Peter Atwater on Consumers’ Decision-Making Process

Published Nov 22, 2023, 9:35 PM

Bloomberg Radio host Barry Ritholtz speaks with Peter Atwater, president of Financial Insyghts and an adjunct professor at William & Mary and the University of Delaware. He studies the impact of changing confidence on consumer decision-making and advises investors, businesses and policymakers. He coined the term “K-shaped recovery" to describe the pandemic's effects on the economy. Atwater previously ran JPMorgan’s asset-backed securities business and served in executive roles at First USA, Bank One and Juniper Financial.

This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on Bloomberg Radio.

This week on the podcast, I have a special guest. His name is Peter Atwater and he is the author of several books, most recently The Confidence Map, Charting a Path from Chaos to Clarity. Peter has had a fascinating career in finance, JP Morgan, Bangwan, a few other large places where he got to see how people's sentiment and confidence levels affected their decision making. And this is everything from securitized credit cards to investing and beyond. I found this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. We discussed everything from the shape of cars to January sixth, and how each of the events that we talked about or milestones in society reflect the confidence, life level and the degree of uncertainty that the population at large feels. These are things that can be measured, and from those measurements you could get a sense of what's likely to come next. I thought this discussion was absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also with no further ado my discussion with Financial Insights. Peter Atwater, Welcome to Bloomberg.

Thanks so much, Barry.

So let's talk a little bit about your background, which I find is kind of fascinating. You graduate William and Mary in eighty three. How did your career begin? Where did you go from college?

Yeah? I have a very traditional finance background. Started at JP Morgan right out of school, went through their bank training program. Wanted a foreign assignment, and the next thing I knew, I was in Delaware. And what I was ended up doing, though, was the beginning of what we call asset back securities today, pulling to get other credit card loans for seers, for mbn A and first USA car loans. And if you remember your history, banks at that point were just beginning to compete with the big Wall Street firms and commercial paper and asset backed securities were the first securities that the FED gave banks permission to underwrite. And so suddenly we were having to compete with Solomon, with Bear, with the CSFB in their territory. And so my job basically became how do we outthink them? Because there was no way we could out muscle Marrow, and so we had to We had just had to be better at structuring, finding ways to make things less expensive, you know, bring something else to bear.

So what years were this. When were you at JP Morgan.

I was there from eighty three to ninety six.

Okay, and then what ultimately, so you missed all the fun during the.

I did I did. I planted the seeds.

Although back then performing credit card debt wasn't quite the same as ninja loans being fed into mortgage.

Back I mean square. And you know, I left JP Morgan to actually go work for First USA, one of the credit card companies, and and you know, part of that was this clear view of the trajectory that securitization was going to change the business. You know, little did I realize that a year later we'd get bought by Bank One because Bank One needed desperately to have a credit card business. And so my career made another pivot to go from the treasure of a startup credit card company to being the treasure of the eighth largest bank in the country.

Eventually you rise to the role of CEO of Private Client Services at Bank One. Tell us a little bit about that job.

Yeah, So Bank One had merged with for Chicago, the merger with Tumultis, and so the board ultimately brought in Jamie Diamond. I talk about it merging with Jamie, you know, because this combination was a terrible cultural fit. It was almost viewed as a Tiffany by his Walmart combination. The egos were not happy with it, and Jamie did a great job of sort of reminding people that the enemy was outside the business. But he quickly uncovered where the merger had not executed the way it meant to. One of those was in the client the wealth management area, where we had lots of great skills in terms of trust and private banking and all of these elements, but no general practitioner. It was like we were running a hospital with no folks who could who could look at the patient holistically. And so one of the first things I did in that job was to identify who can be the point person so that you can cross sell and deliver a much fuller array of products than just, you know, the single products we were offering.

You know, it's fascinating because there's the practice of investing and then there's the business of investing, and there are two very different things. I would imagine it's very similar in banking. There's the practice of banking and then the business of running a bank. You're what you're describing where the folks at Bank one were better at the former than the latter. Is that a fair way to say it was?

This was an organization that had grown by acquisition, and so the mindset was always buy revenue, cut expense by revenue cut expense, and so long as you can keep doing that, you leave some fundamentals un dealt with, right and when you stop the roll up, then you have to look at how do you how do you integrate it or in some cases spin things off. But I'll tell you my timing couldn't have been worse, Sperry. I took that job in early two thousand and basically rode the market down, and I'll tell you nothing teaches you more about how things work than watching them not work on the way down. And so it was really eye opening to see how overconfidence turns into panic as we went through the dot com bubble.

So you're anticipating my next question. It was your first book was Moods and Markets, the second book is all about confidence. What led to this interest in that aspect of behavioral finance? Was it the asset backed securities, was it watching a roll up entity, or was it the dot com collapse that sent asset prices depending on where you were invested. I like to remind people, nastec fell pete to troth eighty one percent. It's a big, big whack. That's great depression level fall.

Yeah. I would say that my interest didn't arise until the Great Financial Crisis. You know, I had left the industry. I turned forty five and my son said, halfway, your dad, you're halfway to ninety and not horrifying kind of a tough you know, punch to the gut. And the other way to look at it is all right. I man, at this far, it's so far, so good. So this was two thousand and six. For the first time in my adult life, I had the opportunity to move away from the trees and start to see the forest, and to see what was happening in the mortgage space to your point Ninja loans and the wildness there, and then to watch as sentiments started to fall, how things started to come apart. And I ended up advising some hedge funds because my background as a treasurer bank treasurer, I dealt with the rating agencies. I'd securitize stuff. I mean, I knew how things go bad. Having spent a lot of time in troubled banks at my time at JP Morgan, and so what interested me as Lehman collapsed and what was going on was this sense that the crisis isn't done. We're moving a lot of risk from the private sector to the public sector, but we have an eliminated risk. And at the same time, everybody's saying things are getting going to get worse, and now the market starts to turn up. And that combination of the crowd saying things are only going to get worse and the market going up was a game changer for me.

It's like, well, the term capitulation means surrender. Yeah, right, so when everybody throws in the towel, you know, I love asking people, you know, if they're bullish or beersh as. The first question and then the second question is what was your last transaction in the market. And invariably, if they're bullish, they just bought something, and if their bears, they just sold something. And it's a chicken and egg issue. Are they bullish because they bought something or did they buy something because they're bullish? Sometimes it's hard to tease the two apart.

It's entirely reflexive, and so I say a lot. Our confidence level, our stories, and our actions exist in equilibrium at all times. I don't care which is chicken or egg. I just know that if I talk to Barry Ritholtz and I know what you're doing, I know what your story is, and I know how you feel, and I can pick one of the three and pretty well deduce what the other two are likely to be.

You know, the old trader's aphorism is news follows price, meaning when the price stocks are going up, the narratives are great, and when the prices are going down, the narratives are usually negative. Although I have a vivid recollection. In the beginning, if they war, oil prices had spiked the same day US accidentally bombed and important mosque, and that was a headline, U Air Force accidentally destroys mosque, causing oil prices to spike. By the end of the day, oil prices had come back down and got negative. So the online headlines were US bombs my mosque accidentally, oil prices fall. It's like, well, which was it? Or maybe you're these just wholly unrelated things and we're trying to create a story.

Yeah, I always feel sorry for the daily news writers when you see major market reverses, because to watch them contort themselves to create a comfortable narrative, it's humorous.

Right, It's all hindsight bias and narrative fallacy and storytelling. So one of the things I was surprised to learn as I was reading your background, and you say you build on the insights of Robert Prector's work in socioeconomics, socioonomics, socioonomics, I've always pronounced that wrong. So a long time ago I read Prector's perspectives and was very influenced by his concept of the long cycle. You come out of World War Two, all these gis are returning to the US. There's the GI bill sending him to college, where building out suburbia, the rise of car culture, the rise of just the middle class, and that cycle seems to go a long time and last a while. How did Prector's work affect you?

So in twenty ten he did an interview for an organization called Minionville. Oh sure, Tod Harrison and I had been writing for Minionville, and I listened to Bob talk and he said something that I had not paid much attention to before or which was a reversal in causality, which is we tend to look at events causing us to change our feelings. Bob's recommendation and the foundation for socionomics is look at the mood before things happen. And suddenly it made so much sense to me that of course we act as we feel, and if I could then figure out what is consistent in those actions and connect them to feelings, then that might be something really useful, as whether it was in consulting or trading, to be able to connect preferences to the choices we make and how we feel.

So how does one go about measuring mood? How can you measure the sentiment of the public. It's not especially uniform. It seems to fluctuate, and as we've learned, we can always trust what people say.

Yeah, so I look at it very qualitatively, because mood is a feeling, and so the qualitative pieces matter more than the data to us data. We always have to interpret data, and so our feelings determine how we interpret. You know, sixty five degrees can feel both warm and cool. But what I try to do is to look at the stories, and stories are a great indicator of how we feel because our imagination of the future, the stories we tell perfectly mirror how we feel. Confidence is forward looking, and so my imagination of what's coming is going to be a reflection on my mood right now. And the media does a great job of letting me know what those stories are. Twitter and social media does a spectacular job. So does Google, I mean Google searches. I'm a big user of Google trends. It helps me to see what's the crowd interested, what are the stories we tell, and the word choices. So recently I see the word relentless being applied to the rise and interest rates as we're coming to an end of the third quarter of twenty twenty three. Well, relentless is a word that doesn't show up in stories until it's beginning to feel like something significant is about to happen.

Right, And if we're going to be objective and put some numbers on it, as much as we all would prefer lower rates, we've had eighteen nineteen months of rising rates, and rates are now back to where they've averaged over the past fifty years. So if you're being bloodless about it, hey, rates have returned to normal fairly quickly, and yet it doesn't feel that way.

But I can also look at the behavior of bond investors and look at the stampede that took place two years ago into negative yielding bonds and the stories that and along that, and the confidence that investors had.

And meaning at the very peak of the bond bull market just before the reversal took place.

Yeah, I mean you could. You could see this sense of permanence and power that that you know, nothing was going to be able to raise interest rates at that point, and so you had a story that perfectly aligned with negative interest negative yielding interest rates that was overlooked because of the the excitement that was happening in the markets and bond prices at record highs.

So, so how do you tease out of these broad events in society? What what the underlying nugget of important signal is? Uh, you had a tweet that cracked me up. I want to share when confidence is low, cars are round. So I started to think about that, and you have some of these ugly old citrones and the qt VW beetle, and then later on the pacer there have been some pretty round and not necessarily beautiful cars over the years. What's the correlation?

So I have to give credit to Mark Elishski, who works with Bob Prector on socioomis, because because Mark did this fabulous study that shows that cars are soft, they're round, their colors are bland, even though the woody. You know, if you think about sure, that's another low confidence indicator. And then you go to the other extreme and you have chrome, very.

Angulag war e type just long, beautiful.

Wide, you know, big engines. You know, you look at the Hummer, that was a classic, you know, that would be an indicator of of huge.

Sentiment, really really interesting. You know what.

The Mayback is one of my favorite indicators because it sort of comes and goes at these extraordinary moments in history.

Is that how you think about cars like the Hummer or the Maybach as just votes of confidence as to the near future.

Yeah, you know the Phaeton from Volkswagen. Again I recall terribly timed.

B twelve big long seven series competitor.

You know, the car companies want to deliver uber luxury to everybody at the top. I mean I spend a lot of time looking at LVMH because I think there's no better real time indicator for the financial elite.

People give me grief because I track Rolex and Protect prices and Ferrari and Porsche prices. There are a bunch of services that track that. It's like, why are you so obsessed on watchers and cars. No, I'm obsessed with what the top one or ten percent does because what they do is going to trickle down to the rest of I don't mean trickle down in Oregan sense, but their behavior has a huge impact on the rest of the economy. Absolutely, talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, So there are indicators to me to all levels of the economy. So if I want to look at the upper middle class, I'll look at a Carnival cruise line. Because travel requires us to plan, to have again a strong imagination of the future. We're going to admit some money we're committing. It's not an insignificant amount of money, and so that that becomes a great bell weather for me in terms of how how are those that are not you know, the one percent, but those that are doing well, how are they faring?

So I'm glad you mentioned carnival cruise lines because there's something that's been perplexing me and I don't want to just dumb it down to explain it, but sometimes dumbing it down does explain it. On the one hand, when we look at sentiment measures of the US population never been more negative, worse than nine to eleven, worse than the financial crisis, worse than the pandemic. People are super negative. And yet at the same time we have record boat sails pleasure craft. I don't mean like Carnival Corps line. I mean twenty twenty five thirty forty foot boats. If you're gonna go out and buy a boat, you're spending a lot of money. The boat is the cheapest part of boating, slip, the winter rising, the maintenance, They're just boating is not a cheap hobby. I don't understand why so many people are saying they're negative and yet so many people are going out and buying boats. Or are these just two different demographic cohorts.

So I think there are multiple demographic cohorts, and I wouldn't discount that today.

I bet this is a big overlap though that's my sense. When I see the like the Maga Armadas, everything is terrible with the Maga signs on their boats. It can't be that bad if you're in a forty foot yacht on the lake.

Yeah, and gallup. And you know, the University of Michigan, everybody's looked at the political impact on sentiment surveys.

A lot of it's just partisans. It's partisan.

And in fairness that this has been the case for quite a while, I.

Mean, but it's gotten much much worse.

It's gotten far worse. You know, the last time the parties felt the same was really the Great Financial Crisis. Coming out of that, you saw recovery on the part of Democrats, but no recovery whatsoever among Republicans.

Which in terms of sentiment, in terms of.

Sentiment, and so you know when people talk about, well, where did Donald Trump come from? When you look at consumer sentiment by political category, it becomes very evident what was behind that. You know, eight years of of Republicans feeling the same way they felt the weekend Lehman Brothers collapsed.

So let's talk about that for a second. Chris, I've heard this and I just don't get it. When Lehman collected and I'm not a believer that Lehman caused the financial crisis, it was merely the first trailer in the trailer park that the tornado took, but everybody had eaten the same bad food at the buffet. To mix metaphors, there were genuine moments of terror, Like I was in New York City. People were very frightened. I remember the head of my firm saying, you gotta stop spiking the football because there's blood in the streets and everybody's really not doing well. And that was a moment of like just genuine financial panic, which by the way, kept going for another six months until the market made their lows in March of two thousand and nine. That was September of two thousand and eight. And then you look around today and listen, nobody is thrilled with the state of Nobody likes either of the two leading candidates, Biden or Trump, to record negatives. You have all sorts of problems in the country, but can you really compare the state of the economy and three point something percent unemployment to unemployment over ten percent. People are concerned the ATM isn't going to work. How is that comparable to what's going on today?

It isn't if you measure it in terms of economic conditions. But confidence is about vulnerability, relative vulnerability, and I think that there are a lot of Americans who feel especially vulnerable. They feel culturally vulnerable, they feel religiously vulnerable, they feel in terms of issues of gender, and so I think that what a lot of our quote unquote economic confidence indicators are picking up is vulnerability that is far more fundamental to people's lives. And I think one of them is stakes the economists have been making is they're attributing too much of these indicators to economic connections rather than to the social and political connections that we're seeing that are quite profound.

So let's stay with that theme of political disenfranchisement and fear and nervousness about changes in society. When I look around at the sociological and demographic changes that have been taking place recently, they're the end of product of trends that have been around for decades. So the US has becoming increasingly diverse. Right, you and I are a bunch of old white males. We used to be the dominant majority. Then now we're a plurality, and eventually we're going to be a large minority. That trend has been in place for decades. The country kind of swings back and forth between the left and the right. I think what's happened is the younger generations have always been more progressive, but now the younger generations are you know, the sixties and seventies. Generations from those decades are in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and very often are in charge of organizations. Isn't a lot of what's going on just the culmination of things that are a long time coming. And I'm not saying people shouldn't be unaware of it. It just seems funny that, you know, post pandemic. Okay, now it's here and we all need to freak out.

Yeah. I look at the roots of this as having been sown in a comparable tumultuous time in the late nineteen sixties, early seventies.

Half a century ago.

Yeah, and so you had, I mean, think about the concerns that folks had in the early nineteen sixties. You have issue of civil rights, you have stonewall.

Gay rights, civil rights, women's rights rights straight down the list.

And so you have those who have felt vulnerable for a prolonged period of time saying I've had enough.

But the groups that seem to be making and maybe this is my So I'm college educated, I went to grad school, I live in a major East Coast city. I make a decent living. So I don't think of myself as the typical middle American, and so I will own up to Hey, that's my You know, I love the Woody Allen line from Annie Hall elitist New York Jewish socialist summer camp. Like that funny, funny line. But I know I don't see the world like a middle American. But that said, a lot of the folks who seem most upset about what's going on, none of this is new. If you're in West Virginia and used to work in the coal mine, Hey, is it a surprise that coal is going away? Am I Am? I to glib when I say that, or.

Yes, I think you are. Because if I think about those that are feeling vulnerable, they have clear senses of scarcity. They have job scarcity, they have relative health scarcity, they have mobility scarcity. I mean the abundance that those who have gained over the past fifty years they now see as having come at their expense. And this is something that we see a lot. When confidence is low. We acquire what I call zero some thinking where I now attribute my misfortune to your gain. That's interesting that you somehow benefited at my expense.

So we saw something very similar to this in the eighties and nineties as a lot of manufacturing jobs when overseas, and at the same time, the finance world, the banks, the private equity, the venture firms that were essentially financing these changes did exceedingly well. And so if you were if you worked in a clothing factory or a furniture factory, or even a steel or auto plant in the seventies, eighties, nineties, a lot of those jobs were shipped to cheaper labor overseas and entirely different group of people benefited. Is that some of the underlying animis absolutely across political, although it's hard to tell because a lot, very often it's almost like Russian nesting dolls, that it's not a clear Venn diagram of this blue circle and that yellow circle. There's a lot of green overlap in the middle.

Yeah, And I say to my friends in politics that the biggest divide is not left right, it's up down.

And I have said that for decades and felt like I was a lonely voice it's not left versus right. It's who owns the means of production and what your role is. Are you a capitalist owner or are you a wage slave? And not to again not to be too glib, but that's what's determined the winners and losers in our economy.

Yeah, and the pandemic only heightened that. You know you mentioned you know, the case shaped recovery because that phrase is a evolution of something that I started writing about in March of twenty twenty, which was the work from home confidence divide. Talk about an awkward mouthful, but you could see even before the month was out. Did those who could work in an office and migrate to home.

Meaning you had a computer at home, you had access to high speed internet, and you had a space where you could physically work. That's not everybody.

It's a very small populace. When you look at if.

You're if you're in a rural area that doesn't have broadbands, if you're in an inner city where you might not have forget internet, you might not have a computer. Big swaths of the population did not have access to work from home.

No, and we have a delivery system today that is extraordinarily enabling of that from Amazon to instacart, those at the top, the pandemic became an inconvenience. But let's talk about those that were serving those at the top.

Meaning medical people, delivery people, restaurant workers, food supermarket staff, transportation, food prep.

You know, all the factory you know, the chicken factories in Delaware, they didn't close. And so it's to me, it's not a surprise at all that where we're seeing work stoppages and strikes and protesters are highly constituted in people who felt intensely vulnerable during the pandemic and saw the rest of the world living a life that was unattainable to them. And so what concerns me, Barry, is not the depth of consumer confidence falling, it's the duration of it. You know, you can hold your breath underwater, whether it's ten feet or one hundred feet, you know, for a short period of time, but eventually you gotta breathe, And so all of the focus and sentiment is missing the compounding effect of duration. And I talk a lot about this notion of stacked vulnerabilities, where it's not one thing those at the bottom are struggling with, it's multiple things. One on top of the next, on top of the next, on top of the next. And so when you look at the social movements like Black Lives Matters that occurred when confidence was terribly low, you have this triggering event on the surface was relatively minor. I mean, we'd seen so many instances people being was but how many young black men were murdered over by cops over the best.

The difference is everyone has iPhones now, and so there was video of a lot of this, and everybody was already feeling stacked vulnerabilities, one on top of the next. So let me push back a little bit economically on this, and I just want to take the other side of the argument to flesh this out. So we have the Great Financial Crisis, so eight o nine, and essentially the banks were rescued, the average American not so much. Rates were taken down to zero, and that helped anything priced in dollars or credit. So owners of capital and owners of stocks, bonds, in real estate they did great. The average American not so much. And you could see that in the data. Mediocre recovery from nine to let's call it fourteen fifteen week GDP subpart job creation, little wage gains, consumer spending was mediocre, and by the way, the bulk of the government action was monetary. We're going to drive rates low, fiscal stimulus really mild. Then comes the pandemic. You have the biggest fiscal stimulus in US history, over ten percent of GDP, bigger than on a relative basis than the start of World War two, two point two trillion under Trump, then another eight hundred billion under Trump, then another nine hundred billion under Biden, and then all the Biden programs, the semiconductors, the infrastructure, the Inflation Act. So suddenly we go from all monetary, no fiscal, to all fiscal and some monetary. And as it turns out, the fiscal stimulus falls into the hands of the middle class and the lower class. Their savings rates go up, their spending goes up, inflation goes up. Aren't these two very different sets of circumstances, the post financial crisis and the post pandemic era. Isn't the middle and lower class better off? I think unemployment during the lockdown peaked in June of twenty one at one point six trillion dollars, a crazy number, Whereas the average American had to fen for themselves post financial crisis. Why are people more upset now than they were? I mean, what was Occupy Wall Street?

What was that?

Six months a year and it was forgotten about?

Yeah, but again was it occurred at a major low in confidence. Again, these spontaneous social movements are wonderful pinpoint moments that highlight when consumer confidence is low.

So I'm focusing on the economics, but what you're really saying is, despite the rescue plan, it hasn't really moved the needle on the confidence level.

No, and part of that is to those at the bottom. It was a necessary oxygen mask. But think about where that money went. It went to rent, It went to car.

Payments, basic basic survival things, food, medicine, rent, But that was it.

And it went through energy. It went through them. It didn't stay with them. It allowed them to catch their breath.

Allowed them to survive, for everybody was out of a job, but those.

At the bottom were under no illusion that it was temporary.

Yeah, No, that makes perfect sense. I want to get to the book. But before I get to the book, I got to ask a political question, which is what was the impact of the January sixth attack on the capital on the confidence of the nation because everybody kind of forgets the first days after that, I think everybody was really taken up, and then the story kind of changed.

I'd look at January sixth a little differently. January sixth is what happens when a large group sees a sense of powerlessness and uncertainty and feels defeated and needs to act.

Well, let's address that. Because a large group is defeated every four years, and normally they go back to their jobs and say we'll get them next time. This group did not feel that way, and if you watch the video, it's pretty clear they're hell bent on stopping the transition transition of power. This was very unusual. So what led to that.

Let's keep the politics out of it. I'm just looking at sentiment. To me, no one should have been surprised by what happened, really, yeah, and why because there are five natural reactions that we have in those moments. Flight and flight we're familiar with for sure, the other follow and there was a lot of that going on, for sure, Freeze and there was a little bit of that, and then the last one, if you'll pardon my French is the F word where we just say it and so We should have been expecting all of that to manifest in that moment. The groups had been primed for it.

Huh.

I mean you go back and look at the messaging.

The message boards were on fire. The FBI has subsequently revealed, Yeah, No, there was a lot of chatter.

Stories, feelings, actions exist in equilibrium, Berry, and that was absolutely a situation where the stories and feelings naturally manifested in that behavior. I look at that moment not any different than I look at other spontaneous social events, you know, the Arab Spring. You know, this is what happens free by something that's relatively insignificant in that and so your point, then confidence fell. It depended on which side of the political spectrum you were on, because at that moment you had confidence among Republicans being impacted by the failed attempt. At the same time you had Democrats feeling vulnerable because of this underlying sense of threat. And so you saw in the data. You know, January twenty twenty one is not a pretty sentiment indicator of mood, just given.

What was happening, quite fascinating. So let's talk a little bit about the confidence map. Essentially, your argument is a hidden factor driving both human decision making and broad economic decision making. Is confidence? That thesis seems like a big lift. Explain it.

Yeah, it is a big lift. But I think first of all, we have to come up with an accurate definition of confidence, okay, because we end up getting caught up in a lot of confidence theater, you know, the appearance of you know, entertainers and sports figures, sort of the bravado of culture, and we also mix it with self esteem and self confidence. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about our feeling relationship with the world around us and in.

The meaning how confident we are about our ability to survive, thrive, et cetera in the world around us.

Yeah, to navigate what's ahead. So if we think about that, then it becomes what does that really mean? And to be successful in that, I need to feel that things are predictable, that there is a sense of certainty to what will happen next. And that could be because I can extrapolate from the past, but I need to have a vision of a clear road ahead of me.

Why is that so important? Because they think about through most of human history everything has been uncertain. You know, you didn't have local police or a military. You never knew when the next tribe over was going to come and take your food and your women and chop your head off and go on with their lives. Why is certainty so important.

Because we abhor randomness. To not have a sense of predictability means that everything is potentially random, which means that I have to be on alert and that's.

Exhausting, stressful, tiring. Just yeah, I could see that.

Yeah, So you're having to just survey the landscape all the time. And you know, COVID is a great example where the visibility that people had was negligible, and so knowing what's coming next, or at least thinking we do, is vital. The second piece of that is a sense of control that I have the skills, the resources, the prepper, the training, whatever I need to be able to succeed. So having a clear road is great if I'm behind the wheel, but knowing how to drive is as important. Sure, And so the only way we're confident is when those two feelings coincide. When I feel that I know it's coming and I've got it. Those feelings are what give me a sense of confidence.

So I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I want to point out maybe the exceptions. In my world, people are confident about things they shouldn't be. They see certitude in things that are random. They claim to understand what's coming next, when reality is they have with the slightest idea, how do you transfer studying societal confidence to a field like investing When my definition is investing as a probabilest exercise using unreliable information about an inherently unknowable future, meaning wherever you look there's no certitude, lack of predictability. How do you apply confidence to the world of investing.

Yeah, so I teach a class in financial economics at William and Mary. In the first day of class, what is it about finance that makes its difference? It's, you know, it's decision making where the outcome is to be determined. So whether I'm lending, borrowing, investing, and so anytime I'm doing that, I am deluding myself if I do feel confident, because all investment decisions are made in an environment where I have control but no certainty. In my book, I call that the launch pad.

It's control but no certainty.

Okay, And so if I'm talking to a group of investors, I'm challenging them with their belief that they should be confident in the first place. So, what's the story you're telling yourself, Barry. If you're buying something, well, now you're imagining the future. Now you're creating this vivid picture of what the future looks like, and to the extent that you're really certain. What's that's saying to me is you're risking being delusional, both if you're certain it's going to be unicorns and rainbows or if it's going to be the depths of hell. So when you're making an investment decision, it's okay to plan for the future that you imagine, but you need to be prepared for the future that you can't imagine, but to appreciate that you're making a decision in an environment that is not confidence.

So I don't disagree with any of the things you're saying. How can we use the general lack of certainty? How can we evaluate what at least what people say about their confidence level, their certitude to help us make investment decisions.

Yeah, the more certain the crowd, the less likely the outcome. If I look at extremes in sentiment, there is not only a certainty of what's coming, the expectation is prolonged. It's powerful, it's unstoppable. You know, the word unstoppable is one that always catches my breath. You know when when Time magazine put unstopped, you know, can Hillary Clinton be stopped? It was like, no, She's done. So I appreciate that these these narratives, there's force to them. There's a real strong energy to the narratives that is mirrored in decision making and action. That reflects this unbridled disregard for any kind of risk management because I know what's coming. That the headlines around SPACs in early twenty twenty one were extraordinary in terms of this cornucopia of clear certainty of what was ahead.

That's pretty fair. In fact, the there's rarely consensus in the marketplace, but when there is, I always like to point out it's right before a major reversal. So early two thousand, hey, it was pretty clear that trees grow to the sky, go to March oh nine, it's clear the market's going to zero, right, who's ever going to be on the other side of your trade? The consensus when everybody agrees is okay, who's left to sell at that point, right.

And there's another angle to it, which is you're an idiot if you don't agree.

That comes a little earlier though, but there's like, think about the fomo trade in crypto that have fun being poor whoor yeah, right, that was forty fifty not quite sixty thousand, but it was close. It was on the way up.

And so you see these same behavioral trades, same narratives, over and over and over, and in my book, what makes them so wonderful is I can put a pin in it. I can identify, oh, we're around here, just based on the stories the actions.

So let's talk about something you mentioned, the COVID pandemic. In the book. You have like a six year chart of the corporate mentions of the word unprecedented, and essentially it's the bottom of the chart. It's just scooping along the bottom for years, and then by the time you get to June July of twenty twenty, it spikes and stays up for the better part of the next year or so. And ironically, as COVID nineteen might have been unprecedented in the modern era, a century earlier we had a national influenza pandemic a respiratory illness COVID wasn't as unprecedented as people thought.

No, and there's nothing unprecedented about the nature of our response, the nature of our stories, the nature of our feelings. It was history rhyming in so many ways. Beauty of the word unprecedented is it became shorthand for almost whatever we wanted it to mean. For executives, it became this universal get out of jail free cart because.

Our earnings and revenues stink because of this unprecedented.

How could I have been expected to be prepared for this? And we see this over and over and over, and a few pages later I put up the chart that shows the same terminology was used during two thousand and eight during the financial crisis. Suddenly you know, once again, we have this unprecedented catastrophe, and we accept that because it mirrors the way we feel. At the same time.

Ray Dalio has this wonderful definition of unprecedented. He says, unprecedented means you're too young to have remembered. It hasn't happened in your lifetime, but if you look at history, it certainly has happened before. Nothing is under the.

Sign No, the means at which we express our level of vulnerability or euphoria may change, but the actions and the underlying nature of the behaviors, the preferences are all the same.

Quite amazing. So let's talk a little bit about launch pad. You mentioned the launch pad environment. Explain what that means.

Yeah, So there are four environments that I highlight in my book that relate to our mix of certainty and control. The comfort zone where we have both of them, the stress center where we have neither of them.

And when you say certainty in control ones, the X axis ones of ys that you have four quadrants of either high certainty and high control, low certainty and low control, and then one or the other.

And so most people when they think about confidence, think about those two.

Boxes high certainty, high control.

And low certainty low control. It's like a buy one, get one free. But the reality is that our lives give us moments where we have one but not the other. If you've taught your kids to drive, that's an environment where you have certainty but no control, and then suddenly it can go from feeling really good in the passenger seat to feeling terrifying. It's the same thing on an airplane, I call it the passenger's seat. For that reason, the launch pad is an environment where we have control but no certainty. You could think about this as a rock climber rising up a cliff side, and so that the issue is do I plummet to my death back into the stress center, or do I safely navigate it into the comfort zone. It's the classic hero's journey is comfort zone, stress centers, launchpad back into the comfort zone. The launch pad is important because a lot of our decision making is there anytime we set off on a journey, anytime we're investing, we're making choices without knowing what's ahead, and organizations go back and forth between liking those environments and not. Entrepreneurs love that environment, you know, give them a steering wheel and they'll put the car in forward, reverse, you know, whatever it takes. They love that area.

So let's take this to the ten thousand foot view. Can we look at historic economic cycles and see how confidence waxes and wanes, and can we use that to extrapolate forward from where we are currently.

Yeah, So I think of us as going on this trolley car ride from the peak of the upright corner of the comfort zone to the bottom of the lower left side of the of the stress center, and that we just go back and forth. In terms of economists think of that as cycles. I think of it in this sort.

Of well moving it's a sign wave.

And if it's the quatran, you're back and forth, just back and forth, and you can see it. And one of the easiest ways to see it Berrier is in our preferences, because.

What sort of preferences give us.

Example, so what we want when confidence is low is all about me here now. So if there's a problem, if I'm feeling vulnerable, there's a bear outside my tent, the only thing that now matters is me in this moment, right here, and that has a big bearing on the choices that I make.

I'm not so personal, local and present.

And present right now. So my decision making is impulsive, maybe tactical, but it's sure not strategic. It's reactive. It is focused on what's good for me, and if it's bad for you, too bad. If it's bad for tomorrow, too bad.

I'm right now, I'm dealing with a bet.

I'm dealing with what I got.

But whether it's a real bear or a market bear, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, right. So, and there's another element to it, which is I need things to be concrete. That that psychologists use the term hypotheticality. I hate that word. But everything I want when confidence is low has to be really concrete. It's why we it's why we hoard physical cash. We get the water from Costco. We know, we.

Want talking maslow hierarchy of needs like food, shelter, you know, uh, heat, energy, just real basics stuff.

And it's here that the cash in the bank isn't close enough. So to your point, you know, why are you going to the atm on that day Lehman collapse because the bank that was around the corner is too far away from you. I want the cash in the mattress. In fact, during that Greek.

And who knows if the bank is even gonna work.

On Yeah, I mean in the Greek crisis, they were selling mattresses with pre installed safety.

Come on, no really, but but.

But so let's think about our preferences today. We have a whole industry geared towards me here now, preferences, Netflix, cuic all of the I phone, iPod you know, everything is geared to deliver what I want when I want now.

I can't wait for instant gratification. I need it sooner, right and so Amazon New York City same hour delivery.

Twitter is another, I mean, talk about me here now, manifestations of decision making.

It's called X now excuse me, but it's the same thing. It's that instant dopamine hit. I want it right now, I want.

It right now.

Huh.

And so we're You know, if I look at our culture, it's incredibly me here now environment. And if I look at its impact take pre and post pandemic. We go from just in time supply chain delivery to just in case to nearshoring. So suddenly I want my warehouses, my manufacturing. You know, you look at Europe. You know, during the energy crisis last summer, suddenly national energy po es, national manufacturing policies, national security policies, that the the our willingness to rely on complex global systems evaporates. In a crisis. We want to be sure that what we need is available within arm's length.

How much of this is just generals fighting the last war? Listen, just in time inventory clearly proved itself to be problematic, and near shoring or even building plants here in the US is a solution to that. But it always feels like anybody who looked at this issue knew this was a problem. Nobody believed it until after a crisis.

Right, And that's that's always the nature of it. So so we build bigger, wider, further distributing, you know that the change we create this complexity. We saw this in the in the mortgage world, where you know, we wertgage going.

From here to there, video square and on and on.

And at the same time it's it's like a Jenga tower. Whereas we're building it taller and taller, we're also taking pieces out because we think we can create even greater and greater efficiency. And I joke a lot that our level of scrutiny and our confidence levels are inversely related. The more confident I am, the less I have to focus, so the less I do focus.

So let's address me here. Now, what's the opposite of that is that we there later.

What I say, us everywhere forever.

Us everywhere forever. So when does confidence signal us everywhere? For was that a late two thousands then? Because confidence was so so in the late two twenty twenties also.

So a lot of futuristic investing, and I would say early twenty twenty one we saw a one wonderful bubble of it in terms of EVS and space and SPAX.

And what about today with AI and large language models? Is that a very long distance confidence sort of thing. It is.

But what's so interesting to me, Berry is our picks of the companies that we're interested in. So in twenty twenty one, are intrigued with futuristic technology led us to buy startups, you know, companies that didn't even exist at that point. Today we're buying shares of Amazon and Google and.

Apple, that the thorough magnificent seven.

And to me, that's a real telling indicator that we're not as confident today as we were, because.

It's very interesting. In other words, the focusing on the biggest, best, most well established companies is a sign of a lack of self confidence, whereas the remaining four hundred and ninety three companies in the S and P five hundred we're ignoring. And that's a sign of that, that lack of future expectation.

Yes, I mean, you look at the gap between you know, the small cap index and the.

Megans large as it's ever ever been, and that.

That is us our natural preference for, you know, certainty in cash flow and earnings, and you know, we know those brands and those products, and so that's fascinating.

So I had recalled during the pandemic lockdown the first few months, I went back and looked at some history, because when you see the pandemic and the thirty four percent market drop, you know, you go back and look at history for non market related, non economic issues, terrorist attacks and wars and presidential assassinations and you know, tsunamis and just something that comes from outside the financial system. You know, I jokingly said, the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs had the same impact. Historically, you could look at about a four dozen of these. What happens is markets wobble and then they continue doing what they were doing before. So when nine to eleven happened, markets were falling beforehand, they wobble and then they continued to fall. When the pandemic happened, markets were rising, they wobbled, and then they really recovered very rapidly. So I wrote a column for Bloomberg that unfortunately has published April first, April Fool's Day, of twenty twenty. Don't assume the pandemic has ended the bull market. I have never gotten more hate mail for anything I've written since before or since. And the irony is I wasn't saying go buy him. I was just saying, don't assume it's over, because here's what history came before. And by the way, that turned out to be correct. And we got a lot of pushback from clients. I understand my dry cleaner's closing, the local movie theater shut, the local retailer shut. Yeah, but those guys aren't in the s and P five hundred. Look at what's in the s and P five hundred. Microsoft, Apple, Hey you could work from home. Netflix and docu Sign and Peloton and all of those companies did really well. And the ones that survived were the ones that continued to operate after the pandemic. So Teledoc and Peloton and docu Sign and to some degree Netflix, they all got shellacked after we reopened. But the big tech companies have held up well. How much of this is just their addressing the market versus concern about uncertainty. So we're going to stick with the tried and true.

I think that we saw a major peak in early twenty twenty one in terms of enthusiasm. All the speculative bubble, right, we're seeing a less robust peak.

People are running, people are running out of savings. All the pandemic large ass is now fading that biggest through the python.

We've also connected mood between stocks and bonds. One of the things that was so interesting to me about early twenty twenty one is we had a reasonably coincident peak in bond prices and stock enthusiasm at the same time you.

Had a forty year bullmarket and bonds that came to an end. You know, you had that ice. Blame fiscal but there are a lot of other theories for why inflation spiked and started that tightening round by the Fed. But there's no doubt a bond market ended around the same bull market ended around the same time the post pandemic bull market slowed.

And so we have this declining confidence in stocks and bonds at the same time.

And which is the last time we had that was forty years ago.

Yeah, And people look at their diversified pie charts and see all these different asset classes. I look at those pie charts differently to say how's the sentiment aligning with all of these because we have a lot of cooling sentiment in many, many pieces of the pie at the same time.

Huh really, that's quite fascinating. So the world isn't black and white. There's a lot of subtlety and nuance, a spectrum of choices, but we all tend to reduce everything to yes, no, up, down, black or white choices. How can you look at confidence? How can you look at sentiment to help you make decisions when there's so many shades of gray?

Yeah, So if I'm an investor, I think it's useful to look at the crowd sentiment rather than your own. We're not always good judges of our own behavior, and we can be more honest judges of others sometimes, you know, painfully honest. But market crowds tend to be almost like a middle school environment where it's it's very social. I joke that, you know, financial markets are social networks with money instead of likes. We put money in and take it out.

It's a popularity. It's a peculiarity, but no thumbs up. It's just cash.

It's just cash, and and that becomes a useful way to look at where's the crowd putting money, where's the crowd excited? Where's the crowd you know, Oh, you wore that you you're a you know, you can't sit with us, And so that that sort of middle school arrangement in the markets becomes a pretty honest sense of where the crowd broadly is. Are their managers who are on the other side of those trades. Absolutely, when I think about the market's mood, the market is a pretty quick, deciding, homogeneous blob that is of average middle school intelligence. It cannot do system too thinking to borrow from connoment. It's only capable of system when thinking, So you shouldn't try to you know, don't try to be too smart, just try to think. You know, how is the high school student thinking about this?

So you're reminding me of the famous Benjamin Graham quote. In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it's a weighing machine. So you get sentiment in the beginning, but later on things should return to what their actual values are.

Yeah, I mean, we're going to overshoot, and particularly when confidence is low, we're likely to be much more impulsive, more emotional than we might otherwise be. I think that was one of the lessons that people missed with meme stocks.

It wasn't about the stocks, it was about the mood at the moment, the.

Mood and the willingness of people to jump into the crowd. You know, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd in the markets, and so we should not be surprised if what goes up like that also comes down like that.

Huh really really quite interesting. So let's talk a little bit about some recent market moods. We were talking about meme stocks. You know, the old timers like myself looked at the various meme stocks and kind of snickered to ourselves and said, I've seen this movie before, I know how it's going to end. And yet still those meme stocks did their thing. They exploded higher before ultimately they crashed and burned. Where's amc now? Down ninety eight percent? A lot of the big meme stocks games stop also way off its eyes when you see this starting during the lockdown? What are your thoughts about these memestocks? What does that triggering you?

Two things? It's sort of an interesting combination of both extremes and mood because you have the nihilism that naturally comes with low confidence, and so you have folks who have cash to actually execute that nihilism and buy lottery tickets. Is kind of what was going on. But you also have the novice and naive, and they're a crowd I like to follow because they're always the last to the party and they're a great tell. In fact, more recently we had a little flurry of memestock behavior in the summer of twenty twenty three. It's a great indicator that we're reaching a climax in mood when it's amateur hour.

Meaning to the upside or to the downside both, Oh really yeah.

Because sadly the novice and naive are the last to buy, they're also the last to sell, the last to capitulate.

Someone's got to be on the wrong side of the train.

And so they buy at the extreme and they sell at the low and are just brutally punished as a result. But it's useful because bubbles unwind on a lipho basis last and first, last in, first out. So no surprise that the meme stocks and companies like Peloton have just been pummeled the shots at the top and then they leave via a high story window.

You know, if you've lived through this before. And I remember watching Tealdoc and Docu Sign and Peloton all the work from Homestocks, and I remember specifically saying, I know these are going to be moonshots, and I know they're going to be disasters. I'm not sure I'm confident enough that I'm going to get the timing right. And I got to think a lot of other people looked at it similarly. Someone made a ton of money on the way up, and someone made a ton of money on the way.

Down, and it may be the same people. Uh huh, I mean, sadly, I think those that wrote it up also wrote it.

Down crushed on the way down.

And we've seen the same thing in crypto, that sense that it's going to come back, It's definitely going to come back, and.

That muscle memory fades after about a year of beating yep, and finally you just stop buying the dips. That just goes away. So let's now roll this into the twenty twenty three fourth quarter. Environment politics generally has become darker and negative, But I don't ever recall a period in American history where the leading candidates for the two major parties are both widely disliked not only by the population at large, but their own parties aren't big as fans. The Democrats say Biden's too old. The Republicans say Trump, who's only what two and a half years younger than Biden, isn't fit. You have both parties wishing for alternatives. When was the last time that happened?

So you can go back to the early nineteen eighties. I think it was John Anderson.

I recall helped Clinton get elected.

It would not surprise me if both Biden and Trump are not on the ballot a year from now.

Really yeah, because you go to the bedding sites, they seem to think it's a head to head.

Absolutely, But watch how we use the term old. You know, the old can mean wives experience or resilient. It can also mean decrepit, it can meet out of touch. And if you think about Joe Biden's career, he came into office as the young buck against an aging group of politicians on a national level.

On a national level, we have once.

Again and we are back to that, both parties, House, Senate, even the Supreme Court. We have a lot of people who are, let's just politely say, AARP members. Yeah, and I don't I don't think we have seen yet the kind of grassroots political leader who rises from within, and and I think that that is a real possibility. What's what's interesting with both parties is that we have these figures who are seeking to control from above.

Right.

History suggests that in times of turmoil we choose from within, that leaders that come sort of unexpectedly from below and not the ones that we expect. I mean, I look at somebody like Zelensky, who no one believed would be a credible leader, and yet from my perspective, had all the traits of a great crisis leader. You know, can read the room, is you know.

Just on his feet, relatively intelligent.

And and I don't know if it's the case for him, but you know a lot of comedians suffer from depression, and you know, if you're in a crisis, you know, uncertainty and powerlessness is called Tuesday. My friend Asergami has written a wonderful book on leader crises in the relationship to to mental illness. But it would not surprise me berry to see young local politicians, governors, mayors who upend the rhetoric and surprise on both sides of the party.

Huh, that's interesting. We've touched very briefly on social media. Let's talk about media generally and social media on a related basis. There's been so much misinformation, there's been so much problems being able to have trustworthy sources. How can we look at centiment and confidence as a way to deal with these issues.

Yeah, So when confidence is high, we go to the center. We watch three networks, you know, ABC, CBS, NBC.

Still is that still no?

But my point is that in the nineteen sixties, as confidence was peaking, we're all watching the same news stories from the same.

We've been totally bulkanized since then, and there's a thousand channels.

Yeah, and the Balkanization that takes place today can be instantaneous. So as your mood changes, very if I create a more resonant deliverer and you could watch this on the right with Fox the News Mix than on. As republic and confidence change, you will find the provider of news that is most me here now you and the Internet and social media enables that, like there's no tomorrow, and and we forget that familiarity and truthiness are much more appealing to us than the truth.

We're all confirmation bias and less fact checking than we want to admit.

To, particularly when confidence is low.

But let let's stick with oh really, particularly.

When because if I've if I've got all these other things to focus on, I don't have the cognitive bandwidth that's fair to do the fact checking.

So let's apply the same left right analysis that we were talking about with economics before, and it's more up down than left right. When I look at both social media and and mainstream media, I often find people who are arguing left right or missing the point. It's usually more what's more sensationalistic, what's more clickbaity, what's more hair on fire, and what's more structurally here's the horse race, So let's not talk about policy. Who's ahead right now? It's always what's the easiest way to generate eyeballs than it is to provide more heat than light, so to speak.

Yeah, So to our media focus is intensely about resonance, relevance, and that creates several problems. One is the media has to follow its audience as opposed to lead its audience. The media also has to create even greater excitement. So I joke often that we've gone from the circus Barker's promoting a two headed lady. You know, the lady now has to have about fifteen heads to capture attention, and that becomes unsustainable. One of the things if you think about our culture of followership, the goal is dependence. And so whether I'm a politician, a member of the media, a pundit at large, the goal is permanent dependence. You have to keep coming back to me. And what I'm looking for, Barry, are leaders who are talking about empowerment that send a message. And again this could be. This is where I think up down may matter. Is if I send a message of empowerment to those at the bottom, you could easily draw together a court from both the left and the right that generates this grassroots movement.

Pardon me for personalizing this, but you seem fairly optimistic that in this time of uncertainty and partisanship and negative sentiment and just general disarray, you seem fairly optimistic that we're going to come out of this.

Okay, I guess I would say I am optimistic that we will tire of the uncertainty. We will tire of the powerlessness, and groups will seek to regain or gain in depending on the situation, certainty and control in their lives. How that struggle plays out, I don't know, but there is no question in my mind that the uncertainty will end. It may be chaotic, you know, it could be civil war as groups fight for what is what does certainty mean for you versus what it means for me? But we don't endure this, well, the.

One hundred years War doesn't. The reason we haven't had one sense is who wants to be at war for one hundred years? Yeah? Huh? Really quite interesting. And let's jump to our favorite question, starting with what are you streaming these days? Tell us what you're either watching or listening to.

So we're streaming murders in the building. My wife assesses and trains autistic adults, and so we've been watching Love on the Spectrum, which is a really heart warmings you know, I watch what my wife's organization does to transform autistic adults lives and even more their parents' lives, and so it's really heartwarming to see that there's there are so many opportunities that we ignore otherwise.

Huh, really really interesting. Tell us about some of your early mentors who helped to shape your career.

I think of some of the mentors I had at JP Morgan, particularly a guy named Dave Wakefield. You know, going into an organization like JP Morgan when I did, it was an organization that was about to undergo mammoth transformation, and what I sow value was the wisdom of what we might refer to now as old heads. You know, the world of finance is typically filled with young, aggressive You had these folks who would like yes, and you know, to your point, they'd seen it before. There was nothing new under the sun. And I really feel like a lot of organizations miss that sense of judgment, and so I feel really blessed to have had that.

Huh, very interesting. Let's let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites. What are you reading now?

Yeah, so interestingly very one. Reading is very difficult for me, But I spend so much of my day reading because I'm trying to capture what's going on in politics and economics and finance all at the same time that by the end of the day I want to go pull weeds in vegetable garden. I want to you know, reading is I'm embarrassed to say it, but it just it takes me a couple of days on vacation before I can.

Crack a b That's my favorite place to read is on vacation, read a book on vacation, or when I'm prepping for a podcast. So let's go to our final two questions. What advice would you give to a recent college grad who is interested in a career in either finance or studying sentiment, So in.

The in the world of finance, I would say, don't feel beholden to New York. I think there's a lot of folks who come out of college with that. You know, if I don't make it in New York, you know. And what I love so much about finance today is that there are opportunities in so many different angles of it in so many different places.

Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, San Francisco, the number of Atlanta, the number of financial hubs have expanded dramatically, and there is pretty active. You know, venture capital used to be just San Francisco. There are a number of venture hubs all over the country.

And to your question about sentiment, I think a lot of economists and finance professionals focus a lot of energy on what we do poorly, what we do wrong, and I think we need more attention on what do we just do? You know, if our objective is to change people's behavior, we need to understand what do we do that's unscripted. And I feel like the reason I wrote this book is to say this is what we just do. And if I understand that better, then I can start to make better decisions.

And our final question, what do you know about the world of finance, investing sentiment confidence today? You wish you knew thirty or so years ago when you were first getting started.

That what I think doesn't matter. To be successful, I need to understand how others think and feel because at the end of the day, my price is a function of their behavior.

In other words, the crowd determines market price, the crowd determined sentiment. It's all about the wei, not the me. Absolutely huh, really fascinating, Peter, Thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Peter Atwater, author of the Confidence Map, charting a path from Chaos to Clarity. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the previous five hundred such discussions we've had over the past nine years. You can find those at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Sign up for my daily reading list at rid Halts dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Rid Halts or on X at Barry Underscore Rid Halts. Follow all of the Bloomberg Family of podcasts at podcast I would be remiss if I did not thank our crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Sarah Livesey is my my audio engineer. Anna Luke is my producer. A Teak of Albron is our project manager. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Uholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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