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

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1:14Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, it's time for our annual AMA episode. The annual call-in show. This is my favorite time of the year, Joe. Totally. It's a weird time of year, actually. The thing is, I feel like we're always answering questions that people ask us, right? Really? No. Maybe we are too accessible. No, I never feel that way. Seriously? I feel like all we do is ask questions and no one ever asks us questions. I feel like if people want to ask us questions, it's pretty easy to do so. But we still have this call-in show.

1:50It's amazing that your entire job is you ask questions to people multiple times a week, every week for the entire year. And your main takeaway from the year is that you answer too many questions. That's not my main takeaway. No, that's really interesting. That's very relevant. That was not my main takeaway. My main takeaway was we are question platform agnostic. Like it doesn't really matter what format the questions come in, whether they're called in like in this show or whether they're typed in via the Discord or on Blue Sky or Twitter or something else. This is fair. I like talking to people.

2:22I like answering questions, but I like the call-in format. I miss the old days of, you know, it'd be fun to do a live radio show with call-ins. It would be fun to do it live. When I was a kid, I called into sports talk radio sometimes, and I sort of missed that platform. And you don't really get that with podcasts so much. Wait, what did you say on sports radio? I don't remember. I think I used to follow baseball really closely, and I would say, like oh i think the toronto blue jays have a lot of momentum down the stretch and i think they're gonna you know win the the american league or it's just some nonsense like that sports analysis and commentary is just something i really i struggle to get into because it's like it's either well the team played well or i think the team could play better that's it like that's the sum totality of what people say on those things so yes we are going to be uh we were invited listeners to record a voice memo and then email that to avlods at bloomberg.net.

3:15And let's take a listen to some and Tracy and I will do our best to answer them. We'll pretend that we're live. Yeah. This is Steve from Northville, New Jersey. I would like Tracy and Joe to set up a cage match type hardcore debate on the value of cryptocurrency. Every sane analyst says it's a pointless scam which uses tons of energy to create valueless tokens that have been bid up to insane prices and at the same time greatly facilitate many criminal transactions. On the other side, there are a host of promoters that say it is the future of finance. First off, Steve, that's not a question. That's a request.

3:51But you know what? We'll take it. We'll take what we can get. I think it's a good request. I would like to see a cage match on crypto. Yeah. So, you know, I've said it before. I have people from time to time to ask us, you know, we should do a debate topic. And we may have done one or two of theirs. I might my the reason I'm skeptical about well I mean if we're talking about a literal cage match where people beat people up that's fine but if we're talking about a figurative one where it's some sort of debate debates to my mind are only interesting if the two sides agree on like 99 % of premises where they agree on all definitions etc and there's a very specific thing most debates on crypto you get some sort of mainstream Keynesian economist and then some sort of you know crazy laser eyes person that don't agree on anything and they just talk past each other.

4:36Not a particularly productive use. And I think most debates in public forums are like that. But if we can find the right guests who largely agree and then disagree on something specific, maybe that's a good 2025 ambition. I think you're right that that's kind of a difficulty there. The one other thing I would say when it comes to crypto, the use case or the envisioned purpose of cryptocurrency always seems to be changing, right? Sure. And I used to think I've written about this, but I used to think that was a bad thing that, you know, one day Bitcoin, for instance, would be like a way to pay for things.

5:09And then the next day it would be a store of value and it would just change every day. But I think as time has gone on, we've kind of seen that that's turned out to be a strength rather than a weakness. But it does make it incredibly hard to have a reasonable discussion over the use case. Totally. You know, I would say we did that episode a couple of months ago with Austin Campbell. I think we're going to have him back on soon. I'm like coming around to some of like the stable coin stuff maybe. Anyway, should we go to the next question? Next question. Hey, Joe and Tracy. My name is Ryan Ross. I'm based in New Jersey.

5:44And I'm curious what have been your most favorite industries you've learned about in the past? And also what are you interested in learning about in 2025? that you've had episodes on the tractor supply, which was interesting, and wood pellets and how those are logistically moved around. And an episode about how car leather affects the price of gummy bears. So I'm curious, what's been most interesting to you in the past in terms of industries? And also, what are you interested in learning about in 2025? Hi, Ryan. I like this question. There are a lot of interesting things that we get to talk about on the podcast.

6:21And at the end of the year, it kind of becomes hard to remember all of them. I will say one thing I really enjoyed diving into this year was doing a bit more on agriculture. I think one of the great things of hosting your own podcast is that you can sort of, to some extent, tailor the content to your new interests. And, you know, I've kind of become interested in gardening and growing my own food. And I have some latent prepper tendencies, I guess, is the way I would put it. And so it's been really fun to kind of dive into industrial agriculture and learn more about that. That's a good answer.

6:57Tracy, will you shelter my family in the event of some disaster? Like, do you have enough stored away? No, no, Joe, what do you bring to the table? Other than sparkling conversation. Which is really important, if we're being honest. You're in for the long haul. I don't know. My kids are very cute. This is very true. Yeah. All right. You know, so I like learning about agriculture, too. So I've said it before. I really want to do more on defense in 2025. Oh, yeah, of course. Defense spending, the defense industrial base. And if anyone listening to this has the perfect guess in anything about how that all works, which I really know nothing about, shoot me and Tracy a message, because I would say that's a big area that feels wide open and interesting for me next year.

7:45Defense is a really good one that crosses over into financial markets, quite a bit, but also is obviously in the news, given the new Trump administration and Elon Musk and Doge and all of that. One other thing I would say that I'm interested in in 2025 that touches on agriculture, I really want to do a fertilizer episode. Like where fertilizer comes from and whether or not all the headlines you see about the land becoming less fertile, how serious should we be taking those. So yeah, if anyone has fertilizer contact contacts, send them our way as well. Let's do it. Should we go to the next? Let's do it.

8:23Hey, Tracy. Hey, Joe. This is Duncan. I am curious, what is the most embarrassingly wrong take you've had on something in popular discourse over the last five years? Love the show. Thanks. wait joe did duncan say the most embarrassing tank take or our most embarrassing i think he said the most embarrassingly wrong take that you've had but i don't know if it was a collective hour oh i think it was more specifically you know like either one of us man i i mostly have wrong takes you know like i wouldn't have expected crypto to bounce as much as it had starting in 2020 when FTX imploded. I wouldn't have expected that so quickly.

9:13I remember we did episodes years ago about China's made in 2025 stuff, and I wouldn't have expected it to be as successful as it has. I wouldn't have expected inflation to persist and be as elevated as long as it has. What else? I mean, I mostly get things wrong. I mean, it's harder for me to think of what I get things right about. I don't know. Tracy, do you have any? I'm trying to think of anything like really, really bad. I would say I probably wrote my last Bitcoin obituary in like 2017. And I've written quite a few at this point before I had my big like come to Jesus moment about narrative flexibility and the idea that as long as the story's there, it almost doesn't matter what the story is and there's always going to be a new one.

10:03I'm trying to think. I will say there's just no upside, right, in writing another obituary ever. No. Like, what are you going to get from that? No, and I will say the last obituary, here's a bit of inside, like, journalistic navel gazing, but the last obituary that I wrote on Bitcoin, I made sure to end it with, like, the possibility that it could come back. Having written obituaries before where it did come back, I learned a little bit. So it's a constant process where you're trying to improve on your own work. And the one thing I would say is, and I don't think people realize this, but journalism, everything plays out very publicly, right?

10:41It's like you do your work, you put it in front of people at the end of every day and people get to comment on it and decide if they like it or not, if they think it's good or not. And so you're constantly sort of getting that immediate feedback and trying to go back and improve yourself based on it. Yeah. It's an iterative process. Let's just put it that way. I'm trying to just think if there's anything else that got, I don't know. You know what I don't think? I don't think I've had many like embarrassingly mega wrong takes in part because I don't have many like takes where I stick my neck out and say like this.

11:17Oh, I know one. I know one that Joe had. What about the thing about scooters, how scooters are going to be like the next mode of transportation? You know what's funny, though? So this is fair. But someone then reached out to me and said, you know, you're wrong about scooters in the U.S., but that in Europe, actually, they have been highly disruptive. So I'm actually giving myself a half point. This is someone reached out to me from Paris, actually. So I'm going to take a half credit for that. But anyway, yeah, I mostly have like modestly wrong takes rather than anything incredibly embarrassing.

11:51But Duncan, thank you for the question. Duncan, I will say like our takes, we try to ground them in some like reality with rational analysis and reason. So hopefully they're never too embarrassing. We show our work, right? Yeah, we show the work. I'm sure we could come up with some, find some if we went back into the archives that we wouldn't want anyone to see now. But hey, they're all there. they're all public. Next question. Hey, Joe and Tracy, this is Nick or Newsman on Blue Sky. I'd like to know what you think is the most significant financial story of the year. I know there's a lot to consider, but there must be one thing that bubbles up to the top when you hear this question.

12:32Thank you for your time. I love AdLots. Oh, man, Nick, there is a lot to consider. I do think one thing, one thing that I find really interesting and I think you could probably connect it to a bunch of different things that are going on right now is the episode that we did a while back on companies getting smarter about how they're pricing their respective products and it sounds like an incremental thing it's like okay well companies they're always trying to charge more and make more money and now they've figured out some interesting new ways to do it with new technology But I think the level of sophistication and the way that they're doing it is starting to become a problem.

13:16And the more it comes on people's radars, I think the more sense of unfairness there is in the general American population over the practice. And maybe that's why you get so much of this anger sort of boiling up into politics and things like that. So price pack architecture, I think, is a really interesting one. I have three stories that I think are the three biggest stories in the world right now and of varying time concerns. One is just the incredible amount to which everyone, every investor is implicitly who has long risk assets is long tech and long AI specifically. Concentration. Concentration in this one bet.

13:54Anyone who has a diversified portfolio is making a bet in some way on tech and AI. the incredible rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse and the sort of big questions about whether anything is going to get built anywhere in the world that's not China and can anywhere, can anyone be competitive in manufacturing outside of China's borders? And then the destabilizing effects of mobile technology, which I think were sort of, you know, social media and how that's changing politics everywhere. And I think, you know, you look like Romania recently, canceled an election because they claimed that there was interference from Russia via TikTok and so forth.

14:32And the sort of ways that new technologies are reverting across democracies, and we see change in basically everywhere, numerous shocking developments everywhere, I think in part due to tech. Those to me are the three big stories right now. When do we get to do the drone slash UFO episode, Joe? I hope. Let's go to the next question. Hey, Joe and Tracy. This is Daniel in Seattle, Washington. I was just wondering your opinion on AI models being trained on journalist content across the web. And feel free to elaborate on what your colleagues might think or who has a bigger bone to pick. Is it you as a journalist or the media company?

15:16Oh, this is an interesting question. I think if you had asked me this like 10 years ago before ChatGPT and all the other variations of it became a big thing, I think I would have expected to be really annoyed at this development. But actually, now that it's happened, I feel kind of relaxed about this idea that, you know, it trained on basically the entirety of the internet and a big chunk of the internet is stuff that paid journalists have been writing for years. I don't know. I don't really feel that upset about it. Do you? No, I don't. And also, I don't know. Maybe I should, but I don't. And also, I don't think it's really worth getting upset.

15:58There are some things that I think of as these sort of big historical technological shifts that are happening, and I don't think our opinions matter very much. So I guess maybe in some sense, I could be convinced to be upset about it. But in reality, I don't think me being upset is going to do very much. I think a lot of journalists have also probably given up on the notion of making money from like old fashioned copy. And so the idea of someone else being able to make money off of it, even if it's by training some new generative AI models, fair game to them. Maybe we should all start developing our own AI models.

16:35Maybe that's the way forward. We'll try. Actually, remind me, Tracy, I have a research project on what I do in 2024 or 2025. I'm going to tell you about it. That sounds interesting. Yeah.

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17:37giving teams across your organization an easy way to order from a huge variety of restaurants, all on one platform, all while consolidating your corporate food spend so you can control costs, streamline billing and payment, and simplify reporting. EasyCater, your business tool for food. To learn more, visit easycater.com slash podcast. All right, next question, please. hello joe and tracy this is moiz from karachi pakistan i'm a big fan of the show my question to both of you is that who are your favorite economists and why are they your favorite oh interesting um well hello moiz from karachi pakistan i spent some time in pakistan um i was in islamabad and lahore i never made it to karachi though i i would have liked to go there um favorite economist do you think he means current or like old school economist well you know what we can answer however we want and that's a good okay well then i'm gonna do like a massive cop-out and i'm just gonna say canes yeah um and the reason is like a he's like you know a sort of granddaddy of a lot of modern yeah economics theory but also i think he was a really good writer yeah and he has some amazing quotes that i still like every once in a while when i find myself being very pretentious uh i find myself using like the words are meant to be a little wild for they are the what is it for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking i think that's it yeah those are some good quotes he's a good writer you know he wrote i wasn't recently went back and you know the last few years people have talked about the so-called vibe session etc he talked about that quite a bit in fact but he didn't call it a vibe session he didn't call it the vibe session but But what he said, I went back and read something.

19:25I forget. It might be like in chapter 12 of the general theory. Our producer says he did call it a vibe session. No, he didn't. Our producer is trolling us. Kale, don't do that. It's Cain's. Anything is possible. But he went back. I was reading something. I think it was like in chapter 12, one of the really good chapters. and he says something about like how political shifts can change people's perceptions of the economy which is sort of intuitive and we see it in polls or whatever but then this thing you said afterwards is like there's sort of no point in being upset about this like it's like people get angry or these facts about seeming irrationality that when uh the preferred party is in power out of power that people shift that then people change their view about investment and impulse and all the investment impulse and that like it sort of bothers people intellectually and he has like some good lines i forget exactly what it is i reread it recently which is like again don't work yourself up trying to like get irritated at the whims of the public except that the whims of the public are the whims of the public and that when the political shifts happen the vibes shift so to speak and this is what it means to sort of understand the economy which i thought was really good yeah that's pretty good so you're also in the canes camp i'll go with canes all right Fair enough.

20:44Next question. Hi, Tracy and Joe. My name is Rosalind Luby and I live in Westport, Connecticut. My question is whether the podcast is going to tackle the state of the venture capital industry as a topic in 2025. I teach a class on alternative investments to undergraduate college kids in an economics department. and I've used your podcast extensively in my class and I think this would be a great topic for you guys to dig your teeth into. Thank you. I agree this would be a great topic and I gotta say whenever I hear, we have a lot of professors who will often reach out and say that they use all thoughts material to teach their students and I always think that like the students are learning a lot more interesting things than I did at university.

21:36Like you guys are learning about like alternative investments. And I learned about neoliberalism versus realism and political theory, but oh, well. Well, always more to do about VCs, for sure. And we ended the year with some VC episodes recently. We were recently in San Francisco and we met with a few VCs while we were out there. Joe and I enjoyed being in San Francisco. I think we will probably be back next year. And I'm just really intrigued you know partially by the whole industry but also the sort of job lifestyle i guess it seems great yeah well the idea of you know you go out you meet people who are doing cool things and you decide whether or not you want to invest in them and then kind of uh take them on as a sort of mentee it seems fun um yeah no plenty more to do and you know the other thing we've recently done some episodes so there's some big changes interest rates have gone up it's not zirp anymore obviously AI is sort of the new dimension.

22:37I think the other dimension though, is that since, especially post COVID, so many people are in the game, right? So many new entrants are trying to get VC, perhaps in part, because as you say, the lifestyle seems pretty great. You know, you wear those like sneakers that look very comfortable. You just want to wear the hoodies. The hoodies, it's totally fine. Like you don't really have to like get dressed up and you like meet really interesting people in probably a way that you rarely get in most careers. Except journalism, perhaps. Yeah, who wouldn't want to be into it? But you have all these changes and all this competitor.

23:10So more to do for sure on that. And plus, you know, there's a lot to do on the fact that there are a lot of tech people in the new who are going to be entering the new administration. So that should just be really interesting to see how that plays out policy wise. Absolutely. All right. Next question. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned from your career that you wish you had known earlier? that is a very good question um okay i have an answer oh go ahead you know what i really wish i had learned earlier something i've found in that when tracy and i interview people the people who are the smartest and have the most um intelligent ideas about things like the sort of best theoreticians so to speak are also the most are frequently among the most detail-oriented and assiduous with the facts and important names, dates, places, things like that.

24:00And I think I wish I had learned earlier in my career that there is no substitute for names, dates, and places, having them memorized and using facts upon which to build ideas. That's a good one. Because I think when you're sort of younger, you get used to thinking about these big thinkers who they have these great ideas, but they're not that detail or technically oriented. But actually, you find that some of the people with the biggest, most interesting ideas, often they have all the numbers and all the facts to hand, and they can walk you through the entire history of their particular segment.

24:33And learning facts and history and dates and times and places and names and acronyms does not seem as sexy as learning some interesting theory about how the world works, etc. So when you're young, you're sort of attracted to the former and whatever, you know you're attracted to the big ideas but the people who actually have really good ideas are frequently and i've seen this over and over again on the podcast very well grounded in actual knowledge so speaking of ideas my lesson that i wish i'd learned earlier this is a little bit more um tied to journalism but you know when i first went into journalism it was like you should be you always want to be first and you always want to be original and that was how you know that was success in journalism.

25:19And I think as time has gone on, I sort of realized the chances of being first to anything, and I'm talking kind of away from hard news scoops. I'm talking like scoops of ideas is what we used to call them or analysis or something like that. The chances of being truly first and original to anything are extremely, extremely low. And so I think as I've gone on, And I've sort of come to appreciate the importance of not necessarily being first, although if that happens, absolutely fantastic. But being the person to like pull it all together the best or explain it the best or I don't know, write it in a new way that like reaches a new audience.

26:01I guess I've just become a lot more patient with coming up with things and sort of presenting them in new ways and not necessarily thinking that just because something isn't like 100 % new and original that it's not worth writing. I think this is a really good lesson. And journalists are very, we're very prideful people. And so the idea that's like, oh, someone already said this or someone sort of said this. Someone said it in the eighth paragraph of a story from six months ago. That doesn't mean that no one else in the world can ever talk or write or think about it ever again. There's a really good line in the movie Pulp Fiction where he, you know, I can't say it on air, but he tells him not to let pride mess with his head.

26:44And I think about that a lot with respect to journalism. Yeah. All right. Next question. What advice would you give to young professionals looking to make a meaningful impact in the financial industry?

26:59looking to make a meaningful impact well decide what that impact is going to be yeah first of all because there are different ways of having an impact you know maybe you think you would like to reform the financial industry from the inside out that would be a pretty big impact but also a tall order but maybe you think that making an impact is generating wealth for yourself and your clients? I think number one is probably decide what the goal is exactly. Yeah, I would sort of say I might take a slightly different turn, which is I don't even know. The idea that anyone can know what it means to have impact in any field, let alone the financial field, is a very tall stretch.