to have winning products that win market share. And without these investments, and if we wanted to just continue to do gas forever, that that would be risky. I mean, that would be that would be closing the doors eventually because governments are not tolerating that. Governments are actually the fuel economy corporate average fuel economy restrictions and the greenhouse gas emissions restrictions in California in British Columbia in Korea in Chile everywhere are getting stricter and stricter. If companies can't meet those, we have to pay penalties. So that's actually raising the cost of a gas vehicle for the automaker at the same. So that cost is going up. But at the same time, we have the cost of the battery coming down and for at least the next 10 years, consumer purchase incentives. So we think that this is the key period that we're that we're going into where the cost will meet, and the consumer purchase incentives will will prove to the customer that these are good value vehicles. Yes, and you when you talk about risk, and you talk about, you know, global expansion, which you're actively involved in right now. Talk about enhanced risk because you have geopolitical issues that we know in this world today that can erupt anywhere anytime we see it happening in the newspaper every day. So that adds to the risk and you know it's like this is the perfect storm for you, because you are a diplomat of a long career, and you understand how the United States is seen in other countries and continents and how people deal with technology and manufacturing global competition. My question to you is, you know, is that on a continuing basis are you satisfied that is a manageable risk, and is the expansion of GM a foreign policy asset. Is there a benefit here in other words when you go into a country and do well and sell to that country and develop technology and give that country, you know, a leadership position in this industry. Are you getting a benefit, not only for yourselves, but for the United States. Am I right. Yeah, I think that any company, whether it's GM or you know any company that is doing strong business with another country. The government appreciates that it's a bridge it's a commercial bridge between countries and you know from my days as a diplomat you know the core mission of a diplomat is to be a bridge builder. So facilitating business and trade between countries was always extremely important so when you look at the US career relationship I talked a little bit about you know the ties that we have, and I know that the US government considers that to be an asset. We have a strong presence, you know, in many countries around the world. And it's always, you know, it's always considered to be to be a very strong thing. And, and appreciated by, you know, and champs American chambers of commerce around the world as well. In terms of supply chain shocks and risk, you know, that's, that's my job, you know, we're supposed to see ahead. The best we can. It was a great, great quote somewhere that's, you know, forecasting is really hard, especially when it's about the future. But, you know, sometimes we, sometimes we get it right. Like I said, we saw increasing tensions arising. We weren't predicting the Ukraine invasion when it happened, but we were becoming less and less comfortable. So we started to build up buffer stocks of some of the raw materials coming from there. We didn't have a big business in Russia selling vehicles. We had actually sold our last plant in Russia a couple, a couple of years prior.  We're very important in China. China is very important to General Motors. North America is our home. It's our home market. Detroit is our headquarters. And so these kinds of, you know, it can create, when US and China have such rising geopolitical tensions, it can certainly create friction and risk that we need to manage. At the same time, I see companies like General Motors that are long investors in China as, you know, providing some glue in the relationship. And I think that's, that's important to have. So we have a, we maintain strong ties there and here. And that's, you know, part of what my job is, is to make sure that we, that we navigate well in that geopolitical environment. Yeah, we should never underestimate the value of industrial diplomacy. And I think that's a really important feature of the relationship. So in losing fossil fuel cars, which California and other states will undoubtedly follow and the federal government will follow in losing fossil fuel cars, where we're losing a diversity of fuels. You know, I mean, up to this point, you could have electric vehicles and you can have fossil fuel, both of them on the road. So if one gets weaker, then you go to the other and vice versa. If we go to electric vehicles as the standard, aren't we becoming dependent on one that is electricity and losing that diversity, whatever the value of it is. And could that be a problem going forward? For example, if the grid goes down in a part of the country, we won't have any electricity to run our EVs, right?  And that's exactly what we're having right now. And so with that comes, with change comes fear, would we, you know, am I going to run out of charge? What if the grid goes down? But at the same time, you know, what are we gaining? We're gaining a world that is going to be cleaner, greener, much better for our children, protecting the climate. We're also gaining practical things like when the grid goes down, well, you've got sitting in your driveway, a massive battery that can power your house and can also plug back into the grid.  So I think that we're gaining, they're also quieter. I mean, we'll end up having, you know, much, much less noise pollution as well. And so there's, there's always going to be a change when there's, you know, a little bit of fear of loss when we go through a big change. But, you know, again, back 120 years ago or so, we, we switched from the horse and buggy. So we lost the horse and buggy, but, you know, what did we gain as a result? Last thing I think I would say is there's also hydrogen fuel cell technology. Let me talk a little bit about that for a second. Hydrogen fuel cell technology is also something that General Motors is developing. We have a technology called hydro tech. We do not see what's the difference? Why, why, why hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus EVs? The difference as we see it, not all companies agree on this, but as we see it is hydrogen fuel cells are great for applications when you need a lot of power over long periods of time.  So we, Hydro tech, we've created these power cubes and we're working with Navistar, the big, you know, long range commercial trucking company to use Hydro, Hydro tech hydrogen fuel cell engines for long range trucking hauling, you know, heavy amounts. We're also working with a railroad company called Wobtech or railroad locomotives that would not run on, you know, diesel and everything else they run on, but would run on hydrogen. So these long haul, you know, heavy, heavy things also, you know, they can use be used as stationary power cubes next to ports, for example, you know, in marine areas, they can be used to charge electric vehicles. So there's a lot of different kinds of possibilities, but we don't see it as commercially viable to have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as passenger vehicles. You were talking before the show about the possibility of using hydrogen on the battlefield. Can you guess that? Well, there's, you know, there's different kinds of applications that are being used. GM has a brand new subsidiary called GM Defense. GM used it, you know, has a long history of, you know, as a military contractor as well. We've gotten away from that. So now there's a new subsidiary called GM Defense. It makes some trucks that are gas trucks for military use. But there's also experimentation going on with hydrogen fuel cells, because again, the hauling capacity, they're quiet, they can go long range, and those kinds of, those kinds of things are underway as well.  Okay, we have about 10 minutes left before we have to close. So we'll want to go to some of the questions that have come in from attendees, okay? And I'll read them. There are a few of them. I'll read them to you. The first one is it bugs me that our policies to promote e-vehicle ownership subsidize the purchase of expensive cars by wealthy people. Does it bother you? Or what should we do about it, if anything?  And the, but under the terms of the Inflation Reduction Act that just passed, that actually changes. And let me look up really quick. There are income limits. There's two kinds of limits that apply to this going forward. So the old incentives go away and these new ones are coming in, but any sedan, electric sedan over 55,000 will not qualify. Any truck or SUV over 80,000 will not qualify for the incentive. So I mentioned that the GMC Hummer EV, it's over 80,000, at least this initial kind of deluxe one. And so that won't qualify. But there's also limits on AGI, you know, the adjusted gross income of the buyer. So Congress wrote in if there's a joint family income of over $300,000 annual AGI, then that buyer does not qualify. If the person's single, the limit is 150,000. So any single person making more than 150,000 also would not be able to qualify. So again, the, you know, I guess U.S. Congress and President Biden shares the view of this questioner. You know, by the way, just in the possibility that somebody may have a question that want to get hold of you, what's your website? What's the way to get hold of you, Tom? Oh, my email address is thomas.cuny.com. Okay, here's another question from an attendee. Since 2018, I have been following solar battery EVs. Today, we have so no Mercedes Benz, Lightyear Toyota, Hyundai, Joilong, and in the U.S. Airstream, travel trailers, and Tesla solar trailers. What are GM's plans for solar integrated EVs or stay plug-in charging only? So GM is investing heavily. Obviously, I talked about any EVs and autonomous vehicles and in charging networks, also in renewable energies. I'm not aware of any plans for solar EVs. So I guess I'm not following that as closely. But we are investing in renewable energies. For example, those cruise vehicles that are running around San Francisco, the autonomous vehicles, those are charged entirely on renewable energies. You know, we cruise as invested in wind energy and solar energy, and that's where that fleet gets all of its charging network from. I hope that helps the answer some way. But, you know, we are very concerned with the transformation of the entire grid. It's not enough just to have clean vehicles. You know, but where are the vehicles getting their energy from? Where are they being charged from? We're not in electric utility, but we're working with electric utilities and with renewable energy suppliers to increase renewable energy investments. And that's part of our carbon, fully carbon neutral pledge by 2040 as well. So it's not building in EV zero emissions end of story, but it's also where is the energy itself coming from from the grid. Here's a combination question for you, Tom. You know, everything considered everything you've been talking about, will we be paying more or less right now to buy, drive, operate, maintain electric vehicles and the necessary charging equipment. And to go along with that, here's a kind of personal question. And that is I'm in the market for a new car right now. Should I look for an EV, all things considered, or should I buy a conventional car and wait until the price, the technology, the infrastructure, the market and so on, or EVs is a little better, maybe in five years or six years from now. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, yeah, there are related questions. Again, we're, we're heavily focused on putting out vehicles EVs with great value at a lot of different price points so that Chevrolet Equinox that will. It's the 24 model year, but it's going to start appearing on the roads in the fall of 23. The Chevrolet Bolt, you know, is already less than 30,000 and the Chevrolet Bolt EUD are less than 30,000. So when, then when you add in the consumer purchase incentives that just passed, you know, these become very affordable vehicles. So the choice, so I think the price is we're almost at that equivalent point with with ice vehicles with the traditional gas engine vehicles because of the way the battery, the cost of the battery is coming down. So I can never advise anybody on their own personal car choice and whether it's GM or, you know, Ford or Honda Toyota. But I think I don't think anybody has to wait five or six years to look at buying an EV. I really don't. I think the the we're coming out with 30 EVs by 2025. So I showed you some of them, but there are 30 coming by 2025 and that's just us. So there's a lot of variety out there. The technology is fantastic. The charging ability continues to get faster and faster. I think it's entirely realistic. If you buy one now, I don't think you're an early adopter. You know, we've seen that with a lot of the people driving the Teslas and the Chevrolet Bolts and the Nissan Leaf that I see a number of those on the roads in Hawaii. Those were the early adopters. This is a proven technology and it's only getting better. So it's sort of like you want to wait for the iPhone. Two or three or four before you buy the iPhone or, you know, is it time to buy one that's that's going to be a personal choice. Time we're at the end of our program really, and it's time for you to give us a takeaway final remarks and integration of all these factors and vectors we've been talking about. I hope you will include in your takeaway, your perception of how this initiative by General Motors and other car companies doing electric vehicles will affect the United States economy, particularly given the IRA legislation. And how for that matter, it will affect the global economy. It's no small initiative. It's huge. So anyway, I just hope you covered that a little bit in your takeaway. But what message would you like to leave without viewers today. Sure. I mean, I can address that that, you know, that specific point about the US. So GM has made massive. Let me let me say this. I've been with GM for three years, and I do international. A lot of what I have done the projects I've been involved with have been actually with withdrawing GM from certain markets around the world and you know selling a few plants here in their traditional gas engine plants in order to make these massive investments in EV and AV technology. So there's been a massive reallocation of capital to these very, very ambitious goals. I've been a part of that kind of it's almost I feel like I'm pruning some of the branches of the withered branches of a tree in order to make the main trunk even healthier. And that would be our investments in the United States. So even just last December, we made the largest announcement in GM history, which is saying a lot 114 years old. $2.5 billion in a single announcement investment in the state of Michigan. That included one of the Altium battery cell plants I talked about and conversion of existing factories from ice to to EVs. That sort of focus on the United States and and also our partners in Canada and Mexico is is ongoing and is underway. At the same time, you know places like Korea and China I've talked about are extremely important to to General Motors so again talking a lot about General Motors here because that's who I work for but in terms of broader take away the whole industry. And it's here you've been hearing about EVs and I sometimes I feel like it's a long wind up, but the vehicles are coming there, they're going to be on the roads. The cost of gas vehicles is, like I said going to be start to go higher because government public policies are making it more expensive to build those gas consuming vehicles the greenhouse gas emissions. Restrictions are becoming becoming stricter and the fuel economy restrictions are becoming stricter and that's intentional because then as we add those technologies to those gas vehicles it makes that more expensive at the same time that we're driving down the cost of the EV. So, it's coming. You may be in your future buying, you know, maybe one more gas vehicle, but you're going to be considering EVs and and the charging networks and everything else that are coming along with it. Biggest takeaway statement I could make is what I said in the beginning, we're in that transformation that's akin to the horse and buggy era, moving to the gas vehicles, and 10 years from now, what the mix of vehicles that you see on the road is going to be vastly different. Gas vehicles will still be on the road 10 years from now, but the electric vehicles are not going to be the rarities. Let me let me stop there. And thank you very much, Jay. Great. Thank you Tom Tom Cooney for helping us understand and see into what's behind the screen and the future for us and the extraordinary prospects in store for national and global transportation it's going to be really interesting, really exciting, really great. Thank you so much to everyone for coming. And thanks to those who submitted questions for the discussion. Thanks to Shirley Daniel director of Pammy for setting this up. And thanks to Carol Mona Lee, and our intrepid think tech staff for supporting the program. We'll see you all next year for the next annual Memorial Paul Sean lecture. Stay tuned for more.


It smells like plastic because it's been carb-oiled. And the only way they can, this is a long slender variety. The only way they can keep it from shattering is by boiling. So what we're trying to do with Marty is come up with technologies which allow us to polish it and get high-quality polish without carbon. It looks off. It looks off, yeah. Here, we passed this slender, and now we are here. So this is the one that was gushing the water through? Yeah, we are here, and then come by, pass this on, and this on the last one, water is coming, and then we are in this place. Where's the bridge we crossed? Where's the bridge we crossed? This is somewhere here. How do we get from here to there? Yeah, this is the bridge. This is the bridge. This is, we can follow this. This bridge isn't... Oh yeah, that's the bridge. Okay, so last year they had 10 farmers with how many hectares? 1.3 hectares. 1.3 hectares of the... Where's the chilli? I don't know. 34. So we had... This is a selection from a local variety, so very... Just cleaned it up. Which is interesting. So they cleaned it up, and now it does about 3.5 tons per hectare, whereas one of these will do about 2.5, 2.7 tons per hectare. If you clean these up, I wondered whether you would get to 3.5 tons per hectare as well. You probably... Well, I don't know.  So one of the key things actually with aromatic rice, one of the constraints is that farmers can't get decent seed. So if you're taking these indigenous varieties, cleaning them up, producing decent seed, then maybe they'll get... I'm sure you would be able at some point to take these indigenous varieties, add a few useful traits to them. Exactly. And then without changing their basic attributes, and then... Holding that package and just putting something home. Just inserting some nice genes in there that will... Dressed all kinds of whatever. Maybe a little bit early. And then your local seed companies can start to produce the seed and sell and get a market for them. To me, you're going to have to have your local seed companies sell on this stuff. But farmers have to be convinced they get a good product. But when I work in Petra, in 2004, we introduced this variety. And then two or three farmers in a nearby village, they are still cultivating their product. Okay, so now are there local seed companies here who will sell mustard or sesame seed? No. There's no seed companies at all? No. Really? In local, no. But in BADC, Bangladesh, it has a development corporation, they sell. But local, not much. But there's no small, private seed companies? Yes. Yes, there are now? Yes, there are now. Any seed companies? For vegetables? Yeah, yeah. Best of a lot of seed companies. That's what I thought. So these companies, because we're talking to the seed companies in West Bengal, which is 50 kilometers that way. Just over there. Yeah. So they say that, you know, if they would love to get into the rice seed business. Right. Because the market is so huge. Yeah. And they just, but they just need something to sell. Because farmers, they all keep, so they say farmers here say they all keep their own seed. Yeah. So it's a product that they could sell, even an inbred, and just get a little bit of a margin. They'd be happy. Yeah.  It's a little bit better than these. It matures about 10 days early. Yeah. And that's where the other ones would come in, because that's what we want. Yeah. See, this is what I think, but you could take, probably take these guys, do a little bit of a selection, clean them up, probably select a little bit for more earlyness. Yeah. And you could, might even, might even have a little bit. I think probably, you know, Dr. Salam, he has a beard or a beard. Oh, sure, sure. When he was in BRAC, he started that selection of, oh, yeah. Okay. Yes. Okay. But probably he could not continue because of the BRAC's policy. Yeah. What's BRAC's policy? Hybrid. Oh, hybrid. Yeah. Okay. Well, I know. I guess because I, at that time I was in, I was heading that department. Yeah. Because this is from my area, running cellar and then customer service pool. Yeah. It's from Romania. Yeah. But these are really interesting looking, you know, you see it on the shelf in a health food shop in the US. Oh, those are very good products. Yeah. Yeah. Even in the minimum that, in our local market, this price is very high. Yeah. Yeah. 70 to 80 kilo. Yeah. You know, like even for a decade. Yeah. So the problem is that, the other problem is that, as I was in that little right what the percentage which the farmer gets for these sorts of things is really smaller than they do for the high yielding varieties. Yeah. Yeah, the standard varieties. So that's why we started to look at them because we think there's more potential in these sorts of things. Yeah. For adding value. Yeah. Yeah.  One is affordable rice for everybody. But the farmer has to make a decent income. Yeah.  Yeah. And that's going to get, that's going nowhere, man. I mean, that's no future. Yeah. So something's going to have to give. All right. Nobody raise your hands. Yeah, nobody raise their hand. What's a kid to be a rice farmer? So the whole point is, you know, we're, how do we, how do we add the value? Yeah. How do we get to farmers? Yeah. You know, it may be that we're only going to have 10% the number of farmers. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have to suit the farmers who are either tenant farmers or very small farmers because to produce a two and a half tonne or a three tonne crop, you don't need very much inputs. Yeah. That's right. There's going to be no zero input. Yeah. On here, they just putting on two bags per hectare of urea. That's all they're doing. So what is the cost of that? You know, it's 2,000 tacker. What, in that group of farmers here, how many of them own their own land? In our place. Yeah. 80% of their own land. They own their own land. Okay. And what's the usual? 80%. No, no, 10 to the few. That's right. What is the holding size? Holding size is 0.3 hectares. 0.3 hectares. I was going to say a poorer hectare. Yeah. You're not going to get rich off that. Not recently. You're not even going to get poor off that. Yeah. I think it's something like 50-some percent of rural dwellers on landways. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't mean that they don't have access to them because they're rented. Yeah. But here the land is different. Yeah. Okay, if you look at that, that's 0.3 hectares per farm family. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, there's no future on that. There's a big percentage who only have half an acre. One bigger. So. Yeah. You have to either do something which is pretty labor saving and then just let somebody else blow the crop and harvest it and have another job somewhere else. Or they use that little bit of land to grow something really high. Really valuable. Yeah. Like vegetables or something. Yeah. Yeah. Opium. Opium. You know what I mean. Yeah. Recreation. Something that will give you a good... Yeah. Okay. Without the commensurate risk. Yeah. One and a half. Now they've got 70 hectares. Okay. So these are... Now this was that machine transplanted? No, no. Is it manual? Is it hand transplanted? Hand transplanted. Oh, each one is a different...  All right. The technique where a farmer can easily go through this line and... Spray all the time the way you go. And they're waiting... And the finalest replication. Better irritation. And the irritation is the main factor. Because sometime, some disease and insects infest, if they are...  How much do farmers use insecticide? Actually, in the traditional variety they do not use, and not much, but the highly variety, the attack is more. How much do they spray? Generally, they do not spray much. The difference on the island is not very much. More in some cases they use. And 34 especially, blast. You have a problem with that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that time it is very... Do they spray for neck blast? Yeah. What do they spray? Generally, they spray for neck blast, or they spray for neck blast. Plainum, plainum. It is on the company, Plainum. Plainum, yeah, yeah, yeah. It also has a lot of false nuts. Yeah, so how is this... What is the small false nuts looking like these days? Pretty. Oh, no. Is there a lot of small false nuts? Last year it was very... Not this part, but another part. But 10 years ago there was not much false nuts. 10, 15 years. Much earlier I saw false nuts. But maybe 10, 15 years before there was no much. But last year... If you like, we've done 49, and then 34. 23 also, last year. I'm told that you see it because it's very visible. Yeah, it's very obvious. But when you actually count the number of heads or seeds infected, there's something... Well, the only thing I worry about, there are two things I worry about. One is it's seed borne, it could spread from year to year. It could increase. The second thing is we don't know very much about it. Micotoxins. Micotoxins, yeah. So if you take that and you mill it, and you get that in there, you don't know it may be invisible. It's poorly studied. But it's something we have to pay attention to. That's interesting. It's less toxic than ergot. Yeah, it's less toxic. That we know. Yeah, good. It's less toxic. I was trying to think of the diseases that did that. Anthony's fire? Yeah. Ergot disease, yeah. Look, I have some coconut. All right, that sounds great. Great. Enjoy the coconut.


Falcon and Winter Soldier is the latest MCU show to drop on Disney+. It's gotten mixed reviews, and I'll be honest, there are several things I really don't like about the show. But as we got farther into the story, I think it added some missing context to the MCU, and I started to enjoy it more and more. So today, I thought I'd talk about a few themes that connect back to a lot of the ideas I've brought up in the past on this series, as well as some new ideas that I think should get way more serious attention. As some of you may recall from the two episodes I did on Thanos wiping out half of all life in the universe, the snap would have been insanely destructive in every possible way. It would have almost instantly impoverished billions of people and created widespread shortages of all sorts of goods and services, causing an array of horrible problems. However, whether or not the people of Earth found a way around those problems quickly depends entirely on how they responded to the crisis. And to my surprise, Falcon and Winter Soldier hints at one legitimate way the world actually might have been able to get back on track, at least within a few years. So I think we should talk about that. Of course, that also means we need to take a serious look at the Global Repatriation Council and Earth's very different response to Iron Man's unsnap. And while we're at it, I want to take a minute to talk about Captain America, why Steve Rogers represents a lot more than America's greatest values and why it would be completely impossible for politicians to replace him. We're going to get into all that and more on this thrilling episode of Out of Frame. After what I thought was a bit of a slow start, Falcon and Winter Soldier picks up on several plotlines from Marvel's movies and builds on the aftermath of the Avengers' Battle with Thanos in Avengers Endgame. Five years after half the population of Earth was snapped out of existence, everyone is magically returned to life, and the world is an entirely different place. Iron Man and Black Widow are dead, Captain America retired. The world desperately needs new heroes, but Bucky Barnes is in therapy and Sam Wilson rejected the opportunity to become the new Captain America. He chose to turn the shield over to the Smithsonian and take contract work running special ops for the US military instead. But most importantly, billions of people reappeared from non-existence, only to find themselves living in a world that doesn't have room for them anymore. It's bad. Living with the instantaneous doubling of the population is every bit as chaotic and destructive as having to cope with losing half the people on the planet at once, although of course their return is better for everyone in the long term. Unfortunately, the governments of the world seem to have responded to the second crisis by concentrating power in the hands of the Global Repatriation Council. As far as I can tell, the GRC is basically a new global government that creates a whole lot of chaos in its inevitably clumsy attempt to organize and control human action around the world. It's been given the power to command the allocation of land, resources, and labor, and to dictate the production, distribution, and use of goods and services. They even get to decide where people are allowed to live. The GRC has a lot of soft power, too, broadcasting friendly messages all over the world in order to convince the majority of people that they're in good hands. Reset. Restore. Rebuild. A global reset, huh? Sounds familiar. This is the kind of concentrated power and propaganda you generally see in socialist and communist dictatorships, so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that there are a substantial number of people who aren't happy with GRC policies. That's why a group of terrorists — Revolutionaries, depending on whose side you're on — Right. Or that. Anyway, that's why a group of super soldiers led by a woman named Carly Morgenthau starts raiding supplies from the Global Repatriation Council, occasionally also blowing up buildings with people inside. And if all that weren't bad enough on its own, the US government decides to manufacture a new Captain America by giving his suit and shield to a decorated, regular human soldier named John Walker. I'll get back to that later, but it all sets up multiple points of conflict that I'm sure will continue to be major issues throughout the show and for the future of the MCU. Ultimately, Bucky and Sam team up to find and stop the terrorists while maintaining a tense relationship with fake Captain America and his partner, Lamar Hoskins. A lot of that stuff is pretty good, but also the show frequently undercuts its own characters and plot with some really clumsy writing, most of which only seems to exist to hammer Disney's woke agenda into the MCU. For the sake of time and staying on points, I'm not going to get into those issues here, but I'd be happy to talk about it in the comments. In spite of all that, Falcon and Winter Soldier is more like Captain America Winter Soldier or the first act of Civil War than any of the huge intergalactic epics we've seen since, and I'm very okay with that. I think it's important for Marvel to show the significance of the Infinity Saga for humanity as a whole, especially since that's something Marvel hasn't been very good at. We got a few glimpses of the human costs in Ant-Man and the Wasp, Spider-Man Far From Home and WandaVision, but they all focused more on people's feelings of loss rather than the material devastation that would have ravaged global economies on every planet in the universe. Thanos was not only an immoral monster, he was also just plain wrong to believe that a universe with half the population would result in more wealth for the people remaining rather than much, much less. As I said back then, more people doesn't just mean more mouths to feed, it also means more minds to create and more hands to build. Our standards of living are powered by specialization, division of labor, and trade. With a fraction of the people, we have a fraction of the knowledge and skills available to improve lives and create the goods and services that we've all come to rely on every day. I really can't overstate this point. Entrepreneurs working on cures for major illnesses, gone. Engineers developing new technology, gone. Experienced technicians who are the only people around who actually understand the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of an old cobbled-together network or production system, gone. Academics conducting basic research, entrepreneurs and inventors who turn that knowledge into practical solutions for human problems. Entrepreneurs who are willing to risk their money to support new ideas, talented communicators and storytellers who are able to convince the public to give those ideas a chance. All gone. Sure, there would still be some people doing the same types of jobs, but with half the trading partners available in the world and half the ideas and creativity, the rate at which human society advances would slow to a crawl. Society would need a lot of time to regain all the localized knowledge that was lost. Some of it would simply be irreplaceable. We'd all do the best we can to make up for all the missing pieces, but we would still need a rapid wave of effective entrepreneurship in order to rebuild the productive businesses that were destroyed. And only after the processes and systems that made mass production possible were up and running again, could we start to see material standards of living come back to something close to what they were before the disaster. But the only way people would even have a chance at achieving all that within a few years is if everybody was actually free to adapt. That requires individual autonomy, not centralized state control. Alas, that's not usually how policymakers respond to crisis. I mean, why bother when you can capture more power for yourself instead? However, thanks to Falcon and Winter Soldier, it sounds like the improbable may have actually happened in the MCU. In the fourth episode, we get a scene which explains that after the blip, the whole world dropped its nationalistic enmity and opened up their societies to peace, trade, and immigration. For five years, people have been welcomed into countries that have kept them out using barbed wire. There were houses and jobs. I'm speculating here a little bit, but between that and some of the things Carly Morgenthau says, it really seems like the world got a lot more free instead of less. Probably out of pure necessity, countries got more open to trade and commercial interaction, allowing people to move to parts of the world that had need of their skills and offered better opportunities. It sounds like they mostly just allowed people to find the best ways to adapt on their own. And if anything could have helped the world get through such a massive crisis quickly and with as little additional loss of life as possible, it would have been that. In the real world, this doesn't even happen after a flood or a tornado, let alone much bigger natural disasters. But I guess that's what we get in a world with half the politicians. But this also brings to mind another thing I said in my first video about Thanos. Wealth is a creation of human ingenuity and expands with every new valuable innovation. As long as people are free to be entrepreneurial and explore new ideas, in a context where other people are also free to decide for themselves which innovations are valuable to them, then wealth will increase. That last caveat is critical. The only way to significantly and consistently increase the total amount of real wealth in society is economic freedom. And if the world allowed more of that after Thanos' snap, then it might have been okay. Or at least not nearly as bad as it could have been. But if not, well, you really don't want to live in that world. Unfortunately, Falcon and Winter Soldier makes it clear that once everybody came back, global economic policy got reset to an even more restrictive set of conditions than we have now. Instead of trying to maintain a free and open society, the Global Repatriation Council seems to be designed to put people back where they left off, by force if necessary. It doesn't seem to matter to them that most returning people are no longer needed in the roles they use to inhabit. And by the way, it's not that their skills couldn't be valuable, including in many or even most of the same professions. It's just that the government has no idea how to decide who should be doing which jobs in which parts of the world. So to try to force people to move to certain regions or restrict what some people are allowed to do with their skills and resources, and by functionally asserting control over the means of production, the government is making an already serious problem much worse. This is an insanely difficult situation that needs a solution, but the answer will never be central planning. Allow me to explain. Societies, cultures, and economies are made up of individuals who each make unique contributions and who can't simply be moved into different roles or replaced by just anybody. The economy is not a machine being run by politicians, and people are not interchangeable cogs to be swapped in and out on a whim. Nobody can or ever could simply replace the millions of people who are snapped into nothingness by Thanos. The same is true for the stuff we produce and the systems that produce it. At any given moment in time, the economy has a very specific nature. You can't just take a factory that makes one thing today and magically make it produce something totally different tomorrow. And after five years of dealing with all the lost local knowledge and skills, the whole world's productive capacity would have been set up to make different things at a lower level of output than it was before the snap. This reflects a major change in what many economists refer to as the structure of capital. The particular way people have organized a society's productive resources, or capital, is what allows the goods and services we need to be reliably produced and brought to the people who want them. It's just not something you can toy with or easily reconfigure like Dr. Manhattan. To quote the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, capital goods are intermediary steps on the way toward a definite goal. If in the course of the period of production, the goal is changed, it is not always possible to use the intermediary products already available for the pursuit of the new goal. In other words, if the overall capital structure of an economy is set up to produce 100 million cars in a year, there's no switch to flip that could get it to produce 200 million. All that extra rubber, steel, wiring, glass, and whatever other raw materials the factory needs is already allocated to other uses. And if a given factory was built to manufacture cars, it certainly won't be able to make boats or building materials, regardless of whether or not that's what we actually need more of right now. Heck, it might not even be able to make a different kind of automobile. Machinery needs to be retooled, new processes set up, workers retrained, different components and raw materials need to be acquired or created. And in some cases, even the buildings people work in need to be significantly modified. There's just no way around that. It will take time to adjust, especially if the government's response is to try to play God and ignore local knowledge altogether. In a world that's already struggling to adapt to a shocking new reality, billions more people suddenly needing resources, land, and goods and services that don't exist is, to put it mildly, a massive disruption. So what I'm saying is, Carly Morgenthau might have a point when she says life was better during the blip than it is now. She's just extremely wrong about how to deal with it. They started a war as soon as they kicked us out of our new homes and onto the street. But Sam, what if I'm making the world a better place? That's not a better place if you're killing people, it's just different. Carly needs to work towards a more peaceful world, not a less peaceful one. One thing I really hate about the show is how much effort goes into sympathizing with Carly's actions. They're roadblocks in my journey and I'll kill them again if I have to. That's a young woman admitting to having zero remorse for killing innocent people and Sam reacts like she just made an off-color joke. Carly isn't a good person and even if her character exposes a problem that does need to be addressed, her actions are unequivocally wrong. You really think her ends justify her means, then she's no different than him or anybody else we fought. But just because Carly is awful doesn't mean the GRC is off the hook. Just as central planning would have wrecked people's ability to adapt to new conditions after Thanos' snap, it would create the same kind of chaos in the wake of Iron Man's unsnap. Humanity control can only get in the way of restructuring an economy on the basis of people's new values and needs.  But more often than not, that's the only solution people in power seem to be able to see. And that brings us to...Fake Captain America. As I said in the Justice League episode, it's not enough to simply look like a hero. You have to display heroic values by doing heroic things. John Walker does not. Do you know who I am? What makes Captain America special is not the big A on his chest or the star on his shield. It's the personal attributes and core values embodied by Steve Rogers. Steve is unique in that he's a principled man in a corrupt world where nearly anyone else with power uses it for coercion and personal gain. This is not only a major part of what makes him a hero, it's also an important part of the story in Falcon and Winter Soldier. One of my favorite things about this series is the expansion of Baron Zemo's character, especially in terms of his philosophy. All of the show's core storylines, Carly's, John Walker's, and even Bucky's, lead back to the point Baron Zemo made about the corrupting nature of power and the sense of superiority that typically goes along with it. There has to be a peaceful way to stop her. The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals. Maybe you're wrong, Zemo. The serum never corrupted Steve. Touché. But there has never been another Steve Rogers has there. The fact that Steve's relationship to power is unique is why the brand of Captain America can't simply be taken by the government and handed to someone else. Plenty of people in the MCU can be trained to fight the way Steve does, and clearly it's possible to gain comparable physical strength, speed, and durability. But putting another guy in the same suit doesn't make him the same person. And if the values and attributes that built the Captain America name aren't upheld over time, that name gets tarnished. As I've been saying throughout this episode, people aren't interchangeable. And arrogant politicians and bureaucrats in government don't know what they don't know. They foolishly thought they could control something that has to happen organically and spontaneously. But that's not how this works. The government can't even get one state created super soldier right, no matter how many times they try to recreate the conditions that made Dr. Erskine's original experiment a success. John Walker was groomed to be America's perfect soldier. I only ever did what you asked of me, what you told me to be and trained me to do, and I did it well. On the other hand, Steve Rogers was repeatedly denied his request to join the army and fight in World War Two.  Walker does what he's told. Steve personally took down shield and chose to become a fugitive instead of signing on to the Sokovia Accords because his code of ethics was stronger than any sense of patriotism or allegiance to the state. Perhaps most interestingly of all, when Steve is used to create propaganda, he's embarrassed and ashamed that he's not doing more to help win the war. And when he violates his orders to mount a rescue mission and saves a platoon of POWs, he submits himself to be court marshaled when he gets back to base. He's a great man, but actually kind of a terrible soldier. Walker is the opposite, obeying orders without having the conscience or courage to do what's right. The danger with people like him, America's super soldiers is that we put them on pedestals. You built me. They become symbols, icons, and then we start to forget about their flaws. I am Captain America. From there, cities fly, innocent people die, movements are formed, wars are fought. Do we want to live in a world full of people like the Red Skull? They just do not know what it takes to be Captain America. They just don't. Politicians picked John Walker because he had the right training, the right credentials, the right look. But they ignored the most crucial aspect of what it means to be Captain America.  Language. Now, imagine making this kind of mistake literally a billion times over. Imagine the hubris it takes to believe you have the authority to control people's lives and then repeatedly send the wrong resources and people to do the wrong jobs in the wrong parts of the world. The Global Repatriation Council promised to send more teachers, supplies. That was six months ago. Imagine thinking that you can override other people's choices and replace millions of individuals collected knowledge with your own. If you can imagine all that, then you can begin to understand why giving the state the power to dictate how to adapt to an economic catastrophe like the blip would create an even bigger disaster. If we've seen one thing over the last year, it's that governments around the world will always respond to crisis by grabbing more power. A year ago, they used emergency powers to force millions of people out of work, creating a result comparable to what Thanos would have created. When it first started happening, I sounded some alarms that perhaps very few people ever wanted to hear. But a lot of what I talked about then is starting to materialize. And more people are now experiencing the consequences of those decisions after a year of lockdowns and restrictions that paused or ended the production of all sorts of goods and services, an unprecedented increase in government spending and the largest expansion of the money supply in US history. Well, the bill comes due. Prices for food, energy, housing and building supplies are all rising sharply. Meanwhile, millions of people are still out of work with an unemployment rate that peaked at almost 15 percent and even now is double what it was prior to the lockdowns. Entire industries are being destroyed, and many of those jobs are definitely not coming back. This has happened because governments all over the world have acted more like the Global Repatriation Council, thinking that they are better suited to plan entire economies, choosing who is or is not essential and controlling what people are allowed to do instead of leaving people to be free to adapt and innovate using their specific skills and knowledge. What we needed a year ago was a carefully targeted approach, protecting the most vulnerable while upholding the principles of a free society for everyone else. And as I said on the series, the last time I talked about Captain America, freedom doesn't just make us more independent. It also makes us more flexible and agile when those traits are the most needed. That kind of entrepreneurial flexibility would have been incredibly beneficial and might have actually saved countless lives over the past 12 months, not just from the pandemic, but from all the other diseases and dangers that a lot of people have been busy ignoring. But we'll never know because we traded freedom for false promises of security. And now we're all left to deal with the wreckage. And once again, how we deal with it makes a difference. While many people will turn to the state doubling down on the belief that it has answers, it's not remotely suited to provide. Some will become paralyzed by guilt and uncertainty. Others will turn their anger into violence. But I challenge you to take a different path. Reject the notion that giving other people unlimited power is somehow necessary for security and salvation. It isn't. The world does not need more mindless allegiance to authority. What it needs is more individuals using their own talents and ideas to solve problems. It needs more entrepreneurs, more innovators, more risk takers, and it needs more freedom for each person to be able to choose the solutions that work best for them. Instead of allowing authority figures to force a one-size-fits-all approach on everyone, you don't have to be a super soldier to make a difference. And you don't have to save the whole world in order to make it a little better. You have the power. Now don't abuse it. Hey, everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. I know I left out a lot of other themes that are pretty prominent in Falcon and Winter Soldier, so let me know what you think about the show in the comments. And if you want to participate in even more discussion, we recently opened up our Discord to the public and it's growing fast. We'd love to see you there. Also, definitely check out our Behind The Scenes podcast. The audio is available all over the place. But if you prefer a video version, we've set up a YouTube channel just for that. It comes out every Friday, but our Patreon and Subscribestar supporters get early access and special bonus content. And speaking of our supporters, I especially want to thank our associate producers to Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor and Vega Starlight. Thank you. Find the links to support the show and everything else I talked about in today's episode in the description below. And as always, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel, ring that bell icon and look for our out of frame accounts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. See you next time.


How do you figure out what to do with your entire life? You know, when you're 20 or 19 or 15 or 40, there can seem like there's all these options and things that sound good. You have your own desires. You have success. You have love and purpose and meaning. You have the wishes of your parents and your mentors. But how do you really figure out what to do in your life? In this video, I want to share this analogy that I call the drunken staircase. What's up guys? Alex Hine, author of the book, Master of the Day. So I've included down below this video a free goal setting worksheet. Now that worksheet will help you strategize what the vision is for your dream life and how to actually make it happen. So you can check it out the first link below this video. Now I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that you really cannot plan your life, right? Like this fundamental question, what do I do with my life is very, very flawed because that's assuming that when you're 25, you're even going to want the same things as when you're 30 or you're 35. And sometimes you even get the goal that you wanted, like financial success or the respect of your parents. But you realize you don't really feel that well internally, or you may even be depressed. So the problem is how do you figure out what to do with your life? You don't. All you can do is figure out the next step. For me, I booked a one way ticket to China when I was 23. But the crazy thing was I went there thinking I'd become a martial artist, kung fu master, a monk, this ultimate sage badass, and I came back after a year. And then I was like, well, what do I do with my life all over again? But the thing is, if I tried to figure out what I was going to do after China, what I was going to do after that amazing year going after my dreams, I never would have even gone to China. But it's one of those things where because I just pulled the trigger, I got on that plane and I just took action on the first thing that that ended up leading me to the next thing. Boyd Vardy has this amazing book where he talks about the analogy and the relationship between being a tracker in the African savannah and someone who's tracking their own kind of life purpose. And the analogy he gave was very, very wise and very simple. He was saying that you don't try to follow the entire lion's track when you're tracking it. You just look for the next lead. So you may not know ultimately if you're tracking a lion for five hours outside, you have no idea what direction you could go in. Did he eat? Did he not eat? Is he mating? Is he sleeping? Is it too hot? Is it too cold? You cannot predict all of those paths ahead of time. All you know is you follow the next lead that you have. You follow the next footprint in the dirt and then you follow the footprint after that in the dirt and then the footprint after that. All you need is the next lead, not the whole trail. Now I think of this as the drunken staircase analogy.  So you're trying to find the next step. You don't look for the whole staircase or at the top of the staircase.  And once you have that first step with the flashlight, then you find the next step. Once you have the next step, then you find the third step. So once you can find that, it's a lot easier to know exactly where you need to be to get up to your bedroom. And that's the analogy for life.  You just need the next step. So what is that next step that is really tugging at you internally? Maybe it means uploading that YouTube video, even though you don't know if it'll lead to anything. Maybe it is taking that job in the new city, even though you don't know if a year you'll still want to stay in that new city, where it's taking the chance on dating that person. And again, you don't know if they're it, but you'll ultimately never really know unless you just take that first step, that first definite lead. So if you are trying to figure out what to do with your life, just pick the next best step. And that first best step will lead you to the second best step. And then in retrospect, you will look back on your life like I did at 23 buying a one-way ticket to China to live there, but I didn't graduate as a doctor of Chinese medicine until 33, 10 years later.  So I hope that helps. If you want help strategically planning that out, download the free goal setting worksheet right below this video. And then when you finish that up, check out these last two related videos.


The optimization of thermoelectric devices has been studied for decades with the goal of maximizing their efficiency. Thermal energy conversion requires the transfer of heat from one system to another, which results in entropy production. This process can be minimized if the thermoelectric potential is at its optimal value, resulting in maximum efficiency. This article was authored by Eckhart Müller, G. Jeffrey Snyder, Wolfgang Seifert, and others.


There's the breakfast and plus CBA Africa. Thanks for staying with us this morning. Let's head straight to a second conversation where that's a plan a proposed plan to have Drug tests now and as the ruling or progressive Party APC sets to hold its presidential parameters on the 30th of May through the 31st 2022 the chairman and the chief executive of the national drug law and fosterment agency Brigadier General Buber Maurer has returned the letter to the chairman of all progressive Congress of the APC Senator Abdullahi a demo requesting that the officials of the NDLE a be given access to conduct drugs Integrity test for politicians seeking political office in the country the drug test will be carried out in all the political parties prior to their primaries now and according to the NDLE a the drug test is Necessary to ensure that politicians vested with importance national office Do not use budgetary allocation to go to buy cocaine and all the drugs instead of providing needed services for the masses While some quarters say that the proposal might be due to previous charges of drug use among Politicians others are saying it might just have a political undertow now in the early 90s The former governor of Lagos state Bola Akma to move What's the rest that in charge with trafficking of heroin and other hard drugs? This is according to the reports that's been made available that what that happened in the United States We have Liana Ayago who is a legal practitioner. He joins the conversation this morning. It's good to have you join us All right, so let's get straight to it I mean, what do you make of this development drug tests for politicians just prior to via pre-armories When you say counter test what do you mean by counter test? I'll come back to that. Oh, that's a character test. No. No, I'll come back to that When you say that there should be drug tests, you know, as a lawyer, I want to look at the legal provision if any that provides for Such an intention because I really come through the electoral act and the Nigerian constitution They don't play provision that say that as students for political offices work on the goal drug test But you can also read into the meaning of qualifications For someone for an office in Nigeria or Somebody who can be removed from office now if you look at session one it is 1889 of the constitution As model It's something from office if It's mentally unstable if you can't seek if you can no longer perform the duty of the office But then it's only a content cut of law went through the medical Angle that can satisfy somebody to be a fit from office So that is one area that you can be that okay if you are a drug addict You are you are no longer mentally fit to hold an office. You can move from office But you know we are going to move classy. So if what we are Saying as a country to get our electoral system to value our electoral system that we're introducing these doctors Who don't find but the timing is a case now How do you satisfy someone to be a drug addict? You want to take him through the The medical test and all that Then the person who also challenges the possibilities of each other medical test I was not conducted in the facility that is So I think that the timing at this moment looking at different areas already here next one The political primaries will be conducted. It may be wrong, but the intention is well intended but beyond that We can okay. Let me come back to what I mean by character test, you know, the the concession we have We operate is a person that put up some of the gates office. I'm talking about the Immunity close down for the executive and it behaves in a in such a way that Any reason woman will question that is this man actually or this man or woman actually Doesn't have a character deficiency You cannot question that because the person has immunity You know, so now that's why I said the character test will come to play It's in the moral angle that because there's no thought that said Actually a bad character of the governor in the president of the vice-president can lead to his room But because the immunity also it's a changing time. So the drug test Assistant I mean not be walking because of the time frame. I'm so want to get a clear court time frame because So do we do into it what you call them political vendetta and all that? So what we have a clear framework for it to work? I'm afraid as a stanza is very difficult for any aspirant to be disqualified based on the fact that Maybe has failed drug tests because that that failure will be challenging cost Okay, fine I understand the fact that you've talked about time in maybe if we can't do it for this particular dispensation or this Primary maybe in future we should consider that but haven't said that you talk you brought about the issue of morality versus Legality yet again if the constitution tells us that you can only remove someone if I He's mentally unstable if you look at it in another way Why not do this test, you know to be certain that this person actually is fit So you don't actually start going through the rigors of the court afterwards I That's why I said for us to achieve this intention This is very not a good intention because I'm sure if I'm a colleague drug addicts To find sensitive public offices and political offices and then of course remember that it's not just for Politicians Political officials that issue before all strike down public service because if you look at The situation we find ourselves is actually very difficult for you to have a clear framework now How do you satisfy someone to be a drug addict? They must be medical examination. They must be history of check and balances. You know that even in sports cycle some athletes have failed doping tests not necessarily because They are taking some drugs but on work. We're arguing that these drugs they took was for medical reasons Which has constituted a violation and they have sometimes they have been punished unnecessarily So that's why I said so that we won't want to lock the system And elise all manner of acquisition. Let us have a clear template I expected the respectable DJ of NDLE to come out with a framework. Now the drug test What duration? What is it that once a medical test is conducted and you say that okay, it's a drug test That the final Situation or the person can challenge such Drug tests for a higher test of confirmatory tests and all that So because if you don't do one confirmation one test and the person face and say that's it You are disqualified the person will have the right to have a second confirmation Now the situation is that let us have a clear framework It is not a whole intention But as I tell you I think the timing may not go away because the problem is I hear already So how you will do that in such a short span and then we can make it legal if it is this intention of Nigerians to be paired into the electoral which is the pre-priscial legislation opening elections in Nigeria So I made our concern our electoral to include drug tests and all that so if we do that it become very legal otherwise I can tell you there'll be all Coming out from this kind of Intention So so now that you know that we know that this this is not have any constitutional Backing or there's no legality to the drug tests that's been embarked on by the and D. L. E. A Do you think that the party leadership would actually agree to having this test conducted because That letter has been you know written already Do you see the party agreeing to it and what happens if this? Aspirant or this person's actually failed a drug test. Do you think that there will also be disqualifying? Yes, so the question is do you see the political party? Yes, please Go ahead Leona Leona we can hear you. Hello, Leona. We can hear you Because We seem to be having a bit of you know a network connection With our guests on the other side as soon as we're able to resolve all of that would definitely have Leona joined the conversation. Here's a legal practitioner. So but To you Justin now, what do you really make of all of this? I mean, it's a very sensitive issue We cannot also take out the fact that you have this agency They'll always say there's no smoke without fire And so the fact that you have this agency raising this concern it shows that you know There's been use of drugs amongst politicians. Yes, I agree with you I think for them to have come up with this particular stance There maybe are some indications that some political office holders, you know You know, they have failed, you know, somehow the test or maybe there are issues or Investigations going on about them and that to avert that in public it That's why the NDLEA boss is actually suggesting that but Leonard mentioned some couple of points that he talked about timing and all of that the the primaries for instance for the APC is about less than 30 days So I don't know how that would work Because if you asked all those who have unbought the nomination forms are to go and do integrity Drug integrity test that going back and forth before the elections and trying to bring all of that together It might just bring some sort of Confusion and that's why he's mentioned that moving ahead. I mean, it's going to be an interesting, you know pre-election year where you're going to see Litigations, you know, because a lot of persons will be dissatisfied with what's going on, but I really want them to go through the test because we need to know the If we're going to concede at this yes, yes, okay, you're saying that it would be interesting to see that Yes, I would love to see that play out really Now if we are very honest if there says sincerity of peppers with all of this because usually The argument would always be that we don't have any sincerity at the end of the day So if it's like it probably might just be an agenda, why have we not considered to We understand how all of this arguments could be why have we not concede that making this part of our constitution? I mean the constitutional review that's been going on You also have the fact that the electoral law has come We have been clamoring that the president just signed it It's been signed and it was not part of it because you know that all of this is going to be some kind of argument There's no legal backing to all of this and so the constitution the law actually guides the action and behavior of everyone And so this is also so the question will now be what's the essence? Are we very sincere is this do we really want this to happen? Or we're just going out and just chasing shadows or the argument I don't know if you've seen that some people say that this have and a political on the tune There might just be some persons who the system is trying to you know, reject or eject I mean, it's a conspiracy theories, but most times you find out those theories Yes, do we still have Leonard online or a Okay, okay, just wrap up your thoughts that we have we have we have a lack of Time to discuss this When we have intention ideas it should be the time should be of essence and of course we can always develop our electoral system By building legislation That provides for illegal framework so that it will not be under the whims and campuses of any person who does not like a particular person I'm also okay. Oh, you'll feel a drop test and that is it and then you will be disqualified so I Can't do the two hour electoral ads I made our electoral which is the principal escalation guiding elections kind of elections in Nigeria so that you know that oh For you to aspire for any political office and all that positions in the country. You must we must have to pass a drug Integrity test so the piece of legislation will really help so that this this principle or suggestion will not be abused by political opponents. That is my fear, but then it is a Of course, there's a medical council that can handle this matters If there's a proper time frame, and there's a lot packing All right. Thank you so much Leonard. This is much as we can take him from you. Thanks for sharing your thoughts All right. Thank you, Leonard for being part of the show Leonard is a member of the Chatham house London. It's good to have you join us And we look forward to sharing your thoughts as always and that's the size of our conversation if you missed out on any Part of it. It's all right to follow us on Facebook Twitter and Instagram and do subscribe to YouTube channel What plus TV Africa and plus TV Africa lifestyle. I am Mesa Boko and thanks for watching And I'm Justin after the events of being a part of the show return again tomorrow But just turn by for the news coming up top of the arc