• The Lowest Consumer Sentiment EVER: We are currently sitting at the lowest level of consumer sentiment in the past 75 years!. Lower than the Great Financial Crisis when the stock market crashed almost 60%, the financial system nearly imploded and the unemployment rate reached more than 10%. Lower than the aftermath of the dot-com bubble bursting which included a 50% stock market crash, a recession and 9/11. Ben Carlson on the new Michigan low — historically a contrarian buy signal, but the gap between sentiment and spending has gotten weird. The chart and the caveat in one post. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Chip Rally Is at $5.7 Trillion and Counting. How Much Further Can It Go?: WSJ on the semiconductor complex’s total market cap, the unit economics underneath, and the multiple expansion that has done most of the work. Sober the next time someone quotes “still early.” Surging demand for chip makers has lifted major indexes from their wartime malaise (Wall Street Journal) see also The Chip Rally Has Gone Parabolic. It’s Time to Separate the Pillars From the Pretenders. A furious rally has raised fears of a new bubble. If and when the party ends, five stocks will be left standing. They all remain undervalued. (Barron’s)

• Ford’s Stock Is Surging — and It’s Got Nothing to Do With Its Car Business: WSJ on why Ford Credit is now driving the equity story. The legacy automaker has become a financial-services company that happens to ship sheet metal. (Wall Street Journal)

• The 4% rule is now the 4.7% rule. That matters for your retirement. The 4% rule has drawn praise and pillory for years. Now, says its author, it’s time for a revisionto 4.7%. The revision illustrates both the strength and weakness of the original rule. (USA Today)

• Independent bookstores are multiplying, although many people still think they’re dying out: The Inquirer on the indie-bookstore comeback — romantasy demand, third-place economics, and what Amazon and the chains can’t quite replicate. The vibe shift has numbers behind it. The latest numbers from the American Booksellers Association show independent stores expanding at a pace not seen this century. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

• You Won the Battle on Investment Fees. You’re Losing the War Against Taxes.: Jason Zweig on where the real frictions in long-horizon returns live now — not expense ratios, but capital-gains drag, turnover, and the bracket math no one models. Required reading. (Wall Street Journal)

• A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It. The math world is losing its mind over the new solution to an Erdős problem. This is what AI found, how we missed it—and why it matters. WSJ on an OpenAI model knocking out an Erdős problem that had been open for eighty years. The “calculator for proofs” framing is starting to look closer to reality than to hype. (Wall Street Journal)

• This High Schooler Developed an A.I. Tool to Diagnose Autism and ADHD Using the Retina: Smithsonian on a high-school project that turned a fundus camera into a screening tool. The headline is cute; the underlying methodology is not. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Three Ways Trump Is Losing the War: At the moment, the United States is negotiating with a regime that President Trump claimed we had already changed, to open a strait that was supposed to be open last month, and to end a nuclear program that we said we had obliterated. NYT opinion on the three distinct fronts where the Iran campaign has gone sideways — operational, diplomatic, domestic. Cleaner taxonomy than most of the cable coverage. (New York Times) see also Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled in Negotiations: The Atlantic on the pattern: Trump opens hot, the counterparty waits him out, and the climbdown gets framed as a deal. Iran is just the latest specimen. (The Atlantic)

• When Fame Comes Very, Very Late: Bob Graboyes on the people who hit their stride after sixty — composers, novelists, scientists. A reasonable antidote to the 30-under-30 ecosystem. (Bastiat’s Window)

Video of the day: Why Aldi is destroying traditional grocery stores.

Grok is the most sycophantic AI model

Source: Center for AI Safety via Paul Kedrosky

Be sure to check out our special Masters in Business this week, Remembering Jonathan Clements with Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. The two recall Clements’ impact on the investor community; they discuss his posthumous book, “Money and Me.”

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• Let There Be Luce: The Electric Ferrari Is Finally Here: Wired’s first look at the Ferrari Luce — the EV the marque kept delaying. Performance numbers, sound design, and the open question of whether Ferrari resale survives a powertrain swap. (Wired)

• “Seriously the best boss ever”: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant: A Guardian long-read on Lesley Groff, the assistant who scheduled Epstein’s life for two decades. The “I had no idea” defense rendered, in detail, completely impossible. No one’s name appears in the Epstein files more than that of Lesley Groff, his assistant. Reading through the thousands of emails, a troubling question arises: what did she know? (The Guardian)

• Tomatoes become latest symbol of America’s affordability squeeze: Tomatoes, ubiquitous in everything from fast-food burgers to haute cuisine, are taking on a new role beyond the plate: A nagging reminder of rising costs. Prices for those red orbs have soared more than any other food product over the past year to cement a spot as one of the consumer headaches du jour. AP on how Mexico tariffs landed straight on the supermarket tomato bin. The first-order story everyone said wouldn’t happen, happening on schedule. (Associated Press)

• Stablecoins Are Private Money. That’s Why They’re a Risk to the Economy. Financial innovations often lead to upheaval and instability. Despite new regulations, those risks persist with stablecoins. Financial innovations often lead to upheaval and instability. Despite new regulations, those risks persist with stablecoins. (Wall Street Journal)

• When “survival of the fittest” justified monopolies and the slow death of democracy: Big Think excerpts a new book on how Gilded Age robber barons used Spencerian Darwinism to justify their consolidation — and how the present rhymes more than it should. (Big Think)

• The High-Seas Black Market That Keeps Iran’s Illicit Oil Flowing: WSJ on the shadow tanker fleet — flag-of-convenience swaps, AIS spoofing, ship-to-ship transfers — that keeps Iranian crude moving despite sanctions. The sanctions-versus-physics scoreboard. Despite U.S. sanctions, the regime has managed to sell billions of dollars in crude to China using a clandestine network of aging tankers. Our reporters paid a visit. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Wrong Stalker: He was an addict. She was his counselor. Who was preying on whom?: A SF Chronicle investigative project that resists every easy frame. The kind of long-form local-paper journalism people keep saying is dead while a few outlets quietly keep doing it. (San Francisco Chronicle)

• This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention: Shortly after brandishing his infamous chainsaw on a conservative conference stage last February, Elon Musk attended a Cabinet meeting where, giggling slyly, he admitted to having “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention in his haste to obliterate the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he added coolly at the time, “and there was no interruption.” That claim has since proven to be disastrously, profoundly untrue. (Yahoo News)

• MAGA Hogs at the Government Trough: The American Prospect cataloging the federal contracts now flowing to MAGA-aligned firms. The grift isn’t hidden anymore; it’s the line-item. (The American Prospect) see also The year Trump broke the federal government: A long, interactive Post piece on what DOGE-era cuts have done to federal capacity. The bill comes due gradually, then all at once. (Washington Post)

• Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help: ProPublica on a family whose Oklahoma property is being slowly destroyed by neighboring oil-and-gas waste — and the state agency that exists to address exactly this declining to act. Regulatory capture in one specific human story. The Merediths were forced to abandon their house after it filled with black goo, reaching gas concentrations at explosive levels. Despite evidence of oil and gas pollution, the state “wanted to act like it would go away,” the family says. (ProPublica)

Video of the day: The 911 Is the New Rolex: Porsche’s Dangerous Scarcity Play

Be sure to check out our special Masters in Business this week, Remembering Jonathan Clements with Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. The two recall Clements’ impact on the investor community; they discuss his posthumous book, “Money and Me.”

The 2026 Races That Could Determine Senate Control

Source: Wall Street Journal

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• SpaceX: The AI IPO: SpaceX’s revenue in 2025 was $18.7 billion, which works out to a potential price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 93x.  The highly-anticipated Form S-1 filing document arrives as SpaceX officially unveils financials for the space rocket startup founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Trung Phan’s notes reframes the SpaceX IPO as an AI infrastructure play more than a launch business. The valuation barely makes sense, even if you accept the reframe. (SatPost by Trung Phan)

• Ukraine is turning the tables: The FT on the cumulative weight of Ukrainian deep strikes, drone economics, and Russian logistics rot. The war isn’t over but the trajectory just shifted. (Financial Times) see also All non-drone militaries are obsolete: Noah Smith on the Ukraine lesson: a $300 drone burning a $3M tank is not an edge case, it is the new mean. Procurement budgets pointing the wrong direction. All warfare is drone warfare now. (Noahpinion)

• The Average Guys Outsmarting Wall Street on Prediction Markets: How prediction-market ‘sharps’ have made millions wagering on everything from war to Rotten Tomatoes. A NYT Magazine feature on the regular-Joe Polymarket bettors who keep posting risk-adjusted returns that would have any quant shop’s head spinning. The story everyone wants to be true, told carefully. (NYT Magazine)

• Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas of his Holiness Pope Leo’s on AI: In his letter, the first American Pope says Humanity faces a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together (Vatican)

• How Barnes & Noble Became Private Equity’s Most Radical Retail Experiment: A Bloomberg feature on the surprise comeback of Barnes & Noble under Elliott — local manager autonomy, smaller stores, books actually displayed face-out. The rare PE story with a happy ending. (Businessweek)

• Being creative requires taking risks: Henrik Karlsson on why nothing actually creative comes out of the optimization mindset. Short, dense, worth saving and re-reading. (Escaping Flatland) see also Hacks vs. Artists: Nick Maggiulli on the difference between churn-it-out hacks and the people who actually care — applied to investing, writing, and most of what we do for money. A good Monday read. (Of Dollars and Data)

• The Strange Melancholy of Slaying Monsters: The MIT Reader on the long literary history of heroes who feel hollow after the kill — Beowulf to The Last of Us. Better than the cover sells. From “Shadow of the Colossus” to “Undertale,” video games have turned one of their oldest rituals into an ethical dilemma. (The MIT Press Reader)

• ‘The devil’s child’: the rise and fall of the only female yakuza: A Guardian long-read on Mako Nishimura — the only woman ever to make it inside Japan’s yakuza hierarchy — and the wreckage on the way in and out. She fought her way into the Japanese underworld, but drug addiction and the slow demise of organised crime gangs almost destroyed her. Reads like a novel and is somehow true. (The Guardian)

• How Bill Lawrence Became TV’s Most Prolific Showrunner: The creator of “Rooster,” “Scrubs” and “Shrinking” — not to mention “Ted Lasso” and “Bad Monkey” — did not expect to have a career renaissance in his late 50s. The Wrap on Bill Lawrence’s Scrubs-to-Shrinking arc — the showrunner economics of building a stable of writers, recycling cast, and quietly running half the comedy slate. (The Wrap)

Video of the day: SNL Documentary By James Franco

Be sure to check out our special Masters in Business this week, Remembering Jonathan Clements with Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. The two recall Clements’ impact on the investor community; they discuss his posthumous book, “Money and Me.”

Is AI Profitable Yet? (No.)

Source: Is AI Profitable

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• One Million New-Car Buyers Are Gone and They’re Not Coming Back Soon: WSJ on the demand hole left by affordability — a million households permanently priced out of the new-car market. The structural part of the auto cycle that doesn’t show up in monthly SAAR. High gas prices, rising interest rates and stubborn inflation are keeping buyers at home and cars on the lots (Wall Street Journal)

• Henry Ford Upped Wages So Workers Became Consumers. The Rest Is History.: Barron’s on the actual economic logic behind Ford’s $5 day — turnover costs, not altruism — and how the story keeps getting retold in service of whatever today’s argument needs. Useful corrective. The decision helped create America as we know it today. (Barron’s) see also Why Costco pays $30/hr and Target doesn’t: A clean Substack post on the operating math behind Costco’s wage premium — turnover savings, throughput, member economics. Standard reading for anyone who keeps citing the model without understanding it. (Justin Kuiper)

• A Stock Certificate From 1941 Taught Me More About AI Than Anyone from OpenAI: A Substack riff using a 1941 stock cert as a way to think about durable franchises vs. narrative compression. Good Sunday reading for anyone trying to value the current cohort. (Apers Insights)

• The Midwestern Exodus Is Finally Ending: WSJ on Akron and the broader Rust Belt finally adding population again — remote work, housing arbitrage, returnees. The story underneath the next decade of regional politics. Longtime migration away from parts of Rust Belt starts to reverse; housing affordability is pull for metro areas like Akron, Ohio. (Wall Street Journal)

• The best analysts chew gum: A short Substack on the silly little focus rituals that actually move research productivity. Gum, walking, standing desks — the unsexy operational stuff that compounds. (OptimistiCallie)

• Is Peter Thiel the target of Pope Leo’s Gandalf quote? An investigation: Ars Technica doing exegesis on a single line in Magnifica Humanitas and asking whether the Vatican is now subtweeting tech-right billionaires. Probably yes. (Ars Technica)

• There’s a Simple Reason Why I’m Sure A.I. Won’t Achieve Consciousness: The individual pieces create a kind of illusion. (Slate)

• A $300-a-Month Gym Is Gen Z’s Social Club: Younger consumers in major cities are discovering more chances to find friends and romance in reformer classes, run clubs and spa-heavy gyms. (Bloomberg) see also Something Strange Is Happening at College Graduations Across the Country: Slate on the AI-titan commencement-speaker circuit getting booed off stages this season — and what the senior class’s mood signals about the labor market they’re walking into. (Slate)

• These Japanese Oyster Farmers Know How to Throw a Good Party, and Everyone Is Invited: There’s a phrase in Japanese, “waku waku,” that expresses a bubbling and happy excitement for something to come. At the train stations on the Itoshima Peninsula, this phrase seems to jump from the mouths of day trippers young and old. There’s a lot of anticipation for the day parties that they will join. It’s a short jog from the city of Fukuoka to visit the kakigoya. Buying directly from the farmers means that the oysters are fresh and the prices are low. A NYT travel piece on the Hiroshima oyster harvest festival. Genial, food-photo-heavy, exactly the palate cleanser this list needs. (New York Times)

• A sleep-time ‘sweet spot’ is linked to healthy aging, study finds: Turns out 6.4 to 7.8 hours of sleep a night might be ideal. Here are some tips on how to get the “just right” amount. WaPo on a new study putting the longevity sleep window at seven hours — not five, not nine. File under “things to actually do” rather than “things to read about doing.”(Washington Post)

Video of the day: How Pulp Fiction Was Filmed | Everything you didn’t know about Quentin Tarantino’s movie

Be sure to check out our special Masters in Business this week, Remembering Jonathan Clements with Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. The two recall Clements’ impact on the investor community; they discuss his posthumous book, “Money and Me.”

More ETFs Than Stocks

Source: Apollo

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Doing the tour to promote How NOT to Invest (paperback out now!) I got lots of interesting questions — about the book, my writing process, my investing philosophy, and my career.

The one (really two) questions that I was not prepared for had to do with the podcast:

“Who was your favorite guest(s) on MiB?” and/or “What was your favorite episode?”

These are actually two different questions — who I enjoyed meeting/chatting with is a different issue from which episode was the most informative and interesting conversation.

I would spout off an answer from the most fun recent episode I could recall off the top of my mind.  But I really should have a better answer than that . . .  so I sat down and thought about it, combining the two questions into one. The result was a list of 25ish shows (out of ~650) that were both memorable, informative, surprising, and fun.

All of these were fun, and have an interesting story around them — either how the guest joined me, or what else was going on that made these unique or special, presented in no particular order:

Bill Gross, PIMCO
Danny Kahneman, BeFi (Nobel)
Cliff Asness, AQR
Howard Marks, Oaktree
Ray Dalio, Bridewater

Jim Chanos, Kynikos (Short seller)
Michael Lewis Author
Jack Bogle, Vanguard
Bill McNabb, Vanguard
David Rubenstein, Carlyle

Marc Andreesen, A26Z
Richard Barton (Microsoft/Expedia/Zillow/Glassdoor)
Bill Gurley, Benchmark
Liz Ann Sonders, Schwab
Jenny Johnson, Franklyn Templeton
Toto Wolff, F1 Mercedes

David Einhorn, Greenlight
Brooke Lampey, Sotheby’s
Joel Tillinghast, Fidelity
Will Danoff, Fidelity
Ken Feinberg, Special Master

Scott Galloway, NYU
Richard Thaler BeFi (Nobel)
Bill Sharpe  (Nobel)
Eugene Fama  (Nobel)
David Risher (CEO Lyft)
Lawrence Juber, Guitarist
John Pizzarelli, Guitarist

You should definitely check out any of these you may have missed…

The post Masters in Business Top 25 appeared first on The Big Picture.

• Land Appreciates. Homes Depreciate. The structure (house) is a depreciating asset: without continuous investment and updates, its value declines over time, even after renovations. The land is the appreciating component: long-term price gains in real estate are primarily driven by rising land values, not by the building itself. Jonathan Miller’s clean reminder of the real-estate math nobody likes: the dirt accrues, the structure depreciates. Useful framing for anyone confused about why the renovation pencils. (Housing Notes)

• There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science: The Atlantic pushing back on the “CS is dead” panic — the freshman entering today is graduating into a labor market that still pays for the rare combination of fluency and judgment. Less doom than your timeline thinks. (The Atlantic) see also Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis: TechCrunch on the tech CEO class working themselves into an AI-induced lather — Altman, Musk, Zuck, et al, sounding less like operators and more like a Hieronymus Bosch panel. Funny until you remember whose capital they’re burning. (TechCrunch)

• SpaceX-stasy: This IPO is a trainwreck: Once you arrive at the financials you start to realize what the language is overcompensating for: awful numbers. The company generated $4.7 billion in Q1 2026, up only 15% from the year before (very low for an “AI company”). It also lost $4.3 billion, up 700% from the year before. That means the company is spending roughly twice as much as it makes (and on pace to explode those losses even more), while growing its topline six times slower than Nvidia. The manic SpaceX listing — investor euphoria, narrative compression, and the precise moment “optionality” became the only thing being underwritten. (Prof G Media)

• How Barnes & Noble Became Private Equity’s Most Radical Retail Experiment: A Bloomberg feature on the surprise comeback of Barnes & Noble under Elliott — local manager autonomy, smaller stores, books actually displayed face-out. The rare PE story with a happy ending. (Bloomberg)

• A Century of Stock Market Winners—and Why Most Stocks Failed to Deliver: The compound buy-and-hold return to the entire U.S. stock market over more than 100 years was 1,504,057%. Yet the median individual stock lost money. (Wealth Management)

• ICE Raids Did Lasting Damage to American Businesses: In one corner of Charlotte, foot traffic and sales remain depressed six months after deportation raids. Bloomberg on the Charlotte data — what enforcement actions actually did to local payrolls, vacancies, and small-business closures. The macro story behind the cable news clips. (Businessweek)

• The One Big Reason YouTube Will Never Replace Stephen Colbert: On YouTube, a new generation of hosts is updating the talk show genre for the way we watch now: on our schedule, on our phones and in short clips. It starts with podcasting, which is now being increasingly consumed as a video product. It extends to, say, “The Adam Friedland Show,” whose host’s charm and neurosis would feel familiar to fans of Dick Cavett or a young Woody Allen. It also includes more experimental formats, such as “Subway Takes,” on which the host, Kareem Rahma, engages his guest in a series of quick-witted, subterranean agree/disagree, point/counterpoints, all shot on an active New York City subway train. (New York Times)

• 6 things a neurologist does to keep his brain healthy: Brain atrophy tends to begin in your 30s and 40s, but certain lifestyle changes can slow or even reverse shrinkage. WaPo service journalism — a neurologist’s six habits for keeping his own brain working. The list isn’t novel but the bylined credibility makes it stick. (Washington Post)

• As Trump Politicizes Justice Dept., Prosecutors Struggle With Grand Juries: The NYT on grand juries quietly refusing to return indictments in politically charged DOJ cases. The most important slow-motion check happening right now. (New York Times)

• The universe may be lopsided — new research: The Conversation walks through fresh data suggesting cosmic isotropy may not hold. If it survives replication, every cosmology textbook from the last fifty years needs a chapter rewrite. (The Conversation)

Video of the day: The Real Reason We Left the Gold Standard

Be sure to check out our special Masters in Business this week, Remembering Jonathan Clements with Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. The two recall Clements’ impact on the investor community; they discuss his posthumous book, “Money and Me.”

Global sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017

Source: Our World In Data

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• SpaceX: Here’s What You Get For $1.75 Trillion: The largest IPO in history. Here are the numbers that matter. A clean bottoms-up breakdown of the SpaceX IPO valuation by segment — launch, Starlink, contracts, “AI infrastructure.” Useful for the math beneath the headline. (Fiscal.ai)

• How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency: The NYT on the CFTC’s quiet capitulation to Polymarket and the broader crypto bloc. The cop on the beat got bought, lobbied, and reorganized; the only surprise is how openly. (New York Times) see also Stealth Deregulation & Institutional Decay: Dave Nadig with a sharp piece on how regulatory rollback is happening through staffing cuts, missed deadlines, and quiet non-enforcement rather than headline rule changes. The decay is the policy. (Dave Nadig)

• The Secret Team Blowing Up Ford’s Assembly Line to Make a $30,000 Electric Truck: 3 a.m. tests and culture clashes: The automaker brought together Silicon Valley techies and industry misfits in a quest to beat China at EVs. (Wall Street Journal)

•  Why strong corporate earnings may not be quite what they appear: Axios on the gap between headline EPS at the Mag 7 and the actual cash generation once you back out share-based comp, capex, and one-offs. Worth re-reading every earnings season. (Axios)

• How to Adapt When Clients Know More Than Ever: ThinkAdvisor interviewing Ben Carlson on advising clients who already have podcasts, spreadsheets, and opinions. The job description for our industry keeps shifting, and Ben is one of the few writing honestly about it. (ThinkAdvisor)

• The end of the internet’s golden age. Axios with a tidy summary of what just ended: search referral traffic, social distribution, the open-web business model. Pair with the TechCrunch “Search as you know it” piece from last week. (Axios)

• The Apartment Megamerger That Shows Landlords Are in Trouble: Equity Residential and AvalonBay’s $69 billion deal follows years of weak profits and slow to no rent growth. A defensive REIT merger that says more about the multifamily cycle than any earnings call. Cap rates, rent growth, the works. (Wall Street Journal) see also These Parents Are Buying Homes for Their Kids — With Strings Attached: The WSJ on the structures wealthier families are using to underwrite kids’ first homes without simply handing over the cash — trusts, shared-equity deals, formal IOUs. Useful for clients wrestling with the same. (Wall Street Journal)

• One-and-Done Heart Disease Prevention? Scientists Show It May Be Possible. A single infusion of an experimental gene-editing drug seemed to reduce LDL long-term in a small trial. The results may point to something “curative,” one expert said. The LDL-lowering gene therapy that, if it scales, makes statins look quaint. Still early but the trial data is unusually clean. Scientists Show It May Be Possible.  (New York Times)

• How the Knicks built an NBA Finals team: Patience, restraint and Jalen Brunson.The journey to this moment, all of New York spellbound by a basketball team that doesn’t seem to ever lose anymore, began years ago. Before the Knicks tore through the Eastern Conference with blowout after blowout. Before the trades for Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby or Josh Hart. Before the team’s captain, star guard Jalen Brunson, ever arrived. The Athletic on the front-office choices behind the Knicks’ Finals run. A nice corrective to the “tank and pray” theory of roster construction. (The Athletic)

• Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s Saxophone Colossus and Greatest Improvisor, Dead at 95: Rolling Stone’s obit for Sonny Rollins. Alongside his own pioneering albums as band leader, Rollins also recorded with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and the Rolling Stones, contributing the sax solo to “Waiting on a Friend.”  A good moment to put on Saxophone Colossus and the Williamsburg Bridge solos and just sit there. (Rolling Stone)

Video of the day: Why Did Humans Evolve To Be So Weak?

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

Change in Fed call: pushing cuts out to 2H 2027

Source: BofA Global Research

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• Inflation Is Stinging Bonds—With One Big Exception: Treasury inflation-protected securities are generating positive returns despite a rough bond market. Barron’s on TIPS finally doing the job they were designed to do. Worth re-reading if you’ve been underweight inflation-linked paper for the last decade. (Barron’s)

• It’s Boating Season, But Only If You Can Afford Fuel: In normal times, boaters spend their money at marinas, tackle shops and dockside restaurants, keeping local businesses buzzing. This year, they’re spending it all at the pump. (Businessweek)

• What layoffs hide about the real problem with the job market: The WaPo on a labor market where the headline layoff numbers are tame but hiring has quietly collapsed — the no-fire-no-hire economy. A more useful frame than most takes you’ll see this week. Despite high-profile cuts by companies including Meta and UPS, layoffs are about as low as they’ve been in years. (Washington Post)

• Life After Ozempic: Esquire on what happens when patients come off GLP-1s — the weight, the appetite, the relationship to food, the unfinished science. When you stop taking the miracle weight-loss drug, the cravings return—for food, yes, but also for something more. The post-prescription phase is where the real story is. (Esquire)

• AI eats the world. Benedict Evans on Tech platforms shifts: Every 10-15 years, a platform shift reshapes technology. What happens in a platform shift? Who is affected, and how much? Inside tech: new gatekeepers, new value capture. Outside tech: Is this a new tool, a new revenue model, or an existential threat? Benedict Evans’s annual deck — clear charts, no breathlessness, and the most useful single document for thinking about where AI economics actually sit right now. Required reading. (Benedict Evans)

• Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto: Washington Monthly on the Silicon Valley right’s mood circa late spring 2026 — the bravado has thinned, the lawyers have not. A useful temperature-take on a tribe whose self-image is increasingly out of sync with its own balance sheet. Theo Baker’s debut book is a film-worthy investigation of Stanford’s culture of fraud. But his disdain for the tech bros keeps him from understanding them. (Washington Monthly)

• Hating AI is good, actually: A spirited rebuttal to the soft-determinist “AI is just here” framing — useful as a counterweight even if you ultimately disagree. Pair with the WSJ “American Rebellion” piece. LinkedIn may be awash with boosters, but shunning AI is the human choice. (The Hand Basket)

• The Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupé makes a dramatic debut: If you still think EVs are low-key, quiet and a little bit vanilla, Mercedes-AMG wants to change your mind. Introducing the first all-electric car from the high-performance sub-brand (Wallpaper)

• 10,000 rulings: The courts’ overwhelming rebuke of ICE policies: A POLITICO analysis reveals judges have ruled against ICE detention practices in roughly 90 percent of cases since the agency mandated that millions of immigrants must be locked up while they face deportation proceedings. Politico tallies up the immigration courts and finds the administration has been losing — quietly, at scale, on the law. The political story and the legal story are running on different clocks. (Politico)

• Blond Ambition One hundred years of Marilyn Monroe: Monroe is famous for her mix of irrepressible sexuality and childlike innocence, but those who knew her in life found her less girlishly naive than tragic and wounded. A Bookforum essay-review on a new round of Madonna writing — what the project has been, what it cost, and what the latest biographers get wrong. Smart cultural criticism. (Book Forum)

Video of the day: The blueprint for becoming an emotionally mature adult, in 68 minutes.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

Kevin Warsh is facing the highest yields on 10-year Treasuries on his swearing-in date of any Fed chair going back to Alan Greenspan in August 1987

Source: @lisaabramowicz1

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The post 10 Tuesday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

The transcript from this week’s MiB: Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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Barry Ritholtz with Vimal Kapur, CEO & Chairman, Honeywell
Episode aired May 21, 2026 — Bloomberg Radio

Barry Ritholtz  [00:00:16] This week on the podcast. Yet another extra special guest, Vimal Kapur is CEO and chairman of Honeywell. He’s worked there for the past 37 years and not only has he been overseeing a fascinating transition, Honeywell is in the midst of breaking itself up into three distinct parts. I thought this conversation was fascinating and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Honeywell’s Vimal. Kapur.

Vimal Kapur  [00:00:49] Pleasure Barry. Thanks for hosting me.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:00:50] Well, my pleasure to have you here. It’s not very often we get a member of the Dow Industrials as part of our guests. Let, let’s start out a little bit with your background. You received a degree in electronics engineering from the Thapar Institute of Engineering in India. What was the original career plan?

Vimal Kapur  [00:01:13] Original career plan was to work and get a job. That was a career plan? Yeah, that was a career plan. And then, you know, first I did two small stints of a job and then I joined Honeywell in early 89. It was a new company in India, so set up. So I ended up joining a startup ’cause it was set up as a joint venture between two large companies. There’s a large Indian company called Tata Group. They jointly

Barry Ritholtz  [00:01:38] Automobiles, everything. Tata

Vimal Kapur  [00:01:39] Is enormous now, everything. Correct. So they invested in this venture. It’s a big Honeywell with a lot of tech. And then they create this joint venture in which you show up and it’s basically creating something from scratch. We had no revenue when I started. Our revenue was 0.00. So you learn how to build a company, how you scale, you wear multiple hats like in a startup, you don’t have a very defined role. So I think that early experience of high flexibility and you know, growing through a very high base in a short period of time, that laid some very strong foundations. You know,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:02:14] For me, so in the United States out in Silicon Valley, we notice a lot of these startups where they end up certainly isn’t where they began. There’s a usually a pivot or three or four. What was the original idea in the joint venture and what did that eventually turn into?

Vimal Kapur  [00:02:32] They turned into what it was planned for because Honeywell did not have its automation business footprint in India at that time. So you’re talking 40 years back. So they partnered with a local company to scale the business. They already had those products and capabilities in us and they were trying to get into Asia and they formed partnerships in few countries, India being one of them. And the strategy was to penetrate the local market, develop the local capability, and we were able to do that quite well. So it’s, it’s not that we have to change our product strategy, but we have to run, learn as we go through. We had intense local competition. How do you beat that? How do we create our own, you know, our own revenue stream there. So it was a very successful story. So,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:03:14] So you come up through the operating side, not so much the, you know, Harvard Business School, Davos theory side. How much of an advantage has that been as your career clicked through all these different divisions?

Vimal Kapur  [00:03:29] I mean, I think it’s a advantage to, in a way, to work in a practical business because you have to deal with actual problems which the business deal with. And having worked in different businesses gave me an opportunity to deal with a different customer situation, different end markets, operational issue, commercial issue, product development, issue, supply chain. So I would say, I mean, there’s no replacement of formal education. One, I’m not suggesting that having a higher degrees is a disadvantage, but I would say that it is equal amount of advantage to get practical experience. And I was benefiting from variety of experiences I got in my long career in Honeywell. And

Barry Ritholtz  [00:04:08] You ran three very different businesses before becoming CEO, process solutions, building technologies, performance materials. Tell us, I mean those names seem sort of ambiguous, right? Tell us a little bit about what each of those three divisions did. Yeah,

Vimal Kapur  [00:04:26] So process, solution business is, you know, it provides automation system in the energy sector. So energy sector, think about it, refining, petrochemical, plants, other oil and gas facilities, pipeline terminals, even I would say facilities like, which may paper metals and mining. So these facilities are very complex in terms of their operating procedures and if they’re not automated, it’s nearly impossible to run them. So this business provides a sophisticated automation system to these large companies. So think about Exxon and Shell and BP as kind of a typical customer or Aramco in Middle East and ADNOC. So this serving these customer, this business was very global or is very global. Even today the business still is very successful. And I became CEO in 2014 of this business. And oil downturn happened within six months. How I becoming the leader of the business. So you learn through tough experiences. Oil price was from whatever, 140, $150 to like a big nose dive. And we did a lot of work in the downturn. Learned a lot. But primarily your question, this business is all about sophisticated automation in complex facilities. And then I moved to the building automation business where we still do automation, but now in this case buildings of different type hospitals, airports, schools, university campuses, data centers. And there the business model was very different. Now you serve multiple building through variety of channel partners across the world. And so our strength comes through product innovation. Our strength comes through channel management. Very different business model compared to what I did in, you know, in my in my process automation days and,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:06:22] And then

Vimal Kapur  [00:06:23] Performance material, performance material and technology. Very interesting business, they build technology, they build energy infrastructure. So if you wanna build a, if you are a refiner, you buy crude, which we all hear a lot about today due to, you know, ongoing Iran conflict. You don’t sell crude, you sell product, you sell gasoline, you sell diesel, you sell jet fuel. So they have options to make multiple products. And as the input changes or the market needs changes, they need to decide what are the options they have to build different offering from their perspective. This business provides technology to energy company to build energy infrastructure ’cause it’s a molecule transformation, converting one molecule to another molecule that’s a heavy technology involved behind it. So performance material and technology provides technology to the customer to build tech, you know, energy infrastructure. So very high technology or research oriented business. You have a lot of chemical engineers who are gonna invent the next best technology and you provide their technology to some very large companies. And that was fascinating to lead that business to see that cycle elimination and work in that business. So yeah, very diverse experiences in variety of sectors, different business models, which I’m benefiting today because now I have experience of dealing with different markets and different situations. And that practical experience helps you a lot as you really get into your CEO job.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:07:56] So in 2022 you were named chief operating officer, we were just coming out of the pandemic. What was that environment like? How did you take your experience at these three prior divisions where you were either president or president and CEO, how, how did that affect running operations?

Vimal Kapur  [00:08:16] I mean, I think at that time the biggest challenge that time actually was the chip shortages and how do we really redesign our products because chips are simply not available. So we really had to learn how do we redesign our products in a much shorter period of time. So think about if we design a product in one year, we had to do that in two months because there’s no other option if we don’t do that, we can’t have an alternative source of the supply and we can’t our product. So I used a lot of experiences on dealing with such different scenario in mild jobs and we were able to successfully, you know, deal with that. That was also a job. I also got exposure to the businesses of Honeywell, which I hadn’t done before. Aerospace being the biggest one. So that got added into my responsibility. So there was a lot of learning there on how that industry works, which is totally different from everything else I had done.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:09:11] Is there a throughput through materials, processes, technologies and aerospace? Or are these all completely different animals,

Vimal Kapur  [00:09:20] Different animals in the sense of the end markets they serve? Right, there are some commonality of the business models and you know, there are, there are, there’s a common denominator, but there are differences which really led me to think about whether we are good to be one company or multiple companies when I started as a CEO and part of it was the differences between them, but part of it was opportunities which is ahead of us that how these businesses independently could shape or scale much differently versus when we are together, which, which led us to do a lot of work to think about optionality and pros and cons of each option and which led us to make a decision that we are better off to split into three companies

Barry Ritholtz  [00:10:04] And we’re gonna spend some time delving into those three companies and the thinking behind it. Before we get to that, I wanted to ask you a couple of more general questions about the firm. You’ve been there so long since, since the 1980s. I’m curious, how has the culture of Honeywell changed? It’s almost 40 years, three and a half decades. Is it still essentially the same company or has everything cha like so many other companies? Yeah, I,

Vimal Kapur  [00:10:38] It evolved a lot. I would say, you know, we, there was a big change movement in early 2000 when Honeywell and AlliedSignal merged together.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:10:47] I recall.

Vimal Kapur  [00:10:48] Yep. So little bit of fun fact, AlliedSignal acquired Honeywell and changed its name to Honeywell, which doesn’t happen. The acquirer keeps name because they figured Honeywell brand was so powerful, it was more impactful. So they changed their own name. So that was a big moment, your question on cultural assimilation of two large companies, it was kind of merger of equals and it did go through its own motion of ups and downs. And that’s when Dave Cote came in as chairman and CEO of Honeywell. And Dave did a great job to rebuild the Honeywell culture, which was much more one company mindset. We are not two companies, we are one company. We are gonna put work towards one stock, one Honeywell mindset, put a lot of operational culture in the organization. So that was one phase of, you know, under, under his leadership. Then my predecessor Darius Adamczyk, he became CEO in 2017. He further enhanced our operational excellence skill. He invested a lot of effort to build more digital backbone of the companies, simplifying Honeywell in terms of internal systems we have, Darius was very passionate about digital on how to mine data and create more capability for our customers. So he created a culture of more operational excellence, more operational rigor, while Dave was much more focused on one Honeywell mindset, culture integration, not multiple companies. And as my tenure comes in over the last now two plus years, we are now pivoting from the more growth oriented company. And the reason that’s important is that over a period of time, our margin rates have grown up and we were sub 10% margin company in 2005, 2006, last date was 23%. So our earnings growth is gonna come more from the top line growth versus margin expansion. Not that we want to mar do margin expansion, but we can’t get from another 15%. There’s no headroom. So growth culture is important, which means we have to be more externally focused now. We need to understand our markets, need to understand our customers, what’s changing, need to understand our competition. So our company, even though name preserves itself as a heritage and, but it has been constantly evolving itself and that’s one of the reason this company has survived hundred in 20 years because it has courage to reinvent itself versus being inward looking and always saying that, okay, we are what we are and we are not gonna change.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:13:16] Hmm. Really, really interesting. So I used to hear people talk about automation pretty regularly as just the process of moving more and more things to machines. We kind of hear people using the phrase artificial intelligence and AI the same way kind of bluntly. I’m curious from the Honeywell perspective when it comes to automation and ai, what are the customers buying? Is it productivity gains? Is it safety improvements, is it cheaper labor or a substitute for labor? What, what is the key selling point for your customers? So

Vimal Kapur  [00:13:55] I would say the, we have to go back to where the automation industry started from to better appreciate how will AI impact automation offerings or automation products. Go back to mid seventies when this industry got created somewhere in mid 75 timeframe when computing was invented, chips were invented. There came the need to say the word has a lot of these expensive assets. Those assets are now running very efficiently. So can we move from the older technologies, which were kind of World War I and World War II era to more modern digital technologies. And the way automation system was created was that you sense a set of properties and how a particular equipment or a machine or a processor is running and then you have a software program running in a computer which is going to make sure that it gets back to the desired condition, what it wants it to be. So it’s a logic based predefined system. And the assumption was most of the time this will work in a normal situation when exception occur, human will take a call. So automation systems were always designed with a human in the loop. And human was supposed to take care of change in input condition, change in output conditions, maintain the equipment, take care of maintenance requirement down the line. Now you fast forward 50 years before AI and data science came in, the people who are running these equipment or automation system or different facilities in different environment, think of a pharma manufacturing facility or a data center. They acquired a knowledge on exceptions which were occurring in those operating conditions. But when they retire or they move on, their knowledge went along with them. So when the next set of people came in, they kind of have the same learning cycle. Maybe some of it was captured in some documents, some manuals, but not a lot. So what AI is solving for is our systems have no intelligence layer on top of the core automation layer so that when the next human being comes in, they’re not starting from scratch, they have an advantage of all the learning over the last 25 years all built in. So they get to say, when this condition occurred, nine out of 10 times this was done. It always worked. So you as a human being can say, okay, I think I will choose this. Logic makes, so humans still needs to make a decision. So I think it’s a changing the human and making them more capable at the heart of it. And the reason it becomes even more compelling now is the shortage of skills which are happening in the industrial sector for performing these kind of tasks. So I would say it’s a perfect convergence of the situation that more capability is coming into our system because of availability of data science. And at the same time situation requires this capability to be there because less people are available to do this work and that’s gonna create more capability in automation system. So automation system remains, intelligence layer is on top of it. So it makes a automation system better in terms of what it can do by preserving its capability.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:17:10] Coming up we continue our conversation with Vimal Kapur, CEO of Honeywell discussing turning Honeywell into three standalone companies. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Vimal Kapur. He is CEO and chairman of Honeywell International. He’s been with the firm for 37 years. Honeywell is a highly regarded automation and industrial company. So let’s start out with plans to break the firm up. You have three distinct entities, Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and then Solstice Advanced Materials. So let, let’s talk about that split that sounds fairly natural breakup based on industry. Tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that.

Vimal Kapur  [00:18:26] The thinking behind that was when I started as a CEO, my incoming thesis was that we have to simplify this company. It’s performed extremely well, great return to shareholder, great service to our customer, but what will we do for the next 25 to 30 years? Are we set up for that? And my thesis was that we need to simplify this into few things where we have a scale. But I started the job in middle of 23 as a CEO of the company. Two things happened in the year of 23, which is good to kind of reflect back just three years back. That was the first year when aerospace cycle really became very strong. It was the year one where everybody said, oh, this industry is growing a lot, let’s pay more attention to it. And this was also the first year when something called AI was talked, right? So if we were sitting here three years back, we wouldn’t be talking ai. So it’s that recent phenomena. So the question we had to really ask ourself that if we have to simplify as a company and these two external drivers are occurring simultaneously, a huge demand in our largest business, which is aerospace automation, which is core to Honeywell, is going to probably redefine itself with ai. Should we do it as one company or should we do it as a, in a different construct? And that question get into a problem solving by early 24 to say, let’s look at all the scenarios, what’s possibilities, what others are doing. And as we did the work over 2024, we got more and more conviction. It’s better to separate automation and aerospace into two separate companies. But we ended up making three decisions because specialty chemical is extremely good business, which neither fitted in any one of these two. And we said it’s compelling to also spin that off as a separate company. So rather than, you know, two said, we ended up becoming three. So they became a standalone business in October of last year, doing extremely well since we spun it off now for six months. Very proud of the management team and the board, which is running this company. Aerospace will become a standalone company in about six to eight weeks from now. Six weeks actually as we speak today. 29 June is a date, and date is formed. We quite committed to that and it’s gonna be leader in segment in aerospace and KO will be a pay automation company, which will be probably one of the largest, if not the largest automation company in the world.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:20:51] Hmm. So advanced materials, does that include building technologies? And

Vimal Kapur  [00:20:57] It’s a pure play chemicals business, just

Barry Ritholtz  [00:20:59] Straight up

Vimal Kapur  [00:20:59] Chemical chemicals business. They make refrigerant, which goes into your car, which goes into your home. They have some other technologies which are related to chemicals that business is doing extremely well as a standalone company. The automation, which you mentioned building automation or automation of industrial facilities, that’s part of the remaining Honeywell, which is Honeywell Automation. Now we will not be called Honeywell Automation. We are using as, just as a equal descriptor on what the business will be. We will reimagine our name as we go by in a couple of weeks from now and we’ll reveal that name what it should be. But for sake of simplicity, the chemicals business, an aerospace business and an automation business and,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:21:39] And performance materials and technology is,

Vimal Kapur  [00:21:42] So part of it became into advanced material, advanced material solstice and then part of it is retained within Honeywell. So it’s split into kind of two.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:21:51] ’cause this is really, everybody thinks of these very broadly, but there are some really narrow specific use cases for different correct groups. So I was trying to figure out what would align with what.

Vimal Kapur  [00:22:05] So think about automation business serves three large end markets. All types of buildings, all types of energy facilities and all types of industrial facilities. That’s what we have kept in the automation. And we also are conscious that we should not make automation business serving so many segments that it’s becomes confusing again, right? So we wanna narrow down to a few very large and impactful segments. This market size is about $200 billion. We will be just shy of 20 billion of revenue. So we have a lot of runway to think about creatively what more we can do, how do we grow more. So we are not shortage of runway. Secularly automation is a naturally high growth, you know, segment because it’s something which is so basic to existence of an industrial facility or on an asset. And then when you add the AI story coming on top of it’s gonna have increasingly more growth, momentum. So all sent, all things being said. Yeah, it’s very well positioned for a compelling future.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:23:05] And what does the aerospace group do? Not, unlike ge you’re not making aircraft engines,

Vimal Kapur  [00:23:11] Right? So we do make aircraft engine for the business jet. So more mid-size,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:23:15] The smaller engines,

Vimal Kapur  [00:23:16] Smaller engine, the business jet engines we make, we don’t make the big engines, but we are a systems company. We make different component from the nose to tail of the plane. So our components are right in the cockpit. Our components, we make radars, we make navigation system, we make brakes for the plane, we make environmental controls in the plane. So we are a systems company, we make engines, we make apus. So our, our approach is system designed for a new platform. So every platform comes in and it could be a commercial plan, could be a business, it could be a defense platform. We will pitch in different components and systems of Honeywell. Customers will select many of them, some of them then that will become part of that c you know, that fleet for decades and decades. So it’s a multi-product business, not constrained to one particular product line. And the business model is more powerful because it’s a systems approach and not a component approach. So you’re right in the heart of the systems, you understand how the whole mechanics work and really add more value for our customers.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:24:23] So over the past, let’s call it 10 years, there have been a number of activist investors like Elliot management that, not just Honeywell, but lots and lots of other large conglomerates, they often agitate for share buybacks or increased dividends or sometimes just break the company into pieces. You seem to have landed pretty much in a, in a similar space as some of these activists. First, were they at all influential in your thinking or was this something that, hey, these are such different businesses, there’s no longer scale advantages of having them under one roof?

Vimal Kapur  [00:25:04] I would say the situation in our case was a bit unique because we started doing work to investigate our future optionality early 2024 and did a lot of work and actually even announced the separation of chemicals business in October. Elliot wrote a letter which was in public domain and I got to see it at the same time. And every everybody else saw it to say we should further split aerospace and rest of Honeywell too. That was their argument. There’s a more value to be created. The good news was that we already had done the work and we were convinced that’s the right thing to do, but we had not announced anything. So we treated them as another shareholder who has a point of view and we have to articulate our strategy. So there was strong convergence on the thinking and I think we worked with them very collaboratively on, you know, path forward. And I would say that there’s a lot being said on activist shareholder, but my experience is that they are, they are like any other shareholder who have a logical argument. If you have a counterpoint, you should support this with the facts and data or if you support their point, then you have to execute it. And in that case it just becomes much more of not what to do but how to do it. So our conversation with Elliot, like any other shareholder was this is a situation, here are the paths, this is how we are thinking about it. And we benefited from their expertise in capital markets, how the shareholders will react. And definitely that helped us to shape our decision in terms of, in a certain way, which was very constructive.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:26:38] Hmm, really, really interesting. So we seem to go through these long phases where conglomerates kind of become in style. They become favored. You oversaw $14 billion in m and a, which sounds like a lot of money, but we know really isn’t, you know, that’s not a, that’s not a mega buying spray. And for a long, for the longest time it seemed like there was a financial advantage to being a conglomerate. At what point does that structure stop being an advantage? What does it, what does being part throwing all these different pieces under one roof, what does that prevent the company from doing?

Vimal Kapur  [00:27:21] I think every business model has an era. So I think we have to go back to what created this era of conglomerate or larger companies. The, it really started from the, when the word was started becoming more globalized, after 2000, China came into WTO, the word became more global and there was much more global trade, which became the norm on how companies were growing. So all US companies started growing globally, but at the same time they were able to drive a lot of productivity by taking manufacturing into Asia. A lot of, you know, manpower, productivity by doing work in different virtual way with a lot of IT skills coming in. So there was a case to make bigger companies bigger because they had the unique know-how to drive a lot of productivity and scale at a global scale because they were already present there. And that cycle persisted for almost 15 years till the time that value was captured. And that value capture became generally known. Therefore the question started asking to say is creating this complex company worth it or simplification or a sector focus is a better way to do it. So I think there was a reason that proposition really worked well and created a lot of value. Take a case of Honeywell, our shareholder value creation from a time of 2000 to 2000 17, 18, 1 of the best in class and the entire s and p. So it’s not that anything was wrong, we created tremendous shareholder value. But now this point of saturation comes in and then it really brings you to the point of specialization if the markets have scale and you can preserve scale while you’re a specialist. That’s best of the both words. And that’s what we are, we are doing now to create a scale aerospace company, a scale automation company. We are still very global. We still have very mature processes, but at the same time we are focused on singular segment. So I guess like in everything else you learn through cycles and this cycle is all about having the mix of scale and specialization. This will persist until something else comes in now where there’s a case to do something else and I feel good about where we are in our position and this is gonna create much more shareholder value.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:29:36] So 20 years before you started talking about breaking into three pieces, your fellow Dow component, general Electric went through the same process, arguably with not a whole lot of success, they started out fairly richly valued, there wasn’t a whole lot of room to grow. And I’m curious, when you’re thinking about breaking into three, are you looking at other companies like General Electric and saying what can we learn from what they did right, what they got wrong, what, what missteps they made? I

Vimal Kapur  [00:30:11] Think the situation for each company is very different because separation cannot create value alone by itself. You have to be convicted that the standalone asset has enough growth, potential and invest and asset base which is gonna grow, which is gonna create value. So I think comparing example you gave versus Honeywell is absolutely very different portfolio. Apples

Barry Ritholtz  [00:30:34] And oranges,

Vimal Kapur  [00:30:34] Very, very different. I mean, so I would say that our drivers were more around what I talked about, our stock price were more static. We were more, we did not destroy any shareholder value. So our question was how do we create more shareholder value with external factors coming in? Growth of aerospace, growth of AI is that inflection point for us to make a different decision. So we did it more from a point of strength versus we have some crisis coming in. So sometime you use your point of strength to make the right decisions and we did it fast and we did it right. I think every other company we came from a different circumstances, but the decision on the outward looked very similar. They looked like they all did the same thing, but they all came from very different backgrounds and you know, different set of assets. When, when we started looking at it, some people believed that we got influenced by success of ge. I want to remind that GE success came post our decision. That was a process which was occurring. So yeah, you have, that’s a data point to say they’re also doing it. But some of the success we have observed some outstanding work by the GE leadership team that really started happening 24, 25 timeframe. We were far along the way in our own analysis by that time. So I think those are kind parallel things happening. So there’s no one thing you can attribute to say that this thing influenced it. It’s a combination of the reason which all come together and that’s what really brings us to where we are today.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:32:05] I like this phrase in your thesis of the current transition from automation to autonomy with artificial intelligence as the dividing line. How far along that process are we as a country are the industrial sector and Honeywell.

Vimal Kapur  [00:32:27] So let’s say that we as a country have an advantage of being the leader in the space of cloud and data science and companies like Honeywell has responsibility to take the knowhow which the tech sector is creating, be it Microsoft, be it Google, be it Nvidia and all the, you know, very capable tech companies. How do we bring that capability into our sector? Because our customer is not gonna go and they’re not looking to buy a cloud capability or they’re not looking to buy a AI LLM, they wanna solve a problem, they wanna run a business, they wanna run an operation, they wanna have more uptime, they wanna have more, you know, profitability. So our job is to take our system to what I mentioned to you before and add this intelligence layer and what this intelligence layer is all about, taking capability from the tech companies. Take large language models from the likes of Google and Nvidia, use the cloud power which is there from Amazon and Microsoft, but really build a purpose-built offering from an industrial sector. And as we are doing that, we are able to create the agentic models for our customers and that’s what they buy from us. The underlying plumbing, what we have, they don’t wanna know it, they don’t wanna know how this is built, say, so you’re automating this piece of my work. That’s great so I’m gonna get more productivity for that, how much I should pay you for it, right? So I would say we are in the state that this is no more a hypothesis. We are in the, not in the early innings, but we are in the stage of deployment of these capabilities across different customer base. The why it is not taken up at scale is because our customers have to go through a significant change management in their organization. ’cause fundamentally the roles of people are changing. Some roles require skills which are less important today and some more new skills are required and they can’t do that overnight just because I created a new set of technology, they have to absorb it, they have to ingest it. But we have some fabulous examples on customer using in scale in different sectors like university systems, quick service restaurants, people are using some of our technologies at a very large scale in refineries, et cetera. So I would say that if I’m sitting with you it 12 months back, I would’ve said very modest deployment sitting today, I would say I’m very excited on what opportunity we see a year from now. I would argue that the penetration will go up, substantially up because it’s a real economic value creation from what we are really profiting and we as a country are leading because we have the core components of this technology and now we have to, you know, take this capability across the world and our customers excited. They really like what we are doing.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:35:16] Earlier you mentioned restaurant automation. What does Honeywell do for either fast food service or casual dining?

Vimal Kapur  [00:35:26] So think about it. I mean when you look at a small fast food dining restaurant, there’s not much automation in that. But it consumes energy for sure. I mean let’s take a typical McDonald’s restaurant as just as an example. There’s a kitchen there, there’s a fryer, there’s a refrigeration. It’s just keeping a lot of products there. There’s of course lights going on. These assets were never thought as a way to improve energy efficiencies by companies like us. We say we should automate a large hospital. It’s massive. There’s a lot of opportunity there, a large building. These assets were never paid attention by us because there was no technology available. But when the cloud technology came in, we are able to connect these assets flawlessly, you know, in a matter of hours. And then you’re able to use a lot of AI based rule set to understand what should be the energy consumption actual versus what it is today. And give that tools to the owner to say, you know, an example, we connected a quick service chain in uk, I think something like 500 plus of their restaurants into a single operating system and they’re observing 30 to 40% energy reduction. Wow. Like anything else, the good old management principle, what you inspect is what you get. Once these were thinking running off my own, nobody paid attention even though their desire to do something, there was no mechanism. So we created an easy mechanism to make this available to the customer. So all of a sudden they’re able to generate a lot more productivity without adding too much of cost. And that’s a part of the new tools which is coming in, which was not possible. And that gives me a lot of excitement that this is gonna be much more level of, you know, productivity efficiency, which is less talked about. You know, whenever there’s AI dialogue, it’s about jobs, it’s gonna cut jobs. Nobody talks about economic value creation. It is doing a real value for our customer base, making people more productive. That’s the story of the industrial side, which is probably requires more, more amplification.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:37:26] So what’s the Peter Drucker quote? You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So forget 500 restaurants. What is Starbucks? 30,000, McDonald’s 40,000.

Vimal Kapur  [00:37:36] This applies to all of these kind of assets and many people have done this work. So it’s not that we have created some new invention. Some of them have done this kind of discovery, but this effort was not very standardized. It’s like a custom made thing somebody will do because you are a big company, you can afford it. But when you do it a large scale, there are hundreds of these chains, there are hundreds of retail stores. We’re also doing similar work, one of the big retail store chains, very similar example. So these distributed assets are becoming a way of capturing value at one end of the equation. On the other end of the equation, when you have retirees coming and our customers are worried about knowledge going out of the door, they’re looking at a mechanism of knowledge capture so they can perform their task. That’s also penetrating very rapidly. So scenarios are different. Some scenarios are looking at, I never paid attention and now I can do it. Some are saying I have less people do something about it and but the capability is fundamentally the same, it’s the same capability which solves both the problem

Barry Ritholtz  [00:38:39] Coming up. We continue our conversation with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of Honeywell discussing the state of automated technology today. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Vimal Kapur. He is CEO and chairman at Honeywell. The company he has worked at for the past 37 years since starting there as an engineer. So I’m curious as to how some technologies seem to just take forever to find their way into the real world. You know, if you travel around the world, I remember the first time I saw one of the point of sale handheld units in a restaurant in Europe, I don’t know, maybe it was 15 years ago. And I was astonished, wait, I don’t have to request a check. They come then they have to give ’em the key, the card, they go away like we’ll take a check. They come by. It’s, it seems to have taken a decade to make its way here. What are some of the impediments to some of this, some of the cutting edge technologies that’s obviously using a bunch of tech that already existed. Is this a problem getting adaptation even though it was clearly more productive, more efficient, faster turn of tables? Like I was astonished how long it took. So I for the United States to implement That’s

Vimal Kapur  [00:40:26] Fair. I think there’s a scenario in your example because it’s a technology displacement of some old method versus a more new method. But the reason I believe more bullish about it is that we are solving a known problem. And the known problem is word has less people to do a lot of work around skilled labor in the industrial world. That’s a real problem. So our solution is not trying to find a problem, we are finding we are giving a solution to a known problem. Adoption rates are lower because of the change management issue. But this is a change management of the order of 18 months, 24 months, 30 months. Not a decade. Not a decade, right. So I remain very optimistic given my, you know, experience in these sectors. The adoption rates here are gonna be much more quicker because the problem is real. We are not inventing the problem. This problem exists for a, and by the way, this problem is everywhere in the world. This is not a US problem. Only skilled labor, skilled labor. Europe has more population shrinkage than us go to Japan and Korea, they have the same problem. China, China as well. China has population shrinkage, right? So this is a universal issue. This is not invented here. Now we get excited on the job displacement happening with robots and humanoids. That’s a small portion of a manufacturing industry that probably is also displacing some tasks which humans are not willing to do. Like lifting boxes, right? Yeah. I mean okay it’s not very interesting. But then there are other jobs with other sectors which we address where a physical AI or intelligence layer is gonna create a tremendous amount of economic value. So

Barry Ritholtz  [00:42:05] I keep hearing people compare that intelligence layer of artificial intelligence to the internet. I’m wondering, and you seem very bullish and excited about everything AI can do, is there a better comparison? Is the industrial revolution a better framework for thinking about the impact of AI over the next 10, 50, a hundred years? I think the

Vimal Kapur  [00:42:31] AI impact will be different in each sector. And I think if we make it too broad brush, we are losing the bigger picture. But when we are making it specific to a segment, then you’re being more precise to say in context of the end markets we serve the industrial sector, I talked about examples there. It’s all about the skill shortage issue, which is very different from if we are using AI for better search engine, if I may, using AI for, you know, making a summary of our talk, which somebody can do in, that’s a very different use case. And one can argue is it gonna add productivity or not or is it gonna take away jobs? That’s a different scenario from simply not having people to do work. Very different scenario. And I think that makes our case more compelling. The adoption rates are driven by a near real, real need versus we are trying to create a need which is unknown and that’s not being talked a lot more, a lot more dialogue is around job displacement. But those are more in the jobs which could be automated like finance function or HR function. Maybe to a certain degree it’s true, but not to the point. My personal view is that it’s gonna have the amount of impact which is being talked about.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:43:43] So let’s talk about some of the challenges of this technology layer and some of the black hats out there. When Mythos came out, I would imagine a company like Honeywell set up and took notice the idea of AI taking over industrial controllers, power water, air conditioning, all that stuff has to be thought of as a genuine threat. Nobody wants rogue thermostats or what have you. How do you look at the threat from a, a powerful entity like Mythos and how much of an arms race are we in to harden all of our, you know, soft underbelly?

Vimal Kapur  [00:44:27] So I think we have to appreciate the fact that where we are deploying ai, it is substantially different from what we are generally talking about in broader public domain. If you think of applying AI in an industrial system, let’s take a case of a hospital and I want to apply AI into automation system to make it more efficient. The data of that is not in public domain. The data is in Honeywell system or it’s one of our competitors system. So you cannot go to internet and train anything ’cause there’s nothing to train on. So that makes data friction as a big problem in industrial sector, which in a way becomes a protection layer for us. But that doesn’t

Barry Ritholtz  [00:45:07] Mean, so the friction becomes a protection layer, but

Vimal Kapur  [00:45:09] It doesn’t mean we should not do anything about it, right? It’s to say, oh, I’m protected. It means we should take it seriously to think of potential threats coming in because if the data friction is removed, which is hard to do, but it humans are very intelligent. So we have worked very hard to remove the data friction and also use our domain knowledge because interestingly you cannot solve a horizontal problem in industrial domain. What I mean by that is you do not have a software application like a CRM system or an HR system. The problems of each sectors are very different. If you’re a refinery, you’re trying to produce more jet fuel and more diesel. If you are a life sensors manufacturing facility, you’re trying to produce drug with minimal quality giveaway. But if you’re a data center, you want more uptime, your problems are so different. So we can’t create a magic AI application and sell to everybody. We have to be purposeful that where do we use our data and what problem we solve, which only come from years of experience. So those two really become in a way a constraint for a generic company to come in because the data friction and lack of understanding of domain, which means companies like us, which possess both have to solve this problem. And that’s why we are very bullish about it, to say we are gonna do it. We are gonna take all the capabilities from tech companies and build new set of capabilities to take our industry from a pure play automation to more towards autonomy. And autonomy doesn’t mean humans will disappear, humans will become more empowered, human will become more capable. And to the extent there’s some skill shortages, it’ll address that point.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:46:48] So let’s talk a little bit about how tumultuous the past 12 months have been in terms of geopolitics. We not only have the war in the Ukraine, but now in Iran we had the on again off again on again and most recently off again tariffs. How does this affect how a company like Honeywell thinks about reshoring and bringing manufacturing back to the United States thinks about supply chain issues? How do you plan in such a tumultuous environment? Well,

Vimal Kapur  [00:47:21] It’s definitely a challenge for companies to have more stability is what companies want. So I would say that companies like us have very mature processes to deal with it. So every time this issue occurs, we have some sort of disturbance for, depends, four weeks, eight weeks, 20 weeks, who knows depending on the situation. So we have learned how to deal with it, but it doesn’t come without a cost. You lose some growth in that window, you may have to incur extra costs like it happened in case of tariff because when tariff got announced, we have no choice but to pay it. Right? Right. Now whether we can recover it or not as a subsequent decision,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:47:57] Are you one of the many companies that have filed litigation to get, get refunds?

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:01] We did not file any litigation.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:48:03] How big of a hit was

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:05] Tax. It was not big for us. We were mostly down to the second part of your question. We have been doing manufacturing local for local for multiple years. So we made for us in US made for Europe in Europe, made for China. In China. So we don’t move a lot of stuff around. However, what we cannot control is the global nature of the components we buy. Right? If I have

Barry Ritholtz  [00:48:26] To buy everything in the supply chain and raw materials. Correct.

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:29] Because we can’t make everything. So if it, if a component is made in Korea, like batteries, we have to buy it from there. And if a component is made in China or somewhere else, we have to buy it from there. So that impact is certainly not under our coverage because we don’t have an endless capacity to invest in everything. But our core manufacturing, we have 150 factories, you know, and they’re well dis the world distributed around the world and they’re well distributed across the world. I mean, so we are so we don’t have this foundational challenge of reshoring, but we certainly have to deal with changing environment in which we have to think about more local supply based development aligned to what the expectations are at this point of time. Huh.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:49:15] So we’ve noticed that defense budgets really around the world, not just here in the United States, ha have been rising and there certainly has been fairly robust demand for aerospace. There’s a big upgrade cycle just kind of starting. A lot of the fleets are pretty old. How do you look at this in terms of risk and opportunity? How are you thinking about defense and aerospace?

Vimal Kapur  [00:49:38] The defense is a big opportunity for our aerospace business. That’s about 40% of the aerospace business. Wow. So it’s certainly the current changes in geopolitical environment and government spending more money is only positive. So it’s gonna become a even more growth driver for the business compared to what it had. So when we started this thesis two and a half years back, we did not predict this level of demand in the defense. But now that’s really a reality. Whether it’s in us, whether it’s some of our US allies, there’s a lot more growth opportunity across the board for different products and services we provide.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:50:14] And then there’s been some debate about the future of technology and industry. China seems to be running away in a couple of areas like energy transition and robotics. From where you sit, is the lead gonna pass back and forth or is there a clear winner and that’s a potential problem for the United States, both strategically and economically? I think

Vimal Kapur  [00:50:40] We have to look at what’s, look ahead, what’s this trying to look back and be, you know, skeptical about it. I will look ahead the problems, which the word HA is in ahead of us. We clearly know the US lead in ai. So how do we protect the lead? We clearly have a lead in quantum, which is one of the businesses we own that. How do we really keep that scale?

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:01] You do, I didn’t realize what, what does Honeywell do on the quantum space? So

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:05] We own a business called Quantum in which Honeywell has a majority stake. We spun it off a separate company in 2021.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:11] Oh, okay. All

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:12] Right. So it’s not, it’s Honeywell investments in that company versus it’s not part of Honeywell.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:17] I recall, yeah, I crawl that way back when. That’s right. Really 2021. Really fascinating.

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:22] Correct. So there are technologies in which us have an advantage, us have to rebuild its supply base for some of the critical sectors like semiconductor, like pharmaceutical, which are mission critical. And I think that’s underway. But we need to have patients that those things take years to happen. There’s not a switch to say, right, we wanna do it. And those things show up, they can take 5, 7, 10 years. Hmm. So I think it’s heading in the right direction. We as a country has all the capabilities. We have the capital, we have the knowhow, but we have to refurbish some of our skills, which we lost over a couple of years in few portions of industrial sector. But let’s not forget, we have very, very capable companies which created the same sector all over the world, right? So those have not gone away.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:52:06] So reassuring is not as challenging as a lot of people make out. It is

Vimal Kapur  [00:52:10] More thoughtful in terms of which, how do you prioritize all things being equals Reassuring is the right thing to do, but my personal view is we should pick up the top five and say, okay, here are the five we wanna go. Really go after and make it successful. ’cause try to do everything is gonna be just extremely difficult in order of prioritization.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:52:28] So final question before I get to our, our speed round. What do you think when, when it comes to automation and artificial intelligence, what do you think business people and investors for that matter really are misunderstanding? What, what little nugget that you’ve experienced would give them a little more insight into what the future looks like? I think

Vimal Kapur  [00:52:49] The point we discussed earlier that the automation gets heavily enabled by AI and really create the intelligence layer and that opportunity to create sales is being underestimated. I think this opportunity is real because of the skill shortage, because of the knowledge gap, which has I got created over a period of time. So I truly believe that’s something which needs more, more conversation and more emphasis.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:53:15] So. So I only have you for another three minutes, so let me click through these questions really quickly. Starting with, tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

Vimal Kapur  [00:53:26] My early managers, I mean, I was lucky to have some very good managers who taught me different things, you know, not to be fearful about whom you’re talking to. How do you think about value propositions? How to think global scale. So I think in Honeywell you’re blessed to have some very strong leaders in different part of my career and in the first 15, 20 years, which really shape you because if you, what shapes you as the first 15 ish years of your life? ’cause once those value system is built in your brain, you kind of live with that. And I was benefiting from some very powerful ventures in different parts of the company. Let,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:54:01] Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading recently?

Vimal Kapur  [00:54:05] So books I read variety, both from leadership to sector specific. The recent one of the book I’m reading is the Price from Daniel Yergin. If anybody is interested about oil economy, please do read it. Six months back I started reading Chip War. So some of the sector specific things, but also read about leadership of some of the people I admire. Dave Cote, who was chair C of Honeywell for a long time. He has some very fascinating book. “Winning Now, Winning Later” in the, joined our board recently. She has some fascinating leadership books. So I read some of them, I read a lot of books on China. I think it’s underestimated the scale of that economy. So I think we just need to, there’s a book called Words View, China’s View of the Word, very interesting book. It’s like we have a view about China, what about their view? Have we ever asked them the question, why do you, what do you do? So I kind of have very diverse the reading habits of, you know, waiting from my business specific to leadership to some of the country’s specifics. Yeah, toggled around a lot on that. And,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:55:11] And our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interest in the career in either engineering or management?

Vimal Kapur  [00:55:22] I mean, both are fascinating career. I would say engineering is a career which gives you a lot of options. So do pursue that because it gives you a wide variety of choices. Management is something that people should do who have more willingness to take a risk and have courage to make decisions. Because in the end, at some point in your career, you will have to do both. And if you think that’s not your sphere, that’s something you’re not good at it. I would rather argue than you choose something you’re really good at versus otherwise you’re going to get saturated at some point. But management is an excellent carrier by itself. So both are, both are excellent.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:56:00] And our final question, what do you know about the world of automation, engineering and artificial technology today that might’ve been useful 37 years ago when you first started at Honeywell?

Vimal Kapur  [00:56:14] I don’t know. I think I’m always excited about learning new technology all the time. You know, I’m still very curious to read things, how they work. I think I will say that staying curious is very important for us as a human being. We should never be satisfied on what we know. We should always ask the question, what we do not know. Whether it is about a technology or a business process or for that matter, any fact of life and more you are curious, more successful you are because you’re open-minded and you’re always willing to learn. And that has been my principle all my life. Always learn something new about anything. And you feel very fulfilled.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:56:52] Huh? Really, really terrific. Vimal, thank you so much for being, thank you very much. So generous with your time. We have been speaking with Vimal Kapur, CEO, and Chairman of Honeywell. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and check out any of the previous 637 we’ve done over the past 12 and a half years. You can find those at Bloomberg, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the correct team that helps put these conversations together amongst the many people who helped me. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 ~~~

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• Memorial Day. Eric Paliwoda was a big dude. Probably six-foot-six. Those big, meaty hands that would swallow your own in a tight handshake. His jaw stuck out, exaggerated by a lip full of dip. He was raised in Connecticut, but seemingly emerged from a Nebraska cornfield, ready for war.A short, ten-year-old Memorial Day piece worth pulling up again for the weekend. Quiet, well-said, no flag-waving. (STSW)

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• A Suicide. He’d been on five or six deployments, defusing bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the previous decade-plus, and was a few years away from retirement. He knew his trade and trained his soldiers hard for our upcoming deployment, which would include missions of varying lengths in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. But he was also loud and gregarious and flirtatious, and the special waggishness that comes from a youth spent in combat could be mistaken for frivolity. A Memorial Day weekend essay on veteran suicide that does the rare thing of being specific instead of statistical. Hard to read; worth reading. (Colossus)

• Marine who crawled under bridge to plant explosives approved for Medal of Honor: Marine Capt. John Ripley hung demolition charges beneath a key bridge, swinging hand-over-hand for three hours while under fire. Task & Purpose on the Medal of Honor for the 1972 Đông Hà bridge demolition. The story has been told for fifty years; the medal took as long. (Task and Purpose)

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• Experience: we found a baby on the subway — now he’s our 26-year-old son: A short first-person Guardian piece that has no business being as moving as it is. Read it in two minutes and feel slightly better about people. (The Guardian)

• They knew they were dying soon, so they threw a party: Living funerals — where people near the end of life plan and attend their own memorials — are becoming increasingly popular. A WaPo feature on the rise of “living funerals” — people with terminal diagnoses gathering loved ones while they can still enjoy it. Gentle, surprisingly upbeat, and worth the read. (Washington Post)

• We need better stories about the future.: Mayer argues the doom-loop dominating tech discourse is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagination is a strategic resource we keep underinvesting in. (Ashley Mayer)

• Inside Israel’s High-Tech Campaign to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker: A WSJ deep-dive on the intelligence and targeting infrastructure Israel has built to systematically pursue every individual identified from October 7. Disturbing in its precision regardless of where you sit on the conflict. One by one, militants who videotaped their exploits that day have been identified and killed, in a measure of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution (Wall Street Journal) see also The Challenge for American Jews: The Atlantic on the political and identity crosswinds American Jews are navigating right now — Israel, the Trump-era right, and a left that has moved on key questions. A thoughtful piece even if you disagree with the framing. Progressive alliances are weakening, political identities are shifting, and emotional ties to Israel are being strained. What now? (The Atlantic)

• Miles Davis: A Visual Dictionary: Fast cars, huge shades and, surprisingly, any old trumpet: These are the things that made Miles Miles. Miles Davis, the jazz legend and style innovator who would have turned 100 this month, remains for many people the pre-eminent avatar of cool. And while Davis’s greatest legacy is musical, he also cut a distinctive image over the course of his five-decade career. (Davis died of pneumonia in 1991, at 65.) His style shifted alongside his sound, but he had his touchstones — face-obscuring sunglasses and ticket-magnet sports cars among them. (New York Times)

Video of the day: World War II told in 20 Episodes with Tom Hanks

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

The great digital media valuation collapse

Source: Axios

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