Super focus a very very safe new tropic mix that absolutely everyone could take very very high quality ingredients Hey, what's up guys? It's Josh here today I want to do a little review on this new tropic called super a focus by super immense somebody from this company reached out to me because I've Done a lot of new tropic reviews and offered me a free bottle So I was like how do I turn down a free new tropic and a chance to do another new tropic review? I can so as far as the price on this new tropic I think it is $30 and you get 60 capsules or 30 servings That's kind of right in the middle like I wouldn't say that's cheap and I wouldn't say that's expensive I would say that's pretty fairly priced also guys I do not have an affiliate link with them so I have no incentive to steer you either way It's going to be an honest review. So this is a stimulant free new tropic It doesn't contain any caffeine no dynamine no tea a cream No, yo him be nothing and it seems like it's more of an overall brain health supplement versus a new tropic But hey if it helps my brain be more healthy, I'm on board. All right guys. Let's run through the ingredients real quick I will try to put them on screen. So the first one we got is organic lion's mane at 445 milligrams now lion's mane is infamous from that Joe Rogan clip where a guy came on and said they gave mice Dementia and when they gave mice lion's mane the dementia went away There was also some studies on it repairing damaged parts of the brain Wow, and I also think it helps regrow brain tissue, which I think at one point We didn't even think what's possible can't say enough good things about lion's mane It's probably one of the most infamous mushrooms to help with brain health. All right The next thing we got here is Bacopa at 300 milligrams now Bacopa is a supplement that I've used tons and tons of times I have never used it on its own. I've always used it in supplement mixes like this every time that it was featuring a supplement mix I had no issues. I felt like it worked great when I researched it before this video It seemed like it had numerous health benefits not just brain health benefits So it actually got me a little bit curious to try it on its own just for the health benefits alone But it's becoming infamous in utropic mixes now and also when I researched the dose They recommended a dose of 300 milligrams, which is what's in this mix right here. All right. I'm gonna butcher this giving you fair warning phospha deal serine phospha deal serine So that's another supplement that I've tried in mixes like this I have never tried it on its own the times that I've tried it in mixes I liked everything about it. I had no side effects with it when I looked it up online Just like Bacopa. It seems like it has multiple health benefits Like when I searched it like like the first thing that came up wasn't even brain health Like it helps all these other things and when I googled the dosage I think the lower end of the dosage they recommended was a hundred milligrams and there's a hundred milligrams in here So now this I'm torn about L. Tyrosine at a hundred milligrams now L. Tyrosine is probably the one of the first new tropics I'd ever tried So usually Tyrosine is dosed at about 500 milligrams the lowest amount of Tyrosine I would expect to be effective It's maybe 250 to 300 milligrams. So I'm not really too sure that you would even feel a hundred milligrams I don't know. Maybe that's just me They even have a stronger version called in acetyl L. Tyrosine and that's usually dosed at 350 milligrams So I love Tyrosine. I just don't know about this dosage But again, it's a very anti-stem mix and L. Tyrosine isn't super steamy, but it can have a little bit of those qualities So maybe they just don't like stimulants. I don't know. All right The next thing we got here is biopurine black pepper extract. So that's basically supposed to improve absorption I don't know if it does improve absorption, but but lots of respectable companies use it So hopefully it does. All right, the next thing we got here is lutein now lutein I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly But lutein is supposed to be great for your eyes and it has a lot of other health benefits besides brain health But that's interesting that it helps your eyes I would say it's most famous for helping your eyes But it also helps with brain health as well and it's dosed at five milligrams And I think when I researched it the Lord when I researched it the lower end of the dosage They recommended was five milligrams as well The last thing we got here is hyperzine a which is basically a backdoor to get more choline in your body Versus just taking choline for me I would say choline is probably one of the most fundamental new tropics out there It's something you should stack with everything whether it's a new tropic mix whether it's a pre workouts Whether you're using rastatams whether using new peps like everybody takes choline all the time and it's kind of like this non Dopamine style focus you don't really feel this motivation and cracked out euphoria, but it just gets you focused on things This is probably the first mix I've ever seen that does not contain any forms of choline when I was Researching all these compounds. I forget which one it was But one of them said that it improves something involving choline as well So as far as the effects on this stuff guys, it's not meant to be something that's overly effective overly noticeable Like I'm somebody who takes some really strong stimulants And I almost always want stimulants in my new tropic mix So I think somebody like me won't feel this as much This is for somebody who is very sensitive to stimulants probably doesn't have much caffeine If I was giving somebody a new tropic to start with I would want it to be very very mild and have them inch up I wouldn't want to give them something super strong They have a bad experience and they never want to touch it again all the ingredients in here are very very high quality I can't really knock them as far as the effects here. I felt a little bit increase in energy I felt generally like my brain capacity was a little bit better But it wasn't overly noticeable like a pre workout or something with stimulants in it But again, that's just me. I actually do think it helps with brain health and brain function I actually really like it for that But if you're used to heavy stimulants and strong stimulants, you probably will need some sort of stimulant alongside this one So anyways guys, this supplement performed pretty much how I expected not very noticeable without the stimulants coming from my position Some really really high quality well studied ingredients in here a noticeable increase in productivity Brain power brain function verbal fluency. I did notice a little bit of all that and I think it's pretty fairly priced at $30 Now when it comes to finding this online It's actually pretty hard like I'm pretty sure if you google super mint or super focus It won't even really take you to this product. It'll be like, oh, did you mean this? Did you mean that? It's also not on amazon either. So you have to buy it I think from their websites the only spot So I will obviously link it down below But it is a little bit difficult like even if you know the name of it It takes a while to find it on google super focus a very very safe Nutropic mix that absolutely everyone could take very very high quality ingredients and a reasonable price of $30 not much Bad I could say about this supplement and you know yourself better than I do If you want some stimulants go with another new tropic mix if you want something super super safe to try out You have this super focus. So what are your favorite new tropic mixes like this? Which one should I review next? I'm having a great day out here. Hopefully having a great day at home. See you all in the next video. Peace


So I'm also not going to say anything new, really. What I will try to do is to map out what I think we should do. Map out what I think what we have been doing and why I think we should be working on a 2.8 project. I wrote about that online. It is on the code.blender.org bloke. You can read about it. I will try to summarize things we've been doing. So my first topic is to talk about three myths. So people usually say a lot of things about blender. I would like to point out that, for example, easy to use. I think that's a myth. Intuitive goes it.  But that's also a myth. But people say it all the time. So what's going on? So if people say easy to use, I say, here, this is totally easy to use.  And everybody can use it, and it is awesome to use it. So easy too many times is the synonym of lazy. And if you want to be a 3D artist, or if you want to be in any creative profession, you have to be prepared to work and work hard, make long days, train yourself, and become really good. Because making 3D, and especially if you want to be on the edge of what's possible, because we are competing with the best of the world, the best software of the world. That means the things are not always easy. But things can be simple. And I think that's what people usually mean. So when they say easy, they usually mean simple. And simple is really a different concept. When something is simple, it is usually really hard to make something simple. People who make film and say, well, I want to have a story, I want to have a plot. How do you make a simple plot? Or how do you make an interface simple to use? Simple then means that it becomes more predictable, or it's consistent, or it has the right, small, flexible building blocks, which you can immediately grasp, and you think, aha, I only have to learn this, this, this, and then I can create a complete universe out of it. That's the simplicity. I always try to get that and keep that in mind. So easy, not important. I don't mind working hard, but it should be simple. That's important. So intuitive. So this is for people who don't know, this is 3D Max, which is totally intuitive, according to most people, because it is industry standard, right? Everybody uses it. The people who say, well, intuitive, I want intuitive software, they mean I want Blender to look like Cinema 4D or Maya or Max or whatever. Or they talk about this. So are you driving on the right side of the road, or are you driving on the left side of the road? I mean, many things are coming down not to things that's intuitive, but it's basically conventions. So what are you used to? What is it, what you have learned before? And that is what makes you like or use software. So conventions are not bad, but it's good to understand why a convention is important to understand. So it's not about the intuition, which is some kind of a magic thing people get born with. It's about something you learn. Sometimes it is good to demand people to learn things because learn once, use everywhere. So once you know one thing in Blender, you should be able to apply the same knowledge in other areas. It's an important thing that makes it intuitive. On the other hand, what you see is people who use different types of software a lot, they might have problems to adjust from one program to another. And it is very justified for them to say, I want software to adapt to me. I don't have time to adapt to other programs all the time.  So I couldn't find worse screenshots. I tried Googling for Blender screenshots and you get those kind of things. For people who don't know Blender, they might think, oh, too many buttons and weird things, I have no idea what this program is doing. I know whatever this screenshot is doing, but maybe for you it's new. But what people usually see is that the interface of Blender, especially if you load it or you try tutorials, it's very difficult to find out when it works or when it works half, or when it works really good, or whether it was meant to work this way or whether you are working with a bug. Because in Blender, that can be dynamic, right? We release every two months and then there's a bug and then there's something working and something else breaks. As a user, especially the new users, have no idea. Even when I start a Blender, I sometimes have no idea what's going on. Like, what's happening here? Is this a bug or did a code purposely do this?  On the other hand, we also have really well-defined design rules and good paradigms. And I think the score is good once in a while to go back to those design rules or paradigms, really look at it, remove the dust, maybe tweak it a bit or add a couple of new ones and then build further on it and communicate it really well because if you understand what is meant to work, you can learn Blender much more efficient. So go back to Blender 2.5. In 2008 or so, 2007, the 2.5 concept popped up. And I think it was almost in a similar situation as what we are in now because we did have the project working, we were making 2.4, 2.4 something and everything was like, yeah. So we are moving lots and lots of problems to the future because we can't solve them now. And that's not good, it doesn't make it a pleasant project. You see the bugs and the problems piling up and we can't help people anymore. So we really have to stop doing this and try to go back to the drawing board and define what we want to fix, what we want to keep. If you go to the weekly section, the development documentation, you can still read a lot of docs about what we did for 2.5. Don't know if people can see it, but there's stuff about how the design was or what the core principles are or how the event system is working, how the windowing system is working. So those things were actually good docs, but I think one of the reasons why we did survive this enormous project because it took us two years to get 2.5 to a working level was also because we really well knew where to go and how to go there. So it had a clear goal and a clear mission and everybody could collaborate on it. So let's go looking at a couple of those original 2.5 pallet digms. Some of them were already originally going back to the 90s when I was a designer in Blender. The first three, non-overlapping, non-blocking, and non-modal. People understand this mostly, but I still want to talk a little bit about it, but non-overlapping is clear. I mean, interfaces, when they start having 20 windows everywhere, it's not really helping you. It's only stopping you from working. On the other hand, the Blender interface based on subdivisions sometimes makes it not easy either because if you very rigidly only allow subdivision, it also doesn't always work. But it's a good starting point, and then you can make users, so you give the users the freedom to pop up a window if they want to, like for a render or a file render or whatever. But for the rest, your interface would be a quiet screen of options which you should use. The non-blocking is more difficult to understand, but you can see this also as a non-overlapping being adopted in, like, every interface now. That means if you do one thing, you shouldn't be stopped from doing something else.  And Blender, whenever you want to do something, you can. The interface shouldn't stop you from doing something. Other software, especially in the 90s, decided that they have to split up in modules. So you force the developer or the artist to think in, okay, I want the model, then I'm going to texture, then I'm going to animate, and when I want to go back, I have to close the software, I import things in a module, and then I can go back to my modeling part. So that's not what you want. The other thing what 2.5 did really well was the fact that if you use a button, you slide values, that the interface keeps working. Even when you start rendering, the interface is responsive. So whatever you do, the interface should stay responsive. I'm the biggest hater of progress bars.  And that's not because I don't like progress bars, but I don't like the idea of people having to wait for software. They shouldn't. Never. If you start a Blender, it should be there. You have to load a file, it should be there. If you want to do something, it should be there. If you want to render, then you have to wait for it. You should show that in a way that you might continue working while rendering is happening in the background. That's non-blocking. Non-modal doesn't only mean that if you pop up a request there and the interface stops working, that is traditionally non-modal. Non-modal also means that you don't make a user switch. There are usability between modes. So when you are used to click and drag and use your mouse gestures and other things in one place, it should also work in other modes.  Sounds very logical, but a lot of software designers make that mistake. And they make even things like escape keys or clicks or middle mouse or right mouse, doesn't matter. But if you make something consistent, the way of your working, the human way of working becomes possible because things become second nature. You don't have to think, oh shit, I pressed a key, but I'm now in this mode and that came in something else as in another mode in Blender where you can use the same keys. You should try to limit that because it's really frustrating that you cannot train yourself and get habits in software. But those concepts led to a couple of other things, like the select and then operate order in Blender is coming from this normal mode principle. Because if you know Maya, if you want to move something in Maya, you first say, I want to move, and then you go to the interface and you move stuff.  Which is very easy for people to learn, easy again, but it's not very efficient. It tops you from walking, plus it packs things model because for every tool option, what you do on the interface gives you a different result.  Now I have to go to another mode and I do the same thing and I get the result I want. So that makes it confusing. In Blender, we decided to flip it.  The second thing was an experiment, 2.5 data doing that, because we wanted to have a fast workflow, so you should be able to operate immediate, and if you are not happy with the operation, you can redo it. You have to redo operating panel on Blender. That's something we could review because it does work, but it also sometimes is very clumsy. Some people want to apply a tool with a preset. I say, okay, I want to extrude in this type and not first do something and then go back and tweak it, right? So this is something we could look at. I don't like it. It does help you to create a fast workflow. The other thing, the separating tools from properties, I think we did that quite well, to hold tool bar is not finished in Blender. We should work on a real tool bar. It's still useful to have it, but I don't know if people remember in 2.4, tools and properties were mixed in the interface. So you had all the properties, the tools and properties, and they had to find your way around where everything is. So we solved that in 2.5. Two things I added myself, it's on the wiki, but Blender is installation free. It's not an interface choice, but I hate installations. I hate a lot of things, bad things, like progress bars, but installation is even worse.  Why do you install software? I don't know. I'm not a programmer, I write software, but I don't know what I'm doing, but I don't want installations.  So everybody who is developing here, and people who is listening to this video, do not install, right? Let's agree on that, because users don't like that. I don't like it. I don't think anyone wants software to mesh with your system. So you should be able, and it's possible even, to plug in your USB drive with Blender in a computer and run it. That's it, that's how software should work. And the last thing, yeah, Blender is for artists. Very obvious. But there are developers who think maybe different, you know? They think, well, yeah, but Blender is also for me, you know? So, now Blender is for artists, really. So if you develop something, if you want to make a new viewport, for example, developers too easily go into the technical, APIs for points, something with that kind of buffering and things, it's going to be awesome. But then where is the user? Where is the artist? So it's always good to have a goal in mind to say, okay, there's a user, he has a viewport. And what does the user want with the viewport? How are we going to help game designers, for example, or animators? What do they need? And then go back to the technology. But the same is for scripting. So scripting is awesome. Add-ons, great. But it is there to help artists. And we don't make a scripting language for developers like Python. So, that was the paradigms. Is it clear so far a little bit, what? So what can we do in this conference in the next month? Yeah, look at the concepts. I wouldn't mind hearing from people what they think or how they perceive 2.5, what they think was a good move forward and how we can keep moving forward. What is it, what we really have to do to make it and keep it working? But be realistic. I mean, coding takes time. And unfortunately, every time you want to make another step, it becomes like 10 times more complicated. So this is the typical thing a development manager will say. If a developer says it takes two days, plan four weeks, right? And when a developer says this takes me two weeks, you can better plan four months. So you double things in an exponential way. So when somebody says four months, it's probably eight years or something. And then don't do it, right? So that's too long. And that's not so much of a making fun of developers thing. It is because sometimes you really have to realize that making something, for example, the particle system, I was talking about it today, I think the first particle system I coded in a week, that's to blend the particle system before YANA coded a decent system for Big Mac Bunny. And that was several months of work in full time. It took them a year, but two months of full time work. And then for the last gooseberry project, we tried to make a new particle system which would have everything we want. And then we decided, yeah, but that will take us too much work. We cannot do it even in two years, right? Or maybe with two people full time, two years, we'll be able to handle this complexity. So this is typical in every company. If you talk to software development companies, they know that once you want to move up, you sometimes have to triple your team and double the amount of time to do it. Same as for us, if you want to get amazing awesome software with lots of features, yeah, but do we have the people on the time and the money to do it? So let's try to keep things feasible. For example, a complete new data design, which is possible for Blender, which would completely change everything, maybe wait with that. There's a couple of other things. If you say, well, if you want to really redo all of those things, then the time to survive it will be so long that we won't do this, won't help us. Yeah, and then we have a couple of unfinished 2.5 tasks which we have to do. We can talk about that like configurability, like come back to that. So this is why I thought, okay, let's start a 2.8 project. I mentioned it this morning because I saw that the main and the key developers of Blender were a little bit complaining and bugs and just review and another bug, another release. It was getting boring a bit, but also they didn't have time to do anything they really wanted. It was only maintenance and the little cycles of making Blender a little bit better, a little bit better. It is really good, it's very stable, very proud of what we do, but it didn't feel exciting anymore. There was not so much interest or vision anymore, but so a lot of lack of direction and also I think a lack of empowerment because nobody knows who decides things. That's really true. A lot of people are empowered, but it is difficult to make decisions, especially if you have to be compatible all the time. You have to drag like 15 years of history with you in Blender and every step you do has to be compatible with like a thousand other things, which is not very efficient. So that's what I thought, coding holidays. So the developers now can sear and say, where are you Ray and stuff? Where are the developers? So yeah, they don't believe it yet probably. They think, oh my God, do we have to do all of that to get coding holidays? I mean, I thought holidays was meant to be fun and relaxing, right? What it is? I mean, that's how I will try to make sure that the developers will have a fun and relaxing time. So the coding holidays, I mean, that's what I did when I wanted to do something big. I shipped myself to a little island somewhere without internet and then after a week I get bored, really bored and then I start coding. That's how you do it. If you get distracted all the time, it's impossible to do big things. So I hope that to like, you don't shut down the book tracker, but mentally you could shut down the book tracker and don't look at all those discussions anymore but give the developers, the people in our team, months. I don't mind how long, but they give them time to think and think and rethink and get bored a bit again that they feel like, okay, now I can do something bigger. So that's the workflow thing. So why workflow? I mean, one is of course marketing because who is against workflow? Anyone? What? Dare to be against workflow? No, that's not possible. Workflow is a great marketing and a great term to get people excited because everybody wants workflow. Right? Yes, I thought so. So workflow is hip and cool in the marketing of other 3D software. If you look at Maximira and all the guys, they don't talk about features anymore because everybody has cycle style renderings and open sub-divs and all the new viewports and all the things, software is almost finished. People, it seems like as if the software is done, they can do millions and billions of polygons and nobody expects you to do even more polygons. So what people focus on is workflow because workflow counts and workflow is not a bad thing because workflow is about what starts in the morning and what you have at the end of the day or what starts at the beginning of a project and then you end up with something and you want to go from A to B in the most efficient and fun way. You have pleasure, it's efficient, it's inspiring and the tools have to work with you. That is good workflow. I think the workflow theme will help us to tackle a number of targets in London. And I think we can limit it to six key topics which will help with people's workflow. So that's the viewport, people understand viewport, talk about that. The interface tools and configurability topic, that is object modifier physics, the everything notes thing, you can probably not do everything but we should have more notes. The asset management and pipelines, the logic editor, because I still people making games with Blender and don't forget about it, and the interoperability. I go into one of every topic a little bit more. What does viewport mean? The viewport project means that we upgrade to a modern version of OpenCL which allows physically based real-time sliders, which allows you to get shader editing, good note-based shader editing which gives you Blender internal rendering quality or better but down in real-time. This is useful for a lot of cases, but it's also useful for game artists for example, because they can mimic the way how a model or an environment or a character will look like in a game inside of the Blender interface. We have to stop having view modes. They're stupid, you have to look at workflow modes, like people who sculpt or animate or who do 3D printing, they all have different ways how they would like to configure. And so we can also look at compositing in the interface, we have to make it balanced. Compositing means even I have a real-time shadow or I own the interface, it's a compositing effect. But you can also make selection as a compositing effect. We have to make sure that those things are well-designed so that things are always working. And of course, no more wireframes. Shocked. Why not? Wireframes, of course, you should have line drawing, but wireframes are the other stupidest thing from the 90s, 80s, right?  Wireframes are stupid, they were there only because we didn't have anything better than wireframe in those days. Nowadays, you can have this in real time. So look, this is a CAD program bought by Autodesk last year. I still don't know what they do exactly and whether it's marketing or so, but they pretend as if they have an interface that does this in real time. And look at it, here, this. So do you need wireframes for this? If you would have wireframes for that kind of stuff, you wouldn't see anything. And this way is how you make modern interfaces. Good looking renders, but you can also combine with outline rendering and get your solid color in a way that you know what you're doing. So the people who design the new viewport should think about that, they should think about, okay, so we are in 10 years time and people are using a viewport that looks like a photo realistic environment. How do you work within a realistic environment? You should be able to. You shouldn't go back to wireframe, right? No, you can do things that make high quality viewports work for tools. So we're going back to the second topic, tools and co-figurability. What does that mean, interface topic? One, stop adding buttons. I'd say it every time to developers. If you add one button, you should remove two, right? That's the deal, otherwise you get too many. You should be able to remove buttons. But buttons are not very helpful. And if you will see the evolution of the blender interface, it's like button creep. They get everywhere. And some people refuse to learn certain parts of blender because of the buttons. And it's not because we are stupid, but if you work the current particle system or fluid and simulation, those buttons are like big airplane cockpits to control something complicated, which is very nice as a first generation interface, but we have to be able to make a step further. You should be able to use a particle system or to set up a hair system without having to learn the physics equations that are behind all those things. It's not needed, right? So those things we have to rethink. Another thing is also that we have to bring back work to viewport. So why would you go to a toolbar, do something and a fill in values, then you go to the viewport and do things? There's a lot of new tools coming up that really focus things on working in the viewport. And in reality, things work without buttons, you see? You can do all this, you can do it and move things around. I don't need anything, right? I can work on it, you can work without buttons. I think we should try to think, how can you work in the interface and create things in the viewport, I mean. Yeah, we have to end the fight over shortcuts. There is no empty key anymore. I'm sorry, we're out of it. So we have to stop. Jonathan said yesterday 95%, what was it? 98%, 95. It's quite modest, yeah. Make it 98, so. But at some moment, the idea is, let's not fight over every shortcut, it doesn't work. Let's try to, everything we fight over, we should not put it in any default, so deliver it and make it a user choice. Let's do what we agree on. And let's also do something which other software do successfully, like for example, my app will download it for the first time. It has extreme minimal default configuration which hardly does anything. So it forces you to go to madness and do all kinds of clumsy things to use the software which is not bad because that allows people to have a release update and then combine it with our own preset and still have everything work. There's no conflict. Say, good topic to talk about. Well, we have to finish the Python API. The people want to have custom editors in Lambda. If you can imagine it, I'm going to explain what it would mean. It would mean really weird things. Second, promise you that. But it's important to have it. We should allow swapping interface configurations. The most of the Blender UI is defined by Python and some other files. You should be able to say very good, high-quality ways of switching interface configurations. For example, I still would like to have a project working which I call Blender 101 which is, for example, for high school kids of 12, 14 years old, a simple tool to introduce them to 3D. Maybe only 3D printing. So teachers or educators should be able to say, okay, this is Blender. I'll kick out 99% of everything. I disable it even. So if they press P, you shouldn't want to have the game engine to run for those kids. You should be able to very efficiently remove all the options except for some of the options for testing, volume, measuring thickness and wall thickness, and the stuff you want to have for 3D printing. And a couple of preset images for the big monkey and some other animals. And people can drag and drop them and the big print button and it goes to the printer. So how would you configure that? I think this is relevant. I think it's important for us as Blender makers, as community, and as open source community to have open source tools in education. But we can only do that if you make educators happy. And as you know, we cannot make anti-educators happy and the people who make feature films. So somehow this has to become a design to swap configurations. Great example of modern tool design is what you see in Pixar Presto. And this is DreamWorks animation tool. You can Google it. There's a great video and demonstrations about how DreamWorks works with selections here. So it's a little solid highlight which allows, this is an input area for posing.  So this is how we work in the interface and the viewport, posing and animating. Plus having nice expressions, presets, and it works. So this is a visual interface which we can do too. This is not too far away from what we could have in Blender. And know my frames, right? Good. Okay, the notes. Everybody loves notes. A note do have problems. They're not always easy and if you have a thousand of them, you get lost. It's like programming, you know. The smart thing of notes, I usually say, is coders like it because this is how they make the users responsible for developer.  And then if they say, yeah, but it doesn't work, then you say, yeah, but it's your notes system. You made it, right? The notes are working perfect. But you made a non-working note system with it. So there is a limit to it. On the other hand, notes are also very powerful, especially for things like physics, particles, lots of relationships in 3D. Notes will be doing great. Modifiers, for example, because this is how people want to use it anyway. If you see what people do with modifier stacks in Blender, it's amazing, but it's so complicated. You can do things a little bit more efficient, I think, with notes. Especially if you then allow also a nice flow that you can have data coming in, a note system. I got the modifiers and hair growing stuff. And then you send it out again. This is a little bit what Houdini does. Houdini is completely designed from scratch for this. We can't do that, but we can do, at least for the modifiers and for physics, particles. We can try to find a nice unified note system that allows this whole list of things. This is already a lot. So we do have a little bit of this already, that two pattern scripts are illustrated here. This is for generative modeling. One is for the animation notes, and two add-ons for Blender, which I think is amazing that we have a Python API where you can already make your own note system to do this. But these are great experiments. You did one? Which one? Ah, here, let me second. So we should have it as a core feature built into Blender, right? You can do C coding. Not yet, good, next year. Good. Okay, the other topic, asset management and the whole pipeline thing. We find it to be an increasingly big problem if we want to make stuff in Blender in our studio. But I think many people will find it increasingly difficult if you want to work with a little team or a group, do something bigger, get all kinds of little issues, and they get complicated and more complicated and you don't have it in control. So the dependency is on external files, images, point caches. It's not visible, it's all hanging out somewhere, and then suddenly it disappears and then it's back and you don't know where they are. There's the matter of versioning or levels. With level, I mean, you want to have a character in a low-poly version, mid-poly, and high-poly. How do you manage that? We don't have nice tools for this. There's a whole linking or referencing, and you want to share data between files and you only reference them, but that's not always simple. And then you don't know if secretly something gets copied or not, and then you lose a file and then you lose your work, and those kind of things have to be solved too. There's online repositories, there's now add-ons which you can use to get your data from a web server. We should have that while working by design inside of Blender. You should be able to connect online and get your assets from a server. Then, of course, inside of Blender, we need efficient browsing of and management of things. But we do have over something working in development. I mean, Bastien is working on it. Bastien, there's Bastien. We will talk about it. This is a view on a blunt file, what? With all the data inside, including visualization of objects. Okay, the logic system. So the current logic editor is like ancient. I remember I wrote it in the 90s, what? It was nice, and we had to redo it very quickly when we had investor money in 2000, and that's it. And when I look back, open Blender, and I look at the logic editor, it's still the same, but it didn't really change in 15 years. This is, of course, a compliment on one hand, but it was not meant to be losing that long. So we have to remove it and replace it. There's something which has all the modern logic components and ideas and concepts people know from other game engines or game creation tools. That is, which works with things like state, state engines and transitions, behavior, AI, all different concepts which you could make different editors for. And it's even more weird that there is already a paper from 2001 written by a guy who was working with me at that time to make the logic system. There's a whole design paper which you look at this here, waiting to hunting, the triggers. Look at this design, what? This is 15 years old, and he made this back then.  And it almost looks like, ah, here we have something that might look like a workable logic system. So he thought about it. So we should try to work on it, and moreover we should make it work next to the animation system. But I don't think logic and animation has to differ that much. There's a lot of stuff which we want to have in the interface interactive anyway. Plus, once you have a logic system, we have a viewport, we have this amazing new physics and modifier system, we almost get a new game engine, what? And then you have a game engine which turns all of Blender into an interactive experience. What happens then? Okay, last topic, the interoperability. So Blender in non-open pipelines. It usually is not a very popular topic, or I usually say, yeah, I'm fine if Blender works in an open pipeline, because that's what we do. We make open source pipelines, right? The goal I showed this morning, full creation tool in open source, et cetera. But in daily practice, people are using Blender in non-open pipelines. And this is essential for workflow too. I don't think it will harm us to make sure that this, that is all IRO business, is part of the design of 2.8 from start. That in every part of a pipeline, in a production process, or in the studio, or in your own workflow, that you can say, okay, I love Blender, but I only want to do the texturing in Blender. Or you should be able to simply put Blender in your texturing pipeline, and then go back and use the tools you like. Or if you look at things, big people see the film with the garden gnome and the caterpillar, which is from Sassia, a good computer. It's a very nice movie, it looks beautiful. What did the guys do? They used Maya for everything, and then they export it to FBX, load it into Blender, and then it starts shading, and send it to Cycles. So the whole first half of the pipeline is in Maya, and the last part is in Blender, which is perfect, which is a really good example. And we should help those people to make those things work. I mean, I know there are people here who work in studios and who look at pipelines or replacing parts of it, or using Blender for animation or only modeling, and we should be in contact with them because I want to have a project working where people also from studios become stakeholders, because you cannot make me responsible for fitting Blender in your pipeline, because I don't know your pipeline. But you guys have to help us get in the design working and make sure we have the right format or the right way of working that you can easily replace your Autodesk crap and put in Blender here to the open. Okay, so the how.  So I'm almost done. So how are we going to do this? A couple of things. So we have a 2.8 branch. We're going to have it, not there yet. That means we can still keep working on 277, 278, 279, 9A, 9B, 9C, whatever it takes. But those are smaller updates where the current projects can go to, but we shouldn't make too much problems of that. We also should say, well, everything we want to solve in 2.8, we call it not fixable anymore in 2.7. Otherwise, you have to keep fixing all the stuff while you wanted to work on something new. And we have to make radical decisions, especially on old code. Now, what are we going to kick out? As much as possible. The modifier system, the constraints, the whole game managing, Blender internal, what, you can know in my list. And people are like, ha! Well, it doesn't mean that we stop having that functionality, but we want to put something better back. And if you want to, what we try to do for Gooseberry to fix the hash system, and it brought us really far, it's Gooseberry or Cosmos Landrum, it looks amazing. But it's the end. It's really the last thing you can do with this hash system. It's not the beginning, it's the ultimate last thing, and it's a pain to use. So we should kick it out, whoo! I say, guys, we have a Blender now, 2.8, and it doesn't do anything. It doesn't have a viewport, it doesn't have game managing, it doesn't have anything. That's perfect. It's like how I started, 2.5. Do people remember the purple, green interface? Well, that was a new interface, and we took it without anything. Then we had one by one, we put things back, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but it was at least a good, fresh start. I think that's maybe a model which we should use. And in parallel, I mean, people still have 2.7, it's not like that we stop when they're still there, but if we want to make a big step, we have to prepare mentally to make a big step too. I'll also not be compatible.  So sometimes you have to stop being compatible if you want to move on. So why not start 2.8 with an incompatible system or physical system or modify system, but we try to convert things to make scripts that ease the pain, but it might not be fully compatible. And lastly, we spend time on organizing ourselves better. So we have to empower people, stop discussing and get to work. Okay, some core principles to agree on. I'll look at the 2.5 specs. I mentioned the data structures and stuff. I mean, we can make blender to survive like until 2020. That is when they have flying airplanes and stuff, or flying cars, I mean, flying airplanes we have already, but for the next five years, we can try to survive with this 2.8 project to make things work, keep it really work, but it's not the end. And there is a nice list of things you can add and call it a blender 3.0. I know those things already, but we don't talk about that now, right? Too much to do. And last, or not least, it has to be fun. Using a blender has to be fun, but also coding in a blender has to be fun. So have everybody on board. It's important as I work on. I want to have the whole core of the blender developers and folks, everybody who is on board. I mean, I really want their feedback. I say, yes, yes, is it a good idea? Let's do it. Or town, this is too ambitious. You can never make it. Well, then we cut half, we could make it simpler or smaller. We have to make it into something which people believe in, but they can't do it. Yeah, and then, yeah, we need more people. And probably we have to be realistic. It is a full-time job. You can't have volunteers in the weekend, two hours on a Saturday, expecting to do this whole thing. So we have to pay the bills. I can buy a lot of the tickets, my winning, or do a massive development fund campaign or move to Kickstarter. That's our topic we can discuss. And that is enough for now.  Anyone has something to ask about? To clarify my stuff. Okay, thank you. My question is about compatibility from another side. When I got over from OSX Mountain Lionion to OSX, today's OSX Yosemite, all the Blender versions I had until 2.7.0 stopped working. No way. Yes, they did. I never got it working again. But that's not purposefully. Okay, no. We didn't do that, but Apple did it, right? Yes, of course, of course. But I switched to the latest OSX 10.2, and I didn't see the problems, but I didn't think try the very old versions. Oh, I didn't try with that. Okay, so what's the question? My anxiety is what L-Captain is going to do with the versions I have still on the computer. Well, I installed 10.11 on my system, and I didn't see problems. No problems at all. There was one person who said that the track path was not working in Blender. Yeah, but it got fixed, right? It got fixed in a couple of days. Yeah, that got fixed, so. I didn't do it. Okay. Don't worry about that. Okay, second question. I see a tendency in the market for more pen-enabled tablets like the Surface 4 from Microsoft and the upcoming iPad Pro. Are there intentions to do something in that direction to use more pen interface-like devices? I think the pen input in Blender is very good, right? But you could talk about that with people here, because people are using Blender with tablets all the time. Pressure sensitivity, I don't know if the Angular staff is working on it. Of course, it depends on Mac and Linux, and when those developers individually, because those things are not really compatible, sometimes it needs a bit of kicking, and then you have a Mac guy who likes to work really a little while on getting the tablets to work. So, but this is not... But I consider these topics typically part of the open source dynamics, right? So you said you needed, well, talk about it online, say, I needed, it's not working, and then somebody might say, oh, but I think I found the fix, and it is going to be there tomorrow. Or, but if people don't know, it doesn't work, right? It's a matter of making noise, and things happen, so. Okay, another. One of the paradigms you mentioned is the select operate settings paradigm. Are you really sure that we want to strive for that? Because some operations work better like knife. We already break this paradigm for knife, and... I think the knife tool is maybe not a good example, because I think you can make knife tool work like that, but I know other tools, especially for painting tools, you use a my-style interface, because you say type of brush, and then you start painting, and you switch to another type of brush and you start painting. That are good examples where you violate the principle a little bit. But this is so common and so typical, but for knife, you can talk about it later. I know how to make knife no modal, it's possible. And I think it's a good thinking, because I hate knives, they do something, and then it's stuck, right? I can't get it, it's a mode, and it doesn't let me go, right? It should not happen. And so your knife tool can be made to work in a way that it works, you cut, and that's it, right? Including having a way to make polygons without having it to stick on your mouse. If it doesn't work, of course, the design paradigms are not rules we shouldn't violate, but it's a guideline, we try to make things predictable that way. But if it fails, if you really don't know, like, yeah, but this rule is not helping us, yeah, sometimes you have to violate it. There could be a knife tool, there could be painting tools, some other tools, they get sticky, and then people say, ah, escape, okay. That's next, right? But is that what you mean? Oh, the way in the back. I'm closing. You first. I have a proposal to make an export import button for other programs, because many artists working with artists who work in after-desk programs and it's a very big problem now with animation to export import to, like, 3ds Max, good animations. It's possible to make sharing a button with other programs? That's what I try to achieve with working on the interoperability, what I mentioned, to make sure that you can mix Blender in a pipeline with 3ds Max or with Maya. For animation, that is very difficult, but we do have FBX support, and if FBX is not satisfying, you should report or feedback us on this. But it should work, but I don't know what to try to do. It's, maybe you familiar with ZBrush, if they get Go-Z, maybe some, like, this button, it will be great. I don't know about that. It's just brilliant. I really hope people will work on that, but that's what I said, I want people on board to do it for us, because I don't have shippers, I don't know why it has problems and where the problems are, but we should be able to work together on it, right? Thank you. Two or three more, and then we have to stop. Okay, pending, I don't know, those are the first. Okay, I would like to ask about the Blender asset management project, what was the state of it now? There is a presentation about it today or tomorrow, I don't know, Bastia has a present talk tomorrow. Tomorrow, okay. So you will learn more about it. Will the UI modification system be like a GUI-based for us to make our own custom UI's? What do you mean? One of the points was to make the UI more customizable for the user. Yeah, will that be a visually-based system where we can snap together our own things? I don't think you will quickly replace every button with a completely different styled button. If you mean that, that's more difficult. Well, that's not typical workflow, I think. Well, for example, in... But the positioning and the out and the size, yeah, probably. Well, being able to take elements that are already there and just reposition them in a custom way that would suit you for a particular workflow, yeah. Certainly, certainly, we should be able to look at that. That's what you need, otherwise you can't make your own editors, you can't make your own button panels and with layouts and that kind of thing. Yeah, that's very exciting. But we should be also working on the layout engine, we call it in blended, it makes layouts for buttons and it should be flexible enough for people to configure things so that you can have an interface work as you want it. And is there an approximate projected timeline for your 2.8 project? No. No, okay, thank you. Thank you. But not more than two years, I mean. But the open source doesn't work if you make things like last forever, so it's one or two years and that's it, otherwise we shouldn't do it. But maybe it's there already in May, I don't know. You really have a question, oh my God. I throw, okay? Yeah. Made it. Usually blenders pretty non-destructive, but I have a problem when I add, for example, primitives like the circles via whatever and modified via modify, just add a mirror modifier, whatever, Boolean, and can't change the primitive at the beginning anymore. If I make add a circle with 12 edges, vertices, whatever, it's as soon as I move it around, I can't edit the amount of vertices there. Is it possible to make it not destructive anymore? Then I have to delete this thing at a new one and... Okay. I thought that should be working what you said. That's not working, like 3ds Max can do this, you can just go back to the primitive, if it changes parameters. If you add a circle, you should be able to tweak the amount of vertices. Just move it around, it's not possible anymore. If you move around to what? It's a atmosphere, move it, can't change anymore. There was one student who had a great project that you could go back in history too. But currently only your last command is editable, but you should have a little stack as you can go back three or four steps. But we do order. And then go back to that step and then reapply the old steps again. That's what we should work on. But I really want to stop because you can talk to me for the ace today, tomorrow, on Sunday, Monday, and you have not talked to me, but you should talk to everybody here, right? Okay, thank you. Thank you.


Survival now is a team sport and life is a team sport. It's the whole world versus a virus. It needs to be beaten together. Welcome to World Versus Virus, a podcast from the World Economic Forum that aims to make sense of the COVID-19 outbreak. Every week we bring you expert advice and analysis of the global crisis and look at what might be done to fix it. I'm Robin Pomeroy. This week, as the richest nations in the world struggle to cope with COVID-19, we look at the even greater risks faced in developing countries that lack sound healthcare infrastructure. One ventilator in Sierra Leone, six in Burkina Faso, 13 in the huge Democratic Republic of Congo. This disease can't be allowed to run riot until it overwhelms an already weak health system. We hear from Bangladesh. When I read about people in the West working from home and applying for unemployment wages, it's unheard of. These are all luxuries in this part of the world. And from this Somali refugee in Kenya. They get access to water once a week. Once a week. How do you wash your hand? As the world prepares to celebrate Easter, Passover and Ramadan, we hear the one about the Imam, the priest and the rabbi, who tell us how they see religion's role in combating COVID-19. You know, this isn't the first time for Passover that we've had to shelter in place. The very first Passover, God commanded the Israelites to shelter in place so that the plague does not destroy you. And we all know what coronavirus looks like, but have you ever wondered what it might sound like? A professor from MIT plays us his COVID symphony, which is not only surprisingly pretty, but could also help us defeat the disease. But first, some stories you may have missed. I'm joined now by Linda Lasina in New York. Linda, how are you? Hi, Robin. How are you? Yeah, not bad. Thank you. Linda picks out three really interesting stories from the coverage on WeForum.org every week. What do you pick for us this week? My picks for this week, they all deal with one question, and that's what's next. People are eager to know when the lockdown will end, when we'll get a vaccine, and what will our lives be like when it's all over. The first, when will the lockdown end? So, Guido Van Ham, a prominent virologist, he spoke to that in a piece this week. He said that one of the key signs to look at is the number of active cases and the number of severe or critical cases. He said, as long as those numbers are going up, hospitals are likely overcapacity, and you can't really expect measures to be relaxed. Those numbers that we get every day aren't any use unless you're putting them into some sort of context. So, it's helpful as we see those statistics coming through. That's called a virologist's rights to his family to explain Europe's lockdown. It's by Guido Van Ham, who is the father of Peter Van Ham, who works at the World Economic Forum, and is a very useful source to us. What's the second one, Linda? The second one deals with that when we'll get a vaccine, a colleague of ours, who is a project lead for Precision Medicine. She broke down the phases of the critical trial and a piece for us, and it's a process that usually takes around 10 years, but thanks to efforts by governments and industry leaders who are expediting efforts, we could get a preventative option in record time, possibly even next year. That one's called why a coronavirus vaccine takes over a year to produce, and why that is incredibly fast. What's the third story of pick, Linda? I think everyone is wondering what life is going to be like when this is all over, and the editor of HuffPost Japan, he wrote a really interesting essay for us tackling that very question, and he was talking about how Japan has already changed a little bit thanks to the virus with more companies than ever allowing remote work and families giving up household work in ways that they never had before. He had a really fascinating statistic, and the piece that said that wives and Japanese couples spend around 263 minutes on chores each weekday, and husbands spend only 37 minutes, and he said these numbers were kind of already changing in the day to day, so if you are wondering what life might be like after corona, you can look at some of the new habits and patterns that you're building now because those are likely to have some really long-term implications. The story is called how can we prepare for the post-coronavirus era of view from Japan? All of those three stories are live on our website, weforum.org. Linda, thanks very much. All right, thanks so much, Rahman. I'm joined by Anna-Bruce Lockhart. Hi, Anna, how are you? Hello, Robin. I'm fine, thanks. How are you? Fine, thank you. You spoke to someone who knows a lot about how the COVID-19 outbreak is affecting the developing world. Who was your guest? It was David Millerband. He is the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. He and his teams are committed to protecting vulnerable populations in refugee camps, especially in the developing world. Let's hear what he has to say. If you think it is really terrifying to face the prospect of COVID in an advanced industrialized country, if you're worried about ventilators in New York City, if you're concerned about the health system in Italy, just imagine what it's like to face the prospect of a virus where there isn't running water, where there isn't a proper health system, where densities of population are not just the 25,000 people per square mile that New York City has, but the 40,000 to 70,000 people per square kilometer that are packed in to Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh where there are a million refugees from Myanmar. So our concern is with using the gift of time that we have in regions of Africa, in the Middle East outside Iran, in South Asia, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, where we know that the disease has not yet hit with full force to do the preventative work. Because if we don't get the prevention right, there isn't the health system to take care of people, and there's going to be death on an absolutely appalling scale. We now know that the disease is being recorded in the world's conflict hotspots. It's being recorded in Syria, it's spiking in Afghanistan, it's being seen in Somalia, the conflict zones of the world, which in the main have the worst health systems and the greatest danger to public health, and now seeing recorded cases of the disease. So we're talking a matter of weeks before this disease, if unchecked, becomes really rampant. So Anna, you asked David Millarband about international aid. Well, we were talking about how the United Nations has been calling for $2 billion in humanitarian aid to help tackle the outbreak in developing countries. But it's clear that, you know, the world is going, it's facing a global recession. So I asked him where the money is going to come from. Well, money we have discovered in the last few weeks is one thing that we're not short of, because when governments determine that they will turn on the spigots in order to meet a crisis, money they can find. The tragedy is it's not being spent in a fair way. It's not being spent in the countries where the disease could run absolutely rampant. What people should never succumb to is the idea that this disease is so big that it can't be hindered in its path. We know that the basics really matter. And for want of hand washing, the disease takes root. For want of triaging, the disease affects a whole family. For want of an isolation centre, the disease hits a whole community. And that's what we're fighting at the moment. I asked him if you could tell us a little bit about the state of health care infrastructure in developing countries. I really want to call out to people what it means to lack a health infrastructure. One ventilator in Sierra Leone, I believe in Burkina Faso 13 in the huge Democratic Republic of Congo. There's a very clear lesson in this that universal health coverage is a million miles away for the people that we're talking about. But also that this disease can't be allowed to run riot until it overwhelms an already weak health system. David Miliband used to be British Foreign Secretary, so he has a good idea of how the international community tends to react to global crises. What did he say about the international response to COVID-19? He said that this was a problem facing the connected world. And he was very interesting on the matter of the coordinated international response. It's risible that the countries of the world are not able to come together in the face of a global pandemic. And I think it's right for us as citizens to say that, yes, the scientists need to be connected, but the politics needs to be connected as well. This is not a time for global political game-playing. It's not a time for geopolitical point-scoring. It's a time for protecting humanity. And I am very concerned that the wrong lessons are being learned. We cannot live in a world of a network of fortresses, that phrase of Yuval Harari. We've got to live in a world where the common elements of humanity are properly recognized. And I think it's time to call out the short-sightedness, the myopia that is governing too much of this response, because it needs to be beaten together. A survival now is a team sport. And life is a team sport. And it's time that the governments of the world showed that they understood that. David Millerband was talking to Anna Bruce Lockhart, and you can hear an extended version of that interview on our website. Anna, thanks very much. Cheers, Robin. Lockdown isn't easy for anybody. But what about Bangladesh, a country no bigger than New York State, with a population of more than 160 million people? Many of the poor live in slums, and there's something like a million people who fled neighboring Myanmar, packed into the Cox's Bazaar refugee camp. I spoke to Asif Saleh, who runs BRAC, a big non-governmental organization, down the line from the capital, Dakar, just a few days into a national lockdown, that he said would fail to keep people at home. He told me 90% of workers there are in the informal sector, and most would have no choice but to go out to seek a living. The people who are getting hammered by this, your day laborers, who actually depend on the local economy to make their living. When things are closed, people are not out on their street. You know, the rickshaw pullers, the van drivers, small businesses. It's happening at a time when our New Year celebration is about a week and a half away. Ramadan is starting. The biggest celebration is about a month and a half away. And so the daily wage laborers and others, they're all getting absolutely nothing. And there's also a vast group who are sort of domestic workers. So with the COVID-19, then they're being asked not to come. We don't have health insurance. We don't have sort of social protection in this part of the world. So that means that you don't have any safety net to fall into. And when I read about people in the West working from home and applying for unemployment wages and other things, it's unheard of. These are all luxuries in this part of the world. So how is a rickshaw driver or van driver going to survive? How are they going to feed themselves and their families? They can't. They absolutely can't. So unless the government comes forward or other groups comes forward to provide them emergency cash assistance, like we have from our organization, those are the things that need to be in place if we don't want them to be starving. So oftentimes in countries like ours, because you don't have these kinds of social protection in place, if you don't pair up economic support or resistance with the lockdown, it's not going to work. And for countries like ours, the government cannot afford this. In Bangladesh's case now, you have a major impact on the garment sector. 83% of Bangladesh's exports actually come from garment. The factories are planning on shutting down. The government just announced a bailout, but that's only for up till June. Another big pillar of our economy is migrant workers who actually send back their remittance money. So that also saw a steep decline. It has not only just the poor and the low income now, even the middle class is also filling the pinch. Another peculiarity about Bangladesh, but it will be fairly normal in many countries, intergenerational households. This is seen as one of the reasons that Italy was hit so hard, is you've got whole families from very young children through to grandparents or great-grandparents living together. That's an extra risk for you. Yeah, absolutely. And it's culturally very, very difficult to do social distancing. It's a very small country. It's the size of New York, but the population is almost two-thirds of the US. So when you think about that, then the idea is non-existent. We have slums which are so densely populated. 60% of Dhaka's population actually lives in slums as well. You also have a lot of refugees. It's a huge worry because that's the largest refugee camp in the world right now. It's even more densely populated. So we have close to 800,000 people packed in 6,000 hectares of land. So if anything happens there, that is a very, very major worry. We need to think of something which actually works locally and figure out what works, engaging the community, changing their behaviors by intense engagement campaigns and other things. We need to figure out what is the best solution beyond shutting down the economy completely. When people are hungry, when people are starving, that often results into social intuition, social unrest. That happens very, very quickly, right? So it can unravel very, very quickly in countries like ours. That was Asif Saleh, a member of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Community. You can read his article which is called In Bangladesh COVID-19 Threatens to Cause a Humanitarian Crisis on our website weforum.org. So what's it like as a refugee in the time of COVID? Mohammed Hassan Mohamud is a Somali who is living in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya but left to seek work in the capital Nairobi. He spoke to Max Hall. You said you left Kakuma three months ago. Why was that? I thought that if I come to Nairobi I might be able to do something to support myself and to also support my family. Nothing has come through yet. This whole coronavirus just makes everything that much worse. The government's policy is to have the refugees be in the refugee camp. So me being in Nairobi looking for a job is so risky for me and for my family. What do you mean by risk? Economic risk? Physical risk? Health risk? If I see the police I have to run away and I cannot go to the health workers at the moment because people ask you what is your status? What is your documented status? Even though I grew up here and I've spent my whole life here considered as part of the society there's a curfew at 7pm and the police are just walking around and if they see you as a refugee it's a whole another issue now.  Because the hospital is the police station who do you report anything to? Because that fear what will happen to me? Will I be deported? Will I be put in prison? People with refugee status how are they able to access information? Are they getting information on the virus and how it affects them? So mostly what they hear is word of mouth someone tells them something and especially now with this fake news you know people they have all of these ideas people cannot clarify what is right and what is wrong. In what way does the coronavirus make things much worse for you? At the moment for example the people I live with in this building they get access to water once a week how do you wash your hands every day? How do you buy even soap? The refugee community in Nairobi was relying heavily on religious leaders for example the local mosque or the local church people would reach out to them they would get assistance, they would get support but now even the mosques are closed the churches are closed and you know everybody now is just retreating back everybody is becoming an individual and now is the time to be supporting one another I think people should be open now I think people need each other now more than ever As the world prepares to celebrate Easter Passover and Ramadan we were wondering how these three religions were faring in the face of COVID-19 I'm joined by my colleague David Knowles David how are you? Very well thank you How are you? I'm alright thanks Now you looked into this tell us what you did So we invited a rabbi a pastor and a Muslim cleric to talk to us on the same zoom call about the ways they and their congregants are changing their behavior and adapting their behavior to do their worship through their major festivals Great so that's the old joke of a rabbi an imam and a pastor walk into a zoom chat room okay alright let's hear what they had to say I'm Rabbi Bartwasowski I'm the Appleman Professor of Midrush and Inter-Religious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York where I direct the Milstein Center for Inter-Religious Dialogue mainstream Orthodox and conservative authorities who normally would say you shouldn't be televising on the holiday or on Shabbat we're all doing zoom satyrs I would normally have a satyr where I had a table full of people and so this year I'm not cooking for everybody because everybody's sheltered at home that's the case in New York but because we're sheltered at home everybody is going to join us nevertheless and share the satyr together and even if I don't have the honor of feeding people food that I cooked at least we can share with one another the spiritual nourishment that a Passover satyr will give us I'm Muhammad Al-Sanusi I am the Executive Director for the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers we go to the mosque like five times a day you know it's not a joke and then Ramadan is coming and usually Muslims really break their fast together in the mosque or in other gatherings and all of that so how we can adjust to all of that these are new realities it's very challenging My name is Bob Roberts I'm the Global Senior Pastor of Northwood Church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and I lead an organization with an Imam and a Rabbi, a multi-faith neighbors network so the first thing everybody did was to livestream their services but there's so much more churches mosques and synagogues can do online than just livestream their preachers and here's the thing people don't want us because they want our religion they want us because they need help and we need to help them and what a beautiful opportunity for Jews and Muslims and Christians to get together and serve together and this is not only the Abrahamic faith as we are a leader of Abrahamic faith we can see this also in other communities the Sikh community I just saw the United Sikh communities also preparing vegetarian meals for those who are unable actually to get food at this time so this is an effort that the faith community really should come together and move forward because we have to learn from this crisis Earlier this week I was on a call to London and a woman there her name is Miriam Laurie said, you know this isn't the first time for Passover that we've had to shelter in place the very first Passover the one in Egypt when God smote the first born so God commanded the Israelites shelter in place stay in your homes do not go out so that the plague does not destroy you and that's really our prayer that this would be the case this year as well we'll stay in our homes and God willing the plague will not destroy us That's almost all from World Versus Virus this week you can find all our coverage of COVID-19 at reform.org and follow us on Facebook Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, YouTube and on Twitter and please subscribe so you don't miss an episode search for World Versus Virus on Apple Podcasts Spotify and most other good podcast platforms Let's end on an up note If you're looking for soothing music to help you through the stress and distress of COVID-19 you could do worse than this It was created by Marcus Buller a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology It's no simple piece of ambient music though this is the very sound of coronavirus Professor Buller assigned musical notes to the various parts of the spiky virus to create a kind of sound diagram of what makes up a coronavirus The music is not only haunting it might also have some serious scientific applications Professor Buller explained to me exactly what it is that we're listening to right now What you hear is a musical representation of the virus's spike protein which is the protein that affects the human cells It's sort of counterpoint music where many different melodies are overlaid in different rhythms to represent the structural arrangement of this particular protein We're interested in finding new ways of modeling matter We usually model matter by the position of atoms but of course if you think about materials at the nano scale you look at atoms they don't actually look like they look in a chemistry textbook because atoms and molecules are continuously moving so they kind of look like a vibrating string actually So we begin to think about building models of materials through the vibrational spectrum that led us to exploration at the musical side of things That is something we have been thinking about to use the knowledge of the nanoscopic vibrations as a way of actually disintegrating the structure You can imagine this being the equivalent of the opera singer singing at home when the glass breaks You have seen those videos or those physics experiments where you have certain frequencies that actually excite the resonances in a structure that can break a macroscopic object I do a lot of research on fracturing of materials A lot of times we're trying to prevent fracturing from happening but in this case we actually are trying to find a pathway to deliberately destroy a structure You can imagine finding a matching rhythm or counterpoint to an existing melody to match what we have in the virus spikes Next week's podcast will feature an extended interview with Adam Grant Organizational psychologist and bestselling author who has plenty of advice on how to deal with the psychological impact of COVID-19 At an individual level unfortunately there are some people who are going to face post-traumatic stress That's I think the sad news I would say the encouraging news psychologically is over half of people report a different response to trauma which is post-traumatic growth That's Adam Grant who will be on next week's World Versus Virus But for now we leave you with and this is its full title Viral counterpoint Coronavirus Spike Protein composed by Professor Marcus Bueller with more than a little help from COVID


The World War II period, the frequency of financial crisis has basically doubled since the early 1970s. The first decades because of the regulation partly there were relatively few crisis and now there are many more. So here are and second thing is that prices have a very long history. So here are some well-known crisis over the centuries and they seem to come. But notice again that this is sort of the big crisis by actually Kinderberg and Alibur. But if you look at, again, more than half are here. There are some old ones, then there was a period of several decades when not that much happened, except that's the Great Depression and the bubble before that. But then things are really since the 1970s, the big crisis. So that's something worth keeping in mind that this has happened now. And let me start by looking at, as I said, I promised to give you an overview of the current crisis, some aspects of it. So let me start the current crisis view with the advanced economies. This current crisis clearly started from the advanced economies. And so what can I do, I'm going to look at the US and the Euro area and compare it to the something that's called the big five crisis in advanced economies before the current one. And that's the Nordics, three Nordic countries in the 90s, Spain in the 1980s and Japan in the 1990s. And then I'm going to put these in the same figure where there's a period T, which is the start year of the crisis. So here's the GDP, and this actually even separates the Nordics out of the rest, but the other figures do not. And so you see that if you look at the Euro area and the US, the blue and the orange, it's pretty much like the qualitative, the same thing. You have a big decline after that, it's a variable length, and then it's an upswing again, and the upswings can be different. I mean, if you look at the orange one, US has already recovered after four years, the GDP level was higher than the previous peak, but Euro area not. We of course know that by now the Euro area has just not that long ago reached the previous peak. So the recoveries can be also very different on this, but there's actually actual declines in GDP and significant declines in GDP in this. And then some other features of the crisis. Here's again the Euro area, I'm sorry, USA and Big Five. One feature is that they've been typically Euro area a little less so, but in the US there's a permanent, permanent being a current account deficit. In the Big Five there was a deficit before the crisis, current account deficit, and then it turned into surplus. So here the count is quite variable. Let me skip the public debt that's less interesting. In stock prices you see again qualitatively same kind of features. That at the peak, basically the US area, big declines in stock prices. If you look at the numbers, for example the Euro area stock price index, I mean this is a particular index, from index number of 180 to a little over 100. Incredibly big decline in stock prices, but they were big also in the US from 150 to about 100. And also in the Big Five, similarly from below 100 actually, somewhat. And similarly house prices, where the decline is much longer than in the stock prices. After four years, after the start of the crisis, house prices were still declining in these situations. So that's sort of pictures that you get. So let me out of this and let me then go into the emerging countries. So this is actually the pre-crisis period. Let me just show you one picture, which is, you know, there are a lot of regions here. Let me not go into details, but you can see this upward trend. So there was a growth was getting better and better here. There were also running current conserplacies in most cases, the emerging countries. And getting into quite fast growth, which of course was very helpful. This is a period when many people got out of poverty situations. Then came the global financial crisis, which as I said originated in the advanced countries. And what it meant here is if you look at it, there's the Asian countries separately. There's just a little bit. They didn't get into negative growth. These are growth rates now, not levels. If you look at the regions, there is some more, but the biggest decline here is the Commonwealth of Independent States. So that's Russia, effectively. And they had, as we know, had a big crisis. 2008-2009 period was very difficult for them. And then there were a couple of others, but they were not that big. But as you remember, the Western world often had crisis from 4% to 7% declines in GDP. What this did, this crisis though, is that it turned the current accounts. The current accounts were mostly in surplus. And now we start to see more deficits and actually increasing deficits or declining surpluses in the most recent years, which is also an important aspect to notice here. And this period after the crisis with the deficit, of course, it was in fact associated with capital inflows, increasing capital inflows. So here are a couple of pictures about that. So here are some various regions about debt securities. You see the crisis there. But then even more, the growth rate in most cases got even higher. And here is an interesting feature. If you break it down to short-term long-term debt and then equities, or roughly FDI, you notice that equities being the blue one, that didn't increase. But if you look at especially the long-term debt to some extent to short-term, which is a smaller numbers, they got higher. So what we saw after the 2008-2009 great recession in the advanced economies was that the funds started to flow into the emerging countries, but not into FDI, more like debt investments. Debt investments, which was the feature. So the structure of foreign liabilities is different here now than what it was before, more in debt. And that Lawrence already mentioned this is a risk situation, clearly because it means that these debt instruments can reverse more easily than foreign direct investments. And therefore there's a possibility of volatility and problems which might be oncoming. So that's a quick overview of it. Let me then just in a fairly bird's-eye view discuss the recent crisis and something, what has been done, mentioned a little bit, what has been done here. And what the situation in my view is in terms of trying to manage financial crisis. So first of all, one has to, and this is something where the profession is not unanimous, I think, is the question is that how fragile are the financial systems in general? I mean there are good reasons also economic, even from economic theory, why there is fragility. There's something that the financial decisions are often complementary, between agents are complementary. So you tend to go one way and then the other way in most. The other one, of course, is the basic feature is the mismatches in asset and liabilities, liabilities which is creating difficulties for. And so these are, I think, features of financial systems. And then there are also amplifying factors. If you really go into practice, one is that economic theory is usually about equilibrium, practice of course. And there is also more recent work now about the fact that yes, in fact the systems, how do they behave if it's not quite into equilibrium? They may be herding, they may be learning aspects so forth. And so these are limitations in human reasoning. And they will add additional reasons for at least volatility and possibly even amplifying and leading to crisis once something happens. The other feature which we saw, which is worrisome in general in the literature on financial crisis, but which was particularly important in this 2008-2009 crisis, is the high leverage. The fact that in the preceding period, I mean, there are various papers in the preceding period, in fact, for example, banks get along with less and less capital, serious own capital. And there was a deregulation going on. And there was also what was important is financial innovation. This was a period where there were, which started in the 1990s, where a lot of new ideas about finance were made, and also ways of even increasing the leverage. So first of all these instruments were opaque, not necessarily transparent, but sometimes there were legal loopholes which allowed for more leverage to build. These are the investment vehicles that banks had and so forth. So this was a feature, the innovation and associated leverage. And so when the asset price collapse started to happen, asset price decline started to happen, this was a big amplifying mechanism and led to the financial crisis. So the financial system is very challenging for policy makers, because of the fact that it has these inherent fragilities about it. There are these amplifying mechanisms to it, and then there is this innovation which has been with the development of IT and improving that innovation phase, and then other aspects of the financial innovation. Men means that, and we saw it in the financial crisis, that this is tricky. How to regulate this kind of financial system is difficult. In the past there were failures, now there is quite a lot of new regulation, but we don't quite know how well it's going to work. But certainly the trend has to be reversed from less regulation to more increasing regulation. That has certainly happened. And so the question really is what do you do with this? How do you prevent financial crisis? And there are two, obviously one is the prevent. How do you diagnose the coming crisis? There is now something what's called also macro prudential regulation going on. That's a new phenomenon. That is a very untested territory so far. But the idea is to try to create advanced indicators and get an advanced view of the situation. Is there of increasing risks and then measures to try to mitigate the risks and try to avoid, at least, diminish the probability of a new financial crisis. So that's certainly something which is going on. But this diagnosing of a coming financial crisis is a big challenge. It continues to be a very big challenge. We, for example, in the central banks, we discussed this all the time now that it's become a big subject. And we try to do our best, but it's a new subject. And untested area to a large extent. Then the other one, of course, is the question, you know, is what about the crisis management? There, I think, some basic principles we more or less know now. We've handled quite a many, and there will be quite a many financial crisis. And we have some basic ideas what to do in that sort of situations. The starting point of this is really this first bullet here, which is that you have to try to maintain confidence in the banking system or more generally in the financial system. Because if you don't have, you know, if the private agents start, you know, consumers and firms start to lose confidence in the financial system, then things really go back bad. So that's the starting point. That's the starting point. That is, you know, and in particular providing liquidity to the banks and financial institutions, making sure that the financial markets work so that funds are being intermediated is the starting point. And then, of course, we've seen that financial crisis lead to significant real consequences. So macroeconomic policy also has an important role to play. It's both fiscal policy and monetary policy. Central banks, of course, in the current crisis, in the ongoing crisis, did react rather quickly in 2008. And I don't know, this is a point being debated, but our view, I think, on the whole is that we managed to, you know, it was a great recession, but we managed to stop the Great Depression, second day Great Depression in 2008. But there was real worries about it. I mean, I remember spending a few weekends also, where we discussed that we are just a small player in this, but this was happening, I think, in all central banks, in the autumn of 2008 in particular. So we know something a little bit better, the idea of making sure that the financial system function and there is confidence of that, and that, of course, is liquidity provision from the central banks and reduction of the interest rates, making monetary policy much easier. That, more or less, is known now. Even though, obviously, it was still a great recession and you couldn't prevent a decline in real GDP and in real activities, but at least we managed to, I think it was managed to make it not quite as bad as it was in the 1930s. Then, of course, the second important thing here is, then once this crisis period is over and the macroeconomic policy has perhaps mitigated the recession, real effect to some extent, then, of course, comes the more difficult and time-consuming part, which is that in many cases, if there's been a banking crisis, you have to restructure the banking system. And there, again, I think the practices over the years have gotten better in time. So you know the principles are there. The question is that sometimes there is not the political possibilities. I mean, in some cases, the countries have big political feuds but I think the basic principles are there. You have to inject capital to fund banks. You have to improve the efficiency of the banking system in many cases. Often the crisis is because the efficiency is not that good in the banking system. And the government has to direct this restructuring process. I think those ideas I think are fairly commonly understood nowadays. So I have to stop here. Thank you.


The capital body conflict. How does capital attack women's bodies? The capitalist system renders the care work carried out by women invisible yet simultaneously takes advantage of it. The capitalist system does not function by magic. Instead, it is powered by women's invisible labor. We live in an exploitative system that prioritizes work as a source of wealth and accumulation. How does capital exploit our bodies? The capitalist system disciplines our bodies for work, subjecting them to forms of exploitation, such as trade, for example, the business of assisted reproduction, expropriation, as women's bodies exist not for their own enjoyment, but to care for others. Judgment and punishment based on the canons of beauty imposed upon us. Women reclaim our bodies in an attempt to limit the expansion of capitalism. We defend our sexual and reproductive rights and our right to bodily integrity. We demand that our bodies be free to make use of our time and territory as a barrier to the ever encroaching tentacles of the market. Capital Time Conflict The system imposes an imperialist rhythm on our time whereby our lives revolve around employment and consumption. Care is not a priority and we must eke out time to provide it. Globalization, the internet and other forms of technological innovation have compressed space and time resulting in an overload of tasks. The system also rejects the rhythms of nature. In winter we want to live as if it were summer. The supermarkets are full of fruit even when it is not in season. Feminist economics calls for the working day to be redistributed and for both the state and community to be involved in guaranteeing the collective right to care. For example, by creating childcare networks in neighborhoods or public daycare centers. We must break away from productivism and the anxiety of always having to do more. For women, productivism is also mixed with guilt at not being able to do everything. Capital Territory Conflict Capital dispossesses us of our territories. It fragments them and imposes borders so that we are increasingly separated and less able to organize. Owning our territory allows us to organize to care for the common good. Examples such as the platform for those affected by mortgages and women defending their land against the extractivism by multinational corporations challenge this system that dispossesses us of the places we live in. The system imposes a rupture with nature, which it sees as a mere service provider. Feminist economics aims to bring body, time, territory back together. In order to identify alternatives, we must be aware of our pace of life and our body's needs, feeling a sense of belonging to a territory that sets its own rhythms. Feminist economics calls for the elements that are essential for the common good to be prioritized over the interests of the markets.