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Maritime logistics is the process organizing the movement of goods across the ocean. Historically, this has been a challenging problem because of the multinational nature of shipping, as well as piracy, smuggling, and legacy technology. It's also profoundly important for security reasons, and because 90% of what we buy travels over the oceans. Ocean vessels The post Tracking Drug Smugglers and Migrating Databases with Benny Keinan and Lior Resisi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Late last month, Hungarian national Dániel Karsai, who has a progressive neurodegenerative condition, challenged  Hungary's ban on assisted suicide before the European Court of Human Rights. Alliance Defending Freedom International has intervened in the case, standing up against the so-called “right to die.”   In a recent press release, they described the current European landscape when it comes to assisted death:  Of the 46 Member States of the Council of Europe, only six have legalized assisted suicide. The practice has been rejected by legislators in the vast majority of countries. …Countries that have legalized euthanasia now allow the intentional killing of children, those who are physically healthy, and those who have not given their consent.  Historically, the “right to die” quickly devolves into a “duty to die” and compromises the conscience rights of physicians and caretakers. Christians must stand for life whenever and however we can. We must always be those who work to heal and never to harm. 

Today's guest is Christian Gore.   Christian Gore is the Founder and Managing Partner of G1 Capital Partners, a private capital firm specializing in multifamily and industrial real estate investments.    Show summary:  In this episode, Christian discusses the company's focus on multifamily and industrial real estate investments. He talks about the importance of technology, data analysis, and a strong team in decision-making. Gore also shares insights on entering the hospitality sector, the impact of capital markets, and the state of the multifamily real estate market. He highlights the role of preferred equity in the market and discusses potential distress in older properties. The episode ends with Gore's predictions for the market in 2023.   -------------------------------------------------------------- Intro (00:00:00)   Focus on multifamily and industrial real estate (00:01:54)   Challenges and opportunities in the current capital market (00:08:55)   Performance of multifamily (00:12:05)   Preferred equity (00:13:03)   Multifamily distress (00:15:23)   -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Christian:  Web: http://www.g1capitalpartners.com/about   Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/g-1-capital/   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/G1_Capital/   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Christian Gore (00:00:00) - As long as there was a longer time horizon. In terms of your investment period, it really shouldn't be any issues. There's, you know, there's dips and. You know, peaks to the market. But ultimately, if you have a longer term view and a sound capital structure, you should be able to weather the storm.   Intro (00:00:17) - Welcome to the how to Scale Commercial Real Estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.   Sam Wilson (00:00:30) - Christian Gore is the founder and managing partner of G1 Capital Partners, a private capital firm specializing in multifamily and industrial real estate investments. Christian, welcome to the show.   Christian Gore (00:00:42) - Appreciate it, Sam. Thanks for having.   Sam Wilson (00:00:43) - Me. Absolutely. The pleasure's mine. Kristen. There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?   Christian Gore (00:00:53) - Poor thing. So I started as a young little kid coming up in West Texas, ultimately worked my way through the system, got involved with a significant real estate guy by the name of Andrew Farkas, was kind of my first gig in New York, really kind of drinking from a firehose in that environment for for about four years post post GFC, which was quite interesting and ultimately worked through a handful of buy side and sell side shops, you know, over the years, and founded One Capital Partners in 2018, and we've been operating since then.   Sam Wilson (00:01:37) - Yeah. What do you guys do at G1 Capital Partners? I know you said there in your intro you guys are into multifamily and I believe it was industrial, but give me give me kind of the breakdown of what you guys have done over the last five years and where you're going for things.   Christian Gore (00:01:54) - Yeah. So we I would say primarily spend our time in the multifamily and industrial space. That being said, we we are agnostic to product type. So for example, we've we've got a hotel deal in front of us right now. So really just looking for the right opportunities and the right markets and less so focused on product. Historically speaking, I will say what 80% of 90% of what we've done is in industrial and multifamily. We do have some retail holdings as well and currently don't have any hospitality, but we'll likely have hospitality by Q1 of of next year. So we kind of have the whole spectrum of the four major food groups, or at least we we screen it, but but ultimately spend most of our time in multifamily.   Sam Wilson (00:02:44) - Got it. Okay. That's really an interesting thing. How do you how do you effectively grow or manage your team and your investor base when kind of bringing a new asset class into the mix?   Christian Gore (00:03:00) - Sure thing. I would say first and foremost, we're we're extremely technology focused. So that takes a lot of pressure. And quite honestly, you know what I would call biases away. So it not only helps our processes but it also helps our team internally kind of select the investments and really get behind them. Um, but but ultimately I mean it's math. You know, we we're integrating a lot of data that effectively is taking an AI and machine learning. And we think that's that's a little edge that we have there. But but at the end of the day, it's math. You know, in this business it's relationship driven and really just utilizing, you know, what we have as a team. The team is probably the biggest component, I think, in in our business to success. I'm a I'm an ex you know, college athlete.   Christian Gore (00:03:59) - And I look at it no differently. And kind of our industry as, as it is in sports, I really do think the best team ultimately ultimately wins and gets gets the best opportunities across the finish line.   Sam Wilson (00:04:10) - Yeah, undoubtedly. When you say team and especially as it pertains to let's use multi excuse me hospitality as an example, are you guys scaling internally or are you scaling with external partners in hospitality. How do you engage a new asset class. And maybe without having to go through the attendant learning curve that taking on new asset class generally requires?   Christian Gore (00:04:37) - Sure, sure. That's a great question. Um, you know, so historically we have about 2 billion in experience in the hospitality space. That was primarily post GFC. But our kind of thought process and business model internally is right now we're a team of five. You know, over the next year or two will probably get up to a team of maybe ten, 15 Max. And the way we're able to scale that is one like like I mentioned through technology, but two, leveraging our partners so we we don't manage any of the assets, you know, boots on the ground.   Christian Gore (00:05:15) - We we bring in an operator in this case for a hotel. You know, it's a very niche product type. So we work with the top three large hotel operators and kind of leverage their expertise in that space. So it's not to say it's the marriotts of the world, it's the operators or the property management team on site that's kind of below that, below that umbrella. That makes sense.   Sam Wilson (00:05:39) - It does. It does. Okay. No, that's that's great I love that and I don't want to stay here I guess too long. But I am curious. I mean, you guys are making hospitality. One of the potential things that you guys are getting into either end of this year or first of next year. Why now? I guess we'll we'll start there. And then I have some follow on question to that. Why hospitality? Why now? Sure.   Christian Gore (00:06:03) - So I wouldn't I wouldn't market too much in the hospitality space. Kind of the three buckets we're playing in right now is multi industrial. And then what I would call special situations and in this case this hotel opportunity that we have in front of us is a special situation, has a great story behind it.   Christian Gore (00:06:21) - You know it's a post post-Covid REIT effectively blow up. So very low bases needs a lot of TLC, a lot of CapEx really a lot of work put into it. But we like the story behind it and it's extremely core asset. Right in our backyard. So headquartered in Dallas, it sits a rockstar away from our office, so we know the asset very well.   Sam Wilson (00:06:45) - Got it. Okay, that makes sense. So you guys aren't necessarily out saying, all right, we're going to we're going to put a full fledged team together to go out and acquire hospitality in mass. It is hey, here's a great opportunity right in front of us. So why don't we see if we can make this work.   Christian Gore (00:07:00) - Exactly, exactly. And then we obviously allocate the right investor profile for that kind of product. If that makes that makes sense.   Sam Wilson (00:07:07) - It's it does, it does. And that's, that's a that's an interesting thing to be able to go, okay, let's take advantage of this situation without necessarily wanting to develop all of the resources to go out and go long in that space.   Sam Wilson (00:07:24) - Is that a fair kind of analysis of what it is that you guys are dealing with right there?   Christian Gore (00:07:31) - 100%? Yeah, we're not going to be growing a massive hospitality platform anytime soon. It's it's more so, hey, we know this deal really well. We can put all the pieces together. We have the right partners on the equity side to execute. And ultimately, you know, our whole team is really just a bunch of deal junkies. So it's it's really fun to put, you know, hotels. There's a lot more moving pieces. So it's a lot of fun to work on.   Sam Wilson (00:07:59) - I bet it is. I bet it is. Yeah. And that's I mean, I'm with you on the opportunity side where it's like, okay, there's a great opportunity. How do we say no? I mean, those are hard to pass up when they're right there in front of you, and especially if you don't have to build all of the necessary parts that go into, you know, taking that one particular niche business to scale, it's like, okay, we're going to buy this and you can plug an operator in and it's not not the end of the world for us to acquire that.   Sam Wilson (00:08:28) - So okay, definitely I won't beat you to death on the hospitality industry then. But you did mention something. You said you have the equity behind you to take down that deal. But let's talk a little bit more about capital markets as a whole. How is that affected what you guys are doing? How has that affected what you guys are doing in multifamily? In industrial, maybe you can compare the two, give us some insight what you see there and how you guys are navigating 2023.   Christian Gore (00:08:55) - Sure. So I will say it's been 2023 has been tough. I mean, you know, the fastest fed rate hikes we've ever seen in terms of speed. So it's really a shock to the entire system. Right. So we've been you know working to try and get stuff done. Have not been successful this year just mainly due to rates moving that quickly and continuing to move. That being said, we do see a bright spot starting in 2024. There's obviously going to be a lot of pain. That being said, we're very focused on scaling the multi side of the business and and to put more.   Christian Gore (00:09:40) - Strategically the affordable multi side of the business. So we're all in on that. That's that's you know our scaled growth product for the next two years. Industrial still is not pricing to where we think it makes a lot of sense. And candidly you know from a lending perspective which is quite honestly the biggest challenge in today's environment, the beauty about multifamily is, you know, the fact that we have two large government agencies that are still lending on that product and that's, you know, what I think is has been fruitful for the multifamily space compared to all the other four major food groups. That being said, nothing's easy in this environment.   Sam Wilson (00:10:24) - So no, there's no there's no giveaways. What about distress? Let's talk distress there. In multifamily, I hear a lot of people. Even even shops that I'm a little surprised at that previously weren't in multifamily now going, hey, we're getting into multifamily because we feel like there is either currently pain that we can take advantage of and or they see a coming theoretical wave of multifamily opportunities.   Sam Wilson (00:10:52) - Talk to me about that. What's your view?   Sam Wilson (00:10:57) - Yeah, that's.   Christian Gore (00:10:57) - That's the million dollar question, right? You've got folks raising distress funds. Um, you know, it's it's tough to say we're we're tracking it as well as we can and other folks can. Um, you know, I think there will be some opportunities probably in Q3 of next year. But what we're seeing live in the market right now is a lot of pref equity flooding the space and plugging a lot of gaps. And, you know, we we we don't currently and have not put out any pref equity in this space primarily due to where valuations were going in that we we still didn't really feel comfortable. Um, you know plugging plugging a lot of the, the gaps at that basis. But um, you know I think there will be some pain. We're seeing some, we're working on some. But I don't think it's going to be as bad as everyone thinks. If you look back to zero eight and the GFC, you know, like I mentioned, you know, we did my my first gig was working for us Lehman guys post GFC and we did a lot of workouts.   Christian Gore (00:12:05) - We did about 6.5 billion. And you know, I'll be honest with you, I think I'd have to look back at the deal sheet, but maybe 1 or 2% of of all of those deals that went bad were multifamily and the rest were other product types. So, you know, I think there's there's definitely pain, but there's there's a ton of liquidity still still out there ready to take over. So a long winded way of I don't think it's going to be as bad as everyone thinks.   Sam Wilson (00:12:33) - I don't think it'll be as bad, or at least I hope you know, it won't be as bad. Primarily one, because I'm not a I'm not a buyer of multifamily personally, so it doesn't on that front. It doesn't affect me one way or another. Although I'm an investor, I'm not a personal buyer presently of multifamily also because I don't want to see a lot of our friends in the industry go through that hard times. But regardless of what I want or prefer, it still happens. Let's talk about pref equity a little bit.   Sam Wilson (00:13:03) - I mean, that can fill the gap for a while. But then what happens when when that. And maybe you can give our listeners that might not understand what pref equity is, what it is. And then my follow on. So so first question is what is pref equity. You define that for us. And then secondly you know what happens when that pref equity runs out. Are they just you know kicking the can down the road.   Christian Gore (00:13:26) - Yeah. I mean, so the short answer is, you know, definition, I would say it's, you know, it's called pref equity, but kind of operates more like a debt product. So you know, you have your common equity and then ultimately your pref equity what's coming, which is coming in behind it that have that has preference over the common equity. And and so ultimately you know once. Let's say cash flow gets low, you know. You know, groups are plugging in pref equity and to yeah to your point kick the can down that you know down the way.   Christian Gore (00:14:00) - You know ultimately it's going to be the performance of the asset on on whether or not that pref equity stays in place. So there are instances for example, that, you know, we're aware of that groups have plug pref equity. And at this point in time their pref equity is already completely wiped out. So ultimately it's come down to the senior lender or the original, you know, originator of the initial loan on the asset level. So it's it's you know, it's challenging out there. It's very deal by deal. It's market by market. It's very, very specific. So it's it's interesting time.   Sam Wilson (00:14:41) - It really is I mean because I think about about some deals I'm aware of that are doing terribly. And then and then I know about some other deals that I'm both that I'm personally invested in that are I mean, just killing it. I mean, there's like, you wouldn't even know that there's any stress in the market. It's the we're still above pro forma across the board there, 99% occupied.   Sam Wilson (00:15:02) - It's like I mean life is good. Life is great. Like how is this possible I don't know, but but it really is. It's on I think like you said, on a deal by deal basis. Are there any, any types or should I say classes of multifamily that you're saying, hey, this is where we're going to see the most distressed in your opinion.   Christian Gore (00:15:23) - Yeah, I would say, you know, the generally your older, you know, 6070s, even 80s vintage product where the kind of the peak of the market folks were getting, getting very aggressive on pricing, very aggressive on leverage and, and ultimately solving for, you know, not so ideal capital structures. And those are the folks that I think will have the most pain. But for the most part, you know, is as long as there was a longer time horizon in terms of your investment period, it really shouldn't be any issues. There's, you know, there's dips and. You know, peaks to the market.   Christian Gore (00:16:02) - But ultimately, if you have a longer term view and a sound capital structure, you should be able to weather the storm, which, you know, I think everyone's saying survives until 25, which it seems to be the timeline here.   Sam Wilson (00:16:15) - Seems to be and and I except for some people, unfortunately, it's probably wishful thinking is that things will turn around and get better for them by 2025. But again, getting there is step one and two having a meaningful business when you get there. Step two. So we'll just see how that shakes out. I don't be all doom and gloom here on the show today. You guys have been that sellers for what, the past 12, 18 months or so.   Christian Gore (00:16:38) - We have. Yeah we've we've been net sellers. We had some assets trickle into 22 that got a little challenging to execute. But but definitely net sellers.   Sam Wilson (00:16:49) - That's awesome. I mean it seems like it seems like you you timed things fairly well you know. And then we talked about a little bit off show.   Sam Wilson (00:16:57) - So you guys have been net sellers. You said this in the beginning that you really haven't found much here in 2023. That's made a lot of sense to buy. We see a lot of shops that are in asset management mode. You guys are obviously in buy mode, I guess. Talk to me a little bit about that. Like how do you ride out the storm? How do you remain patient? What are some things you guys are implementing in your core disciplines that are kind of keeping you true to what you're trying to do?   Christian Gore (00:17:23) - No, that's a great question. I mean, you know, I would say we're we're just trying to keep a pulse on the market. It's, I mean, it seems to be moving on a weekly basis. Um, you know, but internally and kind of in-house, our view is that, you know, capital will start coming back to the market next year. And we are pretty bullish that rates are going to drop pretty significantly post-election of next year. So from a timeline perspective, that's that's kind of how how we're thinking about it internally.   Christian Gore (00:18:00) - But but to say that it's still very difficult to be patient. Right. When you're, you know, looking to buy and so on and so forth. And quite frankly, the model we run is, is what I'd call a kind of a separate account model. So we go to equity partners, you know, on on any given deal that we think fits the equity check and fits the profile, the market, so on and so forth. And, um, and ultimately they're really calling the shots. We, we, we invest alongside them. And you know, as a GP obviously. But ultimately they're writing the large LP check here. So um, you know, and they're pretty much on the sidelines in this environment right now. The big kind of feedback that we get from, from most of our equity groups that we're talking to, I mean, on a daily basis is is negative leverage. And so what does that mean that, you know, it means, hey, you know, in the multifamily space we can get debt at six and a half, you know, so at minimum you should be buying a six and a half cap, unless there's a true path to some sort of six and a half.   Christian Gore (00:19:09) - So that's kind of how we're looking at the world. And the capital markets just hasn't really adjusted to that yet. And we think Q1 of next year, it will probably get to where it needs to be.   Sam Wilson (00:19:20) - Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, I hear the term negative leverage and I just I kind of I kind of get scared, cringe. It's like, wait, this, this, this this doesn't make any sense. At least, you know, obviously, like you said, unless there's a clear path where it's like, oh, hey, this is under market, there's an easy value add. There is all these, you know, earmarks of just something that we the present owner.   Christian Gore (00:19:42) - It is not all doom and gloom, Sam. We have we have 3 or 4 deals under contract right now. So there are opportunities. I want to throw that out there. It's it just instead of, you know, looking at 20 and finding a couple, it's like looking at 200 and finding a couple, right?   Sam Wilson (00:19:57) - Right.   Sam Wilson (00:19:58) - No, undoubtedly it is certainly not all doom and gloom. And I don't want to portray that here, but it is something where I think it's just interesting to watch what everybody's doing. And I think that's kind of sounds like what you guys have been doing this year, watching the market, watching other other sponsors, watching how deals are trading and going. Does this fit what we want to do? Does it make sense now or should we wait? What you know, what's the right move? And I think that's okay, especially if you're not sellers. I mean, that's one of those things where it's like if you have assets to sell and you sold them at the right time, you know what you sound like you're doing, doing the right thing and kind of protecting your downside along the way. So this is great. I've really enjoyed Christian having you on the show today. Certainly have learned a lot from you. You give us insight on the capital markets, on you know, what it's like to get into special situations in the hospitality space when those cross your desk, kind of what your thoughts are on industrial and then how you guys are taking advantage of multifamily and then what your just thoughts on the general market at large.   Sam Wilson (00:20:55) - Ah, so certainly appreciate your time here today. It was great having you on. If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?   Christian Gore (00:21:03) - Yeah, I would say feel free to reach out. You know, we've got LinkedIn, we've got our website. I believe you have all the all the info on us, Sam, but we're we're a small team or active so we can typically get back to you pretty quickly.   Sam Wilson (00:21:17) - That is fantastic. And our listeners do want to find your website that aren't necessarily watching the show or get into the show notes. What is that website where they should go find you?   Christian Gore (00:21:26) - Sure it is G-1 Capital Partners. Com and I believe our Instagram handle is G1 underscore capital and our LinkedIn should be G one capital.   Sam Wilson (00:21:37) - G one capital partners.com will make sure we put that there in the show notes. And Christian again thank you again for your time I appreciate it.   Christian Gore (00:21:45) - Fantastic. Thank you Sam.   Sam Wilson (00:21:47) - Hey thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast.   Sam Wilson (00:21:51) - If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

The Never Weres' Tom and Tim Brown talk about the abysmal Patriots' offense and will it reach historically low levels. They also discuss stories around the NFL in Week 13 including the 49ers big win over the Eagles. Lastly, they talk about the College Football Playoff process.

Tyler Alderson talks with members of the Australian Haydn Ensemble about historical performance in classical music. From instruments to techniques, the ensemble aims to play the music of the 18th century the way that composers like Haydn and Mozart would have heard it. 39m

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Complex systems research as a field (and its relevance to AI Alignment), published by Nora Ammann on December 2, 2023 on LessWrong. I have this high prior that complex-systems type thinking is usually a trap. I've had a few conversations about this, but still feel kind of confused, and it seems good to have a better written record of mine and your thoughts here. At a high level, here are some thoughts that come to mind for me when I think about complex systems stuff, especially in the context of AI Alignment: A few times I ended up spending a lot of time trying to understand what some complex systems people are trying to say, only to end up thinking they weren't really saying anything. I think I got this feeling from engaging a bunch with the Santa Fe stuff and Simon Dedeo's work (like this paper and this paper) A part of my model of how groups of people make intellectual progress is that one of the core ingredients is having a shared language and methodology that allows something like "the collective conversation" to make incremental steps forward. Like, you have a concept of experiment and statistical analysis that settles an empirical issue, or you have a concept of proof that settles an issue of logical uncertainty, and in some sense a lot of interdisciplinary work is premised on the absence of a shared methodology and language. While I feel more confused about this in recent times, I still have a pretty strong prior towards something like g or the positive manifold, where like, there are methodological foundations that are important for people to talk to each other, but most of the variance in people's ability to contribute to a problem is grounded in how generally smart and competent and knowledgeable they are, and expertise is usually overvalued (for example, it's not that rare for a researcher to win a Nobel prize in two fields). A lot of interdisciplinary work (not necessarily complex systems work, but some of the generator that I feel like I see behind PIBBS) feels like it puts a greater value on intellectual diversity here than I would. Ok, so starting with one high-level point: I'm definitely not willing to die on the hill of 'complex systems research' as a scientific field as such. I agree that there is a bunch of bad or kinda hollow work happening under the label. (I think the first DeDeo paper you link is a decent example of this: feels mostly like having some cool methodology and applying it to some random phenomena without really an exciting bigger vision of a deeper thing to be understood, etc.) That said, there are a bunch of things that one could describe as fitting under the complex systems label that I feel positive about, let's try to name a few: I do think, contra your second point, complex systems research (at least its better examples) have a lot of/enough shared methodology to benefit from the same epistemic error correction mechanisms that you described. Historically it really comes out of physics, network science, dynamical systems, etc. The main move that happened was to say that, rather than indexing the boundaries of a field on the natural phenomena or domain it studies (e.g. biology, chemistry, economics), to instead index it on a set of methods of inquiry, with the premise that you can usefully apply these methods across different types of systems/domains and gain valuable understanding of underlying principles that govern these phenomena across systems (e.g. I think a (typically) complex systems angle is better at accounting for environment-agent interactions. There is a failure mode of naive reductionism that starts by fixing the environment to be able to hone in on what system-internal differences produce what differences in the phenomena, and then conclude that all of what drives the phenomena is systems-internal while forget tha...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Complex systems research as a field (and its relevance to AI Alignment), published by Nora Ammann on December 2, 2023 on LessWrong. I have this high prior that complex-systems type thinking is usually a trap. I've had a few conversations about this, but still feel kind of confused, and it seems good to have a better written record of mine and your thoughts here. At a high level, here are some thoughts that come to mind for me when I think about complex systems stuff, especially in the context of AI Alignment: A few times I ended up spending a lot of time trying to understand what some complex systems people are trying to say, only to end up thinking they weren't really saying anything. I think I got this feeling from engaging a bunch with the Santa Fe stuff and Simon Dedeo's work (like this paper and this paper) A part of my model of how groups of people make intellectual progress is that one of the core ingredients is having a shared language and methodology that allows something like "the collective conversation" to make incremental steps forward. Like, you have a concept of experiment and statistical analysis that settles an empirical issue, or you have a concept of proof that settles an issue of logical uncertainty, and in some sense a lot of interdisciplinary work is premised on the absence of a shared methodology and language. While I feel more confused about this in recent times, I still have a pretty strong prior towards something like g or the positive manifold, where like, there are methodological foundations that are important for people to talk to each other, but most of the variance in people's ability to contribute to a problem is grounded in how generally smart and competent and knowledgeable they are, and expertise is usually overvalued (for example, it's not that rare for a researcher to win a Nobel prize in two fields). A lot of interdisciplinary work (not necessarily complex systems work, but some of the generator that I feel like I see behind PIBBS) feels like it puts a greater value on intellectual diversity here than I would. Ok, so starting with one high-level point: I'm definitely not willing to die on the hill of 'complex systems research' as a scientific field as such. I agree that there is a bunch of bad or kinda hollow work happening under the label. (I think the first DeDeo paper you link is a decent example of this: feels mostly like having some cool methodology and applying it to some random phenomena without really an exciting bigger vision of a deeper thing to be understood, etc.) That said, there are a bunch of things that one could describe as fitting under the complex systems label that I feel positive about, let's try to name a few: I do think, contra your second point, complex systems research (at least its better examples) have a lot of/enough shared methodology to benefit from the same epistemic error correction mechanisms that you described. Historically it really comes out of physics, network science, dynamical systems, etc. The main move that happened was to say that, rather than indexing the boundaries of a field on the natural phenomena or domain it studies (e.g. biology, chemistry, economics), to instead index it on a set of methods of inquiry, with the premise that you can usefully apply these methods across different types of systems/domains and gain valuable understanding of underlying principles that govern these phenomena across systems (e.g. I think a (typically) complex systems angle is better at accounting for environment-agent interactions. There is a failure mode of naive reductionism that starts by fixing the environment to be able to hone in on what system-internal differences produce what differences in the phenomena, and then conclude that all of what drives the phenomena is systems-internal while forget tha...

With the recent news that Everton would be docked 10 points for violating Financial Fair Play rules, Graham and Taylor spend some time discussing points deductions. What are they, who hands them out, and why do they feel like the nuclear option? Plus, historical examples of their usage throughout English football history, and the rest of the world too!

“Coaching is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance.[1] The learner is sometimes called a coachee. Occasionally, coaching may mean an informal relationship between two people, of whom one has more experience and expertise than the other and offers advice and guidance as the latter learns; but coaching differs from mentoring by focusing on specific tasks or objectives, as opposed to more general goals or overall development.[1][2][3]” “A consultant (from Latin: consultare "to deliberate")[1] is a professional (also known as expert, specialist, see variations of meaning below) who provides advice or services in an area of specialization (generally to medium or large-size corporations).[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Consulting services generally fall under the domain of professional services, as contingent work.[9] The Harvard Business School defines a consultant as someone who advises on "how to modify, proceed in, or streamline a given process within a specialized field".[10]” “An expert is somebody who has a broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill and experience through practice and education in a particular field or area of study. Informally, an expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study. Experts are called in for advice on their respective subject, but they do not always agree on the particulars of a field of study. An expert can be believed, by virtue of credentials, training, education, profession, publication or experience, to have special knowledge of a subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially (and legally) rely upon the individual's opinion on that topic. Historically, an expert was referred to as a sage. The individual was usually a profound thinker distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment.” -Wikipedia I decided to be a porn and erotica consultant. I decided to do coaching and consultant based upon secular humanism for secular humanism entities. I also decided to be a human rights coach/consultant and religious trauma coaching/consultant for churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, centers, and monasteries. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support

Historically, parenting leaned heavily on punitive approaches. But, as Caroline Mendel, Psy.D., shares, research indicates that balancing warmth with limit-setting is important to raising well-adjusted children, especially when a child is neurodivergent. Free Resources on Parenting Neurodivergent Children: Download: The ADHD Library for Parents Read: How Praise Triggers Better Control in the ADHD Brain Read: Sample Routines for Kids with ADHD Access the video and slides for this episode here: https://www.additudemag.com/webinar/best-parenting-styles-neurodivergent-children/ Thank you for listening to ADDitude's ADHD Experts podcast. Please consider subscribing to the magazine (additu.de/subscribe) to support our mission of providing ADHD education and support.

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

EP315 - 2023 Turkey5 Recap with Salesforces Rob Garf Episode 315 is a recap of Turkey5 (The five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) 2023 with Rob Garf, Vice President and General Manager, Retail at Salesforce. This is Robs' Six time on the show, having previously been on episodes 110, 248, 282, 299, and 313. Jason and Scot discuss the "Turkey 5" with their guest Rob Garf, VP and GM for retail at Salesforce. They analyze data from various sources to provide insights into the holiday shopping season. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, e-commerce grew 7.75% in Q3, while total retail only grew 2%. Jason emphasizes the need for e-commerce to grow at least 7.7% in Q4 to stay on track. Adobe's data shows that Black Friday sales were up 7.5% and Cyber Monday sales were up 12.4% from the previous year. The speakers also discuss data from BigCommerce, MasterCard, and Salesforce, highlighting growth in online sales on Cyber Monday and Black Friday. Rob Garf adds his observations on retail industry trends, noting an increase in demand and robust pricing. He mentions a rebound in demand in Europe, excluding the UK, and highlights retailers' focus on profitability and inventory levels. The discussion then turns to Amazon's innovative advertising approach during a Friday NFL game, where shoppable ads were displayed via QR codes. Jason believes this strategy will benefit Amazon, as it monetizes viewership and reinforces the brand. Discounting played a significant role in driving demand during Cyber Week, with retailers offering an average of 30% off. Consumers were patient, waiting for attractive deals, while retailers managed their inventory and discounting strategies well. The luxury category, however, did not perform as strongly, with only a slight increase or even a decrease in sales. The hosts touch on the resale market and the growing popularity of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options and mobile wallets. They discuss the potential impact of mobile wallets on shopping behavior and note that BNPL resonates with new consumers and has replaced layaway. Finally, the hosts mention the passing of Charlie Munger and the filing of an IPO by Xi'an, encouraging listeners to support the show and announcing more holiday shopping data and reports on Salesforce.com. 0:00:46 Introduction to the Jason and Scot Show 0:05:04 Black Friday: First Sales for Vendors 0:14:06 Softness in Consumer Electronics and Toys Market 0:14:55 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Impact on Holiday Season Shape 0:16:32 Retailers' Inventory Management and Positive Growth Forecast 0:17:47 Retailers analyzing profitability and customer profitability. 0:18:29 Increase in Demand and Robust Pricing 0:22:34 Amazon's Innovative Advertising and Potential Profitability for Holiday 0:26:27 Discount rates over Cyber Week in comparison to previous years 0:29:04 Retailers' management of inventory and transparency in discounting strategy 0:31:52 Consumer behavior and the rise of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) 0:33:32 Mobile wallets and the impact on checkout process and shopping experiences 0:35:26 Buy Now, Pay Later Growing and Replacing Layaway 0:37:22 Charlie Munger's Passing and Xi'an's IPO Announcement 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 Tuesday November 28th, 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 315 being recorded on Tuesday, November 28th. I'm your host, Jason Retail Geek 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. Vigilant listeners will remember that we promised you a delicious turkey five Introduction to the Jason and Scot Show [0:47] sandwich starring none other than Rob Garf, VP and GM for retail at Salesforce. And that's what we're delivering today. Rob was here way back on episode 313 on November 8th. And he is back here today to tell us what happened during the Turkey 5. Welcome back, Rob. Rob: [1:05] Thanks for having me, Jason, Scot. Always a pleasure and look forward to getting into some of this really fun data. Scot: [1:12] Yeah, this is your record sixth time. So your old hat here. Before we jump in, we do want to just kind of set the table, keeping with the post-Thanksgiving, theme with some leftovers. I saw what you did there. Yeah. And we, meaning Jason and his army of interns, have gathered a bunch of data from other sources. So we just want to give listeners that, and we know you have your own data, and we want to paint a complete picture. So, Jason, give us the quick and dirty rundown of other data that we've seen out there covering the holiday period so far. Jason: [1:46] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. And side note, Rob, we're going to keep making you come back till you get it right. Rob: [1:50] I appreciate it. I'm here. Jason: [1:52] I'll do what you need. Awesome. So, super quick reminder, Q3 data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, e-commerce for the quarter grew 7.75%, over, the previous year. year, total retail only grew 2% from the previous year. And so if you take e-commerce out of total retail, brick and mortar in Q3 2023 only grew 1.08%, so lower than traditional. So when you come into the beginning of Q4 and holiday in particular, in my mind, e-commerce has to grow at 7.7% just to stay at par. And brick-and-mortar has to grow more than that one percent. [2:37] So, and I like to start with the lesser data and work our way up to the gold standard, very best data we have, which is, of course, the Rob Garth. So our friends at adobe which have a different data set but similar methodology and slightly different definition so you can't perfectly compare apples to apples, they said black friday sales were nine point eight billion in the us which is up seven point five percent from the year before so that would basically be right at that par i was just talking about, they said cyber monday was up to twelve point four percent and that was hot off the press so i wasn't able to do the math on what growth rate that was. They said for the whole month of November year to date, that they see November up 4.6% from last year. So kind of below that par. These are all numbers Adobe is giving for e-commerce. [3:26] And of particular note, and I know we'll talk about this more, they've seen a significant uptick in use of Buy Now, Pay Later services, and they've seen deeper discounting than we saw last year. Now, Shopify is really out there with a big news cycle. And I don't want to say they won up Salesforce, but they bought the sphere in Las Vegas and broadcast their data on the outside of the sphere, which visually is, is super cool. But their data isn't so useful because they don't report same store sales. They had a, you know, some unknown basket of merchants that sold a bunch of stuff last year, and they had some unknown basket of merchants that sold more stuff this year, and we don't know if the same merchants were here this year and last year or if they added a bunch of merchants or, or if this is true growth. So, so while the Shopify numbers are interesting, if you're investing in Shopify, they don't tell us a lot about what's happening in the e-commerce world. I did see a super interesting quote from Harley Finkelstein, who's the president of Shopify, and it's possibly, possibly that he just misworded this, but he was excited after Black Friday and he said 17.5, thousand. So $17,500. [4:41] Vendors made their first sale this Black Friday weekend. So I took that to mean, not that they launched on Friday just in time for Black Friday, but that this was their first Black Friday where they sold anything. So that's 17.5 thousand new merchants. [4:58] And then he said, in total, 55 thousand merchants set their all-time daily record on Black Friday. Black Friday: First Sales for Vendors [5:05] And while those two numbers sound impressive, if you kind of think about it for a second, you go, wait, the vast majority of merchants on Shopify that are B2C are going to sell their record. Cyber Monday hasn't happened yet, so take that out of the equation, are going to set their all-time record on Black Friday. So not surprised, you would expect the vast majority of all merchants to set their Black Friday record. And 17.5 thousand of them are new. So what that says is there's only 37 thousand merchants that are a year old on Shopify that sold more this Friday than last year on Black Friday. And that's, I guess, less than I would expect based on the usual reports we get from Shopify. So that, I'll just record that as a moment and our stock analysts that cover Shopify listening on the call can weigh in on that one. [5:58] BigCommerce, a slightly weirder data set. They saw an outlier, they saw 14% growth, but again, random, they're not trying to report at the industry, they're just reporting their clients. And then a particularly interesting one to me is MasterCard. I have a love-hate relationship with MasterCard. Unlike all the rest of you, MasterCard gets a set of data for stores and retailers, so they try to forecast what happened in retail, which is super valuable. Historically, I've seen some weird deviations from MasterCard that make me cautious about their numbers. But this year, they reported Black Friday, they did not report Cyber Monday. Their Black Friday number was up 8.5% year over year for eCommerce. [6:39] Which is at the high side of the mean for all these other datasets. And they reported that on Friday, total retail sales were up 2.5%. But if you back eCommerce out of that number, brick and mortar was only up 1.1%. So basically, I would call all those numbers par with our Q3 numbers. So, that kind of sets the table. Scot, take us through what we learned from Salesforce. Scot: [7:11] Yeah. So, a million questions, Rob. Let's start with, it seems like one of the biggest interesting battle royales is, A, why was Rob's face not on the sphere? And then B, it seems like one of the data sets is saying Cyber Monday is much bigger than Black Friday. And then in your pre-show, you had said you guys are seeing Black Friday exceed Cyber Monday. So let's start there. Which was bigger? Rob: [7:37] Yeah. Well, first of all, I lost the coin flip and Astro or Cody, which are critters in Salesforce world, won. So they got their faces along with Einstein on the sphere a couple of weeks ago during F1. So I'm still going for it next year, but we'll see what happens. But I digress. Let's get into the numbers. So yeah, we are seeing, you called it a battle royal. I appreciate any reference to 1980s wrestling, by the way. So thank you very much, but let's not go down that path. That could be a whole other podcast. But what we are seeing is, as you mentioned, a battle between Cyber Monday and Black Friday for supremacy. [8:19] And they are going back and forth. What we found in our data in 2019, Black Friday eclipsed Cyber Monday and has remained there, especially outside of the United States. And so we're seeing big growth and, you know, partly what's contributing to that is not only Alibaba, which has been in place for some time, but Timu and Xi'an, which I know you gentlemen like to talk about. So regardless what I think, two things based on all the data that you provide, and I appreciate the broad perspective that you share here, is people are actually buying. They might not be buying as much as they were in the past and throughout the pandemic, but But there is demand. And you know, I think that's important because when we look at our numbers and just to put it out there for Cyber Monday, and we can bounce around here wherever you'd like to go, is we chalked our number at 12.6. [9:13] Billion in the United States, and that's a growth of 3%. And I'll call it a healthy growth of 3%. And the reason being is, for the first time in five quarters, we saw growth being generated by increased consumer demand and not just merely higher prices, which is our indicator for inflation. And just to put it in perspective, let me talk about Black Friday here, because you mentioned the battle that's happening here. We saw 16.4 billion in online sales for Black Friday in the US, and that was up 9%. And so, as I mentioned, what this shows us is people are buying. What it's also showing is that there's a high concentration of online sales for those two days. And sure, you two gentlemen are laughing because that's been that way since Cyber Monday was coined in 2005, but there has been a smoothing out of demand, particularly around Cyber Week or cyber five for the last several years, but there's been a stark shift back to those two prominent days. Jason: [10:27] So interesting on the top line numbers, one of the, you mentioned that you're, you're seeing items increase, not just prices, right? Which kind of opens the whole specter of, of it's, we're not just seeing growth for from inflation, right? Are there any categories that you're like going into the holiday? It was like, hey, the growth was in essentials and food and things like that. And discretionary items like apparel and electronics and toys were not doing well. Did you guys see, like, are people opening their wallets on discretionary items or are sales continuing to be these kind of essentials and affordable luxuries? Rob: [11:06] Yeah, it's a mixed bag. And I do want to underscore your point, Jason, around. Growth being generated by more volume and not just higher prices. So that's exactly what we saw. 3% growth when you're seeing 9% increase in inflation is a tough equation to, be profitable and to work out in the consumer's favor. But in this case, we are seeing more demand. And the demand, as I mentioned, is a mixed bag. On one hand, we are seeing really nice growth in areas like makeup and health and beauty, skin care. We're also seeing nice growth in active apparel and active footwear as well. I categorize that actually as comfort. In uncertain times when consumers certainly are looking to really take control of their household balance sheets, oftentimes you migrate to comfort. You know, you can talk about comfort food, but this is just comfort gifting and comfort what you put on your body, both clothes and literally on your skin. And so we are seeing nice growth there where actually, if you think about it over the last 12 months, those categories have been hit a bit in terms of the growth curve. [12:20] And what you're seeing on the other side actually is luxury is softening a little bit, which which I think is important to note because for the last, I mean, gosh, through the pandemic and after, luxury was one of the most, no, not one of the most, was the most resilient categories. And we're starting to see a bit of breaking down, especially around the aspirational luxury side. So we're going to keep an eye on that. I will mention one other thing, actually, as it relates to categories that are doing well in the holiday and that is food and beverage and gifting, you know, in terms of. What people look to for comfort and experiences, they are gifting chocolate, they're gifting wine, they're gifting various gift baskets. We saw really strong growth, even starting, you know, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and working its way through the entire holiday. Jason: [13:22] Interesting. One category or two categories that come up a lot, like coming into holiday, electronics had been in a pretty big swamp, like for the whole pandemic. And I'm curious, I've seen conflicting data about whether electronics are back or whether they're still soft. Traditionally, electronics would be one of the fastest movers for holiday. Rob: [13:43] Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, consumer electronics, toys, right? Those two are still pretty soft. I think you really though need to put it in perspective in terms of the astronomical growth we saw on those categories over the last four years. I haven't done the math. You're really good at this, Jason. So I'm gonna put you to task maybe on your next LinkedIn post, but I am willing to wager, and I'm not a betting person, so I'm not really willing Softness in Consumer Electronics and Toys Market [14:07] to wager, but I'd love to see the CAGR of those categories over the last four years. I'm guessing they're in really strong, like high team growth, which any retailer would be happy with that on a given holiday time period. So there is a bit of softening, but I think it's really important to understand it in context with the growth that they've seen over the last several years. Scot: [14:32] Cool. Um, so, you know, with these good showings and Cyber Monday and Black Friday, what's that mean for the rest of the season? Are you guys like doubling your forecast, tripling or, and what's that mean for the shape? We talk a lot about the shape of the holiday. Any, any, any changes to your thoughts on those? Rob: [14:49] Yeah. The shape or the anatomy. I've been asked this by a lot of retail executives because they're being asked by their board, like, are you sandbagging us? Black Friday and Cyber Monday Impact on Holiday Season Shape [14:59] We need to really relook at this forecast. We crawled through the data over the last couple of days just to look through our model and see if we could see the data in different ways through different lenses. The reality is what we're seeing is that Black Friday and Cyber Monday were taking market share from the bookends of the holiday, from earlier on and later on, right before the shipping cutoff date. And so for the last five years or so, we have been seeing a smoothing out of demand for the seven days that we define as Cyber Week, Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. And Thanksgiving became a really strong and important day, especially on the mobile device, especially as consumers. [15:47] Either being distracted or inspired, whichever you want to think about it, on the couch after Thanksgiving meal, looking at social. [15:54] But we've seen a snapback of the higher concentration of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So it's not like there's incremental sales, and that's what I think you were getting at, right? I don't think there's incremental sales that we can now account for. We're still staying to our forecast of 1% growth in the US for November and December. That's how we define holiday and in the US and we're looking at 4% growth globally, really led by Europe. And I want to just put a caveat on this. Not only again, are we seeing that growth come from increased demand, but retailers have gotten smarter. Retailers' Inventory Management and Positive Growth Forecast [16:33] I don't know if it's smarter, but they were very deliberate going into this holiday starting six months ago about managing inventory levels and margins. So there's been a lot of talk about how are we going to handle shipping? How are we going to handle our return policies? And also, how are we going to think about our open to buys? And so I think most retail executives, especially on the merchandising side, are feeling pretty good because they're working their way through the inventory, which by the way, as you know, has been a big glut over the last couple of years, especially in 2021, when so many products were stuck in the port of LA. I mean, that just created this bullwhip effect that we're still just getting our arms around now and getting over the hump. And so that's my long way of saying is we're not reforecasting. We still feel positive with that 1% and 4% growth in U.S. and global, respectively, because. [17:24] Retailers are taking a very close look at overall profitability and this concept of customer profitability as well. Scot: [17:32] Yeah. You'd said, so it seems like the curve was kind of flattening out and now it's like steepening again it's like kind of coming in at the edges and in kind of like shaping up in the middle part of the bell curve which is like the that, Retailers analyzing profitability and customer profitability. [17:48] cyber week. Is that that's right. Okay. Rob: [17:51] That's really good. Yeah. It's kind of snapped back. Right. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Scot: [17:56] It's going to make that sound. Rob: [17:58] Where's the sound effects in turn? Are they there? Are they on call? Can we get that bullying? Jason: [18:02] I'll be adding that in post. Scot: [18:06] You had said something that kind of piqued my interest. You said people are kind of, you know, I may be rephrasing this wrong, but you said kind of demand is back. Like I knew it almost felt like you were saying before there was, you know, people were shopping, but it didn't seem like, you know, a new increase in demand. And now it is because you're seeing robustness in pricing and stuff. Is that say a little bit more about that? I'll make sure I understand what you were saying. Increase in Demand and Robust Pricing Rob: [18:32] Yeah, you got it. So yes. And I, again, and don't think retail executives are doing backflips and thinking that we're getting back to roaring double-digit, growth coming out of the holiday. But what this is an indication, and by the way, we're seeing this as a leading indicator in Europe, let's exclude the UK, which is probably in the same rebound curve as the United States and Canada, but you take continental Europe and who are about two, maybe three quarters ahead of us in terms of the rebound, we're seeing inflation settle, the average selling prices settle down and people are buying more. So we're seeing average orders volume higher. We're seeing slight uptick in units per transaction, only slight. But the order piece is super interesting. We're seeing traffic. We're seeing continued really strong traffic. People are just really being diligent and patient and shopping a lot and looking for the best deals. And we'll have to talk about that in terms of what discounting patterns we saw as well. So that's my long way of saying Scot is people are buying more, they're doing it. By still making trade-offs. So there is a sense of let's load up on some essentials while we're getting good deals. [19:57] Let's look for travel, entertainment, like experiences. And you have to also think of the adjacent categories like luggage, as an example, if you're going on a trip, do you need something new to put your clothes in? And though they are, again, increasing, as I mentioned. So as I think about the sentiment, even with a 1% in the US growth, 4% global is what we're forecasting for the full holiday, retailers are feeling good about that. They want to exit this holiday on a really good foundation of profitability, a really good foundation on inventory levels. And most every retailer I'm talking to has a growth mindset. They're thinking about customer acquisition, finding new ways to do that because customer acquisition costs are still off the charts, but also loyalty, finding new ways to create stickiness, looking for adjacent categories, adjacent services, looking for partnerships to supplement what they're doing organically. And I mean, this would take us down a whole other path, but they're leaning into data. They're leaning into AI to better understand who those consumers are and what they're likely to buy and making sure they're able to create profitable customers. How was that soapbox? I just rattled off too much, too fast. Jason: [21:13] So hopefully you were able to digest it. But you kind of, you glossed over what they're really looking at is just selling ads to brands. Rob: [21:18] That's fair. Thank you. I could have just said that. You're right. That's a very good point. And yeah, we could, I love your take actually, seriously, given that on Amazon's move for the football game on Friday. Jason: [21:31] Yeah. So that's a great point. And maybe just to catch up listeners that might not have followed it. Something very different and unique for this year is that the NFL, you know, normally they have a Thursday game and they have Sunday games and a Monday night game. On Thanksgiving, they have Thursday day games during Thanksgiving. This year, they added a Friday game for the first time. And the sponsor of that Friday game was Amazon. It was broadcast on Amazon Prime, and Amazon actually had shoppable ads via QR codes in the broadcast, all sort of innovative, cool, new stuff. [22:11] The early read is that the viewership was pretty good for the Friday game. There's no history, so we have nothing to compare it to. I would argue fewer people are going and standing in line at brick and mortar stores for door busters. You know, the little bit of data we do have on brick and mortar shows that, like, there wasn't a huge, huge spike in in-store shopping. I feel like Friday has become more of an online shopping day, Amazon's Innovative Advertising and Potential Profitability for Holiday [22:36] which means people are home more, which means there's an opportunity to watch a football game. I kind of don't imagine that the interactive ad formats, like, you know, we're high volume and really move the needle, but they're innovative. And I do think that that Friday game is likely to be a new tradition as the holiday shopping season goes from an omni-channel thing to an online thing. At least that's my POV. Rob: [23:03] Yeah, I am super interested in your point of view given how close you are to this. So I guess I'm gonna put you on the spot. Wow, look at me, I'm totally turning the table here, but this has been on my mind. And actually, interestingly enough, over the weekend at a party, somebody who's not in like retail, you know, he shops. That's the extent of it. He pointed out what Amazon did and thought it was really clever. So what did I hear? Like, did they spend a hundred million dollars for that? Regardless, do you think they made the money back going to your point, Jason, on selling ad space in there and kind of even if it's a break even and or they're gaining more prime members, it was a good day for Amazon? Jason: [23:42] Yeah, I am pretty confident it was a good day for Amazon. Like, one thing to remember is Amazon has a better model for monetizing eyeballs than anyone else, right? So, like, if you're Coca-Cola and you sponsor a football game, you're trying to get eyeballs and the only way you have to monetize those eyeballs is to get them to drink more Coke. Rob: [24:03] Right. Jason: [24:04] If you're Amazon, here's what you do. You get a bunch of eyeballs. You try to sell them something that you make money on. And after you do that, you sell ads to other people for more than you paid. And they try to sell something to that person, right? And so, you know, the combination of the ad revenue that Amazon generates and the top of funnel, and bottom of funnel benefit that Amazon gets, again, they're building their brand. Your friend that was just talking to you, he wasn't talking about a particular product he was shopping for. The brand he remembers is Amazon, right? And so you got that Amazon top of the funnel benefit, which is valuable and important. Amazon probably sold some stuff to people. So you got that Amazon bottom of funnel benefit. And then we know Amazon sold a bunch of ads, which is, you know, a huge, huge driver of incremental profit. So yeah, I definitely think we can call Amazon a winner there. I think when it all settles, we're also going to see that it was just a pretty good sales day for Amazon as well. Rob: [25:09] Yeah, I bet you're right. Yeah. The last point and then we can move on and by the way, welcome to episode one of the Rob Garf podcast, is the fact that I mean, knowing Amazon, those ads that you're getting are personalized in terms of them understanding who you are and even if it's a different size or a different brand or a different you know, whatever, even what they know about what's in your shopping cart, what you bought in the past. So anyways, it sounds like, as I would have suspected, you're pretty bullish about it and I am too. Jason: [25:37] So yeah, I do want to cover something just kind of fundamental. So, so we rebounded a little bit and we got bigger sales on, on Friday and Monday. Potentially we might've just pulled some sales in that were going to happen later in the month per your, your comments about not wanting to re-forecast. Did we partly pull those in by giving deeper discounts than we usually give? Like what, what did you see from a discounting standpoint and what does that say about potential profitability for Holiday? Rob: [26:03] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we actually looked at this going into the Holiday and we went back to 2019 and I have the team look at discount rates starting in November 1st for 2019, 2021, and 2023, what we had anticipated for this year. And what we saw and actually came true is we saw discount rates over Cyber Week hover just north of where they were in 2019. Discount rates over Cyber Week in comparison to previous years [26:31] Don't forget, 2021, there were the lowest discount rates that we've seen because the product just wasn't there. So retailers, it was the first time they won the game of Discount Chicken. The short answer is yes. Retailers did discount the heaviest they have all year, right around 30% on average. And I think that's important. It's on average. I mean, we've all seen discounts of 40%, 50%, really creative discounting strategies. And so that definitely drove demand. I mean, going back to the consumer, while they're buying more, they're making trade-offs and they were really diligent. [27:09] They were really patient and they waited and they waited and they ultimately saw the attractive deals starting in earnest on Black Friday. They weren't even that great on the Monday, Tuesday, I'm sorry, the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thanksgiving, Thursday until Black Friday, and then they started to buy. So they held out and they ultimately purchased those attractive deals. In terms of margin, I think we're doing okay. And the secret here is when we looked at the data, given all the inflation that happened, And actually, consumers are still, even with these deep discounts, paying more than they were in 2019. The optics are there. They're feeling like they're getting a good deal, but the reality is they're still spending more. So I think they'll be okay. And there wasn't this protracted discounting that did happen. And because they manage their inventory well, the retailers, and their discounting strategy as well, I don't think they're going to be forced with the hail Mary discounts that you often see right before the shipping cutoff date. So I think that retailers actually managed it pretty well. I give them credit too, by the way, what we saw in our data as well is retailers were a lot more transparent around their discounting strategy. [28:23] Many were offering price match guarantees. If they saw, you know, the consumer saw the price for less, and they were also much more transparent around their return policies as well. So people felt a little more comfortable buying earlier, even if the prices weren't exactly where they wanted it. So the long of it is, or the short of it, whichever way I look at it, is there were healthy discounts. Consumers took advantage of them. I'm still feeling more positive, especially than I have from last year, about margins. Scot: [28:57] Cool. You said something I want to dig into, and then I want to pivot to be in PL. You said luxury was a little soft. What do we make of that? Retailers' management of inventory and transparency in discounting strategy Rob: [29:06] Yeah, and like I said, it's had a run, like I haven't seen before in any one category. I mean, don't get me wrong. Consumer electronics really strong and some other categories in the pandemic home looked really strong as well. But it continued after the pandemic, both in store and online. What we saw compared again, just to put in perspective, three percent increase on Cyber Monday in the U.S., nine percent increase in Black Friday in the U.S. [29:34] There was a tick low beyond flat for luxury. What it also showed is they started to. [29:41] Discount more than they typically do. You think of luxury, they're going to hold their really price and be sensitive around preserving their brand and their margins. And we were seeing that tick up as well. I think the ultra luxury is still alive and kicking, no problem. It's more of that aspirational luxury. One area that I think is really important to point out is the resale market. More and more luxury brands are playing in the luxury market game. I'm sorry, the resale market game, because they realize people are doing it anyways, and they might as well offer that in many cases on their own website. So like Coach as an example, Canada Goose as an example, have the capability to exchange product, which then allows existing customers to likely buy something at a higher price point. And then if the product is in good enough shape, they're able to resell it and allow for aspirational shoppers to actually access that brand and buy it where they might not have been able to in the past. So yeah, I'm not overly concerned about luxury. I mean, the brands are so strong and there's so much loyalty there, but it just does show that in the aspirational space, people are trading down to a degree. [30:55] You know, they're trading down for value in the resale market. In many cases, they're trading down for vintage. It's amazing to see how many, you know, sneaker brands and specific models are hot that we all remember from our high school days. And you know, even the younger generations like to save the world a little bit as well. Scot: [31:14] Yeah. So I guess what I'm getting at is, do we think the consumer's rolling over and that's kind of the BNPL question too, because one way to read BNPL increasing is people are under financial stress. So they're stretching out payments. Another way is, you know, seeing all this data and it's always sponsored by one of the BNPL providers. So I'm never sure how to take it, but it shows that, you know, millennials and Gen Zers like, they don't like open credit. And it's weird because my kids have this perspective too. I thought it was like, I thought it was totally made up and then they're like, oh no, I, you know, I hate having like these credit cards with big limits. And I'm like, well, if you don't use it, it doesn't matter. It just makes them Consumer behavior and the rise of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) [31:52] nervous for some reason. And do you think it's a generational thing or is it a little sign of softness on the consumer? And maybe the luxury is another indication that it feels like the consumer is rolling over a little bit or you don't see that. Rob: [32:06] Yeah, I mean, I think it is a bit generational to your point. I don't have those data's points to substantiate what you're describing. But a lot of what I learned is from my 17-year-old and 14-year-old because they're right in the smack dab of purchasing and trends and so forth. Don't worry, we have a lot more data at Salesforce to back this up, billions and billions of shoppers. But in any case, the anecdotes definitely help provide a full commentary. But we saw an outpay later over Cyber Week increase 7%. So that's healthy. It's a little slower than we've seen in past. What we're also seeing, and it started last year, is it's on lower and lower price point merchandise. So that also speaks to the adoption as well. It's not just on the big ticket items. I think if I zoom out for a moment as well, mobile wallets were really strong. Mobile wallets were really strong. We saw about a 50% increase year over year in that. Now, of course, it's a smaller base than traditional credit cards and debit cards. But still, it's showing the adoption because it's really breaking down the friction in the checkout process. But we keep a close eye on buy now, pay later, because you're right. It could be an indication, especially as consumers look to buy lower price merchandise, that it might be a softening in the market. But we're not quite there in proclaiming that. Scot: [33:25] You said a mobile wallet. That is catnip for retail geek, so I'll get out of his way. I bet he has a million questions. Jason: [33:32] Yeah, no, Scot knows I love a good mobile wallet and I'm sure everyone's already heard this, Mobile wallets and the impact on checkout process and shopping experiences [33:37] but I have a hypothesis that some of the popular shopping behaviors we see in Asia aren't as popular here because we don't have as good a penetration of mobile wallets and that if you have mobile wallets, it makes certain experiences like shopping on social media and things like that easier because it only requires one hand instead of three hands. So I'd be curious, do you guys think you're seeing more mobile wallet users, or do you think you're seeing more transaction from the existing users, or do you have the ability to? To see between those two? I suspect I just asked you a question you're going to now have to go do research on. Rob: [34:17] Nick Neumann We may have that based on some of the primary research we do. We don't have access to personally identifiable information, so we can't see by user. But my thesis there is it's both. There are more people adopting mobile wallets because they see the convenience and the friction that's removed. And then once that happens, they're buying more. I think you go back to the Amazon example, part of why that's probably a home run for them is because it's a lot easier for somebody to buy in that form factor than let's say Roku or other Verizon user interfaces that you don't have a wallet associated with it. I didn't go through the shopping process on the Friday NFL game, but I can only imagine it was much easier than having to do it through other types of media. So I think that, yeah, I agree by the way, with your hypothesis that, you know, embedded commerce or shopping at the edge has been a bit stunted because, the wallet piece is not there or as accessible as it is in other countries. Buy Now, Pay Later Growing and Replacing Layaway Jason: [35:30] Yeah. Two things I'll just throw out there on buy now, pay later. I mean, I do, I think it, it legitimately resonates with the new crop of consumers. And so I think it's growing for all the reasons that the Buy Now Pay Later people claim it's growing. But I would, there's two accelerators that are just kind of convenient in there. Holiday used to be a big time for this payment method that the youngsters on the call wouldn't have heard of called the layaway. And almost no retailer that I'm aware of has brought back layaway, like they all retired it in the last several years, largely because Buy Now Pay Later has replaced it. And so, you know, layaway is most popular around holiday. So, you know, to the extent that buy now pay later is the digital version of layaway. It kind of makes sense that you would see a spike over a holiday. Also, digital is growing much faster than brick and mortar. Buy Now, Pay Later is disproportionately online. So that, you know, is another reason you would expect Buy Now, Pay Later to spike. One thing that's a little alarming slash interesting to me is that Buy Now, Pay Later gets used for a wider range of purchases and merchandise than LayAway did. Like, LayAway tended to be big ticket items, your kid's aspirational toys, but Buy Now Pay Later gets used for food and consumables and things that economically you would argue probably don't want to be financing something that you need to rebuy every month. Rob: [36:52] Yes. Jason: [36:53] So I'll just throw that out there on Buy Now Pay Later. We are coming up on our allotted time. I do have two other pieces of news that just kind of interrupted the Turkey Five news cycle. And one of them I'm super sad about, and it's actual breaking news that happened while we were recording this show, Charlie Munger just passed away at 99. Rob: [37:13] Oh, wow. Scot: [37:14] That's terrible. Jason: [37:15] Warren Buffett's partner, and I just, I feel like, very admirable person. I've learned a lot. He and Warren Buffett, like, are super generous with sharing Charlie Munger's Passing and Xi'an's IPO Announcement [37:23] all this thought leadership, and I just want to say best wishes to all his family and loved ones. Seems like you had an amazing life. Rob: [37:31] Yeah, I echo your sentiment. Jason: [37:33] Yep. And then in the middle of Cyber 5, you guys teased this a couple of times talking about Xi'an. and Xi'an disclosed that they filed an IPO. So that came out yesterday. It's a confidential IPO, so we won't actually see the prospectus until probably 2024 sometime. Okay. And the theory is that it's going to be, because of their not super transparent ownership structure and their Chinese ownership, it's gonna have extra regulatory scrutiny. And so the reason you'd file a confidential IPO is so you could start talking to regulators and negotiating what you're gonna do and what you're gonna disclose. And so they're probably working through all that stuff to then do the public IPO later. But it's, I'm excited for when that gets disclosed because there's a lot of speculation about how big Shein is and how profitable or unprofitable their model has been. And we're gonna be able to do away with all that speculation and get some real certified data. Rob: [38:38] I can't wait to listen to that show when you dissect that. It will be super interesting to see where they're allocating the investment and the capital. Beyond, obviously, hiring people, but what parts of the business. Jason: [38:51] I totally agree and that's going to be a great place to leave it because we have used up our allotted time. Rob, so grateful and congratulations on being our first six-time guest. And as per usual, if you enjoyed this episode or it was useful to us in any way, the two ways you can reward us are to do a giant enterprise contract for all your marketing services with Salesforce.com or, you can leave a five-star review on iTunes for Scot and I. So, you know, those are the two paths, choose whichever one makes most financial sense to you, but appreciate it if you do one or the other. Rob: [39:29] Yeah. And if I could say too, I know we're running up against time, but I want to give a big, sincere thank you. Obviously we just came out of Thanksgiving, so I want to show my gratitude. You know, it's amazing. Anytime I'm on the show, the people that reach out to me, not only talking about the show, but how much they've learned from you. And so for you to trust me and providing my perspective and Salesforce perspective means a lot and just thanks for being such good friends. Scot: [39:56] Robert Leonard Jason said, no, but I overrode him just so you know the history. I thought, you know, Jason's like, I'm the retail geek. We don't need any Garfies in here. Rob, remind us where could people go? You guys will be updating your data. I assume, you know, this is the last time you'll be on for this year, but I'm sure you'll be publishing more data as we get deeper in the holiday. Where do people go to see that? Rob: [40:19] Jason Cosper Yeah, we have our Shopping Insights HQ on salesforce.com. We will be updating the information. We'll do a mid-season report right around the shipping cutoff window, and then we'll do an all-wrapped-up just around the beginning of NRF. So keep an eye out. Scot: [40:34] Awesome. Well, thanks, everyone, and until next time... Jason: [40:38] Happy commercing!

Randall Degges, Head of Developer Relations & Community at Snyk, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Snyk's innovative AI strategy and why developers don't need to be afraid of security. Randall explains the difference between Large Language Models and Symbolic AI, and how combining those two approaches creates more accurate security tooling. Corey and Randall also discuss the FUD phenomenon to selling security tools, and Randall expands on why Snyk doesn't take that approach. Randall also shares some background on how he went from being a happy Snyk user to a full-time Snyk employee. About RandallRandall runs Developer Relations & Community at Snyk, where he works on security research, development, and education. In his spare time, Randall writes articles and gives talks advocating for security best practices. Randall also builds and contributes to various open-source security tools.Randall's realms of expertise include Python, JavaScript, and Go development, web security, cryptography, and infrastructure security. Randall has been writing software for over 20 years and has built a number of popular API services and open-source tools.Links Referenced: Snyk: https://snyk.io/ Snyk blog: https://snyk.io/blog/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this featured guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Snyk. Also brought to us by our friends at Snyk is one of our friends at Snyk, specifically Randall Degges, their Head of Developer Relations and Community. Randall, thank you for joining me.Randall: Hey, what's up, Corey? Yeah, thanks for having me on the show, man. Looking forward to talking about some fun security stuff today.Corey: It's been a while since I got to really talk about a security-centric thing on this show, at least in order of recordings. I don't know if the one right before this is a security thing; things happen on the back-end that I'm blissfully unaware of. But it seems the theme lately has been a lot around generative AI, so I'm going to start off by basically putting you in the hot seat. Because when you pull up a company's website these days, the odds are terrific that they're going to have completely repositioned absolutely everything that they do in the context of generative AI. It's like, “We're a generative AI company.” It's like, “That's great.” Historically, I have been a paying customer of Snyk so that it does security stuff, so if you're now a generative AI company, who do I use for the security platform thing that I was depending upon? You have not done that. First, good work. Secondly, why haven't you done that?Randall: Great question. Also, you said a moment ago that LLMs are very interesting, or there's a lot of hype around it. Understatement of the last year, for sure [laugh].Corey: Oh, my God, it has gotten brutal.Randall: I don't know how many billions of dollars have been dumped into LLM in the last 12 months, but I'm sure it's a very high number.Corey: I have a sneaking suspicion that the largest models cost at least a billion each train, just based upon—at least retail price—based upon the simple economics of how long it takes to do these things, how expensive that particular flavor of compute is. And the technology is his magic. It is magic in a box and I see that, but finding ways that it applies in different ways is taking some time. But that's not stopping the hype beasts. A lot of the same terrible people who were relentlessly pushing crypto have now pivoted to relentlessly pushing generative AI, presumably because they're working through Nvidia's street team, or their referral program, or whatever it is. Doesn't matter what the rest of us do, as long as we're burning GPU cycles on it. And I want to distance myself from that exciting level of boosterism. But it's also magic.Randall: Yeah [laugh]. Well, let's just talk about AI insecurity for a moment and answer your previous question. So, what's happening in space, what's the deal, what is all the hype going to, and what is Snyk doing around there? So, quite frankly—and I'm sure a lot of people on your show say the same thing—but Snyk isn't new into, like, the AI space. It's been a fundamental part of our platform for many years now.So, for those of you listening who have no idea what the heck Snyk is, and you're like, “Why are we talking about this,” Snyk is essentially a developer security company, and the core of what we do is two things. The first thing is we help scan your code, your dependencies, your containers, all the different parts of your application, and detect vulnerabilities. That's the first part. The second thing we do is we help fix those vulnerabilities. So, detection and remediation. Those are the two components of any good security tool or security company.And in our particular case, we're very focused on developers because our whole product is really based on your application and your application security, not infrastructure and other things like this. So, with that being said, what are we doing at a high level with LLMs? Well, if you think about AI as, like, a broad spectrum, you have a lot of different technologies behind the scenes that people refer to as AI. You have lots of these large language models, which are generating text based on inputs. You also have symbolic AI, which has been around for a very long time and which is very domain specific. It's like creating specific rules and helping do pattern detection amongst things.And those two different types of applied AI, let's say—we have large language models and symbolic AI—are the two main things that have been happening in industry for the last, you know, tens of years, really, with LLM as being the new kid on the block. So, when we're talking about security, what's important to know about just those two underlying technologies? Well, the first thing is that large language models, as I'm sure everyone listening to this knows, are really good at predicting things based on a big training set of data. That's why companies like OpenAI and their ChatGPT tool have become so popular because they've gone out and crawled vast portions of the internet, downloaded tons of data, classified it, and then trained their models on top of this data so that they can help predict the things that people are putting into chat. And that's why they're so interesting, and powerful, and there's all these cool use cases popping up with them.However, the downside of LLMs is because they're just using a bunch of training data behind the scenes, there's a ton of room for things to be wrong. Training datasets aren't perfect, they're coming from a ton of places, and even if they weren't perfect, there's still the likelihood that things that are going to be generating output based on a statistical model isn't going to be accurate, which is the whole concept of hallucinations.Corey: Right. I wound up remarking on the livestream for GitHub Universe a week or two ago that the S in AI stood for security. One of the problems I've seen with it is that it can generate a very plausible looking IAM policy if you ask it to, but it doesn't actually do what you think it would if you go ahead and actually use it. I think that it's still squarely in the realm of, it's great at creativity, it's great at surface level knowledge, but for anything important, you really want someone who knows what they're doing to take a look at it and say, “Slow your roll there, Hasty Pudding.”Randall: A hundred percent. And when we're talking about LLMs, I mean, you're right. Security isn't really what they're designed to do, first of all [laugh]. Like, they're designed to predict things based on statistics, which is not a security concept. But secondly, another important thing to note is, when you're talking about using LLMs in general, there's so many tricks and techniques and things you can do to improve accuracy and improve things, like for example, having a ton of [contexts 00:06:35] or doing Few-Shot Learning Techniques where you prompt it and give it examples of questions and answers that you're looking for can give you a slight competitive edge there in terms of reducing hallucinations and false information.But fundamentally, LLMs will always have a problem with hallucinations and getting things wrong. So, that brings us to what we mentioned before: symbolic AI and what the differences are there. Well, symbolic AI is a completely different approach. You're not taking huge training sets and using machine learning to build statistical models. It's very different. You're creating rules, and you're parsing very specific domain information to generate things that are highly accurate, although those models will fail when applied to general-purpose things, unlike large language models.So, what does that mean? You have these two different types of AI that people are using. You have symbolic AI, which is very specific and requires a lot of expertise to create, then you have LLMs, which take a lot of experience to create as well, but are very broad and general purpose and have a capability to be wrong. Snyk's approach is, we take both of those concepts, and we use them together to get the best of both worlds. And we can talk a little bit about that, but I think fundamentally, one of the things that separates Snyk from a lot of other companies in the space is we're just trying to do whatever the best technical solution is to solve the problem, and I think we found that with our hybrid approach.Corey: I think that there is a reasonable distrust of AI when it comes to security. I mean, I wound up recently using it to build what has been announced by the time this thing airs, which is my re:Invent photo scavenger hunt app. I know nothing about front-end, so that's okay, I've got a robot in my pocket. It's great at doing the development of the initial thing, and then you have issues, and you want to add functionality, and it feels like by the time I was done with my first draft, that ten different engineers had all collaborated on this thing without ever speaking to one another. There was no consistent idiomatic style, it used a variety, a hodgepodge of different lists and the rest, and it became a bit of a Frankenstein's monster.That can kind of work if we're talking about a web app that doesn't have any sensitive data in it, but holy crap, the idea of applying that to, “Yeah, that's how we built our bank's security policy,” is one of those, “Let me know who said that, so they can not have their job anymore,” territory when the CSO starts [hunting 00:08:55].Randall: You're right. It's a very tenuous situation to be in from a security perspective. The way I like to think about it—because I've been a developer for a long time and a security professional—and I as much as anyone out there love to jump on the hype train for things and do whatever I can to be lazy and just get work done quicker. And so, I use ChatGPT, I use GitHub Copilot, I use all sorts of LLM-based tools to help me write software. And similarly to the problems when developers are not using LLM to help them write code, security is always a concern.Like, it doesn't matter if you have a developer writing every line of code themselves or if they're getting help from Copilot or ChatGPT. Fundamentally, the problem with security and the reason why it's such an annoying part of the developer experience, in all honesty, is that security is really difficult. You can take someone who's an amazing engineer, who has 30 years of experience, like, you can take John Carmack, I'm sure, one of the most legendary developers to ever walk the Earth, you could sit over his shoulder and watch him write software, right, I can almost guarantee you that he's going to have some sort of security problem in his code, even with all the knowledge he has in his head. And part of the reason that's the case is because modern security is way complicated. Like if you're building a web app, you have front-end stuff you need to protect, you have back-end stuff you need to protect, there's databases and infrastructure and communication layers between the infrastructure and the services. It's just too complicated for one person to fully grasp.And so, what do you do? Well, you basically need some sort of assistance from automation. You have to have some sort of tooling that can take a look at your code that you're writing and say, “Hey Randall, on line 39, when you were writing this function that's taking user data and doing something with it, you forgot to sanitize the user data.” Now, that's a simple example, but let's talk about a more complex example. Maybe you're building some authentication software, and you're taking users' passwords, and you're hashing them using a common hashing algorithm.And maybe the tooling is able to detect way using the bcrypt password hashing algorithm with a work factor of ten to create this password hash, but guess what, we're in 2023 and a work factor of ten is something that older commodity CPUs can now factor at a reasonable rate, and so you need to bump that up to 13 or 14. These are the types of things where you need help over time. It's not something that anyone can reasonably assume they can just deal with in their head. The way I like to think about it is, as a developer, regardless of how you're building code, you need some sort of security checks on there to just help you be productive, in all honesty. Like, if you're not doing that, you're just asking for problems.Corey: Oh, yeah. On some level, even the idea of it's just going to be very computationally expensive to wind up figuring out what that password hash is, well great, but one of the things that we've been aware of for a while is that given the rise of botnets and compromised computers, the attackers have what amounts to infinite computing capacity, give or take. So, if they want in, on some level, badly enough, they're going to find a way to get in there. When you say that every developer is going to sit down and write insecure code, you're right. And a big part of that is because, as imagined today, security is an incredibly high friction process, and it's not helped, frankly, by tools that don't have nuance or understanding.If I want to do a crap ton of busy work that doesn't feel like it moves the needle forward at all, I'll go around to resolving the hundreds upon hundreds of Dependabot alerts I have for a lot of my internal services that write my weekly newsletter. Because some dependency three deep winds up having a failure mode when it gets untrusted input of the following type, it can cause resource exhaustion. It runs in a Lambda function, so I don't care about the resources, and two, I'm not here providing the stuff that I write, which is the input with an idea toward exploiting stuff. So, it's busy work, things I don't need to be aware of. But more to the point, stuff like that has the high propensity to mask things I actually do care about. Getting the signal from noise from your misconfigured, ill-conceived alerting system is just awful. Like, a bad thing is there are no security things for you to work on, but a worse one is, “Here are 70,000 security things for you to work on.” How do you triage? How do you think about it?Randall: A hundred percent. I mean, that's actually the most difficult thing, I would say, that security teams have to deal with in the real world. It's not having a tool to help detect issues or trying to get people to fix them. The real issue is, there's always security problems, like you said, right? Like, if you take a look and just scan any codebase out there, any reasonably-sized codebase, you're going to find a ridiculous amount of issues.Some of those issues will be actual issues, like, you're not doing something in code hygiene that you need to do to protect stuff. A lot of those issues are meaningless things, like you said. You have a transitive dependency that some direct dependency is referring to, and maybe in some function call, there's an issue there, and it's alerting you on it even though you don't even use this function call. You're not even touching this class, or this method, or whatever it is. And it wastes a lot of time.And that's why the Holy Grail in the security industry in all honesty is prioritization and insights. At Snyk, we sort of pioneered this concept of ASPM, which stands for Application Security Posture Management. And fundamentally what that means is when you're a security team, and you're scanning code and finding all these issues, how do you prioritize them? Well, there's a couple of approaches. One approach is to use static analysis to try to figure out if these issues that are being detected are reachable, right? Like, can they be achieved in some way, but that's really hard to do statically and there's so many variables that go into it that no one really has foolproof solutions there.The second thing you can do is you can combine insights and heuristics from a lot of different places. So, you can take a look at static code analysis results, and you can combine them with agents running live that are observing your application, and then you can try to determine what stuff is actually reachable given this real world heuristic, and you know, real time information and mapping it up with static code analysis results. And that's really the holy grail of figuring things out. We have an ASPM product—or maybe it's a feature, an offering, if you will, but it's something that Snyk provides, which gives security admins a lot more insight into that type of operation at their business. But you're totally right, Corey, it's a really difficult problem to solve, and it burns a lot of goodwill in the security community and in the industry because people spend a lot of time getting false alerts, going through stuff, and just wasting millions of hours a year, I'm sure.Corey: That's part of the challenge, too, is that it feels like there are two classes of problems in the world, at least when it comes to business. And I found this by being on the wrong side of it, on some level. Here on the wrong side, it's things like caring about cost optimization, it's caring about security, it's remembering to buy fire insurance for your building. You can wind up doing all of those things—and you should be doing them, but you can over-index on them to the point where you run out of money and your business dies. The proactive side of that fence is getting features to market sooner, increasing market share, growing revenue, et cetera, and that's the stuff that people are always going to prioritize over the back burner stuff. So, striking a balance between that is always going to be a bit of a challenge, and where people land on that is going to be tricky.Randall: So, I think this is a really good bridge. You're totally right. It's expensive to waste people's time, basically, is what you're saying, right? You don't want to waste people's time, you want to give them actionable alerts that they can actually fix, or hopefully you fix it for them if you can, right? So, I'm going to lay something out, which is, in our opinion, is the Snyk way, if you will, that you should be approaching these developer security issues.So, let's take a look at two different approaches. The first approach is going to be using an LLM, like, let's say, just ChatGPT. We'll call them out because everyone knows ChatGPT. The first approach we're going to take is—Corey: Although I do insist on pronouncing it Chat-Gippity. But please, continue.Randall: [laugh]. Chat-Gippity. I love that. I haven't heard that before. Chat-Gippity. Sounds so much more fun, you know?Corey: It sounds more personable. Yeah.Randall: Yeah. So, you're talking to Chat-Gippity—thank you—and you paste in a file from your codebase, and you say, “Hey, Chat-Gippity. Here's a file from my codebase. Please help me identify security issues in here,” and you get back a long list of recommendations.Corey: Well, it does more than that. Let me just interject there because one of the things it does that I think very few security engineers have mastered is it does it politely and constructively, as opposed to having an unstated tone of, “You dumbass,” which I beli—I've [unintelligible 00:17:24] with prompts on this. You can get it to have a condescending, passive-aggressive tone, but you have to go out of your way to do it, as opposed to it being the default. Please continue.Randall: Great point. Also, Daniel from Unsupervised Learning, by the way, has a really good post where he shows you setting up Chat-Gippity to mimic Scarlett Johansson from the movie Her on your phone so you can talk to it. Absolutely beautiful. And you get these really fun, very nice responses back and forth around your code analysis. So, shout out there.But going back to the point. So, if you get these responses back from Chat-Gippity, and it's like, “Hey look, here's all the security issues,” a lot of those things will be false alerts, and there's been a lot of public security research done on these analysis tools just give you information. A lot of those things will be false alerts, some things will be things that maybe they're a real problem, but cannot be fixed due to transitive dependencies, or whatever the issues are, but there's a lot of things you need to do there. Now, let's take it up one notch, let's say instead of using Chat-Gippity directly, you're using GitHub Copilot. Now, this is a much better situation for working with code because now what Microsoft is doing is let's say you're running Copilot inside of VS Code. It's able to analyze all the files in your codebase, and it's able to use that additional context to help provide you with better information.So, you can talk to GitHub Copilot and say, “Hey, I'd really like to know what security issues are in this file,” and it's going to give you maybe a little bit better answers than ChatGPT directly because it has more context about the other parts of your codebase and can give you slightly better answers. However, because these things are LLMs, you're still going to run into issues with accuracy, and hallucinations, and all sorts of other problems. So, what is the better approach? And I think that's fundamentally what people want to know. Like, what is a good approach here?And on the scanning side, the right approach in my mind is using something very domain specific. Now, what we do at Snyk is we have a symbolic AI scanning engine. So, we take customers' code, and we take an entire codebase so you have access to all the files and dependencies and things like this, and you take a look at these things. And we have a security analyst team that analyzes real-world security issues and fixes that have been validated. So, we do this by pulling lots of open-source projects as well as other security information that we originally produced, and we define very specific rules so that we can take a look at software, and we can take a look at these codebases with a very high degree of certainty.And we can give you a very actionable list of security issues that you need to address, and not only that, we can show you how is going to be the best way to address them. So, with that being said, I think the second side to that is okay, if that's a better approach on the scanning side, maybe you shouldn't be using LLMs for finding issues; maybe you should be using them for fixing security issues, which makes a lot of sense. So, let's say you do it the Snyk way, and you use symbolic AI engines and you sort of find these issues. Maybe you can just take that information then, in combination with your codebase, and fire off a request to an LLM and say, “Hey Chat-Gippity, please take this codebase, and take this security information that we know is accurate, and fix this code for me.” So, now you're going one step further.Corey: One challenge that I've seen, especially as I've been building weird software projects with the help of magic robots from the future, is that a lot of components, like in React for example, get broken out into their own file. And pasting a file in is all well and good, but very often, it needs insight into the rest of the codebase. At GitHub Universe, something that they announced was Copilot Enterprise, which trains Copilot on the intricacies of your internal structures around shared libraries, all of your code, et cetera. And in some of the companies I'm familiar with, I really believe that's giving a very expensive, smart robot a form of brain damage, but that's neither here nor there. But there's an idea of seeing the interplay between different components that individual analysis on a per-file basis will miss, feels to me like something that needs a more holistic view. Am I wrong on that? Am I oversimplifying?Randall: You're right. There's two things we need to address. First of all, let's say you have the entire application context—so all the files, right—and then you ask an LLM to create a fix for you. This is something we do at Snyk. We actually use LLMs for this purpose. So, we take this information we ask the LLM, “Hey, please rewrite this section of code that we know has an issue given this security information to remove this problem.” The problem then becomes okay, well, how do you know this fix is accurate and is not going to break people's stuff?And that's where symbolic AI becomes useful again. Because again, what is the use case for symbolic AI? It's taking very specific domains of things that you've created very specific rule sets for and using them to validate things or to pass arbitrary checks and things like that. And it's a perfect use case for this. So, what we actually do with our auto-fix product, so if you're using VS Code and you have Copilot, right, and Copilot's spitting out software, as long as you have Snyk in the IDE, too, we're actually taking a look at those lines of code Copilot just inserted, and a lot of the time, we are helping you rewrite that code to be secured using our LLM stuff, but then as soon as we get that fixed created, we actually run it through our symbolic engine, and if we're saying no, it's actually not fixed, then we go back to the LLM, we re-prompt it over and over again until we get a working solution.And that's essentially how we create a much more sophisticated iteration, if you will, of using AI to really help improve code quality. But all that being said, you still had a good point, which is maybe if you're using the context from the application, and people aren't doing things properly, how does that impact what LLMs are generating for you? And an interesting thing to note is that our security team internally here, just conducted a really interesting project, and I would be angry at myself if I didn't explain it because I think it's a very cool concept.Corey: Oh, please, I'm a big fan of hearing what people get up to with these things in ways that is real-world stories, not trying to sell me anything, or also not dunking on, look what I saw on the top of Hacker News the other day, which is, “If all you're building is something that talks to Chat-Gippity's API, does some custom prompting, and returns a response, you shouldn't be building it.” I'm like, “Well, I built some things that do exactly that.” But I'm also not trying to raise $6 million in seed money to go and productize it. I'm just hoping someone does it better eventually, but I want to use it today. Please tell me a real world story about something that you've done.Randall: Okay. So, here's what we did. We went out and we found a bunch of GitHub projects, and we tried to analyze them ourselves using a bunch of different tools, including human verification, and basically give it a grade and say, “Okay, this project here has really good security hygiene. Like, there's not a lot of issues in the code, things are written in a nice way, the style and formatting is consistent, the dependencies are up-to-date, et cetera.” Then we take a look at multiple GitHub repos that are the opposite of that, right? Like, maybe projects that hadn't been maintained in a long time, or were written in a completely different style where you have bad hygienic practices, maybe you have hard-coded secrets, maybe you have unsanitized input coming from a user or something, right, but you take all these things.So, we have these known examples of good and bad projects. So, what did we do? Well, we opened them up in VS Code, and we basically got GitHub Copilot and we said, “Okay, what we're going to do is use each of these codebases, and we're going to try to add features into the projects one at a time.” And what we did is we took a look at the suggested output that Copilot was giving us in each of these cases. And the interesting thing is that—and I think this is super important to understand about LLMs, right—but the interesting thing is, if we were adding features to a project that has good security hygiene, the types of code that we're able to get out of LLMs, like, GitHub Copilot was pretty good. There weren't a ton of issues with it. Like, the actual security hygiene was, like, fairly good.However, for projects where there were existing issues, it was the opposite. Like we'd get AI recommendations showing us how to write things insecurely, or potentially write things with hard-coded secrets in it. And this is something that's very reproducible today in, you know, what is it right now, middle of November 2023. Now, is it going to be this case a year from now? I don't necessarily know, but right now, this is still a massive problem, so that really reinforces the idea that not only when you're talking about LLMs is the training set they used to build the model's important, but also the context in which you're using them is incredibly important.It's very easy to mislead LLMs. Another example of this, if you think about the security scanning concept we talked about earlier, imagine you're talking to Chat-Gippity, and you're [pasting 00:25:58] in a Python function, and the Python function is called, “Completely_safe_not_vulnerable_function.” That's the function name. And inside of that function, you're backdooring some software. Well, if you ask Chat-Gippity multiple times and say, “Hey, the temperature is set to 1.0. Is this code safe?”Sometimes you'll get the answer yes because the context within the request that has that thing saying this is not a vulnerable function or whatever you want to call it, that can mislead the LLM output and result in problems, you know? It's just, like, classic prompt injection type issues. But there's a lot of these types of vulnerabilities still hidden in plain sight that impact all of us, and so it's so important to know that you can't just rely on one thing, you have to have multiple layers: something that helps you with things, but also something that is helping you fix things when needed.Corey: I think that's the key that gets missed a lot is the idea of it's not just what's here, what have you put here that shouldn't be; what have you forgotten? There's a different side of it. It's easy to do a static analysis and say, “Oh, you're not sanitizing your input on this particular form.” Great. Okay—well, I say it's easy. I wish more people would do that—but then there's also a step beyond of, what is it that someone who has expertise who's been down this road before would take one look at your codebase and say, “Are you making this particular misconfiguration or common misstep?”Randall: Yeah, it's incredibly important. You know, like I said, security is just one of those things where it's really broad. I've been working in security for a very long time and I make security mistakes all the time myself.Corey: Yeah. Like, in your developer environment right now, you ran this against the production environment and didn't get permissions errors. That is suspicious. Tell me more about your authentication pattern.Randall: Right. I mean, there's just a ton of issues that can cause problems. And it's… yeah, it is what it is, right? Like, software security is something difficult to achieve. If it wasn't difficult, everyone would be doing it. Now, if you want to talk about, like, vision for the future, actually, I think there's some really interesting things with the direction I see things going.Like, a lot of people have been leaning into the whole AI autonomous agents thing over the last year. People started out by taking LLMs and saying, “Okay, I can get it to spit out code, I can get it to spit out this and that.” But then you go one step further and say, “All right, can I get it to write code for me and execute that code?” And OpenAI, to their credit, has done a really good job advancing some of the capabilities here, as well as a lot of open-source frameworks. You have Langchain, and Baby AGI, and AutoGPT, and all these different things that make this more feasible to give AI access to actually do real meaningful things.And I can absolutely imagine a world in the future—maybe it's a couple of years from now—where you have developers writing software, and it could be a real developer, it could be an autonomous agent, whatever it is. And then you also have agents that are taking a look at your software and rewriting it to solve security issues. And I think when people talk about autonomous agents, a lot of the time they're purely focusing on LLMs. I think it's a big mistake. I think one of the most important things you can do is focus on the very niche symbolic AI engines that are going to be needed to guarantee accuracy with these things.And that's why I think the Snyk approach is really cool, you know? We dedicated a huge amount of resources to security analysts building these very in-depth rule sets that are guaranteeing accuracy on results. And I think that's something that the industry is going to shift towards more in the future as LLMs become more popular, which is, “Hey, you have all these great tools, doing all sorts of cool stuff. Now, let's clean it up and make it accurate.” And I think that's where we're headed in the next couple of years.Corey: I really hope you're right. I think it's exciting times, but I also am leery when companies go too far into boosterism where, “Robots are going to do all of these things for us.” Maybe, but even if you're right, you sound psychotic. And that's something that I think gets missed in an awful lot of the marketing that is so breathless with anticipation. I have to congratulate you folks on not getting that draped over your message, once again.My other favorite part of your messaging when you pull up snyk.com—sorry, snyk.io. What is it these days? It's the dot io, isn't it?Randall: Dot io. It's hot.Corey: Dot io, yes.Randall: Still hot, you know?Corey: I feel like I'm turning into a boomer here where, “The internet is dot com.”Randall: [laugh].Corey: Doesn't necessarily work that way. But no, what I love is the part where you have this fear-based marketing of if you wind up not using our product, here are all the terrible things that will happen. And my favorite part about that marketing is it doesn't freaking exist. It is such a refreshing departure from so much of the security industry, where it does the fear, uncertainty, and doubt nonsense stuff that I love that you don't even hint in that direction. My actual favorite thing that is on your page, of course, is at the bottom. If you mouse over the dog in the logo at the bottom of the page, it does the quizzical tilting head thing, and I just think that is spectacular.Randall: So, the Snyk mascot, his name is Pat. He's a Doberman and everyone loves him. But yeah, you're totally right. The FUD thing is a real issue in security. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, it's the way security companies sell products to people. And I think it's a real shame, you know?I give a lot of tech talks, at programming conferences in particular, around security and cryptography, and one of the things I always start out with when I'm giving a tech talk about any sort of security or cryptography topic is I say, “Okay, how many of you have landed in a Stack Overflow thread where you're talking about a security topic and someone replies and says, ‘oh, a professional should be doing this. You shouldn't be doing it yourself?'” That comes up all the time when you're looking at security topics on the internet. Then I ask people, “How many of you feel like security is this, sort of like, obscure, mystical arts that requires a lot of expertise in math knowledge, and all this stuff?” And a lot of people sort of have that impression.The reality though is security, and to some extent, cryptography, it's just like any other part of computer science. It's something that you can learn. There's best practices. It's not rocket science, you know? Maybe it is if you're developing a brand-new hashing algorithm from scratch, yes, leave that to the professionals. But using these things is something everyone needs to understand well, and there's tons of material out there explaining how to do things right. And you don't need to be afraid of this stuff, right?And so, I think, a big part of the Snyk message is, we just want to help developers just make their code better. And what is one way that you're going to do a better job at work, get more of your code through the PR review process? What is a way you're going to get more features out? A big part of that is just building things right from the start. And so, that's really our focus in our message is, “Hey developers, we want to be, like, a trusted partner to help you build things faster and better.” [laugh].Corey: It's nice to see it, just because there's so much that just doesn't work out the way that we otherwise hope it would. And historically, there's been a tremendous problem of differentiation in the security space. I often remark that at RSA, there's about 12 companies exhibiting. Now sure, there are hundreds of booths, but it's basically the same 12 things. There's, you know, the entire row of firewalls where they use different logos and different marketing words on the slides, but they're all selling fundamentally the same thing. One of things I've always appreciated about Snyk is it has never felt that way.Randall: Well, thanks. Yeah, we appreciate that. I mean, our whole focus is just developer security. What can we do to help developers build things securely?Corey: I mean, you are sponsoring this episode, let's be clear, but also, we are paying customers of you folks, and that is not—those things are not related in any way. What's the line that we like to use that we stole from the RedMonk folks? “You can buy our attention, but not our opinion.” And our opinion of what you folks are up to is then stratospherically high for a long time.Randall: Well, I certainly appreciate that as a Snyk employee who is also a happy user of the service. The way I actually ended up working at Snyk was, I'd been using the product for my open-source projects for years, and I legitimately really liked it and I thought this was cool. And yeah, I eventually ended up working here because there was a position, and you know, a friend reached out to me and stuff. But I am a genuinely happy user and just like the goal and the mission. Like, we want to make developers' lives better, and so it's super important.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about all this. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to go?Randall: Yeah, thanks for having me. If you want to learn more about AI or just developer security in general, go to snyk.io. That's S-N-Y-K—in case it's not clear—dot io. In particular, I would actually go check out our [Snyk Learn 00:34:16] platform, which is linked to from our main site. We have tons of free security lessons on there, showing you all sorts of really cool things. If you check out our blog, my team and I in particular also do a ton of writing on there about a lot of these bleeding-edge topics, and so if you want to keep up with cool research in the security space like this, just check it out, give it a read. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to. It's fun.Corey: And we will put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:39]. Thanks once again for your support, and of course, putting up with my slings and arrows.Randall: And thanks for having me on, and thanks for using Snyk, too. We love you [laugh].Corey: Randall Degges, Head of Developer Relations and Community at Snyk. This featured guest episode has been brought to us by our friends at Snyk, and I'm Corey Quinn. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that I will get to reading immediately. You can get me to read it even faster if you make sure your username is set to ‘Dependabot.'Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Historically, the Israelites were God's chosen people, and we have Biblical proof of His care for His people. Is this still true today? This week, Zach and Randy dig into scripture and historical accounts of God's provision for His chosen people and what that means for Israelites today. Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Historically, if you wanted to get better at having difficulty conversations, you had to take part in embarrassing roleplays or actual high-stakes conversations. Now, thanks to generative AI tools like ChatGPT, we can practice in a safe environment with realistic responses and in-the-moment feedback.   That's the premise for ‘AI Conversations', a new digital learning offering from Mind Tools and Learning Pool. In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Garner and Nahdia Khan are joined by Learning Pool's Lindsey Coode to discuss:   ·       How AI Conversations works ·       The role and importance of feedback in developing skills ·       The measurable impact on user capability after just one practice session.   During the discussion, Ross referenced the following paper: Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), 19251-19257. Nahdia referenced the World Economic Forum's report ‘Jobs of Tomorrow'. In ‘What I Learned this Week', Nahdia discussed HuddleCraft. Ross discussed ‘The False Binary in Higher Ed' from Ben Wildavsky. To find out more about AI Conversations, visit: ·       Mind Tools ·       Learning Pool Connect with our speakers    If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers: ·       Ross Garner ·       Nahdia Khan ·       Lindsey Coode

Learn about the latest in local public affairs in about the time it takes for a coffee break! Brian Callanan of Seattle Channel and David Kroman of the Seattle Times discuss the lowest turnout for a state election in Washington history, a new ordinance to reduce greenhouse gases in Seattle, a looming question about the future of Fort Lawton, a perspective on aspirational resolutions on the Seattle City Council, and a newly-launched program for fare ambassadors on Sound Transit. If you like this podcast, please support it on Patreon!

Execution by firing squad is a method of capital punishment in which a group of trained shooters simultaneously fire their weapons at the individual being executed. Historically, this method was used by many countries, but today it is only used in a handful of places.The process typically involves binding the condemned individual to a post or chair and placing a target over their heart. A group of shooters, usually between three and twelve individuals, then take aim and fire simultaneously. The goal is to ensure a quick and relatively painless death.In this episode, we take a look at the new bill that was proposed by a lawmaker in Idaho that would see the firing squad brought back and what that means for Bryan Kohberger.(commercial at 8:25)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Bryan Kohberger could face firing squad if convicted of Idaho students' murders (nypost.com)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5080327/advertisement

Learn how to be your own boss and the power of saying no   Those of you who are wondering whether it's time for you to leave that corporate life and start your own business, you're going to love my guests today, Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau. They're freelance writers and translators and the authors of the new book Going Solo: Everything You Need to Start Your Business and Succeed as Your Own Boss. Many aspiring entrepreneurs have plenty of skill and passion but don't have a sense of how to run a business, which makes their advice so valuable. Are you an entrepreneur or solopreneur? You really should listen in. Watch and listen to our conversation here According to Julie and Jean-Benoit, a good business plan is basically six questions: 1. What do you want to do? 2. Why do you want to do it? 3. What's the market? 4. What price do you want to offer? 5. What will you bring to people? 6. What's the purpose, the “what for”? To connect with them, visit their LinkedIn page or their website. Want to learn more about what makes successful entrepreneurs successful? Here's a start: Blog: 10 Qualities To Drive Your Success As A Female Entrepreneur Blog: The 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business Podcast: Marsha Friedman—How A Woman Entrepreneur Took A Little Idea And Turned It Into A Big Business Podcast: Sharon Cully—Great Ideas to Help Entrepreneurs Gain Time and Success Additional resources for you My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business and On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights My third book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success, co-written with Edie Fraser and Robyn Freedman Spizman  Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants Read the transcript of our podcast here Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink With Andi Simon. I'm Andi Simon, I'm your host and your guide. And remember, my job is to get you off the brink. So I want to bring to you people who are going to help you see, feel and think in new ways. You know, and this is always my starting speech, because what I want my audience, whether you're watching or you're listening, is to learn something new. And the best way to do that is to see it and feel it and begin to get the stories from someone else who has done it and say, Oh, I can do that too. So today I have a wonderful couple here to share with you their story and a new book. Let me tell you about them. Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau are the authors of Going Solo: Everything You Need to Start Your Business and Succeed as Your Own Boss. So those of you who are out there wondering whether or not it's time for you to leave that corporate life and start your own business, or you're already starting the business and want to know how to succeed at business, or you're really thinking about, I don't know, going back into business, it's a good time to listen in and think about your own purpose and passion and where you could really have a great trip. They are prize-winning authors and journalists. The husband and wife pair have been running a freelance writing business for over three decades. Look at the books behind them. I just love books and so many folks have no books. And I'm a book author and I love books. They've spoken across Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, France's L'Express, and more. They've published 15 books, written over a thousand articles, won more than 30 journalism and literary awards. They're avid travelers, they've lived in Paris, which I love, where John Boehner was a fellow of the Washington-based Institute for Current World Affairs. They've been to Toronto and Phoenix, where Julie was a Fulbright Scholar at Arizona State University. They're trilingual in English, French and Spanish, and they are based in Montreal, where they live with their twin daughters. I've told you enough. It's enough for you to see that I got somebody really cool here for you today, and they're going to help you. Just like I want to see things through a fresh lens. Thank you, Jean-Benoit and Julie, thanks for joining me. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: Thank you. Thank you very much for having us. Andi Simon: Now Jean-Benoit has told me I can call him JB. Tell us about your own journey. It's one thing to read a bio, it's another thing to begin to think through, How did they get here? Why this book at this time? You certainly have written lots. Jean-Benoit, would you like to start about your journey? Jean-Benoit Nadeau: Okay. I began as a writer in 1987. As a journalist. I'd done some theater before that. I'd studied engineering, decided in the end that I wanted to earn a living writing, and began as a writer. And since I was not that employable because I had no experience, I started freelancing, which was my destiny as a creator. Anyway, I realized later that a couple of things went well. I got my degree in political science, and was freelancing, meanwhile, and in 1993 things were going well and a magazine in Montreal offered me a job. I took the job and I was employed 29 days and I quit. That's when I became self-employed by choice. My father is an engineer. He had his own consultancy, which became quite large eventually, but he was an entrepreneur, and he's the first person who told me, because I was telling him, I have no job, What am I? Oh, he said, you're self-employed. Oh really? He said, Yes. I know what it was. Andi Simon: Bravo to your father. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: And then we discussed frequently until he became sick at the beginning of the middle of the year 2005. He was a good mentor. He mentored us a lot. And we realized quite early that a lot of the problems we were going through were the same that he was going through as an engineer. Aside from writing, you know, how do you negotiate? How do you manage without losing time? How do you finance your business and all these things? And I gave seminars first for journalists because I had a certain amount of success as a writer. So I was giving seminars to journalists. And then in 1997, I published a book which is the original version of the book in French for the Quebec market. And I started giving speeches in Chambers of Commerce and associate trade associations and realized that I was right on the advice that we had developed, because I was already partnered with Julie. So the advice that we were developing applied to everybody who wants to be creative in their work, really. And then we never had good success. We sold like 30,000 copies of the book in the tiny Quebec market and in French. And Julie said at one point, That book is absolutely translatable. So we got the rights back from my publisher and she translated it, and here we are. Julie Barlow: So I had been thinking for years and years of translating it, but just got buried under other projects. My writing career began much like jazz. I stumbled into it, began writing music, music reviews when I was in university. And I lost my confidence. I didn't come from a background with a father who was an entrepreneur. I didn't come from a business background at all. I didn't even know you could really make a living as a writer. Andi Simon: Aha. Julie Barlow: And that's not unusual in our field, you know, for people to have a skill and develop it but not have any sense of how to run a business. So I finished my education, finished my master's degree, and then just started out. And, nevertheless, even with that help that we had, there's a number of skills you have to really develop in order to make your passion into a business. Basically, I felt very fortunate to have your dad. And of course, we developed our own, our own by trial and error. And over the decades we developed our skills and our tips, and I was very happy to translate the book. We have two editions of it: one for the United States and one for Canada. And it's just great to share with others, not just creative people, but people who want to live their passion. They want to do what they want to do. They want to leave a job, start out fresh, out of school or whatever. There's just some basic things that you need to understand to make it work so that you don't get drowned in frustrations. Andi Simon: You know, it's interesting while I'm listening to you. So I'm in business 22 years now, and I launched my business after being in corporate as an executive in two banks and as an executive in two hospitals. And prior to that, I was an anthropology professor. I got my tenure and I was a visiting professor teaching entrepreneurship. And I was on a journey because I knew I was an anthropologist. I like to apply it among businesses that are going through change because people hate change. And I sort of helped them see, feel and think in new ways. But when I launched it after 911, my PR firm said to me, Oh, Andi, you're a corporate anthropologist who helps companies change. And I went, Bingo. And so in a sense, he defined my passion, my purpose, the why. Then the question was, how? And I did what I used to do anyway, which was start to have lunch with people, you know, never eat alone. We started to network and network and network. And next thing you know, I had a half a dozen clients and I went, Oh, this is fun. This is free. And I'm having a great time being me. And I do think that part of the passion and purpose is knowing who you are, not just what you do, but it's sort of my story. I want to go back to yours. When you began to help people through the book, let's talk about a process, a way of thinking. Because remember, we live the story in our mind. And so now the question is, typically the people who are going to read this book, what kind of story, what are they trying to do? Give them the wisdom and the lessons learned that you have. So the book complements it in some fashion. Who would like to start it? Jean-Benoit Nadeau: I think that a very important moment in the process of thinking of ourselves as entrepreneurial was the realization that it's so hard to change. And as an anthropologist, you'll understand. Historically, people used to be all self-employed. And the people who were employed were at the bottom of the scale. They didn't own their means of production, and they were at the bottom of the scale. And around the 19th century, that scale shifted. The people who were employed moved up socially, and it became a goal of education to have a job. We all went to study in order to have a job. We don't say to people, Study well, you're going to have your own enterprise. We never say that to kids. We tell them to study well, you'll have a job. So then I realized I will never have a job. What am I going to do? Well, I'm going to have work. Yep. So that's what self-employed is. You don't have a job, but you have work and you don't have a boss. You have a client who is your equal because you are your own boss and you don't have a salary. You have income which you build. But you see, it took me about 4 or 5 years even to send a bill to my clients because I thought it was pretentious. I'm sorry, I was an artist. I was a writer. I came from the theater. So at one point they would look at their books and say, Oh, we haven't paid this guy, so let's send him a check. That's how I was paid. So of course, that was the big moment of understanding that that's too much work. I don't have a job. Andi Simon: So, you know, Julie, I'm going to let you pop in, but I want to just set the context because I've been coaching some young women in their 20s, some are graduating from college, some have graduated and have had a couple of jobs. But I'm not sure that they know who they are, what they're doing, or why they're doing it. But I will tell you that the education in college makes them seem as if they're fully competent at something. They just don't know what that something is or where to find a company that wants their something. And I'm disturbed at the disconnect between their job, work, passion, purpose. Julie, your turn please. I didn't want to cut you off, but I wanted to set the stage. Julie Barlow: One of the big places where you see this problem of flipping from feeling like somebody's in control of what you produce and what you do, comes in negotiating, which is something we talk a lot about with writers who tend to think there's a system that they fit into and there's a certain amount that they will get paid. And they tend not to think that they're in the driver's seat. And so they get exploited. And one of the big problems is that people who, and you see this sometimes when people who leave a job to start working freelance, they just think of their clients as their bosses. And they even use that term. They say well, the boss says, the bosses, and they don't start from a position of power, which is that they can sell or not sell, and sometimes it's just worth walking away. I mean, I have this discussion with fellow writers a lot. There are clients who are just not good clients, and they're hurting you and they're not paying you fairly and they're wasting your time. You could be using your means and whatever it is you sell or produce to make money from somebody who appreciates it, you know? So one of the big things is avoiding bad clients and learning to say no. So we have a little section in the book of 16 Ways to Say No. It's very popular with people. You have to learn when to say no and how to walk away from things. And sometimes saying no is what really radically, suddenly improves your condition. I mean, you need to be able to do that. It's tough for people. Andi Simon: Well, it's interesting because I remember my first client who I said, “I'm really not good for you and you're not good for me. So I think you should find somebody else for your sake.” And I remember that feeling of freeing myself, but allowing them to be free of me as well, because we were simply not going to make it. And it was for your sake. And I'm sure that because it was a perspective that it wasn't my problem but for your benefit, it's time to go. But I've learned that no is a good word. Julie Barlow: Yes, it is a good word. And it can even bring a bigger yes at the end of the day from somebody else. I recently, last year, said no to a really, really what could have been a very lucrative writing contract with somebody that I just knew we were not a good fit. You know, you have to, and we talk about this as well in the book, you have to explore fairly carefully with your client. Make sure they understand what they're getting, make sure they understand what you're giving them. Yes, you're on the same terms. Things have to be clear from the beginning or you have problems down the line. And I just could not get through to them. We just could not see eye to eye on the thing. But, we left on good terms and I said, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to do this anymore. The word about what I had done with them traveled back to his literary agent which came back to me in the form of another book contract. So I absolutely understood what I did. But, you know, these are the lessons that you learn as a business person, clients' expectations. And again, it's the boss-client mentality. You have to take the time to make sure that you understand their expectations and that they understand what they're getting or you just end up with problems with them. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: People make a lot of fuss about the business plan. We've got questions about that. And I say, yeah, I know, but we say, the business plan is basically five questions. What do you want to do? Why do you want to do it? What's the market? What price do you want to offer? What will you bring to people? That's just the basics. If you need financing or an associate, you may need to write almost a book business plan, a book-size business plan. But a good business plan can fit on 2 or 3 pages. But there's a sixth question, which I forgot, that I didn't mention, which I think is the most important: What for, the purpose? But your goal, your personal goal, where do you want to go with that? Do you want to teach social dancing? A lot of people want to turn their passion into a business, and that's good. That's often why people go with you. Self-Employment. Well, you're not going to once things start running and that can come pretty quickly. You'll go somewhere if you know where you want to go, and you will not even decide who your clients are. And if you want to start teaching for the purpose of creating a franchise of social dancing, or create a shoe for social dancing, you are not going to choose your clients in the same way. Your venues, the place where you're going to showcase them, etcetera. And it's the same with a writer. You are not going to do all the thousands of choices you have to do in your daily business. If you want to be a publisher or have an agency, or want to be an editor in chief, or move into book writing or film, these are all personal choices. There's nobody who's going to tell you which is right, but it's very important, it orients you. Andi Simon: But I also think, I can't tell you how many folks come in by referral. Sometimes they find us on the internet and they are trying to do what they did in the corporate world in an independent freelance business fashion, but they don't really understand that things are different. You know, they did this there and therefore I'm going to do this now. I said, But there you had the brand of the big company and you had a network and so forth. Why should somebody hire you now? And how are you going to actually build a revenue stream, a client base, have a business with it, as opposed to being an employed person who used to do something. This means the story changes, but they aren't thinking about how to do it actually and they have no idea. Very often your book is very valuable about how I think about myself now? Because when I said I'm a corporate anthropologist who helps companies change, to be honest with you, I knew people had to change, they didn't care how I did it, and I admitted I picked that one up. I knew that the whole sales process was about, you know, where are your gaps? Where's your pain point? How can I help? How I did it, they didn't care. But it's a very important piece. They really didn't know what an anthropologist would do, but it was interesting to watch the transformation. But many times they come and don't know how to turn an idea, an observation, into a business innovation. So your book comes at a very timely moment. When they get going, do you help them create scalability? A word I use often because, you know, there are 13 million women-owned businesses in the US. 10 million of them don't make solopreneurs. 5 million of those don't make more than $10,000 a year. And they're more like side hustles, which is fine. But there are a whole lot of solopreneurs, and I worry about the lack of scalability. Not being able to underwrite it with the right capital. Don't know how to use a bank to finance it. Don't use their credit cards with family and friends. I mean, there's a whole huge market of folks who need to make an income in a better way, but need to think differently about what they're doing and not simply celebrate the fact that they're not inside a company, which is often what they say. “I didn't like being there, so I'm doing this.” I say, “But you're not in business. You're just trying.” So, thoughts? Julie Barlow: So one of the ideas that we speak of is that between somebody making $25,000 a year as a solopreneur and somebody making $250,000 a year, the thing you have to understand is that you don't have to work ten times more. You make your choices in the function of things. In our case, writing that feeds other ways of making money. So for instance, we wrote a book about the French language and we turned that into speaking gigs on the French language, articles on the French language, a film script on the French language, a radio show on the French language. I mean, the book just keeps on giving us content that we use for other things. And we're not being paid to sit and produce new content every day. That's what we would do if we had a job, perhaps as a script writer at a company. But we are using our content to make money for us. The best way to be a writer is to sit and wait for the royalty checks to come to the door. You know, of course we have to write, but all of the choices that we make, we make sure that they are not dead end choices because they are choices that are going to feed that or feed other books or enable us to produce books using a gig, doing something that will feed us with content for something else. I mean, that's how we go from thinking like an employee to thinking like a business person. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: I recently read a biography of Charles Dickens and was fascinated that he was one of the first authors in history to do what he called “work the copyright,” which meant that earning a living was not just about writing, it was to use his intellectual property to work for him, and for a lot less work. And as writers, we have the benefit of having intellectual property created the minute we finish something. The costly part of the intellectual property is developing it into research. But if you choose your ideas very well for the purpose of reusing them, then things become a lot easier. That's just in the production side of it. But if you negotiate well, you can actually improve your productivity without raising your rate just because you understand better what the client wants or because you negotiate better the ownership of what you produce for them, because you keep that ownership for yourself or because you get better terms. That's just at the negotiating level. You can keep collecting. If you bill quickly, you collect quickly, and then you have less money on your credit card. There's all sorts of things like this at all levels of what it is to run a business that are productive. Andi Simon: And what you're saying though, is a mindset. And I do think that mindset isn't the narrow: I'm a freelance writer. It's the broad: I'm in business to take ideas and in multiple channels begin to bring them to market because my purpose is to share French and I need to do it on all the different channels. And I need to do that in multiple different ways. And the content keeps repurposing itself. I mean, people say to me, Did you sell a lot of books? I said, I brought in a lot of clients. I mean, you can bring in good clients. I was in Mexico three times off a book that someone found in a Hudson News in an airport, and got to give programs to CEOs down there three years in a row. Before the pandemic, I just loved the multiplier of the book. And I just had a podcast earlier today of a guy who I gave the On the Brink book to. He took it on his vacation, came back and was quoting it for me. I mean, you can't ask for much more than that. I love how what we do is designed not to be an end, but a beginning.  And I do think it opens the door. And the idea is, how many different doors can it open and how do we get to where we're really taking the message and helping spread it. Julie Barlow: To do that you kind of have to be agile. I mean, the word is a little overused, but you do. You need to be watching what's going on. You know, in the book, we encourage people who are starting out to be curious to contact their competitors, to sit down with people in their business and ask questions and figure things out. People can be very shy and a little bit locked into their own little universe. You can stay in front of your screen all the time, but it's important to get out and understand what's going on. And people are helpful. And they're happy to have somebody, I'm happy for young writers to approach me and to ask for me to sit down and explain things to them. When I don't have time to do a contract. I'd love to be able to keep my client happy by sending them somebody else who can. And you know, that happens fairly frequently. And it's sort of a win-win for everybody. But, you know, communication and being open to that and watching the industry change is really important. One of our early methods was to resell articles because we write in both languages and we would resell them in different markets. And that changed when the internet came. And we started writing before the internet when that all changed. And then it was very hard to keep our copyright over certain things and resell things. But we found new ways to do that. And one of them is translating and we don't necessarily get paid for our copyright, but we need to translate it. So we get paid for that. We're always looking to see where the soft spots are and how things are changing. And you always have to kind of be aware of what's going on and not get stuck in a way of doing things. And that, again, is something very particular to being sort of an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial state of mind, as opposed to thinking like an employee and doing what you're asked to do. Andi Simon: You're segueing into a topic that I always like to include, though, and you've been through many years of watching many different transitions and transformations, and often you pick up. I often talk about the future is here, we just haven't quite distributed it widely. But you pick up little signs, and the little signs are the tip of the iceberg of where things are going. Are there some signs that you're already beginning to watch happen and you're saying, there's something coming? I'm not quite sure what, but I'm really interested to see where and who, and I'm going to poke further, and anything you can share, because I do think the times are changing. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: Well, in Canada we have this problem right now. The Canadian government wants to control better. Well, wants to ensure that big companies like Facebook and Google share their publicity market with traditional media, and they created a law, a Facebook Australia-style law. And Facebook reacted by blocking all Canadian content on Facebook. And Google is threatening that. So that is raising a lot of questions on the future of writing as a writer in Canada. It's going to be a rocky year next year, I would say. Julie Barlow: So artificial intelligence is a big one. Yeah, AI is affecting us. Again, maybe back to what Jean-Benoit said about purpose. We as sort of high-end writers are right now kind of safe from AI. It can't really do what we're doing. So we're enjoying the benefits of it right now, which is transcribing automatic tools for transcribing interviews and translation tools that give us decent first drafts of translations and various different things, but all the writing community is a little on edge about what is going to do, because it's getting better at generative artificial intelligence. We can't afford to have our head in the sand. Andi Simon: I fell in love with AI. I say that gently because I use it in different kinds of ways. It writes great poems for me. And if I want to give a granddaughter a poem about a situation, I give it three facts and outcomes a great poem. And I went, I can't write that, but boy, that is a great poem, and I don't even know who I would ask to write it. But it is interesting to watch what we begin to use it for. I had a great big project and I said, Tell me, what are your thoughts, AI, about this project I'm working on? And it freshened up my thinking, not that I was necessarily going to use it, but as a solopreneur, it's often difficult to find open colleagues with conversations that can make intelligent insights into things you're thinking about. And so I'm finding all kinds of ways to make it my friend. And I say that because it's how you feel about it as opposed to being angry at it. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: You know, we use artificial intelligence a fair amount. We have an excellent character here called Antidote. It's pure artificial intelligence. And all the intelligence software that is there doesn't make a very good translation, but makes a good first draft. In fact, in Canada, where we translate a fair amount because we have two official languages, the number of people who are employed as translators has increased by 18% in the last seven years, when the labor force has increased by six. So it reduced the cost of entry to a lot of people who would not translate. And then they give it to a machine. They come out and they say, someone says, that's not very good, but let's hire someone who finishes the translation. Andi Simon: What is Grammarly? I mean, this whole book, I put every one of them through it. We have 102 women and I gave everyone to Grammarly and they made the corrections and I sent it back and they approved it. And man, it was efficient. And there were limits to how much creativity was going to go into it. But it got me comfortable that they would sound professional and it was even far better than the proofreader of the publisher. And so it was fun to test. I just needed a third third party. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: But one of the things about artificial intelligence is that it's a misnomer. It's an algorithm that processes a lot of information. And one of the problems for journalists, anyway, one of the issues with our AI is that, for example, ChatGPT is essentially a sociopath. It doesn't tell you it doesn't know what it doesn't know. It makes up things and it doesn't give you the source, which is contrary to any kind of ethics in journalism. And, I don't think it threatens journalism. It will be a tool like glasses or even the word processor. Andi Simon: You know, I'm in the schools, my daughter is a teacher. And she said back to me, I had to do a lesson plan for a student in special ed. So I went into ChatGPT and it came back and it was almost as good as I would have done. And in a minute I went, yeah, now use your time to teach the child and not write the lesson plan. You know, it's a perfectly good way to get going. Nothing is perfect, and even our own lesson plans may not be perfect. We think they're better than AI. But I'm enjoying the transition to the next stage of data and insights coming from intelligent stuff in different ways. So it'll be fun if we stay and make it happy, and then be wise and go back and check and make sure it's correct. But even this stuff on Google, I'm never quite sure it's correct either. You have to be knowledgeable enough to know. This has been such fun. I'm so glad that you're on our podcast today, and if folks would like to buy the book, where could they buy it? Julie Barlow: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca in Canada, Barnes and Noble. It should be available in any bookstore. Jean-Benoit Nadeau: It's widely distributed. Just make sure if you ever go, it probably won't happen, but the Canadian edition has a little maple leaf at the top. If it doesn't have that little maple leaf, it's an American edition. Andi Simon: The things that look great. Thank you so much. So it's going solo and if you want to go solo, you've been with us today listening to Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau. I do, as we are trying to really help you see, feel and think in new ways so that you can decide, how am I going to spend the next stage of my career doing a job, or do I want really interesting work? Am I going to be a creator of a whole new market space, or am I going to copy someone else and be another? And I do think it's a time for really rethinking who you are and where you're going and how to do it. So I want to thank you for coming. Thank you for coming today and speaking to our audience. As you know, our new book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success, just came out and it is doing gangbusters. And it too is on all the booksellers, Barnes and Noble and Amazon. It's the stories of 102 women, and they are really interesting stories because the women have five wisdoms they want to share with you, and each of them has a different background, history, and their own journey. And it's really quite fascinating. The reviews are: "I wasn't sure what I was going to find, but I went through the whole book and each of the women inspired me. So when you gave the book to me, man, this is a great book!" Who knew? And I said, I know. The whole idea is to share their wisdom with you so you can be inspired, you can aspire to greatness. You can begin to think about how other women have done it. One of my favorite quotes in there is, “Don't believe everything you're thinking.” And I said, I like that. We preach, turn a page and change your life. I really think women in business are here to help you do just that. So on that note, I want to thank everyone for coming. Keep sending me your ideas on who we should have on, share the podcast and I wish you well. Bye bye now.   WOMEN MEAN BUSINESS® is a registered trademark of the National Association of Women Business Owners® (NAWBO)

Join our free Florida income properties webinar, tonight, Monday, November 27th for 5.75% mortgage rates at: GREwebinars.com Today's topics: Conventional financial advice is God-awful; tertiary real estate markets; I've got a solution to guilt tipping; whether or not the world is uncertain and unsafe. Conventional financial advice is so bad. I attack the practices of setting budget alerts and paying off your smallest debts first.  Don't roll a debt snowball; roll a cash flow snowball. In the past five years, tertiary markets are beginning to exhibit the rent stability of larger markets. Guilt tipping is out of control. Learn my elegant solution. You'll never pay a guilt tip again. It seems like the world is increasingly uncertain and unsafe. It isn't. I talk about why it only seems this way. Timestamps: The limitations of budgeting (00:02:43) Discussion on the drawbacks of using budgeting platforms and how they reinforce scarcity thinking. The debt snowball concept (00:05:09) Explanation of the debt snowball method of debt paydown and why it is not aligned with an abundance mindset. Investing in tertiary real estate markets (00:09:43) Exploration of the emerging bullish case for investing in smaller, tertiary real estate markets and their stability compared to larger markets. Tertiary Real Estate Markets (00:10:56) Discussion of the advantages and objections to investing in smaller tertiary real estate markets. Increasing Investor Appetite in Smaller Markets (00:12:02) Exploration of the growing interest and sales volumes in tertiary real estate markets. Guilt Tipping and a Solution (00:20:16) Explanation of guilt tipping and a proposed solution to avoid feeling pressured to leave a tip when making digital payments. Guilt Tipping and the Increasing Expectations (00:21:20) Discussion on the rise of tipping expectations and the use of digital payment prompts to ask for tips. The Problem with Guilt Tipping and the Inconvenience of Undoing Tips (00:23:45) Exploration of the annoyance of guilt tipping and the difficulty of undoing tips after poor service. The Solution: Paying Cash to Avoid Guilt Tipping (00:31:18) Suggestion to pay with cash as an elegant solution to circumvent guilt tipping and ignore electronic payment terminals. The Uncertainty of the World (00:32:25) Discusses how uncertainty has always existed and how waiting for complete clarity can hinder investment decisions. Disasters and Uncertainty (00:33:47) Lists various disasters and events that have occurred in the US, highlighting the constant presence of uncertainty and the relative sense of certainty and safety today. The Ultra Safety of American Society (00:36:13) Examines how society has become ultra safe, discussing the term "safetyism" and providing examples of excessive safety measures. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/477 Join our Florida properties webinar, free,  Nov. 27th at 8:30 PM ET at: www.GREwebinars.com For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete Episode Transcript:   Keith Weinhold (00:00:01) - Welcome to I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, with a rant on how conventional financial advice is so terribly god awful an outlook for tertiary real estate markets, then? Are you getting worn down from guilt tipping? I've got a proven solution on how you'll never pay a guilt trip to a business again. And finally, how do you arrange your investing in personal finances in a world that's uncertain and unsafe? All today on get Rich education? When you want the best real estate and finance info, the modern internet experience limits your free articles access, and it's replete with paywalls. And you've got pop ups and push notifications and cookies. Disclaimers. Oh, at no other time in history has it been more vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that actually adds no hype value to your life? See, this is the golden age of quality newsletters, and I write every word of hours myself. It's got a dash of humor and it's to the point to get the letter. It couldn't be more simple text to six, 6866.   Keith Weinhold (00:01:15) - And when you start the free newsletter, you'll also get my one hour fast real estate course completely free. It's called the Don't Quit Your Day dream letter and it wires your mind for wealth. Make sure you read it, text GRE to 66866. Text  GRE to 66866.   Speaker 2 (00:01:40) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold (00:01:56) - Welcome from Los Angeles, California, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Wayne holding. This is get rich education. When you pay for a low level service item like a Chipotle burrito, and another human is looking at you to see if you leave a 20% tip on a digital payment terminal, does that make you feel uncomfortable? Well, now you're being asked to. Guilt tip I've got a foolproof way on how to never get put in that situation again. That I'll share with you later here. You know, sometimes you just hear something that triggers a rant. I recently heard an ad for a digital platform that helps you manage your finances.   Keith Weinhold (00:02:43) - And what an awful, in scarcity minded way of thinking this reinforces. But this is actually what mainstream financial guidance looks like. All right, it was an ad for a digital platform trying to attract you there. And here's basically how it works. You set up your account. Then based on your income and expenses, you set up your budget. And as you know, that is a bad word around here, a budget. It's not how you want to live long term. All right. Then, when you're close to hitting your spending budget for the month or whatever, this platform triggers a budget alert. Are you kidding me? You get emailed a budget alert. How convenient. Oh, geez. So much for living an aspirational life by design. What a dreadful idea. Like someone that really wants more out of life would actually take effort to set up something like that. You would be building an architecture to establish life patterns that completely say, I think that money is a scarce resource. Now, in the short term, you've got to do what you've got to do, which might mean living below your means for a little while.   Keith Weinhold (00:03:55) - But in a world of abundance, delayed gratification should be a short term notion for you. I think that this type of platform that centered around stupid budget alerts is so limiting. Gosh, you've got to feel cheap just saying that out loud a budget alert. But anyway, that sounds conducive to this concept of scarcity based finance called a debt snowball that you can read about the debt snowball on Investopedia. But the debt snowball, that's basically how you pay off your debt with the smallest balance first, not the highest interest rate, but yes, the smallest principal balance it would have basically says is in the first step, what you're supposed to do is list your debts from smallest to largest, and that's regardless of interest rate, just smallest to largest based on the amount. And then the next step is that you make minimum payments on all of your debts except the smallest one, because you pay as much as possible on your smallest debt. And then the last step is you're supposed to just go ahead and repeat that until each debt is paid in full.   Keith Weinhold (00:05:09) - That's the debt snowball. So according to that, why do they say to disregard the interest rate, which is your cost of capital? Because they say that when you pay off the smallest debt super quick, that you're going to be jumping up and down with excitement, and that is going to motivate you to keep working hard to get debt free. They say that hope is more important than math. That's the school of thought. And along the way you should lower your expenses, cut spending, work hard and add a side hustle where you can. Oh my gosh, that is all congruent with this debt snowball concept that we sure do not endorse here at. I mean, that is 100% orthogonal to the world of abundance that we believe in. So often on your high interest rate debt. What you would do then is you'd make the minimum payments with this debt snowball, and then you focus it all on your smallest debt amount, regardless of interest rate. You've heard that right? And it even advocates that you stop investing and just focus on that smallest debt amount, even if it's a low interest rate.   Keith Weinhold (00:06:22) - That makes no sense. If you've decided that debt paydown is the best allocation of your first expendable dollar. All right, even if that were a yes, then in most cases you'd want to pay down the highest interest rate independent of the total principal balance on each of your debts. I mean, that's arbitrage, but they even bigger question for you, almost existential in nature is why is the best way to allocate your first expendable dollar on debt? Paydown. And. Any way it's or that. First, because one of the first places to look is how you can leverage that dollar 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 as long as you've controlled cash flows. Now, sometimes there are instances where you'd want to pay down debt before investing, certainly like a 20% Apr credit card debt, that could be one such place. So could retiring a debt to help your DTI, your debt to income ratio so that you can originate a new business loan or a new real estate loan first? All right, you might do thatrillionegardless of the interest rate on a loan.   Keith Weinhold (00:07:30) - But my gosh, if we want to stick with the snowball analogy, since we're a few days from December here, instead of trying to push a debt snowball up a hill to start rolling a cash flow snowball down a hill, when you buy an asset that pays you a monthly income stream to own it, that is constructive. Compounding your cash flows beats compounding your debt paid out. Instead of trying to push a debt snowball up a hill because you're cutting your one and only quality of life down. Instead, start rolling a cash flow snowball down a hill, and now you've got gravity working with you in the right way. That is the end of my rent. Hey, maybe I just feel like complaining a bit. My Jim was playing Phil Collins and Elton John all weekend, so maybe that's a kind of what in the world kind of mood that had generated in me, I don't know. And hey, nothing wrong with Phil Collins and Elton John. I mean, those guys are truly talented singers, 100%.   Keith Weinhold (00:08:28) - I just don't want to be working out to those guys. Michael Bolton, George Michael that's not motivating me to hit 20 burpees. Okay. Hey, well, I hope that you were set up for a great week. Be sure that part of it is that you are signed up for our live event tonight for 5.75% mortgage rates on Florida Income property@webinars.com. Now, whether you're looking at investment property in Florida or most any of the other 49 US states, there's a really nascent and interesting development that's been taking place for at least five years now. And that is what's happening in tertiary markets, smaller markets. I'll define tertiary a bit more shortly, but we're talking about metro statistical areas, MSAs that are probably not under 100,000 population, not that small. From a rent growth perspective. What's happened is that over the last five years, tertiary markets have had similar patterns to bigger markets. And historically, these smaller markets have been more erratic. But in rent growth terms, tertiary markets have stabilized. Now, a primary market is something like New York City or Chicago, a secondary market.   Keith Weinhold (00:09:43) - You might think of that as a little Rock, Arkansas, where it's under a million in size, and then a tertiary market that's going to be somewhat discretionary. But we're talking about a population of 100 K up to, say, 300 K. And what's noteworthy is that there are now more analysts and investors that are bullish on vibrant tertiary markets. So let's talk about why this is happening. I think there's an emerging bull case for overcoming some of the historical roadblocks to tertiary market investments in a diversified multifamily or single family rental portfolio. And one classical objection is that tertiary real estate markets are too volatile. Historically, we perceive smaller markets as more volatile. Yes, and some surely are. But over these last five years, markets outside the top 50 in size were regularly more consistent. Okay. They avoided rent cuts in 2020. They recorded sizable but less lawfully rent hikes in 2021 and 2022. And now they remain moderately positive in 2023, even as larger markets have kind of flattened out in the rent growth.   Keith Weinhold (00:10:56) - And of course, we're talking about a composite group of tertiary markets here. Some are more stable than others. You got to watch those local trends as always, of course. And you know, classically a second objection with these smaller markets is that, well, it's too easy to add a lot of supply. And yes, that is sometimes true and sometimes it's not. Indeed, there are a handful of small markets that are building like crazy, like Sioux Falls, South Dakota in Huntsville, Alabama. But as a group, the construction rate in what that is is the total units under construction divided by the total existing market, that is 5% in large markets versus the construction rate of just 4% in small markets. See, it can be harder to build in certain small markets due to NIMBYism or a lack of debt availability, especially if local banks aren't interested in the check size needed for construction loans. It can also be harder to build in certain small markets due to a lack. Of equity because it's a tougher sell to ask investors in a syndication to bet on a market that they don't have a lot of knowledge of.   Keith Weinhold (00:12:02) - Another objection to these tertiary markets is that small markets are not liquid. Since 2019, sales volumes in dollars going into tertiary markets has doubled. Investor appetite has definitely increased in smaller markets. And that's particularly true among these traditional regional investors that are looking for better yield as the larger cities got pricier. So good small markets, you know, a lot of them really are not secrets anymore. And there's only one more objection to these tertiary real estate markets and that it is harder to scale operations. And yes, there is always benefit in efficiency of scale. But, you know, it's certainly been getting easier with better technology today. Investors can always work with top local property managers. And for investment property owners or managers, they often target small markets adjacent to larger markets where they have a bigger presence. So some other considerations before you as an investor go deep in one of these smaller tertiary markets is you want to be choosy in your market and in your site selection. Look for small markets that have multiple drivers.   Keith Weinhold (00:13:13) - You don't just want these one trick ponies. You know, I've discussed with you before about how markets that are heavily focused on commodities or heavily focused on military, they are not favorable because those two sectors, for example, commodities and military, are just pretty volatile. Look for growth or steady markets, lots of small markets. They continue to grow at a pretty healthy clip. And you want to look for markets with an absence of new product. Now why don't I name a few tertiary markets so that you can get a better idea of this. So about 100 K to 300 K in population size. Not that these next ones are necessarily good or bad markets. It's just for size comparison. I'm thinking about Ocala, Florida and Shreveport, Louisiana. You know those two. They're almost getting too big. They're almost secondary markets Wilmington, North Carolina at 300 K. That's a tertiary market. So are Akron and Canton, Ohio Dayton. That's pretty tertiary, but it's also close to Cincinnati. So you got a little more safety in Dayton.   Keith Weinhold (00:14:20) - Toledo is secondary. Burlington, Vermont is tertiary. Bellingham, Washington is tertiary. Yuma and Flagstaff, Arizona are both tertiary. Yes. We're talking about the stability in rents in tertiary real estate markets. Conventionally. You know, in the past, I've said that MSAs of 500 K population or more, that's pretty much where you want to be. But anymore, with the rise of remote work after 2019, it's really making some of these smaller tertiary markets more palatable to real estate investors and something that you probably want to consider. So really, that's the takeaway for you here and say this is the kind of stuff that really plays into my interests as a geography guy. See, I'm a real estate guy, but I might be the most geography interested real estate guy out there. Geography is something that I really love, though I could I don't share too much geography here on a real estate show. Sometimes it's relevant because both geography and real estate are location, location, location, but sometimes it's less relevant.   Keith Weinhold (00:15:25) - For example, North America's longest river is not the Mississippi, it's the Missouri River. The New York City metro area is so populated that more than one in every 18 Americans live there. That's almost 6% of the entire American population. See, some of this is more trivial or of general interest than it is relevant to real estate. Although you could learn some geography from me. Do you know the closest US state to Africa? If you draw a straight line, the closest state to Africa is not Florida or North Carolina. It is Maine. Look on a globe. Part of the reason that Maine is the closest state is that Africa is primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, not the southern, contrary to popular belief, and to look at a different continent. The entirety of South America is east of Jacksonville, Florida. Here's one more piece of geography. Canada's beautiful and mountainous Yukon Territory is larger than California, yet California has more than 900 times the population of the entire Yukon. Yes, the giant Yukon has less than 45,000 people.   Keith Weinhold (00:16:39) - It is the practice of guilt tipping out of control. And how do you respond to our world that seems to be increasingly unsafe and uncertain. That's coming up next. They say, if you give a man a fish you have fed him for. Or a day. But if you teach them to fish, you have fed him for a lifetime. Well, here at gray, we do both. I'm not talking about both in terms of men and women, but we teach you how to fish and give you a fish. Get rich. Education is where we teach you how to fish. With this show, with our blog and newsletter and videos, we also give you a fish. That's it. Gray marketplace. It's one of the few places you'll find affordable, available properties that are good quality there at marketplace. They're all conducive to our strategy of real estate pays five ways I'm Keith Wild. You're listening to get Rich education. Jerry listeners can't stop talking about their service from Rich lending group and MLS. For 256.   Keith Weinhold (00:17:45) - They've provided our tribe with more loans than anyone. They're truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four plex. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge. Personally, though, even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending Group. You know, I'll just tell you, for the most passive part of my real estate investing, personally, I put my own dollars with Freedom Family Investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in returns are better than a bank savings account up to 12%. Their minimums are as low as 25 K. You don't even need to be accredited for some of them. It's all backed by real estate, and I kind of love how the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains in your W-2 jobs income, and they've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love.   Keith Weinhold (00:18:55) - For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 66866. Oh, and this isn't a solicitation. If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to 66866.   Speaker 3 (00:19:16) - This is real estate investment coach Naresh Vissa. Don't live below your means. Grow your needs. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold.   Keith Weinhold (00:19:34) - Welcome back. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. There will only ever be one great podcast. Episode 477. And you're listening to it perhaps on one third of our episodes. Throughout the show's history, there is no guest. It's 100% me, a slack jawed monologue like it is today, and lots of great Jerry episodes coming up in the future, including Robert Helms other real estate guys here soon as he runs alongside me for an episode as we discuss goals. If you get value from and you don't want to miss any future episodes, be sure to hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast platform so that you're sure to hear from me again after today.   Keith Weinhold (00:20:16) - Is guilt tipping out of control? We have all felt it now. Does this happen to you today when you're about to pay the Starbucks barista or for the subway sandwich and they spin the digital payment terminal around toward you and say, it's just going to ask you a question before you pay. And then they stand there and they look at you in the face and they watch what you choose. All right. Does that right there give you a tinge of anxiety or even stress you out? Well, if you give in to that, that is called guilt tipping. And you know what? I've got a solution to guilt tipping. A simple and elegant way that I'm going to share with you so that you never have to see a payment terminal like this in your face again, that asks you for a tip when you're out shopping or dining and paying for something. Yes, I've got a proven solution for how you'll never even be asked to leave a guilt tip again because I tested it and mastered it. It works.   Keith Weinhold (00:21:20) - We even have an unverified report on Reddit of a self-serve digital kiosk now even asking you for a tip. What? I mean, how far will this go? Yes, like a self-checkout for your own groceries at a supermarket like Giant or Safeway? First, let's get some context about why this is so important to you in the first place and how bad it's getting. It might even be worse than what you're thinking here. All right, a new study from Pew Research. It found that 72% of people said that the long standing practice of tipping is now expected in more places than it was five years ago. My reaction to that stat is what? How is it not 100% of people saying that it's happening all over the place, and consumers like you and I are increasingly getting tired of it? The way it works is that today's digital payment prompts, they allow businesses to preset suggested tip levels, so it's easier than ever for them to ask for tips and companies that have not done so in the past. They are definitely doing it now rather than giving employees a raise.   Keith Weinhold (00:22:35) - Instead, they're asking you to supplement the employee wage by asking you for tips where they didn't before. Must you fight back like David Horowitz, if you're uninitiated on that? I learned about a popular show that apparently ran on prime time network television in the 1980s. The show was called Fight Back with David Horowitz, and it advocated for how consumers can fight back against unscrupulous business practices. In fact, let's listen into the cornball intro of this show, which your parents might remember. It's something about fight back. Don't let businesses push you around.   Speaker UU (00:23:20) - But don't let anyone push you around. Fine, but stand up and hold your ground. I got. Someone tries to you in. Five spot. Just.   Speaker 4 (00:23:44) - Oh, jeez. Yeah.   Keith Weinhold (00:23:45) - Fight back against guilt tipping, I suppose. See, a few years back, the reason that you began getting asked to leave a tip in places you hadn't before. That's because it was a way for you to provide a gratuity for service workers. Because you were supposed to have appreciated that they showed up during the health crisis when a lot of workers did not want to show up.   Keith Weinhold (00:24:09) - But now that the crisis appears largely over with, the tip requests have not gone away. They've gotten worse because by now companies see what they can get away with. Now, look, people don't want to feel like a jerk or a cheapskate. You don't. I don't, but businesses are taking advantage of that fact by making bigger than usual tips. The default option on these payment terminals. It really that's the crux of the annoyance. Say that you're given choices of 20, 25, or 30% on a payment terminal just for someone handing you a pre-made sandwich that's already wrapped in cellophane. I've had it happen to me, and then hoping that you will just go ahead and pay the extra amount, rather than hassling with clicking custom tip and entering a smaller number like 10% or zero. Understand something here. The business call it a sandwich shop. They're not the ones that always decide what tip options you're presented with. Did you know that because the companies that own the payment systems, they can earn a cut of your money from each transaction? Those payment system companies, they also have an incentive to increase those amounts as much as possible, not just the sandwich shop, but they are both complicit in this scheme together.   Keith Weinhold (00:25:37) - But now sometimes you get asked to leave a tip beforehand before you're even delivered any good or service. And see, that's getting awkward too. And see the fear of that you and I should have. Now is that in this case, as the customer, as the client, you are going to get punished if you leave a low tip before they deliver the service to you. See, that's another big problem here with guilt tipping. Now, traditionally, tips were thought of as a way to reward good service after you already received what you paid for, right? That's how it works. You pay your server after a meal, you pay your valet. After they bring you your car. You pay the tour guide after your volcano hike or snorkel tour. If you thought that they did a good job. Now, just the other day at a chain fast casual Mexican restaurant that you've certainly heard of, I was being rung up about $35 for two double steak burritos, and there's a lower service level there than a full sit down restaurant.   Keith Weinhold (00:26:44) - But I left a 10% tip at the counter on that day. I thought they put lots of steak on them. And then I walked my burritos to the tables and the tables were messy. I could not find a clean table anywhere, but I had already left the tip. It was too late, so I left the tip and then only later did I discover the poor service, the messy tables. Oh gosh, I wasn't going to go back and try to undo the tip, huh? Before I tell you about my elegant solution so that you can forever avoid guilt tipping. So let's understand just where are Americans tipping today? The situations when people add a gratuity. You know, this really offers some insight into the new tipping landscape. And again, this is according to Pew Research for dining at sit down restaurants, 92% of people are tipping there. And of note, a majority said that they would tip 15% or less for an average sit down meal. That kind of surprised me, because etiquette experts say the tipping 20% at a full service restaurant is standard now, and that's what I do.   Keith Weinhold (00:27:48) - Okay, getting a haircut 78% of people tip today. Having food delivered 76% for those using a taxi or rideshare service like Uber, 61% of people said that they would tip. I tip for all those things. Buying coffee. Only 25% of people leave tips and eating at fast casual restaurants only 12%. So look, people are upset because we've had years of high consumer price inflation and service inflation on top of that. And then a tip on top of that. Yeah. So it's tip relation on top of inflation. And then there is this preponderance of restaurants especially. It suggests that you tip the post-tax amount. Have you noticed that that means that you're also paying a tip on the tax that you pay? So just pay attention to that next time you're at a sit down, full service restaurant, or really most any other place that suggests a tip amount. And yeah, that's annoying. And I really doubt that that business sends that extra revenue to the IRS where you're paying a tip to the tax amount.   Keith Weinhold (00:29:00) - Gosh. But it all comes back to tip and the influx of automatic prompts at businesses like coffee shops, it gives you more chances to tip, and it'll just wear you down and then wear you out, creating this sense of exhaustion thinking what is all this for? It is just wild. If supermarkets are asking you to leave a tip for self checkout, your supermarket wants to outsource their checkout duties from clerks and cashiers to you, asking you to scan your own groceries. By the way, that is an example of service inflation. And then they ask you for a tip. On top of this food inflation and service inflation, you're doing it all yourself. What is next? You're going to have to unload the store's delivery of food from the 18 Wheeler truck in the back, onto a forklift, and onto the shelves yourself. I kind of doubt that. But if grocery stores are convenience stores, self-serve kiosks, if they're requesting tips, then it's more likely that soon enough, your human checkout clerk is going to start requesting tips.   Keith Weinhold (00:30:09) - When you're checking out at Whole Foods or Publix or Wegmans or Safeway, that human checkout clerk that's going to appear as some sort of small luxury comparatively. I mean, I would expect that to come to your town next. Expect to see it if you haven't already. There used to be this general understanding of what different tip amounts convey to servers and workers. Now, decades ago, it used to be a 10% tip meant, all right, well, hey, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. A 15% tip was normal and 20%. That meant that person did an excellent job. But now those amounts have all become expected and they've all been bumped up 5% or more. All right, well, here's my solution to avoid guilt tipping the way to no longer see a digital payment terminal spun around put in your face. Putting you on the spot to make a nice tip is just this two word solution pay cash. Yes, when you pay cash, you don't have to see an electronic payment terminal at all.   Keith Weinhold (00:31:18) - And it's far easier for you to ignore a physical tip jar that's sitting on the counter over to the side of you. The elegant and simple solution to guilt tipping is to pay cash. Now go ahead and leave a tip for good service if you want to. I'm not here to suggest that you stop all tipping. It's about how you can make an elegant circumvention of guilt tipping. If you have an eight second long exchange where you ask for a cup of coffee and they turn around and pour it from a spout and hand it to you. And that's all they did. Well, that tips discretionary. The bottom line is that you don't have to tip every time you're prompted. And now go ahead and hit up that ATM with cash. You will be armed and you can avoid guilt tipping completely. And hey, can we say that you will be fighting back like David Horowitz? Tipping is fine, but guilt tipping is out of control. And hey, if you want to see more on guilt tipping, I really brought it to life on a video recently where I really broke it down.   Keith Weinhold (00:32:25) - That is on our YouTube channel. We are consistently branded as they say. Our YouTube channel is called get Rich education. So you can watch me talk about guilt tipping and show you more over there. Do you feel like the world that you're living in is increasingly uncertain and unsafe? And is that adversely affecting your investment decisions? That happens to some people and you can't make gains when you stay on the sidelines. I think some people make too much of uncertainty, even though it has always existed. Just look at the last about four years. You know, someone could have said, I am just paralyzed with inaction because of the pandemic. Oh, that's uncertain then the recession fears uncertain, then rising interest rates where they rose fast, uncertain. And today it might be wars uncertain. And you know, the same people that get paralyzed with uncertainty. They will soon say something next year like, well, it's a presidential election year. So. I think uncertainty is going to sideline me again. If you wait for uncertainty to abate, such as you have complete clarity or even great clarity, you're going to be waiting your entire life.   Keith Weinhold (00:33:47) - Uncertainty and an absence of complete safety that's existed in the world every single day since the day that you and I were born and before you and I were born. And it will exist after we're gone, too. I mean, really, just look at some of these disasters that have taken place just this century, and we're still in the first quarter of this century. And let's look here at some just in the US, not foreign crises. I'm thinking about the Y2K bug, the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers in the Pentagon, the Iraq war, the invasion into Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, where 1800 people were killed, the GREAtrillionECESSION, the Arab Spring, the surprise of Donald Trump becoming our president in 2016. Remember, that was a real upset over Hillary Clinton. How about the jarring events of January 6th of the Capitol less than three years ago, the eviction moratorium, the slow creep of climate change, the riots and civil unrest with the George Floyd protests, the wildflowers from California to Maui.   Keith Weinhold (00:35:00) - I mean, I could go on and on about how winners just keep thriving despite a world that's constantly uncertain and unsafe. And I'm only talking about things that involve the United States here, and I'm keeping it confined to this century just a little more than two decades. I mean, before that, we had World wars. We had the Dust Bowl, Cuba's Bay of pigs invasion in the Cuban Missile Crisis that could have led to a nuclear apocalypse that completely destroyed the entire world. There is relative clarity today compared to all that. How about an assassination attempt of our President Reagan? I mean, things are substantially more certain today in a lot of ways. And today, American employment is strong, GDP is growing. Our currency is fairly stable despite our problems, which will always exist. Today, the US economy is outperforming everybody in the world. And in a world that some feel is uncertain and unsafe, just consider the relative sense of certainty and safety you have today. Well, we discuss wars today. As bad as they are when they do happen, they're never on US soil.   Keith Weinhold (00:36:13) - Can you imagine an attack on American soil? How would that sound? Like? The enemy has destroyed and taken control of Charleston in Savannah. And next they're moving inland to take down Atlanta. I mean, that's so unlikely that your mind isn't even conditioned to think that way. But the reason that it seems, seems like your world is getting less certain and less safe is because of media. Media is more fractured than it's ever been. It wants your attention. So with more competition with everything from YouTube videos to TikTok clips now competing with legacy media, you get introduced to more fear in order to get your attention. My gosh. I mean, is American life safer than ever? You can make the case that it's become too safe even. I've talked to you before about how things could very well be in safety overboard mode in real estate. Now here we talk about providing clean, safe, affordable and functional housing. But she should need GFCI outlets all over the place in your property, and carbon monoxide detectors and fire rated doors, even when their improvement to your safety is negligible.   Keith Weinhold (00:37:32) - American society at large is so ultra safe and in fact, there's even a term for this now it's called safety ism. Yeah, look it up. It's how excessive safety is becoming harmful to society. When you are on your last passenger plane flight at night and you just wanted to take a nice nap, or you wanted to get some sleep, did the pilot come on to the intercom system and wake you up, telling you to sit down and put your seatbelt on every time? Just a small amount of turbulence was being felt. Oh, there are endless instances like that where society's gotten so safe that it's just annoying. The last time that I was shopping at Lowe's, the home improvement store, a forklift driver was slowly driving the aisles really carefully. And besides just the forklift driver sitting on the seat, there was a second man, a flagger, that was out in front of him, walking, holding two little flags. So the shopping customers knew that a forklift. This coming. Like, that's such a wild hazard to human safety.   Keith Weinhold (00:38:37) - I mean, gosh, the gross inefficiency of that just to improve safety ever so slightly. Construction workers that have to wear hard hats outdoors in an open field. I mean, our society has become Uber safe. Now, don't get me wrong, some measure of safety is definitely a good thing, but I'm underscoring the fact that historically, this world that you're living in is ultra safe and ultra certain. And then within our investing world, take a look around what can be said to be certain and uncertain. Apple. They're the world's largest company by market cap at about $3 trillion. And their risk is that eventually they might fail to keep innovating. How about Bitcoin? Bitcoin could have government crackdowns or some other lack of certainties, their money in the bank and owning Treasury bonds. All right. That's fairly safe and certain. But you aren't getting any real yield there. And in a world that feels more uncertain and unsafe than it really is, bring it back to the positive attributes of being a real estate investor here.   Keith Weinhold (00:39:46) - You know, monetary inflation is a near certainty, and so is the fact that people will pay you rent if you put a roof over their heads. Certainty. It helps to be mindful that safety is the opposite of freedom, and that having security is the opposite of having opportunity. Hey, well, speaking of opportunity, join our investment coach Norris for Grizz Live event that is to night. You can join from the comfort of your own home. You get to select from one of the two options for Florida Income property. You can select either a 5.75% mortgage rate or the 224 program, which means two years of free property management. 2% of the purchase price. In closing cost credit to you and a generous $4,000 lease up fee credit. Sign up. It's free. It's our live event tonight, the 27th at 8:30 p.m. eastern, 530 Pacific. If you're a few days late, be sure to watch the replay soon. register@webinars.com to have a chance at putting some new Build Florida Income property in your portfolio.   Keith Weinhold (00:41:00) - Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Winfield. Don't quit your day dream.   Speaker 5 (00:41:08) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get Rich education LLC exclusively.   Keith Weinhold (00:41:36) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get rich education.