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In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Charles Bufalino, a relative of notorious Mafia boss Russell Bufalino. What begins as a family history discussion quickly expands into one of the most enduring mysteries in organized crime—the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. Charles recounts how, in 2011, he uncovered information that unexpectedly tied his own family to the Hoffa case. That discovery set him on a path of research that ultimately led to his upcoming book, Revelations of a Mafia Family, the Teamsters, and the Final Resting Place of Jimmy Hoffa, scheduled for release April 28. While he stops short of revealing his conclusions, he makes clear that his findings point toward new insights into Hoffa's fate. The conversation provides a detailed look at the Bufalino family's Sicilian roots and their migration to Pennsylvania's coal regions. Charles explains how these immigrant communities, bound by kinship and necessity, became intertwined with labor struggles, violence, and early organized crime. The discussion highlights the 1902 anthracite coal strike and the broader environment that allowed criminal networks to gain influence within unions and local industries. Gary and Charles examine Russell Bufalino's rise from these beginnings into a respected and highly effective Mafia figure. Known more for his discretion and organizational skill than overt violence, Bufalino developed a reputation as a trusted “utility man” across multiple crime families, including connections in Detroit and Buffalo. His ability to navigate alliances and maintain loyalty made him a quiet but powerful force within the national Mafia structure. The episode also explores the transition from coal and labor rackets into the trucking industry and the Teamsters Union, a shift that significantly expanded organized crime's reach and profitability. Charles offers personal reflections on his family, including his relationship with Bill Bufalino, and describes the dual nature of their lives—family men on one side, deeply connected to organized crime on the other. As the discussion turns back to Jimmy Hoffa, Gary and Charles analyze longstanding theories and newer leads regarding his disappearance. Charles suggests that his forthcoming book will provide a more definitive perspective on Hoffa's final resting place, adding another layer to a mystery that has persisted for decades. This episode delivers both historical depth and personal insight, offering listeners a closer look at how family loyalty, organized crime, and American labor history intersect—along with a compelling preview of potential new answers in the Hoffa case. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript Charles Bufalino [00:00:00] hey, are you wire tappers out there? Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. You know I’m a retired Kansas City, Missouri Police Intelligence unit. Officer and I I worked a mob for a long time and now I’m still studying the mob. And today we have a a descendant of one of the more famous mob names in the United States Russell Buffalino This is Charles Buffalino Welcome Charles. Thank you. And I’m actually not a descendant of Russell, but I’m a an extended family member of his right. Basically I never wanted to write a book about our family until and I still didn’t after, after it occurred in 2011 that I stumbled across three pieces of information that all aligned on the theme of the Hoffa disappearance and its relationship to. Several extended members of my family and there are three things about, there were three little revelations that I experienced, and I don’t really want to go into detail about them now because they’re [00:01:00] all in the book, and frankly, that’s proprietary information for right now until April 28th when the book comes out. But when I got to the third one it really hit me like a shot that. I knew something about the Hoffa disappearance and my family’s relationship to it that nobody was ever really meant to know. And it bothered me just a little bit and I tried to dismiss it and I went away from it for a couple of days and I thought, this is still bothering me. So I’m gonna find out a little bit more about the Hoffa disappearance so I can dismiss this suspicion, right? So I’m searching on the web and I’m pretty sure the source that I found, it doesn’t matter. This is pretty common knowledge. The source that I found though was from the UCLA magazine, 1984 or sometime in that timeframe. And it detailed what the FBI was doing in the [00:02:00] aftermath of Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. And what they did, the presumption that they made was that Hoffa had been cremated, and that’s a story that you may hear. That’s a story you have heard from. I have Ken Lama. Yeah, he got that from Russ himself. So they took that theory to Bagnas Go’s funeral home in Detroit, which whose clientele had been some of the members on the FBI’s watch list over the years. And Bagnas said, look, we don’t have a crematory. They then went to a place called Central Sanitation. Is that, does that ring any bells for you? Central sanitation was Zy Vitale’s place Peter Vitali. Yeah. Who was a member of the Detroit Partnership, right? He had two such enterprises. This was the second one of them. And when the FBI went there, they interviewed the lawyer for the facility and asked him to show them around. He showed them [00:03:00] around to the trash compactors, the, the cardboard compactors and said, yeah, occasionally, a homeless person or a bum crimes in there to, catch a nap and ends up being more or less as asphyxiated than crushed per se. But, that’s a rare occurrence. And and then they wanted to see the incinerator. And they showed him the incinerator and the FBI said, okay, we want another look at that. We wanna make a date and come back. They set a date to come back and central sanitation burned down. Now the, there’s nothing. Unusual about that, except when I was reading the account I’m running across the name Nick Elli, who was the lawyer for the facility who’s giving the FBI the tour and his name was Ringing Bells. Ringing Bells. And I’m thinking Nick, miss Nikki, is that my cousin? That’s my first cousin Nick from Burbank, [00:04:00] California. Oh really? And how did he get involved in this and. That led me to want to know, okay, who all in the family was in Detroit in 1975, apart from Bill Bino and his three of his close relatives, his siblings who went out there with him that nobody knows their names and Russell and what all was going on out there. And moreover, I needed to understand better again for myself. How these people really related to one another. What was the nature of Bill Binos relationship with Russell? The real nature. It’s commonly understood that they’re cousins. What does that mean? I have cousins that I’ve never met and I think it’s easy for people to presume that was the case. That was not the case, bill. And Russell were. In Bill’s mind and owing to a special relationship they had, they were closer than [00:05:00] brothers due to the fact that Bill’s daughter Bill’s rather Russell’s wife was Bill’s daughter’s godmother. That essentially that made Russell Bills. They had a godfather relationship between him and I. Describe what that means in the book. So Yeah. Which is pretty strong in, in this kind of a family that Godfather relationship’s pretty strong. I may talk about the movie, we’re talking about in Italian family, the Godfather’s pretty strong relationship. Correct. It’s a kind of a, yeah, it’s I get to talk about it in the book because in Montero Sicily, where Bill’s father is from. If I suggest to you that, I want you to be my child’s godfather, it really doesn’t imply anything, any responsibility you have with respect to the child. That means I want us to be as, I want us to be in cahoots business together, brothers. But I’m sure it meant more to Bill than it did to Russell. But, it was a token relationship [00:06:00] probably from Russell’s direction, but they certainly were close and they certainly were involved in teamster business together from very early on. So should I spend a minute and tell you what the family structure was like? Yeah. Explain that Family structure from Sicily on, forward in, in kind of a shortened version, but yeah. Explain that. I’ll do it now. I went ahead and I. Put together some visual aids if you would like to. Yeah. Is this that kind of a show? Can we do multi? Yeah, we can do, yeah, we can do that. Oh, not too many because about half the people that listen to it are audio. I’ll be frustrated. Let’s not do that. Alright. What we’ll do instead is we’ll talk about so I’m sitting in Pitton, Pennsylvania right now in a house that my grandfather and his brother built. My grandfather was Nikola, my. Grand uncle was Salvato and Salvatore’s role in the greater family was he assembled everybody. He came here in 1901 in just [00:07:00] before the great big 1902 anthracite coal strike that sent about 30,000 people out of the coal fields. They just, they gave up after a five month strike and went back to the old country or then went west to the Batum fields. So there was a labor shortage. And at the same time, in Sicily, in Montero, especially where sulfur mining was the key industry they were running into a problem where the United States was breaking into the sulfur market in a big way. It was the fracking process. And eventually the United States and Sicily settled the whole sulfur market thing by treaty. All of that is to say sulfur mines were becoming in trouble, and the last of them would close in the 1970s, the Sicilian mines. So they had this problem where they’re gonna have surface of population, they started to [00:08:00] immigrate and they started to immigrate to the Coalfields, Pennsylvania, where, you know there was this lack of late people to work in the anthracite mines. And Salvatore’s role was to bring them over for probably banks of labor brokers. And once they were here to outfit them with. Food and lodging and all of their material requirements. So he was working for, if he was not himself the Petron system. So that’s my grandfather and his brother. And eventually they took three other Buffalo men into the country. One of them was Russell’s father and the other that was Angelo and the other. Brother of Angelo was kalo. They say Charles, but I call him Kalo in the book to distinguish him from other Charles’s. Kajaro was a black hander. [00:09:00] He was a mafioso. Angelo’s father didn’t live for two years. He was killed in a mine explosion that injured my grand uncle. And Russell grew up under Klo, which is right. Russell was an infant when he arrived. And for several years he bounced in and out of the country back to Sicily and eventually Reland in the country in 1914, living for a time in Buffalo and then back in the Pitton area. So in the Pitton area on my block. So I’m in the kitchen now at the house. On my block was this property, which was a soda factory in a general store. Next door also in the family was a grocer. Up the street was a hotel, and next to that was a bar. And they all belonged to Kalo and they were all run by my members of my family. My grandfather in [00:10:00] particular ran the bar and the hotel while Salvato and his family, they all had very large families. Were servicing the general store and the. So that was their role. And all of the children, there were 20 some children between Nicolo, Kalo, JRO, and a third brother. And they all considered Russell their first cousin, despite the fact that there might not have been a familial relationship between Kalo and the other brothers. They all represented themselves as brothers, four men for about 25 years until the family split apart as Sicilian families only can in very grudging way. But Russell never forgot his relationship to everybody in the family. And at one time or another, every one of those 20 children could reach out to him, rub a lamp, and Russell [00:11:00] would appear and. Do something for them and it was mutual. My father was a professional photographer, probably never charged Russell for a thing. And it was that way with other members of the family that had their crafts of their own. Yeah. So does that help to. Yeah that when the Binos came over, they were like in, in this patron system. And so Russell just kind. Fell right into that. And your one uncle was already in a black hander from the old school Mafioso. So they brought that with him. And then you had this one guy, Russell who probably had the oomph, the wherewithal to then rise on, go into that system, rise onto the top. He was really, was born and bred into that system. Yeah, you could say that. He by, people get confused. They assume based on some facts that he was [00:12:00] raised in Buffalo and came up under Macino. Yeah. And I don’t think that’s the case. There’s plenty of evidence within the family and traditions within the family that say, Russell was a very well known quantity in the city of Pitton at the store next door where everybody sat outside drinking soda on a hot summer day, and all the children would fight to entertain the old men. Russell was there along with Kalo Jro, who was a very day-to-day presence in the family, but. There was a strong relationship between Pitton, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York, based on, at the time the Lehigh Valley Railroad. That was the northern terminus of that railroad. So it was an easy trip and there were a lot of labor jobs up there as well with the hydroelectric plant. So people from Buffalo and people from Pitton, a lot of famili familial relationships between them. And at the same time, in 1920, they could see prohibition coming. And Russell was a [00:13:00] mechanic. Where NASCAR comes from? NASCAR is mechanics souping up cars, so they get away from Yeah. The police from the the revenues. Yeah. So I’m almost certain that’s Russell’s first reason for being in Buffalo, working for a guy named John Montana. And John Montana would later testify before the rackets committee. In 1997. So Russell worked for him. It was probably, and again, Mandino’s specialty was importing Canadian whiskey. Yeah, and then there was typical bootlegging they were doing, down here as well as up there. So Russell was probably taking the good stuff down from New York to Pitton area on a regular basis. Pitton is like between Scranton and Wilkes Bar. It’s like a six hour car drive. To Buffalo, and that was his first job. And then he’s back, and so for all of his [00:14:00] life, he was bi-coastal, right? We think of him as in his later years being in New York City, and then two or three days out of the week being in his Kingston home, which is again just down the street here. But he was that way all of his life. He did that between Buffalo and Pittston, and there was a lot of interchange between them by 1922 he’s on the record. He had a car accident on the, on a bridge locally that sent him up for a while. So by 1922, you could more or less consider him again a Pitton property. And he ends up marrying in 1928 into the family through the Chandras. But he was always, a skinny guy. He was, he didn’t really, fit the mold of a classic mobster. He didn’t. He grew up in it. He didn’t show signs of being a real gun toter himself. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. He [00:15:00] probably had a lot of organizational abilities in a certain amount of charisma that would get people to do what he wanted. His specialty was diamonds and jewelry, and so that, that was a specialty. And his other specialty was cars. And again, that continued to be important right through the end of prohibition 1933 December. And. At that key juncture. So kalo, his grant, his uncle was in a tree partite relationship with two other men that formed the real coal country power. They were all coal contractors and gangsters in their own right? Okay. And bootleggers. So they were all in this cahoots relationship, and Russell was in their sphere. Through klo a lot of real heavy mob style violence locally in the 1920s [00:16:00] that was related both to union problems in the coal mines, but also the bootlegging, right? So people were stealing each other’s shipments that needed to be dealt with. Coal miners were going out on Wildcat Strike. There were assassinations related to that big doings in the twenties that probably ended by the middle thirties. The heart of the depression things were so bad for the coal miners, they just assumed worked for substandard wages as go out on strike ’cause they really couldn’t afford to do it. Yeah. But things calmed down pretty much by then, and by that time things were heating up for the three men that they went on background and gave control over to John Chandra. Now, John Chandra is a co contractor in his own right and he’s running the show for Karo and Vbi and Latour, and it’s [00:17:00] under Chandra that Russell really is in a mentorship relationship with Chandra and Chandra, it seems to really have gentled him somewhat. Because the first three men were, they were just killers. They would just, they would take you out rather than deal with you. And Chandra inherited a new generation in the thirties. And his career lasted until 1949. And Russell by then was just the natural to take over. Now from Infancy Forward, he had been in the company of the most dangerous man in the coal fields. People who knew New York gangsters for certain, and was in their company as well. So he knew how to get along and he knew how to be quiet, and he became trusted. That’s probably the thing he was most relied on for. Yeah. Interesting. He was quiet and trusted. That’s, [00:18:00] that is really interesting. People say, and I don’t know how true this is, but they say that, when people have a vacancy and they’re organizational structure, they plug Russell in. And he was not the kind of guy who was gonna try and muscle in your territory. He was just going to keep the balls in the air for you. Yeah. Until the next guy came back and then just hand ’em right back over. He wasn’t a threat. He did seem to be like the utility man of the northeast mobs. He sure was. And when app leaking happened. So I was born in 1957. I was born on the anniversary of his father’s death in the coal mine. Huh? Right away. That’s an Oman. Bad things are coming. Russell and two months later, apple Aiken. Yeah. He was real busy in the late 1950s, early 1960s. He was facing deportation for a very long time, and that’s where. [00:19:00] Bill got a little bit more involved with him because Bill was, an attorney in the family and he was writing letters and doing motions and whatever to keep Russell, you knows, court proceedings to, going on for a long time. Bill eventually wrote a letter to the authorities in Italy that basically said, Hey, don’t take it personally that Russell volunteered to be in the army in 1940. He wasn’t really, trying to get back at you. He was just trying to support his new native country. And and of course there were other people who will tell you there was a suitcase with a million dollars in it that accompanied that letter. Yeah. But Hitler refused to receive Russell. But Russell was apparently ready to get on the plane. Before that refusal came down. Yeah. There’s a whole slew of those cases. I just did a research on that. All the different guys that they tried to deport during those years and the, and their lawyers and [00:20:00] the how they just kept staving it off and staving it off until many times the government just gave up. ’cause it was just like, okay, you have to wonder if they were really serious about it. I think they were just messing with them, but, yeah. But, bills, bill’s teamster career. Where to begin? So Bill and my father both were born in 1918 and a third relative, Jimmy, they were all born in 1918 and they all graduated high school together. Bill was at the University of Scranton for a while before it was called that he was majoring in Divinity and his brother Charles, who was already married into. The greater family suggested you need to be, you need to be a lawyer. We’re going to, we’re gonna get you into law school. And so Bill claimed he had, through his undergraduate, just monitored law classes and approached the dean to say, I’d like to be, I’d like to graduate with a pre-law degree. And [00:21:00] the dean said, sure, why? Sure, why not? And so then Bill went off to, farley Dickinson Law School. Left there just in time to join World War ii, and now he’s assigned in the Detroit area, so it was World War II that brought him to Ellis Air Force Base. Ah, I think it’s just south of Detroit. I’m not sure exactly where it is, but it’s not far. And in that time, I know you know the name Angela Melley. He is a member of the Detroit Partnership. He’s considered the conser of that organization. He has a brother, and the brother has a son who wants to get into business. The brother, I forget his name, comes to Pitton, meets with the Buffalo family. He is from, I think, San Cataldo. Which is a neighboring community in Sicily and they say, look we wanna be in business together. So Bill [00:22:00] now is given the name of Mel’s brother and suggested to contact him, which he does. He says just it was randomly, looking for a deserter in Detroit and it occurred to me to call the brother. So he calls the brother, ends up getting invited to the house. Invited to dinner the next day, proposes to the daughter within three days, and now they’re in the family way. And Bill and Vincent Melly become corners of Belvin Distributing Corporation, I think was the name of it. They were world of to jukebox people. This is where he meets hfa. They’re in the world to jukebox business. Jimmy James, the head of the local 8 95 of the Teamsters, which was called the Jukebox Local ’cause it was a coin and operated local. Starts picketing them. And now Bill and Hoffa are in a lawyerly [00:23:00] way because Jimmy James asked Toya Hoffa into the picture. And Bill presses Hoffa makes him the business agent for the local. Very shortly thereafter, deposes Jimmy James makes Bill the president, and later he is formally elected to the role and now he’s a union president a local president for the next 20 years. And a close associate of Hoffa during the 1960s. So seeing as how I came around so late, I was there to see this. Teamster action because Bill was frequently in Pittston, especially after Hoffa went to Lewisburg Prison, which is 90 minutes down the road. Bill’s sister Mary is my next door neighbor. She’s retired and he comes to visit whenever he goes to C Hoffa, which is every week according to him. To get instructions to bring back to [00:24:00] Fitz. He’s in Pittston. Moreover, he launches a law office in the city of Pittston downstairs on the other side of the house. His father’s old general store because he needs to, he’s not a trial lawyer in Detroit and he wants to join the Detroit bar. And he has to fulfill a. The requirements of a by motion thing to be admitted. Other than that, he’s gotta take the test. He doesn’t want to do that. So he just comes, does a couple probates, this and that for three years and now you’re in. So he does that. So he’s by the time I’m 10, I’m pretty well acquainted with Bill. And Bill is, my father. They’re the close friends. They’re always talking in Mary’s kitchen. I’m sitting there listening, Bill’s running a rator, and they’re laughing about how they sent Bobby Kennedy a parachute because he he said, if I can’t put Hoffa in prison, I’ll jump off the Capitol dome [00:25:00] that I’m a parachute. And he writes about that. RFK writes about that. So it, it was very interesting having him around. Yeah. And he had a brother that would often come with him. To bodyguard him to bodyguard Hoffa, he wore Hoffa’s money belt. His brother Angelo, they called him Yabo, very big guy. And and sometimes he would bring his son Billy boy. William Bino ii, who later had some fame of his own in the nineties. Defending white boy Rick in Detroit. Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot about that. Yeah. So I knew them all and I knew them all in a family way and I was not quite aware that Bill and Hoffa had a falling out. ’cause then I guess that wasn’t fitting information for a 10-year-old. Yeah. But yeah that’s how I know all of them. And so my real connect to the family is through Bill, his sister Mary. His brother [00:26:00] Yabo. When when Bill retired in 1982 for health reasons, his brother Angelo Yabo returned to Pitton and was my neighbor for the next 10, 12 years. And he was my last connection to the 1920s. And he would tell me things that I had no real frame of reference to understand, about. Running whiskey and whatnot. He didn’t share a lot of stories about that, but every now and then something would escape. And he was just the kind of guy you could tell he’d done a lot of things and I didn’t find out until his funeral. At his funeral an individual came up to me who had traveled to the area from Detroit, probably with William ii. He just for some reason he squared up with me, put his hand out and said Yabo was like a father to me, and then just told me everything. I never wanted to know about what Yabo had done in Detroit. Working for Angelo Melly, [00:27:00] running a bar for him. Being a bartender, occasionally helping people find their checkbook, that kind of thing. So he was obviously a very colorful guy. He was obviously very well respected by the Detroit people. At the same time he wasn’t gonna kill anybody. That was not what he did. But the FBI followed him to Angelo Millie’s farm one day. They had an informant in his car, basically. And it became clear, I finally learned why he and his sister Mary, and other members of his family would go to Florida every year and spend about a month in Florida. They were at Angela Mel’s. Timeshare. Basically he availed Yabo, and this is, somebody at the very top level of the organization down there. So he was not respected. I have to ask about this as Hoffa and Russell Bino and Bill. As the Teamsters Hoffa starts having problems [00:28:00] with Kennedy and there’s this back and forth there. Then was, there, was there, there’s a lot of talk about that that Kennedy and, he, that he got so personal with Hoffa, which he did, there’s some talk about, maybe they had something to do with the murder of JFK Mo. Mainly it falls to, marcelo down in Detroit, I mean down in new Orleans, but yeah. But still, Bino was right in there among that crew. Was there ever much talk about that even after it happened? Yes. There’s a lot of talk about it. When Bill Buf, so I’m trying to Dan Mul Day. Dan Mul Day is a researcher who had worked for many years on the Hoffa disappearance. And he spent a lot of time talking to Bill Bino about that. And when he quizzed Bill about, who, who did this right? Bill answered have the CIA investigate the FBI and then have the [00:29:00] FBI investigate the CIA and then you’ll have the answer. That’s exactly what he said. Interesting. And what he was saying was, yeah, the Bay of Pigs thing, the whole. Pal Kill Castro was something that was known by a lot of people that went missing in 1975, or no. Ended up murdered Johnny Roseli. Yeah. Gian and Gian Kana, I think was 1975 too. Hoffa was really the third person to go missing in 1975 that had information to contribute about that Uhhuh. Interesting. Or at least was believed to. And when you read Bill Alia’s book, he says Russell also knew something about that. So Russell was becoming edgy. That Bill would say something, or rather, no, Hoffa would say something too much about that because Hoffa was, pretty much a loose cannon by that time In terms of speaking.[00:30:00] I interviewed that guy with that Billy Leya book. Did you know him? He was Billy, yeah. Do you know him very well? I did not know Billy, my brother knew Billy when they were both young. Okay. My brother Nick, see Nick’s 12 years older than me and I think so is Billy. Yeah. Alright. I did not, I’ve been in his company once or twice, but he wouldn’t know me. Okay. I was just in curious about that. He seemed like he was a guy that was like, he was always around the binos and during those ta those years, he was like always somewhere around in and around that. It’s a real interesting, contrast between Pittsburgh and Detroit, the Coalfields a more rural area, and then the big city and the auto factories and the teamsters and how these immigrant Sicilians moved into that and moved in on up that, the immigrant way, you get here man, and you start getting better jobs. You get better jobs, you take care of your relatives and you bring them in. And so it’s just, it’s really an interesting complex there. I [00:31:00] forget who I was talking to. I said some of the history’s not good, right? It’s not, it doesn’t, yeah. It’s not real neat. And I said, feel bad sometimes for some of the people. And and the party I was talking to said they would swam here if they could have. When I was right, I was expressing concern about the Padron system and how it was sometimes exploitive. I think Salvatore was pretty fair as Padron went. He wasn’t a gouger, but there was a lot of gouging in that system, and it was effectively dead by 1930. Curiously, by 1930, that’s when the family split apart. That’s when Kelo said, okay. This is not a revenue stream for me anymore. Time to break with the other binos and move on. But the thing about the the Sicilians and the coal mines, they started as really, they started as what’s the word, scabs, right? Yeah. So there was a lot of union trouble in 1902. You got Welsh minors from. [00:32:00] Ireland everywhere. It was all here. It was like Brooklyn and now we’re coming in to fill this void of 30,000 workers. There’s trouble, a lot of trouble. And the people who are the replacement miners, these Sicilians, they already owe a tithe to their pad. Drones. Yeah. They’ve gotta go down they’re in this heated place. Now once you get in and eventually it’s 10 or 12 or 15 more years before unions really started to sign contracts with these particular mines in the northern coal field that were run by 1913, by at least three and probably four black handers ran the contracts, right? So the mafia is to all intents and purpose the mine owner. And they’ve got all of these dependent [00:33:00] people who are, their their agents through the Padron system who are members of the union, and eventually they run for elective positions within the union. And now what you end up with is the company is the union. And it happened at least once, that an insurgent branch of the United Mine workers went in opposition against its own district leadership. The district leadership’s bodyguard was one of those individuals who was at the same time a union organizer. A partner with one of the black candidates. So it didn’t work out well. There was a murder involved. Things went badly. It happened ultimately. It’s interesting that, and now you it started out, as union busters, as scabs, right? And [00:34:00] they move in and take over the unions, and then the teamsters come along as the coal kinda goes down and the truck driving is going up, up and up. And then they just. Move smoothly right into the teamsters Union. Yeah. Where there’s political power and money. That was the seat of political power and a lot of money and the political power the power of the purse, the power of the pension fund and the los, and of course clear out to Las Vegas. And Russell Vino was right in the middle of all that with the guys from Detroit and Chicago. It was just, it just is a natural progress of of activity. Exactly. And where was it? Just a couple of years ago. Was it in Florida? The Longshoreman’s Union threatened to go out. Yeah, I remember something like that. What did DeSantis do? He DeSantis mo mobilized the National Guard. Yeah. So that never happened here, but if you think about it so Bill Buffalino at one time the FBI was advised that. Bill was being groomed [00:35:00] to take over the Teamsters. Not by force. Something, God forbid if Hoffa should end up in prison. Yeah. So that was happening. But I think it was thwarted because Hoffa had a little there was a a situation in his ranks where he, somebody was trying to. Openly deposed him. And it didn’t work out. And he probably did a reorg of his own and that’s when he decided to run fifth for 1965 for the, as his vice president. So that, so he was trying to head off all, he probably could see it coming. Yeah. And it was in those years that he began to lose a little bit of trust in Bill. And that was the source of their breakup eventually because he got hot with Bill in prison. But think about it. So Bill then, as the president of the Teamsters, imagine the power they had at that time to effectively shut down the country. Oh [00:36:00] man. Yeah, it was huge power. It was huge. And what’s interesting is Hoffa, then he starts bringing what we affectionately refer to here in Kansas City as Pecker Woods. He brings in Roy Williams down in Kansas City. He brings in Jackie Presser up in cleveland and Fitz Fitz Simmons. These are all peckerwoods, these are not Italians. Now Italian, some of ’em are behind the string, behind the scenes, pulling some strings. Of course. Yeah, but they’ve got all those guys out front. It’s just it is fascinating to me how these guys have worked. Yeah. Very insidious. And the thing about unionism somebody will tell you that, union membership is down, or union participation is way down from the 1960s. Yeah. There was a union for everything. Yeah. In the fifties and sixties, bill to, and probably it was to boost his resume. I don’t know. The car washers in the Detroit area. There were 200 car washes and they employed up to [00:37:00] 40 to 50 people each. Just doing this job. It was, to organize them. The the tactic was I’m not gonna go after the WR and file and get them to vote on anything. I’m going straight to the owner. He is gonna pay me to their membership fees and he’s gonna pay their dues. That’s how it’s gonna be. And that’s what they did. There were certain, car washers that were not assaulted in this way, and others who were, and they were pretty upset about it. And they took it to the law and there was a grand jury hearing that Bill was invited to attend. But according to Dan Mul day, the judge in the hearing was in their pocket. And yeah, nothing ever came of it. That was mentioned also before Keith f so a bill was on the hot seat for that and the Zer, the er the Zer company to sell their machines entered into an agreement whereby their service people [00:38:00] would be unionized. And therefore, if you went to a bar, now you’re a union agent for local 9 8 9 85. Of the teamsters. You go into a bar and you look at the jukebox and it’s not a er. Yeah. Now we’ve got a big problem. Now there’s a picket outside. I guarantee you the picket was Yaba, Bino Bell’s brother. Gotta be big guy with a mortar board walking back and forth. Unfair, this is a scab shop and now what’s gonna happen? No union truck driver is gonna deliver beer to that bar. Crazy. Yeah. And so that’s right. So that’s how they worked that one out. So that was the extent of Bill’s organizing skills. Interesting. So let’s skip forward here a little bit and we don’t want to give it all away, but we’re talking about the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. So how do you go into that? Just, and we want guys to, you gotta get this book guys. It’s the revelations of a mafia family, the temperatures, [00:39:00] and the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. The key words here is the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. As you might know, Charles, that’s the hook here and Dan Maldia and you probably have a problem, I gotta say. ’cause he’s pretty sure he knows the final resting place. I know he, he, that’s what he, but there’s another guy who also thinks he knows the final resting place as well as me, but he doesn’t know as far as I go. So his theory expands on the central sanitation. Whereby HAA is brought to central sanitation and cremated incinerated, to me that means ashes. And what do you do with ashes post cremation? You can throw ’em to the wind or you can do something extremely appropriate and almost poetic with them. And then move them to a town that is your native [00:40:00] home. That’s what I’m saying. Now, that’s where you come in. Okay. But now, in order to, in order for that to be true I’m willing for that not to be true. In order for that to be true, central sanitation has to be in the mix. And a fellow by the name of, oh my gosh, I’ll never forget his name. Bernstein. Scott Bernstein is a Detroit reporter. I know Scott. Alright, so last year they had this symposium in which he and Novi Toko and a former prosecutor Yeah. All submitted. Did you see that? I didnt see it, but I remember when it happened. I didn’t even know that was happening and I was wrapping up the book at that time, submitting the second to last draft when I became aware of their theory. And their theory solves a problem that I had, which is, skeletal remains. Yeah. And I’m not gonna, I’m not going to break [00:41:00] their I’m not gonna give away their findings, but. The problem with an incinerator is it’s not a crematory and it falls 800 degrees short of being able to render, and even, bones have to be crushed afterwards. Anyway. Yeah, there’s still bones left some their theory pretty much takes care of that, that the bone thing. On top of that, someone else wrote a book Mr. Tubman wrote a book in 2024 that said his parents were, driving in a Detroit suburb on the day Jimmy Hoffa went missing and saw someone being wrestled into a central sanitation truck. And the father noted that truck was not supposed to be there on, on that day. And of course, the property was one of the properties that were suspected of being the place where Hoffman went missing. Again, and that’s not definitive. If there were ashes involved, I think that I have a [00:42:00] first person memoir of the person that did something with the ashes. All right guys. And that’s gonna be in Revelations of a Mafia Family, the Teamsters in the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa, correct Charles? That’s what it is. And it’s gonna be released on what is it? April? 28th. 28th. 28th. All right. Charles Buffalino I really appreciate you coming on and talking about your book. And guys, you gotta get this book. I’m telling you, it’s I’ve got a advanced copy of it and it’s pretty interesting. It’s readable and it is. Got a lot of great history into it, as you can tell. If you ever wanted to know the immigrant story of Sicilians, this is it, that the, there were huge miners and because they were minors in Sicily, so we had mining activities. I didn’t know about the whole strike breaking thing. That’s interesting. I knew they came down, like here in Missouri, southwest part of Missouri, we have coal mines and a huge group of Sicilians came down here. [00:43:00] And because I was wondering why. Joy IPA outta Chicago was going dove hunting down in Pittsburgh, Kansas. I went down there just to, to look around in this little town, front, neck. All the stores are, have Italian names and so I, there’s a little museum down there. So I stopped in. I said, what’s the deal? And she said, oh. She said, tons of people came over from Southern Italy and Sicily. To work in the coal mines around here, and it’s a big coal mining area. I said, oh, that’s it. That’s it. That is it. That was a safe territory for these Chicago mobsters and Kansas City mobsters to go hunting down there. Okay, so the coal mining is the mining much to know is a big part of the history of the mafia in a way. For sure. And there’s a place in so I thought Pitton had a lot of at, and it does, has a lot of Sicilian, maybe 24% as of the last census. Yeah. Was recently invited. Last year I went to [00:44:00] Clarksburg, Virginia. 40% Italian to this day. Ah, yeah. And they were all minors. And you go there and there’s no there’s no southern speech pattern. It’s all. Ah they’re Pittsburgh. And I said, why? What’s that all about? Oh, he said, no. We are a, we’re a suburb of Pittsburgh. We’re two hours away. Yeah. But the stuff we were producing went right to the mills. Yeah. And so that was the language that we spoke. Oh, we darned. And there were so many of them that they spoke their own language. They didn’t try to blend in with the right Scott, people that had been there from the country and from the hills down in there for a while. I’ll be darned huh. That’s interesting. That is that. And Clarksburg, I’ll tell you that place in the 1950s and sixties, or I’m sorry, in the seventies when the dress factories fell apart, they were burning pittston down. So Piston’s, a lot of old missing buildings. Yeah. But Clarksburg is just like visiting old Pittston. Huh, interesting. [00:45:00] Pitton, Pennsylvania the the seat of power for Russell Bino back in the day, Northwest. I always, you always hear about Northwest Pennsylvania and up into New York was his territory. And again, he was such an interesting guy because like you said, he was like utility man. He was going around to different families or, they, you don’t, they don’t ever talk about this big seat of power that he had in his underboss and his. His capos and that right there in that one geographic area. So it’s really interesting. Different anthracite coal was such a product. So there’s batum is coals everywhere else, but there’s only five counties in the United States that has 80% of anthracite coal. And anthracite coal was the fuel of choice for the industrial revolution. So there was a lot of money here. And so people really can’t understand, just how much wealth there was here. And how a place this small could be somebody’s seat of power, as you say. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. All [00:46:00] right, charles Buffalino I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. All right, we’re done here. I’ll redo that When I stumbled over your name again and got a couple other things to redo, but otherwise it’s it gotta be an easy edit. That’s the guy I like when the guy really knows his stuff and he goes right on through it makes my job easier and I will wait and put this out just about the time. I gotta make a note right now. Anytime from the 15th forward is fine. I’m sure, we didn’t, I didn’t reveal anything so sensitive that. Anybody can steal. I’ll be maybe mu Monday the 20th. I got a feeling here either. That’s perfect. 13th? 13th or the 20th? Probably the 20th. I got it written down on the 20th. Okay. That’s awesome. All right, Gary, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right. All right. You made it very easy. Oh good. Oh, and have you have you been in touch with Scott? You gotta go on Scott Show. I did mention to him, Scott, I’m gonna send you a book when it’s time. I, I didn’t wanna reveal everything again. Yeah. I’m just being real careful [00:47:00] for all these months. But yeah, I have, oh yeah, I’m in. But yeah, get on his show. He has, I think he has bigger fo I know he has a bigger follow than me. He kinda really gets into the, what’s going on today, which I never do. And he does, I don’t know, I, here in Kansas City, they get bad. I, and I get word back from ’em that they’re bad at me if I mention their names or there’s any mafia today, so I just seem to not mess with that anymore. Yeah, i’m the same way, I’m not even a fan of this stuff. This is not my thing. Yeah. If it’s the whole, like if Hoffa is here in Pitton I really feel, and my family’s involved in it. It’s like a moral obligation. I’ve got a interesting, yeah, I can see why. That’s the only reason I, that’s the only reason I even bother to research. Yeah. I just started doing some research on a true crime that’s not mafia and it’s kinda it’s like a breath of fresh air. I think I’m getting a little bit burned out in the mafia thing. I like the [00:48:00] stories. I like the capers and stuff that people do. I really love that. And so that’s there are some. Interesting people in this. Yeah. And I’ve known a bunch of them myself. My story’s not interesting, but I, yeah. When I was in college, I worked at a pizza shop. The guy was a bookie. Yeah. And every Friday night we’d be with Butchy, scotchy, Ragy Fingers, and the Greenie, and we’d go to the Skyliner Diner after the track, and it would just be, I’ve been at more dice games. Yeah. They used to rope my head for luck. I was 17. They’re so colorful too. And another thing I’ve learned is, hey. These mob guys, they have so many connections throughout the community Yeah. That most people, they don’t have. When I was a policeman, I didn’t have any idea how many connections I, in hindsight, I realized that how naive we all were, how many connections they really had out in the community, and how those worked and how they I don’t know. So many people found it colorful or they liked buying something that fell off a truck and then. And they like to [00:49:00] gamble and they’re just throughout the entire community and we didn’t know it ’cause I lived in this narrow little police world. It’s the adulation that people just adore this lifestyle. And I don’t know, I think maybe if people had less of a sense they were getting bent over by the government all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There’d be less of that. But everybody’s a secret agent in a way, yes. And I’m, everybody wants to be James Bond. And I’m naive enough to write a book about the Mafia and, but everybody I know, they all know better than me. And I tell some of my classmates, yeah, I wrote a book and they’re like, because they know there’s a whole network up. Yep. All Charles, it was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Great meeting with you. Take care. Bye bye. Bye-bye.

"If you show me a company that succeeded with every experiment, I'll show you a company that's very poor at picking their experiments." — Jason GoldbergIn this episode, Jason "Retail Geek" Goldberg — Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Group and co-host of the top-ranked Jason & Scott Show — makes the case that most companies are asking the wrong question about AI. A 30-year commerce pioneer who launched Blockbuster's first e-commerce site in 1995 and has since driven billions in online revenue across hundreds of clients, Jason brings rare long-view perspective to the agentic commerce moment. We dig into why Walmart went from banning AI to hitting a trillion-dollar market cap, why fast followers beat first movers, and what the one question Doug McMillan asked in every meeting has to do with all of it.What You'll Discover:[02:16] Is Agentic Commerce Real — Or the Next Blockchain?→ Jason's framework for separating genuine disruption from hype, and why he thinks agentic is one of only five true disruptions in 6,000 years of commerce[08:27] The Walmart Story: From "AI Is Illegal Here" to $1 Trillion→ What a single question from Doug McMillan — asked in every meeting — unlocked inside the world's largest retailer, and what it reveals about the job of a CEO in volatile times[14:16] Efficiencies vs. New Behaviors: The AI Trap Most Companies Fall Into→ Why optimizing what you already do will save you money this year and cost you everything in five — and the consumer behaviors that will disintermediate your shelf entirely[19:06] The Gartner Hype Cycle as a Leadership Tool→ How to use the trough of disillusionment to your advantage, and why being unrealistically optimistic about the future is just as dangerous as ignoring it[23:11] The ROI Trap: Why You'll Always Choose the Oak Tree Over the Acorn→ The structural reason most companies starve their best future bets — and what exceptional organizations do differently[25:15] Why Ivory Tower Innovation Almost Always Fails→ The REI green vest story: what happens when the scientists solve the wrong problem, and where the real innovation instinct actually lives in your organization[32:43] The Fast Follower Advantage — and the Regret Question→ Why you haven't missed the agentic window, what AltaVista vs. Google tells us about timing, and the one question to ask yourself before leaving any strategy meetingKey Takeaways:Being first rarely wins. Being prepared to move fast when the signal is clear almost always does.The CEO's real job in disruption isn't picking products — it's being the chief change agent for 1.6 million people who learned from their predecessors.The ROI framework will always favor your existing business over your future one. Exceptional companies build a different budget category for experiments — and expect most to fail.About Jason Goldberg:Jason "Retail Geek" Goldberg is the Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Group, where he advises the world's largest retailers and brands on digital transformation. He co-hosts the top-ranked Jason & Scott Show podcast and has been named a leading global retail influencer by Rethink Retail for six consecutive years.

In this episode of The Scott Show, Scott sits down with Henry Yoshida, founder of Rocket Dollar and now head of Retired.com, to talk about the massive wave of innovation coming to the $18 trillion retirement market. From launching Rocket Dollar to help everyday investors use their IRAs to invest in real estate, startups, and crypto — to now running Retired.com with a vision for a fully self-directed retirement future — Henry breaks down how we're on the verge of a generational unlock in private market access. Scott and Henry dive deep into the rise of private equity for retail investors, the shrinking public markets, and why the 401(k)-only model is bleeding out. Bonus: Scott unpacks the implications of Robinhood's tokenized stock announcement and Republic's tokenized forward contract product “Mirrors”, and debate whether tokenization is a feature or the product. What You'll Learn: - Why your IRA is the smartest way to invest in alternatives - How Rocket Dollar lets you deploy dormant dollars into private equity, real estate, and crypto - What Robinhood's tokenized stock move really means - Why Republic's “Mirror” might be the most innovative product in fintech right now - The real future of tokenization: stablecoin rails, 24/7 trading, and AI-powered portfolios. Support the show by creating a free account at Kingscrowd.com Follow Henry at Retired.com Follow Scott on IG/Twitter @Kitun

In this episode of The Scott Show, Scott sits down with Acquire.com founder and CEO Andrew Gazdecki to explore the fast-growing world of micro acquisitions. From his early Twitter rise to landing the premium domain Acquire.com, Andrew shares how he built a breakout marketplace where anyone—from side hustlers to solopreneurs—can buy or sell profitable businesses with ease. Scott and Andrew dive into the future of entrepreneurship in a post-AI economy, where owning digital assets like newsletters, SaaS products, or niche content brands may be the new path to self-employment. They break down how Acquire.com works, why niche is the new scale, and how the platform unlocks liquidity for founders who might otherwise have no path to exit. Plus, Andrew shares his brand-building playbook: bootstrapped growth, the art of founder-led marketing, and how a he bought an entire category for $200K. What You'll Learn: - Why micro acquisitions are the future of entrepreneurship - How Acquire.com is changing the game for bootstrapped founders - The power of premium domains and founder-led branding - Why the “dream” phase of a startup often beats early revenue - What solopreneurs should build, buy, or sell in a post-AI world Support the show by creating a free account at Kingscrowd.com. Follow Andrew on Twitter @agazdecki Follow Scott on IG/Twitter @Kitun

Welcome to the Scott Show, where Scott talks and Jeremy gets us off topic.Fasting Pod:⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/church-of-the-city-new-york/id1245313998?i=1000699503056⁠Crokinole:⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynQQssjxpxQ⁠

In the inaugural episode of The Scott Show, host Scott Kitun welcomes his good friend and Founder of Republic, Kendrick Nguyen, to break some BIG news and to discuss the game-changing shift towards retail happening across private markets. Key Takeaways: → Republic's Major Announcement – A new partnership with Hamilton Lane, bringing institutional-grade private equity to retail investors via blockchain tokenization. → The Power of Private Equity – Unlike volatile public markets, private equity has outperformed 19 of the last 20 years. Retail investors now have access to previously exclusive assets. → Why Tokenization Matters – It enables greater accessibility, easier tracking, and future liquidity, potentially allowing private investments to trade more like public stocks. → Republic's Vision – To become the go-to platform for investing in private assets that power the world—whether infrastructure, AI, sports ownership, or alternative funds. → Scott and Kendrick dive into how the financial landscape is evolving, why retail investors have been historically locked out of high-performing assets, and what the future holds for tokenized investments and online private markets.

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Chicago Bears wide receiver Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Chicago Bears win versus the Green Bay Packers, the Bears' future, plans for the offseason and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Chicago Bears wide receiver Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Matt Eberflus firing, the Bears upcoming matchup versus the the Lions and more. Later in the show, Michael of Windy City Sports Cards joins Adam and Tyler for Sick Sports Cards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a textOn this short comedy set, comic/musician Barbara Scott shares some funny music and material I am sure you will enjoy. She was only in standup comedy for a short time; but as you can hear, she did have a funny way of seeing things.Support the showHosted by: R. Scott EdwardsPlease Write a Review: in-depth walk through for leaving a review.On Your Apple & Android Phones, Visit New APP: Standup Comedy Podcast Network and website .comInterested in Standup Comedy? Check out my books on Amazon..."20 Questions Answered about Being a Standup Comic""Be a Standup Comic...or just look like one"

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Chicago Bears wide receiver Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Chicago Bears loss to the Green Bay Packers, the final drive despite missed field goal, upcoming game versus Vikings and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Chicago Bears wide receiver Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears firing Shane Waldron, what Thomas Brown brings to the offense, the rumors that the Bears veterans want Caleb Williams benched and more! Later in the show, Michael of Windy City Sports Cards joins Adam and Tyler for Sick Sports Cards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Chicago Bears loss to the Arizona Cardinals, why DJ Moore walked off the field mid-play, the Khalil Herbert trade and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Chicago Bears loss to the Washington Commanders, Tyrique Stevenson, Matt Eberflus' preparation and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Chicago Bears upcoming matchup versus the Washington Commanders, preparing for Jayden Daniels despite injury talk, if Bears players discuss NFL trades in the locker room and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Chicago Bears wide receiver Rome Odunze joins Tyler Scott and Adam Rank live from London to discuss the Bears upcoming matchup versus the Jaguars, Caleb Williams, Bears wide receiver room and more! Later in the show, Windy City Sports Cards joins Rome, Tyler and Adam for a live card break. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears' win versus the the Rams, Caleb Williams' celebration, the upcoming matchup versus the Panthers and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the team morale after the Bears loss to the Colts, Rome Odunze's first touchdown, the Bears upcoming matchup versus the Rams and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears offensive growing pains, the loss to the Texans, the upcoming matchup versus the Colts and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears win versus the Titans, the unity within this team, Caleb Williams' season debut, the upcoming matchup versus the Texans and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the optimism heading into the season, Caleb Williams adjusting to the NFL, the Bears upcoming game versus the Titans and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EP319 - Amazon Q1 2024 Recap http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Episode Summary: In this episode, Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg and Scot Wingo dive deep into Amazon's first quarter results for 2024, analyzing the company's performance in various segments such as retail, offline and online sales, marketplace, AWS, and advertising. They also explore the impact of AI on Amazon's business and provide insights into the company's future guidance for Q2 2024. Amazon Q1 2024 Earnings Release Amazon Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript In our latest episode, Jason and Scott cover a range of topics, starting with their reflections on recent events such as May the 4th and Cinco de Mayo. Jason shares intriguing stories from his extensive travels and interactions with listeners worldwide. Scott delves into the intersection of e-commerce and the auto industry, honing in on Carvana. The duo also delves into the U.S. Department of Commerce retail indicators data, shedding light on trends in retail sales and e-commerce growth. The conversation pivots towards Amazon's recent earnings report, contextualizing it within the realm of AI investments by tech giants like Meta and Alphabet, offering valuable industry insights and analysis. The discussion continues with a focus on Amazon's earnings report, zooming in on concerns around AWS amid heightened competition from Alphabet and Azure. The rising trend of AI investments, particularly in data training applications, is explored, alongside the growing popularity of open source AI models due to cost and privacy considerations. Despite a conservative Q2 guidance, Amazon impresses with robust revenue that surpasses Wall Street expectations, particularly in operating income. The retail segment shows exceptional growth, exceeding operating income estimates for both domestic and international divisions. Notably, Amazon's performance in brick-and-mortar stores, spearheaded by Whole Foods, demonstrates resilience with a 6.3% growth rate. AWS stands out with a 17% growth, dispelling market share concerns and showcasing accelerated revenue growth, illustrating Amazon's continuous growth potential and innovation prowess. Scott delves deeper into Amazon's positive quarterly earnings report, emphasizing the remarkable revenue performance, especially in operating income. Insights are shared on Amazon's successful agnostic approach to LLM models and the potential advancements in generative AI. The conversation shifts towards the burgeoning ads business at Amazon, underlining its profitability and future growth prospects. Scot also outlines Amazon's Q2 guidance and the potential impacts of consumer spending patterns on the retail sector, including concerns about changing consumer behaviors and economic pressures shaping market dynamics. Jason complements the discussion with additional perspectives on consumer behavior and economic influences reshaping the market landscape. Furthermore, we embark on a detailed exploration of supply chain logistics, with a spotlight on Amazon's expansion into third-party logistics services, revolutionizing traditional retail strategies by sharing proprietary capabilities for wider adoption. Insights from Andy Jassy shed light on Amazon's logistics business approach. The conversation expands to include how companies like Spiffy are embracing a similar model of sharing proprietary products to drive innovation and revenue growth, showcasing an evolving landscape of retail innovation. The podcast unpacks the complex world of grocery retail, highlighting Amazon's experimental forays like Just Walk Out technology and the Amazon Dash cart, while examining the challenges in delineating Amazon's grocery sector strategy. A comparison is drawn between Amazon's strategies and those of rivals like Walmart and Target, who are adapting their product offerings to match evolving consumer preferences, offering a comprehensive view of the dynamic retail and supply chain management sphere. Dive into our engaging discussion, explore retail dynamics, and keep a lookout for more insightful content. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 319 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, May 5th, 2024. Chapters 0:23 The Jason and Scott Show Begins 2:56 World Travel Adventures 5:53 Commerce Tools Elevate Show 6:53 Jason's World Tour Plans 7:22 Where in the World is Retail Geek? 20:43 Amazon's First Quarter Earnings 23:23 Sandbagging Strategy 26:45 Amazon's Dominance in E-commerce 27:44 Online Segment Growth Analysis 28:53 Offline Store Segment Analysis 31:35 Spotlight on AWS Performance 34:32 Data at AWS 42:02 Gen AI Revenue Growth 46:24 Consumer Pressure 49:56 Supply Chain Evolution 53:46 Leveraging Technology 58:08 Disruption in E-commerce 1:01:54 Amazon's Grocery Strategy 1:05:01 Retail Industry News Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show. This is episode 319 being recorded on Sunday, May 5th, 2024. I'm your host, Jason Retail Guy Goldberg, and as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey, Jason, and welcome back, Jason and Scott Show listeners. It's been a while, but first, happy Cinco de Mayo, and also a belated May the 4th, Jason. Did you have a good Star Wars day? Jason: [0:49] I did. I did. I feel like Star Wars Day always makes me think of the podcast because I feel like we have spent many of them in my latter life together. Scot: [1:01] Yeah, absolutely. Any exciting new Star Wars experiences or merch? Jason: [1:08] No, I understand you got some vintage merch. merch. Scot: [1:13] It's not, but they, back when I was a kid, you would go and if you went every week to, I think it was Burger King, you would for the, I think it was Empire. I have the Empire right here. So definitely Empire, but you would get a glass. Now it turns out these were full of lead paint, which would kill you, but that was the downside. Jason: [1:32] Not recommended for drinking. Scot: [1:33] You got a very, yes, I never, being a collector, I never drank out of them. So that's good. Jason: [1:37] Saved your life right there. Scot: [1:38] Yes, but I did drink out of the Tweety Bird. So that me, me. I'm sure I got some yellow lead paint from a twitty bird glass. Anyway, so they came out with a Mandalorian kind of homage to those glasses and they were at the Hallmark store of all places, not where I usually hang out, but I got to go to a Hallmark store and the little ladies that worked there were, I wish them all an awesome May the 4th. And they looked at me like I was from another planet and it was hilarious. My wife's like, stop, they don't know what you're doing. Jason: [2:07] Wait, they didn't have a big May 4th section in the Hallmark store? Scot: [2:11] They did. The little ladies didn't know. Jason: [2:13] The overlap of people that still buy Papyrus cards and celebrate May 4th is probably not great. Scot: [2:21] It was very humbling. It was a humble May the 4th, but I got my glasses and I was happy. I'm happy for you. And then tonight we had tacos for dinner, so I'm hitting all the holidays. Jason: [2:30] I feel like we should have tacos for dinner every night, whether it's Cinco de Mayo or not, but I'm i am happy for that. Scot: [2:35] We do have a lot of tacos but this was a special single denial edition. Jason: [2:42] Well, very well done, my friend. Scot: [2:44] Thanks. Well, listeners of the pod have been all over me. They're like, why aren't you recording? And I said, it's not me. It's Jason. It's Jason. Because you have been traveling Scot: [2:55] the earth, spreading retail geek goodness. Tell us, we are way far behind on trip updates and all the different countries. It's like you're playing, do you have like a little travel bingo where you're just like punching, what is it, 93 countries? Jason: [3:09] I do. They call it a passport. Oh, nice. Yes. Scot: [3:13] That, uh, little book that you get to carry. Yeah. Jason: [3:15] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have been on a lot of trips and it sounds like you and I may be telling complimentary lies because I also, I've had an opportunity to meet a lot of listeners in the last, we'll call it seven weeks and which they're always super nice. And it's always super fun to talk to people. And obviously they're, you know, strangers recognize my voice in line at Starbucks at all these e-commerce shows. And then we strike up a conversation. And then the next question is always, where the heck is Scott? Because they're always disappointed to meet me and not you. And now the new thing is, and why aren't you producing more frequent shows? And my answer is always that you're dominating the world at Get Spiffy and that you're too busy. Scot: [4:00] Uh-huh. I see. Okay. Jason: [4:02] Well, we're both very busy. Scot: [4:05] You're traveling more than I am. I'm busy washing cars. Jason: [4:08] Yes. I think both are fairly true, but I did finish a grueling seven-week stint where I got to come home a couple of times on the weekends, but I basically had seven weeks of travel back to back. In my old life, that would not have been that atypical, but post-pandemic, The travel has been a little more moderate. And I have noticed that I have my travel muscles have atrophied and I don't really want to redevelop. Jason: [4:35] So the seven weeks was a lot. Please don't ask me for trip reports for all the commerce events because I kind of can't remember some of them. They're all a little bit of a blur. But I was at Shop Talks, I think, since the last time we talked, which is, of course, probably the biggest show in our industry. And that was a very good show. I did get to see a lot of our mutual friends and a lot of fans of the show there. So that was certainly fun. And maybe in another podcast, we can do a little recap of some of the interesting things that came out of Shop Talk. I did produce a couple of recaps in other formats for work clients, so we could certainly pull something together. I also went to a vendor show. One of the e-commerce platforms out there is called Commerce Tools, and they had their annual customer show, which is called Elevate in Miami. So I got a chance to go visit there. They're one of the commerce platforms that I would say is winning at the moment in the kind of pivot away from the old school monoliths to these new sort of SaaS-based solutions. And commerce tools in particular are kind of pioneers in pushing this actual certification around a more modern earned stack that they they coined mock. And I think I think we've had Kelly from from commerce tools on the on the podcast Jason: [5:51] in the past to talk about that. But that was a good show. I got to meet a lot of listeners there. And a funny one, several listeners were like. Jason: [5:59] I would apologize for the, the, our publishing schedule lately. And they're like, I'm cool with it. I like that. Like you don't do a show if there's not something worthwhile. And then, you know, when I do get a show, it's like a treat. So I don't know if they're being honest or not, but that made me feel a little better about some of our, our, our Tardis shows lately. So those, those were good events. I also spent a week in India with some clients and that super interesting, a lot of commerce activity going on there, a lot of different market dynamics than here. So that's kind of intellectually pretty fun to learn about and see what's working there that might be working here or what, you know, why things tend to play out differently there. So that's interesting. And then I have a lot more international trips booked right now. Jason: [6:48] So coming up, I'm going to Barcelona, London, Paris, and Sao Paulo. So if anyone either has any favorite retail experiences in any of of those cities, please send them my way. I'll be doing store visits in all those cities. And if you're based in any of those cities, also drop me a line. Hopefully we can do some meetups while I'm out there. Scot: [7:07] Cool. It's Jason's world tour. You can do a little pod while you're there. Jason: [7:12] We have done a bunch of international pods in the distant past. I remember hotel rooms in South Korea and all over the place, Jason: [7:19] Japan that we've, we've cut shows from. So, so totally could. Scot: [7:23] Yeah. We'll have to do it. Where in the world is retail geek? That could be the theme song. I just sampled that. Jason: [7:30] Yeah. So besides cleaning the world's cars, what have you been up to, Scott? Scot: [7:35] Well, it's kind of funny. My worlds are colliding. So a lot of the analysts that you and I know from the e-commerce world are creeping into the auto world and their gateway drug is Carvana. So in the world of retail, we have Amazon, obviously. Well, Carvana is kind of Amazonifying used cars. They had a bit of a drama kind of situation. They were the golden child of online cars. And then they totally pooped the bed. They did this acquisition. They loaded up with debt. And then after, I think it was 21. So they had a good COVID. They surged. And then the debt got in front of them. Used car prices bop around and they kind of like got in an open door situation where they had bought a lot of cars for more than they were worth suddenly. And then they plummeted and everyone thought they were going out of business, but they have had a resurgence. So it's causing a lot of the internet analysts to now pick up auto tech or mobility or whatever you want to call it. So it was fun. I got to do a live chat with Nick Jones. He's been a friend of the show. I don't think we've had him on due to some compliance stuff that his company has rules around, but he's at this firm JMP and it was kind of wild to talk about, with someone about both Amazon and what we're doing at Spiffy, which is basically a lot of Amazon principles applied to car care. So it was interesting to have someone reach out and say, hey, I think this is a thing. And everyone tells me I should talk to you about it. And I was like, oh, yeah, I would love to. So it's kind of fun. Jason: [9:01] That's very cool. And isn't it also a thing, I think half the vehicles on the road are now owned by Amazon. So I assume that's an overlap too. too? Scot: [9:09] Yeah, not half, but a lot are. The number of last mile delivery vehicles are very, very large. And we work with a lot of them, so it's kind of fun. I started spiffy somewhat to get away from Amazon and still all I can talk about. Nope. So embrace it. I love Amazon. Love me some Amazon, Jason. Jason: [9:29] I'm glad you do. I love them too, but I feel like I spend most of my career You're unsuccessfully helping people compete with them. Scot: [9:38] Hey, got to play one side of the coin. It's a gig. You're going to be more like them or how to fight them. Jason: [9:43] It's a gig. It is indeed. Yeah. Scot: [9:46] Cool. I thought we are going to talk about some Amazon news. But before we jump in, you have done your magic with your data analysis interns. And I'm sure there's an LLM and an AI thrown in there. Let's start with some of the things you're seeing in commerce trends from the data that's out there. Jason: [10:07] Yeah. So as everyone knows, I have a little bit too much of an infatuation with the U.S. Department of Commerce retail indicators data. And these guys, you know, publish monthly estimates of retail sales in a bunch of categories. And, you know, we've talked about this many times on the show, but broadly over the last several years have been really interesting in retail. 2020, 2021, and 2022 were the greatest three years in the history of retail. Like we mailed like $6 trillion in economic stimulus. People didn't travel or go to restaurants as much. And so we sold way more goods than ever before. And so those three years, retail grew respectively at like 8%, 14%, and 9%. The 20 years prior, retail averaged about 4% a year in growth. So normally pre-pandemic, you'd expect 4% growth. We had these three, you know, wildly pandemic influence years where we grew really fast. And then last year we finished a little below 4%. So, so we were around, I want to say it was like 3.6%. So it was growth. It would, it would have been in line with pre-pandemic growth, but it certainly felt like a significant deceleration from those heady pandemic years. And so, you know, people are super interested to see how does 2024 play out? Does it? Jason: [11:32] Kind of return to pre-pandemic levels, like what is the new normal? Jason: [11:37] And we now have the first quarter's data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, and I would call it kind of a mixed bag. If you just look at the raw retail data that the U.S. Department of Commerce publishes, they're going to tell you that retail grew in the first quarter 2.8%. So that's a little anemic, right? Compared to historical averages, that's not a great growth rate. Most of the practitioners that follow this podcast care about a particular subset of retail that the National Retail Federation has dubbed core retail. And so the National Retail Federation pulls gas and automobiles sales out of that number. And gas is a decent size number and it's very volatile based on the commodity prices of gas. And auto is a huge number that has, as you're well familiar, its own idiosyncrasies. And so that's how they justify taking those two out. And if you take those two out and you get this core retail number, retail in the first quarter grew 3.9%. So kind of to align with how the NRF talks about retail, we'll say Q1 overall was 3.9%, which is very in line with the pre-pandemic historic average. So disappointing by pandemic standards, but kind of traditionally what we would expect. Jason: [13:05] What is unique in that number is. Jason: [13:09] That it's very bifurcated. There are clear winners and losers, both by categories and specific practitioners. So if you break down the categories, e-commerce is the fastest growing chunk of retail. I'm sure we'll talk more about that. Restaurants were the next fastest growing categories. And categories like mass merchants and healthcare providers outperform that industry average, every other segment of retail underperformed the industry average. So things like furniture stores did the worst, building materials did really poorly, gas stations did very poorly, electronics did poorly, and side note, electronics have been the worst performer since the pandemic, which is kind of interesting and challenging. So you've had this weird couple categories doing really well, a bunch of categories doing really poorly. And then within the categories even, if you look at the public company's individual earnings calls, what you tend to see is a couple of big players performing really well in overall retail, that's Amazon and Walmart. And then a lot of other retailers really struggling. So that even that's like in general merchandise, it's Amazon and Walmart that are lifting the boats. And it's folks like Target traditionally that have performed really well are actually struggling at the moment. So the average is kind of hard to follow at the moment. Jason: [14:37] But that is kind of how things play out. And then we have some preliminary e-commerce data, but the actual Q1 e-commerce number that the U.S. Department of Commerce publishes will publish on May 17th. So that's 12 days from now. Jason: [14:53] And crunching the numbers that we have available at the moment, that growth is likely to come in at somewhere between 8% and 10%. I'm guessing more like 8% or 9% growth. And so that also is twice as good as overall retail, and it's more than twice as good as brick-and-mortar retail. But that is noticeably slower than the historic e-commerce growth rates pre-pandemic. So kind of file those two numbers away. The overall retail industry is growing at 3.9%. The overall e-commerce industry is growing at about 9%. And then we have our friends at Amazon that dropped their earnings announcement just before May 4th so that they could celebrate May 4th, I think. Scot: [15:39] Yeah, yes, that's a good setup. And without further ado, let's talk about Amazon's fourth quarter. It wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without a little bit of... Scot: [16:01] That's right. On April 30th, Amazon announced their first quarter results. And the setup coming into these, so you had the data you talked about, but like to drill in a little bit. We had Meta, the artist formerly known as Facebook, and Alphabet, the artist previously known as Google. They announced and they both basically told Wall Street, AI is the cat's pajamas and we're going to spend anywhere between $10 and $40 billion of capital expenditures on it, meaning NVIDIA chips. So it turns out the way to play all this is basically buying NVIDIA. So hopefully you bought some NVIDIA stock. Maybe this is not a stock recommendation or when it's too late, so... And also don't take stock recommendations from podcasters. Anyway, so there was all this angst and people were a little freaked out coming into the Amazon results because Meta was down like pretty substantially, 20 to 30 percent. And Alphabet was also up substantially. You also had Microsoft come in there and they really crushed it. Their Azure is really lighting it up with AI. And they announced that they were going to invest a lot. And there's this rumor that a $100 billion project, it's got a name like Starship or something, but it's not Starship. Spaceship? Stardust? I don't know what it is. But it's going to be this mega data center, and they literally can't find a place to put it because it's going to consume so much power. So they're going to have to maybe build a nuclear plant next to it or some wacky thing. Scot: [17:31] Anyway, that was the setup. up. So coming in, Wall Street was very, very concerned about Amazon's AWS division, which is their cloud computing. Because if Alphabet is building out their infrastructure, and so is Azure, that's the two biggest competitors for AWS. And is AWS getting its fair share? And is it going to announce that it's going to have to go build some $40 billion kind of a thing? Also, another Another thing, and I'm kind of curious on if you're seeing this with your clients, but in the, I follow this, you know, the AI, you can't do much without seeing AI everywhere. But the part I'm most interested in is what are big enterprises spending money on? This is like your Fortune 500s. They're all experimenting and really getting into it. And where they're finding a lot of good use cases is training on their data. So they'll say, you know, hey, I'm Publisys. How many documents do you think are inside of Publisys? I don't know, 8 trillion documents. Documents and you know wouldn't it be helpful just the ones I created and who is this retail geek and he's he's created uh you know 90 of those and you know so you know imagine you're starting new at publicists you're gonna be like where do I start going through some of these documents for us and if you had a chat bot that was like hey I've read all that you know I can navigate you through everything that's been published or you know whatever I'm certainly you. Scot: [18:50] Providing a very big metaphor, certainly be more divisional and all this kind of stuff. But that's where big companies are spending the bulk is they're taking their data in whatever format it's in, be it a relational database, a PDF, whatever it is, they're trying to train it. They don't want it to go up into the, they don't want to train the LLM so that other people get the benefit of that and can see any confidential data. So that's really important. So it needs to be gated in these types of things. Because of that use case, open AI is not great because people are very worried. A, it's very expensive and it's only an API. So OpenAI hosts itself and you call it through an API. Scot: [19:25] Those API calls are very expensive. They're getting, as OpenAI has gotten more popular, there's more latency. It's taking forever to get answers out of this thing. And a lot of people are very concerned that even though there's ways to call the API such that it's in a window and not being trained, that maybe it leaks in there. So because of all these elements, the open source models are becoming very popular. And right around the time Meta announced, they announced their Llama, which has become quite popular. And what's nice is you can host it wherever you want. And it's kind of like WordPress, where if you are a serious WordPresser, you can host it somewhere yourself, and you can kind of understand that. Otherwise, there's other people that will host it for you. But it has the nice feature of you're just getting the weights and whatnot, and it's it's pretty clear, it's pretty obvious, it's not training itself on your data. So a lot of people like it because it's quote unquote free. It's not an API usage based. It's a pay once to set it up, pay for some resources type thing and you're done. And it's also not going to train on the data. That's one of many. There's probably 10 or 20 pretty commercial grade open AIs out there. Scot: [20:38] Okay. So that's kind of the setup to get to the earnings. things. So from a big picture, this was a really good quarter. Asterix, the guide made Wall Street a little bit nervous. So- Scot: [20:53] And one of our research analysts just said it's Stargate, which is also a sci-fi series. They must have that on Prime Video or something. There's probably some callback there. Scot: [21:01] So they beat for the quarter Q1, but then they also kind of tell you what's going on the next quarter. Amazon doesn't provide fully your guidance. They just kind of give you a snippet. So when they report one quarter, a quarter, they then tell you what they think the next quarter is going to do. So Wall Street got a little bit ahead of its skis, and the guide for Q2 was below what Wall Street wants. So it wasn't what we'd call a beat and a raise, which is the current quarter was a beat and the next one they increased. It was a beat and a guide down. So that probably tampered Wall Street. But ever since Jassy came in, Andy Jassy, this has been his MO is to be pretty conservative because Wall Street's very much an expectation engine. And the more, if you can beat and tamp down expectations, it makes it, it's a little bit rougher in the short term from a stock price, but it makes next quarter better and then so on and so forth. So it's a smart way to manage the long-term vibe of the stock, the mindset, the expectations around your stock. Okay. So revenue came in at $143 billion versus Wall Street at $142. So pretty much in line. But most importantly, where Amazon really threw people off was on operating income. Yes, Amazon is profitable. This is the proxy for operating income. True Amazonians would tell you, no, it's cashflow. We can go into that, but this is kind of the way they report to Wall Street. So this is kind of the standard operating system, if you will. So this is what we're going to use, but it's a proxy for cashflow. Scot: [22:28] That was 15 billion for the quarter and Wall Street expected 11. Well, you know, 4 billion on a world of 143 doesn't sound like much, but between 11 and 15, that's a very material beat. What is that? Like 38%, something like that. Scot: [22:44] So that was a really nice surprise. And, you know, Amazon goes through these invest and harvest periods and everyone's been feeling like they're going to be back in investing which would mean they're going to start lowering operating income as they invest but it's actually kind of beating expectations, also this is the fifth quarter amazon has come in at the high end of its guidance or above its guidance since basically you know on operating income and that corresponds with when jassy came in so this is his mo right now is to kind of like beat and lower beat and lower you know exceed expectations tamp them down not get not get ahead of his skis and it's working really well. Jason: [23:24] Sandbagging for the win. I like it. Scot: [23:26] Yes, it is. Having run a public company, this is a lesson I learned painfully. So that's something we can talk about over beer sometime. Jason: [23:33] I will book that date. Yeah. And the retail business sort of followed in line with that. They had like some nice growth, but like the real standout number was the improvement in margins and the significant positive operating income from the retail segment. So I think the actual operating income from U.S. Retail was like $5 billion and the Wall Street expectations were 4.3. So again, that was another strong beat. Total revenue, which revenue is not the same thing as retail sales, as we've talked about on the show many times, that we would use GMV as a proxy for that. But revenue was $86.3 billion for the quarter, which I think was in line with the analyst expectations. Jason: [24:27] And I think this was the largest operating income that Amazon has ever reported for the retail business. So that was super interesting on the domestic side. Traditionally, domestic has done pretty well and international has been a money loser because, you know, they've been less mature. they've been investing a lot in growing international and they haven't had the same kind of margins. This was the first quarter that they reported positive operating income for the international division. So that's another super encouraging sign for investors that maybe they've kind of passed that inflection point on a lot of their international investments that they've made in the EU and Japan and the UK, which reminds me is not part of the EU anymore. Jason: [25:13] So so they kind of beat beat international expectations across the board on income. Revenues were lower. So revenues were like thirty one billion dollars, which was below expectation. Jason: [25:25] But they they earned like nine hundred million in operating income. And I want to say the the the Wall Street expectation was like six hundred million. So so again, like a 30 percent beat, which is pretty, pretty darn good. Good. They also, a bunch of analysts have, you know, taken these revenue numbers and they try to back into a GMV number. And I would say the bummer at the moment is there's a fair amount of variance in the estimates, like different analysts have different models. So I have kind of been putting to a model of the models together and trying to kind of find a midpoint. And like Like based on that, the Amazon's GMV globally probably went up 11.5% for the quarter. So if you're comparing this to other retailers or the U.S. Department of Commerce number, overall GMV went up 11.5%. The U.S. was stronger. So the U.S. probably went up at 12.2%. So again, we talked about core retail was up 3.9%. Well, Amazon U.S. GMV was up 12.2%. So, you know, three times faster growth than the retail industry overall. Jason: [26:39] And again, Amazon is mostly e-commerce, very little brick and mortar, Jason: [26:44] which we'll talk about in just a minute. But even if you're comparing Amazon to that e-commerce number, if e-commerce comes in at 8% or 9% and Amazon's at 12%, they're by far the largest e-commerce player out there and they're still substantially outgrowing the average, which, you know, is very impressive and should be very scary to every other competitor out there. Jason: [27:08] One analyst kind of put together an estimate of what they thought the earned income contribution from Amazon was for retail and ads together, pulling AWS out. And they had it at $27 billion in earned income if Amazon was just a retail with no AWS. And that puts them right in the ballpark of Walmart that spent off about $29 billion in earned income or operating income. I keep saying earned, but I mean operating income. So, so that is all pretty impressive and simultaneously super scary. Jason: [27:45] Scott, did you drill down into the online segment at all? Scot: [27:49] Yeah. And, you know, what I would tell listeners is picture a block diagram where you have this big, big rectangle, that's the whole Amazon entity. And, you know, so what we're going to do is talk about the segments. And the first segment is the biggest one, which is the retail business. And that, that's what you just. Jason: [28:04] Biggest and best. Wouldn't you say? Scot: [28:06] Coolest. Jason: [28:07] Coolest. All right. Scot: [28:08] Cool. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll, you know, I don't know. Jason: [28:11] It is for you. Scot: [28:14] Um, I think the whole enchilada, I like the, the way they do this and I'm trying to replicate it. It's 50. We'll talk about that in a second. The, so then the, you know, so then another segment is AWS, another segment, I think marketplace should be in some segment, but they don't break it out. So it's just kind of in kind of hidden inside of the blob that is retail. So we tease some of that out here on the show. They purposely hide it in there. So no one knows how awesome it is, I think. And then they've got AWS ads and a couple other things, but we'll talk about this. So as you dig into the retail business, there's a couple of ways to look at it. You can look at it by domestic and international, which Jason just did, Scot: [28:50] or you can look at it by online and physical store. So the online biz grew 7% year over year, which if I remember your stats, well, you don't have it until may 17th so on may 17th we'll be able to know how that compared but probably the one you can compare is the offline biz which is the the store comp that they have, And Jason, you saw on that one, what'd you see? Jason: [29:16] Yeah, so physical stores grew 6.3%. So again, like, you know, when we say all of retail grew 3.9%, a big chunk of that's e-commerce. Brick and mortar probably grew at like two to 3%. So Amazon's brick and mortar growing at 6.3% is actually super impressive. And it's kind of interesting, you know, for several years, Amazon has had experiments in a bunch of retail formats. So they've had these Amazon Go stores, stores. They had Amazon five-star stores. They had bookstores. They had a fashion store. They're trying all these things. And of course, the biggest chunk of their stores is they own Whole Foods. And so offline stores for Amazon was kind of a mix of all these different concepts. In the last couple of years, they've kind of cleaned house and gotten rid of all those concepts. And so, you know, nominally there's a few of their own grocery stores called Amazon Amazon fresh open, but the vast majority of online offline retail for Amazon is, is Whole Foods. And for it to be growing at 6.3% in the current climate is, is a really good sign for Amazon. And, and I would say somewhat impressive, you know, on the earnings call, they, they announced that they're working up a new format for Whole Foods, which is a smaller format store that's It's going to open in Manhattan. So I have that on my ticker file to go visit when that's open. Jason: [30:38] You know, the whole grocery space for Amazon is super interesting, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more later. But I will call out, they did launch a service that there's been some controversy over. They launched a $9.99 a month grocery delivery service, which essentially lets you have all you can eat free grocery delivery to your home for an incremental fee of $9.99. And they're spinning that as, you know, a cool new grocery service and enable more people to shop for groceries online. And there are a lot of articles about it, like. Jason: [31:13] They used to have free grocery delivery included in your Prime membership, right? And so they've kind of like, I look at the big arc of all this and say, there used to be a lot more free services in Prime that they've kind of peeled out. Then they started charging for, and now they'll let you get it free again for another $120 a year. Jason: [31:32] So interesting things happening with grocery that we could probably talk more about later. But I'm kind of eager to dive into some of these other businesses like AWS. Scot: [31:42] Yeah. So that's the one that everyone was really waiting on the call to hear how it went. And good news, AWS exceeded expectations. Everyone thought it was going to grow 14% and it came in at 17%. And if Wall Street likes, they like a lot of things, they like beating expectations, that's important to them. But their favorite thing is ARG. And that is not a pirate day thing, ARG. It is Accelerating Revenue Growth. Wall Street loves that more than anything. And that's what they delivered for both the ads and the AWS part of the business. And what that means is that as the law of numbers kicks in, so back on the retail business, the only time we see that accelerate is in the fourth quarter and that seasonal acceleration, right? We've gotten used to that for decades now. It always happens in the fourth quarter and whatnot. So it's what you would expect. But this is quite unusual for a relatively mature business. This thing's $25 billion a quarter. So this is a $100 billion business that accelerated. And so that tells us that there is a lot more wood to chop here. It has not gotten near its addressable market. And it really allayed fears that they were losing massive market share because they're, quote unquote, behind on AI to Azure, which is Microsoft offering, and then the Google hosting solution as well. Scot: [33:05] That does not seem to be the case. So they did very well. So they came in at $25 billion and Wall Street was expecting $24.6. So that was really, that accelerating is what really made everyone very happy. And then the operating income came in at $9.5, way ahead of Wall Street at $7.5. So another pretty material 20% beat on this component at the bottom line. And this is really interesting. There was some really good language around this. And this has been Jassy's statement all along, and it's coming true. His early Amazon's early play was we're going to be agnostic on models and it's kind of like bring your own model we'll work with anything now with open AI they're not going to ever host open AI but they'll they're not going to stop you from working with it and then they for these open source ones they've made it very easy for you to spin up an AWS instance throw a little llama in there and I would make a llama noise if I I knew what they said I guess they make like a sheep sound. So you throw a little alarm in there and it does its thing. And, you know, the benefit of them being agnostic on these LLMs is most likely they have some or all of your data, right? Because they've been at this so long that if you're doing cloud computing versus on-prem, most likely a lot of, if not all of your data is in AWS. Extracting that data, you know, imagine you had terabytes or or what's the biggest, Scot: [34:31] bigger than terabytes? I always forget this one. Jason: [34:33] Petabytes. Scot: [34:34] Petabytes of data at AWS. They literally have a product that they can send a truckload of hard drives around and get your data. That's how much data there is that you could never push it across the internet, that there's so much data. So if they have that data and that's what you want to train on, you don't want to have the latency of the internet between your data and the training. So you'd really need the LLM to operate near your data. And this is what they predicted two or three years ago, kind of around the, the, the launch of chat gpt when all this stuff really started to accelerate and it's coming true so everyone feels a lot better about that then their body language this time a lot of times they were kind of like this is what we're doing and we're pretty sure it's going to work now they're like it's working and people really felt relief around this because everyone there was a set of people that believed it but then you know open ai's pitches nope our lm is going to be we're spending, billions of dollars we're going to be so far ahead none of these open source things are going to keep up. If you don't have us, you're going to be so far behind, you'll be like playing with crayons and everyone's going to be playing with quill pens. Scot: [35:42] So it was really good to see that this is not what's happening, that people are embracing, enterprises are embracing these open source models. They are in the same zip code performance-wise from results and much cheaper than OpenAI's offerings. And what Amazon said specifically was very positive around what is It's kind of abbreviated Gen AI for generative AI. And it's kind of a way to encapsulate this. And they said that it already is a multi-billion dollar run rate business. And you always have to parse what they say. So multi-billion can be anywhere between 1 and 9.9, right? And you'll see why I drew 9.9 there. Scot: [36:25] And inside, as part of that big AWS number, and they believe it can be rapidly tens of billions. Billions so they're basically saying it's not double digit billions so it's a single digit million which is where i get one to nine point nine but they basically hinted that that it is growing so rapidly inside of there that it's gonna be tens of billions and this is why they saw accelerating revenue growth which made everyone happy it wasn't just people you know moving some more you know loads on or something boring loads around relational databases or something it was the juicy ai stuff so this got everyone so lathered up that three analysts did price increases and they cited that this was one of the reasons the biggest price increase was from sig susquehanna and they put the price up to 220. At the time all this happened the stock was at 175 and today it's around 185 so it's been up nicely but 220 is a pretty big big you know even. Scot: [37:20] From where they expect that's where they're thinking i think most these guys look at a year to two years as a time horizon on these prices so and that's the the high i have you know again there's a wide range some people think it's going to go down some people think it's over price so go do your research this is not a stock recommendation but i just thought it was interesting that people get really really excited by by this whole gen ai largely the body language that, and it's, Amazon doesn't pound their chest much. So the fact they were, was kind of a new, new way of managing Amazon and Jassy's pretty conservative. So he must've felt pretty good about it, but also that they needed to ally, allay, allay, allay, whatever the right word is, get rid of these competitive concerns everyone's been talking about. Jason: [38:05] Yeah. It feels like a pretty big prize out there. Jassy and the whole team always talk, Just AWS, even before you get to Gen AI, they always remind everyone, hey, 85% of the workloads are still on-prem. So like this, as big as AWS looks, if the long-term future is 85% of the workloads are on the cloud and only 15% are on-prem, there's a lot of headroom still in AWS. And then, you know, you add this new huge demand for AI on top of all that. And like this, it's almost a limitless opportunity. And I want to tie the AI back to retail, though, for just a second, because there's another bit of news that I haven't seen covered very much, but is super interesting to me. Jason: [38:51] There's a particular flavor of AI out there, a subset of generative AI that's now being called agentic AI. And that's sort of a clever amalgamation of agent-based AI. And there's a very famous AI researcher, this guy, Andrew Ng. He's the founder of Coursera. He's done a bunch of things. He was the head of Google Big Think, which was one of the first significant AI efforts. And I want to say he was like on People Magazine's 100 most interesting people list in like 2013 as an AI researcher. So the dude's been around for a long time. He is one of the biggest advocates for this agentic AI. And the premise is that if you just ask an LLM, you take the best LLM in the world, and you ask it to do something for you, that's called zero shot. You give it an assignment, and you take the first result you get. It's a zero shot. You get pretty good results. But if you... Jason: [39:53] Turn that, that LLM into multiple agents and break the task up amongst those agents and potentially agents even running on different LLMs, you get wildly better results. Jason: [40:05] And so his, his research kind of showed that, Hey, if, if Jason goes write a PowerPoint presentation for his client, explaining what's going on in commerce. And I just give that to the turbo version of ChatGBT 4, I'll get a pretty good deck. But if I say, hey, I want to create four agents. I want to create a consultant to write the deck and a copywriter to edit the deck and an editor to improve the deck and three people to pretend to be mock customers to poke holes in the deck and have all those agents work on this assignment. I could give that assignment to chat gbt 3.5 and it would actually output a better work product than the the newer more advanced model was by by breaking the job into these chunks and so in retail you think about like this is the idea of assigning higher level jobs to shopping right so instead of saying like going to amazon and saying oh now it's a ai-based search engine and i'm going to type a long form query into search and get a better result. Jason: [41:09] The agentic AI approach is I'm just going to say to Amazon, never let me run out of ingredients for my kids' school lunches. And the agent's going to figure out what is in my school lunches and what my use rate is for those things and what weeks I have off from school and don't need a school lunch. And it's just going to do all those things and magically have the food show up. And this is a long diatribe, but the reason it's relevant is is this dude, Andrew Ng, was named the newest board member at Amazon three weeks ago. Scot: [41:40] Very cool. Jason: [41:40] I did not see that myself. Yeah. And so if you're wondering where Amazon thinks this is going, like this, in my mind, ties all this tremendous opportunity in generative AI and the financial opportunity in AWS directly to the huge and growing retail business that Amazon runs. Scot: [42:02] Very cool. Oh yeah. I had not seen that. So maybe Wall Street picked up on that. I'm sure. And maybe that was another part of the excitement. Jason: [42:09] Yeah. But all of that is just peanuts compared to the real good business in Amazon, which is the ads business. So again, you know, Amazon used to, to obfuscate their ads business. They've for a number of quarters now had to report it as earnings because it's in their earnings separately, because it's so material. And it was another good quarter for the ads business. It's hard to say whether it's actually accelerating growth or not, because the ads business is very seasonal. So the ad business grew 24.3% for the quarter versus Q1 of 2023. Q4 grew faster. So Q4 grew at 27%, but the 24% growth is much faster growth than other... Q1 year-over-year growth rate. So however you slice it, it's a good, robust growth rate. If you add the last four quarters together, you get $29 billion worth of ad sales. There's lots of estimates for how profitable ad sales are, but there's no cost of goods for an ad, right? Jason: [43:13] And so it's very high margin. So if you just assume, I think 60% gross margins is a very conservative estimate. But if you assume 60% gross margins, that means the ad business spun off $29.5 billion of operating income over the last 12 months. And to put that in comparison, AWS is big and profitable as it is, twice as much revenue at over $100 billion now, but it spun off like $23 billion in operating income. So the ad business is a much more meaningful contributor to Amazon's profits than even AWS. Jason: [43:51] And another way I've been starting to think about this is what percentage of the total GMV on the Amazon platform are the ads? And they are now 6.5%. So that's a very significant new tax. You know, as Amazon has hundreds of millions of SKUs available for sale, no one's ever going to find your SKU or buy it if you don't do some marketing on the platform for that SKU. And that's this 6.5% tax that Amazon's charging. And in the same way we said, hey, AWS is a really robust business. And then there's this thing called generative AI that can make it even huger. All of this ad revenue we're talking about is really coming from their sponsored product listings, which is like basic search advertising on the retail platform. Last quarter, Amazon said, by the way, we have this huge viewership streaming video service called Amazon Prime. And we're going to start putting ads in the lowest tier version of Amazon Prime. So unless you want to pay more, you're going to start seeing ads on Amazon Prime. And that's another huge advertising opportunity that hasn't been very heavily tapped yet. So the analysts are pretty excited about the upside of Amazon potentially tacking on another $6.5 billion in Prime video ads onto the $50 billion of search ads that they already have. Jason: [45:11] And so ads are a pretty good business to be in, which is why every other retailer is trying to follow suit with their own sort of version of a retail media network. Scot: [45:22] Cool. I imagine you get a lot of calls to talk about that. Jason: [45:25] Oh, yeah. I actually, I'm sick of talking about it. So one nice thing about working at an ad agency is there are now thousands of other experts. You know, I was one of the early guys in retail media networks. Now there are thousands of other experts that are way more credible than me. So I don't have to talk about it quite as much, but it still, still comes up in every conversation. Scot: [45:43] Very cool. All right. So then that was the basic gist of the corridor from a high level. And then it came to the what's going on in Q2. So that did come in lighter than folks expected, as I said, and they guided the top line to 144 versus 149. Let's call it 146 and change at the midpoint. They always do this range kind of thing when they're doing their guide. And Wall Street was at 150 consensus. So, you know, a tidge below two or three percent below where they wanted. But the operating income guide was above Wall Street. So they're kind of, we'll take it. Como si, como sa. Scot: [46:21] So that was, you know, I think Amazon tapping things down. Yeah. Now they did talk a lot about consumers being under pressure. So they said in the, it wasn't in a Q and a, it was in the prepared remarks and Jassy said it, which is kind of like the more important stuff. And I will say it's really nice to have the CEO of Amazon back on these calls because Bezos basically ditched them after, I don't know if, I think he came the first two quarters back in 97 but i honestly can't remember but he has not gone to the calls and jassy's been to them all so it's really nice to hear from the ceo and he answers very candidly i feel you know he doesn't feel as kind of like robotic as many ceos when they get on here because it is a stressful thing that you're going to say something wrong, but there was this exchange well first of all he he in his prepared remarks he talked about. Scot: [47:12] I forgot to put the exact language, but he said, we're seeing a lot of consumers trade down. So they're seeing, you know, we're seeing this in the auto industry. Tires is this huge thing where it's under a lot of pressure right now because people are just waiting. So there's a lot of this, you know, it's not showing up in the data that I've seen, but there's, you know, maybe the inflation data, but not the GDP and some of the other unemployment data. But it feels like the consumer is under a bit of pressure here, and they talk about that a lot in the prepared remarks. So I thought our listeners would find that interesting. Jason, before I go into this longish little thing that I wanted to just cover, what do you, did you pick up on any of that consumer stuff? Are you hearing that? Jason: [47:55] Oh, yeah, that's very common. And remember, in the beginning, I mentioned that there's this weird bifurcation that some retailers, even in categories, are doing well and others aren't. And some categories are doing well and others aren't. That's super complicated to get to the why. But the most obvious why is that consumers feel like they're under a lot of economic pressure and are trading down and are deferring certain types of purchases. The easiest way to see this is own brands and private label sales going up and, you know, national brand sales stagnating, see things like chicken protein going up and beef protein going down. You know, there's lots of examples out there, but the retailers that are best able to follow the consumer as she trades down are tending to do well. And the retailers that only cater to the luxury consumer, the super luxury is still doing fine. They're somewhat insulated. But the folks that haven't been as able to cater to the value consumer as much have struggled more. And the non-mandatory categories have struggled more. So Andy's comments exactly mirror what we're seeing going on in market dynamics and what other retailers are saying in their earnings. It is slightly weird because if you just look at the macros. Jason: [49:18] It's objectively, the consumer is doing pretty well. There's actually a lot of favorable things, but there's a ton of evidence that the consumer sentiment is that they're really worried about their household budget and are making, you know, hard, hard financial decisions. Scot: [49:36] Yeah. Yeah. It's tough out there. Well, hopefully it'll get better. So one of the questions I want to just kind of pull out some tidbits, because this has been a theme on our pod for a long time and I thought it was really, really interesting. And this is going to get into the weeds of supply chain and this kind of thing. So sorry if that's not your jam. We like to talk about logistics. Scot: [49:56] Side note to you, Jason, I saw that deep dive we did on Amazon logistics is still like our number one show and all the stats and stuff, which is kind of fun. So someone cares about it. Anyway, one of the friends of the podcast, Yusuf Squally asked a question. He's one of the analysts and he said, as it relates to logistics, so he's talking to andy on the call back in september you launched amazon supply chain can you help us understand the opportunity you see there where are you in the journey to build logistics as a service on a global basis and does that require a huge increase in capex a function increase in capex which means huge so jesse said this was a very long answer so i'm going to pull out two snippets you can go read the transcripts can you put a link to that in the show notes absolutely yep yeah so so i'm just gonna give you the the snippet the whole thing is worth reading but it would be like another 20 minutes to do that. But so Jassy starts out and says, I think that it's interesting what's happening with the business we're building in third party logistics. And it's really kind of in some ways mirror some of the other businesses we've gotten involved in AWS being an example. And even though they're very different businesses, and that we realized that we had our own internal need to build and launch these capabilities. Scot: [51:01] We figured that there were probably others out there who had the same needs we did and decided to build the services out of them so this is this model that really blows the minds of traditional retailers where you know so walmart has this huge data you know capability there's this this urban legend that they know when people are pregnant before they do they can see changes in their habits or they know who all is on weight loss drugs they they see your buying habits so intricately that they can do that that's a neat capability but they view it as proprietary and And that's old school thinking. Scot: [51:32] What Amazon does is says, well, that's a cool capability. Let's certainly someone else needs it. Let's open it up. This is one of my favorite things at Amazon. And it's so counterintuitive that in my current car world, I talk about this and everyone's like, why are you, we're doing it a lot at Spiffy. And they're like, well, why are you doing that? That's like your proprietary thing. And we're like, well, that's just how it should be. And like, this is a better way to do it. And it's really interesting that still today, Amazon's built what I say, $100 billion business out of AWS, which has used this and people are, are befuzzled by the whole thing. So I, I thought that was an interesting use case. And then he, he goes into some details there that are pretty obvious for our listeners, like how this is gonna work. But then he basically kind of brings it back around and then he says he wraps up and says, I would say that supply chain with Amazon is really an abstraction on top of each individual block services. And in those services, he talked about all the things that, that, you know, FBA and last mile delivery and buy with a prime. He talks about each of those kind of and how awesome they are. So he's basically saying Amazon supply chain wraps a bow around all that. And it gives this collective set of business services is growing significantly. Scot: [52:43] It's already what I would consider a reasonable size business. I think it's early days. It's not something we anticipate being a giant capital expense driver. So it's because they've already invested in all this that doesn't require additional capex. And then he finishes and says, we have to build a lot of the capabilities anyway to handle our own business. And we think it will be a modest increase on top of that to accommodate third-party sellers. Scot: [53:05] But our, there's a typo in the thing. Our third-party sellers find very high value in us being able to manage these components for them versus having to do it themselves. And they save money in the process. So I thought that was a really interesting, interesting. So they're really leaning into this supply chain. I think that ultimately they'll open this up to more consumers where you can send Aunt Gertrude in Detroit something from Chicago for three bucks a package and just throw it in an Amazon box, maybe a return box, and it kind of makes it way cheaper than you can FedEx it. I think that's coming, but it's really interesting to see. The way they think about things and his articulation of it was very crisp, Scot: [53:45] and I really enjoyed that. I was geeking out on that when I was listening to the call. Jason: [53:50] Yeah, for sure. That actually came up in some of the conferences I was at that he, you know, Jeff Bezos famously wrote this memo a long time ago about kind of being an object oriented, company and having all these building blocks that people could easily access and use internally and externally. And, and that this was kind of Andy Jassy doubling down on that. Yeah. It's Biffy is an example of that. Like you inventing some cool products that make it your jobs easier. And then you're selling those products to, to your potential competitors. Scot: [54:20] Yeah. So two examples, we have some devices we've developed for ourselves. One is a tire tread scanner. So it does 2D and 3D tires, tire tread scans. It's called Easy Tread. And we developed it for ourselves because we touch 3,000 cars a day right now and we wanted to measure the tire treads. And the state of the art is a Bluetooth needle. And it's, you know, you have to lay on your back. The cars are on the ground for us most of the time. So you have to like get underneath there, measure three things, and then it Bluetooths to a phone. Then you have to take it, the data entry, it doesn't have an API. Then you have to like take what it measured and then now cut and paste it into something else. It's kind of, kind of redonkulous in our world. So we developed a solution for that and we're selling it externally. And then the big, the big one is from day one, this has been the plan is we've built a ton of software for Spiffy. So we're, you know, we've got 400 technicians, 250 vans doing all kinds of services across the US and there's no operating system for that. So we, there's no like Salesforce for that or Shopify. So we had to go build our own. And so we've built, you know, route optimization specific to this parts integration, fitment integration, VIN lookup, all these things that are required integration with tire suppliers, oil filter suppliers, oil suppliers, parts suppliers, all these things. So we have like 150 things we've integrated with and pulled in from all over the place. Scot: [55:44] And then labor management, all the reporting that comes along with it, all that stuff. And we're starting to license that out as its own platform to anyone that wants to do auto services. And so these dealerships and large auto service companies are coming to us and finally saying, this seems kind of obvious now that we need to provide the ability to go to our customers. They call it at their curb. They use a different language than we do. But basically what you and I would call mobile, you know, last mile delivery of the service. And we're starting to license that out. And it's a lot like AWS, right? So we had to build this for our retail business, which is doing the services and now we're licensing it out a lot AWS and we have this device business. So it's been, I would not have, it comes intuitively to me now. Cause I've been, you know, basically living this lifestyle for 20 years and watching Amazon do it, But it's been fun to kind of build a company with this mindset of we're going to take these things we build and give them to other, not give them, but sell them to other people. And then that makes them better. And they help us pay for all the R&D that we've done on it. Jason: [56:48] Yeah, that's very cool. And that gives listeners a very tangible example of why we haven't been able to podcast quite as frequently as we'd like. Scot: [56:56] Yes. Jason: [56:56] I do, at the risk of making this the world's longest episode of our show, I do have a geeky add-on to the supply chain conversation. Yeah. So a lot of these services that they're adding to specifically what they call supply chain with Amazon are around importing services, because an increasingly high percentage of all the stuff Amazon sells is. Jason: [57:20] Amazon is taking care of importing it, right? And most often from China, but from all over the world and taking care of all that logistics and getting it ready to sell and deliver via the world's most impressive last mile to consumers in America. And there's tons of complicated, high friction touch points and processes to flow all those goods. Well, the big competitors out there to Amazon at the moment that we've talked about ad nauseum on the show, like Shein and Timu, had this kind of direct from China model where they're putting all the goods on 747s, flying them over, and they're taking advantage of this loophole in the postal treaty called the de minimis provision to not pay taxes or duties or have all these goods inspected that they ship into the U.S. and U.S. Jason: [58:07] Businesses have been complaining it's unfair. There's like all kinds of talk about it. We've done shows on this and I'm sure we'll do others. So here's the new thing in supply chain. Jason: [58:15] All the people that have been complaining about this are now doing it because guess what's happened? A bunch of these companies have been born that now help every other brand in the world take advantage of the de minimis provisions to near shore their goods. So you're a footwear manufacturer, you make your shoes in Vietnam, Instead of shipping them to the U.S. On a pallet and paying taxes and duties, you ship them on a pallet to Mexico, and then you send them individual parcels across the border from Mexico into the U.S. and never have to pay taxes or duties on the stuff. So I don't know if that will last in the long run, but that's a very disruptive, significant change happening in the whole world of e-commerce supply chains as we speak. That's pretty interesting. Interesting. Had you gotten wind of that yet? Scot: [59:07] No, no. That's all new to me. Thanks for sharing. Jason: [59:09] Yeah. That's probably how you're going to have to start getting your spiffy stuff into the country now too. I won't, I won't, we won't go there. But the one other piece that did not come up in the earnings call, but a controversy around Amazon since our last show is news articles came out that Amazon was de-installing its Just Walk Out technology from its grocery stores. So Amazon had built Just Walk Out into several of these Amazon Fresh stores and they built it into Whole Foods. And if you know the history of Just Walk Out, this was the original intention of Just Walk Out was was to do it for grocery stor

Dive into the heart of the Christopher Scott Show as we embark on a journey of new beginnings. This episode is a thrilling ride, unveiling the grand makeover of our studio and the launch of a fresh radio show. As we celebrate the release of our new book and an exciting book tour, we also take a moment to reflect on the many videos we've produced.But the thrill doesn't stop there. We're looking ahead, pondering the future of this podcast and the very future of our country. With crucial topics at hand - the border, elections, and budget - the silence in public discourse is deafening. It's time to break that silence.This episode promises to be a roller-coaster ride of suspense, revelations, and discussions that you simply cannot miss. Are you ready to join us?Buy my books: https://store.bookbaby.com/book/victory-over-chaosWatch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v4oxo15-unveiling-new-beginnings-a-journey-into-the-heart-of-the-christopher-scott-.htmlWebsite: www.christopherscottshow.comSubscribe: https://www.christopherscottshow.com/subscribeLEAVE A MESSAGE AND MAYBE I'LL MENTION IT ON THE SHOW! https://www.christopherscottshow.com/contact Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears loss to the Packers, Justin Fields' press conference, Bears exit meetings and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss Packers week, the missed touchdown and more. Later in the show, Draft Dr Phil and Carmen Vitali join Adam to talk all things Bears and answer your questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss Budda Baker, the Jaylon Johnson situation, the Bears upcoming game versus the Falcons and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears win loss to the Browns, the missed Hail Mary, Justin Fields' future with the Bears, the rest of the season and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears win versus the Lions, gaining momentum with back to back wins, his upcoming homecoming game vs the Browns and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott joins Adam Rank to discuss the Bears upcoming matchup versus the Lions, college football playoffs and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Tyler Scott joins Adam Rank to discuss the Bears win over the Vikings and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Adam Rank and Tyler Scott discuss the Bears' loss to the Lions, Justin Fields' return, the upcoming game vs the Vikings and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears upcoming matchup versus the Lions, Tyler's crucial 4th down catch, a welcome to the NFL moment and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears win versus the Panthers, the chemistry he feels in the locker room, Justin Fields and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears trading for Montez Sweat, the loss to the Chargers, Jaylon Johnson and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears quarterback Tyson Bagent joins Tyler Scott and Adam Rank to discuss his first NFL win versus the Raiders, the pressure that comes with being the starting QB for the Bears, how Justin Fields has helped him and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears loss against the Vikings, Tyson Bagent as the starting quarterback, upcoming matchup versus the Raiders and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode #269 On this episode, we share a recent live broadcast where Ryan guest-hosted The Tamara Scott Show on Lindell TV. Ryan talks about the Israeli war, Christian persecution around the world and is joined by Dr. Edward Smith, a law enforcement and disaster response chaplain.Dr. Smith shares firsthand accounts of ministering on the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war. He describes the difficult conditions and his conversations with Ukranian soldiers, reminding them of Christ's presence and love for all.Though the political realities are complex, Dr. Smith focuses on bringing spiritual hope amidst crisis. He also discusses his humanitarian work delivering food, medical aid, and God's Word through Mission Harvest America.Additional topics include:How God called Dr. Smith to serve in UkraineWays to pray for persecuted Christians globallyBalancing geopolitical discernment with compassionSpeaking biblical truth to soldiers in war-torn trenchesHelping traumatized communities process grief and lossTune in to be inspired by stories of faith in action. Despite surrounding danger, Dr. Smith shows how every moment can be an opportunity to demonstrate and share the Gospel.Interview starts at 22:00 minConnect with Dr. Edward Smith:email: jethunter@aol.comwww.MissionHarvestAmerica.comWatch this episode on YouTubeMORE FROM RYAN:Get your FREE DOWNLOAD 21 Days to a Spirit-Led Life to learn how the Holy Spirit can be your personal guide through today's cultural chaosSubscribe to Cutting Edge Faith on YouTubeConnect with Ryan on Instagram or LinkedInSubmit a question or topic for the podcast at ryanshoward.com/contactGet Ryan's eCourse & Coaching Programs

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears upcoming matchup versus the Vikings, Tyler's rookie dinner, the team's morale after their first win and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears first win of the season vs the Commanders, DJ Moore's career night, the locker room celebration, Dick Butkus and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears loss to the Chiefs, the Bears mentality after starting 0-3, upcoming matchup versus the Broncos and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears loss to the Bucs, Chase Claypool as a leader, embracing the underdog role and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott and Adam Rank discuss the Bears loss to the Packers, Justin Fields' message to the team after the loss, week 2 vs the Bucs and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of The Sick Podcast, Bears WR Tyler Scott joins Adam Rank for the first edition of The Tyler Scott Show to discuss the upcoming game versus the Packers, the Bears preparation for the season, Justin Fields & DJ Moore and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taylor Swift announced the release of her album ‘1989 (Taylor's Version)' during her final Eras Tour show in LA. V of BTS released the first track off his debut solo album ‘Layover.' 60 people have reportedly been injured at Travis Scott's show at Colossum after someone in the crowd sprayed pepper spray into the audience. And more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pastor Todd Coconato on The Tamara Scott Show Guest host Ryan Howard talks to Pastor Todd about a specific area that the Holy Spirit will be leading all of us in - standing for the truth! https://frankspeech.com/tamara-scott-show To go to our website please visit: www.PastorTodd.org To help us support this ministry, please go to www.ToddCoconato.com/give

Episode #232This episode includes a recent interview Ryan did on The Tamara Scott Show on Lindell TV.  Tamara interviews Ryan about a so-called "conversion therapy ban" that a local city was considering at the time. The interview exposes the truth about deceitful and fraudulent bans on talk therapy.Watch this episode on YouTubeSubscribe on YouTube Connect with Ryan:Instagram LinkedIn Submit a question or topic for the podcast: ryanshoward.com/contactFREE DOWNLOAD21 Days to a Spirit-Led Life eCourse & Coaching Programs Visit ryanshoward.com/cef to learn get signed up for our new eCourse & coaching to transform your faith into an everyday reality.

Buy a ticket to a Travis Scott show at your own risk... Early Wednesday morning, Travis dropped by a New York nightclub to perform, and things went downhill fast. The “SICKO MODE” rapper got into a physical altercation with the sound engineer, which left him in the hospital, and allegedly caused $12,000 in damages to Club Nebula. There are conflicting stories about what *exactly* went down, but given Travis's track record with live performance disasters – Astroworld, anyone? – it's definitely not a good look for him. And we wonder if he's becoming too big a liability for live performances.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the second to last edition of the "Great Scott Show", Scott was joined in studio by former UL & NFL wide receiver James Butler. The two talked Aaron Rodgers (former teammate of James) and what a darkness retreat actually is, the KD trade, Pelicans, Saints, Derek Carr, UL, and much more. Plus, several calls from The Goat nation.

Scott was joined by friend (Saints beat writer) Luke Johnson, UL coaches Garry Brodhead and Bob Marlin, and one last hour with Jay Walker. It was special.

 Tamara Scott, host of the Tamara Scott Show which airs on Frank Speech https://frankspeech.com/shows/tamara-scott-show interviews Hal Shurtleff of Camp Constitution.  Tamara and Hal discuss the recent Christian flag lawsuit and the dangers of an Article V Convention.  Please visit our website www.campconstitution.net

" Holding the narcissist accountable is like emotional abuse to them. They receive it as offensive. They will not receive any type of constructive criticism. They will not even receive how you are feeling, how they have affected you. And they will, all of a sudden their ego will be triggered." -RavenNarcissist Abuse is not your fault. 5 Signs your Relationship is dead & you're dealing with a narcissist. 5 Ways the narcissist manipulates you into thinking it is your fault. Leaving you morally bankrupt as a chef, call girl, errand boy, and scapegoat feeling alone and ashamed. Today I share Episode 2 of THE RAVON SCOTT SHOW with Paxton on Narc Abuse TV Instagram: http://instagram.com/narcabuse_tv (@narcabuse_tv) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdYtibDzO1XHrzPyvguPh-w (UCdYtibDzO1XHrzPyvguPh-w) Get Daily Growth Emails http://daily-affirmations (Sign Up) Full show http://ravenscott.show/ (Webpage ) GRABhttps://unlockyourdestiny.net/free-self-healing-guide ( free Narcissist Survival Guide Book) PDF Grab all links and full transcript on our website http://Ravenscott.show (Ravenscott.show) http://instagram.com/ravenscottshow (Follow on IG ): http://twitter.com/ravenscottshow (Twitter)http://twitter.com/thrivingintuitv (: ) SHOP Raven's Girl Talk https://www.etsy.com/shop/ravenscottshow (Merch Store)! : SUBSCRIBE TO YouTube Channel Raven Scott Show Mugs & Water bottles Restorative Tote Compassion T Shirt Spiritual Mantra Sweat shirt Gorgeous Journal Empath & The Narcissist https://www.amazon.com/Empath-Narcissist-Healing-People-Pleasers-ebook/dp/B097CP63G5/ref=sr_1_16?dchild=1&keywords=empath+%26+narcissist&qid=1625605765&sr=8-16 (Book) : Music YouTube Library: Drifting at 432 Hz by Unicorn Heads Believe by Neffex Mentioned in this episode: Trauma 2 Triumph Summit https://the-thriving-intuitive.captivate.fm/https-bit-ly-3xjlfvb (Traum 2 Triumph Ticket)