One of the best places on the web

And it's not Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Buzz, Bebo, Digg, Xanga, Twackle, etc, etc.  It's Charlie Rose.

Charlie is an American journalist who hosts a one-hour interview show, a job he's had since 1991.  I enjoy watching Charlie Rose, not because he asks the tough questions but because he gets interesting guests and goes in-depth with them.  I also enjoy exploring the archives of his website (www.charlierose.com), where interviews date back 15 years and where business leaders, movie stars and politicians opine on topical issues.  A quick assessment suggests there are about 5,640 archived videos available on Charlie's website (141 pages * 40 videos per page), and thanks to classification by topic and keywords the videos are easily searchable.

Here's a video from 1995 where Charlie discusses Wall Street with Byron Wien (one of my favourite market strategists who spent his career at Morgan Stanley and now is a senior advisor at Blackstone) and Jim Cramer (long before he became a boisterous commentator on CNBC).  At the time the DJIA just passed 5,000 and it appeared the early-90s recession was ancient history.



It's surprising, and maybe it shouldn't be, that a number of the topics discussed in this interview 15 years ago still are being discussed today.  An understanding of history is important, especially in cyclical areas like the financial markets, because it often repeats itself and many market participants either a) have short memories or b) are too young to understand what took place during previous cycles.  Charlie's website offers thousands of hours of free 'history lessons' to everyone.

In this video Wien offered an insightful view on the internet - "the internet could be the most important development since the television".  Easy to see this in hindsight, but remember this is 3 years before Google was founded, only 3 months after the first version of Internet Explorer was released by Microsoft, when the founder of Facebook was 11 years old and when it took Jim Cramer 15 minutes to download a solitaire game to play with his daughter (on AOL, who at the time had a leading market position).  Just think about what you can download today in 15 minutes...

I encourage all to explore Charlie's archives - I bet you'll be surprised who you find and be interested in hearing what they had to say.