Okay, so I finally finally got through Rhythm of War. It took me longer than other booktubers because I didn't get an arc, but you know I'm not I'm not salty about that at all. The point is the book is phenomenal. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Okay, so this one it's a little too big to just do a regular review So we're gonna have non-spoiler spoiler section non-spoiler. Let's go So this is a stormlight archive book, you know If you are at all familiar with the stormlight archive if you've read through it already You have a pretty good idea of how this one is gonna go. It's gonna start off Relatively slow. It's gonna jump around between a couple of big characters and then you'll get one or two chapters from more minor characters You're gonna get flashback sequences, which are a mixed bag in my opinion And then at the end there's gonna be a big climax and some sort of big twist which will leave you wondering well, where's the series gonna go after this and This one it does mix up the formula a little bit. I'll get to that in a minute But overall it just it does that extremely well The events of this one pick up about a year after the end of oath bringer So, you know the forces of odium and the boy bringers and all them are still attacking They still hold most of Alec car, but also the night's radiant and everyone else are fighting back against them But things have kind of deadlocks now neither side has made all that much progress so both of them are looking for ways to move things forward and so Dalinar takes Pretty early on he takes most of their army and goes to azish Which is in the western part and they're gonna try and free up some territory so that they can have Almost complete control of all of southern Roshar Meanwhile Adolin and Shalon go into Shadesmar because they need to talk to the honor spren because the honor spren really don't want to Bond with radiance anymore And so they can't really make any more windrunners and in fact the other types of spren that make the other types of night nights radiant are also not really Well, they're not excited about the prospect of bonding with humans because last time it happened a whole bunch of them died and they're just You know, they're wary about it so Adolin and Shalon are basically a diplomatic mission going there to try and fix things and also Caledon that after this really big action sequence which most of the book starts off with we see that Caledon is Really starting to get affected by all the things he's seen and they call it battle shock in this but it's pretty clearly post-traumatic stress disorder and So he is just taken off the front lines and he goes back to being a surgeon for a little while and Granted that's like 200 pages into the book But my general rule of thumb is that the first 20% of the book is fine to talk about in a non-spoiler context And this is 1200 pages long. So even though it takes a while to get to that point I think it's fair to talk about that. So all the great stuff in this is mostly stuff That was great in the first couple of books like Caledon is still my favorite character like it's still Granted a lot of people aren't gonna want to see him just some would say moping or groaning or whining or something like that, but I enjoy watching his emotional turmoil and his general inability to find a purpose in life even though He wants to protect everybody. That's why he became a windrunner in the first place But yeah, he's he's a little lost and it's nice to see him Find ways to deal with that loss. I'm sorry words are hard sometimes But I'm trying to word this in a way which doesn't give away too much information Because like I said, he goes back to being a surgeon But then there is some more beyond that that he works on and then obviously some shit goes down and the characters all get in their own brand of trouble and So we have to see them all try and get out of it now of all the Stormlight books This one is the least action focused which includes the climax by the way Like I'm not saying the climax is bad not by any means But if you're expecting the traditional like sander lance where there's huge epic battle and a whole bunch of plot stuff happens And you know people die people are triumphant they kill a couple of villains But the villains still live to fight another day and the heroes are possibly set back some still like, you know If you're expecting that it's a little different like it's more Plot focused and a little bit more subtle like there's still some battling at the climax but really not that much and I'm not upset by that because Some of the things that happened there. I was really not expecting like they're Every Stormlight book has at least one or two.  I wasn't expecting that to happen moments And this definitely has a couple of them some are more in the middle and some come right at the end the rest of the book though It did Okay, I'm not gonna come right out and say it dragged a little Because it's not that bad like even even oath bringer was worse in this regard I think because of like that whole going to Kohlanar and then going to Shadesmar like that was that was really obnoxious And kind of difficult to read an oath bringer whereas in rhythm of war There is less action in the middle. Yes, but there's still stuff happening. So it didn't bother me that much However, once in a while there would be just like one chapter and they're usually not long chapters They're less than ten pages where I'm just thinking man This is this is kind of dull and I wish that it had just been Folded into the last chapter that followed this character I think that if we just cut a few things out here would have been better and It's not that there's any like specific plot points or anything that I think we could cut because I don't think we can I think We need basically all of those but when you consider this is longer even than oath bringer an oath bringer was already ridiculous in terms of length like you could have shaved a little bit off here, so You know I I'm trying I'm trying not to make it sound like a bigger deal than it is because it's really not that big of an issue Like I said, it's just the occasional couple of pages once in a while would drag but for the most part Pacing's really good as for the flashbacks. Those are They're not bad by any means, but I do think they're the weakest of the flashbacks We've seen so far because you know, they've all had their ups and downs a little like calibans for the most part Is pretty great, but there are one or two chapters which just felt a little repetitive there like it's oh, okay He's trying to be a surgeon, but he's also a sad boy And he doesn't want to fight but then he winds up having to fight and it felt like they went into that a little too much So it went down and then back up a little bit Shalons had much more up and down, but overall was good Dalinar's was across the board great and then this one follows each and I and Venley who are not Bad characters by any means, but they're nowhere near as interesting especially since we like Eshan is already dead we already know she's gone and Venley while she does get some interesting development following her both in the past and in the present She's still not as good as the other three. I don't think and This one like the flashbacks start off kind of weak but after the second or third one they do jump up a little and they don't take up that much time in the book actually like I Don't think they come up until you're like halfway through and even then there's not that many of them so Overall like again that I think the flashbacks are The worst part of the book, but they're they're really not bad the second worst part of the book is the bit with Adolin and Shalon and Shadesmar and Again, that's not bad. I think it was really interesting. It's just They don't focus on it that much like I think Book three in this or part three in this does not follow them in Shadesmar at all like there's an entire section of a couple hundred pages where we don't see anything that happens there and I Mean once we get to it. It's pretty good like we get to find out more about the spread and how their society works and we find out some stuff that went down with the Recreants and like when the Knights Radiant Cast off their armor and that destroyed their oaths and or broke their oaths Excuse me and all that. We find out some more about what went down there, which Interested me a lot But again, we'll say that for the spoiler section and I want to give huge props here because This book takes a character which was not very important before Nivani who is Dalinar's wife now formerly his sister-in-law now his wife That's a little weird, but we'll move past it and it takes her She was a side character in the first couple of books and in this one She becomes a major presence and she is Awesome, she really is awesome. Like she's intelligent. She's determined Well, I'm trying to think of a way to put this without just listing more positive attributes But like she is a very very good character like she goes through She goes through a lot of shit in this but she still comes out on top and she winds up being one of the big heroes here And I think that's phenomenal. I think it's amazing that they were able to do that now for the recommendation part Obviously if you've read the first three Stormlight books read this one You'll you'll love this one if you have not read any of the Stormlight books so far then I mean obviously I recommend them They're super super fucking long So I wouldn't really say that for casual fantasy fans But if you're looking for really big epic fantasy that plays around with some of the tropes and ideas and has Like really powerful themes and really powerful characters then I would say yeah go go for it and go check it out However, I will say that before you read Rhythm of War You should read some other Cosmere stuff because this one is much more Cosmere Aware I guess is a good way of putting it like there's a lot of smaller plot points and characters and such that Tie into the wider Cosmere in fact There's one character who just at one point pretty early on outright tells Shalon like look There's a lot of other planets with humans on them out there and I'm from one of them And it's not even treated as that big of a deal in the story. So with this one I would recommend reading some other Cosmere stuff before you get into it Specifically, I think read Warbreaker and If you want to read some other stuff read the original Mistborn trilogy mostly Warbreaker though Because that one plays a huge part in this and even though Warbreaker is Probably the weakest Cosmere book so far. It's still not bad. It's just Not as good as the others So now for spoilers The first thing I want to talk about is how Caledon after he leaves the battlefield he decides he wants to start Helping people not just with physical ailments because you know he's a surgeon, but with mental ones as well He wants to help people who have Depression or depression as we know it they usually refer to it as like the darkness or something like that But he wants to help people who have that he wants to help people who have battle shock aka PTSD and He is experimenting with ways to do that and mostly he's just bringing them out and having like seminars where they all talk with each other About their issues and stuff like that and that seems to help and I think that's amazing. I I like that Sanderson put that in I like that he shows.  They don't just go away. They still have some Serious problems that you have to learn to live with and I was I was happy that they decided to add that but they also showed like there are ways to deal with it and I liked how Caledon didn't just stick with that the whole story because if That was if he just went from being this super badass warrior to completely not fighting anymore I would have been a little upset because like watching Caledon fights really fun, but Partway through this book the void bringers managed to take over your theory Which is the center of all the night's radiance operations And they managed to take it over and get rid of the radiance powers and Caledon is one of the only people there That's trying to fight them off and trying to make sure they can't solidify their control and actually that's a huge part of the book So we do get to see him not only fighting again, but we get to see him fighting without his powers which forces him to Be a little more strategic in his thinking which is a lot of fun. I really liked seeing that I like seeing him Isolated I think like not 100% isolated cuz he does have a couple of allies in the tower But cut off from most support cut off from the other nights radiance cut off from most of his friends And he doesn't even have his powers anymore, but he's still continuing to do all this cool badass stuff I I liked that a lot and it continued up through the end of the book when he Finally said the fourth ideal the fourth night's radiant ideal and I'm oh Man that was just so cool like every time he's sworn one of the ideals It's gotten cooler and cooler like from the end of the way of Kings when he said he protect those that won't protect themselves And they had that huge battle where they thought they were gonna die But they managed to pull through that was fucking awesome and then when he Decided he wanted to protect King Elocar and he fought Seth it or set the Seth I'm actually not sure how to say that in the middle of the high storm like every time It's just get been getting better and so Caledon's character arc in this even though he has progress to make like I don't think his character is just gonna stop here and say Yep, we're done. It's just getting better and better and I loved that but obviously the big big big twist in this book and the big spoiler which like for real if you haven't read this leave now is What happens with Taravangian and Odium? because Okay, so near the end of the book Odium and Dallin are finally come to an agreement on a way to stop the war and It's basically they're going to have a contest of champions and whoever wins the contest They have a specific contract drawn out so that Even if the good guys win Odium will still hold on to some of his lands and he'll He'll he won't be able to escape Rochar completely But he will still have some power and he'll have made some progress where and the opposite is also true Like if they're good guys lose then they aren't completely dead but Anyways, the point is that not long after Odium makes that he goes to Taravangian Who is imprisoned at this point because he betrayed Dallin are and the others not long earlier and I Okay, long story short Taravangian kills rays who is the vessel for Odium You know, he's the human that took on the power of Odium and Was doing all this shit like he kills him, but Odium's power is still there So Taravangian takes it and he is now the vessel of Odium. He is now Not only the main bad guy of the Stormlight Archive But he seems to be shaping up to be one of the antagonists of the Cosmere as a whole now Like for the longest time while reading I've been thinking that Odium was going to be the big bad of the entire Cosmere I wasn't exactly sure how it was going to work out But I was fairly certain that's how it was happening and now I'm almost 100% certain that that's how it's gonna work out except Odium is Well, he's he's a bit different now. You know, he's no longer Rays Odium. He's Taravangian Odium who has somewhat of a different personality Which was actually the plan a whole long turns out cultivation was trying to manipulate events for this to happen and Taravangian he has different motivations for what he's doing like he no longer wants to just save Roshar or even save his city, Karbranth But he now knows about a whole bunch of other stuff going on in the Cosmere about how there's total chaos and everything's ruled by Broken half-dead gods and he's thinking near the end of the book. He's thinking, you know, I think I Think I can I think I can fix this but before I can get to that I have to break out of my prison which means he has to finish all his shenanigans on Roshar because he just like how Odium was imprisoned in that system Taravangian is also in prison or Taravangian Odium. I don't know they're Calling him Taravangian kind of feels like dead naming at this point. So just based on that I have no fucking clue where this series is going to go next like there's a million directions It could go I know that Sanderson said he had to finish up the next Mistborn book before he could do Stormlight 5 Which I was already excited for the next Mistborn book, but now I'm super excited for the next Mistborn book but I'm not sure what information we're gonna see there that will Force us to or that he has to get out before he can do this one. We'll we'll just have to wait and see But oh my god, I did not see that one coming that one that one is amazing and Frankly, some of the stuff that went down in this book not just that bit with Taravangian, but also Knowing that apparently the Knights radiant and their spren Broke their oaths on purpose and their spren agreed to it. They sacrificed themselves to protect humanity from Something we don't know precisely what I think it has something to do with the the Don shards which are what destroyed the humans previous home Ashen and forced them to come to Roshar It might have something to do with that but we're not completely sure yet and Just based on that and the fact that Taravangian is now odium and actually the epilogue of this is terrifying because it shows wit aka hoid aka Whatever other name he decides to go by in the other books it shows him and he meets up with odium slash Taravangian and He's talking to him and he's realizing you know something's wrong here something seems off and For a brief moment. He realizes. Oh, this is somebody else somebody else got the power But then odium Erases his memory somehow and this is the first time we've ever seen hoid not only get scared but get outs out smarted and Oh dear right like Taravangian odium is ten times scarier than raise odium and so oh Man, I'm just gonna be rambling on forever if I let that happen But man like this is the best stormlight books since the way of kings because I think way of kings is still just a tiny bit Better than this one, but they're both like ten out of ten hundred out of a hundred million out of a million Awesome very few problems here and those problems that I have are just so minor compared to the good stuff if you Want to read just just read stormlight, okay read stormlight archive then gets a rhythm of war and that's all bye Hey patreon patron the oppo Savalain and Eva tumor brother Santotis Christopher Quinten Deanna Day him Mbis Emily Miller Joel Carcat Kitsune Lawrence Hicks Lisa Ruta Kova Madison Lewis Bennett microphone Rizia roll sad martigan tobacco crow Tom beanie vacuous Silas Bay Victus You're all pretty cool if your name isn't on here then sign up for patreon give give me money please I I need want you more money now and Subscribe and channel like video stuff. 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Lee was on his third career working well into his retirement, simply because he loved people. From my very first day, I could tell he was different from any manager that I had ever worked with before. It was in my late teens when I was working as a bellhop at a beautiful resort in the Wasatch Mountains. One day, an elderly guest pulled up and I helped her out of her car, just me simply doing the job I was hired to do. But after I helped her inside, Lee came up to me and he said, Clint, I was so happy to see that you noticed that that woman needed some extra help. He said, I saw how you were extra careful with her and you took your time as you walked her into the hotel door. He looked at me and he said, now that, that is the type of thing that can really make a difference in someone else's life. Keep it up. What an immediate connection that made. I remember I felt proud. And more importantly, it made me really think about the everyday interactions that I was having with our guests and the kind of impact they could have by catching me doing good, Lee reinforced my strengths.


Hi, this is MXUX, this is a quick video on some new information, some leaks and some other information that's come out on the Lordstown Endurance after the Hindeberg Report. So let's just get going with this and move on to the slides. All right, we got some information on the battery, there's going to be an eight-year warning, I have a little more information on this later. The battery will be replaceable and will be upgradeable, so it's not structural like the Tesla. What they're thinking of doing now at Lordstown is they may take it back and use it in residential applications like the Powerwall for Tesla, but I think it's pretty cool they're going to be able to replace the battery. It's going to be grid-capable and bi-directional as an option. So in other words, you'll be able to feed power back in the grid, I guess, and you'll be able to power a house with it and so forth. You guys can look that up for sure, but that's some new, I think the fact that it will be replaceable is a big deal and upgradeable as new battery technology comes into play. All right, on the body of the endurance, there will be variations. They have what's called a bed-delete body, which is the king-cap only without a body, so you'll be able to put a flat-bed body on it or the toolbox with the tool rack with the ladder rack on top or I would imagine a small bucket truck, a bucket assembly on there or whatever. There's going to be a towing in a trailer package. It is going to be snow plow-capable and it's going to have they're working with the people that build the snow plow fittings to put the plow on for the Silverado so they'll have a kit that you'll be able to set up a snow plow on it. So this is exciting. It doesn't have to be a pickup. It can be anything you want and of course you got the snow plow. So there you go. All right, the initial run for the truck is going to be for fleets and it's going to be a work truck. It's going to have vinyl seats and rubber floor mats and it's going to have limited options. I personally like the idea of vinyl seats and floor mats because it's a truck. Yeah, duh. Anyway, but this is the initial run and this is for the fleets. Again, I don't have a problem with that. The rest of the interior is going to be pretty much the same. What they're going for is an affordable work truck. It's not a lifestyle vehicle like the Tesla Sabre truck. So this is like, I remember back in the day when you bought a pickup truck. Guess what? You got vinyl seats. You got rubber floor mats. It's great. This is great. This is like a throwback. I personally like it. Three year 36 miles, 36,000 mile bumper to bumper warning and an eight year 100,000 mile battery warning, which is pretty much standard in the industry now. Again with that swappable battery. All right, these are some more body specs. They've been testing it and the truck go work in three feet of water. So anybody that's thinking of going across any streams or anything, there you go. Three feet of water. They're building their own proprietary heating and cooling system for the battery. They're not going to use anybody else's system, I guess, but anyway, this is supposed to be a pretty big deal. They're not going to have a proprietary charging plug. I don't know the plug variations, but it's going to be one of the standard plug variations. They're going to have level one, level two in DC fast charging. So, you know, they're going to use third party chargers. They're not going to put their own charging network in. So, but it'll be a universal kind of charging set up. For all you guys down there in Texas, you can lift it. You can put a lift kit on the truck. Cool. All right, some more body specs. They're going to have an infotainment system. I don't know if it's going to be Android Play, Apple Play or whatever, but that's part of the deal. They're going to have over-the-air updates, you know, just like Tesla. They're going to have telemetrics. It's going to give the status and send the information back to the fleet headquarters as far as the repairs, the motors, you know, if there's any problem, most likely location of the vehicle and speeds or whatever the case may be, but it's going to be a connected vehicle. The vehicle, I guess with that bi-directional option, is capable at this point with the battery capable of powering a home for a day and a half. Everybody down there in Texas day and a half. And they're doing, they're still in the process. They're at the betas. They're almost there. They're doing improvements along the way. So it's about 90% there, but changes coming as well. Okay, now, you know, this chick with the fake accent, she's talking about making fun of the motors and I don't want to get into it, but anyway, she's ill informed. They did 20,000 miles of in-house testing on the motors, the hub motors. The manufacturer has done a million miles of testing and they've done drop tests and they've submerged them in water. They've submerged them in mud. They've done shop tests on them. They've done all kind of stuff. So there's a million million miles of testing on the motors and they've done 20,000 miles of testing in-house on the motors, on the mule and the prototype truck. So that's 1,020,000 miles of testing. There's one moving part in the motors. That's the rotor. That's it. It's the hub that the wheel goes on. Now this came through in the conference call and their earnings call, which I want to do a video on. I don't know if I'll have time and the Goldman Sachs analyst goes, well, when you get a flat, do you have to take the motor off? People. No. You do not have to take the motor off to fix a flat. The hub of the wheel fits right on the hub motor, just like a regular, it's like a brake drum. Look at it, it's like a brake drum. You know how you built a multi-tire and a brake drum? That's how you do it. That's how you take it off. Another analyst said, well, are you going to have a spare tire with a spare motor on it? No. You don't need the motor. That's not how it works. The motors part of the truck, it's like a, just look at it like, and I plan on doing another video on this as well, as a drum brake. Okay. It's the same kind of thing. Badge in a 62 Buick with drum brakes on it. Not this brake, drum brakes. That's what it is. Okay. I could not believe that these analysts from these Wall Street bankers are asking these questions. It was shocking to me. It just shows you how ill-informed everyone is. You know, these guys are so busy engineering this truck and building this truck and getting it out in September. You know, no one's getting a word on all these things. There's just three electrical connections to the motor. And this is some news that I got from my sources. They have tested, you know, the prototype by guessing the betas on the track. They have tested them up to 120 miles an hour. So they're going to limit these fleet trucks electronically to 80 miles an hour. But this truck is capable of going 120 miles an hour at least. Okay. Now this is the Lawrence Town Motors endurance versus an ICE internal combustion engine truck. So they say there's going to be $20,000 in total cost of ownership over the life of the truck. So it's already $20,000 cheaper based on that. It's going to have a 250 mile range, which is five times what an internal combustion truck is. 72% lower maintenance costs. Again, no transmission, no oil changes, no spark plugs, regenerative braking, lower braking repairs. You know the drill on this. They have done simulated crash tests and they're going to do the real crash tests on the beta. I guess it's the beta, but the beta body. But they're already near, I mean I think they already have a five star in the, don't quote me on that, in the simulated computer generated crash tests. They're expecting a five star crash rating.  I mean this thing that I'm sure it's going to get a five well. It's four-wheel drive, 5,300 pounds. It's the lightest full-size fleet pickup truck there is. And with the motor governed to 80, it's a 5.5 second zero to 60 mile per hour speed. And as I said, it can go faster. And it's got the fewest moving parts of any pickup. Now I just want to say I was looking at, I think it was a Ford hybrid electric ice truck. Oh my god. It looked, the schematic of it looked like a fighter jet. I mean they got an electric motor in the back and then they got a battery to the side. Then they got an ice motor. Then they got a transfer case. I mean there must have been 10,000 parts, additional parts just for putting this electric motor into this F-150. So this thing has four moving parts, the wheel motors, as far as the drivetrain goes. That's it. Fantastic design. Alright, some more specs. Tightest turning radius of any full-size pickup, king cab, 2,000 pound payload max at this time. You know, it might change, doubtful. Towing capacity in this model, the first run is 7,500 pounds max. Could change, not likely. 20 cubic foot frunk in the front. It's waterproof and it has an outlet in it. Okay. And what they're saying is it's a familiar form factor with a radical drivetrain and battery. Okay. And now they're still working on the battery and they're putting the battery plan in. You see they got it, we're in. But they're talking about 109 kilowatts to 117 kilowatt battery. Still in development. They're getting the cells just like Tessa. They're putting the battery pack together themselves. And again, this battery pack is going to be removable and interchangeable. Now I don't think it's going to be swappable. It's going to take a little more than, you know, just pulling in some bay and having a robot change it up. But it is going to be replaceable. So I think that's just a great option. I mean, you know, the truck could last a really long time under those conditions. Anyway, let's move on here. The motor, they have, they have regen braking. Again, some of these analysts during the earnings call were asking, well, will it have regen braking?  Anyway, not only does it have a regen, it's really good at stop and go driving with these particular motors. And again, you don't have all that inertia and all these moving parts having to spin up to move the wheels. You got, you know, you can understand how that works. Very rugged four-wheel drive system. So each wheel has its own controller, and then there's a master controller, I'm sure, for the truck itself. But they have computer control traction, you know, ABS system. If you can see from some of my other video, if you watch my other videos on Lordstown, I got a few of them. If you watch them, guys, you'll understand all these things. This torque vectoring I went over in detail, this is a fantastic thing. This computer control motor is going to give you this torque vectoring, which is something they use on F1 race cars, okay? And it's going to have obviously electronic stability control, which is going to tie all these systems together. This, you know, this is going to be a really safe vehicle, I believe. I mean, between all these computer controls and individual motors and having each wheel individually controlled and the crumple zones, I mean, a really super, super safe vehicle. Anyway, the people that have driven it said it handles like a sports car, which it should because it is like a sports car. It's got low center of gravity. It's got the four-wheel drive. It's got the torque vectoring. It's got the traction control. It's like an F1 car. Okay, there's, and the people that have talked said there's no sway in the body when it's turning. And they said there's no issues with it rolling over in a crash or anything like that because the center of gravity is so low. And you can look at the Tesla crash test and say same type of thing. Gross weight. I don't know what GVWR is. It's 6,000 pounds. That's not final. I think that's the gross weight. I'm not sure what that figure is.  There's a towing receiver. The frame, as they say, they say it's practically indestructible. But anyway, there'll be a, you know, probably I'm sure aftermarket towing receiver, but there's also going to be an option for a fleet to have a towing receiver installed during the manufacturer. Regenerative braking is standard. Again, these Wall Street analysts. What does it do? I can't believe it. Okay, there's a 15-inch ground clearance on a truck. And again, for you guys in Texas can be lifted. Any, basically any lift kit you could put on a Silverado, which is my understanding, not from them. You can put on this truck. So I think that's pretty cool. I don't know. I think the Rivian isn't going to have this feature. I think the Rivian and the Tesla truck are going to have an air suspension. Anyway, you know, talking about the Tesla, this truck has a solid rear axle. And that's for telling. Tesla's going to have independent rear suspension with airbag suspension. And according to my research, I don't know how that that's going to be a real feat of engineering to get that to work with towing. Anyway, that's what they say. And they're going to have on-board battery charging outlets so you can charge your work tools or whatever, 110 volt 30 amp circuit right now. That's what they have planned. But again, this could be subject to change, but there's going to be outlets on the truck is what they're saying. Now, this is Lordstown Motors versus Ford, Tesla and Rivian. Well, first of all, Lordstown Motors is going to have the first pickup truck. Right now, Lordstown has the capability to build more vehicles than either of these, any of these. Okay, their plan is bigger. It's better. It was the number three plant in GM's crown. Okay, I had some video later of this plant. I can't, I don't think anybody understands how cars are built, were built. How big this plan is. Anyway, Ford is building a special plant to build EVs. It's a small, it's like a sub plant in Detroit. Rivian, we still don't know. I did a video on this, who will be the first pickup truck. You guys should look at it. Each other Rivian plant, they're hand building cars in the background. I don't know. Anyway, Lordstown Motors is going to be the first one out. It's going to have lower pricing. And the hub motor drive train is a major advantage of the Lordstown Motors. I think this is going to be one of the keys. I think it's the best drive train in the electric vehicle market, honestly. I mean, it's a revelation. Now let's talk about lower pricing. You know, the Cybertruck, they got, I don't know, 600,000 pre-orders. Who knows how many will come to fruition. But they've got a lower end pricing on that of like 40K. I just want to remind everybody. When Tesla announced the Model 3, they were taking orders. They said 30K. There's going to be a 30K Model 3. Never happened. I mean, remember, there was like hidden on the website. You could have ordered one. Nobody even knows how many they sold. They took it off completely now. I'm going to predict right now that's going to be the same thing with the Cybertruck. They have already said, I believe the Cybertruck they've announced, and again, I did did a video on this, you can look at which one will be forced, Ford, Rivian, or Lordstown. It goes into this. But I believe they've already announced they're going to start with the expensive models first. And then my prediction, they'll never get around to making the cheaper one. It'll never, it's vaporware, my opinion. That's the Cybertruck vaporware. The 40K Cybertruck never going to happen, my opinion. Okay, now they've been talking about, oh, there's over 10. How many orders do you have? I got to tell you, I want to do a video just on this. You know, I've done some just some basic research. This is a massive, this is these fleet sales just for municipalities. I mean, they want an electric pickup truck. A lot of municipalities in the United States, they have mandates to go electric. Okay, they don't want a Cybertruck. They don't want a $70,000 Rivian. They want a work truck. Okay, they want the Lordstown motor. By the way, Ford's fleet sales for the F-150, are they enough? Down 26% this year, over the last 12 months or whatever. Nobody's buying an F-150. And they ran out of the chips to make the engine controls on the gas powered F-150. Now they even get worse mileage. No one's buying them. That's the number one fleet vehicle. So that's a distinct opening for Lordstown. But they do not want the Cybertruck form factor.  I'm sure they'll be aftermarket things, but they want a truck. You know what I mean? And the Lordstown endurance really, really fits these municipalities. And you know, the municipalities can't put in letters of intent and all this. So and another interesting thing I learned is on the municipalities, I did not know this, many states have anti idling laws. You're not allowed to idle a truck for more than five minutes and in a lot of places. And this is mostly described as diesel trucks. But you know, you're not supposed to idle a truck.   And then the manager shows up and he's got a pickup truck. And this is not just the manager. This is the other trucks do this too on and off. But the manager, he shows up, the project manager, he shows up with a pickup truck, right? And it's got a big screen in it like a police car. It's got a radio and it's got all this stuff in it. You know what I mean? And I think he hooked some kind of device up, maybe a fan that was blowing air into the manhole they were working in underground or whatever. And one of the cool things was this guy gets out of the truck with a laptop and he opens it up and I happen to see the screen of the laptop. This laptop had a wireframe drawing of it of the street of every building accurately drawn in 3D wireframe above the ground and a full 3D schematic below the ground of every power line, sewer, everything. It was amazing. And and you know, and it was like X-ray vision as he walked around it would change. It was the most amazing thing, the detailed information they have. But getting back to the story, the thing is, they would work for hours on this thing.  And this is the same with a lot of power companies. And you know, they say Duke Energy is going to order these trucks. They are mandated by safety mandates. And when they run bucket trucks and other things, anything that has hydraulics or that needs a power takeoff for a tool or a fan or a light or whatever, they are mandated by their safety requirements to keep these trucks idling the entire time that project is underway.  But this pickup truck, I don't know why I don't like I said, I don't know, this guy is running a fan or what, or maybe he need to make sure the radio was running so that he could call for help if somebody got hurt.  These electric vehicles will stop all that. It's amazing. Just the demand just in that one application. And again, the form fast factor of the Lord's sign endurance is what these municipalities want. Anyway, let's get back to the slide. 60 beta builds, they're testing. Some of them are going to be crash tested. Some are going to go to customers for feedback. Some are going to go on sales calls. They went in an affordable EV pickup option, which is what they're going for 52 K right now. It's evolving. Again, I don't I think the low cost cyber truck is vapor where you can quote me on that. Rivian forget it. It's not even I don't even think you can get one for less than 70 K. September 2021, which is a couple months away, they're going to be the release. Again, the municipalities really want this truck. And right now. And again, this is a forecast and you know, all these haters and these short I'm just going to say this is some with some of my research has come up with of internal forecast they have for demand. Let's say for the first year or the first first production run or the first couple production runs. I'm not sure exactly the timeframe. This may be municipal trucks, 250,000 to 400,000 vehicles.  And in the demand for this truck. Unbelievable. Anyway, let's just move on to the next slide here. I think I got a couple videos coming up and I think they're going to start automatically. Okay, this is a makes you I'm going to play this video at double speed. This is the Lord's time plant making Chevy Cruises and this is the vehicle they made before they made the endurance and I just I don't think anybody has an idea of just how complex and big this facility is and this plan is and actually what it takes to really build a vehicle. So let's just start this. It's at double speed. Now you see they start with rolls of steel and then it's stamping. And this is all the same equipment that Lord's town motors has. And now they're putting the bodies together. And now they're dunking the bodies for the paint application. They're applying sealant to the bodies there. And they're the robots are paying it then the bodies come down. The trim, what they call the trim line. That's what that is. They put the dashes and the seats and everything into the bodies. So you can see here. And then now look how big that line is people don't people don't get it. They think this is a hoax. I mean, there's a robot's putting the seats in. There's a robot putting the glass in and again, Lord's time has all the same equipment is in place at during Lord's time. And look at the immensity of this place. Look at the complexity. It's like the Star Wars movie now that the ice engine line they don't need they're they're putting their electric motor line in there and their battery assembly plant in there where this is. And it's supposed to be like a clean room in there now. And now this girl here she's fastening the drive train in. But anyway, then there's the final car and I'm look how long that line is. Look how gigantic this plant is. And again, this is this is just coming in sheets of steel. And they used to roll one of these cars off the line a minute one a minute 24 7365. Okay, so that's an inner I'm sorry phone call that's an interesting now that gives you an idea of what this plant was doing right before Lord's time bought it and Lord's time got it less than a year ago. All this equipment was still warm. It's all in place and we're going to go to the next video here. I can get it to start right and it's just going to be a current video of the beta production at Lord's town. Okay, this is the latest video from Lord's town 316 showing the same plant building the beta builds of the truck that the short seller say they can't build. There's the floor pan. There's the robots. This is the same line that was in the cruise line. That's the same robots. Everything's been reprogrammed for this truck and you can see everything's working fine. Oh, it's not working. They can't build them. Well, these are the beta builds to build 80 of these. They're very close on these they're still doing changes to the specs but this is the car. I mean, this is the truck and you can see here now this is the roof going on. I'm just going to pause it right here. This roof is going on and this is a very special procedure to attacking it in place. The robots are using spot welds. You're going to see the next video that plays. They have a laser welding on the roof and Schmidt, the president of Lord's town, pointed out specifically what a big deal this is. It is cutting edge, state of the art technology, extremely expensive. Nobody else uses it and I can tell you from my own research, you know who else uses this laser welding technique? Rolls Royce does on the roof of the Rolls Royce. So let's just play this and you can see now watch it. It goes by pretty quickly here but these are lasers welding the seams on the roof. Impressive. Okay, it's coming up here. There you go. Pretty cool. Now here's the non-existent battery plant that what's his name? Hinda Brick says they don't have. There they are. There's a battery pack they say they can't make. All right. That's it. That's I mean, I don't know what else you need to see. September, they're on record. Okay guys, that's the video. I hope you liked it. I'm going to put a link, an informational link on the top of these videos if I can or at the end of these videos to my other Lordstown Motors videos. I don't know. I have four or five. If you watch them, you can understand there's very in-depth explanations there of these hub motors, especially, which people can't seem to grasp, but it was a hard concept for me to grasp because it's so unique. Anyway, I hope you liked the video. That's it. Going on long enough. Thanks for watching. Creepy music about the start.


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Well, this is the first of our, China is not our enemy webinars from Code Pink. We want to be creating tools for how we as activists can lead to peace and not be used by lies and fears, the dry of wars and are fed by the Pentagon, the State Department and the deep state. So at Code Pink last week, we did our first alert to our community calling on Biden to commit to before the convention, the first strike. And we joined with Wilf and Wand and Mass Peace Action in sending that letter. Anne Wright, Colonel Anne Wright, participated in a pivot to peace conversation two weeks ago and just this last weekend, Medea Benjamin, participated in a global conversation to stop the looming Cold War between the US and China. We need to build a movement to stand in the way of the lies that we see growing every day. We have a head start that we didn't have with Iraq. At Code Pink, we say, stop the next war now. We started that with Iran when we first spoke it. But unfortunately, it has increased to too many other countries in the world. And this is serious. I'm very excited to have as our first guest to be to Chow, who's been organizing campaigns for corporate accountability and racial economic justice in Chicago since 2009. He co-founded Justice is Global, a project of people's action that is focused on building a grassroots movement to win structural reforms to create an equitable and sustainable global economy. Yay. To be to welcome and can you start by telling us about Justice is Global and how your work has been pivoting to China and the manufactured hate that is being fueled by those in Washington, DC of both parties, especially during this time of COVID pandemic. Sure thing. Thanks, Jody. Thanks for having me here. I got to say it's an honor to be invited to this Code Pink event. I remember when I was like a political infant watching Code Pink direct actions around the Iraq war on TV and think like, wow, that's that's really cool. Never thought that I'd be I'd be working with you like this. So Justice is Global is a special project of people's action. And people's action is a national organization made up of a number of community organizations and progressive political organizations across the country, working on issues of racial and economic justice and climate as well. And Justice is Global has a specific mission of winning a just and sustainable global economy. We were founded at people's action just over a year now. It was June 2019. And before the pandemic, we were developing a campaign for a progressive alternative to the US-China trade war, which laid some of the groundwork for the escalation and tensions that we've been seeing in recent months. And we were working with some of the member organizations of people's action in swing states, as well as some groups working with rural communities, who were being impacted very severely by the trade war. So we have a background in working on US-China tensions from that perspective. When the pandemic hit, we could see that not only was the pandemic going to take over US politics, but it was going to become the dominant question in US-China, US-China relationship specifically. So we pivoted to trying to develop some strategies for how to confront the rapid escalation in US-China tensions that we knew from the beginning that that was going to be a major part of the political dynamic under the COVID-19 crisis, that inevitably the most hawkish elements among US elites, we're going to seize on that as an opportunity to escalate against China. So since then, we've been building alliances, working on analysis and strategy, developing narrative tools to counter the increasingly extreme anti-China narratives that we're seeing from particularly the Trump White House and the Republican Party and right wing media. We've also been developing a campaign for international cooperation to beat the pandemic with a special focus on US-China cooperation because we believe that lifting up the potential for cooperation between the US and China on shared challenges and most immediately that's the pandemic, that that is a really important part of building an alternative to these escalating tensions that we see right now. You guys are doing a lot. So when you started Justices Global, I moved to China part-time. So it's just, I want to say like watching this happen in such a short period of time. I mean, I think, you know, it's just, I moved in April and everybody was just like, Yay, China. It's so cool. Like, you know, and then slowly, slowly, it's just like now. Oh no. And then there's all these stories about how horrible China is and that there are enemy now. I was just like, what, nothing happened. So maybe start with what did you see when the pandemic started? And as, as was that used, did you watch a shift as you were engaged in this? Yeah, I think the first thing that I experienced when the pandemic hit, and this was very early on in early February. I started, I experienced anti-Asian racism.  And that was like my first taste of the rapid escalation in anti-Asian racism that came as part of the popular reaction to the pandemic blaming it on China, associating it with Chinese people. And then by extension, just a broad range of Asian people in general because so much of this country can't tell any of us apart. And yeah, I anticipated that that would be an important part of the reaction and that was very quickly confirmed in early February. And then since then there's been, you know, some, some organizations that have tracked incidents of anti-Asian harassment and violence and there's there's been thousands since then. The other thing that we were tracking was some of the right wing media discourse around the pandemic which moved very quickly towards narratives of blaming China and shifting very quickly into the realm of conspiracy theories. Sometimes mixed in with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.  It's Jews or it's the Chinese or maybe a mixture of both. So that's sort of the range of the ideology on the right nowadays. So we saw these conspiracy theories and these blame China narratives. They were being developed and we saw right wing figures investing a lot of energy in them. So for example, Tucker Carlson on Fox News was a major leader in this. And that they were starting that before it ever made it into Trump's mouth in the White House. Like Trump didn't get to that stuff until mid to late March. I think March 18th or something like that, but it was being developed well before that. So that's what we were seeing coming. And we knew that there were independently of the pandemic, a growing set of forces among U.S. elites in both parties actually, actually who have been agitating for years now for a more confrontational approach to China. And that they, it was predictable that they would use this rise in anti-China sentiment as an opportunity to try to build greater popular support for their anti-China agenda. Because the challenge that they have faced for years is that there's not a lot of public appetite for increasing confrontation with China. People are sick of the wars that we're already in. Why would anyone think favorably about the prospect of engaging in a war with a much more powerful country? You know, that just doesn't make sense. But there has been this increase in anti-China sentiment under the pandemic. So for some of these hawks, that's an opportunity. So let's just look at that. I mean, this is not, this is a game plan that has been played out on the U.S. people for a really long time. Nobody wanted the Iraq war either.   And we called Code Pink for peace because they were frightening. They were used to frighten the American people into voting for war. And so, you know, when you say that there's, there are those in the capitalist, you know, corporate circles who see China as an economic threat to what, to U.S. hegemony, you know, global hegemony. And we've seen that for a really long time.  And they work on creating a balance. So there are those that aren't interested in that balance. But I think, you know, where we watch the, the lies being driven to create an enemy. And again and again, what, how, how do we look at that as activists? And okay, here it's happening again. Here's the game plan. We're watching it. It's rolling out.   And instead, you know, that they didn't tell us until like June, I mean, he said some later date, but they told us in December. And even the U.S. CDC doctor said, I was called by the Chinese head of the CDC crying to warn us about what was happening. Not just worn, but like really this is serious. So that discrepancy between what is true and what is being driven is we know as anti-war activists is where we need to insert ourselves. And so kind of we're watching this wave grow and we want to enter. So you're telling us how this is happening, but what, how do we look at this as activists and say, how do we insert ourselves in this moment? Because also we know that sanctions that are also being driven by the Trump administration on Iran and Venezuela and Iraq and sorry, Cuba. They drive also nationalism. And so in this time where we see the world is global and we're all suffering from pandemic and what should be happening is cooperation and connection and understanding where a global economy and global climate change, which the effects of that are going to make COVID look like child's play. So what, you know, how do we also not become nationalists, not drive nationalism and debunk all this?  Sorry. Yeah. You know, the task of debunking some of these arguments and even conspiracy theories from the anti-China hawks. That's a big task. It can very quickly get very complicated. It requires a lot of background knowledge about China that, you know, is not necessarily accessible to a lot of people.  You can read, there are some long articles that are quite good about spelling out the timeline and so on. And so, you know, there were some missteps by officials in China. You know, my understanding is that the biggest missteps were from local officials in Wuhan who were acting out of motivations that should be very familiar to us when we look at the missteps from Trump and Republican governors. They were worried about the economic impact of overreacting to the pandemic. It's like, well, you know, the information still got getting out. If we, if we, if we set off the red alarm now about a pandemic that will hurt the economy and that will delegitimize us politically.  But, you know, this, you know, I think the anti-China hawks turn this into this exotic thing that is, that is particular to China, when in fact we can see those same motivations playing out in the U.S. And in fact, like by any reasonable standard, it's playing out much worse in the U.S. than it played out in China, like there were temporary delays in China. In the U.S. it's been months and we have Republican leaders still running with that playbook, which is totally destructive. I think like a good place to start is to get clear on what the most important driving motivations are behind the anti-China hawks and to sort of critique everything that they say from that perspective. So there's two related strands of concern. One is military and the other is economic. So under the military concern is that, so we start out with, if you're a member of the national security elite in the U.S., you start out with a basic dogmatic commitment to U.S. global military hegemony, right? So the idea is that the U.S. military or alternatively the militaries of U.S. allies is going to control, ideally, every square mile of the planet. And if you start out with that basic commitment, then... Is that imperialism? Yes, that is what, that is another word for that. Thank you. And if you start out with that basic commitment, then, yeah, China's going to seem like a threat. So for example, a big flashpoint is the South China Sea, where the Chinese military has been building up its presence and making claims over which waters are county's Chinese territory that conflict with the claims of other countries in that region. So that is perceived by U.S. military as a threat to the U.S. While it is a threat to U.S. military hegemony, it's a threat to U.S. imperialism, that does not mean that is a threat to any living American person, other than the ones that we send over with the Navy and so on, right? So that's sort of the military perspective, which then gets blown up enormously into these hugely inflated images of the Chinese threat. So Secretary of State Pompeo last week talked about the military conflict with China in like apocalyptic terms. He said, he had a quote of something like, if we bend the knee now, then our children's children will be dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, right? It's this image that if we don't confront China in the South China Sea right now, then they're coming to take over the United States, which is just this bizarre paranoid fear for which they're like, China doesn't want to run the U.S. like this place is a mess. And in fact, the tweet right after that said, but really they were doing what they were doing and that China was evil. So the China would change their behavior, you know, not so that we would be forced into something, but this is a force for China to change their behavior. Yeah, so it is in fact changing China's behavior, but not in the ways that the U.S. military Hawks advertise, right? So it is the impact that this is having in China. It's feeding Chinese nationalism. It's making the Chinese leaders more defensive and fearful. And you know, it is a reality that the Chinese military is building up his presence in the South China Sea. And maybe some of the neighboring countries are rightfully afraid of what that will mean for them. But a lot of that is motivated by a justifiable fear that the U.S. military presence threatens to like strangle China in its own backyard. Right? So that fear of the U.S. military presence, and we have to remember like there's a string of U.S. military bases surrounding China, right? I think we can hopefully sympathize with the Chinese leadership's fear that this is going to be increasingly become a threat to them, particularly as China continues to rise in the world and that they need to establish a foothold in their surrounding territory in order to protect themselves from the threat of the U.S. military, right? So this increasingly aggressive and bellicose rhetoric and actions from the U.S. actually feeds in to these actions from China that we interpret as aggressive, right? So we're getting this like really destructive feedback loop, which the Trump administration has done everything in its power to accelerate. And in fact, there was an article in The New York Times earlier this week that I think just nailed it on the head, saying that the Trump administration is trying to push the U.S.-China relationship past the point of no return. They want to poison the relationship so badly that even if they lose power to Biden and the Democrats in November, and even assuming the best intentions on the part of a Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, that they'll be unable to repair the damage that the Trump administration wants to do between now and in the months to come. So that's what we're dealing with on the side of sort of the military hawks that are driving this conflict. There's another side to it that's related, which is economic nationalism and anti-China economic nationalism, which stems from the fact that China's economy has not only been growing but really advancing, and that we are in a place now where Chinese tech companies are real competitors to the U.S. tech industry. And this is a problem because on the one hand, these are the most profitable industries in the global economy nowadays, and the U.S. wants to maintain control of them. Because they're the most profitable industries, they're also the source of the greatest power in the global economy. So the U.S. is very jealous of its control over this tech sector. On top of that, you know, we have to see that there are these global systemic problems where the global economy never fully recovered from the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and global economic growth has been very mediocre since then, in particular in recent years, which has pushed the U.S. and China into the sense of zero-sum competition over economic growth, and these highly profitable sectors are particularly important if these two countries are sort of competing with each other over who's going to get the larger piece of this shrinking pie of global economic growth, which both countries rely upon. So the tech sector is super important for maintaining, like, high corporate profits in this increasingly hostile economic environment, which is only getting that much worse under the pandemic, right?  A final point there is that in the minds of the national security establishment, the U.S. tech industry is basically a wing of the military-industrial complex. So losing supremacy in the tech industry for the militarists also implies the threat of thereby losing military superiority, because so much of military advances are dependent on tech advances. So if you don't control the top players in the tech industry, how can you control military supremacy? So this is a big fear that they have about the advances in the Chinese economy. So we have the militarists and the economic national sort of combining to really push this agenda forward. So, well, let's just get back to the human beings. You mentioned earlier that people generally in the United States are not really gung-ho on a war with China. But they don't really notice the boiling water or the steps that continue to escalate, just as you've really well laid out, is like, this is really happening and happening quite quickly.   They are committed to their people. You know, let's look at, I think, they've taken an estimate of 500 million people out of poverty. So, and then we're in a country that is falling apart. That's kind of, you know, certainly not there for the people. So you're, you didn't bring up that kind of difference of like the for a really long time. The United States has killed an awful lot of people because they were communists. So that I don't know where that is that actually absent in the conversation because it's certainly the thing the US has been afraid of since World War two, and why they dropped a nuclear bomb was to show that they were powerful and, you know, to scare the communists, basically. So here we are back in history to this moment. And I just it wasn't there and I, it's, I think part of why people don't want to talk about it, like, like, why even progressives are left or afraid to talk about this is that it does bring up this conversation that is so about what the US has been about for a really long time. I mean, the US built on slavery built on genocide, and then built on the murdering of innocent communists around the, and many of them Asian. So where is that in here because I think if we don't talk about it, it's partly what keeps everybody quiet, because like, oh my God, if I say something positive about China, I'm a communist, or, you know, and I, and and right now in the middle of, you know, Trump's insanity. So underneath that is the United States of America that is built on genocide and slavery and, you know, basically run by corporations instead of a government, or the government is run by the, you know, so does that in in between those two is that is that river flowing or is that does that come up. Do they operate without it. I don't know. So you mentioned like red baiting. And I think we're seeing a return to red baiting and attempts to revive a kind of like new McCarthyism. I think it's combined with like extra layers of racism because, you know, back in the original Cold War that the enemy was Russia now it's a majority person of color country so that there's an extra layer of racism that comes in there. I think, you know, this problem of red baiting from the right is going to become more and more of an issue and it's going to become unavoidable. The right is trying to cast every political question as a question of are you with the United States or are you with China. He's trying to recast every political question in that light.  And there's a range of stories they tell one is that the black lives matter protests are to the advantage of China they're advantageous to China, because they're creating chaos in the US, which therefore helps the Chinese Communist Party.  There were even accusations from some people on the right that members of the Chinese military were present in protests and sort of leading to violent acts within the protests. So, you know, this is an attempt to associate black lives matter is allied either directly or indirectly with China.  That's the argument. The recent fight over the US military budget, like US versus China was all over that. Trump a couple weeks ago made this big speech in the Rose Garden. That was about bashing China and then accusing Biden of being on China's side. He brought up the efforts to defund the military as a gift to the Chinese Communist Party. This is about weakening the US and empowering China. He also brought up climate politics. He said that the Paris Climate Accords was an attack on the US manufacturing sector and a gift to the Chinese Communist Party in that it was Joe Biden who made this gift to the communists. And, I mean, you know, there are different versions of this for other issue areas, but in general we see accountability for tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg has been making this argument for a while. And I keep making it that we need to not regulate Facebook in a way that could harm Facebook's business model because if we do, then the Chinese social media companies are going to overtake the US social media companies, right? So this plays out across a range of issues. And it's something that is going to just come up more and more, I think. So I thought Biden's response to that was interesting that he got his campaign to say they weren't going to be on TikTok. So, yeah. I want to take a question from the audience. Carol Ardes asks, do you think that a war with China would remain in the economic struggle or become a nuclear war? I'm not going to make any predictions. However, I think the tendency is towards military confrontation, to be honest, and the risk of any military confrontation escalating into nuclear confrontation is, I mean, I want to say it's unthinkable, but I think there's a real chance of that. Like I said before, the idea of economic conflict is really closely tied to the interests of the national security establishment in the US. In their minds, these are not separate issues, right? The economic conflict and the military conflict are just two sides of the same coin that ultimately ends in military conflict. That's what it's ultimately about. We have to, you know, I would like to think that even in the event of a military confrontation, that at least the Chinese government would avoid nuclear escalation. I mean, that is their policy. But, you know, there's just so many other, like one scenario that I've heard about in recent weeks is the way that other countries in like these major conflicts are sort of aligning with the US versus China great power conflict. So, you know, for example, we're starting to see Israel, well, no, we have seen Israel, which has gotten more and more extreme aligning with the US government, the Israeli government and the US government. In response to that, we're seeing the Palestinian Authority and the Iranian government aligning more with the Chinese government. We're seeing an increasing the emergence of an alignment between the US government in the Indian government. And there's this decades long conflict between India and Pakistan. We're starting to see the Pakistani government aligning with the Chinese government. And there are a lot of nuclear weapons within that list of countries. And I think, you know, we should think, I think the Cold War is like not the best model for us. We should be thinking more along the lines of the escalation towards World War Two. I think the dynamics are much more similar to that. And how conflicts in one place can translate rapidly into these other conflicts that are based on these alignments and how new alignments can emerge in unexpected ways very, very quickly. And so if things break out between the US and China and that's translating into conflicts between India and Pakistan and Iran and Israel, there are just so many opportunities for someone to make a bad call. And I think, you know, we need to do everything possible to avoid this path and create a new path that is focused on international cooperation as a real alternative. Yeah. Thank you for really raising how serious this is to be I think that it's hard for people to hear. But, you know, the US has dropped a nuclear bomb. There are people in the White House that think we've got to cover so we're fine and, and they do it and nothing would happen so there's, we know there's delusional thinking inside of the power of the US that is quite frightening. I'm sure it frightens the Chinese government and an escalate another escalation of nuclear weapons is not something this planet needs or the people on the planet need, and we want to deescalate. So for that also just it's like more creation of more nuclear warheads and weapons is is itself a horrible thought. But, you know, it's, it's in the works and, and as you described China would have to do that because it just starts to look like your job is to take care of the 1.5 billion people in your country. So, we only have about 10 minutes left, and I'm so happy it ended with, yes, this is very, very serious. So, now what can we be doing where peace activists and what are some things that you could tell us we should be doing. Before I move on to that one last point to make is that there's in a White House official Michael Billingsley who I think is ironically in charge of arms control who said that we ought to engage China and also Russia in a new nuclear arms race, because we are because if we do that then we can quote spend them into oblivion. So, horribly delusional and nihilistic, but you know that thinking is at work like an embrace of a new nuclear arms race, even though that that spells like doom for us as a species. Yeah. So yeah it's very serious so what should leftists, what should all of us be doing. I think the most important thing is to build grassroots power to build at the grassroots organize people who understand the importance of this issue. I have this this fear that is this start stuff started to escalate our movements as a whole we're really caught sort of flat footed. The US China relationship isn't a thing that most, most of our organizations are used to really thinking about. And, you know, understanding China is a huge undertaking so like, like, I understand the difficulties that people have in like thinking about these questions. But we need to build grassroots power among people who are clear about the dangers of this growing conflict and the need to create an alternative. And I think part of this is engaging in more political education around the US China relationship, and also about you know the Chinese economy Chinese politics, Chinese society. So there is a need to construct new narratives to counter the, the anti China narratives that are being pushed very intensely from the right and that, you know, and even inversions of them also show up within the establishment in the Democratic Party. There's a bipartisan phenomenon. We need more powerful counter narratives in order to like fight back against those narratives. Something that we've been doing at Justice is global is we just finished a few weeks of testing some narrative tools with voters in swing states in Michigan and Pennsylvania. And it is we leaned into narratives of how the US and China could cooperate to come up with real solutions to this pandemic and end it more quickly. And that these these escalating tensions between the two countries are just incompatible with all of us coming together as a global community to come up with real solutions to this very urgent problem. It can make a similar argument around climate. I think all the same arguments transfer over to the climate crisis, but the pandemic is much more in people's minds right now. So we need to like move those narrative tools out. Justice is global is working on coming up with a toolkit and things like that around and writing a report about this work. We want to get other progressive organizations to take this up, as well as progressive candidates for office in these upcoming November elections. I think there are probably a lot of progressive candidates out there who know that they need an alternative line on what to say about China but aren't sure what that is. And so we want to help develop that. And I think finally, we should find ways to increase the pressure on the Biden administration to move to a better place on these issues. You know, I want to give Biden and the Democrats some credit for refusing to engage in some of the most inflammatory and conspiratorial rhetoric that we see on the right but I am concerned that they are maintaining too much of the framework that has been developed by the Biden and military hawks and by the economic the anti-China economic nationalists and that without much more pressure from us, they are going to be unable to chart a new path in the US-China relationship and they'll find themselves embracing this like spiraling conflict, which is the plan of the Trump White House that they will lock in a US-China conflict that Biden and the Democrats will be unable to undo. Oh, great. Well, that's a great way to articulate it. Thank you so much. We have one more question from John Kavanaugh. The climate movement has long pointed out that reaching the UN greenhouse gas targets to save the planet requires major reductions by both the US and China. You pointed out that there are many problems with Biden. How do you think we can create grassroots pressure on both governments for massive reductions? Before you answer, I just also, John, just to say there's a Harvard study that just came out last week that I found interesting in that 95% of the people in China are worried about climate change and are engaging in personal behaviors changes around it. So that grassroots, that's an interesting thing that I don't think Americans are well aware of, but I'll give it to you. Yeah, yeah. So this is related. One other thing I want to mention is that Justice is Global, we're developing a campaign to pressure the US government to implement a plan for US-China cooperation around the pandemic. And I think, I think, you know, we can do something very similar to that. So this isn't our work immediately, but we want to look forward to doing something very similar around climate change. And there is so much potential in US-China cooperation around climate. We need to be honest in the US that the Chinese government has done in many ways a much better job than the US in pushing for the development of clean energy industries. There are a number of clean energy industries where Chinese firms have scaled this up to a degree that just outstrips anything that exists in the US or anywhere else in the world. Actually, there's sort of a leader in a lot of these industries. And we need to think about what does US-China cooperation look like that recognizes that China is actually bringing a lot to the table, and we need to recognize that as an asset in our shared efforts to combat climate change and not see it as a threat, which is a tendency that's all too common, even among progressives like worrying about, oh, is China going to dominate the clean energy industries of the future? If that's our concern, then the enormous investments they've made in clean energy industries then appears as a threat. That's totally backwards. We should be thankful that there is a country that has made those investments. And we need to think about how we can work together to deploy those in the US globally in a way that is going to work both for the majority of people in China and also, you know, we can do this in a way that also creates jobs in the US. There's more than enough work to go around. Like that doesn't have to be something that we're anxious about. Thank you for that. Well, so, Tobita, thank you. It has been so lovely to have this conversation with you, you are. We'll also acknowledge and commitment and passion. So everyone can find justice is global.org and also follow Tobita on Twitter at TobitaC. And then we also have a lot of tools on code pink.org backslash China. There is a newsletter that's coming out from China with some other news that could make you a little smarter than the mainstream media is trying to drive about China. I, you know, both, I think both Americans and Chinese get to know should get to know each other. And what can we do to help that happen because we remember it's really, it's the government and and as people we know we want peace and justice, and find out ways we can connect and really understand the seriousness that to be to talk about of the racism that this is driving. And, and, you know, at the core as Americans we should really be seeing that and see what we can do to help in the Chinese communities in the United States. First, too. And I know there's organizing happening there. So I hope we'll all engage and do our best to work towards peace and justice. And thank you, Tobita. Thank you so much. Peace.


Welcome back to another review and today I'm going to take a look at the retro robot from pro rigs and that character is part of the robots collection you can see there are a bunch of different designs I do love retro stuff so I had to pick that one first of course and of course you can also find a link on my animation beefy sites to that linking to pro rigs and where you can see a bunch of other reviews that I've done if you have anything send me an email I will add it to my list to check it out and review now this is the robot and all of its glory right off the bat we can see that character is actually slightly off balance and then there's one thing that I saw if you select both of these and you want to move it back it actually moves them like this and I would love for rigs to to move them in the same direction so that will be one thing so watch out this is not balance at the very beginning and it is following the same format as all the other weeks which are awesome so you have of course the main rig like this you have this one which as always as I show you can bring this down which gives you different pivot in case you want to have that guy fly around or something whatever it is this control has a bunch of other stuff so you have the global scale of course on here you have all the controllers on or off you have an extra gimbal as you can see here gimbal controls there you also have geometry visibility so you can turn this off like that and like that depending on your blocking needs of whatever which is cool and then you have here reference templates or normal for geometry and then you have here break apart you can see this here like that you got your controls for that which you can see here these are there you go so you can take this off and make this guy fall apart whatever it is so since this is a robot it's going to be slightly different in its approach it does have all the the color aspects where you can change things grab everything here you can see long list of color changes which is very cool but let's go to the feet because you can see big difference here so if you grab this yes you have your full control and all of this and it rotates just the foot so you're gonna have to have to do this with that controller which of course has world space options here the pullback to here usually has a pin which in this case it does not have which I think it would still add it would be great to have why not and as you continue here let's say you have the ball pivot raise you can see here you got to be very careful as with anything robotic you're gonna start having intersections that is totally normal with every rig and for someone who's animated on transformers that's just a pain in the butt and that's just normal but you have options to rotate and move things but just be mindful of that and given that this is flat foot like this you're not gonna have your regular foot wall so be mindful of that same here you're gonna deal with intersections fairly quickly but again that is to be expected with a robotic rig but this is you know you don't have a toe bends but that's what it can do watch out for all of that stuff in terms of intersections what I would love to see and if you look at all of this here and you have gimbal but again the gimbals are up there there's nothing in terms of I mean you have the geometry complexity and everything but there are no extra bend bows or any other controllers what I would have loved to see is stuff he was this looks stretchy you mean like this can stretch out which is cool but it would be needs to get something just like on the kid with his puffy jacket where we have controllers over this so that if we do have anything where let's go with this and that's whatever it's like foot roll whatever we can start kind of squishing things together just kind of help out with shapes and that would be kind of cool other than that you got the control in the back of course this switches from IK to FK you can see here controls are switching and then once you go into FK mode it's the classic leg that you can select like this and so on and you have extra control here for this so this is all pretty straightforward you have the scale in this case and aligning with the world and pelvis and the leg detach so again don't forget you have all these controllers here to take this character apart which is gonna be a lot of fun and that's of course on both sides then we get to go to the hips first here you got that so again watch out how far you go in terms of rotations but it's there and you can translate this off so again you have lots of options and its scales or scales translates to be you know a bit more detachable which is cool and then you have a controller here where you can also take this apart so you got in a way two of them then of course you got your root and I'm still in FK mode here as you can see already a very light rig and I haven't changed complexity yet I mean you can go into you can see this here how the complexity changes to make this even lighter I really that's it's gonna end up being a very fast rig which is always fun when you do have robotic rigs because you don't have any organic deformations then we got this which all makes sense and you can do that that's why I love this because you can really do a lot of all kinds of stuff you know as you move forward you can really exaggerate a bunch of odd stuff if you want then we get to the more complex part here complex as in it's not it's simple but you got to be careful again we don't have all the crazy shoulder raises or anything but you do have your control here again you can detach but this is a solid block so you're not gonna have a shoulder per say if that makes sense you have since I'm back here you have this which I love any type of little goodies on a rig like this great of course you get to this and we have buttons so a you have a glow version so watch out for that in the render and then of course you got the the translate so you can push the buttons and of course go like this as well and that is the same thing here that and push these are for all of these you can see controllers on all the buttons then we get to the upper part which you have this here and again all glow volume compensation as well going up to the top part we have the head and again watch out how far you can go you can of course lift it and then this could be something where it goes it starts floating around and then it could go goes back into like a magnet mode I don't this is awesome this is why I love robots you have this here again you would have to probably go up a little bit and do your thing and probably add some other geometry if you want for something but watch out for that but that lets you obviously rotate so this is your your head controller as this would rotate like that for a robot then going back on the channels you got the alignment you got the headscale if you want you can go broader cartoon here and all of this and then we got the middle part here so you got the eyes so you can rotate this around like that obviously into all different directions no scale and then you have the outer one so then you can rotate this around there is an eye scale as well overall here and then we have this here in the middle so you have your lids so you can do this you got the upper lid like that you got the lower lid like this but of course you got the translates if you want to do your blinks this is lower and upper and then the glow as well this one is visible in the viewport and just to go back if I put this at the full complexity here you can see how this gets a lot rounder because before that it was very chunky looking but there you go then just going back here quickly since we had the glow on the eyes you have a selection here to change the glow on the mouth so this is pretty cool I love all this you got of course full glow and completely off but I like how this is just gradually almost like a night rider kit anybody is watching that there you go now I would still love a main controller for the eyes I mean you are selecting them like this here right so you can look around and then you have that for the overall I think it would still be cool to not have to select these separately and move them around in the channels to still have your classic I box here that you can drag stuff around and move the eyes around just for constraints and I don't know to follow I think that would be kind of fun then moving on here of course you got your classic move like that you can break it this way so watch out which way you go and then if you select this here you have your IK arm which then switches to this of course so then you got your IK arm like this and you got your elbow movement no pin I would still love pin same thing for arms and then if you go closer here you have your spread on the fingers that you got your relaxed pose and you got rolls that could be fun to do a bunch of different stuff like that lean scrunch definitely looks cool and then you got your curl and of course you can go in there and move all of that separately so you got full control in terms of rotations everything again this is a robot so this is pretty normal and pretty cool and as you get to the fingers here as well you have that of course separately so you got the curl like that you got the scrunch separately lean and the roll is awesome so what you can do with this here and then of course the relaxed pose so you got that as a whole and for all three if you want now let's take a look at how this animates so here we go got the jump in there rough stuff but I wanted to just kind of use a lot of controllers you can see arms rotations in those claws stuff in the head you got a little head detachment just see kind of how that works stuff in the eyes and it's all pretty good as you can see intersections with the feet but that is normal like as you do something with a robot you're gonna be very careful how far you go but I just wanted to show you if you go low that's what happens but totally workable this is complexity 2 1 actually complexity 2 is like this it still works pretty well definitely you can see not super smooth but it works and obviously if you go all the way down to zero super smooth you can block this out again my machine is not the fastest anymore not that it was super fast way back but workable now it's getting kind of old but you can see this is pretty steady speeds I like it I put in the frame right here we are at 24 24th 23.9 24.1 I mean you can see I'm animating at 24 FPS so you can see this is all totally doable I like it and then switching to 2 this is now dipping for me to 17.5 16 8 that's kind of what I have on my computer so there you have it pretty cool I love that robot lots of cool stuff in there I would be kind of neat to get a and you see here going back to the quickly check something here reference I'm gonna put this on normal if you select this fear no there's nothing there I would love something where maybe you could animate the sphere something where this would retract come on maybe change color I think it's a lot of fun stuff you can do where we can just animate more pieces and that's my main thing not that you want to make these pieces on the sides here but anything to give us maybe some more control but definitely this fear will be really cool I mean I don't see anything here you got a line and then you have low headscale a line rotation order that's it's my mouth glow there but yeah that's kind of that I'll be kind of cool to get something in there as we kind of play around with with this being on a planet and maybe the you know the oxygen level is not good we're gonna put this back on despite being a robot and so on stuff like that obviously you can break connections you can do your own thing but we kind of cool to have that built in very cool I like it cool design super fun easy to animate lots of characters that pro rigs definitely check them out lots to come more as well I'm very excited you can see my the reviews on my channel of course check out their cyber all the other rigs any concerns and questions let them know they're awesome people they will respond very quickly and check out your concerns and your needs whatever you need and that's it from me hopefully I'll see you in my next review


Hello, and welcome to a screencast about finding local and global extrema. Right, let's talk about a couple of the words here first. So extrema, remember that just means either where the graph has a maximum or a minimum. And then the local idea, that's just kind of if you look at the graph in a little area. So kind of like a neighborhood, I think of that. From algebra, you may have also heard the word relative, maximum or minimum. So relative and local are basically the same idea. And then global, that just means like overall. So a word you might have heard from algebra from before is absolute, maximums or minimums. Okay, so just know all these words mean the same thing and just be able to distinguish between them. Okay, so as we're looking at the graph, the graph is increasing here. And then it kind of hits a peak right up here. So if we were to kind of take a neighborhood around that peak, hopefully you agree that this point right here is definitely the highest point of that peak, didn't want that to happen. All right, try that again. There we go. That's the highest point of that peak. So this is a local maximum. Because as you look at points around that point, that's definitely the highest of all of them. Okay, now your graph starts decreasing and it decreases. And it does something kind of funky here, but it's still decreasing. Okay, until it gets to about down in here. So again, if we take a little snapshot around that point, you can tell down here is going to be the lowest point in that little neighborhood. So that would be considered a local minimum. Okay, now your graph starts to increase. And then it kind of settles down, but it's still increasing. So there's really no neighborhood in this area that we could take. Like if we were to look at this neighborhood here, well, this one might kind of be the biggest point. But then if you were to extend the neighborhood, like to here, then this one would be the highest point. Okay, so can you kind of see what I'm doing? So it's not like there really is a good neighborhood in this area, because the graph is constantly increasing and kind of settles down. But then again, there's not really any sort of smallest or biggest point in there. Okay, so that continues on until we hit this peak area up here. So again, if we were to take a little neighborhood around that, that peak there would give us a local maximum. Because again, it's the tallest in that area, the largest in that area. And then again, we're decreasing till we get down here to another valley. So let's say this point in here looks to be my local minimum. And I'm just using eyeballs since we don't have a function to work with. You just got to kind of guesstimate where it's going to be at.  I just like to do that, so it kind of gives you a smaller snapshot. So if you were to think about zooming in on that graph, that would be the highest or the lowest point of that area. Okay, so that takes care of our local extrema. Now, what about our global extrema?  And yes, absolutely. This local max right here is actually also a global maximum, because that is the highest point on this graph. Okay, how about minimums? Is there a lowest point on this graph? Is there a point that the graph does not go below? And yes, again, as it turns out, it is at this local minimum. So this local minimum is also a global minimum. Now, that's not always going to be the case with the graphs, because this part of the graph continued on. I may go off the screen a little bit here. But if it were to go on, let's say down here, then this point down there, oops, there goes my menu again. This point down here at the bottom would have ended up being my global minimum. Okay, so I don't want you to necessarily think that because it's a local, it can be a global, or it only can be a global if it's a local or whatever. It just really depends on what the graph is doing. But because this graph happened to be cut off and this red area that I added on was not really there, as it turns out, the local and the global are actually the same thing for these two particular high and low points. Okay, thank you for watching.