The Odd Lots AMA Episode: Joe and Tracy Answer Your Questions

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1:15Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracey Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, it's my favorite time of year. That could mean so many things. That's right. It's earnings season again. No, it is the holiday season, the festive season. More importantly, it is our annual Ask Me Anything episode. I love the end of the year because rather than, you know, like coming up with new guests and like figuring out what the big stories are, we can just do like roundup episodes and sort of look backs and retrospectives. No, but for real, I genuinely enjoyed this episode. I like it.

1:53I like that it has that old-timey radio call-in feel, and I always like to hear what's sort of resonating with our listeners and what they're curious to hear more about. Totally. And, you know, sometimes people are curious about us and our careers and stuff, and we don't really like, I don't know, I'm not that into talking about ourselves. You know, I want to be the question asker, you know? That's why we went into journalism. But it's fun to hear what people are curious about. And every once in a while, I guess, having the microphones turned, so to speak. Yes. So we invited all of our listeners and readers and Discord subscribers to send in their questions, anything at all that they wanted to ask us.

2:34And we have a selection of those questions here. So without further ado, why don't we hear from our first caller? I'm Alfredo. As of now, I live in Bonn, Germany. I had a question pertaining to how you actually started the podcast, where you got the idea, and how you two went from being co-workers to co-hosts on a podcast so niche and so interesting. Thank you, Alfredo. I'll start with that one. There was no real plan. I think, so Tracy and I started working together here at Bloomberg in 2015, and we were doing digital stuff, and we've had a variety of jobs. But I think it was sometime in 2015, podcasts were getting big or starting to grow.

3:18And I turned to Tracy and I said, you want to do a podcast together? And she said, yeah, that's my memory of it. It's a good thing I said yes. What if I said no? I have too much other stuff to do. No, that's - We did have a lot of stuff on our plate in those days. Yeah, that's right. I think at one point, Joe and I were doing three different jobs, if you include the podcast. You know, we were going on TV. We were managing the Bloomberg News Desk, lots of stuff going on. But I am really glad that we started it in 2015. If you go back and listen to some of our early episodes. Don't, don't. Well, they are a little bit embarrassing because you can tell that we were sort of learning as we went.

3:58But they are also some of my favorite episodes. So one of our very first ones was an episode about the banana, the evolution of the banana, how the world ended up with a boring banana. There are some really interesting episodes with an archaeologist, Arthur Demarest. Those are still, they live free in my head. Do you remember the catfish bubble episode? Yes. Yes. We did some real niche stuff back in the day. And of course, that I think that still exists. But we were like, the news was like, oh, what's that? Like we were way off the news back in those days. Yeah. But I'm glad we started it. It's turned into a really great place to actually dive into topics and learn more about them in a more, I guess, intense way than you can necessarily through other journalistic mediums.

4:43So yeah, that's how it started. And I definitely didn't think this would be our main job. I always figure it was like a side job of a side job. So when I turned to Tracy, I said, should we do a podcast? It was definitely not like this is what we are going to do with our careers. So this has been fun. This is producer Kale. Before we go into our next question, could you also say why and how you came up with the name OddLots? Oh, we were looking for something that wouldn't necessarily pigeonhole us in one topic. And I think odd lots came from, it's a bond market term that I knew back then. It's basically like an order of a non-standard size.

5:28And I thought the idea of oddity or non-standard size was kind of perfect for what we wanted to do because we wanted to dig into things that weren't necessarily at the forefront of the news cycle. And we wanted to do it in a slightly different way where we wouldn't sacrifice nuance and detail just for like, you know, a five minute here are the important bullet points about this particular topic. We wanted to cover it in a slightly different way. And so I think the All Thoughts name turned out to be perfect. Yeah. And I like the fact that like you don't necessarily know what it's about. I feel it's given us a lot of flexibility over the years.

6:06And finance media can be a little bit cliche. You know, you can you just sort of pick some random words like you're doing for Drader poetry, like market wire or market whatever it is. And so I like that you don't really it's not too it doesn't beat you over the head with the idea that this is a markets podcast or economics podcast. Hi, Tracy and Joe. I love the show. This is Jeffrey Ting from Chicago. I'm an actuary. And my question for you two is, at what point did you decide to introduce each guest as the perfect guest in every episode? I don't think we ever actually decided that. I think if you go back and listen to a lot of our old episodes, it took us a while to get into a rhythm of even introductions, our old uh how we do it oh yeah we used to include our full job titles and it took like five minutes just to do the introduction for ourselves well also i remember like we used to do this thing where like we would sort of pretend that one of us didn't know what the episode was getting oh yeah we did all kinds of stuff sometimes it wasn't pretending though because we were doing it on such an ad hoc casual basis that sometimes we genuinely didn't know who had been booked but one thing i'll say is that i learned by the way our first ever guest was our colleague tom kane And one thing, having watched Tom Keen on TV over the years, he is one thing that he's great is he sort of like puffs up the guest.

7:33And there's a good reason for that. If the guest is here, it's because you think they're great. Because if they're not the perfect guest, why are you talking to them? So I sort of always thought that that was a great thing that Tom did, which is make the guest feel special, make the audience feel like, yeah, we're really excited about talking to this person. So I think that's sort of part of how it slipped into our consciousness to do that. Yeah. None of the sort of taglines that people are familiar with now, like, let's leave it there. Shall we leave it there? None of that was premeditated. Totally.

8:04It just kind of came naturally, and then we kept doing it. And especially with The Perfect Guest, I feel like if you say it once, it's sort of an insult to other people if you don't also call them the perfect guest. We don't always say it, but it's never intentional. Yeah. Hi, my name is Roy. I'm from Detroit, Michigan. And my question was, how do you find the perfect guests? If you have an idea for a specific episode, like the legal cannabis market in New York, or energy drinks with small modular nuclear reactors, does the episode idea come first? And if so, how do you find the right person to speak to that?

8:37Hi, Roy from Michigan. So there are a couple ways we go about finding the proverbial perfect guess. So sometimes we have an idea for an episode. So for instance, there's an episode that I really want to do right now about why headlights on cars are so freaking bright nowadays. And so we're sort of in the early processes of trying to find good people for that. And the way we typically go about it is we'll often look on Twitter because frankly, if your whole life is tweeting about one particular topic, the chances are you would make a really good odd lots guest if you sort of eat, breathe, and discuss particular topics.

9:20And also sometimes we'll just come across someone who we think is very, very interesting, who we think would be fascinating to talk to. And so we'll do it that way too. There's sort of a variety of ways that we go about it. Sometimes we'll read research, we'll pick out particular academics that we think have done really interesting papers on a particular topic, we can kind of come across them anyway. But I will say in more recent years, one of the ways we have been finding more people is through suggestions from listeners. And so we sort of have this network now of people in the All Thoughts world who might hear that we are interested in doing a particular show topic and will make a suggestion for someone that they think is really good.

10:03Yeah. You know, a lot of the guests that we have themselves will pitch a guest. They're like, oh, you were interested in that point. I know someone who'd be good. It really is all different kinds of things. But, you know, at the end of a lot of episodes, we're like, we should do an episode on this. We should do an episode on that. And then someone hears that and they said, hey, I know the perfect person. So it really is sort of as the network and community and audience builds, we get, it makes it easier to find people. Hey, Tracy. Hey, Joe. This is Ethan from I'm Annapolis, Maryland. With the cryptocurrency total market cap up over 100 % this year to north of$1.5 trillion, I was wondering what your guys' general thoughts were on the industry and its outlook going forward, and specifically if you had looked into Solana or Avalanche or any of the gaming things going on.

10:49We can't escape crypto, can we? You know what I think is really funny? So he mentioned, I think the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is like$1.7 billion. billion or something like that, which is kind of big. But like the market cap of Apple is 3 billion. So what I kind of find to be fascinating about the crypto industry, so to speak, is that the entire thing, which is like captured so much public attention over the last decade and executives talk about all the time and this huge culture, smaller still the entire thing than one prominent companies. And there are other companies that are about as big as well.

11:31So I kind of find that fascinating for all of this attention and fascination. Still feels kind of small to me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, Joe and I could probably do this entire show just talking about crypto. But part of me thinks I can't believe we're doing this again. And some of the froth that we've seen in the market is already reminiscent of stuff that was happening in 2020, 2021. But the other part of me, and I've written about this, thinks that crypto kind of, there's a reason people are really into it. And personally, I think it has to do with like, it's so sort of postmodern that you can make it anything that you want it to be.

12:15And some people have dubbed this the narrative flexibility of crypto. So the idea that when it first started, you know, it was sort of post 2008, central banks were intervening in the market for the first time in a long time in such a dramatic way. and people thought of it as like central bank proof currency and that was the big attraction and then as it matured it was you know it was digital gold it was inflation proof uh then earlier this year when we had the banking crisis it was like an anti-bank bank proof currency and it just sort of moves from thing to thing to thing and i think that gives it a resilience or a sort of attraction that is far longer lived than a lot of people give it credit for.

13:03That doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, it's the future of money or it's the way we're going to do transactions. And Joe and I have talked about this a lot on the podcast, that the idea that despite, you know, more than a decade of cryptocurrency existing, we have yet to see a real use case. I don't think like either of us have been convinced of a real use case here. But the fact that it's so kind of detached from reality means that it is excellent for pinning a narrative to. And we've seen that time and time again at this point. And I'll just add to the questioner, like on some of these alt layer ones like Avalanche and Solana.

13:42I haven't checked in lately on the state of crypto games. I sort of get it in theory, but I still have yet to hear of one that's like genuinely fun and not just a thing. You know, we sort of talked about this in our recent Magic episode where Magic the Gathering cards, you could make a lot of money at some point if you held the right ones. But the game was also just really fun to play. If there's really a fun game in crypto that people are excited about playing for the gameplay itself, and it's not really about making money on NFTs or something, I would love to see one. So if someone wants to shoot one to me and show it to me, I'd love to check it out.

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15:49My name is Scott from the University of Paso, where I teach business English. Tracy, I'm just sort of interested because I think you once said in one episode that you have an Austrian connection. Just sort of sort of curious what that connection is. Hi, Scott. Yeah, sure. That is an easy one. my mother is Austrian. She's from a relatively small town called Klagenfurt near the southern border with Italy. And I used to go there all the time when I was a kid. I tried my best to learn German. But as a person who hates grammar, I will say it's a struggle. I can understand pretty much anything. But my grammar is still pretty bad.

16:29But yeah, I'm half Austrian. That's My name is Gabriel from Columbus, Ohio, and I'm a huge fan of the podcast. My question is, if you were forced to make the case, how would you steel man Austrian economics? That's a good one. Joe, you go first. I could definitely do it. I mean, I'm very ideologically malleable. I don't have strong views on anything. So if someone said, you know what, go steel man Austrian economics or anything else, I'm sure I could do it. Look, I mean, I think there's something real to this idea that monetary constraints are important and that obviously, you know, that there can be such thing, obviously, as too much money, too much money printing, that could cause inflation, it could cause difficulty in business planning, etc.

17:20And so the idea of taking that to some extreme that you come up with some sort of optimal productive outcome by virtue of some sort of very serious commitment to monetary scarcity, I think there are weaknesses in this idea. And I think there's almost a sort of utopian fantasy that if we have an entire monetary system around to enforcing that scarcity, then all kinds of problems get solved. I think there's issues with Austrian theories of interest rates. But I don't think that at core, you know, I think you could tell an argument or tell a story about Austrian economics that people would find compelling, like built around this idea.

18:02I think I could do it if given some practice. Someone's going to force you to do this now. Can I just say I'm very happy that this has turned into an Austrian episode. Okay, if I was forced to steel man Austrian economics, I would simply call up my dad and ask him to do it, probably while stacking his hoard of silver coins. That's what I would do. Maybe that's a good show idea. Tracy, let's do it. Hey, Tracy and Joe, Ryan from Seattle, long-time listener. I want to know what the two of you talked about when the tapes stopped rolling after the infamous SBF episode. That's a good one. Yeah. I mean, I think we were mostly still in shock.

18:45And if you listen to the episode, you can sort of hear it at the end when we do the outro. I mean, we are in shock and we literally say, I don't know what to say. Yeah. You know, the one thing I'll say is that that was a rare moment in life where I knew something major had happened right then that people would talk about for a long time and that in this sort of like history of crypto or whatever, this would be a mile marker. And, you know, the week after that episode recorded or aired, sorry, the week after that aired, SBF was in the Bahamas on stage with Bill Clinton and the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at their big conference.

19:22And I just remember thinking to my and he was in shorts and sneakers and they were in suits. And I just remember thinking to myself, OK, in one week he sort of described crypto more or less as a Ponzi scheme. And then a week later on stage with these two heads of state, I was like, this is a turning point. And I just intuitively felt it in real time right then. It was very surreal. One journalistic process question. I mean, we knew we were going to write the comments up and publish an article. So we set about doing that. And one thing we made sure to do was we made sure that the resulting story was free outside of the Bloomberg paywall so that anyone could read it.

20:05And so that it could kind of get as many legs as it could as a sort of, I guess, public service. Also, the headline of that story was SBF described yield farming and left Matt Levine stunned. I feel like that was a recognition that part of the story was leaving us stunned or leaving Matt stunned. And so we sort of recognized that at the time it wasn't just that he sort of described very clearly the Ponzonomics, but that our mouths were sort of agape. He said the quiet part out loud, which was the major surprise there, I think. My name is Corey. I'm from New York City. What would you say is your most unpopular food opinion?

20:43Most unpopular food opinion? I can't tell what's popular and what isn't now. Oh, I hate intermittent fasting. I think it's an incredibly clever rebranding of what women have for decades called dieting or crash dieting. and we were very much not encouraged to talk about dieting in a public setting, especially the office. But somehow, if you're intermittent fasting, it's completely acceptable to wander around the office and say that you're about to faint because you haven't eaten for three days. That's a really good take. I really like almost all food. I consider myself sort of like an enthusiastic omnivore.

21:28I'll try anything. This might be sort of scandalous, but I'm not into like lox or smoked fish. Oh, I hate lox. OK. And I feel, you know, I like grew up like a Jewish family, like people eating bagels and lox and all that stuff. And I just like I feel like I should like it. I like fish. You like sushi, though. We've had sushi. Totally. uh smoked fish generally it just what those various flavors of fish that people put on bagels it doesn't do it for me i generally don't like fish very much as you know actually this is a funny story the first time joe ever invited me over to his place for dinner he asked me if there is anything i don't eat and i said i'm not a big fan of fish and then he sorry about that and then And he made a poke bowl with raw tuna for dinner.

22:20And it was very good. And it's not that I will never eat fish. It's just not my favorite. I kind of have to be in the right mood for it. I was in a big poke phase in those days. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your poke passion, Joe.

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24:04And my question is really for the producers. How big of prima donnas are Joe and Tracy off the mics? Or are they really easy to deal with? And if you're not going to answer that question, my question for Joe and Tracy is, in the era of Venmo and Zelle, is FedNow a solution in search of a problem or is there a real use case for it in 2023, 2024? Should we let the producers answer that question? Since we have about half a dozen producers on the show currently, I will say for the listeners, Joe and Tracy are probably the easiest people I've ever worked with as a producer. That is incredibly sweet, Kale.

24:48I feel like I have to say you've only been working for us for like two months, but I appreciate that. I'm sure it'll get worse. I'm sure it will but it's also Joe and Tracy are both the most willing to do their job every single day I've worked with people who are maybe a little bit more reluctant to do this and you know we have to go and we have to re-record something we have to schedule one more episode for that same day and Joe and Tracy are always completely willing and actually probably more often than not pegging us to do more work so they are the most willing and the most kind of on the spot capable people that I've worked with.

25:27That is very kind. That's very nice. I would just say on that last point, like I really enjoy this job. I really, I think it's like a real privilege to get to host Odd Lots. So when you say like we're into doing it, I really am. And I sort of feel the, I guess, you know, it's an honor. It's great to be able to do this job and that people listen to us. And so the idea of not wanting to put in the work or not being enthusiastic about showing up and recording even when there's something you know extra or takes time like it's unfathomable to me yeah part of me still i still can't believe that this is our main job now and we basically get paid to talk about things that we're interested in and to learn more about them um the other thing that i would say is kale is a hundred percent correct that probably the main source of tension between us and the producers is that we constantly kind of want to tear up the schedule because we found something new and interesting yeah exactly and we want to get it out asap um and nine times out of ten they are completely willing and accommodating and very flexible and will um let us kind of do that on a regular basis so thank you guys for for bearing with us in in our enthusiasm to get stuff out quickly always our pleasure oh yeah as for the other question to me and Joe about FedNow, I think it's really interesting because part of me cannot believe that the U.S.

26:55has existed for so long without this kind of real-time settlement program. And I think in our episode with Michael Barr, I mentioned this, that in the UK, I can remember when an equivalent system came into being, I think it was like 2008 or something like that? It was more than a decade ago. And here we are in 2023 and the Fed is unveiling an equivalent. That said, you're absolutely right that there is instantaneous payment technology that already exists. There's also the clearinghouse system. And I think it's kind of interesting that the Fed has basically created a competitor to the clearinghouse payment system.

27:38And again, we spoke about this with Michael Barr, it's going to be really interesting to see the take up for the Fed system, how it compares with the clearinghouse one, and whether or not we see different types of payments sort of splitting on those two channels. Right now, it's just myself and our rotator Ashna in the studio because all the other producers are currently out with COVID. And one of them, our show lead Carmen, has a question for Joe and Tracy. While she's having COVID-induced fever dreams, she's wondering if you have ever had any odd lots related dreams or nightmares. Oh, I know why she's asking this.

28:20It's because I posted in our little internal office chat, I posted a dream last week that was very odd lotsy. Okay, I will answer this. I have extremely literal dreams that you can very easily connect with things that happened to me during that particular day. So recently, we had drinks with some of our listeners who are active in the discord, and one of them gave us a very nice present. It was some chocolate from Germany. It's really delicious. I've eaten it all already. And that day, I think during one of our recordings, I also So I mispronounced something. And so one of the producers asked me to rerecord a sentence, which is not an unusual practice in podcast land.