Podcasts about merchants

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

In her formidable and fiercely well-argued new book Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022), Divya Cherian shows with meticulous detail and in lyrical prose, the processes and practices that contributed to the emergence and hardening of an exclusivist Hindu identity set in opposition to a notion of Untouchability that also subsumed Muslims. Set in eighteenth century Marwar in the Rathor Kingdom, this book sketches an intimate portrait of the micro-politics and the everyday life of the aspirations, fissures, and resistances that went into the stipulation of caste distinctions in early modern South Asia. At the heart of this book is a narrative equally fascinating and frictious of how a state driven campaign to cultivate “virtuous” Hindu merchants or Mahajans contributed to the demarcation of epistemological, legal, and spatial boundaries between upper caste Hindus and untouchables, including Muslims.Merchants of Virtue combines the best forms of social, legal, political, and conceptual history, and its invasive examination of the interface between religion, state, and society will be of much interest to scholars of religion, South Asia, and Islam. Available also as an Indian edition, this book will also make for an excellent text to teach in both undergraduate and graduate seminars. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. 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

After the City of Oakland missed a critical deadline to secure grant funding meant to help local businesses, the city's merchants say they're planning to go on strike, saying all the crime is pushing their businesses to the brink. For more. KCBS Radio's Margie Shafer and Matt Bigler spoke with KCBS Insider Phil Matier.  

We're back! After an extended post-STLV recharge, Heather and David return to talk Star Trek again. The Very Short Treks are out, and, well…they are certainly being talked about. Plus, Lower Decks Season 4 is here, bones are being drank, promotions are being had, and a character has caught David's eye. Plus, the latest on […] The post Promenade Merchants #74: Catching Up, Lower Decks and Prodigy Concerns? appeared first on Delta Juliet Mike Media.

We're joined by BadGuyScooter, Wicked, and the Café Bitcoin Crew for a conversation about the latest Bitcoin news, the importance understanding self-custody, and how best practices on storing your Bitcoin safely. We are then joined by Analys Falchuk, Business Development and Product lead at IbexPay, for a conversation about how they're making it easy for merchants to accept Bitcoin through the lightening network. Connect with: Analys Falchuk: https://twitter.com/AnalysFalchuk IbexPay: https://www.ibexpay.io/ Twitter Nests: Join (https://t.me/cafebitcoinclub) for Twitter Nests Swan Private Team Members: Alex Stanczyk Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexstanczyk Café Bitcoin Crew: Ant: https://twitter.com/2140data Tomer: https://twitter.com/TomerStrolight Wicked: https://twitter.com/w_s_bitcoin Peter: https://twitter.com/PeterAnsel9 Produced by: https://twitter.com/Producer_Jacob Free Bitcoin-only live data (no ads) http://TimechainStats.com“From Timechain to Cantillionares Game, you can find Tip_NZ creations at Geyser Fund:” https://geyser.fund/project/tip Swan Bitcoin is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring buys and instant buys from $10 to $10 million. Get started in just 5 minutes. Your first $10 purchase is on us: https://swanbitcoin.com/yt  Download the all new Swan app!  iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swan-bitcoin/id1576287352  Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.swanbitcoin.android&pli=1  Join us for Pacific Bitcoin Festival 2023! Purchase your tickets now before prices go up: https://PacificBitcoin2023.com  Are you a high net worth individual or do you represent corporation that might be interested in learning more about Bitcoin? Swan Private guides corporations and high net worth individuals toward building generational wealth with Bitcoin. Find out more at https://swan.com/private  Check out the best place for Bitcoin education, Swan Bitcoin's “Bitcoin Canon”. Compiling all of the greatst articles, news sources, videos and more from your favorite bitcoiners! https://www.swan.com/canon/  Get paid to recruit new Bitcoiners: https://swan.com/enlist Hello and welcome to The Café Bitcoin Podcast brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the best way to buy and learn about Bitcoin. We're excited to announce we are bringing the The Café Bitcoin conversation from Twitter Spaces to you on this show, The Café Bitcoin Podcast, Monday - Friday every week. Join us as we speak to guest like Max Keiser, Lyn Alden, Tomer Strolight, Cory Klippsten and many others from the bitcoin space. Also, be sure to hit that subscribe button to make sure you get the notifications when we launch an episode. Join us Monday - Friday 7pst/10est every Morning and become apart of the conversation! Thank you again and we look forward to giving you the best bitcoin content daily here on The Café Bitcoin Podcast. Swan Bitcoin is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring buys and instant buys from $10 to $10 million. Get started in just 5 minutes. Your first $10 purchase is on us: ⁠⁠https://swan.com/yt⁠⁠ Connect with Swan on social media: Twitter: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Swan

This was supposed to be an episode where we talk about the challenges the Hanse was facing after the victory over the Danes and the Peace of Stralsund. But that is not to be. Listeners Mehmet and Nina pointed out a few gaps in what I had been talking about last week and now these need to be filled. It is all good talking about the trading network and the flow of goods across the Baltic and northern Germany. But what about the opposing flow, the flow of money? How do the Merchants get paid? How can they pay for all the goods they, or their agents, are buying way down in Flanders and England? How do they cope with the sometimes erratic monetary policies of late medieval rulers?After all, it is money that makes the world go round!The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.As always:Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.comFacebook: @HOTGPod Twitter: @germanshistoryInstagram: history_of_the_germansReddit: u/historyofthegermansPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/HistoryofthegermansThis episode relied heavily on:Jahnke, Carsten: Die Hanse | Reclam VerlagJahnke, Carsten: Netzwerke in Handel und Kommunikation ander Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert am Beispiel zweier Revaler Kaufleute. Netzwerke(hansischergeschichtsverein.de)Stuart Jenks: War die Hanse kreditfeindlich? on JSTORHistorical documents of Hanseatic League added to UNESCO archival heritage list | Tallinn

On this episode of ‘Grab A Glass', DT goes more in depth with the gems he got from a stranger in an airport and discusses where passion seems to lie in American NBA players.

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans.  In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans.  In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. 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

Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (June, 2023).  Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time. Divya Cherian: An assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Prof. Cherian is a historian of early modern and colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan. She is the author of Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023) (Indian edition: Navayana, 2023), winner of the American Institute of Indian Studies' 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners' feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. 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

Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (June, 2023).  Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time. Divya Cherian: An assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Prof. Cherian is a historian of early modern and colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan. She is the author of Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023) (Indian edition: Navayana, 2023), winner of the American Institute of Indian Studies' 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners' feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans.  In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans.  In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (June, 2023).  Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time. Divya Cherian: An assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Prof. Cherian is a historian of early modern and colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan. She is the author of Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023) (Indian edition: Navayana, 2023), winner of the American Institute of Indian Studies' 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners' feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today's oceans.  In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today's cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior. And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (June, 2023).  Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time. Divya Cherian: An assistant professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. Prof. Cherian is a historian of early modern and colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan. She is the author of Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023) (Indian edition: Navayana, 2023), winner of the American Institute of Indian Studies' 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners' feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tickle Me Elmo{00:04:30} - “The world has changed. The shopper experience has changed. That linear thing that you talked about from an experience perspective has changed. That journey that customers go on has changed. The way that they interface, they search, they click, they like, they turn you into a buyer immediately has changed. So merchants have to change too. So now is the time, if you haven't already thought about is what is your strategy?” - Meghan{00:15:24} - “eCommerce nowadays is the mentality of all of these things coming together: the infrastructure, the platform capabilities, and then what you want to do as an eCommerce brand manager that has to be seamless to capture me in that very emotional moment of buying.” - Meghan{00:22:07} - “One of the things that I think is super important and it's not discussed too much in typical holiday shopping prep is you actually need to prep for other types of shoppers that you wouldn't normally deal with when you're typically running your promotional promos or your marketing or messaging campaigns. The type of buyer might be someone who's way outside of your ICP, but they're buying it for someone that they know is in your ICP.” - Brian{00:41:47} - “Merchants have to think global at local as well and when they think about this is just a Thanksgiving Day sale, yeah, it may be but Thanksgiving is not celebrated overseas. But at the same time, your sales are celebrated and people are going to your site to think about things.” - Meghan{00:44:08} - “Some retailers definitely have to lean more into promotion to have a clear out and to make room for inventory. And others are leaving money on the table. That's where you don't ever really get the demand curve perfectly. What I think we've seen most recently is that there were some missed forecasts and demand that have led to the industry having to lean more into promotion over the last 18 months.” - Phillip{00:47:44} - “The future of commerce is where AI is going to lead us from where I sort of surrounded it on the data side and analytics and then getting into predictive analytics and then getting into predictive changes and then making individualized journey changes.” - MeghanAssociated Links:Learn more about Meghan Stabler and BigCommerce.Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereMeet us at eTail Boston 2023Check out The Edge Summit from BloomreachHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

En este episodio me reuno con Deborah Besseghini para hablar de su artículo The Weapons of Revolution: Global Merchants and the Arms Trade in South America (1808-1824), Las armas de la revolución: comerciantes globales y la importación de armas en América del Sur (1808-1824), que es parte del Special Issue Vol. 8 No. 1 (2023): Global Merchants in Spanish America: Business, Networks and Independence (1800-1830). Descargar artículo en acceso abierto: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.... Abstract: Este artículo investiga el rol ejercido por el comercio de armas vinculado a las guerras de Independencia hispanoamericanas en las transformaciones en el comienzo de la globalización decimonónica. Analiza, específicamente, cómo los suministros de armas a los gobiernos contribuyeron al desarrollo post-mercantilista del comercio sudamericano, y determinados efectos dominó de dicho negocio. Este momento de cambio en la historia económica se analiza a través de las trayectorias biográficas de comerciantes bien posicionados entre geopolítica y comercio, que poseían funciones “imperiales” sin estar formalmente involucrados en proyectosimperialistas. Mediante correspondencia comercial y política, documentos notariales y registros de aduanas, de archivos de Europa y las Américas, se revela la operativa de las alianzas y de las iniciativas empresariales de comerciantes globales cuyas compañías fueron principales importadoras de armas en Buenos Aires durante los años precedentes a la liberación de Chile. Las trayectorias de las redes de John McNeile (importante pero olvidado personaje) y David DeForest se insertan en los principales laboratorios económicos y políticos de países desde donde se importaban la mayor parte de armas: Gran Bretaña y los Estados Unidos. Alcanzaron Chile y Perú desde Buenos Aires, y permanecieron cruciales para las campañas de liberación, promoviendo una expansión comercial adicional a lo largo de la costa del Pacífico americano, y hacia Asia, y fueron pioneros en aventuras financieras. Las relaciones entre algunas casas de comercio activas en Hispanoamérica y Asia revelan redes y vínculos transpacíficos, británicos y norteamericanos, entre los sistemas comerciales yeconómicos de dichos lugares. De este modo, relacionando fuentes fragmentarias ydispersas de ambos lados del Atlántico, el artículo desvela la importancia del comercio de armas en Sudamérica como un motor de la emergente globalización. La Dra. Deborah Besseghini es Investigadora postdoctoral y docente en la Universidad de Turín, Deborah Besseghini es doctora en Ciencias Humanísticas por la Universidad de Trieste. Ha sido investigadora invitada en el Laboratoire Mondes Américains/EHESS de París (Francia) y profesora invitada en la Universidad de Tucumán (Argentina). Miembro de redes internacionales de investigadores, ha participado en congresos e iniciativas científicas en distintos países (Chile, Perú, México, Reino Unido, etc.) como por ejemplo el número monográfico del proyecto IMERLIB de la Casa de Velázquez (España). Ha escrito sobre las rivalidades internacionales en la América latina durante la crisis de la monarquía hispana, sobre las transformaciones del comercio en la Era de las Revoluciones y sobre el imperialismo informal. Sus últimos trabajos son: “Global Change: Carlo Vidua and the Age of Revolutions in the Hispanic World” en Atlas Histórico de América, Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, Lima, 2023, pp. 37-61; “The Space of Imperialism: An Informal Consul on the Banks of the River Plate (1808-1820)”, Nuova rivista storica, 107(1), 2023, 157-206. Presenta Paula de la Cruz-Fernández. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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¿Quieres empezar a vender en Línea? Aprende el paso a paso para crear un ecommerce exitoso y cómo hacer publicidad en redes sociales para lograr tus primeras ventas en poco tiempo.

Today, on the Hudson Mohawk Magazine: We begin with an interview with the Guilderland chapter of March for Our Lives. Then, for our Peace Bucket, we talk with Kathy Kelly about the Tribunal for Merchants for Death. Later on, we hear someone's personal challenges with navigating the social service system as a homeless individual. After that, we talk about the Farm Bill, particularly as it relates to hunger. We finish with some discussions with vendors at the Troy Farmer's Markets.

In this episode I talk about the Merchants Championship and Remote ID. More Content: prestonjensen.com

Kathy Kelly, Board President of World Beyond War, will be one of the featured speakers at the 25th annual Kateri Peace conference in Fonda on Sept. 8 and 9. She discusses the Merchants of Death Tribunal she is organizing beginning Nov. 10h with Mark Dunlea for Hudson Mohawk Magazine. The tribunal will hold accountable — U.S. weapons manufacturers who knowingly produce and sell products which attack and kill not only combatants but non-combatants as well. https://merchantsofdeath.org/ kateripeaceconference.org

In episode one of the Inaugural Swellness Pilgrimage Podcast, the blue collar grit merchant Kristy Smyth shares her story as the pilgrims assemble in the holy city of Dharamshala for some pre-pilgrimage Doof Hof, ice-water plunges, runny bum and the beginnings of some deeply cosmic goings-on.  Register your interest for the next pilgrimage (Oct 2nd - 15th) at uptheswellians@gmail.com. Lifeline: https://www.lifeline.org.au Wim Hof Breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ Thich Nat Hanh, Calm and Ease Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XHvtIcaD194See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Astrophysicist and cosmologist Brian Keating, Ph.D., talks about the high-pressure world of science. For a decade, Dave Asprey, “the father of biohacking,” elevated what you knew about the capabilities of your mind and body across a thousand episodes of Bulletproof Radio. Now, he's evolving it even further in his plan to upgrade humanity. You're invited to expand your knowledge, explore your own performance and embrace possibility with The Human Upgrade™. You'll meet bright thinkers and radical doers who push the boundaries of science, technology, personal development, and human performance in every way imaginable. You'll learn from experts around the world who elevate what it means to be human. Every guest you listen to, every topic you learn about, every new idea you discover on this podcast moves you forward. Join The Human Upgrade™ with Dave Asprey on this next evolution to upgrade your mind, body and life. Visit netsuite.com/impossible to take advantage of their special offer! Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs linkedin.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple's best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it's here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it's here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 25th annual Kateri Peace Conference will take place in Fonda on Sept. 8 to 9. A key presenter will be Kathy Kelly on the upcoming Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. John Amidon talks with Mark Dunlea of Hudson Mohawk Magazine about the overall themes and speakers of the conference. kateripeaceconference.org

In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and Buddhist activity between China and Japan. Carefully analyzing a rich array of sources–both Chinese and Japanese–including Buddhist writings, letters, poems, legal records, archeological findings, and material culture, she recovers relationships vital to Sino-Japanese relations. In this episode, Li shares how she first developed her research interests in Chinese and Japanese history. She then walks listeners through her book, considering major shifts in the network. She touches upon key figures and moments as monks shifted from practices and procedures developed during formal tribute missions to their collaborations with merchants, who helped transport them and material objects–both ritual and commercial–across the sea in exchange for access to their Buddhist networks and political connections. This network deepened over time, especially when Japanese authorities allowed Chinese merchants to permanently reside in Hakata, Japan, and they became important agents in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan. Yiwen Li has crafted a solid, accessible history of maritime East Asia, shedding light on a private network that sustained Sino-Japanese commerce and religious exchange during a 600-year gap in formal tributary relations. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and Buddhist activity between China and Japan. Carefully analyzing a rich array of sources–both Chinese and Japanese–including Buddhist writings, letters, poems, legal records, archeological findings, and material culture, she recovers relationships vital to Sino-Japanese relations. In this episode, Li shares how she first developed her research interests in Chinese and Japanese history. She then walks listeners through her book, considering major shifts in the network. She touches upon key figures and moments as monks shifted from practices and procedures developed during formal tribute missions to their collaborations with merchants, who helped transport them and material objects–both ritual and commercial–across the sea in exchange for access to their Buddhist networks and political connections. This network deepened over time, especially when Japanese authorities allowed Chinese merchants to permanently reside in Hakata, Japan, and they became important agents in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan. Yiwen Li has crafted a solid, accessible history of maritime East Asia, shedding light on a private network that sustained Sino-Japanese commerce and religious exchange during a 600-year gap in formal tributary relations. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. 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

In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and Buddhist activity between China and Japan. Carefully analyzing a rich array of sources–both Chinese and Japanese–including Buddhist writings, letters, poems, legal records, archeological findings, and material culture, she recovers relationships vital to Sino-Japanese relations. In this episode, Li shares how she first developed her research interests in Chinese and Japanese history. She then walks listeners through her book, considering major shifts in the network. She touches upon key figures and moments as monks shifted from practices and procedures developed during formal tribute missions to their collaborations with merchants, who helped transport them and material objects–both ritual and commercial–across the sea in exchange for access to their Buddhist networks and political connections. This network deepened over time, especially when Japanese authorities allowed Chinese merchants to permanently reside in Hakata, Japan, and they became important agents in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan. Yiwen Li has crafted a solid, accessible history of maritime East Asia, shedding light on a private network that sustained Sino-Japanese commerce and religious exchange during a 600-year gap in formal tributary relations. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and Buddhist activity between China and Japan. Carefully analyzing a rich array of sources–both Chinese and Japanese–including Buddhist writings, letters, poems, legal records, archeological findings, and material culture, she recovers relationships vital to Sino-Japanese relations. In this episode, Li shares how she first developed her research interests in Chinese and Japanese history. She then walks listeners through her book, considering major shifts in the network. She touches upon key figures and moments as monks shifted from practices and procedures developed during formal tribute missions to their collaborations with merchants, who helped transport them and material objects–both ritual and commercial–across the sea in exchange for access to their Buddhist networks and political connections. This network deepened over time, especially when Japanese authorities allowed Chinese merchants to permanently reside in Hakata, Japan, and they became important agents in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to Japan. Yiwen Li has crafted a solid, accessible history of maritime East Asia, shedding light on a private network that sustained Sino-Japanese commerce and religious exchange during a 600-year gap in formal tributary relations. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. 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

Links from the show:* Fascinating True Tales from Old California* Connect with Colleen* Rate the showAbout my guest:Colleen Adair Fliedner is an award-winning author, journalist, and historian. She has written three nonfiction books, radio and t.v. commercials, screenplays, and hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines, and online publications. She was a staff writer for the Orange County Register newspaper's online travel website and was a regular contributor for Talking Travel Radio Network based on the East Coast. In the Shadow of War: Spies, Love & the Lusitania is her first novel. Colleen began her professional career as a research historian, writer, and oral historian at California State University, Long Beach, CA.  Her job included writing newspaper articles, brochures, radio, and cable television scripts, and more.  Her first nonfiction history book was written for the County of Los Angeles, a five-year-long project which required conducting more than 100 oral history interviews and combing through historic ledgers, photographs, and dusty, long-forgotten boxes of old documents. Her next two books were a history about Park City, Utah, “Stories in Stone: Miners and Madams, Merchants and Murders,” and “Quick Escapes from Orange County, published by Globe Pequot Press. She was then hired to ghostwrite two books and numerous blog articles for an internationally famous psychologist.Her awards include Alumni of the Year (California State University, Long Beach) for her first nonfiction book commemorating the 100th anniversary of Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center, which began as the Los Angeles County Poor Farm. An article she wrote about Oklahoma City received an award from the Oklahoma Convention and Visitors Bureau. And her historical novel, In the Shadow of War: Spies, Love & the Lusitania, was the grand prize winner over 300 entries in the San Mateo Literary competition, an award which resulted in its publication by the Sand Hill Review Press. Recently, Colleen was honored by the California Writer's Club (statewide competition) for a nonfiction short story about George Freeth that appears in their annual literary magazine.In addition, she has optioned a screenplay and two teleplays, written radio and t.v. commercials, plays, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Her credits include the Los Angeles Times Travel Section, the Orange County Register; Westways, Home & Away (both Auto Club publications), France Today, BajaTRAVELER, and Native Peoples Magazines.Her latest project is a nonfiction book, “Fascinating True Stories from Old California,” a compilation of interesting accounts of some of the Golden State's most unique people, places, and things.Colleen lives in Orange, California with her husband, Rick, and two Pomeranians.  Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

EPISODE 1639: In this KEEN ON episode, Andrew talks to the prolific futurist and tech critic, Douglas Rushkoff, about the false promises of social media and our need to engage with what he calls "reality reality" Named one of the “world's ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff's work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He serves as a  research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EP308 - Amazon Q2 Earnings http://jasonandscot.com Amazon reported a strong quarter across the board for Q2, soundly exceeding analyst expectations and retail industry averages. In this episode we break down the 1p and 3p retail performance, AWS, and the Ads. We go into depth around Amazon disruption reorganization (to a regional model), Amazon's newest efforts in grocery, and health care. 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. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 308 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, August 4, 2023. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode a 308 being recorded on Thursday August 3rd 2023 that's a lot of Threes I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scott showed listeners well Jason today is one of my four favorite days of the year it is Amazon earnings day. Jason: [0:51] I was going to guess it's the 4th Halloween okay. Scot: [0:54] Nope good guess and today was a real doozy so we have a lot to talk about and of course it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show without. Jason: [1:05] Amazon news your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [1:18] That's right sometimes I hear from listeners why do you guys spend so much time talking about Amazon well my rationale is a it's one of my favorite subjects did be not only is Amazon the biggest retailer but it represents over half of e-commerce and for our listeners I think their data is pretty much the standard compared to even anything like comscore or adobe, just by definition of them having so much data that it is the basically the best source for what's going on and then given our macro environment we're at the tail end of the last show you were talking about how it's setting up for kind of a bad holiday so we're heading into this it's a critical quarter and for me Q to see what Amazon is done really sets us up for the back half of the year. And especially holiday. So kind of a canary in the coal mine and right now there's all this confusing data coming out about the consumer you see things that sentiment is down travel to starting to tip over housing is slowing so there's some negative but yet credit card spend is going pretty well and so this is probably the best read we're going to get on the consumer heading into holiday. [2:39] So I think of it as Scott foreshadowing the whole industry that's why we like to spend a lot of time on it, so the other thing I'll point out is it's been kind of a rough period for Amazon the last, probably 6/4 a day that things have slowed down post covid they've struggled they've done some layoffs but having watched Amazon if we zoom zoom out having followed them since 97 they're really good at reading the room and if the market and the externalities are saying you're free to invest they will invest like crazy and you know and by saying that I mean they'll focus on Revenue growth implementing infrastructure but then when the macro turns - and they can move to harvest pretty quickly so, a lot of that kind of goes as good as Wall Street so Wall Street will love them and give them a lot of rope and they'll invest invest invest and then while she starts to worry they're like oh my gosh this is scary your spending so much things are doing this and then they will turn very quickly and can then get into Harvest mode and produce results that's a really a big theme for this quarter so that's part of the set of the other part of the setup is we have some eCommerce data coming into this what is that, what are those tea leaves tell us before we jump into Amazon. Jason: [4:00] Yeah so we have data from the US Department of Commerce through June and it is a really complicated story so that the top line is a little bit of a worrisome sign so year-to-date January through June of this year retail sales are 1.9 percent higher than they were during that same period last year so time now to put that in perspective in the 10 years leading up to covid we average retail growth of 4% a year so so far this year the growth is less than half of the industry average and then the last three years of growth the last 3 years of Cook post covid were the biggest three years of retail growth in the history of retail so we had these three monster years and now for the first time we have a six month period That's, well off the average and, Q2 was worse than q1 now you know people always say well what about inflation in these numbers if you adjust all these numbers back to 2019 dollars to sort of take inflation out of it, retail sales this year are actually down 2.8 percent from last year so so. [5:15] All of the Mir growth we have this year is really due to its unusually high inflation now big caveat there, the information news is actually pretty solid in inflation in June is only up three percent year over year which. [5:32] You know before all this inflation stuff started the Fed was always trying to keep inflation between two point two and three percent so. [5:39] Information down and three percent if it if it stays down there is pretty encouraging but from a retail standpoint, you have this weird thing you have the macroeconomics getting better there's a lot more economists saying we're not going into a recession we somehow managed a soft Landing you've got the inflation numbers coming way down all the wages and employment numbers have continued to be robust so you're all these favorable macroeconomics and now the consumer has stopped spending and you hear every retail are talking about how, consumers are trading down a cheaper Goods they're buying more needs and less wants and all of these sorts of things and so. If you if you kind of look at the retail industry average. There are two retailers that have hit consistently been outperforming the industry average and those two retailers are Walmart and Amazon which are the two, largest retailers in the United States of America. Um there's some controversy over who's actually bigger but we'll leave that for another show if the bottom line is if the two biggest retailers in the market are both outperforming the industry average. That's a bad sign for the rest of the retailers. Scot: [6:54] Someone's losing share. Jason: [6:55] Exactly exactly and I would note we don't talk about it a ton on the show but then there's two Chinese companies that are. Dramatically grabbing share really quick so she and and and Tim ooh so you know outside of those four. It's not looking super up to Mystic for, for retail so I was super curious to hear not only how Amazon did but what they're what guidance they gave for Q3 and what they were seeing in terms of consumer spending because we do have this weird paradox. Macroeconomics getting better, but retail spending getting worse so that being said like what what did Amazon report Scott. Scot: [7:40] Well it's an interesting quarter because again for like the last six quarters are 18 months it's been kind of using Wall Street language Wall Street always comes in with expectations and then you either meet those beat them or miss them and or sometimes I'll call it in line if you meet their expectations well this was this was pretty much an unprecedented four-way beat with a raise and that's that last part is what about next quarter so the current quarter is did you how did you do and then did you for future Revenue expectations did you stay in line with those or did you raise them so this was kind of like one of the best quarters you can have using all the Wall Street language and I say a four way beat so number one is earnings per share, while she was expecting 35 cents and they handily beat that at 65 cents so that's the first one the second one is revenue revenue came in at 134 billion versus 131a clear beat. [8:41] AWS Revenue there was a lot of worry around this because Microsoft was really showing their first of all Microsoft had to break out as your separately for the first time and it used to be all clumped in together in this kind of cloud bucket, where they could kind of have office they're hiding what was going on with Azure so now that Microsoft had to call, carve out Azure it has been slowing down very dramatically so everyone was very worried about that a WS beat the expectation was 21.8 and they came in at 22. I will talk a little bit more about the growth things and some other color there third-party exceeded expectation the only thing that was really kind of in line is online store Revenue but the margin improvements if you can't go back to that EPS were so dramatic that everyone was fine with Alan being I think it was like. [9:30] Point two percent miss or something it was like basically in line so that was the only piece that didn't beat and everyone was fine with that because all these other things really swamped the outcome there and then to cap that off the midpoint we'll talk about it but this represents about 11% growth all in for this quarter and the next quarter they guide for growth for 11 to 13 so they're basically saying hey we beat your expectations this quarter and things are accelerating into Q3 so and then they also on the bottom line that guided up for next quarter as well so that went really really well um and that was a pretty amazing so let's peel the onion and see what we can learn you want to take us through the retail business. Jason: [10:18] Yeah for sure so the the retail business globally grew 11% so that last year this in this quarter they grew nine percent so accelerated growth, North America grew 11 per sent an international grew ten percent International really struggle this time last year they actually had a 12% decline last year and so so in general pretty robust growth now, these are the revenue numbers which returned mine everyone Amazons and Marketplace they don't report all of their sales as Revenue they only report, one piece sales and then the fees they earn on 3-piece sales so it's not it's not a perfect. [11:09] Now match to to the sort of Industry retail data I said but it's a close approximation so, on average retail grows four percent a quarter the last two quarters retails grown you know less than half of that and Amazon comes in at 10 or 11 percent growth. So that's you know a pretty healthy outperforming that the industry average is and, you're essentially taking share from the rest of retail now often just a side note. Obviously the vast majority of Amazon sales are online traditionally online grows much faster than. [11:48] Brick and mortar so historically we would see ten to fifteen percent online sales but post pandemic that's actually slowed down quite a bit and so, online sales this year are probably averaging around. Seven and a half our eight percent and so Amazon's growth not only did it beat brick-and-mortar it actually beat the industry average, even for e-commerce so that that is very robust, they spent a lot of time both in their their press release and also in their earnings call talking about their focus on efficiencies, and you know the all the work and efficiencies reorganization of their supply chain you know changing of Labor models, that those others efficiencies are starting to bear fruit because, the profitability was significantly up for. [12:52] For the retail business for this segment so I want to say no for North America they ended up earning like 3.2 billion and earn income. So you know some quarters they don't learn any so 3.2 is a healthy number. [13:10] For their growth and for people that aren't following it. Part of these efficiencies is a super interesting story essentially what Amazon has decided and what they now seem to have successfully executed is that having a national Supply. [13:27] Chain and a national order fulfillment network is not the right way to structure themselves so in the old world they had one order fulfillment system that covered the whole nation you could really want some, delicious Green Tea Oreos you know that are only in the warehouse in California and you order those and Amazon figures out had a, get those Oreos to you in 2 days from the warehouse in California, and increasingly what Amazon said is you know customers really want speed we have to get faster in most cases where promising next day or same day to day is. Is you know a promise from 10 years ago and in order to do that efficiency efficiently and save money, we have to have those Green Tea Oreos really close to Scott to start things off and so we're going to drop a bomb on our own industry-leading fulfillment Network and we're going to redesign it as a set of regional networks so that the vast majority of good Scott orders come from a much shorter distance and so one of the, the impressive results of that effort today is this quarter Amazon said that like despite all this growth and increasing order volumes that they actually drove 20% less miles than they did this quarter last year. [14:42] So they're very successfully getting the goods, closer to the consumer and to put you in put it in perspective how many Goods that is they announced that they now have over 300 million, items that are eligible for Amazon Prime and over fifty percent of those items get delivered same day or next day. Scot: [15:07] Yeah I thought that part was pretty amazing and what they've done is they've split the country into eight regions they actually were pretty and the call to get into some pretty interesting detail on this end and I thought that was interesting because I usually pretty pretty tight-lipped on this so then so they've taken their National optimization you talked about and they're almost running each region has its own country so they're doing more of the load balancing inside of there so in addition to the 20 percent fewer miles there touching the packages 20% less and you now get 76 percent of the units are in the union are in the region and just a while ago it was 66. [15:50] And then what he's what he's basically saying is that's a big efficiency and then within there another efficiency is they're leveraging the same day where houses so things used to go from these really big distribution centers to the smaller ones and now we're going to these much smaller ones and they can now inject things in there and he said those are streamlined and they can get an item from the order coming in to delivery in as little as 11 minutes and those are even closer to the consumer so that it's almost he didn't say this but I kind of envisioned as eight regions are split up into eight more regions almost with these tiny you know within points being some of these other ones they basically said this is working so well we're going to double the number of these small last-mile fulfillment centers so that was I don't think Wall Street heard that because that's you know whenever Amazon says double that's a big number because they have like 200 ish of the big fulfillment centers I don't know how many small ones are but Amazon doubling anything is Nan. [16:55] Trivial number of dollars they're going to invest you didn't say over what time period you want your when ordering covid they said they were double and they went from like 120 fulfillment centers took to actually literally doubled those pretty quickly so it's going to be interesting to watch that build-out I haven't seen one of those I've seen them Beck's I haven't been in one of been on the back end of one to watch the flex drivers that that's kind of what they used to do for Flex drivers so be interesting to see how they scale that and I would like to go got a visit one I don't I don't know if any of the dsps which spend a lot of time with dsps here at spiffy so I've got to see this side of the world a lot more than I did in the software e-commerce world and there at the big fulfillment centers at these delivery stations that are called bolted on the side haven't seen how they pick up from some of these but I'm making it a mission. Learn more about this. Jason: [17:48] Dsps are the third party delivery services that Amazon uses yeah. Scot: [17:52] Delivery service professionals yeah so that was interesting. Jason: [17:57] And a reminder for the big fulfillment centers Amazon actually offers tours you can sign up and get a tour I don't think they haven't seen them ever offer tours on any of the other formats but there are some bootleg videos out on the internet if you know where to look I'll see if I can find some for the show notes that that show like like one of the general contractors that builds these facilities put some videos on their website of, of the finished facilities before they open. Scot: [18:28] Yep so that's kind of the retail business let's mix it up usually I cover third party but let's kick it over you to run through them. Jason: [18:37] Yeah are you okay with me talking about marketplaces I feel like as a Hall of Fame member you you this is like when mess a wet the other guy take the penalty kick. Scot: [18:45] I'm an auto guy now I don't know what this what is a 3 P3 what are the three p's. Jason: [18:51] Yeah so another milestone for Amazon's Marketplace. They hit a new high for the percentage of their total sales that came from third parties so the mix is now 60% third parties 40% first party so that that's continuing along long-standing trend. The third party is continuing to grow and being the most important part of the. The assortment makes at Amazon I don't have the number in front of me but my memory is that the. The growth in 3p Services was actually faster than the retail growth as well so sort of implies that the volume went up but also Amazons. Doing even better at collecting more fees from all those three p providers so that the marketplace continues to be robust and important. You know one that always gets a lot of the energy on these earnings calls is a WS and there's kind of an interesting story going going on so so first of all, the the Wall Street expectation was for AWS to grow eight percent this quarter and they announced that a WS grew 12% so. Massive beat from that perspective. Um and so then you go well is 12% good growth well a year ago they were growing at like 33 percent so twelve percent doesn't sound all that impressive compared to 33 percent. But what you have to remember is. [20:20] The rate of growth has been significantly slowing down quarter after quarter and last quarter q1. [20:27] That growth was 16 percent and when they announced that growth was 16%, they really put dosed a bunch of cold water on investors because they said and we already have a month of data since the end of that quarter and it's slowed down more since then so I think that really is what spooked. The the investor community and that's where that sort of 8% expectation came from so 12 percent growth is kind of an indication that the growth rate although you know swelling down is stabilizing. Um and I think they're they don't give guidance on these individual segments but they. Made a nod to the fact that we're probably not going to see the growth rate slowed down dramatically from this, they do pay a lot of lip service to the fact that, it's a very big number and you can't grow in double digits anymore by just getting organic growth that like in order to, continue to grow double digits you need to acquire a lot of net new customers and you need to acquire a lot of net new workloads, but the good news is you know they have a very robust narrative about why there are a lot of customers and additional workloads to acquire and spoiler alert. You know a huge amount of them are related to generative Ai and a large language models where. [21:54] Amazon is investing a lot in things a lot of the future is going to be in these these three hosted layers of AI services that companies use to build AI Solutions on top. [22:06] So so you know I think their sales focus is going to be is less about getting more money from existing customers and more about getting. New customers and new workloads on a go-forward basis for a WS, um I do want to say you add up the numbers for AWS and it's 88 billion dollar a year business that's the Run rate right now. And they make about 25 percent gross margin on that business so that that 88 billion dollar business is spinning off 21 billion dollars a year in profit. And everyone always talks about how AWS is by far the most profitable business at Amazon so keep that 21 billion dollar number in the back of your head because the next segment that Amazon talked about is ads, and while AWS is growing at 12% they announced that the ad business is growing at 22 percent. Um so that puts, the the ad business at like a 41 42 billion dollar run rate. And that the speculation is that the ad business is about a 75% gross margin. Business and so if they're at a 41 billion dollar run rate that means they're spinning off 30 billion dollars in profit. [23:25] For the ads business so Thirty 1 billion dollars in earning come from ads versus 22 billion dollars in. Or 21 billion dollars in profit from AWS so. Quit talking about a WS being the most profitable business than Amazon ads is the most profitable business and is growing almost twice as fast. And there's another of my favorite facts about that ad business is. You know so again they're selling 44 billion dollars worth of ads you know where they get all the eyeballs that they they have to sell those ads. [24:03] Buy them from Google for 20 billion dollars. So so here's like an awesome business, the Amazon is one of the largest advertisers in the world they spend twenty billion dollars I'm sorry 22 billion dollars on ads to get people to come to all their services, and consume them for profit right so, so you run ads and you get people to buy stuff on Amazon you run ads and you get people to sign up for AWS you run ads and you get people to sign up for Amazon Prime Those ads do all this heavy lifting for all these different business units and then after you've monetize that, that a dollar you then sell that ad dollar back for a profit through this ad business so you want to talk about the network effect and how powerful it is this to me is just an an awesome example of business engineering and you know I think. Often misunderstood aspect of the Amazon profit machine. Scot: [25:01] Yes pretty amazing quarter for ads the they're just really Trout's snap used to be in the conversation and Twitter and it's really just Facebook Google and it was on it. Jason: [25:11] I mean Amazon's a much bigger ad business than Microsoft and Bing. Scot: [25:15] Absolutely another tidbit from the call we had talked about this and if you remember we had we had a guest on from Guardian baseball and he was talking about this was right one by with prime came out and you were super skeptical that anyone would adopt. Jason: [25:35] Yeah and what should you do anytime I'm skeptical about a new idea. Scot: [25:39] Go long on it go. Jason: [25:40] Invest in it. Scot: [25:41] Yeah. So first of all I saw a tweet earlier and this is from everyone's favorite follow bearded egg F ba and a couple other people had similar tweets but he actually had used the software that scrapes all these websites, and he reported there's over 2,200 sites that now have by with Prime and then jassi's comments he said quote, merchants in early trials use by both Prime saw their Shopper conversion increased 25% on average which makes a real difference in their business Merchants who participated in Prime Day activities, experience 10x increase in Daily by with prime orders, so there was a knock on effect that if you had by the Prime on your website then people found you and and rattled over and you saw a really nice kind of ripple effect from the prime day efforts I thought that was an interesting tidbit so they're like like everything Amazon and I haven't followed the features but I'm sure if you remember Matt was complaining that you couldn't turn it on and off for certain excuse there was some feedback he had and maybe it didn't work with attributes like a parent-child skews I'm sure they fix all that or else it wouldn't be on this mini website so it sounds like that's really getting some some traction. Jason: [27:00] Yeah I do I still think. To cite Lira but my double down on my earlier skepticism there still are some rough edges to the customer experience right so it still is a purse Q experience which is a little weird like you know some products on the on the website you can get fast shipping for and some, some products you can't and it's hard to know what they are until you put them in your cart so that's kind of the the old shop Runner. [27:32] For if you will but I do want to say two things both Amazon and Shopify are leaning into these, conversion rates way better when you have by with Prime on your website or when you have shop pay on your website and you know you have to ask yourself what they're comparing that to write because, it should surprise no one that conversion rate when the customer has stored payment information available is much higher than when they don't have stored payment information so the magic question is if you already had shop, pay and PayPal on your site and then you added by with prime did by with prime perform 25% better than PayPal. Um or are they only saying by with prime prefer performs better than nothing because performing better than nothing isn't, quite as impressive in my book and I do want to say well well they are making progress with by with Prime and the 2500, Merchants is impressive just a reminder there's 2.5 million merchants on Amazon so the fact that 2,500 of them are using it you know does not exactly mean it's caught fire. Scot: [28:44] So still skeptical. Jason: [28:46] Yes so again what should you do go double down on the go along. Scot: [28:49] Short Amazon Jason you short Amazon I'll go alone. Jason: [28:54] Yeah that. Scot: [28:55] Prime is not going to work thesis and I'll go on. Jason: [28:58] Yes I don't I don't think you're giving me helpful investment advice. So that was all the main stuff I saw in the earnings calls was there anything else you wanted to cover because I think there is a few other tidbits of Amazon news. Scot: [29:15] I saw Grocery and I had a feeling that your ears were too perked up I I fell asleep during that part so I'll kick it over to you. Jason: [29:21] Oh my god do you not eat. Scot: [29:23] I do but groceries is everyone's least favorite chore. Jason: [29:28] Scot doesn't want to say it but he has people that get his groceries for him that's what's going on here he hasn't been to a grocery store in like 10 years. Scot: [29:35] Every every meal is from Chick-fil-A so I don't have to go through. Jason: [29:37] That seems like it would be a pretty fun for a little while but I have a feeling that the there would wear off, so yes Scott you are right I'm super interested in grocery groceries 25 percent of all retail spending it's the biggest category of spending that Amazon hasn't won, I think it was about 40 years ago that they acquired Whole Foods do I have that right was it 40 years ago. Scot: [30:03] 49 Jason: [30:05] I'm exaggerating I was over 10 years ago now though. That they bought at Whole Foods and hopefully just kind of flat since they acquired them it really hasn't you know turned in anything a reminder Whole Foods is very niche in the grocery space like Whole Foods doesn't sell Coke they don't sell Fritos, um and they're only in a handful of big cities so there the the industry leader in organic produce but they're not a mainstream. And one of the things so Amazon made a bunch of announcements that they were retooling their grocery experience and changing some of their offerings. Two days before the earnings call. And I'll come back to what those announcements were but on the earnings call Andy answered some questions about Grocery and he kind of admitted something interesting, Amazon is doing very well at what Amazon usually calls everyday essentials. And I think the Brian the CFO call that non-climate controlled Goods right so all these shelf-stable things that you tend to buy from a grocery store but you don't actually eat. Um Amazon's pretty good at selling and growing fast and they have a big chunk of that business they are not good at selling. [31:21] Perishables they're not good at Selling climate-controlled Stuff they're not good at selling fresh food online. Um and what Andy said in answer to one of the analysts questions was, to really meaningfully capture sharing grocery you have to have a broad offering in all the areas of grocery not just the everyday essentials and we don't believe you can win. With a broad assortment of groceries without a national footprint of stores. [31:53] So you know he kind of conceded that the Fulfillment center model and the multi-tiered regional Warehouse model that Amazon is building out. Is not particularly well suited for the grocery mix and so he said so you know we need to figure out a grocery, and we kind of concluded what we've rolled out over the last few years at Amazon Fresh is not a winning grocery concept so we put we put a hold on growth, we went back to the drawing board we invented a bunch of new experiences and now we're testing those new experiences to see if they are, more appealing to Consumers so the First Market to get these new experiences is Chicago so they just remodeled the the Amazon Fresh stores here in Chicago I'm going to go visit one soon. But they've essentially they've changed the assortment quite a bit they've added more private label and they've added more National brands for a grocery store Amazon Fresh doors were really kind of a limited assortment grocery store and so it sounds like. [32:56] They're moving they didn't say numbers but in my mind, they were like a twelve thousand SQ grocer and Kroger is like a 20,000 SQ grocer so they're there it sounds like they're moving up to that 20,000 skus. [33:10] And they're testing a bunch of new amenities, and one of the big problems you have in grocery especially when consumers are being really cost-conscious is consumers walk into a grocery store with a budget and they want to make sure they don't overspend that budget. And just walk out grocery stores you actually don't find out how much you spent until 15 minutes after you've left the store. [33:35] Which is an awful experience if you're trying to make sure you stay under 100 dollars. And so one of the amenities they've rolled out is on these Dash cards these digital cards that they let you use in the store they now have a real time running total of what's in your cart so for the first time you can see. [33:53] You know how much you spent so there's a bunch of experiences like that I'll get a better feel for what the new ones are. When I go visit but they're starting to Pilot new grocery Concepts and they're you know they've kind of conceded that they need to scale one of these brick-and-mortar Concepts nationally before they can really be a. A meaningful winner in the digital grocery space. But they made a couple other big changes in grocery to one of the biggest complaints and one of the stupidest things about Amazon's grocery is before you shop for groceries in Amazon you need to get an org chart and understand how Amazon's organized because, you have to decide in advance if you're shopping online at Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh and guess what most customers don't understand the distinction between those two things, and so they had separate carts you actually have three cards on the Amazon website you have a general merchandise Encarta gross Amazon Fresh cart and a Whole Foods car, and it can be really confusing because you just click add to cart on a bunch of stuff and then you go look at your cart and it's not there because it's in one of the other car. So they announced that they're moving to a universal cart. I haven't seen it yet so I can't speak to exactly what it looks like I have a few a name mean a universal grocery cart I don't think they're actually going to mix it in with general merchandise but. [35:11] Will be eager to see that and then the other announcement they made that is I'm not I mean I just don't think it's as big a deal is, um they have opened up grocery delivery from Amazon Fresh to non-prime members so so prior to this week you had to be a prompt Amazon prime number to order from from Amazon Fresh. And this is kind of interesting because this is a further erosion of Amazon Prime benefits you used to get free delivery, um with Amazon Prime for groceries and about a year ago Amazon caved to try to get more profit, and they added a delivery fee even if you're a Prime member but they said you can only get delivery of your Prime member now they're they're taking that benefit off the scale and I just point that out because. Amazon's ordinarily so good at adding new benefits to Prime is kind of rare to see them taking benefits away from Prime so I think that's interesting in the. The grocery space anything else that I missed or the jumped out at you about grocery Scott. Scot: [36:13] No I thought it was you know. A lot of people would expect him to throw in the towel because they've closed some of these physical store experiments and Jesse did that but they still seem committed to grocery at least the four star or what was that start. Jason: [36:30] Yeah five star. Scot: [36:31] Faster that is the closed all those right. And the trimming back the just walk out stores so it's interesting to see that there they they see something in grocery or it's just such a big tan they feel like they have to obviously they have Whole Foods but. Jason: [36:50] Yeah I do think it's one of one of their big bets and it was interesting like in some of the narrative Andy kind of he threw something at the grocery teams under the bus. You know like a lot of his complaints about the Amazon Fresh stores is he's like we just weren't good grocery operators that like are. Our inputs as he called it just weren't good like the the inventory turns the, you know the inventory waste the labor cost that you know all those things weren't where they needed to be to be a competitive grocery store and there's I'm sure a lot of traditional grocers that were listening to this call going amen Andy we told you groceries are really brutal, difficult Cutthroat business and you won't find it as easy as some of the other businesses you've dominated so, I still want to bet against Amazon I still think they're ultimately going to be a big player in grocery but. [37:53] And then one other to me really interesting tidbit is Healthcare that Amazon announced last week a new National Healthcare offering which is telemedicine. Um service and that's attached to Amazon Pharmacy. Um so this used to be an in-house experiment that they use to provide health benefits to a bunch of Amazon employees but and then they started offering it to. You know a few other employers that they had Healthcare agreements with, but now they've made it a national authoring that's available to everyone so you know if you if you need some prescription or you need some some medical advice and you don't want to go in and see a doctor you can't get an appointment. You can you do now use this Amazon Health Service to get a fast and easy. Um Health Care visit so you know we know Amazon has been kind of. Kicking the tires on the healthcare industry and they've had a couple initiatives they had some Partnerships that they walked away from, but there's another one where it seems like they haven't given up on the space and they're still you know rolling out and trying new things. Scot: [39:08] Yeah and I hope they nail this because my my experience with the physical drugstores always terrible. Jason: [39:17] Yeah I am not bullish on physical drug stores so again. You you know oil listeners now know what they should do for the investment there but like. You know the drug business used to be a retail business you walked into a pharmacy and you got all your prescriptions today the insurance companies mostly try to force you to use mail order. Pharmacy said the main reason people had to go to. Pharmacies has kind of gone away and as a retailer if you don't have to go there to get a farm prescription filled. The retail drug stores are awful retailers like they, you know they don't have a good assortment they don't have a good prize they're they're deficient in digital in and if you watch all the moves they're making, the thing that every retail drugstore is trying to do more than anything else is get out of retail and become a Healthcare company and own an insurance. So you know a lot of the CEOs of these companies now come from the insurance sides of the business and it it just doesn't seem like. The long-term future of us retail is to have you know multiple big National drug stores because the model is kind of waning. Scot: [40:28] Yeah yeah we'll I'll shut a small tear when they all go out of business and I can get things more efficient. Jason: [40:36] Yeah I think at least one is going to have to survive because there are a lot of impromptu emergency get it right now kind of kind of needs but you know maybe down the road we'll do a grocery in Pharmacy Deep dive. Scot: [40:50] Or Amazon will have things so close to you can get it in 15 minutes so you won't miss it. Jason: [40:55] Yeah you know one thing I will say like I thought you were going to say I won't feel bad if Amazon sells this because Healthcare in America. Royally screwed and a lot of people you know don't have in can't afford access to it so certainly it would be good if they fix that I will say Amazon rule that a service similar to a Walmart service which is really beneficial, they're now offering generic versions of most chronic prescriptions for a flat five dollar fee and so one thing that has approved a lot in the United States in the last two years. Between Walmart and Amazon and actually like a big startup that Mark Cuban is running is a lot of these. You know prescriptions that were Out Of Reach for a lot of low-income people are becoming more affordable which is certainly a good thing. Scot: [41:40] Yeah yeah we'll take care of them but I'd need my experience you better too. Jason: [41:44] See how I found a way to end the show on a happy note. Scot: [41:47] Yeah World Peace. Jason: [41:50] Yeah and that you know last week we had a slightly shorter show and listeners told this they loved getting a little bit less of us and so miraculously we have done it again we brought in a voluminous Amazon earnings call in a pithy 41 minutes, so if you'd like to reward us for our brevity the best way to do that would be to jump on iTunes and give us that five-star review. Scot: [42:14] Thanks everyone we hope you enjoyed this Amazon Q2 earnings results and until next time. Jason: [42:21] Happy Commercing.

The hype is real. Heather and David are headed to Las Vegas for the 57-Year Mission Convention, also known as STLV (Star Trek Las Vegas) this coming week. Trek conventions are special for both of us, and we cannot wait to be there. But before this weekend, we go over the surprise of THREE episodes […] The post Promenade Merchants Podcast #73: The STLV Go-Home Show appeared first on Delta Juliet Mike Media.

Imagine receiving thousands of packages from Amazon that you didn't even order. In this one-minute podcast, I'll share how this exact scenario unfolded for a woman in Virginia.

The song you just heard at the top of the show was 'Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs' by Arthur Loves Plastic. You can find more of Arthur Loves Plastic's music on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/arthurlovesplastic This is Part II of our discussion with Douglas Rushkoff author of the must-read Team Human and Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Rushkoff is an author and documentarian on the frontlines of understanding how technology and tech billionaires are impacting our lives and the world. His twenty books also include the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. His films include the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. He won the Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. For more on his indispensable work visit his website.  In our bonus episode, Rushkoff takes the Gaslit Nation Self-Care Q&A. To submit your own answers and give inspiration for ways to recharge as we run our marathon together to protect our democracy, leave your answers in the comments section or send an email to GaslitNation@gmail.com. We'll read some of the responses on the show!  And don't forget that Andrea will join comedian Kevin Allison of the RISK! Storytelling podcast for a special live event at Caveat in New York City on Saturday August 5th at 4pm to celebrate the launch of the new Gaslit Nation book Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think! To get a ticket to that event in person or to watch the livestream, visit this website. Signed copies of the book can be ordered at the event!  Gaslit Nation Self-Care Questionnaire  What's a book you think everyone should read and why? What's a documentary everyone should watch and why? What's a dramatic film everyone should watch and why?  Who are some historical mentors who inspire you? What's the best concert you've ever been to? What are some songs on your playlist for battling the dark forces?  Who or what inspires you to stay engaged and stay in the fight? What's the best advice you've ever gotten? What's your favorite place you've ever visited? What's your favorite work of art and why?