Why I Bought My Own Ticket to Our Conference

Dr. Richard Smith, FSC Chairman

A Note from the Chairman: Live in '25 Conference

Dear FSC Friends,

The FSC is hosting Live in '25, its first in-person cycles symposium in over 40 years. We will be gathering in New York City from June 12 – 14, 2025. As the Chairman of the FSC, I obviously didn’t need to buy my own ticket, but I did buy my own ticket and I want to tell you why.

I have a sense of urgency about our times. I think you do too. As I see it, the time for a reckoning with cycles is at hand. As Neil Howe pointed out in his masterful book The Fourth Turning Is Here, we have run roughshod over the very idea of cyclical forces for centuries now, and we are, consequently, increasingly subject to the very cycles whose existence we try to deny!

There is no doubt that cycles are intrinsic to our world. It’s not even a question I bother to debate any longer. Cycles are literally everywhere and in everything. The question is whether we are going to recognize and acknowledge cycles and, ultimately, learn to work with the cycles.

Our own times are not dissimilar to the times that first gave rise to the Foundation for the Study of Cycles (FSC) nearly 90 years ago, in the second quarter of the 20th century. While, thankfully, we are not experiencing the same physical upheaval of two world wars, we can certainly all sense the deep conflict coursing through our world today and the risk of that latent conflict erupting into the open again. We are also keenly aware of the existential ecological risks.

The parallels between our times and those of our founders have become more apparent to me over the past year due to my exploration of the FSC’s physical archives. These explorations have led me to realize that, while the founding of the FSC was originally in 1941, an important event for the FSC actually took place a decade earlier on the Matamek River at an old Hudson Bay trading post in Quebec, Canada.

In the summer of 1931, Copley Amory, an investment partner at Loomis, Sayles & Company in Boston, gathered a small group of research scientists for the Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles in Quebec, Canada. Amory had converted the trading post into a summer home and retreat.

I had long assumed that FSC Founder Edward R. Dewey had been in attendance at the Matamek conference but, as it turns out, he was not. He only discovered the official report from this conference in a library many years after the conference took place. He writes about his discovery of these proceedings early in his book Cycles: The Mysterious Forces That Trigger Events:

About the time when I had been anxiously interviewing economists to discover the cause of our Great Depression, a Boston financier named Copley Amory had organized an international conference on biological cycles that was held at his summer estate in Matamek. Twenty-five of the world’s leading biologists assembled to compare notes about cycles in wildlife. As I read the transcript of their findings, a strange excitement took hold of me, for I learned a fact known to every sportsman, namely, that game is sometimes plentiful and sometimes scarce. But what impressed me was that the periods of abundance, and of scarcity, often came at amazingly regular time intervals. Cycles!

I discovered something else on that fateful day when the transcript of the Matamek Conference came to my attention. I learned of the cycle work that had been done by C. N. Anderson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Anderson had discovered that sunspots act as if they were influenced by a variety of cyclic forces similar to those that Hoskins and I had been discovering in business figures and also to those that the biologists had discussed at Matamek. Cycles in business! Cycles in wildlife! Cycles on the sun! And, in many instances, these cycles had the same length and went up and down together. Now here was something basic, something fundamental, something more profound than I could envision. For if two or ten or a hundred separate and seemingly unrelated things fluctuated in cycles of identical wavelength and turned at about the same time, it was unlikely that they were as unrelated as might first be supposed. Either some of them were causing the others to behave that way, or something hitherto unknown and unsuspected was causing all of them to go up and down together. Do you see the mystery, the excitement? A detective story on a cosmic scale!

I saw at once that we were confronted with a basic scientific problem that could be solved only by linking together economics, biology, and astronomy—and perhaps several other sciences as well. The problem had to be attacked on a broad front.

Soon thereafter, Dewey and Amory joined forces to attack this basic scientific problem on a broad front. Dewey was, of course, the first Executive Director of the FSC, and Copley Amory was Chairman of the Board.

We have a rare complete edition of the Matamek conference proceedings in the FSC archives, and it reminded me about the “why” of the FSC. We also have a rare opportunity to pick up the flag that Dewey and Amory planted together back in 1941 and carry it forward into the 21st century.

That is why I bought my own ticket to FSC's Live in ’25 conference. I hope you will too.

Time rhymes,

Dr. Richard Smith
Chairman of the Board and Executive Director