Hello and welcome to our guest session where we've got Mike Singleton who's tuning in from the States, he's going to tell us a little bit more about himself and his background. But Mike is a senior analyst in Victus Research and I've seen quite a few of his videos now and I think they're think they're awesome they really break down and deconstructs what can be quite a complex macro environment particularly given how pretty ferocious 2022 has been into something a little bit more digestible and also practical if you're a student trying to consume this data and information and use into something more kind of investment strategy wise so I'll hand over to Mike and he's going to walk us through a kind of slide pack how you know his investing philosophy of his process and how he makes sense of it so Mike welcome and over to you. Alright, thank you for having me Anthony. By way of introduction. My name is Mike Singleton I'm the founder and senior analyst at Invictus Research. And as a quick summary, our goal Invictus is just to provide research on the business cycle to keep it really simple and deliver it through short easy to watch videos. Sort of like the business section of the newspaper but from the perspective of a global macro investor rather than a journalist. Before starting Invictus. Let me go to the intro slide. I was working at a private investment firm called Broadrun Investment Management. I was the senior most analyst on the investment team there. It was a wonderful experience I had the chance to lead about $100 million worth of investments over my time there. Prior to that I worked briefly to your price and main street capital, and on the right there is a picture of my lovely wife Mimi and I on our wedding day and not picture it is our son john who was born about a month ago. So let's take a step back. Most investors, particularly as it relates to macroeconomics in the business cycle are really all over the place we're living through a very interesting time in financial markets, pretty much everyone has access to unlimited data. One might say we're all drowning in data retail and professional investors alike. And our view at Invictus information really has very little edge by itself. We have access to the same data that I have hedge funds have access to that same data. So, if there's no informational edge. Where does the edge why the edges and how you analyze it. And believe me there's a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to macro probably more than any other discipline within finance. So, what do you what what you need, when you have a, you know, an excessive information like this what you need is the right frameworks for putting it on to context you need mental models as Charlie Munger might say. So what is a mental model. It's an analytical framework for understanding reality.  If you don't have mental models and investing or in life, you will tend to just be overwhelmed by all of the data that life throws at you. The various religions are sort of like mental models, political parties provide mental models, again mental models are just ways of putting the data that we encounter in everyday life into context and making sense of it all.  One of the frameworks one of the mental models that's most central to our process and dictates is our growth and inflation framework. Well, it says that growth and inflation are the two primary variables that drive the returns of the liquid asset markets so stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies, and nothing else really matters everything else is either a noise or be an input into our growth and inflation outlook, almost every analysis we do at Invictus, whether it's looking at the employment situation or the credit cycle or we're doing some type of market analysis. It's always with the end goal of trying to get a better grasp on the growth and inflation outlook. Anytime you were presented with new information anytime anyone any any analyst of the business cycle is presented with new information and you don't know what to do with it. Pretty, pretty good first step is to think about how it might change your outlook for growth and inflation. Okay, so growth and inflation drive the asset markets. But there's more to the story. You can't, you can't just, you know, look at them willy nilly you have to have the right method of interpretation so we look at growth and inflation in a very specific way. We look at the year over year rate of change so this year versus the same time last year. The absolute level is really less important than the rate of change. In other words we care less about growth or inflation being higher low, we care more about it getting better or worse. And this is sort of logical right. It doesn't really matter to the markets of growth is high in absolute terms if growth is about to crash, you know stocks will do poorly. Likewise if growth is very low in absolute terms but it's in the process of bottoming, then stocks are very likely to do well. At this point, I think if you're new to macro hopefully you're breathing a sigh of relief, because it has a discipline macro has a reputation for being very complicated but you know, now you really only need to worry about two things. I think it's even better than that because forecasting growth and inflation. Well, stop take a step back not forecasting but growth and inflation are not random they're not unpredictable. They are cyclical, right. And they move in trends. So if you want proof of that, we will go to the next slide. Here we're looking at the growth and inflation cycles going back to the 1950s, and you can see that they look like a sine curve. If you remember from trigonometry, they trend and then peak trend and then trough trend and then peak over and over and over again. Growth and inflation are both cyclical and together the real that's real growth on the top, not nominal growth I guess I should clarify. Together, the real growth cycle and the inflation cycle form what we at Invictus call the business cycle. So, if you're an astute listener, you might have realized that because growth and inflation can only go up or down. This creates the possibility of four distinct economic regimes, each of which represents a distinct phase in the business cycle. You've got early recovery where growth is accelerating but inflation is still going down reflation where growth and inflation are going up together stagflation where growth is going down but inflation is going up and deflation, which is when they are both going down together. So these two regimes early recovery and reflation are broadly risk on and the bottom two stagflation and deflation are broadly risk off risk, risk off risk on. You could think of them as being good for risk assets and bad for risk assets it's just sort of the parlance. We'll talk more about these regimes later but before we do that we're going to spend a couple of minutes talking about the growth cycle in the US and what the implications are. On this slide we're looking at the Institute for supply and management's manufacturing PMI PMI stands for purchasing managers index. So what is this. Why do we care about it. Why are we showing it to you. Invictus we think the ISM manufacturing PMI is one of the best cheat codes in macro, and yet so many investors still ignore it for some reason. It's a diffusion index it's something called a diffusion index it's constructed from the survey responses of purchasing managers at manufacturing companies. So, if a lot of you are new to macro that might not have helped at all. So, I'll do my best to simplify it. But this is only a very slight simplification it's not really that complicated purchasing managers are asked in a survey, our business conditions getting better or worse. If they get better than this line goes up, if they say worse than the line goes down. That's it. It's pretty much that simple. The PMI is index to 50 so above 50 means positive manufacturing growth, and below 50 means negative manufacturing growth. Although keep in mind, we're still more interested in the rate of change here than the absolute level. So, the PMI is just another way to measure growth, that's how we use it Invictus, we like it because it's high frequency, meaning it's reported monthly rather than say quarterly for GDP. It's a measure of manufacturing growth, manufacturing is very very cyclical relative to services, it's very sensitive to economic conditions and so it tends to lead other measures of broader growth, like say GDP. In any case, the important takeaway from this slide is simply that the ISM manufacturing PMI measures economic growth, it's a way of tracking the growth cycle. If you want evidence that it tracks growth and you don't believe me. You can see the PMI here next to the year of your rate of change in GDP. They look very very similar and that should make a lot of sense because they're both reflections of the same underlying growth dynamics in the real economy. Of course GDP is reported quarterly like we just said instead of monthly, and that makes it less useful, despite the fact that GDP essentially gets all the headlines. But that's just in the US right. This is a really interesting chart, I think. We're obviously looking at the PMI again, and we're comparing it to the OECD index for global growth. And you can see that the US growth cycle and the global growth cycle actually track each other shockingly closely in my mind. Why is that? Well, we live in a very globalized world, especially with regards to commerce. I will also add that the US by itself has an enormous impact on the global business cycle. First of all it accounts for about 20% of global output, and it counts for a larger percentage of consumption. The US tends to be a significant consumer of global goods and services. And on top of that, the US currency, the US dollar is the primary global reserve currency. The US business cycle has significant impact on every other country's business cycle. And as a result, the US and the global business cycles are largely synchronized. All right, here's another interesting chart. The PMI against the CRB commodity index, which is essentially like the S&P 500, but it's for commodities. So oil, natural gas, corn, copper, gold, wheat. And you can see there's a fairly close correlation there as well, which should make sense, right? All else equal as growth increases. So does aggregate demand for commodities, think lumber for homes, copper and steel for cars, oil for powering industrial activities, that boost in demand in turn pushes up prices. Anything is just a function of supply and demand and the PMI represents demand. So all else equal, faster growth should mean higher prices for commodities. So in short, just from looking at the ISM manufacturing PMI, you can get really valuable information about the US growth cycle, the global growth cycle, the commodity cycle, and all of this is just from looking at one diffusion index. So that's pretty good, pretty good bang for your buck there. And if you're interested in learning more about this, Raoul Paul actually has a great video covering a lot of this on YouTube if you're interested, it's one of his oldest real vision videos. So that's a good resource. All right, so we've talked about growth and inflation. We've talked about the four economic regimes a little bit, we've talked about the ISM manufacturing PMI, and its implications for the growth cycle in the US and globally. All of this macro stuff so far has been somewhat abstract. And to be honest, it's only useful in so far as it actually helps you make money, that's your, your goal if you're an investor in the asset markets. So, you know, if you're forecasting GDP correctly down to the decimal point, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make money, it doesn't matter, unless you know how and why that information drives the asset markets. The good news is that there is a relationship between the financial markets and the real economy and the relationship. Maybe this is counter consensus relationship is fairly straightforward the financial markets are a reflection of the underlying economy. That's the relationship because growth and inflation trend and cycle, so do financial markets, and the financial markets do so, because the economy do so does so. It's also important, just on a high level to understand that each business cycle resembles prior business cycles, not just in terms of growth or inflation going up or down that's that's obviously true but also in terms of the asset markets reactions. Why is that well because similar assets will always react in similar ways to similar economic conditions in aggregate, not, not specifically. Right. So if you want evidence that markets reflect the economy. This next slide should be pretty clear evidence of that on the top is the ISM manufacturing PMI which we just talked about quite a bit. And it's overlaid with the year of year rate of change in the S&P 500. Obviously that's a very close relationship. In my opinion it's a very logical one. But let me give you the right read on it in case it's not perfectly obvious when growth is accelerating when the PMI is moving up stocks tend to do better. And when growth is decelerating going down and the PMI is going down stocks do worse. It really is that simple. Don't overcomplicate it. Economic activity drives trending stock market performance. I think anyone who says stuff like, you know the market is broken price discovery is destroyed the feds ruined the markets. That's not right. And they're probably just suffering from about a bad performance. I don't know anyone who's doing really well that says stuff like that. On the bottom there is the CRB commodity index which we just talked about too. It's a basket of commodities we're looking at the year of year rate of change versus CPI inflation, which by the way is also measured in your every year terms usually, and they look very similar. Well, the price of commodities is certainly an input into inflation so that's part of it. But commodity prices are also the most liquid and economically sensitive constituent of inflation right when there's an economic shock, what typically will react first the cost of your rent, or the market prices of freely trade commodities well, obviously it's a ladder. I would also point out that generally speaking, the markets front run the reported economic data by about three months markets are forward looking. They are, you know what a classic investor would call it discounting mechanism, and that's an extremely important understand the markets take economic information and they price it in in advance. Okay. All right back to the four market regimes we have early recovery reflation stagflation and deflation on this slide. We're showing the back test for the various equity sectors against those four economic regimes. If you just look at the page, I think you'll find it to be extremely common sense. When the market is pricing in better economic conditions, you know, faster growth, healthy inflation and whatnot. You'll see riskier more cyclical exposures tend to outperform stuff like technology and consumer discretionary stocks and financials. Why is that people are the market is discounting people are going to buy new iPhones new cars new houses are going to be taking out loans. Even worse economic conditions. It's the defensive exposures that tend to outperform utilities, health care, consumer staples. And again that should be very logical right. Most people don't stop paying their electric bill or their health insurance premiums, or stop buying toothpaste even if there's a recession. That said, I will give a word of caution on back test because I think everyone in the finance industry has sort of a thing for back tests and anything quantitative. I think there's the sentiment that because something's quantitative attended down by God and that's not true. All back tests are highly sensitive to your back test parameters where you set dates, how you're defining growth, etc. And second, every business cycle is different. So I'll give you an example real estate is generally defensive right, which again should be logical, it should pass the common sense test. Most people and companies really have to be in trouble before they stop paying their rent. But if you looked at 2007 eight nine, that was a risk off market but real estate underperform the broader market. Doesn't that contradict the back tests. Yeah, it does but of course, if you remember or if you've seen the big short, there was a real estate crisis going on. So if you just bought real estate stocks in 2007 because the back test said that they were defensive, you know you would have gotten your clock clean. The best way to view these back tests is that they are just guidelines. They are for setting expectations. They're not for predicting the future. This next slide we're looking at the same economic regimes but instead of looking at equity sectors we're looking at style factors. What's a style factor, it's just a way of grouping together stocks that have similar characteristics, and therefore, usually to some extent trade together as a group. Small caps versus large caps high beta low beta defenses versus cyclicals and so on and so forth. Again this slide should make a lot of sense intuitively the top half of that square is risk on early recovery and reflation when growth is accelerating that's risk on. So, in those regimes you should be seeing riskier exposures outperform small caps cyclical high beta high leverage low liquidity etc. On the bottom, you have the to risk off regime so you should see largely the opposite large caps outperform low leverage high liquidity. And also, another high level comment if you see a back test that doesn't make any sense economically or intuitively, it's probably not a great back test common sense is a very important skill when interpreting a back test. Next slide is just another way of visualizing those same back test on the prior two slides. Two things I want to point out here in particular, because they might be a little bit surprising right now with inflation where it is. In developed markets, so think largely the US and Europe risk appetite, liquidity, strong performance from risk assets are all pro cyclical with growth and inflation draw down risk moves left on this chart draw down risk increases is growth inflation slow together. And there are a variety of explanations for this which we can maybe touch on later but on a high level the reason is that developed markets are rife with naturally deflationary forces so over the last 40 years or so when inflation has kicked up it's been largely benign, and at least relative to pre 1980. So deflationary forces have been deflationary shocks have really been the larger risk to the markets, since around 1980 versus inflationary ones. Right, so, at this point I have to apologize because I've lied or at least been a little bit misleading earlier I said growth and inflation or all that matter. And there's a sense in which that's true if I really wanted to you know, stretch the truth a little bit. But there's one more thing that we really need to get a handle on and that's monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve. The reason we talk about this last after growth and inflation is twofold. First, growth and inflation are primary that's really really important to understand. They drive the majority of price action across the global asset markets. And second, growth and inflation. Largely drive central bank decision making. Nevertheless, it's still important to talk about this separately, I think. Luckily understanding monetary conditions is much easier than most people make it out to be particularly if you're equity focused. So first, what do we mean by monetary conditions. Invictus we define it as the impact that the Federal Reserve has on liquidity through the financial markets. We call it inorganic liquidity because it's the result of an exogenous force not free market behavior. In terms of stocks all you really need to know is at the bottom of the page there the bottom left. Tighter policy means higher discount rates for discounted cash flows, lower asset valuations think the price to earnings ratio in the case of stocks. Easier policy means the opposite, lower discount rates and higher asset valuations. And this is all else equal right obviously there's never just one factor affecting stocks. The best way in our view to measure monetary conditions is through real time market indicators like the dollar relative to other currencies. This mortgage spreads above and beyond the risk free rate. The relative performance of growth equities real rates yield curvature. You can also look at some reported data, like the Fed funds rate or the Fed's balance sheet, but you have to understand that those data sets will always always always lag the market. If you want to see how monetary conditions interact with different equity risk exposures, as in, as in a back test, check out the right side of the screen there. I'll just summarize it quickly. Easier policy, lower discount rates disproportionately help high growth, high valuation, riskier exposures. Of course the flip side to that is when liquidity is taken away, they tend to crash, which is what you're seeing in certain parts of the stock market right now. And that brings us to another important part of our process. What we call confirmation from the asset markets. So it's one thing to understand the economic data and build a model. And we certainly do a fair amount of that Invictus. But there's a second part to a process. And this is actually the more important part. We have our fundamental view from our bottom up work you know growth or inflation will go this way or that. But you will not invest on that until the asset markets are confirming it. We want validation from the asset markets before we start underwriting new investments with real capital. Why, why is that well it's because human beings, including us at Invictus might forecast the business cycle incorrectly, but the asset markets as a whole will never forecast the business cycle incorrectly never. I pretty much guarantee it. Moreover, as we mentioned earlier, the asset markets will actually front run the economic data every time with virtually no exceptions. So you'll give yourself a huge edge in terms of forecasting, and more importantly portfolio management by studying the bond market stock market, the commodity market the forex market and learning what they have to tell you about growth and inflation. So, here's some quick evidence of what we're talking about. On the top there we've got a ratio of small cap stocks to large cap stocks. In the middle we have spot price of copper versus the spot price of gold. And at the bottom we have the US tenure yield. And a lot of people have never seen a chart like this before but they're surprised to see that they have a very similar profile over time. The reason is that they're all trading on the same underlying macro dynamics, more or less, namely growth, all three of these indicators, largely change trade on the rate of change of economic growth. So, if we were to do sort of a thought experiment here, if we believe based on our fundamental outlook that growth was going to accelerate, we would like to see all three of these indicators going up confirming faster growth. And over the last year or so, we've actually seen a historic divergence in these charts right you can see usually they move together right now they're kind of moving in opposite directions it sort of looks like a Neapolitan ice cream carton. But we can talk about that later if you want, maybe a conversation for another time. There's evidence that studying the markets will refine your forecasting, and more importantly, help you make that better investment decisions and look no further than Stan Druckenmiller, probably the most successful hedge fund manager of all time, famously compounded his clients capital at 30% per year for 30 years with no down years and I think it's maybe like one or two down quarters, possibly making him the best hedge fund manager of all time and who knows if anyone will ever recreate a track record like that. But Stan says by far the best economic predictor I've ever met is the inside of the stock market. I don't mean the stock market I mean the inside of the stock market. What does that mean in practical terms, well basically means what we just talked about. He has his own expectations for growth and inflation but he respects what the market is telling him. You know he respects things like the copper gold ratio small cap large cap ratio performance of cyclical stocks versus defensive ones. He wants validation from the markets before investing if you've ever listened to Stan talk, you know on YouTube or whatever. You know how seriously he takes market internals.  But first we need to answer a question question that we haven't addressed explicitly. And that's on the topic of time horizon. So over what time horizon is the market are the markets and accurate reflection of underlying economic activity. To use around number at Invictus we say about a month, although obviously, you know that's not a rule, it's just sort of a principle. But generally speaking, any market move longer than a month is a reflection of some economic development the most important of which is always growth. Another way of saying that the growth cycle drives trending performance in the asset markets, and probably always will. What about the shorter term moves. What about seemingly random noise in the markets. Well, a lot of it is noise doesn't mean anything, but we associate a lot of that noise to positioning sentiment and psychology. So the mental model here is trending moves are driven by economic fundamentals and short term moves are driven largely by positioning sentiment psychology. And the good news is that analyzing sentiment positioning data is fairly straightforward and principle, although it's more challenging in practice. The reason it's straightforward and principle is because it tends to be mean reverting positioning tends to oscillate from bullish to bearish and in a perfect world, we're going to be adding exposure and everyone is bearish and reducing when everyone is bullish. And obviously the reason we would want to do that is better returns when positioning is really stretched in one direction, even small counter consensus surprises can cause big moves in price. And we have it in the quote there but think of it like a rubber band. The further it's stretched the more violently it'll snap back on a catalyst and victims we use a number of sources to evaluate positioning and sentiment including investor surveys flow funds data from the Fed, which is longer term data. The weekly commitment of traders report from the CFTC, and we also look at a lot of options data. So, that's the overview of the Invictus process. I don't know if Anthony has any questions I'm happy to answer them or whatever you want to do next. Yeah, let me. I do have a couple of questions I was noting down and as you can see on the screen as we as we go there's definitely some good resources that the mic has so you should definitely check those out if you've enjoyed the break down a couple of things I guess one, just to give the kind of further context to the listeners is what what is your daily, because they're thinking about careers as well so I'm trying to tie in that element. What does a typical day look like for you then because if you're eliminating out, let's say the kind of blast them and kind of all the headlines that are coming out every single day. Are you follow how much is it following tracking say single items of major news flow like a central bank speaker saying X or a company stock coming out with an earnings report of why, or to then looking at data and just looking at the growth and various different or looking at the other types of information that you said with market internals. What's a typical day in your life look like from your analysts perspective. That's a great question and it's funny I think that a lot of investors really like Warren Buffett right and Warren Buffett famously says he spends all of his day reading. He says he subscribes to you know eight different newspapers and so I think that within the industry there's this thing that everyone wants to read newspapers and be on top of the news and I think there's the perception that there's some edge from that. I think I really admire Warren Buffett and I've read all of his letters. I don't think his edge actually comes from reading the newspaper. And I, at least personally, I sort of separate my professional work and analysis and reading the news I consider that more entertainment. And there's a few reasons for that. One is that the news is written by journalists and journalists tend to be backward looking just because the nature of their profession is backward looking right I report on something that's just happened. You can't report on the future. But the markets are discounting mechanisms like we mentioned earlier. And so the world view that an investor has is just very different from a journalist. And so that's part of the value out of Invictus is, you know, we're looking at the world the way an investor looks at the world, not the way a journalist looks at the world and maybe that seems like a fine distinction. But as an investor where you get your information is really important, because in subtle ways it can affect how you think. In terms of what we actually spend our time looking at, almost all of our, you know, information is taken from, you know, basically column government reports the be a the various Federal Reserve surveys in the markets. So that's where we get information that we use for making investment decisions. And, you know, I like staying on top of what he wants doing with Twitter to, but it's just not it's not a part of the decision making process. Okay, cool. And then the other thing was one of the slides I saw when you're explaining about the risk on risk off and it had the spectrum between the different assets and where they would sit on the most extreme in terms of, I guess, risk appetite was crypto. Now, crypto is an asset. What's your views there in terms of where we're at at the moment, and then from the clients that you talk to, to the analysis and correlations that you see with more traditional assets. If any. Yeah, that's a good question. So I think the most important thing to understand is that crypto is a risk asset that trades with financial condition very closely with financial conditions. So I'll try and break this down in a way that makes sense. There's two there's two constituent parts to financial conditions, excuse me. Not used to talking this much. There's two constituent parts to financial conditions there's economic conditions and there's monetary conditions right. So, and they're the two inputs into liquidity. So liquidity gets better when economic conditions improved, which should make sense right. If the economy, I think the economy is going to do better I'm more likely to transact with you Anthony. And then the second constituent to liquidity is the inorganic liquidity that we talked about earlier. That's basically the Fed, right so Bitcoin does better and risk on regimes where economic conditions are improving people are feeling good. You know they're buying a car they're investing in all coins they're getting stimulus checks whatever. Crypto is also, you know, an asset with zero cash flows which sort of de facto makes it a very long duration asset. So it's very sensitive to the discount rate. So when the Fed is raising rates. That's really bad for crypto, and when it's, you know, easing monetary policy reducing rates, particularly real rates crypto can see very very well. Right now we're outlook on crypto Bitcoin Ethereum, you know the altcoin complex is bearish and the reason is the Fed is explicitly saying it wants to take the wind out of risk assets. And there's only one institution in the world that has the credibility to say something like that and it's the Fed. So, if they're promising us they're going to do it, we believe them, and we have some precedent for this right. So if you look at real rates and a chart of the price of Bitcoin, they look fairly inverse. And if you look at the last hiking cycle the last policy cycle which ended in 2018, you can see that real right as real rates went up. Bitcoin crashed. The Fed is saying it wants to do the exact same thing it wants to take rates above neutral. And I will say I'm impressed with how well Bitcoin and crypto generally has held up I would have thought it would be down a lot more. It's still down a lot I think that's probably important to keep in perspective but as long as the Fed is saying, we want to tighten we want to bring rates up we want to bring real rates up, we want to take the wind out of risk assets build Dudley saying you know stocks need to feel more pain. I wouldn't touch crypto. I'd be looking for tactical opportunities to add, you know short exposure. And then the final one was where you had the, well I thought was really excellent breakup with the four regimes. Where do you see where we're at and right now in the regimes and I know it's, you were talking about a month to kind of let things and realize and so forth and a bit of time for that to see through but how do you see where we're at in the context of right now and that transition but then also with what the market is kind of aware of with where we're heading with the soon to be tightening of policy and the subsequent impact that we could have then the second half of the year. That's a really good question. So, I think it's very others. If you, I'll refer to the framework we use in our last monthly market outlook, there are three parts to our thesis right now. One, we expect growth to continue declining it's already declining we expect that to continue the asset markets are clearly pricing that in. So we don't really have validation to decline in the coming months. Obviously that has not happened yet. We think April, the April print is very likely the first decline in your every year rate of change terms. I'll add the asset markets aren't totally pricing that in yet right inflationary exposures are still doing quite well. So we don't really have validation from the asset markets on that part of the thesis so we're not short inflationary exposures yet. We don't have trends we don't short strong momentum. Our back test tell us that's a horrible idea. So we don't do it. And I've certainly lost money betting against those things in the past. And then the third thing is tightening financial conditions, which is like we just said the fed saying it's going to tighten it's happening you'll curves are inverting rates are moving up or have been moving up across the curve. You saw, you know, the Dixie dollar index is moving higher mortgage rates are spiking clearly financial conditions are tightening. Eventually that's going to break something. That's sort of the history of, you know, central bank policy making in the Western world. And when that happens that that will happen through crushing demand so that'll push growth down further, and it'll also reduce inflation. So that's around the corner at some point in terms of what it actually happens. So we're watching closely, but in I could and I could guess it's going to happen in the next couple months, but really part of being a good investor is, you know, keeping an eye on things and changing your mind when information changes and right now, you know the market is still saying stagflation. We expect faster inflation slower growth tightening policy, we expect that to transition into deflation but we leave it to the market to tell us exactly when that is. Cool. All right, we'll let on on that will look to wrap up the session Mike. Thank you very much for giving up some time to to share your thoughts and share your process. I'll share in the description of this video, all the links to Invictus and to Mike so feel free to connect with him through those means and Mike thank you again from the community and catch up with you soon. My pleasure Anthony thank you for having me.


Your Excellency Minister Desmond Lee, Minister of the Prime Minister's Office, and Second Minister for Home Affairs and National Development Singapore. Your Excellency Honorable Fikele Balouda, Minister of Police South Africa. Excellencies Mr. Meng Hong Wei, Interpol President, Interpol Executive Committee Members, Chief of Police and heads of Interpol National Central Bureau, partners from the private sector, ladies and gentlemen, a very good evening. This my great privilege to welcome you back to Interpol World and to once again experience the hospitality of the government, the city and the people of Singapore in what will be another outstanding global event. Throughout history, islands were often taken as simple isolation. Singapore provided and proved us all wrong. We stand today in a global travel, financial and talent hub, one that made cross-border connectivity and innovation both a vision and a daily reality. Ladies and gentlemen, today's generation lives at the heart of a global competitive market. While this opens to endless opportunities for young businessmen and women stepping forward in life with hope and talent, it also shapes an operational landscape for law enforcement and governments worldwide that has never been more challenging. Interpol anticipated those challenges almost a decade ago, leading to the establishment of its global complex for innovation ITCI here in Singapore so that foresight and research could become new assets in the service of law enforcement in the field. The trust that the Singaporean government has placed in Interpol by providing the organization with a premises for ITCI as well as supporting our operational and project-oriented activities demonstrates a partnership that is beyond usual. Your Excellency Mr Desmond Lee, thank you very much for having us here today, for hosting ITCI and for your continued support to Interpol's mandate and vision. When I assumed office in 2014 my vision statement was to further reinforce the spirit of modernizing international policing methods to better adapt to the challenges of tomorrow. This perspective has brought once again two worlds together here today, industry and law enforcement. Over the course of the next few days, experts and practitioners from both worlds will analyze the threats we all share and showcase how state-of-the-art technologies can be harnessed to bring tangible solution to the field and shape the future of security. Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing technological and geopolitical uncertainties leading to a complex international security environment. Opportunities are thriving for those who do not seek progress but harm and for those who do not want economies to thrive but to become victims of organized crime. If we look at virtual space it has become the most revolutionary invention to impact the contemporary world. It has unexpectedly shortened geographical distances, breaking barriers between people, eliminating national borders and destroying all previously conceived barriers to communication. This however has led to a largely ungoverned space for crime election which is becoming increasingly difficult to penetrate by law enforcement and other security actors. Mobile connectivity and the Internet of Things have shattered the barrier between physical and cyber space. Simply walking on a sidewalk, each of us is consuming and producing more megabytes in data than the number of steps we take. Criminal opportunities are endless. Cyber criminals can now attack from anywhere in the globe, any target destination, putting at risk governments, businesses and consumers and creating path for cyber extortion, ransomware and actual physical security threats. Child abusers can pursue and abuse young victims all over the world within a clique. Social media has been playing a pivotal role in the recruitment and radicalization of vulnerable youth and encrypted applications are the channel of choice to coordinate terrorist action. Connected unmanned vehicles have already been turned into weapons in conflict zones. Responding effectively to these challenges requires constantly adapting investigative procedures, ensuring that investigators have the right skills for this environment. Staying ahead of trends as well as time accessing information outside the police ward and preserving evidence wherever that might be hidden or hosted. I still remember the days when I was a young police officer. Learning to lift prints from the snow seemed complicated. At that time the police world is a different world nowadays. Today the bank robber is no longer the thief who walks into a bank with a weapon to steal whatever amount is with a cashier. Today the bank robber is part of a multinational chain of hackers. Runners and cash outcrews stealing millions of dollars from multiple ATMs in multiple nations within a few hours. Law enforcement is now required to think outside the box. We can no longer work in isolation. Building bridges to other worlds has become a modern necessity, which Interpol has recognized as such. Police must have the capacity to stretch out of its comfort zone. Interpol was created with this goal in mind almost a century ago. The organization's neutrality was designed to allow even countries unable to have diplomatic relationship to cooperate at law enforcement level. Once again we were built to break different worlds together for global security. That same spirit lives today in our role as a gateway between police and industry. A mandate endorsed by the World Economic Forum in its recommendation for public-private partnership against cyber crime adopted last year in Davos in Switzerland. Just like our entire history, our relationship with the private sector was spawned and evolved out of sheer operational imperatives. The first was to rely on the industry as a solution to access expertise, technology and other resources that are not readily available in the public sector, but urgently demanded. This is the case of technologies in the areas of ballistics, biometric, identification and cybersecurity, among many others. Benefits for the business community include access to a global network of key stakeholders in law enforcement and greater visibility of their contribution towards a safer world. We have seen this in the area of child exploitation.  Secondly, the industry may unwillingly play the role of a key criminal chain node. In many cases the private industry will manage platforms that are often abused by criminal groups. This is the case, for example, in the area of online pharmaceutical crimes. Last year, Interpol coordinated the largest ever operation which targeted the online sales of medicines and medical devices, Operation Pangea 10. Interpol gathered private partners from the internet and payment industries and supported the operation which saw millions of illicit and counterfeit medicines being seized. Thirdly, in the police world, the industry can be perceived as a sensor able to extend the security perimeter provided by state structures. An example is in the area of works of art and cultural heritage. Interpol giving access to its stolen and lost works of art database to all art private market stakeholders since 2009, so for instance museums and auction houses, to facilitate the detection of stolen and lost cultural heritage items likely to surface into the art market. This means that for instance when cultural heritage is destroyed by ISIL in Syria or Iraq and items are sold on the black market, the decisive action is to recover that object will be enabled by a private entity which will recognize it within its stock thanks to police formation available through Interpol. A similar approach is applied to the automotive sector and stolen motor vehicles. Interpol through project index has brought together member countries, international organizations and private entities to share vital information, expertise and best practices on preventing vehicle theft. Recovering stolen vehicles and ensuring stolen vehicles are not used in other crimes. Once again the industry can protect itself from criminal commodities penetrating its business while acting as an advanced sensor for law enforcement. And finally the industry can be seen as a full operational partner. In many instances the industry and data collected by it has been an integral part of operations coordinated by Interpol. An example can be seen at the beginning of this year when Interpol led operation targeting cyber crime across the Asian region resulted in the identification of nearly 9,000 command and control servers and hundreds of compromised websites including some of governments. The Interpol Global Complex for Innovation worked with Transmigral, Kaspersky Lab, Japan's Cyber Defense Institute which is part of the LEC consortium, USL Hamilton, British Telecom, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks to develop actionable information packages. Information provided by the private sector combined with cyber issues flagged by the participating countries enabled Interpol produce and analyze cyber activity reports which identified multiple websites infected with a malware code which exploited the vulnerability of several governments. This shows Interpol's added value in this highly specialized crime field as a neutral platform bringing together not only private and public sectors but also countries that may even be on the opposite side of ongoing diplomatic roles. However no matter how closely we seek to work together challenges between the public and private sector will still remain. Firstly simply because criminals move as quickly as innovation and technology and often much faster than law enforcement's response. Secondly, member countries are still seeking to harmonize the international legal responses to the exchange of information across sectors and jurisdictions which still remains a complicated exercise in the hands of the law enforcement community. Many member countries continue to rely on traditional means of formal international cooperation in solving cyber crimes which in practice cannot be adapted to an everyday evolving and very specialized crime. In addition, while partnership with the private sector is critical to prevent sophisticated cross-border crimes, both parties still see obstacles to mutual trust. The protection of the industry's clients' privacy, a perceived lack of reciprocity in data sharing and often cumbersome process to access information from the private sector which may result a daunting task for most law enforcement agencies are cases in point. Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, interpose approach to these challenges is simply put to embrace them. We must analyze them, address them and turn them into the next generation of security solutions for our respective governments, markets and citizens. This is the vision behind Interpol World and it is a vision that requires all of you to be turned into reality. I also hope that this conference will generate pivotal recommendations that will further shape the way in which the private industry can work with law enforcement in making the world safer. I wish you all a successful conference and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Stork.


Well, that's going to do it for this trip Hate to go but I went out yesterday and got some service and called home and Donnie's itching to come back up So I can't be more happy than be up here with Donnie So I'm gonna go back get him and we're gonna work on some things together I know he wants to get that outhouse built before snow fly and Be awful nice to have him There's a lot of questions I have when I'm working stuff that I just don't know how to do and he's an expert at it, so So yeah, so I'm gonna go pick him up But I'll show you what we got done this week Main thing was getting this wood stove in here That's the crown jewel Right there. That's pretty awesome getting that in and Working it has not shut off I think I'm on like an 11-day stretch right now and I haven't shut it off in 11 days So that's pretty awesome. I got that in got the flooring in which looks beautiful in my opinion Really happy about that flooring Had one mistake this morning Couldn't even believe it couldn't believe where it happened But I dropped my nail gun off the top of the ladder and of course it's gonna bite nose first sharp first Look where it hit right there right Put a wicked ding right in the middle of an opening to Maybe you can repair that stuff. If not, I'll put a bandaid over it But this this room took took a while to do the stuff in here But I got this room all done for the most part other than just the electrical stuff And I got the trim in around the corner trim Kickboard everything else in just got to finish that part up when I run the rest of the wires Wires are all run Just I want to go home and watch some YouTube videos on just hooking them up. Make sure I do it, right? It's been quite a few years since I've ever hooked any up, but I got insulation in all these walls Ran these lights got those all hooked up. I guess some insulation up in the attic ready to go for next trip And look jeez. I thought I got a lot more done than that But a lot of little things that up that the will make shift kitchen over here for now And Yeah, so that's about it. I got to learn the territory a little bit I took a ride two days in a row with Sean and chubs in the afternoon and ended up getting three or four birds myself and Got to see Four or six moves. I guess I get to see this week. So that was pretty cool, too so That's it other than the ride home and go get Donnie and come back up with reinforcements And I think Stevie's coming up next weekend. So we're pretty pumped about that Stay tuned guys really appreciate all the support a lot of stuff gonna be happening in a hurry here next trip because I feel like we're plenty dried out after that 11 days stint with the Wood stove going and felt pretty dry before that So I think we're gonna be right straight ahead insulating and and then after it's insulated then it's Whatever we feel like doing for boards


top PC building mistakes that you should avoid in 2024. Part 1. Number 1, overspending on the CPU. Whether you're building a new PC or upgrading, you really do not need the top and most powerful, most expensive CPU. The current mid-range 6-core offerings from both Intel and AMD will be more than enough. There's not a lot of games out there that will fully utilize 6-8 cores. And while higher-end CPUs do offer more CPU clock speeds, the GPU performance will matter more and have a more significant impact well before the CPU clocks with build. For other applications, unless you do heavy video rendering, simulations, or other CPU-intensive applications, sticking to CPUs like the 14600K or the 7600X will be a good choice. And you can spend more on the GPU or for the RAM or more faster storage in productivity. If your application does require more CPU horsepower, you can of course get the 4900K or the 7950X. And if you're in the Philippines or beyond, you should check out our store to order. Check out our channel and watch out for more.


Users and customers here, they've got some great stuff to show. And so I'm gonna go ahead and start, bring up Previer Chondry from Bloomberg. And Previer is going to tell us about what they are doing with OpenStack at Bloomberg. So, Previer Chondry. Hey, what's up? So, a little over a year and a half ago when I first got pinged by a recruiter from Bloomberg, my first thought was, what does Bloomberg do? And so I've come to learn this, which is important. We're a services company. We're a services company that's incredibly focused on our customers. And the service that we provide is primarily financial data and analytics for people in the financial space. Primarily, we do a lot of other things too. Have a TV channel and a radio channel and all that kind of stuff. But just to give you an idea of kind of the scale of it, what it means really is that we're a technology company because we have to be a technology company in order to provide all these services. And just to give you a feel for that, on a given day, we process about or send out about 22 million instant messages. That's not terribly interesting. We also do about 220 million messages, so like emails. Again, that's kind of interesting. Then I came to learn that we actually run one of the largest private networks in the world. We have around 20,000 routers that run across our private WAN. We also have the largest server-side JavaScript deployment in the world. We have 22 million lines of JavaScript code that's in production running on our server side. And we also, this is one of the more interesting stats, process tick data from financial markets. So when there's market feeds that are coming in, we process all that data. There's 45 to 50 billion ticks per day. And for those counting along at home, if you were counting with a UN32, you would have overrun it 10 to 11 times every day. So that's kind of just a feel for what we do in terms of technology. And so when we started looking at OpenStack, we had some interesting design goals that we had in mind for this kind of elastic infrastructure that we wanted to build. The first focus that we had was primarily on high availability. That's really important for us. And it's incredibly important also when it came to our architecture to make sure that we didn't have an architecture that would have opportunities for cascading failures, right? We didn't want to have a cloud infrastructure that we put up that would have one thing that goes wrong and then cascades down the line and takes the whole service down. That's of course, it's not something that we can live with. In addition to that, another design goal that we had was to try to make sure that we were scaling down to small sizes, not only scaling up. We have a lot of node sites around the world, about 200 or so points of presence throughout the world. And the opportunity to actually have a programmatically defined infrastructure in those locations is huge. It actually saves us a lot of time, a lot of energy, and it makes us very nimble when it comes to actually being able to deploy those kinds of services to different parts of the world. In addition to that, another design goal that we had was to try to keep our stack as open-source as possible and in well-defined layers so that we could actually, if something went wrong, actually pull a layer out and replace it with a new piece. So kind of looking kind of forward into what we were, when we started kind of analyzing OpenStack and thinking about how we were going to actually use it, we came across a few kinds of problems that we had to solve on our own. So there was, I'm going to put them into two categories. There's kind of problems that are below OpenStack and then problems that are sort of above OpenStack. So when it came to problems below OpenStack, we had to sort out, you know, how do we do highly available databases, right? We ended up settling on using the Glera plugin for MySQL to do kind of a multi-master setup. We had to figure out how to do availability of the message queue. So we did some rabbit MQ clustering and had to play around with HA policies and things of that nature in order to get that piece, right? In addition to that, we also had to figure out even more basic things than that, which is what's the hardware platform that we're going to use? What kind of servers are we going to use? And it kind of related to that was also how are we going to do storage in a highly available fashion, to which we actually ended up using Ceph with the awesome guys from Ink Tank that have helped us out tremendously with that. So those are kind of some of the problems that were below OpenStack that we had to solve. And then OpenStack, of course, plugged in really nicely and solved a lot of our problems in terms of giving us the APIs and the programmatically definable infrastructure. But then there was another layer on top of OpenStack that we also had to work out. And that was how do we do some of the basic housekeeping things? So how do we do log aggregation and things like that from the hypervisor level? So we ended up putting together a system involving elastic search, log stash, Kibana. People have done that before. It's not really all that new. We also had to sort of define a layer for doing metrics for the hypervisor. So in terms of actually collecting information to make sure that our infrastructure was healthy. So we ended up using graphite and some tomfoolery with carbon relays and caches and things like that. In addition to that, we also had some orchestration issues that we had to sort out. So when it comes to individual hypervisors or an individual instance of a service, we didn't care so much about how many nines of reliability we were getting out of that. What we wanted was the ability to have our five or six nines of availability on the service level, like an aggregate, so that we could actually have an individual instance that dies and nobody cares. An orchestration service sees that it dies and relaunches one of the new availability zone if necessary. And so we had to work on that. And we ended up using no jitsu and we're actually looking at a few other folks to actually help us sort out that kind of problem. In addition to that, there's also what we wanted to do in terms of future things, looking in terms of operational efficiencies. And one of the interesting technologies that we're just starting to play around with is the VMS technology from grid centric. So really the main thing that I kind of wanted to emphasize here is we had to solve a lot of these problems ourselves, but we wanted other people to be able to learn from it. So go clicker. There we go. So what we're doing is actually, we just put this up today, so I just wanted to announce it, that we actually took all of the cookbooks that we've had to put together to solve all of these problems and we're making them available on GitHub. It's under an Apache license. And it's not that we're trying to actually go out there and make this like a huge project that we're trying to rally a big community around, but really it's for folks that had to solve similar problems to us so that people can learn from it. And of course, you know, comments, questions, flames, always warmly accepted. But other than that, thank you very much.


Interpol is basically essential. If you look at wildlife crime, for instance, we're seeing quite sophisticated syndicates now dealing with all our wildlife products, particularly for South Africa in the sense of rhinoceros. And those syndicates are working trans-nationally organised crime and therefore we have to bring Interpol in and we have to work collaboratively and in an integrated manner with all of our police stations, our police officials, as well as the Interpol officers all over the world. You know, we're finding that our wildlife products are ending up in many countries, in transit, as well as in a lot of other countries within Asia and we really need to work with our national crime bureaus in order to deal with those types of issues. We're really looking at how we can strengthen the communication between the countries. So I think when it comes to the transnational nature of the crime, it means that the products are moving out of South Africa into other countries.  And Interpol can really assist, obviously, with the communication, with getting the police officials within those countries involved in cross boundary investigations that we need to do collaboratively. And I think there's quite a big role, I think, moving forward that Interpol can really play in terms of us doing these joint investigations because I think if we're not going to work together on those types of investigations, we're never going to route out the transnational crime that is linked to wildlife currently. The World Wildlife Day is coming up on the 3rd of March. I think one of the big things that we're doing within South Africa is to bring together all the different agencies that are involved in the fight against wildlife crime. And I think what we have recognised and I think what Interpol is recognising is that only together can we actually deal with this issue and address the problems that we have. And it is only when you bring all of these different agencies together and deal with it collaboratively can you actually address the problems. And I think we also need to understand that and raise awareness around that on the 3rd of March.


Everybody Matt here for late in sports cards rip in 2022 panini select football hobby six box half case break number 55 pick your team We have Christopher C. Saints Daven Devon B Jags Derek I lions Diego I Niners Dustin H Chargers Titans Eric W so Texans Colts E Norman Bill's chiefs Gary H. Cardinals Broncos Jared W. Seahawks Jason our Patriots Jeffrey H. Steelers Panthers Joey a dolphins Judson C. Browns Lance H. Packers Eagles Louis F. Raiders Matt J. Rams Bucks Maximilian H. Ravens Vikings R. E. C. Jets Cowboys Russell P falcons Sean D. Giants Sean P Commanders Vito C bears and Xavier G. Bengals All right, let's get it going 15 to go on select football half case number 56 pick your team Teams are on sale. Grab them up. Let's get that one filled and get a rip today your Wilson Martin Emerson rookie silver those Jones Jr. rookie tri-color on Dale Moore Lante Taylor your lot Burks Jordan Davis Field level rookie silver and Jefferson Mack Jones silver and Justin Fields field level I'm Jack Orange to 49 Ravens there's my home silver Reese Hall rookie Ingram remandres Stevenson and Jets to 49 that is rookie light blue auto Amon sauce gardener Nice one Jets Can you make this one please? Great way to start off the break. Kevin Harris Mechie rookie tri-color Alec Pierce Romeo Dobbs rookie silver Hutchinson silver sweet level Justin Jefferson Chris Olave rookie and Bucks to 99 Jersey Mike Evans Jefferson silver Jaylen Waddle tri-color Desmond Ritter rookie sweet level Cousin silver Silver phenomenon Brock Purdy Bernard Rhyman rookie silver say a likely strong and Nicoby Dean rookie blue that is to 199 This is to 125 Dolphins Jersey auto Javon Holland Mike the Parsons 15 to go 15 spots left for Select football six box number 56 pick your team Son Haskins rookie tri-color and Panthers to 99 Blue auto JC Horn Ryan Cox Leonard Floyd and Nashi Harris snapshot tie-dyed to 25 County Ingram and Giants to 75 rookie Jersey Kavon Tibido Scholar Thompson rookie silver Let's fill up the next break Select number 56 six box pick your teams Cardinals Falcons Ravens Bill's Broncos Packers Chiefs Raiders Dolphins Viking Saints Eagles Bucks Titans and Commanders Traylon Burks rookie silver Sean This is white 35 Hunter Renfrow Charles Cross rookie silver and Matthew silver Nikon's Dare Kenry Saquon silver Darius Slayton field level white 35 Nick Bonito rookie silver Silver Devonta Smith Garrett and Wilson Tri-color Tua Ryan Robinson Jr rookie sweet level Monroe St. Brown Kenneth Walker Phenomenon and Lions to 75 rookie Jersey auto blue Aidan Hutchinson nice color match rookie Jersey auto for the Lions Christian Watson rookie per cup Alante Taylor rookie light green to 49 Watson silver and Brady box number three Chavo Brian Robinson Jr rookie blue to 199 Arnold E rookie silver Chargers to 99 Jersey Keenan Allen Romeo Dobbs rookie silver You know Nikon Samion Pierce rookie Scholar Thompson rookie silver and Breece Hall field level rookie Traylon Burks Leonard Floyd blue sweet level George Pickens rookie sweet level Cousins XRC draft redemption that is card number 517 tight end to Sam Laporta for the Lions you go Detroit and sweet level silver Tom Brady So Darius Smith tri-color sweet level and Colts to 60 rookie auto maroon Alec Pierce solid hit for the Colts Bailey Zappie rookie Mar-Chase Traylon Burks rookie silver yeah that sucks they got a cousin's auto in the other one there's Tom Brady Brian Robinson Jr neon icons rookie silver Tyler Linderbaum he tri-color Saquon Haskins Jalen Hertz this is Niners to 49 rookie Jersey auto purple Danny Gray Dalman Cook Kenny Pickett rookie and Orange Lamar Jackson to 49 once again for the Ravens Patrick Mahomes silver Mahomes neon icons and sweet level rookie silver Chris Olave wants a Smith Sensation silver Patrick Mahomes Eric Stingley Jr rookie silver Will Shakir rookie red Evan Lloyd rookie silver for 14 spots left on select football half case number 56 pick your teams Joe Mixon neon icon silver Robert Woods Devin Lloyd rookie red J-speed Zeke Patrick Mahomes Patrick Mahomes snapshots and Commanders to 99 prime selections rookie jumbo Jersey auto Johan Dotson training Tindall Colts Cross and rookie tie-dye to 25 Brian Cook chiefs Brock Purdy neon icons rookie sweet level silver Tom Brady all right time for a huge hit here Forest and tie-dye phenomenon Josh Allen to 25 bills one of 25 nice one Buffalo Renfro Traylon Burks Zemir White and Raiders to 75 rookie jumbo Jersey White Zemir White Sean Bateman Waller silver and Drake London rookie field level rookie purple to 75 Romeo Dobbs lamb jack Justin Herbert silver Joe Mixon Twente Adams silver Claypool Hit on the back here that is tie-dye die cut auto to 25 for the Ravens Gus Edwards Bill Baltimore auto to 25 this is 199 Jalen Hertz try color Tom Brady just a second here all right we have Cardinals Ravens bills Broncos Packers chiefs Raiders Dolphins Viking Saints Eagles Bucks Titans and Commanders 14 to go on select football six box half case number 56 pick your team Rocker purple Kyler Jalen Hertz silver capery snapshots Travis Kelsey silver field level and darnold XRC draft redemption this is card number 5 14 wide receiver 5 that is Jonathan Mingo Panthers cons Drake London rookie silver Marshawn Lattimore Trey Lentz tri-color Robinson Rondale let's see a huge head or two in the spray Juergens Devon Diggs this is Chargers that is to 25 tie-dye rookie patch auto Isaiah Spiller go charger chub Jonathan Taylor blue sweet level Hayden Hurst Packers to 49 Jersey Bronze Aaron Jones Justin Jefferson silver and icons Devonte Mack Jones silver and field level rookie Johan Dotson Josh Allen light blue A-Rod Silver Patrick Mahomes George Carloftus rookie Maroon it's to 149 Cowboys to 199 Jersey Auto Tony Pollard CD Land commanders I don't think they've done much in this break yet you know Pierce Martin Emerson rookie silver Justin Fields sensations Kader Kohoo silver rookie all right one box to go rookie light green David O'Jabbo K-Dot and rookie silver Jeremy Rocker well equal a sensations rookie and nice Falcons rookie auto to 199 Desmond Ritter Congrats Atlanta nice one Falcons mag that for you still 14 to go on the next one we need to get that one filled up pretty quickly if we're gonna get that ripped during the daytime break today it's blue JK Dobbins it's to 99 Fyderian Mathis rookie silver and Bailey Zappi rookie Aiden Hutchinson silver snapshots Bolton well let's finish strong here Sean Watson and Titans 2 of 75 rookie Jumbo Jersey White Malik Willis nice one Titans our Chase Silver Neon Icons out Lave Justin Herbert silver and Drake London rookie field level Pierce Rookie Tri-Color sauce rookie silver says Randy Moss multiverse SSP that is a Vikings card even though it shows both teams I'll show up on the checklist for the Vikings Chabonté Williams phenomenon Devin White I'm gonna double check I'm almost positive because I've looked up the other ones yeah Randy Moss Vikings on the checklist some of her White and Josh Allen Aaron Rodgers purple 75 and Bucks Super Bowl Auto Devin White Miles Garrett Traylon Burks rookie Brian Robinson Kway Walker rookie silver this is Cold Strange rookie Tri-Color Joe Burrow silver last pack Patrick Mahomes Traylon Burks snapshots James Cook field level rookie silver AJ Brown all right just a minute here and we'll recap so we had Randy Moss multiverse goes to the Vikings Panthers XRC draft redemption wide receiver five Lions XRC prison redemption tight end two and then a few tie dies here Bill's Josh Allen phenomenon Chiefs rookie Brian Cook and Steelers snapshots Nashi Harris come on now so Packers bronze Jersey Aaron Jones 49 Raiders rookie Jersey White 75 Samir White Chargers Jersey Kenan Allen Titans rookie Jumbo Jersey White 75 Malik Willis that's the Giants rookie Jersey White 75 Kevan Tibido Bucks Jersey Mike Evans Cowboys Jersey Auto Tony Pollard that's Chargers rookie patch auto tie dye to 25 Isaiah Spiller Commanders rookie Jersey Auto Johan Dotson Niners rookie Jersey Auto Purple Danny Gray Lions rookie Jersey Auto Blue Aiden Hutchinson Dolphins rookie Jersey Auto Javon Holland This is Bucks Super Bowl Auto Devin White Ravens tie dye die cut auto to 25 Gus Edwards Colts rookie auto red Alec Pierce Panthers blue auto JC Horn Falcons rookie auto silver to 199 Desmond Ritter and Jets rookie auto light blue a mod sauce gardener that was to 49 that'll do it for the break thank you everybody we have number 56 up next


Monica Wood was in the fourth grade when her father died suddenly in the spring of 1963. In her new memoir, When We Were the Kennedys, she tells how her family was inspired by the grace and strength of John F. Kennedy's family when he was killed just a few months later. Brian Knoblock talked with Wood about her family's story at the Portland Public Library Brown Bag Lecture. Monica, the title of the book is When We Were the Kennedys, but your story is not really Camelot as people think of the Kennedys. Tell us a little bit about the story. The story, well the title works on two levels. One is the main story is, it takes place in 1963 right after the death of my father when I was nine years old. And he was a worker in the Oxford Paper Company, which was the paper mill in Mexico, Maine back then. And it's about what happens to our family in the year after his death. But it's also about two other things. I think of the book as kind of those nesting dolls. And the foundation doll is the death of my father and this family's grief. And then the one that goes over that is what's happening in the town at the same time. The town of Mexico is bracing for a labor strike that will change the relationship between the Oxford Paper Company and the town forever more. And then the third entity that goes over that is the Kennedy assassination and how that had a very personal effect on our family. Because there was a certain amount of shame around being left fatherless and for my mother to be left a widow. And she was worried that people would think she couldn't take care of her children, that kind of thing. And then to have this incredibly glamorous Camelot family have exactly the same misfortune before them. It had a strangely ennobling effect on our family's grief. There was a end of innocence not only I guess for your family but for the town as well and the country perhaps as well. Yes, 1963 was an interesting year on the micro level for my family but also for, I think of it as the teetering hinge of the supremacy of American manufacturing. And it was just about to start its long decline. And again, yes, definitely a loss of innocence in the country. And so when we were the Kennedys it works on two levels. One is how that fits with our family and how we felt about the Kennedys. But also when we, America, were the Kennedys at a certain time this vanished era is what I'm trying to bring back in this book. Was there sort of identification between some members of your family and some members of the Kennedy family? Well, I certainly identified with Caroline who couldn't have grown up any more differently from me. But she was just two, three years younger than I at the time. And it was a strange comfort that this glamorous little girl who had her own pony that the same thing could happen to her. So yes, and my mother absolutely identified with Jackie. She would, every once in a while she, this would be months later and she'd just stop and say, I wonder how she's doing. And we knew she was talking about Jackie. Did the Kennedy assassination in some strange way save your family? I wouldn't go that far to say that it saved my family but there was, as I said, an ennobling effect. We felt so, I did anyway as a child and I think I was taking my cues from my mother very much outsider. In a place where everyone is the same, everybody had a connection to the mill. I was the only, we, my sisters and I were the only fatherless children in our little school. And so there was something about feeling less alone in our loss. Or that people could understand it on a grander scale, I think. This is your first memoir, your previous four books have been novels. Why the switch? It's so funny. People have asked me that and I'm not exactly sure how to answer it except to say that I think all of my fiction, and it's a lot that I've written over the last 20 years, was aimed toward this book. And I can't say it any more articulately than that except to say that there are more autobiographical elements in each novel that it's almost as if I was trying to very carefully approach this material and waiting until I was old enough and wise enough and had enough distance to do it justice. So I hope I did. You've said or wrote that the period 1963-1964 was a year that contained almost everything that I know. When did you come to realize that? Well, I came to realize it when I was writing this book. It's so interesting to write memoir because you go back to this place and time and you see what you did know on some level but certainly as a child you had no way of articulating it. And so I think of the memoirist's voice as a way of articulating something that a child couldn't possibly do. For example, things like social class and family ties and the company town. All of these things that I certainly wasn't thinking of consciously as a nine-year-old, but it was absolutely there. And it took the adult me to go back and say, here's what you knew then and you didn't know that you knew it.