The Hundred Year Pivot Ep. 10 – Peter Atwater

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of The Hundred Year Pivot. Joining me, as always, the Don Quixote to my Ascension of Panzer, Demetri Kofinas. Hello, my friend. How are you?

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:53)
I'm great, man. I was making breakfast right before we jumped on this call, and I was thinking as I was very calm and relaxed, and I was like, man, I love this new format of doing these episodes of Grant where I don't have to spend all this time preparing and I can just walk in, turn on the microphone, we can have a conversation.
I like this lifestyle, so I'm a big fan.

**Grant Williams** (1:13)
It suits you. We know you are the most prepared man in the show business, but as I said at the beginning, I think that the very nature of these conversations means that they're going to take us and spin us off in all kinds of directions. And I think the more flexible we are in where we go with them, I think the better. We've already experienced that. It was some of the things we've talked about with our guests so far.

**Demetri Kofinas** (1:33)
We haven't had a chance to talk about this, but I don't know what you're... I mean, in general, I get great response from people. People love the show. I get tons of emails from people saying like, please don't stop these hundred year pivots.

**Grant Williams** (1:45)
Yeah. I mean, I don't know what makes us stop because I don't think we're going to smooth it out. We might either get too hopeful or too full of despair. That might make us stop. But until then, we will keep going. And we'll keep going again today with a great mutual friend of both of ours, Peter Atwater, joining us. Peter is an adjunct professor at William & Mary College and the author of the terrific book The Confidence Map, which he published, I guess it was last year. And his work on mood and confidence is absolutely groundbreaking. He's the person to go to. And so with mood and confidence being such important components of all the things that we're talking about, it felt like a perfect opportunity to get Peter on to come and talk about their place in the pivot and try and help us understand what they look like, how to recognize them and where they might both be at the moment and where they might take us to. And I'm really excited for this conversation.

**Demetri Kofinas** (2:33)
Yeah, I think the subtitle of the book is From Chaos to Clarity. And boy, does that not capture kind of the spectrum, the political spectrum. And we're currently on the chaos side and have been for a long time. So it'll be really great to dig into that framework with Peter.

**Grant Williams** (2:49)
Well, let's bring him on, shall we?

**Demetri Kofinas** (2:51)
Sounds great.

**Grant Williams** (2:53)
Peter Atwater, my friend, welcome to The Hundred Year Pivot. Demetri and I are thrilled to have you joining us on this little pilgrimage of ours.

**Demetri Kofinas** (3:00)
Thanks, Grant.

**Peter Atwater** (3:00)
I'm delighted to be here.

**Grant Williams** (3:02)
It's been a funny old thing. We have these conversations and they're so random and so different and so interesting. And I, you and I were chatting a little while ago after we published, I think it was the one with Pippa or maybe Jonathan Kirsch. I can't remember. One of the ones we published. And we were chatting about mood's role in this whole pivot thing. And there's nobody that thinks about mood and talks about mood in more detail and more thoughtfully than you. So this is a great opportunity to have you come and talk about just this shift in mood that we're feeling all around us. And I guess the easiest way for us to start this would be if you could just give the people listening, because there will be some that aren't familiar with you and The Confidence Map and your other work, just lay out The Confidence Map, those four quotients, just so that when we, because I'm sure we're going to use terminology in that throughout this conversation. It'd be good for people to have a representation of it.