Good day fellow investors! One of my favorite investors is Seth Klarman and as we have finished with the summary of the Intelligent Investor you can find the playlist in the link below if you wish to watch that. I thought that in this market something very very valuable to you all would be to make a summary of the margin of safety from Seth Klarman because that's the core book of value investing and I think that value investing is the way to go now in this let's expensive or fully priced markets. So in this video we'll give an overview about who Seth Klarman is we'll discuss a little bit about his track record, his cash exposure, his portfolio and to give a general overview of who he is and then in the next videos we will start with chapter by chapter topic by topic summary of the margin of safety where I'll explain what's going on put everything more into a contemporary time because the book was written in 1991. So let's start with Seth Klarman and his investing style. His investing style is really simple and he explains it like this. Our strategy is to hunt for bargains and we typically find more when the market is weak and fewer when it is strong so logical value investing. Here is his elaboration on what those bargains consist of at Baupost we follow a value approach that seeks out undervalued investments with catalysts for value realization. We differ from other funds as a result of our steadfastly long-term risk averse orientation we'll talk more about that later very limited exposure to short selling involvement in both public and private markets willingness to hold cash in the absence of immediate opportunity and 34 year record of strong performance. We refuse to enter Wall Street's ubiquitous short-term performance Derby. So as a value investor Klarman focuses on risk first that's so first focus on risk what can go wrong and then from that risk you look at the upside. Secondly Klarman has a bottom up perspective in place of 99% of Wall Street that have a top-down perspective. Wall Street looks at what will the results of G20 be what will Trump say etc what will the trade war end up and Klarman really looks at the businesses at the value at the margin of safety and from there from the business bottom up he finds best investments. He has been very very successful at what he does and therefore we're going to discuss what he did over the last 40 years and his book on this channel. Now his book margin of safety is selling on Amazon last I saw it which was $1250 a year ago when I checked it was 800 so someone made the 50% return there because it was printed I believe only in 1000 or 5000 copies so it's much of a collector's item now. It's better to invest that money into stocks instead of buying a book so as an investor as a value investor I hope to give you value by summarizing this book but what's more important it's said Klarman's track record. The ball post group is very secretive he manages about 40 billion 30 billion of money so he doesn't need any new investors he is one of the few investors that even with the fund gave cash back to investors because he didn't find that many investing ideas over the last few years plus he usually holds about 50% in cash when the markets are expensive nevertheless from the data points that I have found out from 1983 till 2015 said Klarman delivered a 16.4 return per year 16.4 return per year the SAP 500 in that period delivered about 9.4 percent so he had returns over 30 years 50 60 percent above the SAP 500 which puts Klarman into the basket of the best investors of all time he hasn't been outperforming the SAP 500 over the last three years and that's logical because he is a value investor focused on risk and very very conservative as we'll see later he owns he has 50% of his portfolio usually in cash so he is waiting for opportunities and that leads unfortunately to underperformance even if he is very very happy with a single digit return in this market and I believe that the investors that have 40 billion with his fund are extremely happy with single digit risk averse return because when you measure performance you should first measure risk and then performance if you look at said Klarman's performance this is something extremely stunning look at this performance from 1990 till 2001 so over 10 years or 11 years 50 000 investors in the boutpost group would end up being 131 000 however 50 000 invested in the SAP 500 would end up being 247 000 so almost 100 percent more than what Klarman did over 10 years so looking at this there you get the stories value investing is dead value investing is for old people crazy low returns there avoid value investing focus on growth stocks of course over 30 years and since then Klarman has significantly outperformed the SAP 500 but as a value investor Klarman has suffered 10 years of underperformance of course the important thing is what he did in 2001 2002 2003 and 2009 because that is what risk management is and that is what leads to long-term sustainable returns why did Klarman underperform in the 10 years because he's a risk averse conservative investor look at his april 40 2001 portfolio location cash 48.6 percent us public equity is only 18 percent western europe 4 percent etc etc and then performing and non-performing that so really into that investing 23 percent where he finds value when there is minimal risk even in liquidation but significant upside so that he also owned securities in liquidation over the long term he delivered 16 percent so that's something amazing and just think about holding 48.6 percent of your assets in cash of your stock market portfolio however it's all about character to hold 48 percent in cash you need to have a strong character as we discussed or as Buffett discussed in his 1985 interview that you can watch on the card above on youtube so Buffett says how it's all about character and holding a lot of cash if we look at Berkshire's current balance sheet they have 114 billion in cash on 200 billion in stocks so what is that 30 45 40 percent of the stock market portfolio is available in cash deduct the 20 billion they need for insurance and 94 billion dollars is ready to be used applied when opportunities arise and Buffett has been having this huge pile of cash doing nothing or sitting in short-term treasuries at 2 percent for a long long time and this is what we hope to get by summarizing the margin of safety the character that will allow us to invest sustainably risk averse focused on risk bottom up over the long term because you see all these people making money yes in a bull market then losing everything in a bear market i see now some dividend yield investors investing on margin etc because high yield is i don't know eight percent you can get a margin for six percent so such crazy investments are certainly not what is sustainable over the long term and that's why we are summarizing this book and that's why we want to work on character on the mindset because that is what has delivered and i think it will deliver the results you expect over the very very long term so just to look at said klarman's latest top portfolio holdings so 21st century fox chenyer allergan via sat p g and e corporation corvo and then 21st century again but we have to really check these positions we'll put these positions and compare it to what he is saying in the book so it will be an interesting period when we analyze what said klarman is doing why is he owning what is he owning and how to apply that within a value investment risk averse perspective so thank you for watching looking forward to a comments the next video will be about the first chapter of the book margin of safety so please subscribe if you haven't clicked that notification bell to get notified when a new video is coming up to see what's going on thank you and i'll see you in the next video


Switching gears a little bit. When we were preparing for this chat, we were out on your beautiful balcony here.  Tell us about your beliefs in that. Tell us what that means to you. My spiritual beliefs? Well, that whole circle of information there, because our previous discussion was simply fascinating. So, I was born an Episcopalian and I was a kid. I went to my Sunday school and followed all of that. When my mom died, I remember that the priest told me things like, God takes the best first and didn't make sense to me.  She's not going to miss you at all, which I misinterpreted totally. So, I'm already questioning things. And my dad now, several years later, is marrying a Roman Catholic. And I'm a teenager who's already thinking in terms of my imprint on the world. And they put me through cataclysm collapses. It was just a priest and I sitting along and they did just some weird things. One thing is they re-baptized me. I don't know if you know it, but Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics all have the exact same creed. So, if you go into the service for either of any of those three churches, it's really the same service. It just seems like the Catholics have a lot of statues and fancy robes and things. The Episcopalians quadruple that. They have tons and tons of ritual. The Lutherans have no ritual. But the service is about the same. The creed is about the same. So, I asked them in our creed, don't we say we believe in one baptism? And this priest tells me, well, we're going to re-baptize you in case the first one didn't take. And I'm thinking the first one didn't take, is it like photography or these people that think they've got a good baptism? But it didn't take and they really aren't baptized. So, just things didn't make sense to me. And then in college, we were praying for victory in Vietnam at a time when I thought we should be praying for peace. And I didn't understand why God would love Americans better or more than he was loving these Vietnamese people. So, I fell away from the church. I lost faith. And it wasn't until years later when David Groves, who was a member of the Renzweil family, sat with me night after night. We would sit in the family library four or five in the morning. And he basically showed me all of the world's religions. And as we looked at them and discovered what they believed, I started seeing this pattern and this belief system. And eventually, David introduced me to what he had been introduced by Chuck, which was the ability to do your own services. So, when you look at what the Catholic Church is doing, they believe that you can watch this and you can participate with us. But basically, our priests have this power and you don't. You have to come to us with your intentions and we will do these rituals and these ceremonies. And in much of the occult, at least Western occult, so proudly forward, the belief is that you can do it yourself. You can create your own rituals or use rituals that have been handed down and you can do what they do at church. If you're exposed to Eastern philosophy, so Asia, they also, they don't go into their temples. They watch from the outside, but they have integrated the spirituality and they might stop ten times a day a little shine and do a prayer. And when you go to somebody's house, you start by going to their shrine at their house and praying and saying hello to the dead ancestors and the not yet born ancestors. So, if you look at all of that that I had been exposed to from David Prunes and you look at the occult services that he and Chuck were doing, I naturally kind of fell into that and started doing it myself. And for those of you who hear that and say, oh, that's black magic and that's some type of paganistic religion and it's not black magic. I know, I mean, we owned an occult bookstore. Occult just means hidden. It just means you aren't usually shown this. So, it's the things that the priest does on the altar. You don't know how to do those things that it's been hidden from. So, there is no praying to the devil. There is no trying to get your enemies. Not that I suppose somebody couldn't do that, but they could do that in the Catholic church. I could go in there and wish for somebody to be killed or pray for bad intentions. But of all the people that I met, I never saw anyone that was practicing anything dark like that. People were asking for the same intentions that you do when you go to church. People were asking for health or success in something or love, peace. So, through my exposure within the Renzel family, I was exposed to this. I came to adopt it for my own. Not that we didn't go to churches also. I mentioned my children earlier with two children. They were both baptized in the Episcopal church. One later was rebaptized by their own Catholics. Got a lot of the Catholics. I consider myself an Episcopalian. I was raised there. I was confirmed in the Catholic church, so I consider myself a Catholic. I don't know that they consider me a member of the faith, because I don't, especially since Chuck's past, used to go to Easter and Christmas services. But the bare minimum requirements I don't do. And I'm sure that they would not approve of my occult beliefs. But I consider myself a Christian among other things. And it's all good. I'll take it where you haven't taken me yet, but I know that we're leading up to that. And you may have mentioned it, and that's my Masonic affiliations. So, along the way, I've rediscovered God. They have a very strong belief again in God. Again, I'm performing services, or I'm participating with other people in services. I saw myself as a spiritual tourist. So, when I traveled to Japan, Thailand, Ireland, South America, the things that I wanted to do was explore their religious and spiritual places. So, I've done that all over the world. I've done that here. I've gone to every type of church service and, you know, temple and mosque that you could go to. So, none of them were mine. I was a tourist in them. And we discovered Masonic. We can trace its history most definitely to the 1700s. But by mentions of us in other documents, poems and things, we can trace it to about 900 in England. And we know from that poem, which is something called the Regis poem, they were talking about it coming to England a lot earlier. Some people believe that it can be traced all the way back to the ancient sun worshippers in Egypt. But it is a spiritual fraternity. It is not a religion. And what they practice rather than a mass is a Western magic ritual. And the ritual that they do in their temples and in their lodges is identical to the rituals that we were doing at home in our cult services. And it's just that the intention that they have behind it, the work that they were doing or are doing is to make a man into a Mason. So they are initiating him over a series of three rituals and giving him this information. So Masonry is based on the allegories from the Stonemasons Guild. So the tools that they give you are these ancient Stonemasons squares and compasses and setting mallets and plumb lines. And then they teach you how to use those in a spiritual way to finish what we believe is an unfinished temple that exists inside of all people. It's where you go to meet God. It's where God resides in you. It is that one point of view that is God. It's kind of a sideline. I believe that if you have God here, it is this all encompassing everything. As you move down towards man at six o'clock, we start seeing ourselves as less part of this. We start thinking of ourselves as individual fingers. But if we go back up that circle, we find out that, oh, we're a hand. And if you step back even further, we say, oh, we're a whole body. So you eventually get back to where you are, that one thing that encompasses the entire universe. And not to bring it back to the dawning of the age of Aquarius, but with knowledge and with the awakening and re-understanding of where we've come from, you start the path back. For masons, we believe that we met God in the East. And we are now traveling back to the West to see what has been lost. Discovering masonry for myself and for every member of the Renzo family that eventually became active in masonry was a acknowledgement of our personal beliefs and our personal journeys. It was a landed credibility. It gave us a structure whereby we could go in and acknowledge with other people who were on their own journeys. And so, you know, if you went into my lodge tonight, which is very a lodge, number 411 in Chicago, Illinois, a lodge of the Grand Lodge of Illinois, you would find four holy books on our altar representing the four major religions of the people who are members of my particular lodge. And all of those people, some who are very devout Christians and some who are Muslims. We have a Buddhist. At one point we had a Native American. We were going to put a bundle of sage on the altar to represent a holy book for them since they didn't have one. But regardless of the journey that each of those members is on, when we get together and perform this one ritual to make another man a mason, it unites us. You know, we don't talk religion in lodge. We don't talk politics in lodge. We don't talk about anything that brings people apart. We tend to concentrate on the things that bring people together. So I've continued. I served in our lodge as the secretary for, I think, 17 years. I am now in my 10th year on the board of directors for our statewide charity. So one of the things masons do, you have this old stone masons guild from the mid-centuries, and they have this knowledge. And the knowledge basically was geometry. It was how do I build a structure that's not going to fall down into stiff men? That's incredible knowledge. It gives you a reason to go to other countries at a time when people didn't do that.  You weren't free to travel, but free masons were. That's why we say free. They were allowed to travel because each of the different leaders, token types, teams, they wanted the masons to come in and build their structures, so they allowed their masons to travel, and they just kind of trusted the masons to be able to move about. Which, by the way, put us in association with a lot of different belief systems around the world, which gave us our ability to incorporate and find some truth in all men's religions. Surprisingly at a time when we were building structures for individual religious beliefs. So we could be working for the Roman Catholic Church to build a cathedral. At the same time, some of the people that are working on that were Muslims. So it just put us in a very unique place. Now, the knowledge had to be protected. If everyone has that knowledge, then everyone can earn these huge wages and travel about the country. So we took an oath to protect the knowledge and to dish it out slowly. That survives today in these three initiations. We also took, it was dangerous work, so we took an oath to protect each other's widows and orphans. That exists today, and that is the charity that I share. We have about $114 million endowment to take care of our members and their widows and orphans, their families. So we have case workers. I have maybe 80 clients who have given months that are on our months to month program. Now they're 80 who are looking for individual one-time help. We're on disaster relief if a hurricane hits in Texas. We're on the ground. We actually are there before because a hurricane gives us warning. Something that we're not expecting. Maybe we get there the week after. We're doing a lot of good work. I can't help but ask this geometric knowledge of the mathematical equations from where do they derive? How do the basins come to have that? That's the mystery, isn't it? Yeah. Again, you can trace us to about 900 or at least know that we existed. You can prove that we existed in the year 900. But where we were before then, it depends on what your belief is and the faith that you have. Again, many people, myself included, believe that we came from the builders of the temples and the pyramids. They had knowledge to build those. We know they did. The structures still exist. Why don't we know how they built it? Well, because it was secret. It wasn't something that they shared with everybody. And how do we know that they had this secret knowledge? Well, because we still don't know how those things got built and they're still there. You can go around the globe and you will find evidence of Mason. Our symbols are there. Our symbols are on the cathedrals. Our symbols are all over the city of Washington. You know, here's an interesting fact that Washington, D.C., was selected because it was low-lying swamp that none of the states really were using. So it was an easy place to say, well, we're going to carve this out and take it for the federal government because none of the states really wanted it. There were two high hills in that whole area that weren't swampy. One became Capitol Hill and it's where our government resized. Guess what's on the second one? The National Masonic Line. Why is that one? Because Mason's built Washington, D.C., Mason's built this country. Every one of the principles that the United States has built upon was a Masonic principle before that. So freedom of speech, freedom of education, freedom of association, all of those things for 100 years, hundreds of years were Masonic. If you listen to the oath of office that Marshall, the vice president, but if you listen to the oath of office and you listen to one of our installation rituals, they're identical. Or at least a lot of the wording is identical. When Washington was being sworn in, he made up his own inauguration because we've never inaugurated a president before. He pulled from his Masonic experience how was I how was I installed as the wordful master of my lodge. He wrote a ceremony very similar to that and on the way to his inauguration he stopped off at the lodge and grabbed their Bible so he could be sworn in. And we swear you're in on a Bible, you got sworn in on a Bible, that Bible still exists at the lodge in Washington if you have the privilege of visiting it and I wasn't allowed to put my hand on it.  So the conspiracy theorists now say, oh well you've got this new world order, you're trying to take over. First of all, it's a very old world order, it's not very new. And secondly, we aren't trying to impose it on anybody, but we are trying to express it and express it in a way that it will affect the world. So all of the leaders of the world's western revolutions were Masons. The Masons didn't do those things, but the same type of person that would be attracted to Masonry is the type of person that we get involved in the formation of their country. The closest that we did that you can say, oh that was a Masonic lodge with the Boston Tea Party, you can read in their lodge minutes how they adjourned their reading to take care of some business and went down to the harbor and did that. They came back and started the lodge again and recorded it all. I will say this, that history is right with stories from the wars that the Civil War probably most vividly, where battles were stopped so the Masons on one side could exchange bodies with the Masons on the other side because both sides trusted the Masons. You're going to get the bodies back and bring ours back and you're not going to tell them anything and you're not going to...  The way that it has been done, I'm told ever since, was the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts communicates with the Grand Lodge of Havana communicates with Casperers and Vicerversa. So we've always had even if you look at the Knights Templar the Knights Templar have this whole history that people are aware from the time of their persecution in the King of France who was also trying to become taking control of the Catholic Church turned his forces against the Templars and the Templars came to the Masons and basically hid with the Masons What you wonder though why did he do that? Why was he so concerned with getting them? Well because they were a huge power they were a huge army that had no allegiance to any country and they were the bankers of the world. And why were they the bankers? Because everyone could trust that if they were going to move this money from this country to that country they were going to get it there they were going to be able to do it and they were going to do it safely and everyone trusted them on that side in this site. So Harry Truman once gave a very famous fireside chat where he said, you know what guys if you're in the trenches and you're feeling really down and like there's no hope find yourself a Freemason and take it to hell and that's the truth.


Mr Speaker, thank you and of course just to briefly bring about to say thanks on behalf of the vulnerable population of Saint-Rusia and of course I've heard so many reasons why this investment is necessary but of course it is the same prime minister who plays back the distress fund and of course I am aware based on my long-standing relationship at the ministry of equity that the distress fund certainly has gone towards assisting fire victims. This investment in a serious way in part a group of individuals who disproportionate me has been affected by fire more than anybody else and the fire officials who are here sometime ago I asked them to provide me with data on the number of fire victims we have in Saint-Rusia that has not recovered from fire. And I am happy that this investment is being made at a time when our vulnerable population make use of wooden wooden homes plywood structures. Also these are the individuals who sometimes get disconnected because they are unable to pay the light bill electricity bill and have to use alternative form of lighting their homes. All of that contributes to the risk the environment in which they live. And there are times that when there is a fire the fire service is not on time or probably delayed or probably do not have means of accessing the homes and of course you have an entire situation you know families being affected. But also Mr. Speaker they seem to be almost a season when this thing happened because when you have one then within us you know within a short time frame you could have number of homes being affected and a number of vulnerable people become victims of this sort of man-made or disaster of that kind. So I am happy that the investment is being made. I am also happy to hear that psychosocial support is being made to the fire department. But in training I would like for the fire professionals to consider providing some psychosocial support or finding the victims to have access to psychosocial support because the fire victims are hardly ever recovered from research shown and they are most times just provided with a kit. I would also like the fire service to find ways of providing the fire report a lot earlier to those fire victims because without that report they cannot have the ID cards, the passports and the distressman cannot be activated to get them back on the feet. So with all of that investment being made I would like for the fire service to consider the vulnerable population in terms of how they respond. I am extremely happy that the prime minister has mentioned that he is removing this amount for ambulance services. Mr. Speaker this morning just listening to the presentation made by the prime minister, the boring for the fire service, the announcement by the prime minister. I am sure that the person listening this morning extremely happy for the investment by the fire department because we know it will impact vulnerable population in a positive way. Thank you Mr. Speaker for this brief remarks.


We are very nearly ready.  Oh Tent see I had no idea This is my favorite tent of all of them. Don't tell ten a it'll get jealous But 10 today where you are going to be Seeing an amazing talk by Barney Livingston talking about his poetoid lyric cam. Have I pronounced that right? Yes, sure. Why not? So what I need I need you to start clapping, but very very gently. Can you start clapping very gently? Yeah, and now just bring it up a bit a bit more bit more bit more. Please welcome Bertoy Lyricam Thank you My name is Barney. I'd like to talk to you about this Bertoy Lyricam thing that I made before I start I'd like to Give a disclaimer in case there are any real poets in the room What this produces is probably best described as Pro's poetry or free verse or maybe bad poetry If there are any actual poets, I'm quite interested in collaborating to improve the poeticalness of it And Okay, and so I'll start with a demonstration I'm going to take a poem of you all and In case you worried about being photographed There's the actual images only kept briefly and as I'm thrown away and there's no network or anything And if you're still worried then hide your face now We have to wait for it to develop and I've no idea what it's going to say I apologize if it's a less than complimentary Okay, the city a group of people sitting on a bench Many images of people on a city street People are sitting while standing in a street under flags City standing kids The woman is talking near other kids standing in the street kids Okay, so have that work Inside there is a Raspberry Pi B plus Until recently there was a 3B, but I seem to have a killed the cereal on that recently as a pie camera in the front and A nano thermal printer from Adafruit to 18650 lithium batteries And series to make about 8 volts as a pimeroni wide input shim attached to the pie and So the printer wants 5 to 9 volts and the pie and shim wants 3 to 16 volts. So They both work within the range of the batteries Batteries tend to last more than a day I find So for the camera itself It's it was originally called super color swinger by Polaroid made in about 1975 It was pretty terrible camera and the film is no longer made. So I don't feel guilty about gutting it and There's a has the advantage of having a lot of space inside and I was able to keep the shutter button working And it has a handy locking function This is the third version of This the first version I made for emf in 2016 It used to send the poem to a server in my house via the Wi-Fi and if you remember Emf in 2016 the Wi-Fi was not very reliable. So the camera wasn't very reliable So I was determined to make it entirely self-contained, which I've done The second iteration was a bit much too slow. It took about close to a minute for the poem to come out But I've spent quite a lot of time fixing that and as you saw it's quite a lot reasonably quicker now So Before I talk about the intricacies of the software, I'd like to go back and have a look at the history of How this project came about 1916 during the second world the first world war. So a group of artists refugees gathered in Zurich Their reaction to the horror going around them was to abandon the usual forms of art and embrace the absurd They chose a name from their group by slating a word at random from a French-German dictionary That name was Dada a prominent member of the group was the Romanian poet Tristan Zara The Dada was to wrote a lot of manifestos In 1920 he wrote the manifesto on feeble love and bitter love in which he gave instructions for how to make a Dadaist poem to make a Dadaist poem Take a newspaper Take some scissors choose from the paper an article of length you want to make your poem Cut out the article Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag Shake gently next take out each cutting one after the other Copy conscientiously in the order in which they have the bag The poem will resemble you and There you are an infinitely original author of charming sensibility even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd Yeah This became known as the cut-up technique Several people across literature have employed the cut-up across literature and music have employed the cut-up technique The beat author William S. Burroughs used in several of his books After his friend and collaborator Brian Geissen rediscovered the technique Vaxed and by while cutting out the amount for a drawing with a Stanley blade on top of a pile of newspapers Tom York from Radiohead used it in Radiohead's Kid A album and also this chap When we were in Los Angeles in 74 You were still using that technique of cut-ups. Do you still use it or do you do yeah? Yeah Yeah, increasingly so to a great extent on outside Even say on the new album Earthlyn if you put three or four disassociated ideas together and created awkward relationships with them the the Unconscious intelligence that comes from that those pairings It is really quite startling sometimes quite quite provocative a Friend of mine in San Francisco developed a program for me on the computer, which enables me to do it Really quickly So instead of going to the laborious presence of cutting things that you use your computer Yeah, and you can and you can work with far more material. So I'll take articles out of newspapers Poems that I've written pieces of other people's books And put them all into this little warehouse of this container of of information And then hit hit the probe are the the random button and it'll randomize everything and I'll get reams of papers back out of it with interesting ideas and then I'll either take Sentences verbatim as it as it spews them out or there might be something within a sentence which triggers off an idea I love how pleased he is with this program. I think I'd have liked to have been David Bowie software developer Around all this during all this time I was born Growing up, I suppose the influence of the Dadaists Was came to me through the this country tradition of absurdist comedy Spike Maillac and Monty Python big and Bob all that lot Probably my first encounter with generating text came in the form of mrs. Hathaway's knickers This was a children's party game invented by my grandfather Each child was given a piece of paper with a noun or noun phrase written on it The adult would start reading from a book at some point they would point at a child and That child would then read the word for example mrs. Hathaway's knickers mrs. Hathaway being one of my mom's teachers This was hilarious Like many of you here of my age, I learned to program on a BBs on a BBC micro It's so that the in fact the exact BBC micro was over in the bar showing Twitter at the moment And I was about 13 My friend Peter Jones not that one and I collaborated on a program called hoed I'll demonstrate it now so as you can see the first line is based on the The title of the poem by the poet master grunt of the flatulence of the Asgore's for Korea the second worst poetry poets in the galaxy From the section on Vogue on poetry in Douglas Adams's hitchhike's guide This is basically a more sophisticated version of mrs. Hathaway's knickers in that it As well as nouns it incorporates verbs adjectives and present participles It consists of a large amount of very buggies spaghetti code and You can probably see some bugs sometimes, but as at its heart there are two lines Two lines of templates with placeholder variables that are replaced by words or chunks of text selected at random from lists Of the appropriate type. This is similar to the game mad libs With the right choice of templates and carefully crafted lists this technique can be used to produce some interesting and amusing results Much better nodes certainly Fact bot one is a Twitter bot written by Eric Drass which Display which plays with the idea of that people on Twitter general or and generally will believe plausible sounding facts This bot dates back to before the current fake news disaster. You can hear more about it from him in fact Shortly after this talk in stage B Frequently, it's not quite as plausible there Yoko no bot by Rob Manuel off the beaters Combines Templates based on Yoko no's tweets and writings with text of several lists of things like foods computers and celebrities Tracery is a JavaScript library written by Kate Compton, which uses grammars described in Jason Which so they produce text in a similar way, so the those these words are replaced by items from these lists and the results come out like that This is used By a site called cheap bots done quick comm created by George Buckingham that allows anyone to make Twitter bots easily and and many have and I Think they tend to make Twitter slightly less horrible than it is generally. These are a couple of my favorites. This is a Like a kind of a Dungeons and Dragons based in Ikea have some tasty bargains So now back to stuff I made and Markov chains. I first discovered these when playing with dissociated text program built into the text editor emacs Which is very strange in itself as I'm a by-user Markov chains are built from existing bodies of text which are cut up Usually into single words and then a graph is built by creating Which encodes the likelihood that a word will be followed by another word the graph can then be traversed randomly to build a new text similar to the original and Usually somewhat grammatically correct It's probably easier if I demonstrate this right so at the top is a word is a sentence that we're going to Take apart and turn into a graph so I start with a and that's a So we have an edge going to a then we take Markov That comes off a chain is and then from is we go back to a and Stochastic from a model and then Stop that's the end of the sentence Just help you out here. Okay, and then we have another sentence So same thing we start and start node Then we have Andre Markov. We already have Markov to go back to there was here a again back to the a node popular node Russian mathematician stop Okay, final sentence a cat is a very mammal. So what happens this time start then to a But we already got a from still we already have from start to a so we've updated the edge to two and then cats comes off a and then is and Then we already have an edge from is to a so that comes to and then very Mammal and stop. Okay. So now we have a complete graph of our text We can I can show you what it happens if we traverse it. So start at start Then for instance, it's quite likely that we go to a because it's two vertices one So a then we can say Go to cat Then we can go to is Then we have to go back to a and then we can go anywhere we like so we could say Stochastic Model a cat is a stochastic model. There we go Okay, we do again start because it's fine. Maybe we go to Andre Markov was a very mammal And so Yeah, that's right. That's how Markov chains work for generating text Generally the larger the body of text you feed it the better the results because I have more variety Sam our Cosgrave as a Twitter brought line made based on Markov chains What it does is it regularly searches Twitter for hype in the hashtag haiku and records what it finds it's been running for several years now and as accumulators Close to 900,000 haikus It then uses these to build three Markov chains one per line There's another example of its output here Inspire ration is another Markov boss I made This one feeds on thousands of inspirational quote type text type text Markov chain text tends to be quite incoherent, but sometimes it will spit out the occasional gym Eventually, I got bored with Markov chains and moved on to AI. I started playing with Character recurrent neural networks char R&N in the torch framework And these can be used in kind of a similar way to Markov chains and that you feed them a large body of text And then they learn how to produce text that looks somewhat like the original So I had a laugh with that and produced some bizarre new episodes of friends Then I found neural neural talk to model This is a neural network that takes an image as input and produces captions It's trained on the MS cocoa data set, which is a set of about 300,000 photos with five captions each And this is what I used to create the original Lyric am and I Notice that the captions when I was playing with it had a kind of vaguely poetic feeling In November 2016 I took part in the nano gen mode national novel generating month similar to nano RIMO But the aim was to spend a month generating a novel of 50,000 words This is the result AI AI This is a an AI's take on the film AI. I extracted 5036 stills from the movie and had neural talk to produce a caption for each Then I formatted the captions into sentences possibly joining to then paragraphs from sets of sentences and chapters from number of paragraphs chapter titles of are the most common five or more letter word from the chapter That's not already been a chapter title Finally, I formatted it all through latex to produce jpeg on jpeg PDF Then my friend Libby was kind enough to get one printed for me I'll read you a sample chapter 9 picture The nameless are located on the slippery side of the indiscernible a man is taking a picture of a mirror Lighted man with a train bike looking bad at window and a man is taking a picture of himself in a mirror There is a man in a restaurant using the phone a woman is holding a cat in a kitchen I'm afraid you can't get much sense of the of the of the film from the book It occasionally talks about children and teddy bears which I gathered in the film. I've not actually seen it So now you're back to the camera Torch doesn't work on Raspberry Pi's so I had to switch to using TensorFlow again, this is on the M2 text model which is the same as Neural talk to but and or similarly trained on the MS Coco's data sets So when the shutters pressed an image is captured and stored in a python array This is then passed the neural net and four captions are generated Neural talk to had an option called temperature Which you could use to adjust the sensibility of the output. I generally had it turned down to a quite insensible Into text is more sensible in that it always tries to create the most accurate captions possible So I had to modify it to to dumb down the search code and introduce a random element captions are then cleaned up and Fed through the the eng tagger library, which tags each word with a part of speech Nouns verb adjectives preposition etc Then there's a random chance That it will break the line On our on our verb a conjunction like and or or preposition like four of This kind of makes a vaguely poem shaped block of text Sometimes sometimes it will repeat some of the work the nouns in the list form Finally the results into the printer So that's it at this as I said at the start. I'd love to improve the quality of the poetry And I'd be interested in collaborating with people on that There's a lot of scope for employing various techniques for transforming the captions I'd also like to investigate changing the the neural net to be more poetic The only reason I haven't looked into this is that on the hardware I've got training the the model from scratch would probably take weeks So I'll be wandering around for the rest of the event is my poet's hat on Taking poems if you'd like one Please ask These are my contact details. I also should thank my employer lobster pictures For being understanding while I've prepared this talk and prepared for the MF Thank you. Does anyone have any questions for our speaker? Have to wait for it to develop anyone else have a question we can I can read it afterwards How big is the database of images and text that you use in the raspberry pi? Well, the original database of images was 300,000 or so But the model that it produces. I think the file the checkpoint file is about 180 megabytes or something like that Which fits quite comfortably in RAM It takes about a minute to load off the of the SD card though Okay, we want to hear this Ode to the two glasses of wine an older fellow is wearing green And white looks like a tie a Man wearing a tie and a hat looks at their teeth For the evening an older man wearing a yellow shirt taking two glasses of wine. He holding a glass Hair any other questions? Well, then I think on That lovely note. Let's have another round of applause for our speaker


What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you were awesome and I have another Fault Custom match for you today. We played in cinematic mode which means no UI.   If you want to join in on the Fault Customs we do them on the Bearded Wolverines Twitch channel on Tuesdays. I'll put a link to his Twitch in the comments. Let's enjoy the game. I told you man. It's awesome. Oh my god I don't know which side of the map I'm supposed to be going to because I don't know. Go over to right lane. That's red buff, that's red buff. Okay we're good, we're good. Yeah but the red buff is always in the same location. You have to check where you're at. No it changes. That guy, you must go over the left side of the map. Offlane should be on the left. On the left. Alright I'm just gonna go where Goose is. I'm just gonna follow Goose, that's all I'm gonna do. I will follow Goose. I wonder if the minions are gonna have life too on here. I hope not.  I mean we have health bars so. Yeah. To see each other teammates but. I think they'll still, I think you'll still be able to see their health bars. I don't know, I could be wrong. We'll find out here. If you go to settings over gameplay you can activate the health bars. Or we can all deactivate it. I think this is bad. I think this is good enough with what we got going right here. Okay he has a health bar. We're never gonna know when to upgrade our abilities. Oh wait you'll have the health bar above you. Yeah we can see their health bars. We're good. I can snipe that. Dude I can't tell when to upgrade my abilities.  You're gonna know it, I'm pretty sure of it. Okay they are dehydrated. I dehydrated them. Thank you sir. That's getting his heart man. Why is the last thing the same? Mid lane. Yep. Coming. I'm dead. I'm dead. Get out of here. No I'm dead. Ooh yes. Who killed him? The tower did. Go off to that lane. An enemy has been slain. Nice one. Thank you. These actually require you to have map awareness. Now people will start using the wards. You cannot see even with the wards. You got the ping but that's all. But doesn't it cause like a silhouette of them? No just the pipping sound.    Watch out there's missing mid lane guys. There's no way he could have guessed out there.  I came here on solo. It's super fun. I'm coming right now. Man I have to actually turn my camera to see if someone's coming. He has been slain. I didn't know if I'm upgrading. The ally has been slain. Oh you got this. Oh jeez. No I'm so dead. An enemy has been slain. Nice.  This is so strange to play it like this. You'll hear the upgrade for your abilities. Yeah. But you have to be aware of your level. You got a ward there? Yeah. Do we need a ward? We got a ward okay. I don't think it's going to do anything for us. But we have a ward there. I'm hopefully going to hear the ping. That's what I'm hoping for. That's all I'm hoping for. Watch out the mortgage just back. An enemy has been slain.  Okay I just heard that. We have too much of a minion wave here to do nothing. The deal is on back. I'm going out with no pots. Where? It's still coming mid. Okay. No if he covers your jungle stun on my way. Come over. He's chasing me. Alright I'm there. Staying here dying my bad. I really have a Q health. Yeah no worries. An ally has been slain. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Get him get him. Who's there still? Super fan. Careful on right lane guys.  I'm only level 5. One more level I can snipe somebody. How many does knight pass the reticle or not? I'm pretty sure it's not going to have it. It should. I don't know why it would. Yeah because it's part of your crosshairs. I don't think you would not have it. Maybe jacked up. Bearded mine as well close as I snipe. Okay I got ultimate. I got ultimate. Going in. Left or right.  Got him. No worries. Lift. No right. Middle. Yeah but I'm a little lower heads up because I definitely can't see it coming over. Yeah yeah I messed up. I was going to say right I accidentally said left. Yeah but even when you said that you were already in the middle. Like attacking them. Is it low? Watch out. Mortgage smithing me. Very low. Low it up. My husband's slain. An enemy has been slain. Nice nice nice. Oh shoot. Steel. Steel. We're still. Over there. Okay I'm fine. He's like I don't care. Bearded gets killed. I'm fine out here. He's like we're still. I'm like right. He goes okay I get it. I'm fine.  It's nice that I can't see how many times I died. I don't know how bad I'm doing. You're good man. Gives me a false sense of confidence. Was that just put a ward right there? You're still a radical there. Yeah. I got my ultimate. I just unlocked it. Pulled it up. Nice. Still there. Watch out guys. Mortgage smithing me. I'm on my way. He's done. Yeah he's trying to get my jungle. Yeah I'm over here. One down to ward looks like. Aimless one towards mid. Careful. Yeah he's still coming towards mid. I'm coming behind him. You and me we got this goose. Enemy has been slain. Nice. Power is under attack. Oh no. Oh god. Careful careful careful. Oh I'm dead. Almost got me mori. Almost got me. What can I access to store? What? I don't think there's any rules to get cheese in the store. Yeah right. No something's wrong. I cannot move my camera unless I'm attacking. Oh that's weird. Oh go get killed. That glitch happened to me yesterday where I was trying to ult. I was trying to ult. They're coming behind you bearded. I was trying to ult to steal with Kalari. And during my ult he used his dash and I got stuck like that. I went long long way. I'm like by mid lane right now going long way around. Alright let's get this guy. Careful careful steal.    It is the minimap. I'm on my way over to that side. Morgish is behind you guys.  Ah I'm so dead. No I'm still with the same glitch. Allied tower destroyed. Enemy has been slain. Allied has been slain. Very nice. I'm still glitched guys. I don't know what to tell you man. After dying? Yeah. What I'm gonna do is just take a small clip of this and send it over the depth so they can see these afterwards. Morgish in our jungle. Red side. She's coming to you bearded. She's coming to you. Oh and you guys still behind you.  Geez almighty. Not that tower dead. Yeah. Allied tower destroyed. They're hungry for me. I didn't know I was that good of a player. Destroyed. I don't know how to do anything without minimap. It's actually the reverse. You can be not good and not use the minimap. It's really easy. The better you use the minimap the better you are. That one I'm not so sure Wolverine. Oh it definitely is. I'm so used to using the minimap all the time. That just says you're a much better player. Because I'm telling you when I first started playing these games I never touched minimap. Never looked at it. And I got ganked so hard. I just pissed off him. It's got nothing to do with the minimap though. He's gonna be tanky. Play a little more under your tower. Watch out solo. Morgash is still going your way. Thoughts of a catcher. Thoughts of two. Watch out Morgash and still going over dual lane. Of course there. Why would they be?  I don't know. It's alright. I have been slain. Probably one more way around here. I'm not buying nothing. I'm so useless at this point in the game. The tower has been slain. Sons of bitches. Right. Jesus. The tower is under attack. An enemy has been slain. An ally has been slain. An ally has been slain. Jesus Christ. The tower died much? Oh man looks like I've turned in right on time. New patch dude yes. Yes exactly. Yeah steals are sharking around in the jungle. Yep. Oh my gosh. Shoot. An ally has been slain. Jesus. Yeah I didn't even see him come up on you. There is no him knowing. How did that mess? An ally has been slain. We have 8 kills. They have 26. That's a close game. And I'm still with the last item I bought that was the shoes. I haven't been able to buy anything else.  Freaking aimless.  An ally has been slain. They're coming mid. Oh no I'm going away. Good luck my friend. I'm running. I have no idea where our towers are. They're gone. It's like a walk up to them. What's that word? I don't know if I'm a fan of this mode. I mean they're playing with the same handicap. No I know they are. I'm just saying like I don't like. Like it's almost impossible to do anything. You don't have towers. You literally have nothing. I'm not saying it's because they're just destroying us. I'm saying like I don't know like there's like nothing you can do. I think it's funny that you didn't even counter it. No what. A little kill. The CC man. It's annoying. They got to be coming up behind us soon. Like we can't there's not enough more than you can put on a map. To be able to counter what is happening. Oh we got an aimless coming. Round our backside here. Look at it. How does he know that? If I had a word. A word is not going to put. They're going to tell you where you're at. Ah.  There's a lot of stuff in a new patch. Yeah. This is the biggest patch they're putting out right now. This is the biggest patch they're putting out. I'm actually hoping they condense it down to smaller patches from now on. Allied tower destroyed. Allied tower destroyed. That's T2 right laying down. Maybe he's gone all the way over in here.   An enemy has been slain. She's not even the main menu. I can pop her up. This is broken. Yeah I'm just going to go down there. See if I can go over there and steal it. Oh the raptors. They got it. They just got raptors. Fragash just passed through mid lane. Seems like they're coming mid. Yep. What are they doing?  Missed my god damned ultimate as usual. Crime has no life. I spied it. I did. I don't know how much. Holy jesus.


Hi, I'm Siljidowski and welcome back to the PonderScope. Today is a very special day. It is actually the seven year anniversary of the PonderScope. Well, about. This is all the way back in 2016 when it was founded. We've been all about bringing updates and school happenings to AHS. Today, however, we do have a major update on the future of the show. Starting today, as of this show, we'll be largely guest oriented but bringing new guests every week to talk about school culture, clubs, opportunities and events instead of giving you our weekly news segments. We'll also be actively posting clips behind the scenes and exclusive content on our Instagram page at the PonderScope. So be sure to check us out there. Today, starting off a new season of PonderScope, I have with me freshman class treasurer Liam Shadrick. Welcome. All right, hi, nice to have you on the show. Thank you. Let's start off. Let's give our viewers, give us a rundown of what it means to be a treasurer, what it is that you do and what your contribution is to the school government. Cool. Yeah, so what I found for me in student council is that it's like each position doesn't have, like individually, they don't have that much different roles from each other, but like as a whole, just everyone contributes as many ideas as they can. And then not as like a group and like see if it's a good idea, see if we can make it possible. A group, would you say, is it just class of 2026 or is it everyone? Is it different? What does that look like? Mainly, we've just working with the four, like not the representatives. We asked them about like a few things, but for the most part, it's the four like treasurer secretary, but president and vice president. And we're trying to collab with the other, like the higher grades, see if we can do any events. I feel like it'd be cool to get like, we can get more people. Yeah, that segues perfectly into my next question. What kind of events have you guys done? What kind of events are you looking forward to? Do you have anything planned? Yeah, okay, so this year, we've already done a dance and like we did little, it was like gift bags of like grams you get, which is like a cool thing to get with your friend. So in the future, we're trying to, right now we're trying to set up something on Pi Day with the volleyball team. Sounds fun, yeah. Not officially yet, because it's still working out, see if it's possible, but it's on our to-do list. And then along with that, we want to do like, probably like a bake sale or something, some like fundraiser and then give like half of the money that we raise to our links and eats. Nice, okay, that's really cool. Kind of going back to what you said about collaborating with the other grades. Do you find that it's more competition between each grader? Do you guys think that you mostly just work together and split up? How does that work? So, especially on a treasurer level? Yeah, so I've met the, I've met two at Jack and Vishnu at the dance. And they're really nice to talk to, but yeah, I think it's less competition. Because it's like, why have competition when you just work together and you can get more people on to go to the dance if it's multi-grade, cause a lot of people have like friends in other grades. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I guess last thing to close it off, is there anything, not just in the next following semester, but also in the next maybe four years, three years that you'd want to achieve? Mainly just like, if we keep, the goal of freshman year, I think, is if we keep getting like little front rangers for the student council, going into the next few years, we'll have a lot of money that we can spend. And then the more events we do, the higher, like the bigger events we'll be able to do. Hopefully getting like cooler and just like bigger. Yeah, of course. All right, thank you so much for being here. That's really cool. I'll look forward to hopefully a high day volleyball event. Thank you for coming in. Thank you. That'll do it for Fun & Scope this week. I'm Salida Oskian. Again, be sure to check our Instagram page and give us a follow. Stay tuned for future episodes. We air weekly on Mondays. Catch you next week.


Okay, good morning all You're very welcome. Thanks very much for joining me. I hope you're well today. It's actually quite a nice day here in Hartley Poole sunny morning, so I think a Walk on the beach with the dogs fairly soon is required Before I get on to some Hartley Poole Excuse me, but Hartley Poole related news this morning. I want to have a quick look at some national news and what's Nominating the national headlines this morning From the BBC it's top story this morning Bring back rules amid rising cases arch NHS chiefs Let's have a look Some COVID restrictions must immediately be reintroduced if England is to avoid stumbling into a winter crisis Crisis health leaders have warned the NHS Confederation said a backup strategy or plan B, which includes mandatory face coverings in crowded and enclosed spaces should be implemented UK cases have been rising, but deaths are well below the winter peak Business secretary quasi-quartank said it was not time for plan B And urged greater uptake of booster jabs The lower hospitalization and death rate compared to January show that this virus This is a virus we're learning to live with he told BBC breakfast And he did not want to jeopardize hard-won gains of reopening the economy and returning to a more normal life I don't want to go back to a situation where we have lockdowns. He said I Don't want to inject inject any hint of complacency, but I do think so far our approach our approach is working. Okay booster jabs We knew this was coming There have been remember this we went from three weeks to flatten the curve To jabs second jobs Variant after variant after variant Lockdown open up lockdown open up local lockdowns. We're talking about these things again Now we have booster jabs and here's the thing for every booster jab more money for big drug companies More money for GPs administering these GPs are paid separately to administer COVID jabs and Importantly, and this isn't being mentioned Certainly not be mentioned in the press, but it's not been mentioned by many commentators either and That is that every single winter there is a crisis in the NHS everyone all you have to do is a simple Google search on I've googled a few different things NHS crisis just in just Google that Year after year after year after year. I've gone into this in some detail previously but year after year There is a crisis in the NHS every single winter now here's There are crisis in the NHS It's the worst at the moment that I've known it But the crisis is because it's so badly wrong We can't keep running away from this reality It is not being run properly, and I know this for a few reasons One because I walked in it for a long time But two because winter comes around every single year There's always a winter and yet somehow Every single winter the NHS Seems to be caught off guard Oh No, there's a winter again. How does this happen every year? There's a crisis If you look back you'll see 2016 the worst year in NHS history 2015 crisis in the NHS goes on and on and on Every single year the problems in the NHS are these it is run by Several layers of bureaucracy They are not medical people who run it the bureaucrats The money is never-ending Politicians just promise more money to the NHS. That's what they do So the money is never-ending. So when you have an endless supply of money You tend to be less careful with money It also encourages sadly self-interest And these layers and layers of management Will use that endless supply of public money your money To fatten their own bank accounts And that is exactly what they do It's also a political vehicle and it's being used for politics You'll have climate change advisors and diversity this and diversity that Massive salaries And then no money for certain treatments. That's how it's been run Endless supply of money will encourage laziness and self-interest No accountability For incompetence none if NHS management Waste millions of pounds of public money They're not fired for it They're given more public money So they can waste that as well. That's how it works Political parties No interest in talking about this none It's just let's give it more and more and more money. That's why the NHS is in crisis but we Instead of dealing with that the reality the true problem the true issue Instead Will threaten And the language of the business secretary here is threatening language. We don't want to go into lockdown again It's threatening us It's that ever-present danger Of destroying the economy destroying society destroying our daily lives that ever present danger that they exploit To try to get us to do what they want That's coming back now. We were masking all that stuff going to come back This it feels like It feels like this is never going to go away Is this pattern just going to repeat and repeat and repeat and a method Of control You have to do this or the NHS will be in crisis We have to control your everyday life or the NHS will be in crisis Meanwhile, it is they the very same people who are controlling us Who have caused the NHS to be in crisis And who won't deal with the real crisis in the NHS Instead, they'll use it to impose even greater control on the people That's what's really happening Okay, let me go to some local news similar and related mismanagement poverty Pledge for the headline this morning pledge for action to halt soul destroying and heartbreaking flood of poverty in Hartlepool Councillors have stressed talking to people impacted by poverty must be at the heart of an investigation into abuse into the issue Members of the Hartlepool borough council audit and governance committee are continuing with an investigation into child poverty in the town As part of their work program for the year At the latest meeting they received presentations on the topic from the joseph rantry foundation And thrive a t-side charity to help guide and inform their research. Okay so massive poverty problems in this town and a third Latest figures I can find a third of children in this town are living in poverty Now the local council is doing an investigation into poverty And once again as I say this all the time every week I'll say it again the all of these issues are repeatable and and happen in towns and cities all over the country This also happens in towns and cities all over the country There's a problem Huge problem significant problem of real problem poverty. That's a problem. It's a real problem We shouldn't have these levels of poverty In great britain, which simply shouldn't this country is still quite well off It's just that the money we have is misspent So we've got a real problem poverty the local government carries out an investigation and most likely it will produce a report Because that's what they do They investigate and produce a report That's the extent of the governance and this again repeated all over the country Actual steps actual brave moves to tackle that poverty Such as job creation lower taxation, etc Spending public money On children last week. I told you about how children's health services are being cut That's a misspending of money actual brave moves to tackle poverty Are not undertaken For the simple reason that they are brave you would need to be brave principled and really care to make some of the moves that need to be made to actually end or reduce this poverty so instead They'll carry out an investigation and produce a report That's what we do and by the way That's also what bureaucratic wasteful left-wing societies do They appoint committees and then they appoint a subcommittee and then they appoint another subcommittee And then they have a meeting and then they have a meeting about a meeting Then they have a meeting about a meeting about a meeting then they produce a report and then they produce a report about the report And all the while the poverty gets worse all the while the taxes go up cancel tax going up again This is what we're governed by And until we have people who actually give a dam This is what we will continue to be governed by You need courage to make decisions in the best interests of the people you represent. Those decisions won't always be easy. You will get flack for it, you will get criticism for it. That's part of leading. That's part of putting, of representation of the people. It's taking criticism, taking flack and making tough decisions in the interests of the people you represent. But we don't do that. We have meetings and produce reports and investigate and then produce another report. All of which, by the way, is costing money. Money that could be used to alleviate the poverty. This is common sense stuff. I sometimes wonder what ever happened to common sense. How can you be, how can you be so lacking in sense as to spend money trying to figure out how to save money? Why don't you just save the money? This happens in the health service as well. Management consultants, paying out six figures to external consultants to tell them how to do their job, paying out six figures to external consultants to tell them how to save money. And that's not a joke. That's genuinely what happens. Let's pay this person a lot of money so they can tell us how not to waste money. Incredible, incredible. And it just carries on and on and on and on. Here's a related story. Hartlepool councillors sick to the stomach over impending budget cuts. So here's another, here we go again. So on one hand, what are we going to do about the poverty? So we'll have an investigation. On the other, let's cut our budgets, increase taxes and try to reduce our deficit. So taxes are going, local taxes, council taxes are going up and there will be no, at the same time, services are being cut. So what is the increase in tax going to pay for? It's going to pay for a reduction in the deficits that this same council has built up. It's unbelievable. Literally unbelievable. Well, it would be unbelievable to people who had an ounce of common sense, which I'm not entirely sure is the case. Related article, Hartlepool gets nearly, give me a break, Hartlepool gets nearly one million pound from the government to help needy over winter. Council bosses are being given nearly one million to help households most in need with the cost of daily essentials. It's as part of a 500 million pound government scheme, the Household Support Fund announced earlier this month and designed to last throughout the winter. A third of kids in this town are living in poverty. A million pound, by the way. A million pound will pay for just about, actually it won't. It's over a million pound is how much it costs for the unelected chiefs that make all the decisions that have put the town into a deficit of 7.523 million. So we're getting a million pound. There's a deficit of seven million. The salaries of the unelected chiefs is over a million. And still nobody, we'll have to have an investigation into poverty. Let's investigate what's going on here. We know what's going on, just told you. You don't need to pay me to investigate. I could tell you this for free. You're wasting money, siphoning off money to put in your own pocket.  That's what's wrong. There's your pub, no need for an investigation whatsoever. There you go, free. No reports, no meetings. I'm just sitting around wasting public money to figure out what's going wrong. I've just told you. You know why they do this, of course? Why they do this reports and investigation? To look like they're doing something. That's all it is. It's a theater, it's a state show. We have to look at all the poverty. Let's investigate. The investigation won't find, however, the truth, because the truth is they're the ones wasting the money. They're the ones causing these problems. So an actual investigation would reveal that they were the ones causing this problem. So instead, the investigation will show something else entirely. It'll blame someone else. If it's labor, they'll blame the toys. If it's labor and we've got surrounded circles, we go. That's how it works. It's quite simple. That is how it works. And as for this, £500 million government scheme to help people through. Give me a break. £500 million, really? And how many millions... How many... How much have you spent on illegal immigrants in the same time frame? £500 million is a pittance. From the national government. And you consider how much of that. Do I need to say, £14 billion in foreign aid? £500 million for the whole country to get them through the winter? Extremely difficult winter. £14 billion for someone else. £500 million for British. Great. Thanks. OK. Another story up this morning. Please, to improve women's safety by lighting up Hartlepool Railway Bridge. Councillors are calling for improved lighting under a bridge to help residents feel safer.  There is a huge problem in the whole country with violence against women. And do you know why? Now, I'm not suggesting Hartlepool Council can do much about this. But do you know why there's such a huge problem with violence against women in this country? Because the police are ridiculously bad at dealing with these crimes. We've been covering up crimes against young girls, for example, for decades, because it wasn't politically correct to prosecute. Even when they are prosecuted, the judiciary is also ridiculously inept, complicit in this. Complicit. The judiciary will give a far smaller penalty for violence against women than it will for, I don't know, fraud, maybe, drug dealing. Much higher penalty for that than for violence against women. Politically incorrect offenses will often get you tougher punishment than violence against women. That's the problem. Again, I'm not charging for this, by the way. So the Home Office can carry out a million reports and spend public money investigating why there's such a big problem with violence against women. I can tell you right now you've basically licensed it. You may as well, I mean, with the way the grooming gang scandal unfolded, you may as well just tell these men they can do what they want. If you don't punish them, then that message is received loud and clear. The reason there's a problem is not lighting under bridges. I'm nothing against lighting under bridges. Put the lighting under the bridge. The problem is there is no law and order. There's no justice. A problem, and if you look at one of the most notorious cases recently, this policeman, Wayne Cousins who murdered Sarah Everard, he had red flags all over him. He should never have been in a police uniform, but he was.  And he went on to murder Sarah Everard. And then they learned how can this have happened? It happened because you let him get away with things over and over again. He's a microcosm of society. You let them get away, you let these predators and rapists get away with this over and over and over and over again. The message is received. They're carrying on. That's the reason for violence against women. That's the reason you have a problem there. Free. No need. Pretty Patel, no need. You're welcome, by the way. No need to spend millions of pounds of public money trying to figure this out. I've just told you. Okay. Back briefly to the NHS. There are there is a campaign going on at the moment which I have just joined on Facebook to build a 380 million pound super hospital in Hartlepool. I hope it goes ahead. I will be joining the campaign for that because there is no hospital. There's a hospital but it doesn't have an A&E. There's a need and there's a need for a new hospital in the northeast and Hartlepool is pretty much the only place in the northeast of its size without an A&E, for example. But some of the arguments made and they are good ones and again there's common sense here so Glenn Hughes of fighting for Hartlepool hospital said the hospital, Hartlepool sits on a lot of land is a newer building and easy transport to the A19.  It's the... Thank you Glenn, bless you for your common sense. Just bless you. Extend what you have rather than buying more land. Common sense. Okay another story Hartlepool's fire and rescue service commits to tackling modern slavery and human trafficking. What a utterly depressing headline. There's a new anti-slavery trafficking campaign for want of a better word being launched by the by Cleveland Fire Brigade. Alright, to finish I'm going to finish on something slightly less depressing and I won't be here next week and the reason I won't be here next week is I'm travelling to London on Tuesday and I will be travelling back from London on Wednesday morning so I won't be here for a live stream next week so that means that the next live stream will be the 3rd of November which is post-Halloween and in view of coming which I love, I've always loved Halloween I finished with this story the spooky Hartlepool pub where unusual events happen almost every week unexpected reflections and people hearing their name being called when there's nobody else around these are just some of the extraordinary events experienced by staff at a Hartlepool pub but despite it all sounding a bit spooky David Clarke, manager of the Duke of Cleveland in Church Walk has said the events have never been a bother David said the occurrences usually happen on an evening when staff are closing up the pub he said it's a weird place it's not a negative vibe it's a really nice atmosphere there's a big mirror in the hallway and once I looked in there and something caught my eye I saw the reflection of a pregnant lady stood on top of the stairs straight away I turned and looked at the stairs and no one was there, there was nobody in the room I didn't know how to feel I thought someone was pranking me he said when you are pulling up on a night sometimes you can see people in the window but there's actually nobody in the building by where something doesn't click with someone the Duke of Cleveland is that pub and there is on the 30th of October a paranormal investigator is doing a walk around the Duke of Cleveland I've had a look and apparently it's all sold out unfortunately but the Hartlepool Art Gallery is doing some painting and I'll read it to you so on the 29th of October the Hartlepool Art Gallery is running haunted houses session where people are encouraged to come along and draw and paint haunted houses in the area sounds great actually I'll be back in two weeks time 3rd of November have a look at yourselves until then and enjoy Halloween I will, I love Halloween and I know exactly what I'm going to be wearing when I answer my front door to trick-or-treaters alright thanks everyone take care see you in a couple of weeks time of course I'll be back with my Monday Night livestream if you happen to be watching this in London next Tuesday night London Branch I'll be there, Ed will be there please do come along if you can alright everyone thanks a lot take care see you soon


Hello! What a surprise! Victimhood and grandiosity are two facets of pathological narcissism.  The compensatory aspect of pathological narcissism relies heavily on falsifying reality. And there are two ways to falsify reality. One of them is to say, I'm godlike. I'm a perfect being. That is grandiosity. It's a cognitive distortion. But similarly, another type of cognitive distortion is victimhood. It's to say, I am not responsible for anything that's happening to me. I'm angelic. I'm perfect. I'm blameless. I'm impeccable. I'm immaculate. Things are happening to me because I am supremely and infinitely good. As you see, both victimhood and grandiosity are two sides of the same coin. And indeed, the narcissist succeeds to combine them in a way that is highly specific to pathological narcissism. He says, I am a victim because I'm godlike. Now, how do you square this incredible circle? The narcissist says, I'm perfect. I'm a genius. I'm drop dead gorgeous. I'm hyper intelligent. I'm super accomplished. I am unprecedented. I am incomparable. And because of this, people envy me. Because of this, they want to take me down. It is my perfection that drives people to insanity. They victimize me because I am a kind of divinity or deity. It is the fact that I'm a genius. The fact that I'm irresistible. The fact that I'm amazing and fascinating and unique. The fact that I'm perfection, reified. These facts drive people to the point of misbehaving. These facts engender the misconduct of people. That's why they hurt me. That's why they trespass on my property. That's why they steal my work and my ideas. That's why they do these things to me. I am a victim because I am perfect. And this is the way the narcissist succeeds to combine grandiosity and victimhood. But of course, the narcissist's version of victimhood is grandiose. The narcissist says, I am chosen because I'm unique. I am targeted because I am incomparably perfect. I am made the butt of conspiracies and collusions because I am all powerful and all-knowing, omnipotent and omniscient. People want to take me down because they envy me. They are mediocre. They're pedestrian. They're average. And I'm not. And they can't tolerate this. So the narcissist creates a plausible narrative where it is his nature, grandiose, inflated and fantastic as may be. It is his nature that drives people to victimize him. He is discriminated against. He is ignored. He is rebuffed. He is excommunicated. He is appropriated. He is abused. He is maltreated. He is mistreated. And all this because people find his supremacy is incontestable superiority intolerable.  This is the combination. Of course, this means that grandiosity, both grandiosity and victimhood are cognitive distortions. They are ways to divorce reality. Both grandiosity and victimhood falsify the truth. Both of them impair what we call reality testing. Both victimhood and grandiosity are narratives of perfection in an otherwise evil, imperfect world. So these are grandiose narratives exactly like paranoia. Paranoia is also a grandiose narrative. I'm the center of attention. I'm at the focus of malign and malevolent planning and conspiring and so on. So this is a paranoia narrative which is highly self-centered and highly inflated and highly fantastic. The victim's narrative is, I'm chosen. I'm special. I'm unique because I'm super nice. Because I'm amazingly empathic. I'm an empath because I don't know what. I am targeted for who I am. So these are grandiose narratives. In addition to that, clinically speaking, both grandiosity and victimhood are what is called reaction formations.  You cannot accept yourself as you are. You reject yourself.  Sometimes you feel guilty. This is known collectively as ego-distony. And so you compensate for this by pretending to not be you, by pretending to be someone else, by adopting a fake identity.  He would reject homosexuals ostentatiously, thereby proving to the world that he is not homosexual. Similarly, the narcissist is weak. He is fragile. He is vulnerable. He is broken. He is brittle. The narcissistic personality organization is potentially the weakest, most enfeebled form of personality known in psychology. It's even much more fragile and much more vulnerable than the borderlines. So the narcissist compensates for this innate weakness, compensates for it by pretending to be super strong, by claiming that he is Godlike, that he is perfect, that there's nothing he cannot do. He can accomplish anything if he just puts his mind to it. By insisting that he is all-knowing and all-powerful, this is compensation for the truth. The truth is the narcissist is a bad object.  And to compensate for this, he pretends to be someone else, someone with properties and traits and qualities and characteristics which are the exact opposite of who the narcissist truly is. And this is known as reaction formation.  And so to compensate for this, he pretends to be a victim. It's a form of reaction formation. I'm not the abuser. I'm a victim. That's victimhood. I'm not weak. I'm super strong. That's grandiosity. Now, there's a group of narcissists who do not possess a bad object. They possess an idealized object. They have voices inside themselves, introjects, that keep informing them that they are really godlike. They are really perfect. They are really omniscient. They are really omnipotent, etc., etc. They are really perfect. This is the idealized object. The idealized object tends to support grandiosity. The idealized object drives the narcissist to believe that his grandiose fantastic claims about himself are actually true and that the false self is not false. This is the idealized part. And yet even this kind of narcissist resorts to victimhood because victimhood is morally superior. The narcissist regards the world in terms of a morality play. He is all perfect. Everyone is imperfect. He is all good. Everyone is evil, etc., etc. This is known as splitting.  In order to belong to the group of angels, he casts himself. The narcissist casts himself as a victim because victims are all good. Ironically, many victims of narcissists do exactly the same. They split the world. The narcissist is a demon, is diabolical, is demonic, is all evil, and they, the victims of the narcissist, are perfect, angelic, impeccable. They have no contribution and no responsibility to what has happened to them. They are, in short, idealized victims. So we see that grandiosity and victimhood are two sides of the same coin. They involve cognitive distortions, in other words, misperceptions of reality, which are emotionally invested in. There's an emotional investment in falsifying reality. This is not reframing, by the way. Reframing is when you see reality in a new light, which is true, an actual new light, a new light that conforms to the truth, to facts, and to reality. That's reframing. This is not reframing. This is falsifying reality, period. Faking it. So grandiosity and victimhood are cognitive distortions because they don't correspond to reality at all. They're not real. They're narratives, fantastic narratives, nonsense. Similarly, narcissism and, I mean, grandiosity and victimhood are also reaction formations. They constitute a rejection of something inside the narcissist, that the narcissist feels ill it is with, that the narcissist rejects. Most notably, his or her shame. Grandiosity is a compensation for this shame. But so is victimhood. In both cases, the narcissist is rendered perfect, impeccable, immaculate. And this is a good definition of pathological narcissism.