Odd Lots

James Robinson on What It Looks Like When a State is Failing

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 37 min

The third and last episode from our Chicago live show is with James Robinson, a professor at the University of Chicago and a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics (which he shared with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson). His most famous work is 2012's Why Nations Fail, and in that book he and his co-author Acemoglu document the institutional factors — whether it is reliably run elections o

CME's Terry Duffy on the Disconcerting State of Finance Regulation

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 29 min

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission was practically brand new when Terry Duffy started working at CME Gropu almost five decades ago, and over the course of his career at the exchange, this legend of the trading world has seen an enormous amount of change when it comes to finance regulation, including the rise of prediction markets, 24/7 trading and perpetual futures. Duffy is set to transitio

What Wall Street Really Thinks About the AI Trade Now

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 41 min

It has been a big week for the AI trade — we've seen wobbles in the market, many of them in response to headlines like the Anthropic S-1 and earnings from the hyperscalers (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). So what does Wall Street make of all the news, and how are they processing an increasing sense that the laws of the economy barely apply to AI? Today, we speak with Alexander 'Alty' Altmann, global hea

AI Is Upending the Lives of People Who Do Social Media Professionally

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 27 min

Social media is really strange these days: Increasingly, our feeds are starting to look uncanny, as AI slop proliferates all over the Internet. And for the professionals who are tasked with making content, whether it is social media managers or creators, it has been a head-spinning time of change. In this conversation, recorded at the Vermont in Hollywood, we get a primer on social media's AI era

Bhaskar Sunkara Thinks the Market Has a Place Under Socialism

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 53 min

In September, Gallup released a poll that showed that 43% percent of Americans viewed socialism positively, the highest approval since Gallup began the poll back in 2010. Since Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral election, the left has made a number of gains across national politics. Still, the majority of Americans view socialism negatively, according to Gallup. As a longtime DSA member and vetera

What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at 'The End of History'

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 54 min

Francis Fukuyama's essay “The End of History?” was published in the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essay's argument — that liberal democracy would not only defeat communism, but that its partisans might, in victory, miss the “courage, imagination, and idealism” that defined the ideological battle — lives on as one of the most cited pieces of political theory i

Jeff Yan's Plan to Bring the Entire Financial Industry Onto Hyperliquid

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 · 58 min

Traders and market watchers around the world started talking about a crypto platform called Hyperliquid earlier this year, when speculators used markets built on top of it to trade crude oil after war broke out in Iran. What Hyperliquid allowed for was a 24/7 market on the blockchain. Then in August, President Trump said the CFTC was working on bringing “Hyperliquid into the United States in a ful

What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Economic Problems in Europe

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 52 min

In so many conversations, there's a widespread view that Europe is falling behind. Or it's in trouble. It has been two years since the publication of the Draghi report and the problems the report identified about European competitiveness are far from solved: Demographic challenges, rising energy costs, and a lagging tech sector still cast a shadow over Europe. But according to the economist and po

Everything in Markets Is Now Moving Incredibly Fast

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 44 min

The market is acting in ways that make it very hard to get a handle on what exactly is going on right now. The overall indices are surging, while many individual stocks are doing badly. Rates are rising, but the economy is still robust. There's capex spending and the AI trade. There's the war in Iran. And of course there's persistent inflation and the Federal Reserve's ongoing tightening cycle. On

Introducing: Bloomberg Money

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000 · 0 min

Bloomberg Money takes the pulse of your financial life, powered by the reporting of our global newsroom.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How a Chicago Restaurant Has Stayed Open For Nearly Three Decades

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 48 min

Richard Mott's first foray into hospitality was in the 1980s at the University of Chicago, where he started running a coffee shop in the basement of the business school when he was a grad student. By the time he graduated, he helped grow that single coffee shop into four locations across campus. He's a longtime Chicago-based restaurateur and his farm-to-table restaurant North Pond has been around

A Goldman M&A Banker Helped Bring the Olympics to Los Angeles

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 32 min

We're in an era of megadeals, with Goldman Sachs reporting a record year for big deal volumes as companies scramble to compete with AI. Gene Sykes has seen multiple deal cycles come and go over his multi-decade career. The co-chair of global mergers and acquisitions has worked on famous transactions like Comcast's purchase of Universal and Disney's buyout of Pixar. In addition to being "the most-i

David Byrne Explains How Forgotten Ideas Come Back to Life

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 60 min

History is littered with ideas that have been tossed aside, only for them to gain relevance at some later date. Think of Moby-Dick: forgotten in Melville's time, but now regarded as the great American novel. Or the work of economist Hyman Minsky, which became influential a decade after his death, when the 2008 financial crisis made “the Minsky Moment” a mainstream term. These are just a couple of

Robert Friedland on the World's Monumental Shortage of Copper

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 69 min

Copper demand is booming, with the metal surging another 15% this year. Copper demand has always been tightly linked to economic activity, but now it's in overdrive, thanks to data centers, electric cars, and the global push to reindustrialize everywhere. Copper prices are also rising because it's caught in the crossfire of trade wars and resource nationalism; the US is expected to place tariffs o

Why Building a Crosswalk in LA Is Kafkaesque

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 21 min

Bill McBride did not just predict the 2008 housing bubble, he helped invent financial blogging with his Calculated Risk newsletter. Zach Lasry, meanwhile, is much newer to the scene, but in his career as a real estate developer, he is already responsible for building one of LA's hottest new neighborhoods — Melrose Hill. We spoke to both of them at our live show at the Vermont Hollywood, for a wide

AI Agents Are Already Changing the Price of Goods

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 50 min

It's obvious that things are getting more expensive, and there are plenty of reasons behind the surge in prices — whether it's wars or inflation or companies padding their profit margins. But with the release of AI agents like Meta's Muse, tech companies are promising consumers that agents will start saving them tons of money by finding the best deals. According to today's guest, Lindsay Owens, th

How LA Is Quietly Becoming America's New Industrial Tech Hub

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 36 min

The story you hear nowadays is that America is struggling to make things and can't compete with China when it comes to advanced manufacturing. But of course, there's tons of high-tech stuff being produced in the US, and more and more companies are doing it out of Southern California, with factories sprouting up around Los Angeles to build things like precision metal parts and jet engines. Two foun

Don Wilson on the GPU Market's Trillion Dollar Question

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 26 min

When we spoke to Don Wilson, founder and CEO of DRW, in Chicago last year, he told us he wanted to build a market for GPUs that would eventually be bigger than oil. A year's time in the age of AI is an eternity, and so for the first episode of this year's Chicago live show - recorded at City Winery - Wilson joins us on stage again to talk about what's changed and what hasn't in his quest to help b

OpenAI President Greg Brockman on Doing Business in the Wake of Hugging Face

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 62 min

According to OpenAI President Greg Brockman, the models that escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face's servers had yet to go through alignment training. That they were able to break free of the testing environment was not a surprise to OpenAI, but what has happened since has forced them to rethink some things. Today, we talk to Brockman about what OpenAI has learned since the hacking in

Nate Soares on How AI Really Could Kill Us All

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 76 min

Since the Hugging Face incident, concerns over AI doomsday scenarios has entered the mainstream. But of course, some people have been warning about this for years, long before LLMs or ChatGPT. In their 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky spelled out their vision of humanity's inevitable demise once superintelligent AI is built. In this episode, we speak

Why Treasuries Are 'Risky' Again

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 50 min

We all know that US Treasury yields have been surging, alongside bond yields all around the world. So what explains the selloff and does this mean that bonds are becoming fundamentally riskier? What happens if investors can no longer hedge stocks with government debt? And how do expectations of the Federal Reserve's "reaction function" fit in? In this episode, we speak with Carolin Pflueger, assoc

The $300 Billion Structured Notes Market Is Booming

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 09:00:00 +0000 · 51 min

The structured products business in the US has gotten very large recently — on track to hit $300 billion in sales this year. That they are all the rage means a once opaque financial product is getting a lot more attention. So what are structured products, exactly, and how are they influencing the economy? In short, structured products are basically a fusion of a bank IOU with a derivative product,

PHP2Shell Won't Be the Last Big AI Cybersecurity Risk

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 49 min

Earlier this year, cybersecurity researchers discovered a vulnerability in PHP, an open-source coding language used in roughly 70% of the world's websites, that had been lying dormant for a long time, and if exploited, could have led to disaster. And the researchers only understood the extent of this bug through the use of frontier AI models. Today, we talk to two staffers at Calif (CEO Thai Duong

Hollywood Was Cooked Before AI, and Now It's Only Getting Worse

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 32 min

Is Hollywood just screwed? Writers are earning less. There are fewer shoots taking place in Los Angeles. And people are freaked out about AI. But according to Hayes Davenport, things were starting to feel bad in Hollywood before chatbots showed up to the scene. Davenport — who’s written for shows like Family Guy and is now creative director of LA Material and the co-host of the fantastic Hollywood

The Forgotten Godmother of Economic Literature

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 43 min

In 1776, the field of economics was born with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. And among the book's earliest readers, and most ardent advocates, was a Regency-era novelist named Maria Edgeworth. In her time, Edgeworth was one of the most famous literary figures in England, and she smuggled into her stories economic concepts and debates around rent seeking, the idea of product

There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 59 min

In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this

The French Political Crisis That's Turning Into a Debt Crisis

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 · 47 min

Just about everyone is worried about what is going on in France right now: the country's public finances are in sorry shape and there are fears that the French bond selloff, and the country's growing debt crisis, might spillover into the rest of Europe. On top of that, the 2027 elections have investors worried: The two leading candidates, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, aren't seen to be up

Why Bridgewater's CIO Says AI's Human Extinction Risk Is Real

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 65 min

Greg Jensen was one of the earliest backers of both OpenAI and Anthropic, and at Bridgewater Associates, where he is the managing chief investment officer, he leads the hedge fund’s AI strategy. As an early adopter of the technology, he has a lot of thoughts on where things stand right now in terms of model capability and safety, as well as the broader economic impacts of AI. Just recently, he pub

How AI Is Upending the World of Mathematics

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 60 min

Last month, OpenAI announced that it had produced an AI-generated proof for the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the most famous unsolved questions in mathematics. LLMs used to be bad at counting, but now they are solving math problems that have stumped humans for decades. Meanwhile, at universities, the problem of AI in education continues: Now that LLMs can do a student's homework, teachers are str

How Airlines Actually Hedge Higher Fuel Prices

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000 · 53 min

Fuel is a huge expense for airlines, and even on a good day, jet fuel prices are pretty volatile. Throw in two major wars now effecting energy infrastructure, and fuel prices across the board are higher and higher. Airlines have long tried to manage this expense through fuel hedging, using things like swaps and options to hedge against future increases in the price of jet fuel. David Kang, former