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"Zen in Our Time" and "Connecting the Dots" are themes that I have hit upon for 2025, forming the thread running through (one meaning of "sutra") all of my DharmaByte newsletter columns and online UnMind podcasts this year. Contextualizing the teachings and legacy of Zen in modern times — without throwing the baby out with the bathwater — is key to transmitting Zen's legacy. Connecting the dots in the vast matrix of Dharma — while bridging the gap between 500 BC to 2025 CE in terms of the cultures, causes and conditions — is necessary to foster the evolution of Shakyamuni's Great Vow, from the closing verse of the Lotus Sutra's Lifespan Chapter: I am always thinking: by what means can I cause sentient beings to be able to enter the highest path and quickly attain the Dharma? As in so many aspects of our overloaded society, when contemplating the next column or podcast, the question always arises, "Where do I begin?" I turn to my collaborators — Hokai Jeff Harper, publisher of the newsletter, and Shinjin Larry Little, producer of the podcast — for clarity and inspiration. Jeff responded to my call for suggested topics with an intriguing trio: • To everything there is a season• The wax and wane of householder zazen practice• What we are feeling right now IS impermanence manifesting itself Instead of choosing one over the others, it occurred to me that all three are important. And they are interrelated, in a kind of fish-trap narrowing of focus, from the universal span of spacetime as a causal nexus for humankind; then homing in on the social level, considering the modern householder's vacillation in attempting to pursue what began long ago as a monastic lifestyle; and finally zeroing in on the personal: the intimacy of realization within the immediate flow of reality. I will attempt to treat them in succession over the next three installments, in the context of transmission of Zen's Original Mind. TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASONIf you find the 1960s Pete Seeger song popularized by the Byrds running through your brain, you are not alone. If you recollect the poem from Ecclesiastes — which I studied in a unique, small-town high school literature course — you may be hearing echoes of: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. Or from Tozan Ryokai: Within causes and conditions, time and season, IT is serene and illuminating And finally, from Dogen Zenji: Firewood becomes ash and it does not become firewood again.Yet do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future, and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death... Birth is an expression complete this moment; death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring; you do not call winter the "beginning" of spring, nor summer the "end" of spring. There are many more such incisive and insightful references to time in the literature of Zen, as well as Western thinking, of course, most notably Master Dogen's fascicle titled "Uji," which translates as something like "Being-time," "Existence-time," or "Living time," as Uchiyama-roshi renders it. This 13th Century writing is said to have anticipated the theory of Relativity, Einsteins' prodigious accomplishment, perhaps the most important scientific breakthrough of the 20th Century. But these few recollections from the rich legacy of Zen's written record will suffice for our purposes of connecting some of the dots in Indra's Net, or the modern components of the "Matrix of the Thus-Come One" as described in the Surangama Sutra. Scanning the Biblical poem, it is striking to see so many various activities and reactions to the obligations and behaviors of daily human life listed in equally dispassionate terms, not implying false equivalencies, but for example to blithely assert that there is "a time to kill" and "a time to heal"; "a time of war" and "a time of peace" — in the same breath — is in itself breathtaking, considering the admonition against killing, or murder, found in the Ten Commandments as well as the first Five Grave Precepts of Buddhism. Jumping to Master Tozan, or Dongshan, the founder of Soto Zen in 9th Century China, we find a hint of some resolution of the "whole catastrophe" in his reference to "IT" being "serene and illuminating," regardless of time and season, causes and conditions. This "it" appears in various Buddhist sayings and teachings, as tathata in Sanskrit — the inexpressible; or inmo in Japanese — the ineffable, the essential. These all point to what I analogize as a "singularity of consciouness" that emerges in zazen, where we pass the event horizon of conventional perception — the mind collapsing inward of its own mass — returning to and revealing our Original Mind, merging subject and object, duality and nonduality, in mokurai — the resolution of all apparent dichotomies. Earlier in Tozan's Precious Mirror Samadhi, or Hokyo Zammai, from which the above quote is taken, he magnifies the central place of this "it" in the experiential realm of Zen realization: Although IT is not constructed, IT is not beyond wordsLike facing a precious mirror, form and reflection behold each otherYou are not IT but in truth IT is you Master Dogen's coinage of "the backward step" captures this 180-degree attitude adjustment in the way we usually approach learning, self-improvement, and general development as human beings on the learning curve of reality. "From the very beginning all beings are buddhas," as Hakuin Zenji, 18th Century Rinzai Zen master, poet and artist states in the first line of his famous poem, "Song of Zazen." For every thing there may be a season, but when it comes to the most important thing in Buddhism, there is fundamentally no change — from beginning to middle to end — of this "poor player," life, strutting and fretting his/her hour upon the stage. In another line from Chinese Zen, the third Ancestor in 6th Century China captures this succinctly: Change appearing to occur in the empty world we call realonly because of our ignorance. So, somehow, once again, we are getting it all wrong, backwards. Our recourse is, of course, to get our butts back to the cushion; trust the original mind; take the backward step; and embrace the revolutionary notion that WE are not IT, but in truth IT is US. I cannot resist the urge to close this segment with one of my favorite quotes from the great Master Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us. It may be a comfort to realize that "mine enemy grows older" as we age. We just have to outlive our enemies, including our own ignorance. Next month we will take up the second suggestion, the waxing and waning of householder zazen practice. Been there, done that.
With Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton and author of the bestselling “Co-Intelligence”, we explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT can enhance scientific creativity. Ethan emphasizes that AI excels at idea generation through sheer volume and recombination, outperforming most humans in many creativity tasks – though it does have odd obsessions with VR and crypto. However, AI is most effective when integrated into a collaborative human–machine workflow rather than used as a replacement. Ethan describes AI as your tireless science buddy that never gets bored or judgmental during brainstorming. We discuss how AI's "hallucinations" can be used for creativity, how AI can bridge disciplines by revealing hidden connections across fields, and how prompting strategies – such as chain-of-thought or playful personas – can guide AI toward more original outputs. Ethan stresses the need for scientists to actively experiment with these tools, share their methods openly, and reconsider scientific workflows in light of rapid AI progress.For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .
As we prepare our fifth season of Exile, we're looking back at our favorite episodes from seasons 1-4. Each re-release brings back a unique, fascinating, and often heart-wrenching story from the Leo Baeck Institute Archives. At the height of his fame, a shirtless, barefooted Albert Einstein escapes the bustle of Berlin for a simpler life. The best thinkers of the time gather at his beloved summer house in Caputh to laze by the water, swap ideas, and gossip. There, he can escape the pressures of global fame, but his summer haven can't keep him safe from the growing Nazi movement bubbling in Germany. The Albert Einstein Collections in the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York include hundreds of Einstein's personal photographs, many from Caputh, as well as the Guestbook from his summer home. After a few pages bearing the signatures of the friends and international luminaries who visited the Einsteins those short summers before 1933, most of the pages remain blank. You can see the Collections at www.lbi.org/caputh. Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York | Berlin and Antica Productions. It's narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Executive Producers include Katrina Onstad, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Produced by Emily Morantz. Associate Producer is Hailey Choi. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson with help from Cameron McIver. Additional sound by Kevin Caners. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Voice acting by Jillian Rees-Brown. Thank you to Outloud Audio; Erika Britzke of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam; Michael Grüning's, “A House for Albert Einstein”; Friedrich Hernick's “Einstein at Home” translated by Josef Eisinger; The Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The New York Times; and the Max Planck Society.
I dagens episode kommer vi forbi banankrisen i 1999 og Einsteins flugt fra Nazityskland. Og så har værterne tilladt sig selv en enkelt øl i studiet. God fornøjelse!Musik af Max Fomsgaard
Hej! I dagens lite annorlunda avsnitt av Vandra med Henrik hamnar han, sittandes i bilen någonstans i Småland, mitt i ett oväntat uppehåll från ett rejält regnväder. Istället för att vandra till fots blev det en fundersam stund stillasittandes, lyssnandes på bilarnas sus och filosoferandes över livets och universums stora frågor.Henrik delar med mig av sina tankar kring planlösa resor och den sköna känslan av att bara vara i rörelse utan ett bestämt mål. Sedan börjar han babbla om stjärnhimlen och fascinationen över Andromedagalaxen, vår framtida galaktiska granne. Det leder till en djupdykning i tidens natur och Einsteins relativitetsteori, där han försöker greppa det hisnande konceptet att vårt "nu" inte är universellt och hur rörelse påverkar vår uppfattning om samtidighet.För att försöka förstå detta på ett mer konkret sätt spinner han vidare på ett tankeexperiment om en potentiell invasion från Andromeda, där det blir tydligt hur olika observatörer kan uppfatta samma händelse vid olika tidpunkter. Trots dessa svindlande tankar betonar han att information fortfarande inte kan färdas snabbare än ljuset, så vi kan inte använda detta för att förutspå framtiden.Avsnittet avslutas med personliga reflektioner kring dessa insikter, som väcker både ödmjukhet och en känsla av samhörighet, trots att universum inte alltid följer våra intuitiva regler. Vill du slippa reklamen? Bli plusmedlem: https://plus.acast.com/s/vandra-med-henrik. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Man who was transitioning says he was wrong to change gender More than a fifth of UK adults still not looking for work Welsh tourist in US chained like Hannibal Lecter Woman who died in crash on the Strand named as Aalia Mahomed Teslas challenges run deeper than controversy around Elon Musk Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US Strangers twice as kind as we think, happiness study suggests Big drop in overseas students at Scottish universities Eddie Jordan Former Formula 1 boss dies aged 76
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv More than a fifth of UK adults still not looking for work Eddie Jordan Former Formula 1 boss dies aged 76 Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe Teslas challenges run deeper than controversy around Elon Musk Welsh tourist in US chained like Hannibal Lecter Woman who died in crash on the Strand named as Aalia Mahomed Big drop in overseas students at Scottish universities Man who was transitioning says he was wrong to change gender Strangers twice as kind as we think, happiness study suggests Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe Woman who died in crash on the Strand named as Aalia Mahomed Eddie Jordan Former Formula 1 boss dies aged 76 More than a fifth of UK adults still not looking for work Man who was transitioning says he was wrong to change gender Big drop in overseas students at Scottish universities Teslas challenges run deeper than controversy around Elon Musk Strangers twice as kind as we think, happiness study suggests Welsh tourist in US chained like Hannibal Lecter Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv More than a fifth of UK adults still not looking for work Strangers twice as kind as we think, happiness study suggests Welsh tourist in US chained like Hannibal Lecter Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US Man who was transitioning says he was wrong to change gender Eddie Jordan Former Formula 1 boss dies aged 76 Woman who died in crash on the Strand named as Aalia Mahomed Big drop in overseas students at Scottish universities Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe Teslas challenges run deeper than controversy around Elon Musk
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Gwyneth Paltrow told intimacy co ordinator to step back a bit What nine months in space does to the human body Lancashire prisoner on the run after van motorway escape Matt Hancock criticises wholly naive and hostile Covid inquiry Russia Ukraine Trump hails very good phone call with Zelensky Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US How killer Nicholas Prospers school shooting plan was thwarted Hearse attacked by vandals while on way to funeral Trump administration reinstating nearly 25,000 fired federal workers Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Gwyneth Paltrow told intimacy co ordinator to step back a bit Lancashire prisoner on the run after van motorway escape Russia Ukraine Trump hails very good phone call with Zelensky How killer Nicholas Prospers school shooting plan was thwarted Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe What nine months in space does to the human body Hearse attacked by vandals while on way to funeral Matt Hancock criticises wholly naive and hostile Covid inquiry Trump administration reinstating nearly 25,000 fired federal workers Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Gwyneth Paltrow told intimacy co ordinator to step back a bit Trump administration reinstating nearly 25,000 fired federal workers Hearse attacked by vandals while on way to funeral What nine months in space does to the human body Matt Hancock criticises wholly naive and hostile Covid inquiry Russia Ukraine Trump hails very good phone call with Zelensky How killer Nicholas Prospers school shooting plan was thwarted Lancashire prisoner on the run after van motorway escape Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US
Morse code transcription: vvv vvv What nine months in space does to the human body Trump administration reinstating nearly 25,000 fired federal workers Lancashire prisoner on the run after van motorway escape Venezuelan mother says son sent to El Salvador mega prison from US Russia Ukraine Trump hails very good phone call with Zelensky Matt Hancock criticises wholly naive and hostile Covid inquiry Dark Energy experiment shakes Einsteins theory of Universe Gwyneth Paltrow told intimacy co ordinator to step back a bit How killer Nicholas Prospers school shooting plan was thwarted Hearse attacked by vandals while on way to funeral
In der neuesten Episode des JWR Podcast tauche ich gemeinsam mit Thorsten Läsker in die Welt der Zeitreisen und Relativitätstheorie ein. Wir starten mit H.G. Wells' „Die Zeitmaschine“ und erklären die Grundlagen von Einsteins spezieller Relativitätstheorie: Zeitdilatation, Längenkontraktion und die Verbindung von Raum und Zeit. Wir diskutieren, wie Geschwindigkeit und Gravitation die Zeit beeinflussen, auch wenn diese Effekte im Alltag kaum spürbar sind. Thorsten erklärt, wie schwarze Löcher die Raumzeit krümmen und Zeitreisen in die Zukunft durch hohe Geschwindigkeiten möglich wären – wenn die Technik mitspielen würde. Wir beleuchten schwarze Löcher, Wurmlöcher und spekulative Theorien zur Zeitreise, wobei viele dieser Konzepte noch theoretisch sind. Thorsten erklärt, wie Wurmlöcher als Abkürzungen im Universum dienen könnten. Gemeinsam diskutieren wir das Großvater-Paradoxon, lineare Zeitstränge und parallele Universen – alles Möglichkeiten, um die Verflechtung von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft zu verstehen.Thorsten Läsker präsentiert abschließend angebliche Beweise für Zeitreisen, darunter Geschichten von John Titor und dem Grafen von Saint-Germain, sowie Stephen Hawkings „Party für Zeitreisende“. Wir hinterfragen, warum es bisher keine eindeutigen Beweise gibt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here I describe my interaction with the Gene Keys hologenetic profile which was so accurate it blew my mind!Find the gene keys and the work of Richard Rudd on https://genekeys.com. No affiliate links.00:00 intro to the Gene Keys book/course - an update of the i-ching - significance of 64 different patterns - number of different combinations of DNA02:30 The New Biology of Bruce Lipton, and quantum biology shows us that DNA is vibrational not fixed and responds to emotions and unconscious beliefs. 04:40 Consciousness creates reality. Coming into your true self via conscious connection with our world and our place in it. A guide to meaning and purpose set in motion at your birth. Plays into cosmological embededness of everything.07:38 Quantum Biology, mind and body connection, etc is being corroborated by Glen Jeffery at UCL Michael Levin's morphogenetic fields) and Jack Kruse, and Alexander Gurtzwitch09:45 Science beginning to corroborate new ideas. Einsteins idea of anything important being ridiculed at first. Biophotons, photobiomodulation for instance. Hologenetic profile based on birth date.12:20 My profile amazingly accurate - a synopsis. What I'm here to do. An analysis of my reality vs. the prediction of the gene keys. 17:00 Accepting suffering with grace, empathy and lack of judgement. Applying this to my own life will unlock everything - as I approach a new pathway. A plant medicine journey.20:10 My evolution - stepping up as a leader. Healing as a journey of uncertainty. Guidance of pulling together different strands enables us to move forward humanity. Lack of stagnation. Moving on.25:00 Standing at the cutting edge of human evolution. Crossing the science/spiritual divide. Decentralised healthcare is a direct threat to vested interests.*Watch another video**HEAL YOUR SPIRIT TO HEAL CFS/ME https://youtu.be/hXGaOjrV6PAWHATS THE MATTER WITH MEDICINE - IAIN MCGILCHRIST https://youtu.be/CdE1QphYKoUHOW TO HEAL BIRTH TRAUMA WITH EMDR https://youtu.be/JmtarRiGsgYEMOTIONAL RESILIENCE https://youtu.be/E5TYi9dEBEUWHY ANXIETY IS NOT A MIND ISSUE https://youtu.be/Ty-J2pu37tAHOW CHILDHOOD EMOTIONS STILL AFFECT YOU: https://youtu.be/8LzR8yhR8u8 *If you're suffering from Chronic pain, fatigue or anxiety, I CAN HELP*CONTACT ME: https://www.alchemytherapies.co.uk/Alchemy Therapies & Emotional MasterclassOTHER USEFUL RESOURCESGroup Healing Program: http://myemotionalaudit.comAuthor/Book site: https//patriciaworby.comPodcast: https://www.alchemytherapies.co.uk/po...121 and group therapy and training for stress related conditions like anxiety, fatigue and pain: https://alchemytherapies.co.ukSee in particular: Thrive! - an introductory mindbody connection program and The Emotional Audit for more intensive training.COMING SOON:Intensive Training Program: https://emotionalmasterclass.com
Welcome to ohmTown. The Non Sequitur News Show is held live via Twitch and Youtube every day. We, Mayor Watt and the AI that runs ohmTown, cover a selection of aggregated news articles and discuss them briefly with a perspective merging Science, Technology, and Society. You can visit https://www.youtube.com/ohmtown for the complete history since 2022.Articles Discussed:All the Superb Owl Advertisementshttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/watch-all-the-ads-of-super-bowl-2025/Thunderbolts asterisk explainedhttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/the-continuity-report/f/d/thunderbolts-asterisk-meaning-has-finally-been-explained/New Apple Home Products Inbound?https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/smacktalk/f/d/apples-brand-new-home-product-wont-launch-until-april-or-later-per-gurman/Sanctions due to Fake Case Citationshttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/lawnerd/f/d/no-42-law-firm-by-head-count-could-face-sanctions-over-fake-case-citations-generated-by-chatgpt/Warning Signs of Eruption and Tsunamihttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/satellite-data-analysis-reveals-warning-signs-that-foreshadowed-a-volcanic-eruption-and-tsunami/Fantastic Four Popcorn Bucketshttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/the-continuity-report/f/d/these-fantastic-four-popcorn-buckets-are-so-good-ill-be-furious-if-they-dont-get-made/What caused The Walking Dead Zombieshttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/the-continuity-report/f/d/what-caused-the-walking-deads-zombie-outbreak-the-creator-doesnt-want-you-to-know/Medicinal Mushrooms in Renewable Energy Labhttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/greenagram/f/d/i-grow-medicinal-mushrooms-in-my-renewable-energy-laboratory/NVidia's 50-series melt down.https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/nonsequiturnews/f/d/nvidias-rtx-5090-power-connectors-are-melting/Einsteins stunning ring.https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/euclid-discovers-a-stunning-einstein-ring/
Vilka kan utmana topplagen i NBA!? Jimmy Buckets-gate! SBL!
Herzlich Willkommen zur vierundzwanzigsten Tür des begründet glauben- Adventskalenders. Wir wünschen euch gesegnete Weihnachten! Wir haben unterschiedliche Referent/innen gefragt, warum sie auch 2024 noch gerne Weihnachten feiern. Viel Spaß mit unserem Adventskalender! Dr. rer. nat. Albrecht Kellner ist 1945 in Swakopmund (Namibia) geboren und dort aufgewachsen. Er studierte von 1965 bis 1970 Physik an der Universität Göttingen. Er hat über einen Bereich der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie Einsteins promoviert und war über zwanzig Jahre als Manager bei der internationalen Raumfahrtfirma „Astrium Space Transportation“ beschäftigt. Er ist Buchautor und gefragter Referent in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. https://www.begruendet-glauben.org/podcast/ https://www.iguw.de/ Ihr findet uns auch auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/begruendetglauben/
Franziska, Christoph und Gabi sprechen über die Versteigerung von Einsteins Liebesbriefen, die zwischen Romantik und Relativitätstheorie springen. Außerdem geht es um ein neues Abkommen zu Schleuserkriminalität und einen Besuch in Churchills Cabinet War Rooms.
2020 delades Nobelpriset i fysik ut för upptäckten av ett supermassivt och kompakt objekt i mitten av vår galax Vintergatan. Varför dröjde det så länge? Och hur vet vi att det är ett svart hål? De udda objekten som ibland bryter mot fysikens lagar finns lite överallt i universum. Och den som försöker förstå sig på dem drabbas inte sällan av huvudvärk. Intergalaktiskt är tillbaka med en ny säsong. För att reda ut frågan om svarta hål har Bill Burrau och Viktor Krylmark bjudit in Jonas Enander som är aktuell med boken Mörkret och människan. Han berättar historien och fysiken bakom de svarta hålen. Från den sedan länge döda prästen John Michel, via Einsteins relativitetsteori till dagens avancerade teleskop och teorier. Vill du komma i kontakt med oss? Tips på vad vi borde prata om? Tveka inte att höra av dig: viktor.krylmark@nyteknik.se bill.burrau@nyteknik.se Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thanks to our Partners, Shop Boss, and 360 Payments Recorded at the ASTA Expo, Gerard Tonno from NAPA Autotech discusses being an "automotive Einstein." He emphasizes the importance of critical thinking, passion for auto repair, and effective use of resources and tools in diagnostics. He highlights the necessity of understanding basic electrical principles, conducting thorough visual inspections, and practicing with diagnostic tools. Gerard Tonno, NAPA Autotech Training Show Notes: Watch Full Video Episode ASTA EXPO: https://astaexpo.com/ NAPA Autotech: https://www.napaautotech.com/learn Thoughts on Being an Automotive Einstein (00:00:28) The Importance of Passion (00:02:03) Utilizing Online Resources (00:02:54) Visual Inspection Skills (00:04:34) Foundational Knowledge in Electricity (00:05:41) Understanding Pinpoint Tests (00:06:43 Shop Boss – Shop Management Software built by shop owners for shop owners. It works the way you need it to, right out of the box. Find on the web at https://shopboss.net Connect with the Podcast: -Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RemarkableResultsRadioPodcast/ -Join Our Virtual Toastmasters Club: https://remarkableresults.biz/toastmasters -Join Our Private Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1734687266778976 -Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/carmcapriotto -Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmcapriotto/ -Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/remarkableresultsradiopodcast/ -Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RResultsBiz -Visit the Website: https://remarkableresults.biz/ -Join our Insider List: https://remarkableresults.biz/insider -All books mentioned on our podcasts: https://remarkableresults.biz/books -Our Classroom page for personal or team learning: https://remarkableresults.biz/classroom -Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/carm -Special episode collections: https://remarkableresults.biz/collections
Våra sinnen ger oss inte en hyfsad bild av världen med en mänsklig touch, utan något helt väsensskilt. Argumenten för att vi inte vet någonting om verkligheten hopar sig, konstaterar Helena Granström. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna. Ursprungligen publicerad 2022-05-09.Finns månen när ingen tittar på den? Frågan lär en gång ha ställts av Albert Einstein som en reaktion på kvantmekanikens märkligheter. Den nya teorin beskrev en värld där partiklar får verklig existens först när någon observerar dem – men var det en värld där också existensen av en massiv himlakropp manas fram av betraktarens blick?Einsteins fråga var förstås retorisk – att månen inte försvinner när vi sluter ögonen ansåg han, liksom de flesta av oss, vara en självklarhet. Men efter ytterligare ett sekels forskning inom teoretisk fysik, tycks dess svar allt mindre uppenbart.Att en partikel inte har några bestämda egenskaper innan vi efterfrågar dem är idag ett experimentellt fastställt faktum – och dessutom ett som inte bara gäller minimala objekt som elektroner och fotoner, utan även stora molekyler. En måttfull slutsats av fysikens landvinningar är därför att en observation, åtminstone på tillvarons lägsta nivå, inte är en neutral bestämning av en existerande verklighet, utan ett ingripande som påverkar och i viss mån skapar verkligheten.Men den moderna fysikens existentiella konsekvenser slutar inte där. I den andra änden av vetenskapens storleksskala har de forskare som studerar svarta hål åstadkommit häpnadsväckande resultat. I dessa extrema miljöer tycks en mängd saker som vi normalt uppfattar som absoluta vara beroende av perspektiv. Ska man tro de mest drastiska tankeexperimenten kan till och med svaret på frågan om huruvida en människa är död eller levande vara beroende av vem man frågar.Så långt den samtida teoretiska fysiken, alltså – men den är ju trots allt i hög grad en abstraktion. Forskarnas tankeexperiment är tveklöst fantasieggande, men de bygger på kvantmekanik och relativitetsteori, två modeller som trots sina enorma framgångar inte kan vara det sista ordet om verklighetens beskaffenhet, i synnerhet inte som de är oförenliga med varann.Och medan det existentiella dramat pågår kring de svarta hålens avlägsna gravitationsbrunnar och i materiens innersta, tycks vår egen varseblivning relativt intakt: Våra sinnen visar oss alla ungefär samma värld, och denna värld är också, tänker vi oss, mer eller mindre liktydig med verkligheten. Månen, för att återknyta till Einstein, försvinner inte bara för att vi tittar bort.Eller? Enligt den amerikanske kognitionspsykologen Donald Hoffman, har Einsteins fråga inte bara ett kontraintuitivt svar – den är dessutom felställd. Orsaken är att den grundar sig på ett felaktigt antagande, nämligen att vi ser verkligheten sådan som den är. Det är för övrigt samma missuppfattning som ligger bakom det som brukar kallas medvetandets svåra gåta, den om hur partiklars och elektriska impulsers rörelse kan ge upphov till ett jag som känner, upplever och reflekterar.Sanningen är enligt Hoffman den motsatta: Det vi upplever är inte verkligheten. Det vi upplever är det vi behöver uppleva för att kunna överleva och fortplanta oss, vilket inte alls behöver vara detsamma som essensen hos de objekt vi har omkring oss. När jag tittar på ett äpple och ser någonting rött, blankt och runt har det med andra ord ingenting att göra med den bakomliggande verklighet som svarar mot ett äpple – vad min perception visar mig är istället en sorts symbol som sammanfattar allt jag behöver veta om äpplet.Det hela kan liknas vid gränssnittet hos moderna datorer, där man för att använda ordbehandlaren inte behöver veta något om kretsar, strömspänning och programvara – allt man behöver göra är att klicka på ordbehandlarens ikon på skärmen. Att likt Einstein ställa frågan om huruvida månen existerar när ingen ser den är, slår Hoffman fast, ”detsamma som att fråga huruvida penselikonen i grafikappen visar penseln inuti datorn”. Och på samma sätt som denna ikons funktion inte består i att förmedla sanningen om datorns inre mekanismer, utan snarare att dölja tillräckligt mycket av dem för att användaren enkelt ska kunna fatta rätt beslut, är funktionen hos våra sinnesintryck inte att avslöja verklighetens sanna natur för oss, utan att förse oss med den information vi behöver för att överleva tillräckligt länge för att skaffa barn. Vilket också innebär att det inte finns någon motsättning mellan att sluta ta våra sinnesintryck bokstavligt, och att fortsätta ta dem på allvar – även om tigern som ett djur med randig päls och vassa tänder försvinner så snart vi blundar, så kvarstår den fara som denna randiga, huggtandade ikon representerar. Man kan tänka på en varningsskylt som i sig visserligen inte är farlig, men som man trots det gör bäst i att inte ignorera.Bilden av våra sinnesförnimmelser som ikoner utan direkt samband med den verklighet de representerar gäller enligt författaren inte bara för hur vi upplever objekt i vår omgivning, utan för hela den struktur vi upplever dem inom: Rumtiden, konstaterar Hoffman, är helt enkelt vårt gränssnitts bildskärm. Att så brutalt avfärda verklighetsstatusen hos allt vi trott var objektivt verkligt kan tyckas djärvt i överkant – men faktum är att den moderna fysiken erbjuder gott om stöd för Hoffmans tes. Också bland fysiker kan man få höra åsikten att rumtiden som koncept är dödsdömd.När de tänkare som historien igenom grubblat över medvetandets gåta formulerat sitt problem har de inte bara ofta förutsatt ett medvetande som upplever verkligheten korrekt, de har också i regel föreställt sig att medvetandet är ett fenomen som uppstår, mer eller mindre plötsligt, ur samverkan mellan delar som själva är utan medvetande. Hoffmans hypotes ställer inte bara det första av dessa antaganden på ända, utan även det andra. Om vi släpper vårt förfelade antagande – att våra sinnen visar oss verkligheten – säger våra perceptioner oss egentligen ingenting alls om vad i vår omvärld som är medvetet. Kanske är medvetandet i själva verket primärt, och existerar överallt i universum? Skillnaden mellan en sten och en myra, eller en myra och en tiger, eller en tiger och en människa kanske inte är graden av medvetande hos dessa entiteter, utan snarare hur mycket information vår perceptions ikoner förmedlar om de bakomliggande fenomen som svarar mot dem. Vad behöver vi veta om en sten för att överleva och fortplanta oss? Inte så mycket mer än att den är tung – för att överleva, få den inte i huvudet – och då är det detta vår stenikon visar oss. Vad behöver vi veta om en tiger? Lite mer – och om andra människor ännu lite mer, varför deras ikoner är de kanske mest sofistikerade av alla.Men i slutändan är, om vi ska tro Hoffman, den åtskillnad vi gör mellan levande och icke-levande ”en följd av begränsningar i vårt rumtidsgränssnitt, inte en insikt i verklighetens natur”. Att den yttersta verkligheten är oåtkomlig för våra sinnen skulle kunna framkalla en känsla av djup existentiell ensamhet – men möjligen finner den dystra slutsatsen alltså sin kompensation i upptäckten att denna verklighet är rikt besjälad.Helena Granström, författare med bakgrundi nom fysik och matematikLitteraturDonald Hoffman: Dold verklighet : om evolution, medvetande och perception. Översättning Tom Sköld. Fri tanke förlag, 2021.
Årets Nobelpris är presenterade och Åsskar inleder avsnittet med att skoja så han förbereder en prutt-present och ringer upp Gabriel för att berätta att han vunnit NobelFIS. Efter den inledande chocken så fortsätter Gabriel med att berätta om årets Nobelpristagare! Han beskriver glädjen i Sydkorea över litteraturpriset och vad namnet Han Kang betyder samt förklarar de dubbla AI-priserna. Därefter kastar dom sig in i historien för att lära sig mer om kärnvapen och årets fredspristagare Nihon Hidankyo. Dom tar sig från industriella revolutionen till andra världskriget och förklarar Einsteins teorier, atomklyvning och det fruktansvärda som hände i Hiroshima och Nagasaki i augusti 1945. Dom lär sig även om Kalla kriget och vilka länder som har kärnvapen idag, samt kampen för en fredlig framtid! Självklart blir det även massor av skämt och lite fis-fakta. Dagens ord: kärnvapen, atomer Produceras av Frälsningsarmén www.kylskåpsradion.se
Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! El punto de partida de este programa es la presentación del libro "Carta abierta a Salvador Dalí" (1977). Escrito por el propio Salvado Dalí. La faceta de escritor es la menos conocida: «Mi padre decía que era mucho mejor escribiendo que pintando, y seguramente es verdad... los pintores somos muy burros... en cambio los escritores son mucho más inteligentes, y si yo fuera menos inteligente, indiscutiblemente pintaría mucho mejor». Dalí nos cuenta y rememora desde sus años en la Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid, en donde conoció a Federico García Lorca «la más grande amistad que he tenido». sus relaciones con escritores y la escritura fueron constantes: «Hace cuarenta años que estoy escribiendo para saber quién soy y aún no lo he logrado». Joaquín Soler Serrano consigue que Dalí abandone durante una hora su personaje más superficial e histriónico, y así evidencia su excepcional dominio del lenguaje, siempre acompañado de un extraordinario sentido del humor: «Si hubiera dos mil Picassos, treinta Dalís, cincuenta Einsteins, el mundo sería prácticamente inhabitable, pero que nadie se espante, no los hay». Gonzalo Herralde realizó varias presentaciones con Joaquín Soler Serrano de programas de A FONDO, en la que sería su última aparición profesional antes las cámaras. En este caso se trata del programa A FONDO con SALVADOR DALÍ del año 1977. La producción se hizo gracias a la colaboración con RTVE para los Canales Temáticos Internacionales, que dirigía JAVIER MARTÍN DOMINGUEZ. Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de GCO SPAIN. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/2313218
Apeadeiros da conversa: .Palpites de dentistas. .Criança de bibe a fazer a contagem decrescente do foguetão. .O ecrã enquanto piscina-gaiola. .Einsteins em idade pré-escolar. .A escola e mercado de trabalho. .Gravidade é a mãe da comédia. .O roberto de cinco de anos a falar com a educadora de infância. .Carrasco de malmequeres. .Levar cavalos para a praia. .Pinguins e sons de baleia. ---- O menino está aqui: Twitter: twitter.com/RobertoGamito Instagram: www.instagram.com/robertogamito Facebook: www.facebook.com/robertogamito Youtube: bit.ly/2LxkfF8
Saul Perlmutter fick Nobelpriset i fysik 2011 för upptäckten av universums accelererande expansion – den helt oväntade upptäckten att universum inte bara fortsätter bli större och större, utan att det också går fortare och fortare. Han berättar här om hur upptäckten gick till. Och om hur det visade sig att det som Einsteins såg som sitt största misstag i själva verket visade sig vara det som gör det möjligt för kosmos att växa – den mystiska mörka energin. . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Schönberg föddes för 150 år sedan och förblir den evige radikalen, ständigt missförstådd men också fascinerande. P2:s Johan Korssell undersöker den okuvliga viljekraften i Schönbergs liv och verk. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Schönbergs tolvtonsmusik är idag hundra år gammal men fortfarande avskräckande för många lyssnare. Plink plonk-musik i mångas öron, en musik tyngd av regler och teori som inte talar till känslorna. Men inget kan vara längre från sanningen, för trots den teoretiska snårskog som omger Schönberg är han i själ och hjärta en romantiker inriktad på största möjliga uttrycksfullhet.Arnold Schönberg var många saker: kompromisslös tonsättare, en målare som specialiserade sig på självporträtt, en hängiven lärare och en av förra århundradets mest inflytelserika och på samma gång kontroversiella musikaliska tänkare. Man kan jämföra Schönbergs betydelse för musiken med Einsteins betydelse för fysiken. Schönberg ersatte dur och moll med ett nytt system och öppnade för helt nya uttrycksmöjligheter.Tolvtonsmusikens uppfinnare led även av en livslång fobi mot talet 13...I dokumentären samtalar Johan Korssell med Schönbergs 92-åriga dotter Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, barnbarnet E. Randol Schoenberg och Ulrike Anton som är chef för Schönberg-centret i Wien. Vi pratar också med Schönberg-beundraren och P2-programledaren Firas Haki.En P2 dokumentär från 2024.
Welchen Einfluss hat die Geburtsstadt auf die Persönlichkeit? Einen großen, geht es nach Albert Einstein. Obwohl der Physiker nur 15 Monate in Ulm gelebt hat, blieb sie zeitlebens ein familiäres Zentrum für die Einsteins, auch wenn die Stadt ihm während des Nationalsozialismus den Rücken gekehrt hat. Ein neues Museum in Ulm erkundet nun die Geschichte der Familie.
During this episode of Jones'n 2 Branch Out, Ryan and Alysha return to catch up on the stories we've missed, including Alysha's 'common sense' blind spots, Girl math and the DoomsDay Clock. Why Ryan swears off chaperoning field trips with kids who exceed his height, also a recap of Ryan's birthday weekend in New Jersey trying to Touch The Sky like Kanye. Listen to new episodes every Monday and Wednesday on Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify!TIME STAMPS2:34 -Things Alysha doesn't know (I mean who knew California had a whole forest?)9:11 -Ryan's sketchy trail walk 15:42 -Why Ryan will never chaperone another field trip25:34 -Jersey Driving, skydiving, go kart racing and BEAR sighting? 41:40 -Next trip is to Vegas and Alysha's already acting like a bird. 47:10 -Doom Scrolling
Where's Einsteins Brain? by 102.9 The Hog
In this episode, we talk about lost talents or lost Einsteins and Marie Curies in an economy, the relationship between inequality, innovation, and inflation, and more! Let us know your thoughts, comments, and questions! 05:00 Lost Einsteins and Marie Curies 12:00 Creative Destruction and Inequality 20:00 Inflation, Inequality, and Innovation 25:00 Cheezy Questions! Hosts: Ruveyda Gozen (@ruveyda_gozen) and John Van Reenen (@jvanreenen)
This is Adam Wagner's 18th crossword, and it was a doozy, with 4 debut answers, including both cohosts' favorite, 6D, Exploded, WENTKABOOM. The grid was replete with many other less explosive but still notable clues/answers, such as 24D, "The Way" in Chinese Pinyin, DAO; 9D, New Jersey city named for its most famous former resident, EDISON; and 1D, Bully in "Back to the Future", BIFF. A fine, fine crossword, and we are looking forward to Adam Wagner's 19th, which based on his prior record, ought to appear ... tomorrow!Show note imagery: Twelve Years a Slave, by SOLOMONNORTHUPContact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!
Lee Povey is the Founder of Maximize Your Potential Coaching. As an executive coach, he works with ambitious brands to help them upgrade their emotional software. To see problems differently. Because in business, growing pains are not limited to financial or structural. They are also emotional and spiritual. That's where Lee comes in. Back when I worked as Senior Copywriter at MUDWTR, Lee worked with our employees every week, and the results were remarkable. As a previous elite cycling athlete and Olympic Development Program Coach for USA Cycling, and from coaching hundreds of World, National, and Olympic champions, Lee understands the importance of World-Class leadership. In this wide-ranging podcast, we talked about how to give feedback, common problems for fast-growing startups, and tyrannical Einsteins. Reach out to Lee.This episode is brought to you by Claude Agency, an out of the box way to inbox.If you dig this podcast, will you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds and makes a difference when I drop to my knees and beg hard-to-get guests on the show. You can join my newsletter on Substack. It's glorious. Send voice memos and hate mail to thiermann@substack.com Get full access to Writing by Kyle Thiermann at thiermann.substack.com/subscribe
Ever wonder if your dreams were more than just dreams? Dive into an intriguing conversation with Erik Hoel on our latest “Securities” podcast with host Danny Crichton, as we explore the unexpected link between AI, neuroscience, and the enigmatic world of dreams. What if dreams are our brain's way of preventing cognitive overfitting, much like synthetic datasets in machine learning? Could dreams be the human equivalent of synthetic data? This episode doesn't just stop at dreams. We end the conversation with a discussion of Erik's essay “Why we stopped making Einsteins” delves into the intriguing question of why, despite the widespread availability of knowledge through the internet, there hasn't been a noticeable surge in the emergence of geniuses or a new golden age of intellectualism. Hoel argues that the decline in the production of geniuses, or world-historic figures, is closely tied to changes in education, particularly the decline in personalized, one-on-one tutoring. Could AI be the revival in one-on-one tutoring that we need to unlock genius? With engaging insights from guests Josh Wolfe and Samuel Arbesman. Don't miss this captivating episode that merges the mysterious with the scientific, offering a fresh perspective on the wonders of the human mind and the future of AI. Tune in and be part of a discussion that's reshaping our understanding of consciousness.
ein Vortrag der Literaturwissenschaftlerin Jutta Müller-Tamm Moderation: Sibylle Salewski ********** Albert Einsteins Relativitätstheorie revolutionierte nicht nur das physikalische Weltbild. In den Unsicherheiten und Umwälzungen der 1920er Jahre diente sie zum Ausdruck eines Lebensgefühls und wurde zur Zeitdiagnose. Ein Vortrag von Jutta Müller-Tamm. Jutta Müller-Tamm ist Professorin für Neuere deutsche Literatur an der Freien Universität Berlin. Ihr Vortrag hat den Titel "Albert Einsteins Berliner Jahre". Sie hat ihn am 25. Mai 2023 an der Freien Universität Berlin gehalten im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung "Berlin im Krisenjahr 1923: Parallelwelten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft" im Rahmen des Programms "Offener Hörsaal". ********** Schlagworte: +++ Albert Einstein +++ Relativitätstheorie +++ 1923 +++ Krisenjahr +++ 1920er-Jahre +++ Physik +++ Quantenphysik +++ Jutta Müller-Tamm +++ Literaturwissenschaften**********Den Artikel zum Stück findet ihr hier.**********Ihr könnt uns auch auf diesen Kanälen folgen: Tiktok und Instagram.
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Did Elon Musk break Twitter? Or did Twitter break Elon Musk? Ben Mezrich is the author of “Bringing Down The House,” “The Accidental Billionaires,” “Dumb Money,” and, most recently, “Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History.” Ricky Mulvey caught up with Mezrich to discuss: Twitter's impact on Musk's legacy, The philosophies that drive Einstein-esque founders, And the startup working to “de-extinct” the Woolly Mammoth. Tickers discussed: TSLA, META, GME, AMC Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Ben Mezrich Producer: Mary Long Engineer: Annie Pope, Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
EP313 - Holiday 2023 Preview with Rob Garf of Salesforce Episode 313 is preview of Holiday 2023 with Rob Garf, Vice President and General Manager, Retail at Salesforce. This is Robs' fifth time on the show, having previously been on episodes 110, 248, 282, and 299. It's happened again. Your Halloween decorations have come down (or at least your pumpkin is not in good shape), you survived Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, and now you're getting ready to ditch your in-laws and enjoy one of the most exciting retail weeks of the year. Yes, it's time for Holiday 2023! This year, we've decided to do things a bit different by previewing the holiday in advance of Turkey 5. Rob Garf has kindly joined to walk us through Salesforce's e-commerce forecast for November and December, and we compare it to all the other forecasts out there (NRF, Deloitte, Bain, US Dept of Commerce). In addition to the top line forecasts, we touch on retail versus e-commerce, changing shape of the holiday, discounting climate, inventory and supply chain impacts, top performing categories, the economy, and the impact of rapidly growing Chinese brands (Temu, Shein, TikTok). Throughout this episode make liberal use of real-time data from Salesforce Shopping Insights HQ, which tracks how 1.5+ billion consumers are shaping shopping trends. You can see a real-time holiday dashboard, powered by Tableau so you can interact with the data yourself on the Salesforce Holiday Insights page. Episode 313 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday November 8th, 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 313 being recorded on Wednesday November 8th 2023 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners Jason is 3:13 the lucky number I had the 13 is kind of on there so I think we'll count it. Jason: [0:48] It's a lot of threes. Scot: [0:50] Yeah yeah I think it's a primal have to get one of our research analyst to work on the okay so we are recording this in early November as Jason said so at that critical part of the retail calendar all the plans are laid the discounts are on the table Cyber Monday. Thanksgiving Black Friday everything's teed up and everyone's waiting in anticipation of what holiday is going to bring us this year. And we know longtime listeners will know that our holiday turkey five coverage with a lot of sprinkling of data is second to none in the industry and this year we're going to take it up a notch in past years we've had our friend of the show Rob Garf VP and GM for retail at Salesforce on after the turkey 5 give us a real-time view of what they saw and for those of you that have been with us very long time this is her Jason's mom primarily those were episodes 110 249 282 and 299 man that's quite a track record this year we are going to take it up and have a delicious rub Garf before and after holiday sandwich it's kind of like that turkey sandwich but we're going to kind of sample it here before we even even have Thanksgiving. Rob before I before I go on welcome back for the fifth and I think record time on the show. Rob: [2:11] Wow I love it this is I will have to call the Guinness book up and make sure we get this knocked in memory on this is fantastic it's always good to be here and even better Scott and Jason and first of all thank you for having me on doing a little bit of a preview because as you mention were normally crawling through the data talking about the holiday weekend and seeing where everything lands after the critical time period and it's fun to take a little bit of a sneak preview and look at what we're anticipating and what we're seeing going into as you mentioned one of the most critical times of the year. Jason: [2:45] I think you're exactly right Rob I don't know why we didn't think of this sooner I feel like they should have always been part of our holiday tradition. And I do feel like we're getting all of the Rob protein with none of the nasty carbs so that's like a. Particularly healthy Thanksgiving treat but Rob before we jump into all of the good data remind listeners what the heck it is you do for Salesforce and how you get all this juicy data. Rob: [3:13] Yeah that's awesome let's by the way the listeners decide you know how. Advantageous this is after the fact I hope it is and again we'll do our best so yeah and I've been I always thinking about it thinking into this conversation now at Salesforce for over 7 years but I came. To the CRM Leader by way of demand where and if you remember demandware now Commerce Cloud was the leader and the cloud space and we instrumented the platform early on to get access to everything that flows. Through our Cloud so you think about all the Taps all the clicks all the swipes. [3:48] Now we don't have any access to personally identifiable information but we bubble that up and it becomes really The Benchmark for what's happening in digital and over the years we've included. Things from marketing and Service as well to look at a more complete buyers Journey. [4:08] And it's been really fun each quarter we release our shopping index which is available on salesforce.com built on Tableau and it's interactive so you can slice and dice it by vertical and by geography and it really helps. Retailers gauge how they're doing vis-à-vis their peer set which of course is extremely important anytime of the year but certainly even more important during. The holiday week now I think there's one thing that I sometimes forget to say so I want to make sure right cover it now which is. Our index and by virtue of that our benchmarks are from a outside in perspective so they are a look at the entire industry, not just Salesforce data we've modeled this over the last 10 years since its Inception so it's really intended to look at. The overall industry and benchmarking how peers are doing rather than speaking to anything that Salesforce is doing so that's my quick infomercial but hopefully more than anything just a little bit of credibility as to where we get the data, what we do with it and most importantly the conversations were able to have similar to what we're doing here. Jason: [5:19] God so that that sounds perfect. I do want just a couple clarifying questions before we jump into the actual data because I know we're going to talk about holiday like what is your official definition of holiday what what dates are you looking at. Rob: [5:38] Yeah thanks for asking that's always an important question so we've defined it over the years as the complete November and December so that's our holiday our peak season look. And we look at in particular for again the holiday weekend I know you call it cyber five or thirty five, we have cyber week which starts the Tuesday before, American Thanksgiving and works its way through Cyber Monday it's just something we started from the beginning and 4y like to like, your rear comparisons we've kept that intact so in on referencing cyber week or cyber five it's really looking at those, those seven days now of course the definition by some has been elongated and I hope we'll get into that in terms of when does the official real demand start but to answer your question straight on Jason it's for us at Salesforce November December. Jason: [6:27] Got it and so for historical purposes you've always been located in November December and then you're predominantly or exclusively focused on digital sales so you're you're reporting on what actually happened and forecasting what you think is going to happen in terms of e-commerce sales but unless I had this wrong you guys don't put a flag in the ground on on what you think is going to happen in brick-and-mortar is that true. Rob: [6:50] That is accurate now we do kind of go on the fringes a little bit because the bleeding between online or the blurring I should say between online and offline so we do have, data on buy online pick up at store we do have data on returns as well which is by virtue of, definition multi-channel omni-channel type of process but we don't put a stake in the ground because we just don't have the intrinsic data to be able to bubble that up and provide on the actuals. Jason: [7:20] Sure and then one other fun fact you reference the shopping index and you always have like the quarterly recap on there but I think. For sure during holidays and I think you're going to tell me your round you actually have a real-time dashboard up there so it's kind of a fun thing during the individual days of cyber week to kind of pop in and see see what's going on after your family Thanksgiving dinner to see if you're still going to have a retail job when this is all over. Rob: [7:50] Yeah yeah we do exactly so during particularly cyber week each morning the team is getting up super early as you can imagine and work around through the data and we're updating in real-time the data from the previous day and so for any retailer who is looking for the latest and greatest certainly by I would say 10:00 eastern time at the latest you will get that and see that up there we do have many customers who do use that in there Roundtable boardroom discussions each day to understand how they're doing it repairing it and more than anything Jason truth be told we need to get it up that early because our boss this guy named Marc benioff is typically texting us saying where's the data because I want to tweet it so yeah as much of a motivator as anything else. Scot: [8:40] Always fun when you get the text from The Seer. Jason: [8:44] Slack's slacks the he sends wax not to. Scot: [8:48] A slacks yes sorry I was off I was off brand for a second yeah he Einsteins it to his his Einstein slacks you. You mentioned one follow-up on that you mentioned American Thanksgiving that prompted me to ask this is largely we're talking about the u.s. here primarily we're not going to this is an international I'm sure you can go International but, we're doing more us right. Rob: [9:12] Yeah I'm prepared to do whatever I thought we'd probably borrow a bit more into us but we do have Global numbers but yeah. Scot: [9:20] Okay we have time Jason's obsessed with these Chinese companies I'm sure he'll ask you some questions so. Rob: [9:25] That's fair that wouldn't. Scot: [9:26] Yeah he gets all his clothes from she in any way. So before we dive into the topic du jour which is this year's holiday 2023 maybe recap for listeners kind of that you know. I know we had you on but the dust has settled and I'm sure you're going back and looking at it now with holiday 22 what were some of the bullet items that you kind of you you're thinking about as we go into 23. Rob: [9:56] Scot you don't think the listeners have totally taken This to Memory what we talked about last November 29 come on. You're probably right that's fine yeah I get it not all of us live and breathe this but yeah let's bring us back and you know actually if I could just for a minute, to put 2022 in context you need to think a little bit about 2021 and let me just spend a minute there and then I'll fast forward to 22 which is if you remember some of us don't want to in 2021 it was truly one of the first times that demand, actually got pulled forward in the holiday season and the reason was. The first mile delivery issues were stuck if you remember so many products were stuck in the port in the US of a Lala. The containers if they even got to the port or having a difficult time getting off the ship in into the domestic supply chain and people saw a headline after headline when I say people like consumers by or shoppers and they realized if they didn't buy early in the season. [11:03] They might not get the product that they actually want because in the past they would just have a waiting game and wait for the last and final deal and so. Demand got pulled earlier in the season and oh by the way retailers didn't have to Discount as steep as they normally do so going into 2020 retailers thought. [11:26] All of a sudden there would be this magical shift to Consumers buying earlier in the year and you know what that just didn't happen, there was actually a really good point of why that didn't happen when you look at the first two weeks of November we saw some of the lowest discounting rates that we typically see during the holiday season and because of these lackluster deals. People really didn't buy anything they waited and they again went back to their normal buying Behavior. One other by-product out of that is those that did by early. [12:04] We saw that they actually return the product during cyber week cyber week last year 2022 at some of the highest. Return rates during that week of the entire season people were doing their own price adjustments if they bought the product earlier in the year and realize they could have gotten a better price so there's like. I don't know how you calculate a triple or quadruple whammy on the bottom line that retailer saw. Because they were hoping to chase the deals earlier or wait I should say for the deals into the season and consumers just didn't bite. Overall and then I'll stop talking for a second here is what we saw. For let's just take cyber week as an example in the u.s. we saw a nine percent year-over-year growth growth online and globally we saw a 2% growth so us was really buoying up the global number there but a lot of that Sales Online happened right before cyber week and through the Thanksgiving holiday. Scot: [13:07] Got it it's kind of coming back to me I Remember You coining The Phrase discount chicken I remembered that is that right remember. Rob: [13:15] Yeah yeah yeah totally and thank you so discount chicken you know for the first time that we saw, retailers won the game of discount chicken last year I'm sorry in 2021 they tried to win again in 2022 but it just didn't happen consumers are really wise the real patient and now especially as they're seeing headwinds in their economic future there's definitely searching out for better and best deals. Scot: [13:46] Yeah this this kind of goes back to our data question it just occurred to me as we were talking about this obviously the macroeconomic is different now does that factor into your when you swirl all this together and you guys put together a funk forecast is that is that an input. Rob: [14:00] Absolutely yeah for sure and another piece that we look at very closely because it's driven so much of the growth over the last two years is inflation as well and so when you look at the last two years much of the online and growth is from increased prices not increased demand so people are just not getting as much from their dollar because of those increases we're starting to see that settle down the last couple quarters which is good news we're not quite seeing in Europe by the way but here in the US and so we're hoping, some of the growth will come from We're anticipating I should say some of the growth this holiday season coming from actual increase demand. Jason: [14:41] God so I want to I want to jump in the big reveal but a quick quiz first if you don't mind so last year us e-commerce growth nine percent G20 21 was also an incredibly abnormal year do you remember what the actual number you guys got for 2021 was. Rob: [15:00] For cyber week that's a. Jason: [15:02] No or sorry for holiday if you don't have it it's fine. Rob: [15:05] Overall holiday for 2021 was nine percent but that's Global so I'd have to go back to see what it was with the US. Jason: [15:13] No problem but so last year in the u.s. nine percent growth which was outlier for because Global growth was quite a bit softer. And so now here we are getting ready for Holiday 23 and what what do you think's going to happen when how much stuff we're going to sell online in November and December of twenty three in the US. Rob: [15:35] Yeah, so we're anticipating here in the US basically flat online growth and anybody I'm talking to is candidly quite okay with that and let me tell you why they're not overly bullish about significant growth online this year. For two major factors one is, we actually looked at the kegger over the last couple of years going back to 2019 and if things play out the way we anticipate we're still looking at for the holiday season compound annual growth of somewhere between 20 and 25% and so we're really where we are better than where we've been in 2019 year-over-year so we're you know we've been looking at these data points for quite some time during the holiday season if we're going to do 10 to 12 to 13 percent year-over-year growth online we're feeling really good and we've seen the average over the last couple of years come out well over that so there's a baseline that we're still needing to consider as we think about growth the second factor is. [16:50] The store. And we can't forget about even though our data doesn't explicitly account for that what we've seen in our data is that people are still going online very, aggressively meaning traffic quarter-over-quarter year-over-year is still really strong however what we're finding is people are then doing what they've naturally done for a long time which is in many cases then go into the store to actually make the purchase and so it doesn't necessarily tell when you look at flat growth year over year for the holiday season the entire story we're still feeling really good about it what helps us by the way one more caveat that I'll put in there and I should have mentioned it's got just a moment ago when you asked how we get to the numbers one of the key influences, is what does it October look like and particularly prime or we should I was about to say Prime day but the prime big deal days and so what we've seen when it first came out a nice halo effect. And we still see a halo effect certainly during the dog days of summer in July since the Inception of prime day. What was that 56 years ago but we although we saw bumps in the early part when it. First was established in October there wasn't a significant halo effect that happened during Pride a meaning those. [18:18] Not named Amazon during the October event we saw nice traffic we though saw really low discount rates once again so people were being patient they're biding their time and so we are seeing some nice add to cart rates as well so we saw people were poking around they were doing their research they were starting to. Think about what their holiday gifting this look like but they were waiting and so that's my long way of saying we're anticipating a fairly moderate holiday but we're not at all discouraged by what we. Jason: [18:54] Totally fair and so and I want to put your forecast in a little bit of context but before I do you kind of open the door on this whole October and shape of holiday thing like hey. Super useful to have historical consistency so I'm glad you guys report. The same time period every year right like I'm by no means proposing that everyone should change periods but it is interesting there's there's a lot more promotional activity. Happening in October than was true 10 years ago right and in very specific ways you convoluted 22 years ago, Prime day was cancelled in summer and happened in October and then they move prom date back to Summer but they added this second prime day and put a lot more marketing behind it this year than last year so and every other retailer on the planet. Counter programs against that that holiday and so there's been a. An increasing amount of pressure to pull sales in in October and then on the flip side a lot of people feel like holiday doesn't really end. And told mid to late January and there's a variety of reasons for that but one very particular one heck of a lot of gift cards get sold and gifted during holidays and they get redeemed. [20:18] Predominantly in January and so I guess I'm just kind of curious I'm not sure you would have necessary data behind this but like it does feel like holiday is flattening out and I know you guys pay particular attention to cyber week which you know is still a huge outlier and obviously we see way more sales on Cyber week than a traditional holiday week but. As a. Relation to the total holiday period it does feel like that spike is starting to flatten out a little bit like do you see holiday getting kind of stretched and flattened. Rob: [20:53] Yeah I love the question in this I feel like we could look back you know in a year or 25 years and do a whole. [21:03] I don't know extensive research project around how, people in mindset and shopping has evolved because it has and of course the pandemic had a big accelerator to that what we've seen in our data Jason is there has been a flattening out throughout cyber week meeting the big Spikes have typically been Black Friday and Cyber Monday and those still remain the two largest online days of the entire year but we are seeing a flattening out throughout the entire week but we haven't seen a lot of the sales, when it's all said and done pulled into October we do see a little bit of a blip in and around, the big deal days and we actually to your point other retailers have preempted the sales and we saw that in July as well meaning doing sales events the week before and it does draw them up, some traffic but we haven't seen a large portion being pulled into that time period what I will also say again lackluster discounts played a big role we're anticipating, comparing big deal days to cyber week cyber week we'll see about a 40% higher discounting rate. [22:28] Then what we witnessed just a couple of weeks ago in October you are totally right by the way that. [22:37] The holiday season does definitely extend through December and into January that's why most every retailer has there. You know fiscal year ending in January so they can really reconcile and get out from under what happened in the holiday not just gift cards but all of the returns and exchanges that invariably happen as well but at the end of the day just put a nice little underscore here is in 2020 and 2021 we did see a bit of pulling forward into October a couple of percentage points of sales but we're forecasting that 25% of all holiday sales will happen again as we Define it the 7-Day is of cyber week. Jason: [23:27] Interesting very cool okay so before we dive into some more granular topics I do you want to put the 9% in context and some listeners will be familiar with Nate silver and his poll of polls in the the kind of boring, boring a political forecast but the way more interesting March Madness forecast so I like to fancy myself as the Nate silver of e-commerce and so I do try to watch all of this data and huge caveat, nobody's data is Apples to Apples right so it's not really a matter of though this number doesn't match up to this number. Everyone has a slightly different definition of what e-commerce means everyone has a slightly different set of dates that they're looking at and they have different methodologies right so your methodology I feel like you get perfectly accurate data from a slice of the market right like there's there's no like. Human. [24:30] Are introducing your data because it's coming right from the systems and that the challenge for you guys is to take your slice and extend that to the the entire world of retail. The and I feel like you guys do that really well. So another data source that of course people are sick of me talking about is the US Department of Commerce which are these like surveys that they force retailers to fill out and. There's. Entirely different challenges and flaws in their survey methodology and how they defined e-commerce but just to kind of put things in perspective. I'm going to talk about they give us both brick-and-mortar and e-commerce data and so I pulled right before a show I pulled their data for the historical averages of November and December and so for the 27 years before covid-19. November and December sales grew, 3.8 5% per year so that's brick-and-mortar that's not related to the number you gave it all so average retail growth in that States of America / the US Department of Commerce in November and December three point eight five percent so and then I remind people the three covid years 20 21 and 22. [25:45] Were the greatest three years in the history of retail right because we didn't let anyone spend any money on travel and we mailed 10 trillion dollars to every man woman and child in America, to spend and so via the US Department of Commerce data 2020 Drew 9.2 percent. [26:04] 20:21 Drew 12.5 percent in 2020 to grew 5.4% so three straight years of, way over the historical average growth right and then using that same methodology they US Department of Commerce reports internet sales I'm way more skeptical of their internet sales because of the methodology in the way they Define it but just to put it in perspective. [26:32] For the 27 years before covid they have e-commerce growing eleven point two five percent a year and so then 2020 when everyone was locked in the house and not going to retail we had this monster year e-commerce group 35% in November and December from their data and then the following year because there was sort of a rebound and a return into two brick-and-mortar sales e-commerce sales were actually lower than the industry average so 2021 they had sales at 10.5% so a little bit off of the historical average and then last year they were the softest of all they were seven point six eight percent which is the slowest e-commerce growth in Holiday in the last 30 years so that's just kind of an interesting context right so the orders of magnitude are all right you had nine percent growth last year they had seven point six percent growth they don't forecast of course and so then I start looking at the forecast and a big forecast that comes out every year we're all friends of the NRF here and there in RF members the NRF just did their holiday forecast their forecasting brick-and-mortar growing three to four percent so. [27:45] Pretty much in line with that historical average that's a deceleration from last year which was 5.4% and they're forecasting internet sales of 7.9 percent so they're kind of perfectly splitting the difference between the US Department of Commerce and Salesforce for whatever that's worth by pretty pretty broad range and so that just kind of passes my quick sanity check Deloitte also does a forecast now deloitte's forecast is a different time range they consider holiday November to January and they're forecasting brick-and-mortar 3.5 to four point six percent so a little more optimistic and they're forecasting e-commerce at ten point three to twelve point eight percent so again a little more optimistic and then Bain did a forecast this year and they have three percent brick-and-mortar so I just wanted to throw that out there that most people are expecting this kind of three to four percent brick-and-mortar growth and this kind of we'll call it eight to eleven percent e-commerce growth. Rob: [28:51] Yeah and I would say given what you just talked about. Others a bit more bullish on the e-commerce growth than we are but I think directionally both brick and mortar and e-commerce are telling a very similar story which is e-commerce is still alive and kicking but it now has to be looked at in the context of brick and mortar and I think there's a lot of factors in that that actually will make the reporting moving forward even more difficult it is making it difficult and Jason you and I have talked about this before it's just the attribution models because it's not just about last-click anymore especially as people might you know in many cases go online and then go into the store where's that last click and how is that I'd be factored so everything from. [29:38] What we had anticipated in seeing around, you know 60% of digital sales now influenced by the physical store because the associate is driving demand through, customer service or client telling or social media or they're fulfilling Demand with being able to, you know pick pack and ship and online order. Or what's happening in digital as well in terms of people buying online and then picking up in or around the store so I think what is super interesting. In addition to what you said is how these metrics might evolve over time because it will depend a lot on, by retailer who's getting the credit and I know that's something that's been talked about for quite some time but literally how to is it how is it being accounted for and what does that do to how their reporting the numbers. Jason: [30:33] Yeah couldn't agree more and just 11 sort of example to illustrate that 11 kind of category that sold almost no meaningful volume online before the pandemic was grocery right second biggest category of consumer spending but none of it was online before the pandemic now depending on how you count ten to twelve percent of its online and guess what it all gets attributed as store sales right because it all it's all bananas that are getting delivered from a store and you know so 100% of instacart sales look like store sales to the retailer. And so it like I agree with you it's just it's just getting more and more convoluted. Rob: [31:14] Yeah well it's an interesting point around grocery you know our data showed in 2020 and most of 2021 we saw Triple digit growth year over year because of what you just talked about you just wouldn't ordinarily or historically by groceries online what drove a lot of that and what I think will drive Behavior moving forward is in 2020 we saw a 40-percent increase of net new. Digital Shoppers so these are people that hang out online but they wouldn't click the buy button and so a lot of those people now want to go back into the store but they're using digital they're using their phone in particular to really be that connective tissue. Scot: [31:55] What's a continue to peel the onion here you hit on this a little bit but tell us more about what you think is coming up in the 2023 cyber week for example if I recall last year Cyber Monday was the biggest e-commerce Day Ever set, is that did you guys agree with that or what's a my misremembering. Rob: [32:14] Yeah yeah so we actually have seen Black Friday actually. Bust up to the largest I know that's kind of hard to how others have looked at it but they're both really strong and we anticipate that being the case again again though we are seeing a bit of smoothing out of demand throughout the seven days. [32:36] Particularly on phones and I guess that's not a big butt when we weren't traveling we saw the Resurgence of you know iPads and tablets and actual regular computers especially when you get nice groovy one Scott like you did just recently but anyways I am getting distracted here by your awesome new computer but. What we are now seeing though is I move back to mobile and what we saw also during Thanksgiving a really strong traffic particularly local times between 4:00 and 8:00 if you think about it that's essentially when people are finishing their Thanksgiving Neil and they need a little break there sitting on their couch and they pull out their phone and so we're seeing a lot of traffic. Via Mobile and social as well by the way we are anticipating and we predicted this going back in June that we're going to see. Traffic via social be at a 10 times higher rate. Than traditional marketing so there's a lot of budget being pushed towards that media and we're seeing. [33:49] A lot of success there now they're still a bit of a gap in terms of conversion rate through that channel but again if you connect the dots mobile. And social happening over cyber week in particular on Thanksgiving it's going to be really strong and we're seeing again retailers lean into that. Scot: [34:10] So Black Friday was bigger growth last year or bigger absolute dollars or both. Rob: [34:18] For us it was biggest absolute dollars the growth was essentially spot-on for both Cyber Monday and Black Friday. Scot: [34:28] Jason and I'm assuming that did other people say it was Cyber Monday or it was at all. Jason: [34:32] Yeah they're they're different different folks had that different Peak yeah so but. Scot: [34:39] Controversy in e-commerce I love it. Jason: [34:41] Yeah controversy and they're getting closer together like they're worth in the early days. E-commerce Cyber Monday was a giant Tower and no one had internet access on Black Friday like that that could really is no longer the case. Scot: [34:55] Yeah well rip Cyber Monday cool I don't have any follow-ups Jason's Europe. Jason: [35:03] Awesome so. I want to jump into one of the other topics you introduced a little earlier so far we've been mostly topping up talking about Top Line which is a kind of easy way to think about this and it's you know it's a it's a kind of easy way to get your brain around it, at the end of the day retailers care a lot more about bottom line and a huge impact on holiday bottom of line is how aggressively in deeply folks have to Discount in order to achieve those sales so, are you guys like what do you forecast I don't know if you have a formal forecast for discounts but what what should people expect from discounting this year versus last year and what what are the trends there. Rob: [35:46] Yeah yeah yeah this is good because I missed a point before that I want to make as a relates to Discount and so this will give me a good opportunity to bring that up but still has to go right at that Jason we're forecasting on average a. Thirty percent discount rate throughout cyber week and again to put that in perspective it was 20% here in the US during the October event for. Prime big deal days again we look at the entire industry not just Amazon as a relates to that and so we're seeing a much more aggressive, discount rate now it's going to differ obviously by different segments you're not seeing as high in luxury as an example we do anticipate for tour toys and a consumer electronics which have been a bit of a softer category over the last 12 months again especially because because of the high Baseline they had because of the growth over 2020 2021 but we're also seeing and this goes back to the pulling forward of demand. Is more and more retailers are providing. [36:55] Black Friday deals throughout the course of November and. What's different in the past was it was fairly opaque in terms of we're giving you deals but we're not really sure those are going to be the best deals right and though we're seeing now much more transparency there's one major retailer that I'm sure you can guess who's doing Black Friday deals throughout the course of November and they are guaranteeing price matches. If for some reason they do go lower and they are also offering buy now pay later so you can commit to getting the product so you don't miss out on it but you can then pay over time and so what really came to life for me in this topic was we were doing a round table. [37:47] In Toronto in June and one of the attendees and she talked about this again at dreamforce in. September so I feel comfortable talking about it is a digital executive from Desi mm which is a cool health and cosmetics and Beauty brand that also has two other brands one called the ordinary and they have something that they've been doing for quite some time calling it, slow vember and their whole point is don't cause any urgency but rather. Make it a more relaxed buying experience and their point is throughout the course of all of November we're going to provide the same exact discount no matter when. And if you buy it and so we're seeing that a bit more and more some of it is coming by way of. [38:38] Early Access or exclusivity but also again extending and providing visibility, part of it is again trying to create that confidence that you're getting the best and final deal and also by the way you talk about the bottom line Jason. Is trying to reduce the Deluge of returns that often happen a lot of retailers. Are changing 88 percent according to our research are changing their returns policies and that's going to be a. Big risk and what and how that impacts holiday purchases this year. Jason: [39:13] Yeah you know it's funny there's so many moving Parts it's so complicated you think about like what a big impact inflation had on last holiday and you know good news like it seems like inflation is going to be lower this holiday. Consumer was in a better economic position last year than it seems like they're getting their sure we're seeing credit and defaults and things like that start start to creep up so there's there's just all these moving Parts but one thing I think a lot of people lose sight of is in the last three years predominately driven by the pandemic every retailer has completely reinvented their supply chain and their demand forecasting and I would argue everybody's way better at it now and they have way more agile Supply chains and there they're they're a lot more accurate with their level of inventory which means. They're more confident they're going to sell through their inventory and that changes their discount strategy like they're just all these moving parts that make it really hard to compare your over year when you know. Preview point the last three years sometimes we didn't have anything to sell and then the next year we had two years worth of stuff to say so. Rob: [40:24] I was just talking about that with an executive just earlier today and how retailers have gotten as you said better at demand forecasting. Better at Inventory management and I joke sometimes although I'm only half joking that supply chain has really come to the front office it's like really part of the customer experience at this point and has such an opportunity, to either negatively impact our hopefully positively impact. The customer experience especially when you're you know trying to find product after the shipping cut off window we're anticipating once again a huge uptick for those that have the ability for Consumer to buy online and. Pick it up in and around the store after. [41:06] The ship and cut off window we're seeing seven times higher growth rate for those that have that capability because essentially you're kind of shutting down your online doors if you cannot. Fulfill those orders after the fact and so but that requires to your point Jason like a lot of tuning. Around supply chain order management inventory oh and by the way store associates as well we have to. You know planned for that extra time that they'll have to take to fulfill that order will have to provide the right incentives and will have to give them the tools as well and I think retailers have gotten better at it. I don't think anybody's fully cracked the code but going back to your bottom line point last year for us the holiday theme was profitability and that doesn't go away I think people have gotten meaning retailers have gotten better at it but certainly always opportunity so I'm glad you called that out. Jason: [42:02] Yeah I like to say profit is cool again. Rob: [42:04] Providence cool again yeah. Jason: [42:06] The if you take nothing else away from this episode profit is cool. The the way it's funny like I joke about this but it's kind of serious when I started my career the the VP of supply chain probably started his career as a truck driver and and today that VP of supply chain like probably has a PHD in data science um so it's a that that occupation has dramatically changed the one other follow-up question. One of the cool things about your data set versus some of these other ones I look at is. You guys have real-time access to the data so as we record this we're eight days into November have you seen anything interesting or there any patterns that have stood out it you does it make you more confident in your forecast or in anything that's interesting for listeners to know. Rob: [43:01] Yeah we did look at the first couple days of November and also of course looked at October it's pretty consistent with what we saw, in Q3 in the US we're basically flat in terms of growth however traffic is up so traffic is up four percent. Orders are slightly down what we've seen which I think again is a very nice leading indicator is, product view rates have increased by 5% and add to cart month-over-month so September to October plus a little bit of November we've seen a slight uptick as well so what that's telling us is people are interested. They're doing their research. They're looking for the best deals they're understanding where the inventory is available and so that they're ready to make the move when they feel like they're getting the best and most value. Scot: [43:58] Cool so it sounds like if traffic's up in orders are down a lot of Tire kick in and kind of prepping and watching and making your list and you know could be the start of discount chicken 2.0 will see. Rob: [44:10] There you go exactly 2.0 I'm using that Scott I'm grabbing that I hope that's okay. Scot: [44:14] Discount chicken the chickens Strike Back. Rob: [44:18] Well and also I mean you talked about kick the tires so I think it's a good opportunity for a promo for spiffy at this point too so don't forget to get your gift cards as well right. Scot: [44:28] Yeah yeah we will be running some promos thanks. Jason: [44:30] And if you do kick your tires Scott can come to your house and replace them for you. Rob: [44:34] Exactly. Scot: [44:36] And shop for the new shoes online. Rob: [44:38] There you go I think there's a mash up there there's going to be spiffy and a DDOS coming together for anyways I don't know we'll leave that to the markers. Scot: [44:48] That's a good segue into my question in the predictions on category so I remember last year you guys had some interesting data on that does your prediction. Kind of data science get down into the category slicing of things or that's going to be more in the rearview. Rob: [45:06] Yeah no we certainly look at that we do it obviously based on what we've seen historically we're anticipating for the holiday. Active apparel active Footwear Health and Beauty being really strong so. You know we talk about the big number because that gets the headline in terms of essentially flat growth but we had tisza Pate some nice growth in those areas it's going to be a challenging partly because of comping as a relates to toys and gaming and consumer electronics if you think about that's just macro trend. People are looking for Comfort part of it is coming out of covid and maybe not all of us getting back into three piece suits but also when you feel a little bit of economic uncertainty I was listening to some Financial show. [46:02] While I was traveling over the last couple weeks and somebody put it as kind of the household PL or the household balance sheet you know when you're looking at that in your making choices you're taking more control of your finances which is happening people often migrate not only obviously to value, and safety they're looking at comfort and so there's something to be said for comfort and shoes and Footwear comfort, in apparel and almost the openness to be a bit more comfortable both in Social and in work situation so what are anticipating like I said active apparel active Footwear Health and Beauty being really strong luxury as well don't sleep on luxury they've been the most resilient category. In the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic and so that end of the market has held really well we're seeing a little bit. Of softness and what I'll call the aspirational luxury but as a whole that category is looking really strong and we anticipate it looking pretty strong, during the holiday as well. Scot: [47:12] Yeah this is old school but I remember a channel advisor going through 08-09 we were always shocked that luxury you know it's like the world is falling apart around us and people are like oh yeah I'll get a get a 400 dog and back it's gone. That part of the market just doesn't care that they're immune to those things I guess. Rob: [47:30] They're pretty resilient. Yeah I mean one other thing I'll throw in there just because I'm talking about it more and more with customers as we think about the holiday more as a. I think Bellwether to what will anticipate next year over the course and this is a global number but over the course of holiday were anticipating 194 billion dollars of online sales being influenced by a. Sorry are you thought you were going to get through this whole I know should I have not done that I'm sorry because you definitely that's on your bingo sheet. Jason: [48:07] Now I have to check the there's a I in this episode flag on iTunes. Rob: [48:11] Exactly well might get some more traffic that way so who knows but we find that super interesting most of it I want to like temper that. A lot because people are getting really excited about that headline is most of it will be from predictive a I like product recommendations which we've been doing for quite some time we're starting to see some early adoption of generative AI whether that's in email marketing with subject lines or body copy for that Saint product detail page with product descriptions or in service super interesting wood Gucci is doing and what they call a Gucci 9 their service center and teeing up responses for their agent to make them more efficient and allow them to scale but also stay on brand and so we'll see that a bit more but again a vast majority like I said it's around globally sixteen Seventeen percent of all sales will be influenced by AI this holiday. Jason: [49:06] That interesting so Rob we're almost out of time but I want to throw a super meaty 12 you for for a final question Scott was making fun of me but I am super interested in these Chinese brands that are capturing attention and share in the u.s. right and in particular that's that's Tim ooh which is has more traffic than Target more sales than Ed see in the United States Xi'an is the largest apparel reseller in the United States and then to a lesser extent Tick-Tock which has the vast majority of consumers attention in the United States and is now trying to sell stuff to people. What super interesting is it's not obvious those guys are all growing at Breakneck Pace much faster than your your nine percent growth number it's not obvious if or who they're taking share from so I'm curious of you if you have any POV it kind of seems like there they're inventing new demand or at the very least they're taking sure from brick-and-mortar it does not appear they're taking sure from the Amazons of the world. Rob: [50:09] Yeah that's awesome I'm glad you're addressing this I've just spent a couple weeks. In Europe I was in four different cities so talking to a lot of luxury Brands talking to a lot of traditional brick and mortars, and this is an area one of the executives put out Tech intermediary and I told him I would steal that and here you go I'm stealing it. Because I would say those that you just categorized are really wedging themselves in between the demand and the supply and they're creating a whole new platform where. It was just an originally with Tik-Tok and others about inspiration and now it's about purchase and so you know what we're seeing in Jason you and I have talked about this got 20 degree as well this idea of embedded Commerce or shopping at the edge. Where the buy button is being pushed up through the funnel on these delivery platforms again these Tech intermediaries I mean if you think about it they're almost like. The next generation of the shopping mall the shopping mall is created because of access because the highway here in the states and it created a place for people to hang out for people to get some food for people to shop. [51:16] People to socialize and because of that hey they could have tenants who that would then pay rent and sell stuff right and it's not dissimilar to what these Tech into mediators are doing in that they're monetizing their traffic I think they're coming after, the brick-and-mortar to a degree they're all so I wouldn't say creating more demand but fraying some of the man from. The brand sites because the brands are showing up there and so I would say there. [51:52] A little bit creating more demand but more than that they're kind of defraying the demand we've seen is. A high degree of growth thirty percent over the last couple of years of growth on these third-party intermediaries that we're talking about and they are taking from other platforms. Jason: [52:14] Interesting I don't know what the real answer is but I do know it's super interesting and important to pay attention to so I'm glad we brought it up but Rob that is going to have to be where we leave it because we have used up all of our allotted time I'm going to make sure to put a link to the Salesforce holiday dashboard in the show notes and super grateful for you taking at time and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and we're looking forward to talking with you right after Cyber Monday. Rob: [52:45] Thanks Jason Banks got ya looking for doing a short couple weeks looking forward to talking to you then. Scot: [52:50] You robbed remind listeners where they can find your pontification xand and do they just Google the the index to find your daily things or like is there a quick URL that you guys have that. Rob: [53:04] Yeah you know to be honest with you the best way to is go to Google and put in shopping index Salesforce and you'll get to our holiday insights Hub so it not only has the dashboards but has all of the blog's were writing and all of the up-to-date analysis. Scot: [53:20] Cool well thanks we really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to deliver this delicious holiday sandwich for our for Jason I in our listeners. Jason: [53:31] All right you guys be well and until next time happy commercing!
Everyone knows the famous formula E=MC2. Especially if you were a maths nerd as a child - like I was. Many Maths and Physics classes diving deeply into this formula.But what if we looked at it for our business as well.With some simple tweaks, we can create an incredibly powerful formula for our business success, and our wealth creation.
De mest forbløffende nyhetene fra forskningens verden. - Både gode og dårlige nyheter fra månelandingene som har skjedd den siste uka. - Innsekter sliter seg ut i lysforurensede områder. - Ny teori om mørk materie, kanskje. Kan Newton og Einsteins teorier stå for fall? Hør episoden i appen NRK Radio
Live from the heart of AMERICA—I'm Steve Gruber—In the Foxhole of Freedom—I am your Soldier of Truth—putting the spotlight into the darkness everyday—God Bless America this is the Steve Gruber Show! And here are 3 Big Things you need to know—to start this hour— Number One— At Hillsdale College—the professors and the students have proven and now built on one of Einsteins most incredible theories—it is amazing—time travel is coming— Number Two— The National Defense Authorization Act—has now kicked open the door for the government to do something that has never been allowed in American history—and that is direct propaganda at the public— Number Three— Its really no wonder that faith in our institutions is at an all time low— I mean who can trust a government that leaves the border wide open—gives the Presidents junkie kid a pass on numerous serious crimes that would have meant prison for any one of us—a government that locked us down and lied about the actual science of Covid-19 and continues to lie about the science of Climate Change while pursuing ever more draconian and Orwellian ideas at the expense of Freedom and Liberty— Today I am going to spend a lot of time—going through the testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray—who had a lot of questions asked BUT very few answers to the most serious ones— It is a very sad day in America—when we no longer trust those with the most power to use it fairly and even-handedly BUT that is where we find ourselves—in a country being turned upside down and inside out—by political agendas and not the concerns for freedom, liberty and American citizens—
Called the “Einsteins of Love,” Drs. John and Julie Gottman share their insights and strategies for building love and long-lasting relationships, offering a deep dive into the science of what makes relationships work - and thrive.John and Julie have been studying love for over five decades; they've compiled data on thousands of couples, all in service of one goal: to identify the building blocks of a good relationship. Their latest book, The Love Prescription, is a New York Times bestseller, detailing a simple but powerful 7-day plan to transform your relationship. There's a reason they've been called “The Einstein of Love” and “the dean of marriage experts.” John was named one of the Top 10 Most Influential Therapists of the past quarter-century by the Psychotherapy Networker. Julie was named Washington State Psychologist of the Year and received the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from Psychotherapy Networker. Together they've co-authored many bestselling books and founded The Gottman Institute and Affective Software, Inc. – all to further their commitment to research-based approaches to relationship. Whether you're a skeptic or a romantic; no matter if you're married, pursuing romantic relationship or longing for a way to expand your perspective on either, I trust you'll find this conversation truly enlightening.-----You can WATCH this episode on our YouTube channel.Connect with us on our Instagram.For more information and shownotes from every episode, head to findingmastery.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
One day these two Einsteins went out to build a house.
On this week's episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: TBR evaluation and a great e-reader setup Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: an exploration and praise of the Quiet book The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives As per usual, time-stamped show notes are below with references to every book and resource we mentioned in this episode. If you'd like to listen first and not spoil the surprise, don't scroll down! We are now including transcripts of the episode (this link only works on the main site). The goal here is to increase accessibility for our fans! *Please note that all book titles linked below are Bookshop affiliate links. Your cost is the same, but a small portion of your purchase will come back to us to help offset the costs of the show. If you'd prefer to shop on Amazon, you can still do so here through our main storefront. Anything you buy there (even your laundry detergent, if you recently got obsessed with switching up your laundry game) kicks a small amount back to us. Thanks for your support!* . . . . 1:44 - Bookish Moment of the Week 4:14 - Kindle Oasis 4:16 - Casebot Kindle Oasis Case 7:01 - Kindle Paperwhite 7:38 - Current Reads 7:53 - Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (Kaytee) 12:29 - The Drift by C.J. Tudor 12:44 - The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor (Meredith) 17:52 - The Whisper Man by Alex North 17:53 - The Chestnut Man by Soren Sveistrup 17:54 - The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard 18:42 - Chef's Kiss by TJ Alexander (Kaytee) 19:18 - Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl 23:35 - The Candymakers by Wendy Mass (Meredith) 25:46 - The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart 26:53 - Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh 27:25 - The Book Scavengers by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman 27:27 - Winterhouse by Ben Guterson 27:53 - The Einsteins of Vista Point by Ben Guterson 28:28 - Violeta by Isabel Allende (Kaytee) 28:34 - An Unlikely Story 32:11 - Never Lie by Freida McFadden (Meredith) 38:02 - The Housemaid by Freida McFadden 38:38 - Deep Dive: Quiet Books 43:00 - Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry 44:07 - The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry 45:42 - Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 47:18 - Love and Saffron by Kim Fay 48:09 - Tara Road by Mauve Binchey 48:35 - We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates 48:37 - The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein 48:45 - The Dutch House by Anne Patchett 48:46 - Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell 50:45 - What Should I Read Next w/Anne Bogel 50:58 - From the Front Porch w/Annie B. Jones 51:30 - Meet Us At The Fountain I wish we all had readerly “What Should I Read Next” bubbles that popped up when talking with new readers. (Kaytee) I wish everyone would shake up their reading formats and do something outside their “norm”. (Meredith) Connect With Us: Meredith is @meredith.reads on Instagram Kaytee is @notesonbookmarks on Instagram Mindy is @gratefulforgrace on Instagram Mary is @maryreadsandsips on Instagram Roxanna is @roxannatheplanner on Instagram currentlyreadingpodcast.com @currentlyreadingpodcast on Instagram currentlyreadingpodcast@gmail.com Support us at patreon.com/currentlyreadingpodcast and www.zazzle.com/store/currentlyreading
Wie hätte der Jahresrückblick 1922 geklungen? Es war das Jahr der Erfindung der Gummibärchen, von Einsteins erster Vorlesung zur Relativitätstheorie, von Mussolinis Machtergreifung. Und 1922 waren die Menschen noch geprägt von den Nachwirkungen eines Weltkriegs, von dem noch niemand wusste, dass er später einmal der Erste Weltkrieg heißen würde... Autor: Thomas Pfaff Von Thomas Pfaff.
This is an episode for the visionaries, the radicals, the new and solution thinkers among us. For those who have ideas that are different than their family members ideas or perhaps their peers—or the other parents around them with children the same age. Being ahead of the crowd is no easy task. It takes courage and bravery—it takes being able to deal with not everyone really getting who you are or where you are going with this while you're doing it. It's for the modern day, Einsteins or Shirley Chisholms, or Jane Goodalls, or Harriet Tubmans, those who whatever their scope— are internally filled with solutions and the tenacity to move forward with whatever it is they do. It's encouragement for you and all of us who have just been through and continue to be in a great period of disruption. This a solution making moment we're in in history. AND, in this episode I also tell some stories of stupid things I've done by way of encouragement! So sit back and enjoy. It's intended to give courage and heart and help you know that you are not alone, revolutionary. You are not alone and are needed and welcome here now.Show NotesYes, tell me! How the heck do I tell the difference between the voice of my intuition and my “fear-based” ideas? Download the free audio here.Empath Core Tools program“44 Signs You Are An Empath” free download“Empath—How To Tell If What You Feel Belongs To You” free download Laundry soap sheetsLaundry eggSolid bar dish soapAimée on InstagramAimée on FacebookFor more about Aimée, her work, readings, speaking, or classes visit www.AimeeCartier.com.
At the height of his fame, a shirtless, barefooted Albert Einstein escapes the bustle of Berlin for a simpler life. The best thinkers of the time gather at his beloved summer house in Caputh to laze by the water, swap ideas, and gossip. There, he can escape the pressures of global fame, but his summer haven can't keep him safe from the growing Nazi movement bubbling in Germany. The Albert Einstein Collections in the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York include hundreds of Einstein's personal photographs, many from Caputh, as well as the Guestbook from his summer home. After a few pages bearing the signatures of the friends and international luminaries who visited the Einsteins those short summers before 1933, most of the pages remain blank. You can see the Collections at www.lbi.org/caputh. Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York | Berlin and Antica Productions. It's narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Executive Producers include Katrina Onstad, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Produced by Emily Morantz. Associate Producer is Hailey Choi. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson with help from Cameron McIver. Additional sound by Kevin Caners. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Voice acting by Jillian Rees-Brown. Thank you to Outloud Audio; Erika Britzke of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam; Michael Grüning's, “A House for Albert Einstein”; Friedrich Hernick's “Einstein at Home” translated by Josef Eisinger; The Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The New York Times; and the Max Planck Society.
Sturdy, Colorful, Charming Havanese Bring Cuban History to Life [caption id="attachment_10917" align="alignleft" width="230"] Dr. Adam King, DVM with one of his Havanese in a corded coat.[/caption] Dr. Adam King, DVM, of https://www.askinhavanese.com/ (Askin) Havanese, joins host Laura Reeves in Love the Breeds Month for an overview of the little dogs of Cuba's aristocracy that survived the Cuban Revolution. According to King, the precursor of the Havanese was brought to Cuba from Spain and Italy during colonization in the 1600-1700s. More European immigrants arrived in Cuba in the 1800s with Poodle type dogs, which also became incorporated into the developing breed. Originally developed as the family pet of the Cuban aristocracy, Havanese are sturdy, colorful and charming. King noted that wealthy Cubans fled the country during the Revolution in the 1950s. “Many of them thought it was going to be a short-lived thing, leaving their dogs with the domestic help at the time because they thought they'd be coming back to Cuba very shortly,” King said. “And that's something that obviously didn't happen for many of those families. “We are fortunate that a small number of Havanese were taken by their owners to Costa Rica and the US. That's where the majority of the breed then developed. Most of the Havanese, both in Europe and in America, came from those people who just happened to take their dogs with them.” “They are a toy breed, but the nice thing is that they are not a fragile toy breed for the most part. We don't want them to be clunky, but there should be nothing fragile or breakable about Havanese whatsoever.” [caption id="attachment_10919" align="alignleft" width="287"] Puppies generally change colors multiple times over the course of their lives.[/caption] The variety of colors is part of the breed's charm. Color is immaterial per the standard, with only dilute blue being unaccepted in the ring. Merle is not a naturally occurring color in the breed. “So, we definitely get people who come to us as puppy owners who say they want a specific color,” King said. “And it really is sometimes difficult to convince them that ‘that's nice that you think this is a good color right now, but I just want to make sure that you know it will not be this color probably in six months, it may come back to this color, but it won't be this color in six months.' “I wouldn't say that they are Einsteins at the dog world. People disagree with me, but I'd say that they're like a C plus student. They're happy to be here. They're game to do whatever you want, but it's not a breed that you have to out-think all the time. “Havanese do go through at least one coat change, usually sometime between the ages of 7 and 10 months, that can be pretty maddening. We look at them and they mat, like it truly is quite terrible and you think you're going crazy. But if you can get a coat through that, generally it's something that's relatively easy to do. “They don't shed like the typical dog and they tend to have a pretty low dander and pretty low odor as well. Everyone's allergies are different and so starting to come around this breed would be a good idea to see is this something that triggers you or is this a dog that you can really deal with. But because you do have hair versus fur, it is agreed that is a good breed for most people with allergies. “I can generally place my puppies in homes and know that I'm going to get multiple texts and emails about how much they love their dogs for the rest of the dog's life. “They are just like potato chips. They are so charming and so happy that you can't help but fall in love with them. And when you have one, all you can think about is, well, you know, it might be a good idea to have another one as well because they're so fun and easy. It really is a breed that does well in the vast majority of homes.”
Our guest this week is Larry Siegel. He is the Gary P. Brinson director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. Prior to that, he was director of research for the Ford Foundation's investment division for 15 years. Siegel began his career at Ibbotson Associates in 1979. He specializes in asset management and investment consulting and has served on various boards as both an advisor and a director. He has also served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and TheJournal of Investing. Siegel is a prolific writer and has authored several critically acclaimed books in recent years, including Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly as well as Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his MBA in finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.BackgroundBioUnknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly, by Laurence SiegelFewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance, by Laurence SiegelResearch"Lifetime Financial Advice: Human Capital, Asset Allocation, and Insurance," by Roger Ibbotson, Moshe Arye Milevsky, and Kevin Zhu, ResearchGate, January 2007.Popularity: A Bridge Between Classical and Behavioral Finance, by Roger Ibbotson, Thomas Idzorek, Paul Kaplan, and James Xiong, Jan. 15, 2019."Bursting the Bubble—Rationality in a Seemingly Irrational Market," by David F. DeRosa, SSRN, April 29, 2021."Equity Risk Premium Forum: Don't Bet Against a Bubble?," by Paul McCaffrey, CFA Institute, April 8, 2022.The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do, by Erik Larson, April 6, 2021."Value Investing: Robots Versus People," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, June 30, 2017.Endowments and Investing Lessons"Don't Give Up the Ship: The Future of the Endowment Model," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, April 7, 2021."Where's Tobin? Protecting Intergenerational Equity for Endowments: A New Benchmarking Approach," by M. Barton Waring and Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, April 21, 2022."Debunking Nine and a Half Myths of Investing," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.org, March 12, 2020.Inflation"Protecting Portfolios Against Inflation," by Eugene Podkaminer, Wylie Tollette, and Laurence Siegel, The Journal of Investing, April 2022."The Novelty of the Coronavirus: What It Means for Markets," by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.com, April 1, 2020."Will Demographic Trends Drive Higher Inflation and Interest Rates?" by Laurence Siegel, larrysiegel.com, Feb. 10, 2021.Other"Cliff Asness: Value Stocks Still Look Like a Bargain," The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, May 31, 2022."Tom Idzorek: Exploring the Role of Human and Financial Capital in Retirement Planning," The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, June 7, 2022.TranscriptJeff Ptak: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I'm Jeff Ptak, chief ratings officer for Morningstar Research Services.Christine Benz: And I'm Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.Ptak: Our guest this week is Larry Siegel. Larry is the Gary P. Brinson director of research at the CFA Institute Research Foundation. Prior to that, he was director of research at the Ford Foundation's investment division for 15 years. Larry began his career at Ibbotson Associates in 1979. He specializes in asset management and investment consulting and has served on various boards as both an advisor and a director. He has also served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal and currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and The Journal of Investing. Larry is a prolific writer and has authored several critically acclaimed books in recent years, including Unknown Knowns: On Economics, Investing, Progress, and Folly as well as Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. Larry earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his MBA in finance at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.Larry, welcome to The Long View.Laurence Siegel: Thank you.Ptak: Thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to chat with you. I wanted to start with your early career. You worked for Roger Ibbotson early in your career. In fact, you were Ibbotson's first employee if I'm not mistaken. Talk about Roger's influence on you and more broadly, the impact he has had on our understanding of markets and investing.Siegel: Roger was not only my first boss, he was my first finance professor at the University of Chicago. So, I got fed the Ibbotson—and to give credit where it's due, to Sinquefield—view of the markets early. I was 21 years old. And I would describe that view as that asset classes are what's important; that security, individual securities, are best viewed as components of asset classes, although when you get involved in the business, you realize that you have to understand the market at the security level, too; and that long-term performance is very strongly in favor of equities. So, at the time, pension funds, who were the main customers for Ibbotson Associates' work, had relatively little in equities, and one of our missions was to improve the returns of those funds and thus for the sponsors and the employees by holding more equities. This was in the early ‘80s. I was hired in 1979. So, you can see that was a good strategy.Benz: So, sticking with your background in your early career, you think young professionals should have a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Why is that?Siegel: Well, not every single one needs to, but the ones who are going to rise to the top in the business need a grounding in the common cultural heritage of the human race, and that's given by humanities and social sciences that the liberal arts broadly construed. Investors invest in businesses or governments, but mostly businesses, and businesses exist to serve the needs and wants of people, an ever-changing group of people around the world. So, without a deep understanding of human affairs—in other words, of the why of business—young investment professionals are likely to fall into some intellectual traps: short-termism, geographically narrow thinking, where you only think about your own country, and a bunch of other well-documented behavioral biases—you shouldn't do that.Ptak: Maybe a dumb question to follow up on that: Why doesn't the market do a better job of creating incentives to ensure that younger professionals—let's talk about those who are heading into finance and in investing in particular—that they have a liberal arts background and they're able to better avoid some of those traps? Why haven't those incentives really taken shape and why is it still so typical to see this procession of MBAs and people with the traditional finance background dominating finance and investing?Siegel: Well, if you're as old as me, I'm 68, you have observed that it used to. The market, when I was getting out of school, was in a very different position. There weren't many MBAs. It was an unpopular decision to go to business school. And most of the people who were accepted in business school had an Ivy Plus background where a liberal arts education is required in order to graduate. By Ivy Plus I mean the University of Chicago, Stanford, Northwestern, places like that, plus the Ivy League. So, this staffed the investment business with a fairly broadly educated group of people. What happened in the next 40 years is that business got too big. And the MBA programs mushroomed from a little specialty of a dozen or two dozen schools to something that everybody felt they had to get in order to get a job. So, it just became more of a trade school degree rather than an academic degree. And I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody here, but that's the way I see it. And the investment business became more of a trade. So, the market became less efficient, I think, because it just got so big that it had to pull in a lot of different people, including people who had specialized early because they wanted to be in finance because they were seeing people in finance made a lot of money.Benz: Speaking of specialization, do you think that the only way to truly specialize is to have had a generalist humanistic education first? In other words, are the most successful specialists people who trained as generalists first and is there any evidence for this?Siegel: I think there is among CEOs and maybe CIOs, chief investment officers. The greatest businesspeople in the world have generally had a pretty broad background and a lot of them started, the legend is in the mail room, but they may have started in engineering, accounting. They may have started in sales. Whatever they did, they found their way to the investment business through a kind of evolution over time. An organization needs foxes and hedgehogs. Isaiah Berlin, drawing on an ancient Greek story, said that there are two kinds of people of foxes who know a little about everything and hedgehogs who no one big thing. Einstein, for example, was a hedgehog. He really only cared about physics, and he was very productive. We would have a very different world without him. I am suggesting that you're better off looking for foxes, but you also want to have a few Einsteins in there, and an organization that consists entirely of foxes would be very unfocused and would be more like a college dorm than a business.Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about something that seems like it's been an awfully short supply lately, which is optimism. You wrote a book called Fewer, Richer, Greener, evincing optimism about the global economy and humanity in general. Have you always been an optimistic person? Or has it gone back and forth or been situation dependent?Siegel: I've always been an optimistic person in terms of my intrinsic biases. I do know enough economic history and regular history to know that living conditions have improved so much in the last 250 years, and actually in the last 50, that you'd be kind of crazy to deny that things have improved. This is a bad year and a bad decade. And it's very easy to become pessimistic when you read the news or check the stock market or look at the world situation with wars and so forth. But underneath the surface of all this chaos and negativity, technology is continuing to advance at an amazing rate of speed. And what we really rely on for economic growth is improvements in technology, where I use the word technology to mean it very broadly. Technology is not just the gadgets or computing power. It's biology. It's social technology—my ability to gather together a bunch of people in a Zoom meeting from all over the world and have a board meeting. And as this technology has grown in the broad sense, we have made our lives much easier; work has gotten easier. We do less of it. The 80-hour work week has now become a specialty of doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. Coal miners—my father-in-law was a coal miner and he worked 80 hours a week in a coal mine when they let him. He would have preferred to work 40, but he needed the money. So, we have an economy in which we produce an awful lot without doing all that much, frankly. We have probably the easiest lives of any population that's ever existed.Benz: Optimism seems like one of those secret weapons in investing, in finance in that if you're optimistic, you're more likely to stick with it, stick with your plan, and markets have tended to reward people who have stuck with it over the longer term. But it's hard to be optimistic about the long term given how unknowable things are. So, is the equity-risk premium compensation for subjecting ourselves to that unknowability?Siegel: Yes. There are two kinds of risks. One is fluctuations in asset prices. We all know what that is. The market just went down 20% or 25%, and we're feeling it. And we might forget this, but it went down 34% in a month in the spring of 2020, which is a profound dislocation in the markets. And a few months later, we forgot it. The other kind of risk is actually more profound, and it's the possibility that our general expectations for assets are wrong. And if you look back, equities have returned about real 7%, 7% plus inflation. Going forward, it's pretty unlikely that they're going to do that over the next 20 or 30 years just because of the high prices. Even if economic growth were as rapid in the future as it was in the past, you want to pay less rather than more for the stocks. So, right now, they're selling at a premium to their historical average. That conventional asset-allocation input of equities generate 6.7% or 7% real is almost certainly too optimistic, and we've got to do what Jack Bogle said, which is budget for it. We can't all earn alpha and earn a higher return, because the net alpha in the market is 0, so we would all be trying to take it away from somebody else. We have to budget for lower returns.When you look at the bond market, it's even worse. Bonds seem to be priced to yield about real 0% to real 1%. That's much lower than the historical average, about half the historical average.Ptak: You got that right. It looks like real yields across the yield curve 49 to 99 basis points as of yesterday, which would be July 11, so a pretty paltry real yield. I did want to, if I may, stick with the general topic of optimism and its nexus with investing, talk about that in the context of value investing. I sometimes wonder if value investing pays off because it's so repulsive over long stretches that it's almost impossible to be optimistic. That does, though, raise questions about the implications for its practical usability. For instance, if investors are likely to give up on it because they do find it so repulsive when it underperforms growth as it had done until relatively recently, they might miss out on some of that payoff, which can come in bunches. Or do you think that's off base? Do you think that value investing really is usable, you just have to stick with it long enough?Siegel: I think that value investing is usable. But you shouldn't concentrate your whole portfolio in it. What we've seen is that the pendulum has swung between value and growth in very long cycles and large cycles where value does much better or much worse for the entire time that data are available. Fama and French did this back to 1927 and you get these five- to 15-year swings, which is so long that people give up on either value or growth at exactly the wrong time. So, in 2007, value had outperformed massively, and it was a great time to buy growth stocks because we were just about to enter not a tech bubble but a period of tech innovation that produced huge returns for a decade and a half. Anybody who went against the grain, anybody who went against the tide and overweighted growth stocks did much better than the market from 2007 until a year or two ago. Now people are saying, only growth works, so value is disgusting. And the more disgusted you are, the more likely it is to work. I would overweight value right now, but not all the time.Benz: I wanted to ask about intuition. It's something that tends to be greatly valued in everyday life, but it can lead us astray when it comes to investing. For example, in March 2020, which you referenced earlier, few of us expected the great snap back in the markets because intuitively we knew the pandemic would be bad for humanity. Do you think intuition was a better model for investing before markets became so efficient or has it never really worked?Siegel: Well, informed intuition, if you've spent a lifetime in, let's say, engineering and you know something about the way that computers are put together or the internet is put together or something, you might have had the intuition that this was going to be a profound change in the way everybody did everything and you bought those stocks. But the problem is that most people who bought the stocks in the first tech wave, in the 1990s, bought them without knowing anything about the individual companies. They were right about the technology; they were wrong about the companies. So, you would now have a portfolio of AltaVista and Netscape and AOL and a bunch of other companies that had promised but they were just outcompeted by somebody else. So, I would rather hang my hat on analysis than intuition unless you just happen to be one of those people with special inside knowledge but that is obtained legally. But most people who think they have inside knowledge don't. So, I would try to avoid relying on intuition too much.Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about your role at the CFA Institute. You have a lot of experience assessing research proposals in that role. What are the best pieces of research have in common based on your experience?Siegel: Well, they draw heavily on theory to make practical recommendations that can be implemented in the short to medium term. And going back to Roger Ibbotson, we published a piece in 2007 on lifetime financial advice that came from Roger with several colleagues. We are about to publish, but have not yet received the manuscript, the second installment of that from Paul Kaplan, Tom Idzorek, and a third author whose name I forget, and that will come out later this year or early next year. So, even though they're 15 years apart, the Ibbotson people have an integrated theory of investing insurance, annuities—all these different tools in order to provide people with a lifetime income that's secure and yet has the room for adding value through either asset allocation or security selection alpha. So, that's the kind of research I like most. We sometimes have also done pieces that step outside of the box of the Financial Analysts Journal or the Journal of Portfolio Management -type of research and look at a broader set of issues—for example, geopolitics, demography. There was a beautiful piece by David DeRosa on bubbles. He's against them. I don't know how he can be for or against bubbles. Either bubbles are or bubbles are not. But he takes the position that what we think are bubbles are mostly rational responses to circumstances and then when the circumstances change, the bubble bursts. But it wasn't a bubble; it was rational at the time. I don't know that I buy that 100%, but it sure was interesting reading his logic because he expresses it so well. So, these are the kinds of research I enjoy the most.I've also done some of my own research here. I am compiling for the CFA Institute Research Foundation a book on the equity risk premium, which was a symposium of 11 fairly famous people—Marty Leibowitz, Rob Arnott, Cliff Asness and so forth—which I led. I'm not one of the famous people, but I know them all socially, so I was able to get them to come. And I edited it with a co-editor, Paul McCaffrey, who is producing a book on that as we speak. It could come out in the next month.Ptak: I did want to ask you about what's become the new rage in investing research and portfolio management, which is combining quantitative and human-driven decisions. If you had to draw up a CFA curricula for a bot, how would it differ for the current human-based curricula? And on the flip side, how do you think the current human curricula ought to be reshaped to account for the rise of things like machine learning? Is that something you've given any consideration?Siegel: A little bit. I'm writing a book review right now for Advisor Perspectives, which is an industry newsletter, a very good one. And the review is of a book by Erik Larson that's called The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. I'm giving it a good review, so you can see where I'm going to come out. I believe that machine learning is a real thing. Machines can be programmed to learn, and that's a valuable tool in investment management. But when you step beyond that to the idea of artificial general intelligence, I think it's an illusion caused by very fast computers, very big data and very clever programmers who want to create that illusion. So, we have had 300 million years of evolution—not as human beings obviously but as animals—to develop a set of connections in our brains that actually are intelligent. Yet intelligence in the sense that we are talking about now didn't really emerge until the last 200,000 years. So, it is rare. It is fragile. And we don't know what it is. It's like Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: We don't know what it is, but we know it when we see it. And to imagine that we're, as human beings, of one level of intelligence, whatever we are, can build a machine in a few decades of those 200,000 years that's more intelligent than we are with all that evolutionary heritage is frankly ridiculous. These machines are going to do what we tell them to do. But if we tell them using instructions that are crafted well enough, it will give the illusion of being intelligent. When I don't know how something works, like everybody else, I tend to think it's magic. I'm driving and there are two or three cars lined up at a red light, it immediately turns green and makes the other traffic stop because it's a smart red light, and all it's doing is counting the number of cars that are waiting for it to turn and changes the cycle, changes the frequency, according to the traffic instead of operating on a fixed time cycle. But it looks like a pretty smart red light when you haven't encountered it before and you say “Gee, that's really amazing.” Well, I think that AI as we're experiencing it now is kind of the same as that. It's just a technology that other people understand because they developed it, but we don't because we don't have the knowledge and so we feel like it's magic or intelligence, whichever you want to call it.Benz: There's been a lot written about the glut of skilled, highly trained professionals in the investing field. Can you talk about the level of competition you see now versus what you saw earlier in your career?Siegel: The industry has become way too big. Every stockbroker has become a financial advisor. Ninety-six percent of them ought to tell people buy, hold, diversify, and rebalance and minimize taxes, and then they have to fill in that outline through implementation. In other words, somebody has to do it; their clients aren't qualified to do it. But they should mostly be telling people to buy index funds and to use premixed asset-allocation decisions that conform to what somebody at the headquarters has decided is optimal. To add value for an individual, what you really need to do is be more like a psychologist and a life counselor who says, “You have too much debt, you're not saving enough; you have too many houses; at some point your assets become a liability.” Or you don't have a house at all, you are a renter—you might want to consider a house as a hedge against inflation. But telling them which securities to buy or micromanaging the list of mutual funds, to me, is a fool's errand for most people.Inside the business, that's the public-facing side. Inside the business there are too many security analysts, too many asset allocators, too many broker/dealers. And I think that competition has become more and more people fighting over fewer and fewer real alpha opportunities, and that's why the competition feels so fierce. It used to be an easy business. And it's not easy anymore because the market is more efficient, I guess.Ptak: Wanted to shift gears and talk about asset allocation, specifically the 60/40 portfolio. And my question for you, which is a question I think many are asking, is the 60/40 debt. It's having one of its worst years ever. But the paradox is that yields are now, albeit they're still paltry, they're now a little bit higher and valuations are a tad lower, which you'd think would boost the 60/40's future prospects. What's your take on the 60/40, Larry?Siegel: I think that it's a pretty good consensus outcome of people buying what's available in the market. If you look at the supply of securities, it has to be somewhere around 60/40 because everybody holds it, and the supply and demand have to equilibrate in the long run. But why do issuers produce that ratio? I think that the underlying reason is that for a very long period of history, bonds were a very good investment. If you didn't have 40% in bonds, you wanted to, because they were producing high real returns. And that period is roughly 1981 to 2007. It's a long time. From 1940 to 1981, bonds did terribly because interest rates were going up and up and up, and we didn't have a lot of 60/40 portfolios, but what we had was mostly 0 or 100. Institutions bought fixed income to fund their pension plans. They bought fixed income to fund if there were insurance companies. The big money was in fixed income and equities were this gravy—you sold some stocks to some rich people. And over time as the stock market went up and the bond market didn't go up, you had greater interest in equities, and the consultants who emerged from this world of pension funds settled on 60/40 as a consensus. And so, you've got what I call the standard model. The allocators picked from a list of active managers in each asset class, usually buy way too many of them, didn't have access to index funds or didn't want to buy them. And so, they compared the performance of their active managers to benchmarks, fired the underperforming ones, gave more money to the outperforming ones, and since these things tend to run in cycles, generally underperform the market. They also had to have an overall asset-allocation policy where 50/50 was the tradition that they'd been coming from, but they moved it up to 60/40 because the stock market was beating the bond market and it just stayed there. Stocks are risky. So, 70/30 or 80/20 seemed like it was too volumed. We're all human, and we do what we see the person next to us doing. I think it's really just consensus-building, although there is a supply aspect to it. You have to buy what's out there. And if we all decided to increase our allocation to equities, we couldn't. But we would just be buying them from each other. This is a point Cliff Asness made. He can usually be counted on for very good thinking.Benz: Our research has found that fund investors tend to do a really poor job of utilizing so-called liquid alternative funds. If you take the illiquidity and gates away from alternatives, do you think they can still work for individual investors in the form of liquid alternatives?Siegel: Well, the term liquid alternatives has changed over time. When I started hearing about liquid alternatives in the early to mid-90s, it meant hedge funds and to some extent managed-futures funds because the stuff they were buying was liquid, and then the illiquid alternatives were venture capital and private equity. Over time, liquid alternatives have come to mean liquid to the investor. And when you securitize an alternative investment, you've removed—so that you can trade it like a stock—you've removed the one thing that has tended to give alternative investments better returns, which is the lockup. If you can lock up somebody's money for a long time, you can take risks that don't necessarily pay off in the short run, but that may pay off in the long run. If you take that away, I would rather just invest in liquid nonalternatives, stocks, bonds, and some real estate. Although some people call real estate an alternative. It's the oldest asset class, so I'm reluctant to put it in the alternatives bucket.Ptak: Wanted to shift and talk about endowments. You spent a good chunk of your career in the endowment world. And as you know, a lot of ink has been spilled concerning debates over the endowment model. Some decried it as costly and complex, others defend it as path-breaking. What are the lessons an advisor or an individual investor should take away from the success of the endowment approach? And conversely, what are the lessons they need to unlearn, so to speak?Siegel: I'll start with the last one because it's so easy. The lesson they need to unlearn is that if David Swensen can do it, so can I. He and the people at other big endowments and foundations have access to the best funds because they come to you, you don't have to go ferret them out. The best people they can afford to hire, outstanding analysts and other chief investment officers who can make millions. And if they do lose money, they have this capability of withstanding some pain. A foundation, in particular, which doesn't have professors to pay, or buildings to maintain, or students to give scholarships to, has to pay out 5% of whatever it has at the time, so if it loses some of the assets, their liabilities go down too in a one-to-one correspondence and so, at some level, they don't care. Of course, they do care because it's always better to have more money to give away than less. But the foundation isn't going to be destroyed by a 20% decline in the market.Endowments are a little trickier because the liabilities are not so flexible. If you start paying your professors less, they will just go to another place that doesn't pay less. Students will do the same thing. But these institutions also have a lot of reserve in their fundraising ability. An ordinary individual investor doesn't have any of this backstop. If I want to raise funds, I have to work harder. I'm already working as hard as I can. And I don't have the option to reduce my liabilities by saying I'm just not going to pay them. So, individuals have to be inherently more conservative. You get older, life becomes a race against diminishing capabilities and your risk level has to go down as you get older. So, there's a lifecycle effect that institutions don't experience. So, I would say that's the main lesson is, endowments and foundations have generally done well, but they have some structural advantages over individuals. Unless you have a rich uncle—a university has a rich uncle—which is the alumni and yet that's not an unlimited resource any more than your rich uncle is. But it is a backstop for bad performance.Benz: One investing paradox is that success demands humility, but humility is a tough sell. What's the humblest thing an investor can do to boost their odds of success while also attracting clients? Is it to have a long time horizon?Siegel: Well, the humblest thing an investor can do is buy index funds. It says to the client, I don't know what stocks are going to do best, but other people collectively as a market make pretty good decisions, so I'm just going to trust them to say the prices are roughly right. And when you buy an index fund, you're making a bet that the prices are roughly right. They're obviously not exactly right. In terms of having a long time horizon, it can be humility, or it could be hubris. I can claim to have a long time horizon, but I don't know what liabilities I'm going to face tomorrow, so I better have a short time horizon with some of my investments and I could also live 30 more years, so I need to have a long time horizon with other parts of my portfolio. But the time horizon issue I don't see so much as humility versus hubris, but it's a planning tool that a lot of people don't use effectively.Ptak: One of your more popular pieces of writing in recent years was an article you wrote on investing myths. If I'm not mistaken, I think you've updated it a few times to this point, the most recent being in 2020. Why'd you write it, and how would you change it if you were to update the piece yet again today?Siegel: I wrote it because somebody in Brazil paid me to come down there and give a talk on Siegel's Nine Myths of Investing. So, when that gave me an outline I had to fill in. Most of the myths have changed over time. I've updated it every two to five years. And what would I change now? Well, first of all, you'd have to go back and look at what the myths are. I don't really think I have time to go over all of them. But the one that I would change today is that stocks and bonds are always negatively correlated, so each is a good hedge against the other. It's not true. It runs in cycles. There was a period where they were positively correlated in the ‘90s and then before that at some other time, and all of a sudden, it's back. So, with stock market down, the bond market is also down, and people say, "Diversification doesn't work." Well, first of all, nobody told you to go out and buy the longest bond. Diversification within the bond market works in the sense of holding some less-volatile, shorter-term securities. They sacrifice some yield in order to get that safety. Secondly, stocks and bonds will again be uncorrelated or negatively correlated someday. But this is not that day. And there are other assets. The one that comes to mind is the original alternative investment: cash. Right now, you're losing money in cash in real terms, because inflation is so high. But, on average, over time cash has paid a percent or so over the inflation rate. And then the other one is real estate. I keep coming back to real estate because it has become the unloved stepchild in the investment world. And other than their house, nobody has any. The last time I heard somebody talking about real estate as an investment was probably in the decade of the 2000s, and probably it was going up a lot. Then there was a crash. And the crash stuck in people's minds while real estate itself turned around and went up again. And there may yet be another crash, but it's just another asset class that should probably be in your toolkit.Other myths—I kind of went out on a limb in the last version of that article and started talking more about social and political issues. One is that we can transition to entirely green energy without disrupting the entire world economy. We can't. We either have to transition slowly, which may not be good enough, but I actually happen to think it is, because energy transitions have taken a half century or so—wood, coal, coal to oil, oil to natural gas, and so forth—and the next transition is not going to be all solar and wind. Nuclear power is going to be a vital and probably the most important part of it. So, if the myth that you're subscribing to is the, let's call it the European version, although that's not quite fair because they have plenty of nuclear power in Europe. It's not going to happen, but we're going to need all the energy we've got, because the world is getting richer fast. Growth rates in China are down to 5%. That's still huge. Indonesia is higher than that, and it's a country of 300 million people that most Americans couldn't find on a map. The energy demands are going to be huge from all these different parts of the world that are growing and becoming middle class. And so that myth is something I spent a little time on in the article and I would write more about it next time.Benz: You more or less predicted the spate of inflation we would have before it happened. In fact, one of the myths you wrote about in 2020 was that the government could borrow all it wanted without sparking inflation. What did you see then and what do you think people should be monitoring to assess how long high inflation will persist into the future?Siegel: My forecast at the time was based on basic economic history from the 1700 and 1800s, which is that when the government borrows more money than it can pay back, it's going to pay it back anyway but in cheaper dollars. And the way that you get cheaper dollars is to have inflation. Inflation is a transfer of resources, of real resources, from savers who are bondholders and cash holders, to borrowers, which in this case is the government itself. So, it's tax. So, when you have a budget—that's how government budgets, it's out of balance by a lot for a long time— you're going to have a lot of inflation, because it's the only way the government is going to be able to make those payments on the bonds. I didn't see anything in the economy other than the budget deficits. And it was so early that you could say, I was wrong. There's not much difference between being a decade and a half early and being outright wrong. So, I'll say I was wrong.What I didn't see was the supply catastrophe that came with COVID and our response to COVID. So, when you get a supply shock like the one we've just been through, prices are going to rise, and you don't even need an unbalanced government budget, you don't need budget deficits for prices to rise when there are shortages of things because by ships not being able to dock and workers not coming to work, we just have never seen anything like this. And so, I think the inflation rate will come down from these astronomical rates to something more normal, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, but we're not going to go back to zero to 2, because governments have over-leveraged, and deleveraging is always inflationary.Ptak: What role do you think top-down macro should play in an allocation and investing process? Obviously, it's hard to correctly make a macro bet, though we've just talked about one you did correctly make, but it's even harder to translate that into a successful investment. So, should most people just avoid macro and diversify and call it a day?Siegel: If you mean macro bets to guide your general asset-allocation philosophy, I think you should. In other words, if you believe, as I do, that global economic growth, while slowing, is going to be very large in absolute terms for a very long time. In other words, the absolute terms meaning the number of overall dollars, or whatever your currency is, generated by the world economy that you want to hold equities because bonds don't give you a claim to that growth. And they give you a very indistinct claim I wouldn't bank on it. But international investors say that when a country is growing rapidly, the currency goes up, so you get a little bit of diversification that way. But equities are much more powerful, and international equities are frankly cheap relative to the United States. So, that's a macro bet, and I'm recommending it. But again, I recommended it for a long time. I thought the U.S. was expensive. It hasn't been cheap since the 2007-08-09 period. So, you should make an evaluation of those conditions and implement it through your portfolio.In general, most Americans suffer from home country bias because the U.S. is so big that you can get a pretty diversified portfolio with just the S&P 500 actually, because that's a lot of stocks, and those are all the big caps. If you lived in Belgium, you would not be under the illusion that Belgium was the whole world. It's just you can reach the border in an hour from anywhere in the country. So, you've known since you were a little kid that there's a big world out there. We Americans just don't have that intuition. So, that's why I'm saying that international is a macro bet that is reasonable to make. Now, if by macro bets you think that you act like a hedge fund and you think that the pound is going to crash, and that oil is going to go to $70 and then back to $110. No, individual investors should not do that.Benz: People aren't very good at respectfully disagreeing these days. You're someone who seems unafraid of having a fulsome debate. Besides stepping away from social media and the internet, what are some things we can do to exchange differing views without becoming polarized?Siegel: Well, if I knew I would run for President. People have become dug in—I don't like it at all. Spend a quarter of your reading time reading points of view that you know in advance you're going to disagree with, see how that person expresses themselves and what arguments they make and trying to take their side mentally while you're reading it. Consider maybe I'm wrong, maybe they're right. If I name some names, that would be too obvious where my biases are. But I would read the moderates on the other side, because the extremists are extremists, and they overstate everything. That's about all I can think of other than be nice. If the people you care about and generally respect have different views from you, ask yourself why. It's not because they're crazy or stupid or evil. It's because they've looked at the same data in the broad sense. They've looked at the same world and come up with different conclusions. Try to think about why that might happen, and then picture them doing that to you. That's about all I have to say about that.Ptak: Well, that's great advice and I think a great way to close this conversation, which we very much enjoyed, Larry. Thanks so much for your time and insights. We very much enjoyed having you on The Long View.Siegel: Well, thank you very much.Benz: Thanks so much, Larry.Ptak: Thanks for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a minute to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can follow us on Twitter @Syouth1, which is, S-Y-O-U-T-H and the number 1.Benz: And @Christine_Benz.Ptak: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.Finally, we'd love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.(Disclaimer: This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Opinions expressed are as of the date of recording. Such opinions are subject to change. The views and opinions of guests on this program are not necessarily those of Morningstar, Inc. and its affiliates. Morningstar and its affiliates are not affiliated with this guest or his or her business affiliates unless otherwise stated. Morningstar does not guarantee the accuracy, or the completeness of the data presented herein. Jeff Ptak is an employee of Morningstar Research Services LLC. Morningstar Research Services is a subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. and is registered with and governed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 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