Okay, continuing with our series on video editing in Blender using Blender 2.78a and Today we're gonna be looking at doing layer effects and in the end we're gonna create like a an old grainy film type Look which I've done tutorials on in other programs. It's just a look that I like. It's fun to do So let's go in here, and I'm gonna go to video editor, and I'm going to say add Movie I'm gonna choose my one of my movies here and say add the clip and This is the clip right here. So let's start off with some still images So I'm gonna go ahead and say add an image and we're gonna add a vignette. This is a PNG that has a transparent layer on it So it's the black is is drawn on and then the center part is a transparency I'm gonna add that in you can see what it looks like right here. I'm gonna grab the end here and make it the Same length as my clip But you see you don't see even though it's transparent you're not seeing the video below it Well with it's like to make over to the edit strip tab here and the blend mode Which is cross which is we what we used for our cross effects when we use the opacity in the first or second video that I did We can come up here, and you have a few options Overdrop multiply gamma cross alpha under alpha over subtract add and cross and replace well You're probably familiar with a lot of these if you've done any type of video editing or image editing in like GIMP or any other video Or still image editing program, but what we want here is alpha over and so that what that's going to do Is it's going to allow us to use that transparency? from that image And it's great that we have all these options that one thing that there's other Blend effects or blend modes. It's called here. I usually call them layer effects that you could use But one of the most common is screen and I'm very disappointed blender doesn't have that here I'm sure there's another way to do it. I think you might be able to do it in the compositor But I'm really surprised there's not a screen option here That's just an effect that's been around since the beginning of the film industry But anyway, I'm just going off on a little why is there not a screen option here But alpha over if you're you working with a transparency Let's go ahead and add in a another still image and I'm going to choose this image Which is just some grain I'm going to grab that Make it the same length as my video here And for this I think I'm going to use multiply Multiply multiply and screen apply the two that I probably use quite often so now you can see we have you know our video with a Nice vignette and some grain it looks okay. The grain is a still image So it's not really moving neither is the vignette. So let's look at another way of doing this I'm just going to box select my two still images here Or at least try to box select it there we go and I'm going to import a Video clip that I got off YouTube Open go into effects. I'm going to do my thumbnail view here. I have different types of Of film effects here overlays, so I'm just going to choose one of them. I'll start off with this one go ahead drop that in there and It's longer than my video clips so I can trim it down if I want I can see this view clip again It's 119 frames so if I select this one I can come over here to length and say one nine And I'll trim it down or I could drag it with the mouse And again, you can see that our our image is here for our video And that is a video of film grain and we're going to change the blend mode for that to multiply So now we have that film grain over top of it It's it's not a the vignette is very Apparent the scratches and grain in this particular clip. They're definitely there that it's not over overly strong Again, it's just different different videos. You're going to overlay on there. We'll have different effects So there's that so now I can grab my original video here. I can scroll down to Saturation I can set that to zero if I want to make her black and white there So now I have a nice little black and white videos probably the things I would add I would I would you know, usually I add like a grain effect and and I also Might add a slight blur every once in a while or What else do I do? Might make it the the original video flicker But with just a layer effect and dropping down your saturation you have a halfway decent video effect Oh, another thing I probably do would it be a affect the strobe whoops right here Like I said set that to two or three and then and also I tend to like to speed up the videos a little bit When I'm doing these old film videos, but that's that's it right there. I do thank you for watching So now you can you can layer videos as long as you don't need to layer with a screen effect You can layer different images or videos over each other so vignettes and other types of effects Real quick. Let's let's undo the last few effects There we go. We'll delete this layer, and I'll just just for another example this video shorts. I'll Add another movie clip This I'm gonna add one with some color here. Let's see how that looks with some of our options I actually haven't tested this for you out and with these options, but let's just see what multiply looks like So there you go.  I think it's gonna be really strong. Yeah And it's gonna just make that white so there you have like lens flare if you you know Like what's his name that does the Star Trek movies likes lots of lens flares. That's kind of what you got going there But yeah, so play around Get different layers you can layer on there to do different coloring and layering effects I thank you for watching. Please visit films by Chris calm. That's Chris okay There's a link in the description and there you can go to my sports section if you like my videos You can support me through patreon or paypal. I'm sure check that out You can search through all my videos from this channel and my other channels At my website very easily be sure to like share subscribe and comment I really do appreciate it, and I hope that you have a great day


Hi, hi everyone, I'm Alessandro Donparalli. I'm a computational designer and I'm also the developer of an add-on that is called tissue I started to experiment with digital tools generative design and procedural modeling you can call it how you want in a very field of experimental architecture and Then using 3d printing technology started to move to a smaller scale working on wearable devices and then some product design like medical devices and Other type of products and I'm also involved in different teaching programs where I teach the tools that they use in my work So around ten years ago I would say I started to collect some scripts some tools that I was using in my daily practice and I started to collect them in an add-on that I called tissue and This is something that was helping me in my work and they decided to share with the community because maybe someone else needed for his work And for me it was also a way to try to advertise blender that I was loving and I was thinking was a great tool I still think that To the people that was in my field so for other computational designer architect It was just a way for me to convince them we have a tool that they actually needed inside a software that was amazing already But tissue in my opinion is something that can be useful for Generic modeling purposes. So what I would say is that if you are a lazy modeler Maybe when you have to approach something like a sci-fi helmet You could approach it with a small component you define the features that you want in your final object Then you define a topology with those different materials and the loops that you like more and these will inform the distribution of the Components so you can work procedurally without the need of manually intervening in the modeling phases, but at the same time everything is still related with actual 3d meshes that you can manipulate easily and And of course is something that they use in my teaching activities So for example, we did a workshop in Saudi Arabia and it was about the modeling architecture for the metaverse Now the metaverse is a pretty fun playground for an architect because you can have fun You can experiment with your architectural language and you don't actually care about how you're gonna fabricate it because maybe you don't have to and We use tissue for this workshop. So for example imaging You have a simple module like a wall a piece of ceiling and a piece of floor and You can apply that to a square face The same thing can be applied for example to the wedges of a polygon of a square and what happened is that that simple module Becomes a column so these works also with generic polygons and also with system of polygons So the same thing when applied to just a bunch of random polygons can generate a kind of architectural system and The same thing can be applied to a smaller scale where you have your component that can be applied on the surface and That generate a more complex object and everything is procedurally So you can define the feature of their main system with the feature of a smaller pattern component whatever you want to use and you can just deal with easy modeling without dealing with a complex node interface or scripting or whatever and This is just a video that show in practice how this works I have to say that while teaching to this type of audience we are architect We are designers their goal is not to learn something complex. They want to do nice design So for me that this is a way that takes out of equation the complexity of the scripting of the nodes and Just focus on the modeling and I have to say that this is already challenging sometime because if you're not familiar with mesh modeling Understanding that the vertices should be aligned otherwise. They don't weld it. It's not that easy at some time you spend a lot of time on very simple things and It's just better to keep other stuff that is not necessary specifically for the design So at the end they were modeling some spaces and the idea was you upload them on a platform And then you can share with colleagues friends or community and they can explore the space that you that you are creating and at the end of the worship every participant was designing his own space and We designed a main one that was kind of gathering some portals for the different spaces and this was like the main hall that you were entering in while visiting the Virtual installation and here you can see a video that shows a different workflow, but based on the same principles So again very simple component in this case We added some materials because the materials can be used to inform different components in a second iteration and You just manipulate a little bit And then those are the component that are applied on top of that and if you play smart with very low poly geometry at the end We if they combine well together then you can again You can get something very complex at the end We added some texturing just because we wanted to reduce the number of total polygons and that was helping adding an additional level of detail and The other tutor was instead focusing on generative patterns using Houdini for those garment that was were exhibited there So everything is easy for the metaverse But at some point if you're an architect a designer you may want to actually fabricate something and these Opens new challenges, but what is interesting also for a computational designer is that a challenge in the Fabrication process can become actually an opportunity to explore a specific language or a specific strategy in the design And I developed these additional tooling tissue, which is the contour tool And is just allowed to create a slices of your geometry and you can play with the angle the distance the offset blah blah blah And also there are some other strategies that are just not plan are slicing and everything is non-destructive so you can update the original geometry refresh and And just an easy a one-click way to generate those those curves something very basic But it works well for example with 3d printing if you want to actually design the printing path of your geometry So imagine you want to 3d print something usually you made a model then another software make the slices and then you print it but instead you can actually design the material that is going to be printed and Usually when you slice a geometry you use horizontal planes and this is fine It works most of the time But sometimes you have problem according with some material that you're using and the geometry because if you have a certain angle Then the layers tends to add the touch to each other and you lose some cohesion between them So an additional strategy that you can deploy is for example to use the geodesic distance in order to have Offsets of the curves along the geometry in order to have a kind of uniform distance between them The version that is implemented in tissue is actually an approximation of a geodesic distance, but it works pretty fine for the job Some other time if you want to instead ending your printing base in this case with a continuous closed Polyliner curve you can use instead the topology distance Which is basically just a distance that count the number of segments that you have in your geometry So you have a very nice topology very regular this can create curves that start from the bottom and end on the top That's it. This is something that we use in this project that has been Developing collaboration with VCU arts in Qatar and it was about a system a simple system of smart blocks and What we did in this case was indeed to work with this strategy in order to start with a certain angle and then on a different angle and Having the layers that were matching exactly the shape and the topology that we were making We call that smart block because it allowed to be combined in different way Here you can see how the layering of the printing is actually generating a texture that is part of a feature of the object We wanted to create and when we are combined together there is a kind of sense in how the texture is related with the shape of the element and It's called the smart block because you can rotate in different way and do different type of composition another iteration of this design is this other version always together with VCU arts and is currently hosted in exploring Qatar and The idea in this case was to take inspiration from the Mashrabiya Which is an architectural element in the Arabic culture where you have a porous wall that regulates the Sun the temperature and environment and We wanted to create a simple shape That is always similar but playing with the position of the walls and the angles We wanted to achieve a kind of variable opening of those components It was a bit tricky because we had to 3d print and see if the angle was fine for the properties of the material So it requires some iteration with a Bruno de Mazzi that was the ceremony that was printing it And we created a series of different components that were creating this kind of gradient We isolated some three different design with three different level of opacity and We were using them for the production Of course when you 3d print something you can produce an infinite number of them But just for convenience we say okay, let's let's choose three of them. It's just easier to handle So Bruno de Mazzi printed all of them and then we selected some of them And they are currently exposed as small panels in doing the exploring Qatar and we created these two version The first version is a derivation of the first design that I show you and the second one is the one with the opening and closing Another part of tissue that is pretty old now is the reaction diffusion For me was more like an experiment to see how I could implement a simulation inside blender using scripting Of course now we have geometry node We have simulation node that would have saved me a lot of time a lot of headache at a time I didn't have it, but I learned a lot so it was it was worth the time and These are a couple of videos that they created with this sound designer That was adding some music to the videos that it was doing and for me was like an experiment just to stress a little bit the the pattern and see what are the expressive possibilities of something that is Extremely organic and also how to change the parameter over time over the surface just to explore what I could get from that So as you can see there are different areas with different effect And I wanted really to try to get an effect that wasn't like the conventional reaction diffusion pattern I wanted to usually get right away and Also, this is happening on the level of the vertex group and also the vertex colors So I was informing a displaced map together with some shader properties This second one is using a different workflow is a more simple pattern But I wanted to add a bunch of modifier just to add some extra geometrical properties to that This is something very simple at the end. I think but this was actually the inspiration for another project That was a collaboration with a fashion brand Which is called 3s4 and the stratases which is one of the leading company in the 3d printing industry and Stratas is developed these 3d printing that 3d printer that is able to print on fabric They can print different materials with different colors is basically a raising but they can change the opacity also the consistency of the material and 3s4 had already quite some collaboration with them So they know how the material works how how to deal with the design So they started to create a series of shapes and I was taking those shapes as input in order to generate my reaction Diffusion pattern I was for example taking the outer edge in order to generate a gradient and having a variation in the scale According to that I was generating a vector field that was informing the direction of the reaction diffusion in order to have like a kind of twisting effect around the specific shape then using some geometry know that was just taking care of extrusion of very simple triangles along a geometry and I Generated a series of different shapes that then I sent to stratases for printing. It's not visible here but there was also Some tuning using the UV coordinates in order to use a texture for changing the color the opacity And that was possible with the geometry node Here you see a detail of the printed pattern and it's important to mention that all the different Extrusion's they should not touch each other so that the fabric can still move and be flexible So they put together all the different pieces and those are some details of a final garment Or you can see a little bit the transparency a little bit the color grading of the material and This is the final piece I wanted to create to add the reaction diffusion to that because I think the shape was kind of suggesting this type of marine aesthetic underwater aesthetic Then I spent a couple of years in Denmark working with a create group in the University of southern Denmark And they are working on experimental architecture dealing a lot with fabrication and computational design strategies And one of the project that they did together with them was this a summer school 2022 it was a project with the other researcher with all the students involved and The idea was to design a couple of slabs and when you deal with structures usually you have to deal with stress and When you have some specific loading conditions some support you have a vector field that represent how the stress is moving in your New geometry according to this stress there are some stress trajectories that are generated and In order to make up an efficient use of the material you may want to distribute the material along those specific direction Sometime with a stress trajectory is a bit tricky because they converge They are not uniform so there should be a smart way to use that information But that generates something a bit more regular So when I see that I see the perfect food for a reaction diffusion pattern so the reaction diffusion can change the density can change its direction and Because of these properties kind of already find the perfect way to occupy the space according to a specific direction So I did an implementation of the reaction diffusion that is based in this case on the texture painting the students were able to just provide Different texture in order to control the scale of a reaction diffusion the direction of the reaction diffusion and Then according to some parameters you can change if you want for example to have some specific walls Or if you want a more interconnected structure that in structure, it works a bit better so The student design and a couple of steps one we've saw for supports another one with two supports with a different angle and They generated some maps that they're used for Generating their reaction diffusion so they took the direction of the stress and they created our RGB image from the x y and z and They just generate a grayscale image for the intensity of the stress and of course the pattern that was generated by the interaction between them and Using them they generated the thickness of this lab while the height is affected by is controlled by the intensity of the stress And at the end we needed to mill it When you mill with a robotic arm or in general where you're dealing with milling There are some consideration that are not that far from 3d printing because for example if you want to reduce the The milling time the time of the machine that reduce also the cost You may want to use a large step, but these generate a quite a visible pattern of the milling path So you have to play smart with that So one of the strategies that we used was to use actually the geodesic distance In order to have a distribution of those curves that was kind of coherent with a shape And we figure out that if the curves are perpendicular to the pattern of the reaction diffusion They were looking better. There were no interference between the two pattern. They were looking like they were a good match So this is the formwork that we that we milled there was some coating some Rebars that were bent and inserted inside the formwork and of course the final piece that was produced with the casting and as you can See because of the milling setting that we used the layer is quite visible But at the same time is a texture that kind of makes sense with with a type of object this is a different view and This is the second lap is a The pattern is pretty similar. We use a different strategy for the milling But the concept is kind of very similar and the last project is this polyhedral structure that is is almost finished and Polyhedral structures are structure that are interesting for an architectural point-of-view and an Engineering point-of-view because they offer opportunities to optimize the use of the material according to some specific loading condition These open a lot of challenges and how you build those structures, especially because you may have a lot of different components that have different shapes and also if you want to deal with actual structure sometime is Recommended to use reinforced concrete and using reinforced concrete is complicated because you have to create a formwork for the concrete But you also need steel inside that ideally should be well So we came up with a solution that was 3d printing those Kind of three-dimensional frames that were taking some plates and rebars and converging them to the center Here you can see how they align around the center and This was necessary for welding together all the rebars the frame that you see should be open so that the operator can of course weld the pieces together and Also, we had to 3d print some shells that were needed to close the formwork Now the pressure of the concrete inside those component while still liquid was quite high So we had to reinforce those shells by using this pattern that was kind of giving more strength to the material without the need to Increasing too much. We wanted to reduce as much as possible the printing material and we were closing the formwork and This is the closed formwork then you pour the concrete from the top and you have the final piece that is produced as You can see all the feature of the concrete are coming from the formwork So when you design the piece you should think of the formwork and when you design the formwork This is kind of affecting the the piece that you're producing and you can see how the three-dimensional frame is generating those grooves along the geometry and the the curves on the shells are generating this pattern on the final piece and The formwork is quite complex and as I mentioned the structure has many different components So how do you model this in a smart way so that you don't have to manually remodel for every component? And as they say if you are a number you see nails everywhere So my solution was to use tissue and the tessellation So if you have like topology, which has some faces that are aligned with the features that you want You may generate like just three simple components that contains the geometrical information for defining your Formwork and as you can see there are three different components Two of them are taking care of the overlap of the shells and one is just Containing the wavy shape and the thing is that when you combine all of them together What you get are some different geometries that then can be separated easily What happened is those so that in the component itself there are both the parts of the formwork and The surface of the concrete so what happened is that you see both at the same time every iteration So I was evaluating the aspect of a final piece of concrete and also the shape of the forward So this was an iterative process. So it could evaluate exactly the consequences of both on both aspects In order to deal with that we needed a very nice topology and we tried like a rematching and was not good We tried like different strategies and we couldn't get a nice topology that was aligned exactly with our feature So for that I had to add another piece at tissue. That was the polyhedral wireframe That is basically doing what the wireframe modifier is doing but dealing also with Inner faces in your geometry all the things that usually messed up your wireframe are working fine with a polyhedral wireframe We tried also the skin modifier that didn't work well because it's great a nice topology, but not perfect so We added some extra strategy extra rule just to have like plan our intersections Seams between the components because we had we had to use some flat steel and There are a lot of things that you don't consider while modeling because yeah, you see a nice shape and that's it But then every aspect when you have to fabricate Actually becomes a problem for you that you have to solve and there were a lot of challenge to solve in this case So this is a system of different component that we produce with that strategy And we assemble a structure of three meters more or less that unfortunately I cannot show you because it has not been disclosed yet So what I can show you are just some dramatic renders that I did with cycles that kind of give you the idea of a more complex system while assembled and I work on in different fields and on research education and Practice and I have to say that blender is an amazing tool for Visualizing new words and new ideas But is also a valuable tool when you actually want to produce when I'm fabricate the world that we are living in and I want to thank of course the blender development Developer for making this amazing tool the community for all the valuable Feedbacks that they gave to me and also my patrons that are really supporting me and giving me really the enthusiasm for Continuing this project. Thank you very much


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The middle class of America has been shrinking for multiple decades now, but does that mean that people are actually living worse lives? There's a debate going on on the internet right now, and it's going viral. Yeah, we're talking about multiple articles, multiple posts on Reddit. The most recent one was a meme that went viral, saying, once upon a time in the 1950s, a family could own a home, a car, and send their kids to college all on one income. And then we cut taxes on the rich, and the middle class died. And this sparked a huge debate. A lot of people supporting this, a lot of people going against it, a lot of people providing, what, additional context and nuance. So make sure you like, subscribe, turn on your notifications. Andrew, there's a lot of stats, Andrew, Pew Research. I got the infographic charts right here to show that it is true. People who are in the middle class have been shrinking over decade to decade.  What, are we shrinking to zero? And I think most people would agree that's not a great thing. You do need a strong middle class for a lot of things. As you can see from this graph, the upper income has been increasing. The middle class is shrinking. This has been going on for a little bit of time now, but I think the conversation has changed. One, I think a lot more people, and we're gonna get into a number of points and also the comment section, but I think the biggest point is, a lot of people are asking, okay, the middle class is shrinking, but are lives actually getting worse? Our middle class people, which is a shrinking portion of people, but are they still living a good life? And are people generally living a better life than they were 20 years ago? Right, because a simple income statistic, like one infographic, cannot explain the extreme, almost infinite complexity of daily life, right? So anyway, guys, make sure you like, subscribe, turn in your notifications, Andrew. I think it's clear that it is shrinking in a generalized sense, but it really depends on which demographic you fit into. There was a lot of comments and we're gonna get into it saying, yeah, if you were like a straight white male, you might wish you went back to the 1950s, but anybody who was not a straight white male, including straight white women like 2023 more, even though there's a lot of problems now that didn't exist back then, because all the other tribes or subgroups of people were just screwed back then. Right, another point that a lot of people were bringing up is that people may own less assets. It might be harder to buy a house or pay off the mortgage, right? Nowadays, right, but a lot of people are still living better lives. They have more things, maybe they're happier. Are people happier? Are their lives better? Do they have dogs? Are they living in a better apartment? Do they have more hobbies? Are they just generally, you know, just enjoying life more? Possibly. Right. I think there's a ton of reasons for this shrinking macro statistic about the middle class and I think that everybody can argue about the distribution of the pie slices, but I think everybody can understand, Andrew, that there's like realistically 22, what, 100 factors that play into this, but everybody would rank them differently, right? Like your rank of how you rank the 100 factors might be different than mine, but we can both agree, whether, let's say for example, I'm an extreme left and you're extreme right. It's got to be made up of a ton of reasons, right? Right, right. And I think a lot of people are asking like, what does even middle class mean exactly? Like what is the cutoff point where look at this chart where it's like, okay, for a family of one, if you make under $34,000 a year, that's lower income and then the middle income is anywhere from $34,000 to $100,000, and then upper income for a single person is $100,000 and up. Now with inflation, salaries are larger, things are more expensive. What does that even mean? Shouldn't you measure? Like is this based off coastal cities or the middle America, right? Yeah, and the cost of living is different in different cities. So $100,000 in New York City in Manhattan is different than $100,000 in San Antonio, Texas. For sure. And what about social capital or cultural capital? Some people and who are experts on this subject would argue that those are even more important or just as important in terms of life experiences and those are incredibly difficult to quantify because they are not hard metrics with any sort of quantitative number you can place on it. Right, now are people traveling more? Are people having more good times? I guess that's questionable. I mean, a lot of people say social media is making a lot of people depressed and stuff. So I guess that, you know what it is? That metric is harder to measure. For sure. It's harder to measure because everybody can measure the income because that's a dollar amount but it's hard to measure. And then you know how everybody says that social media is making people sad but then why do they spend hours a day on social media? It's because the social media must be causing some sort of dopamine release. Yeah. So theoretically the dopamine, I don't know, maybe it's different than serotonin or whatever. Is there David depressive dopamine? Is that possible? See, this opens up a whole bunch of can of worms. Anyway, let's get into the comments section, Andrew. Somebody said there's plenty of data showing that quality of life is much better today. This is the stupidest flat earth theory that everybody thinks that the leave it to beaver days were all great and everybody was like super happy in America post-World War II. Yeah, that might have been a select group of people, especially like white families that were on TV or depicted in Hollywood. But no, everything's better nowadays. Yeah, right, right. I mean, that is true, man. If you cherry pick something like, oh, it's easier to buy a house back then. That's the only thing that determines quality of life.  It's a significant portion. But literally, is that the only metric? Yo, if you look at some of the food, Andrew, those TV dinners that they had to eat in 1950, that was way worse. They was eating the meat with the gelatin. And what I don't like is like looking back at those days like we can never bring those days back. We cannot bring those days back. They are long gone. Technology has changed. Everybody has the internet. Even school has changed. I'm going to get into my theory about school curriculum later in this video. But why can't we bring it back to those good old days? Somebody said then the factory jobs were gone. Then the entire country thought it was a good idea to try to be real estate tycoons. Then the real estate prices exploded. Then the loan and credit card industry exploded. Then wages stagnated for two decades because people would rather take out another credit card than ask for a raise or get a new job. Then the house and credit card bubbles exploded. And then everybody was facing the fact that housing, healthcare, and education are ludicrously expensive and no job is paying enough to make ends meet. This was kind of blaming it on the average citizen falling for these what guy Kawasaki or, you know, there's all these like different things you could, you know, I think just falling into consumerism. First of all, here's my stance. This is my hot take. I don't like blaming average citizens for being average, for thinking average.  And that's okay because that's how most average people act in most societies. In what society is the average person super smart and like, oh, no, no, no, I can reject these things, guys. But it is true to play devil's advocate. Americans like to view themselves as incredibly independent thinkers or like critical thinkers, right? Because it's a very diverse society is less collectivist. David, who is the quarterback of society? All right, these move makers, these big corporations, these hedge funds, these groups here and there, they're the ones making all the moves. They get most of the money in the glory. Therefore, they should get the blame. Okay, so you are not blaming the consumers for signing up for like seven credit cards and like, you know, having not that good of a job as much. I'm not blaming the average person as much. That's my opinion. All right, well, this next comment, Andrew, put the blame on the politicians. Somebody said, man, it's just crookonomics. This is where the thieves win. The politicians get bought and the real producers and workers that provide everything get less than 1% of the pie that they actually build. The world will burn for the sake of satisfying oil money instead of improving the human condition. And this is basically talking about a corporatocracy. Other people are pointing out Bezos and Musk and other people who buy it out things BlackRock.  Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, you guys, let me know in the comments down below what you think. But I'll say this. I mean, I think the government does have control over certain things. All right, like they kind of have more control over like what goes into the school curriculum or at least that's like a board of people that kind of work for the government. And then there's also like things that the government can do like handle crime differently. But the government cannot control how kids grow up at home. Right. They cannot control the family life. They have no impact in that. They only have impact in the government structures. Andrew, here's a little bit of history for you. Other people were pointing out that the original British colonialism that led to the creation of America was funded practically by private ventures like the Virginia company and the first colonists were actually just working for private companies living in private company towns that were just called colonies. So basically somebody said, you know, this is just inherent to our creation story. We're just not taught that in public school. Oh, I did hear this thing. So guys, history buffs, let me know how true is this? I'm not talking about some conspiracy theories. Is it proven that really the first people, you know, they weren't coming here just to free themselves from religious prosecution over in England. They were coming here as private companies for money. I heard that. This next comment pointed at globalization. The rest of the world is a lot more competitive nowadays in American exports. They got to compete with a bunch of different countries. Somebody was saying in the wake of World War II the entire industrial world with the exception of the United States had been completely bombed to rubble. So everybody else had to buy American exports. Since then the rest of the world has recovered and in some ways even overtook us in certain industries and in some ways. So now we were just at a time where we were just like killing everything. It's almost like a team, Andrew. The hits like 15 threes in a row. It's just unsustainable. Oh, and then no. And then the opposing team has like one of their star players injured. Right. So it's almost like this perfect storm of things. Guys, I think you're blowing out the world by like 60. Some people said, you know what's interesting, Andrew? Germany and Japan went against USA and World War II but those countries actually recovered a little bit quicker than other countries as well. But now Germany is still doing okay. Japan has been stagnant for 20 years and some people are saying that now maybe the USA is past its Westbrook MVP average triple double years. Oh. Because the USA was just like going hard. Wow. I don't know guys. It's tough to say. I think but there's something to it. Wow. I think this goes back, Andrew. There was a bunch of comments about the founding fathers, Andrew. They had built this into the system. We were sold lies. This whole thing has been super capitalist from the beginning and someone said, yeah, it's hilarious to think the founding fathers were anything than wholesome set where some wholesome set of human beings. That's just public education. And someone's like, yeah, I'm sure they predicted this when they were just pooping in an outhouse with a candle. Like, how much is it fair that we blame the founding fathers? Because they're, I mean, they were, I guess they were just living in their era setting up systems. But they had no idea how things were. We're not going to know, man. I think it's been like it's been a couple centuries, man. I feel like you have to start looking at the people that were making the decisions as of 50, 80 years ago. Um, somebody said that up to this. Somebody said that it's all about kicking the kids out. A lot of kids, they parents, they kicked their kids out when they're 18. But that causes them into a bunch of debt. And it just like cycles over time. Like basically other more traditional cultures don't kick the kids out for sure until they're 30. But in America, they're kicking the kids out of the house at 20. But at 20, you might not have the earning power and the almost adult responsibility to make the right reads to survive on your own. But there's also a lot of articles I read in the past year that said millennials are one of the only groups that are actually moving back home and living back with their parents at least for a few years. So I think it is more common, whatever this person is describing of living with your parents longer, that is actually starting to happen. For sure. Somebody said it's actually a childcare bubble. The childcare prices have like soared over the time. So that's what's causing people to not even want to have kids or if you do have kids, it crunches your whole finance equation for your family. There's so many bubbles, David. Yeah, man. Bubbles on bubbles. I mean, I guess David, if all the bubbles are added together, it makes one gigantic bubble.  Even if you have maybe 15,000 in savings in Robin Hood and their, your stocks are all going down, but you have the newest iPhone that even the richest billionaire cannot get a better version of. So basically society has tricked you because you have a designer wallet and the newest iPhone that comes out every year, you just figure your middle class, but all your assets are with BlackRock. Whoo, yeah. I mean, I think that's what it means, like standard of living or quality of life. Like, what does that really mean? Because if crime is going up, that affects your quality of life. Now you have, everybody has nicer things, better food now. I will say this. Food is way better than it ever was. Drinks are way better than it ever was. Clothes, design, shoes, cars, gadgets, way better and cheaper than they ever were. Not to me. I'm okay with the old in and out days. Yeah, but I get you boys. Dude, the vegan burgers are way better than they've ever been. No, but I know what you're saying though. But yeah, it's, it's difficult to say. I think there's a lot more variants nowadays.  I know some people, Andrew, that are still living like America's like 1962. Other people living in like the year 3000. And I want to, I mean, that's why I think it is beautiful that people still live on the ranch with their family and they still enjoy their life despite all these new things that we have. Listen, leave a comment down below. How do you judge your quality of life? Like what are some of the metrics that you judge your quality of life on? Is it just your income? Is it just how many friends you're having? Is it how many backyard barbecues you're having? Is it how much you have hobbies? You know what I mean? Yeah, a European child did and said, I'm middle class in Europe. I own my own place and I have two cars. I send my kids to uni for free and everybody has health insurance. I guess Europe feels like a cheat code sometimes. But of course, Andrew, the Americans had a blast back and said, yeah, I'm sure your house is 3000 square feet on one acre, right? How many miles per gallon does your full size SUV get? Huh? Do your kids both have MacBook Pros with iPhone 14 Pros with unlimited 5G data and PlayStation 5's? Do you have OLED TVs in every room? Because that's what's considered in middle class in the USA because everybody in the family's got orthodontic braces. You ever seen an American refrigerator?  It's like a fifth of the size.  So basically he was basically saying what is middle class? Because it is true, Andrew, the way they live in Scandinavia, Western Europe even though they have certain things that they're not worried about going into debt into their refrigerators way not as nice. Yeah, that's true. That's true. We have the best air fryers. Um, Andrew, how much does it matter that for example, black households are way more represented in the middle and upper middle class now since 1971 to modern day, right? So basically a lot of people were saying that oh, everybody always who posts these memes has to be a white male because maybe white males macro statistics have slipped in their strangle hold on power but everything has become more distributed. Yeah, I think America's still really good for immigrants. America's great, much better for black people than it was a few decades ago. So I guess like everybody should be happy and should be at least, you know, should I guess understand that I guess, you know, so I do think a lot of the people posting the memes honestly are like 40 year old and up like white males. No, for sure. I think that they want the time machine possibly not all come on guys. Andrew, the last thing was there was a lot of French sociologists and public intellectuals that came up with this thing to measure social and cultural capital. Basically, they wanted ways to measure how somebody's life was outside of just hard metrics because for example, Andrew, let's say you're an immigrant kid. Your parents open up you know, like a chop suey spot like a walk spot in the middle of nowhere and your parents make $170,000 a year but they work 17 hours a day seven days a week. It almost feels like you're living in poverty but you've got money in the bank. That's going to skew like income statistics but you're living a horrible life, right? Oh, yeah.  Yeah. So I guess what do you think? Like should people in America more look at try to quantify social or cultural capital because we know as Chinese and a lot of Chinese the income statistics are decent but they might be working like 365 days a week. Again, I think this goes to the question. Guys, you let me know in the comments down below. How do you measure your quality of life? Yeah, in America. Anyway, let's get into some solutions on how to solve middle class issues. Andrew, I think early track vocational schools with real skills emphasis for people for a lot of kids were basically like schools not their thing. Yeah, I think there's going to be an increase of kids who don't feel like school is their thing. The structure of school is now starting to feel old school because now with the internet you can learn all these things good and bad things. You can spend a lot of time on the internet and just a lot of kids are just not going to be able to sit in the classroom. Now, does that mean you force them to? Well, if the government mandates that and punishes kids for playing hooky and not going to school then yes, you can but the government has to do that, right? The government has to put that in place. The families are not going to be able to keep their kids in school. The government literally the police literally have to tell these kids go go back to school or stay in school, you know?  But other than that, then you got to change the curriculum of school. Do you think there needs to be more money management or money growth or saving investing due diligence on business deals? Like they don't teach you how to balance your credit cards or anything in school. Man, I mean financial education, man. There is a lot of financial education out there but a lot of it's based in like how to get rich quick and all this stuff. And that's what I don't like. I think it is sad that a lot of people do not trust the people who run society anymore. We don't trust it because we're saying, listen, I have to buy my own house. I have to rush to buy a house because if I don't buy that some BlackRock or some real estate tycoon or some guy who owns like 50 properties now was going to buy that and then jack up the price for me. So I need to buy that house quicker than other people can. Yeah, it feels like that right now. Yeah, in a perfect world you'd be like, yo, I'm just like trying to rent and maybe I'll buy a house but hopefully it's not ridiculously high. Right, right, right. And I did some googling, you know, the main solutions that people say are like, you know, higher minimum wages, renewed infrastructure investments, almost like the new new deal with Theodore Roosevelt. To me, I ultimately think that those sound that sounds right, but it's going to ultimately fall on individual communities to share knowledge amongst themselves. You know, like, for example, right now there's a lot of urban Black pages that did the work and they're almost taking like Bloomberg knowledge but they're distilling it with a different messaging and a different tone for a new audience that otherwise wasn't receptive to it when it was all like, you know. Yeah, I mean, the messenger matters. That's like saying having like certain, you know, Asian people deliver a similar message as something else but it's going to hit different. It hits different, it hits different. Yeah, I think people just got to help each other out more. Right, like I do think that the days Andrew of having a nine to five plopping down in front of your big screen TV for three to four hours and then just thinking that life is going to be gravy. That's probably not going to work anymore moving forward. Right. Yeah, I know. And I think the world is more complicated, but like I think students almost have to be taught like how to use social media to their benefit versus like for negative. You know what I mean? Because it's going to be there. Like unless we literally are locking down phones like China and like limiting like phone usage and app usage. Does TikTok need the education tab in America? Yeah, yeah. And the government needs to come in and step in to be honest because really people are only going to follow it as much as the government allows you to really. Honestly, let's just get into our takeaways. Andrew, I think as far as the macro statistics on the shrinking middle class, I think there's so much that goes into it, but the truth is Andrew, nobody can change it. Right. Like there's it's very, very difficult. There's so many.  It is what it is. Right. And I think that that's why you see so many people going for this new Gold Rush mentality of everybody's like trying to get rich by any means, whether that's like, you know, only fans or whatever. I mean, there's a lot of other ways that, you know, yeah, outside of the system, but I'm saying everybody's like going for those right now, but those are not necessarily fully constructive either. Yeah, I think just people have to, there has to be more focus. This is my last takeaway is that there needs to be more focus on speaking to people who do not want to operate in the traditional systems. Like even our job. Yeah, we get a check from Google and YouTube, right? That's part of it. And then there's certain brand deals we'll work with. But we are kind of like one step out of the traditional system. And I think people need to stop thinking that more and more people are going to jump back into the traditional system. Even though the corporations, I'm sure that's what they want. Yeah, you still need electricians and stuff like that. Like, so someone has to train that job. But I'm saying like, more and more people are finding a way to make money in a new way. So you have to prepare for that. Yeah. You have to prepare for that.  Don't only get caught up in the Joneses and like this and that. I think there's ways that you can still live a really good middle class life if you are in the middle class and you have no intention of like being outside of that.  Yeah, definitely. And yeah, I think like you said, Andrew, the tools are out there. The game is more complex, but there's also more like game packs to understand the new expansion pack that we're in. Yeah, I think people need to stop focusing on the past because the past was so simple, man. Life was more simplistic back then. I'm not saying it wasn't hard. It was just more simplistic. So I'm saying life is now more complicated, perhaps maybe easier, more comfortable, but more complicated to figure out. So what are you going to do? Yeah, you just can't think old school in the new school. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for watching. We are the hot pot boys. Let us know in the comments down below what you think. Please hit that like button and let us know if you enjoy the news and commentary we provide. And until next time, we out. Peace.