Odd Lots
Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway explore the most interesting topics in finance, markets and economics. Join the conversation every Monday, Thursday, and Friday.
Episodes
Nate Soares on How AI Really Could Kill Us All
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
How AI Is Upending the World of Mathematics
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
What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Economic Problems in Europe
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
Why Treasuries Are 'Risky' Again
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
How Airlines Actually Hedge Higher Fuel Prices
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
Everything in Markets Is Now Moving Incredibly Fast
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
Why Building a Crosswalk in LA Is Kafkaesque
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
Hollywood Was Cooked Before AI, and Now It's Only Getting Worse
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 fantast
AI Is Upending the Lives of People Who Do Social Media Professionally
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
How LA Is Quietly Becoming America's New Industrial Tech Hub
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
Introducing: Bloomberg Money
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A Goldman M&A Banker Helped Bring the Olympics to Los Angeles
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
There's a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America
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 o
What Francis Fukuyama Is Seeing at 'The End of History'
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 mos
OpenAI President Greg Brockman on Doing Business in the Wake of Hugging Face
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
Robert Friedland on the World's Monumental Shortage of Copper
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 Bridgewater's CIO Says AI's Human Extinction Risk Is Real
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,
The Rise of Organized Retail Crime at Big Box Stores
If you walk into a local pharmacy in New York City, more likely than not, lots of the merchandise is locked behind closed doors as a measure to mitigate shoplifting. So how big is the “retail shrink” problem really? And why are stores willing to sacrifice customer experience to protect their inventory? According to today’s guest, the Home Depot’s VP of Asset Protection Scot
Why Money Launderers Love $100 Bills
Hardly anyone nowadays seems to carry much cash, never mind carrying around a bunch of $100 bills. So why does the amount of physical cash in circulation — especially big denominations like the $100 bill — keep increasing? There's a pretty obvious answer. All those dollars are being laundered and used by criminal enterprises. In this episode, we speak with journalist Oliver Bullough, a
Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense
Our guest today is Colonel Sanders. More precisely, we speak with Wayne Sanders, a retired US army colonel who is currently senior defense research analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. During his military career, Sanders specialized in cybersecurity and weapon systems research and his work for BI has recently focused on directed energy weapon systems — better known as lasers. Just a few decad
What's Behind the Big Surge in US Government Bond Yields
Global bond yields are at their highest level since 2008, with the 30-year US Treasury touching 5% just before Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a surprise increase of his department's bond buyback program and Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh made his hawkish speech at Jackson Hole. So what's driving yields higher? And what options do policymakers have to bring them down? In this episode we speak
Adam Posen Thinks Things Could Get Very 'Messy' for the Fed
Kevin Warsh gave a hawkish speech at this year's annual Kansas City Fed Symposium in Jackson Hole, but that doesn't mean the challenges are over. Will the Fed actually pull the trigger on rate hikes? What happens if the central bank doesn't act quickly enough to curb inflation? And how exactly will the new chair want to leave his mark on the Fed? In this episode, we speak with Adam Posen, presiden
Richmond Fed’s Tom Barkin on the Surprisingly Resilient Real Economy
The implications of Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech are pretty clear: Traders expect a rate hike given the hawkish hints littered in his address, largely focused on inflation. There are still a number of open questions and Warsh's lack of forward guidance does not exactly lend clarity to how the Fed will act in the coming months. Today, we recap the speech — in a conversation rec
Austan Goolsbee Is Worried the Economy Is Overheating
Inflation remains high and the 2% target is farther away than it was this time last year. There are signs all over that the economy is overheating — the strange labor market where hiring and firing remains low, while GDP is growing, but mostly due to AI and the data center buildout — and Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee is worried about how uncertain central bankers are about what
Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid on the First Jackson Hole of the Warsh Era
We are back in Jackson Hole! And this year's Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium on monetary policy might be one of the most interesting editions in years. It marks the first under new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh, and Fed observers all over the world will be closely watching his Friday speech for signs of how he might further distinguish himself, and the institution he is in charge of, from
The Nigerian Industrial Behemoth That Could Reshape the African Economy
Earlier in August, it was reported that Nigeria's Dangote Refinery secured a $1 billion underwriting for its upcoming stock market listing, which is set to become Africa's largest IPO. Indeed, the whole the continent has seen lots of economic growth in the last few years: According to the United Nations, growth across Africa was expected to reach 4.0% in 2026. The history of economic development o
Jasmine Sun on What the AI Industry Got Wrong About the Public Backlash
Within the AI industry, even the builders of it have been very anxious about the technology. They've talked for years about its potential to create destabilizing job losses. They even spend a lot of time thinking about rogue AI that could lead to human extinction. But for all their anxiety, they missed the thing that's become the most publicly salient: how upset people would be about building data
Nick Bostrom on What Happens if AI Solves All of Our Problems
The philosopher Nick Bostrom was one of the first thinkers who mapped out the existential risk of AI. In his 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, he delved into various scenarios — like the now-famous “paperclip maximizer” — to show the dangers that unfettered and highly intelligent AI posed to humans. A decade later, in Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in
What the OpenAI-Hugging Face Hack Really Tells Us About AI Danger
Scenarios that used to be the domain of sci-fi writers are coming true. We have machines that can talk. We have machines that are capable of ignoring the intent of their creators. And we have machines that are capable of planning and coordinating with other machines to deceive their creators. All of this came together last month, when it was revealed that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into
A Historic El Niño Is Coming That Could Cost the World Trillions
Every few years, weather nerds and agriculture analysts will talk about an upcoming El Niño, and then they mostly pass by with relatively few headlines. But sometimes El Niños end up being massively destabilizing -- leading to devastating droughts, flooding, and other catastrophes. And this year's emerging El Niño could end up being one of the big ones, with forecasters predic
Trucking Is Booming Again, And Drivers Aren't Happy About It
In the last year, freight companies have seen a significant upturn in the business. Volumes are up. Billing is up. And in addition to growing demand, we've also seen new constraints on the supply side, with the administration cracking down on who is even allowed on the road. As we know, trucking is an especially cyclical industry, but is this current boom structurally different from past booms? Wh
NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Running a Media Brand in the Age of AI
In the last decade, the New York Times has remade itself many times over. It has done that through acquisitions (The Athletic, Wirecutter, and the ever-popular Wordle) and by navigating all the different challenges that have emerged in the digital age and now the age of AI. Its video operation, for instance, has grown exponentially in the last few years. And they've used AI tools in their reportin
Introducing: Our Town
Our Town from Bloomberg’s Big Take podcast follows residents of Gainesboro, Tennessee, after a group of far-right Christians moves in with plans for a radical social experiment.Listen to Episode 1 on the Big Take.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can
Just a decade ago, tinned fish was hardly a premium product. Most Americans likely associated cans of tuna with thrift. But that has changed a lot in recent years. The category took off during Covid and now shoppers are shelling out for high end brands like Fishwife. Today's guest Becca Millstein started the company in 2020, positioning it as a distinct, artisanal product, more akin to one might f
Brad Setser on the US's Unusual Japanese Yen Intervention
Last week, the US joined forces with Japan to try to stop the yen’s slide. It’s the first time the two sides have intervened in the Japanese currency in 15 years, and in many ways it was an unprecedented and unusual move, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent choosing to sell euros (as opposed to dollars) and the use of a little-known Federal Reserve repo facility. So why did the yen&r
The Tungsten Market Is Warning of an Upcoming War
Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling tells us you can think of tungsten mining as “a century old prediction market for war.” As he writes in a recent piece, tungsten is “a super-element that can determine the fate of nations.” While the commercial market for tungsten is fairly small, it can be crucial in war manufacturing, due to its high density and melting point. He
Why Private Credit Got Entangled With Insurance
Insurers have quietly become a major driver of the private credit boom, with numerous private equity shops striking deals with insurance companies or buying them outright. But the entanglement with private credit is also changing the insurance industry itself, raising a number of questions about risk and regulation. Today we speak to Andrew Granato and Pranjal Drall, authors of a new paper, &ldquo
How the Iranian Economy Actually Works
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the country's new leaders — religious and political — promised to redistribute the country's wealth and made moves to make Iran independent from western influence and business interests. In the decades since, Iran's economy completely transformed, and it is closer to what Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin describe as a "mafia state," where
Branko Milanovic on What Comes After Globalization
It's pretty obvious by now that globalization has fallen out of favor. And while many pundits have deemed economic globalism dead, we are still figuring out what to call this new era. Branko Milanovic's chosen phrase is "national market liberalism," a term that sums up how a world once defined by the free movement of capital has begun to contract as the most powerful governments have come to favor
How Financial Advisors Can Grow During the Great Wealth Transfer (Sponsored Content)
Over the next two decades, more than $100 trillion will change hands in the greatest wealth transfer in history. This is a massive opportunity for financial advisors, both new and established. This conversation provides detailed, research-backed information and practical advice for financial advisors who are considering their next move. Produced by Bloomberg Media Studios and Prudential Financial,
How Franchise Restaurants Opened the Door to the Gig Economy
When the fast food industry began booming in the 1950s, it did so via a new business model known as the franchise. This model allowed independent operators to license trademarks from a business like McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts, and it soon spread across the country, with huge consequences for how Americans are employed. Legal battles fought by franchises eventually opened the door to what's now kn
Why Apple Is Heading Into a Pivotal Moment
There used to be a time when the latest product release from Apple was a huge deal. But lately, it's been kind of 'meh,' and a lot of the hype in the tech world has been directed at companies doing things with AI. For better or worse, Apple seems to have largely missed the AI boom. But there are signs things might be changing. In addition to appointing John Ternus as the new CEO to replace Tim Coo
The Creator of Claude Code on The Hottest Piece of Software in the World
2026 has been, in terms of software, the year everyone is talking about Claude Code. Indeed, Anthropic's coding agent incited a market scare — and helped usher in the era of vibe coding — through its promise of streamlining software development for both pros and amateurs. Famously, Claude Code began as a side project of Anthropic led by Boris Cherny, who speaks to us today about the ea
Lev Menand and Nathan Tankus on Why Fed Independence Is Now Hanging by a Thread
Last August, President Trump made the unprecedented choice of moving to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook. The administration claimed she was being terminated with cause, citing an ongoing investigation in alleged mortgage fraud committed by Cook. The legal battle between Cook and the administration has been tangled in the courts for the last year, eventually reaching the Supreme Court. This June, in a
Why Soccer Analytics Works Like Volatility Arbitrage Trading
American sports fans have long been comfortable talking in the language of stats and analytics. Soccer embraced the 'moneyball' revolution later; the sport was once perceived as too complex to model analytically — there were too many players on the pitch, the game's progression was too random and chaotic to reliably predict. That's no longer the case, and soccer watchers are well aware of st
NY Governor Kathy Hochul on Her One Year Data Center Moratorium
On July 14, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on new large data center projects in the state. It's the nation's first such pause at a time when anti-data center politics is on the rise around the country. But Hochul insists that she's not anti-AI, and that she's an avid user of the technology, as well as a believer that it can be a force for economic growth. On this ep
Why AI Might Actually Create More Work for Lawyers
It seems obvious that among the many industries that AI might disrupt, the legal profession might face some of the most adverse outcomes. When clerical, research-based tasks like searching through databases and reading contracts are automated, what is left for lawyers to do and how might they justify all those billable hours? In this episode we speak with Gary Wingens, chair and partner at the law
The Korean Levered ETFs Shaking Markets All Around the World
Retail participation in the stock market is booming. And of course the biggest story in markets is the AI trade, which has created an incredible amount of demand for chips and memory. These two broad themes have come together in the form of leveraged, single-stock ETFs. And while these products are popular in the US, the scale coming out of Korea is enormous. It's a good week to talk about this in
One of the World's Largest Hedge Funds on Its 86x Growth in Token Spending
We've gone through a number of a technological revolutions in investing, whether it was the dawn of the high frequency trading era or the introduction of robotraders. When it comes to AI, the big question that remains in the investment context is whether or not the technology will be implemented like those past tech innovations — meaning it will be integrated into the flow of the business wi
These Are the Sharps Actually Making Money on Prediction Markets
Here's a couple things about prediction markets. A lot of it is pure gambling and speculation, much of it on things with very little economic relevance. Another fact is that in all likelihood, if you yourself started trading right now, you'd probably lose your shirt. But there is money being made by some dedicated traders, really focused on areas like politics and economics. On this episode, we sp
How a Major Grocery Store Chain Can Dramatically Lower the Cost of Food
In June, grocery giant Aldi opened a store just off of Times Square in Manhattan. It's the company's first location in Midtown and, according to their US Chief Commercial Officer Scott Patton, Aldi has to orchestrate a "logistical symphony" to get groceries into the middle of one of the busiest places in America. For instance, they use shorter trucks to navigate the tight corners of New York City
What Dan Wang Saw on His Last Trip to China
There's this weird contradiction that hovers almost all conversations regarding the Chinese economy. On the one hand, the growth and rising material prosperity is undeniable. And of course, Chinese industrial giants are at the frontier in all kinds of things, like batteries. On the other hand, you always hear about a soft domestic market, and a general state of unease among workers who fear that p
Baidu's CFO on How It Became a Full-Stack AI Player
In the China tech space, Baidu is now a full-stack player in the AI industry. The company makes its own chips, has its own AI models (Ernie), its own cloud system, and it's integrating AI into its self-driving car business, Apollo Go. But before all this, Baidu was known for being China's leader in search. Things, obviously, have changed a lot since the company was founded in the late 1990s. In to
How Lenovo's CFO Is Allocating Capital During One of History's Biggest Booms
We know that companies around the world are investing heavily in AI. So intense is the race to win the AI battle, that it feels like there's almost no upward limit on how much you could spend on it. So how are CFOs thinking about capex in the AI age? In this episode we speak with Winston Cheng, CFO of Chinese-founded multinational tech firm Lenovo. Lenovo is known for its personal computers, espec
Rory Johnston on Why His $200 Oil Prediction Didn't Turn Out Right
The Strait of Hormuz has (mostly) re-opened! Crude prices are still up since the start of the war with Iran, but popular predictions earlier this year of $200-a-barrel Brent didn’t pan out. Why is that? We last talked to Rory Johnston, the founder of the Commodity Context newsletter, at the start of the conflict. And in that conversation he said that the Strait’s closure would lead to
How the 1994 World Cup Transformed the Business of Football Forever
The last time the World Cup came to the US was 1994. Before then, the World Cup was an enormously popular event with surprisingly limited commercial significance; the 1990 tournament in Italy, for instance, lost money for broadcasters. But that all changed in 1994, when American companies sought to make their mark in the form of advertisements and sponsorships: firms like McDonalds, Mastercard, an
Grace Shao on What the World Should Know About Chinese AI
China's AI industry has changed a lot since DeepSeek released its cheap frontier model last year, and briefly sent US tech stocks falling. After being locked out of the most advanced chips, Chinese companies are now allowed to buy some Nvidia H200s. In fact, many of the big Chinese tech companies — like Baidu — are making a push to become full-stack players, with their own chips, model
How Substack Creators Are Covering This Strange Markets Era
We closed out our New York live show on May 28 with a panel that featured three of our favorite Substackers: James van Geelen of Citrini Research, Sam Ro, founder of The TKer, and journalist Jasmine Sun. They've all been Odd Lots guests before, and we wanted to get them together to discuss how journalists and analysts are supposed to cover this incredibly strange and highly pressurized moment in m
Anthropic's Co-Founder and Top Economist on Doing Research at the AI Frontier
There’s a lot to unpack with AI right now — everything from its potential impacts on the labor market and society to more extreme questions about existential risk. Anthropic, which builds frontier models like Mythos, Fable, and Claude, is actively grappling with these issues, including whether governments should limit AI development. Just last week, the Trump administration forced Anth
Jeremy Grantham on How to Tell If a Bubble Is About to Burst
Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and long-term strategist of GMO, has a long history of calling bubbles. As he recounts in his new memoir, The Making of a Permabear: The Perils of Long-Term Investing in a Short-Term World, that includes spotting the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, which some people see as analogous to the current excitement over AI. And when it comes to today's market, there are a l
The Iran War’s Lasting Scars Across Asia
An interim deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz offers relief, but Asia’s economic woes are far from over. Beyond the chokepoint, the conflict has forced long-lasting shifts in Asia’s food and energy flows.On today’s Big Take Asia podcast, Oanh Ha joins Odd Lots co-hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal to discuss why Asia is reeling from the conflict and what the “new norm
Carmen Li's Plan to Build a Futures Market for Compute
When we spoke to DRW's Don Wilson last year, he talked about building out a GPU market that might be bigger than oil. Now, a year later, he is working with Carmen Li to do just that. Li is the CEO of two companies — Silicon Data and Compute Exchange (where she works alongside Wilson). The former company is building the index for GPU pricing while the latter is a spot marketplace for GPU proc
Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute
Anjney Midha wrote the first check to Anthropic. He teaches a viral course at Stanford on how AI works. And he was, until recently, a partner at a16z. In other words, he is AI-industry royalty. Midha's new project is AMP PBC, a company that believes it can radically lower the price of compute. To accomplish that, he is working on building a compute grid that turns GPUs into a standardized utility.
How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent
The hay market is not a transparent market: It is very fractured by types of hay, whether it is alfalfa or clover hay. There are a few opaque, illiquid markets like this — scrap metal for instance — that require some hands-on investigating to figure out. Aiden Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the HayWire newsletter, which aims to make the hay market more transparent: He and co-founder
Why Tomatoes Are the Most Expensive They've Been in Four Decades
In April, the price of tomatoes was around $2.69 per pound — the highest seen in some four decades. And tomatoes aren't the only food getting more expensive. From cauliflower to lettuce, fresh produce is spiking all over the place. So what's driving the price spike? And what can tomatoes teach us teach about America's political economy including changes in trade and tariffs? Our guest today
How CoreWeave Sees the Market for Compute Right Now
When we last spoke to Brannin McBee, the co-founder and chief development officer of cloud company CoreWeave, his business was not yet public and sourcing GPUs was a key constraint on growth. But three years later, things look pretty different. CoreWeave IPOed and has been raising money in the bond market too, as well as signing more deals with chipmaker Nvidia. In fact, investors have basically b
Why Susquehanna Is Building a Prediction Markets Business
Prediction markets that enable you to bet on pretty much everything are everywhere nowadays. But there's still a big question over whether they can expand to include larger institutional investors like hedge funds. Part of the problem is that a lot of prediction market contracts are illiquid and trading volumes can sometimes be shallow. That's where trading firm Susquehanna International Group com
Inside Hudson River Trading's Blistering Token Burn
Today’s episode, which was recorded at our recent live show at New York’s City Winery, follows up on a conversation we had with Iain Dunning, head of AI at Hudson River Trading. Last year, we talked about how his firm uses AI. Now, some seven months later, we follow up on how one of the biggest market makers around is deploying this technology. We talk about the price of memory, bottle
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI
There's a lot of debate about the future of AI — not just whether it will produce the returns investors are expecting, but also if AI will lead to mass worker displacement. Big banks are the perfect prism through which to explore some of these questions. Not only are they deploying AI very quickly, but they have a wide range of workers who are using the technology, from back-office employees
The Hidden Plumbing of Commodity Finance
We talk about the commodity supply chain all the time. We talk about the ports and the trucks and the ships and all of that. But there's another dimension to moving commodities all around the world, which is actually paying for it. Who funds the oil tanker and what happens when that tanker is, say, stuck in the Strait of Hormuz? Commodity finance underpins production, transportation and storage of
How the Invention of Rope Gave Us Modern Civilization
Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was it developed and what were the big
Gita Gopinath on Why Interest Rates Have Surged All Around the World
There's been a massive selloff in the bond market and rates are rising all around the world. Japan, Korea, the UK... You name it. Gita Gopinath, Harvard economics professor and the former first deputy managing director of the IMF, has long warned that bond markets are "in a fragile place." She sees a confluence of demographics, high levels of public debt, and the intense capital needs of the AI bo
Brendan Greeley on the Real 500-Year History of the Dollar
We love talking about money. And of course, we love talking about the dollar, in all its varieties — from bank deposits to eurodollars to stablecoins. But what fundamentally is a dollar and who actually controls it? To understand these questions, you need to understand how the dollar was born. Journalist (and current Ph.D. candidate in financial history) Brendan Greeley argues not only that
What It Takes to Run One of London's Most Popular Pubs
As our listeners know, restaurants are great microcosms for macro-economic trends. They sit at the intersection of everything from consumer confidence to commodity costs to the labor market. So on our recent visit to London, we wanted to learn about the business of pubs. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, approximately two pubs a day have closed in England during the first quarter
Architect Norman Foster on Why the West Struggles to Build Big
Not many people think of designing buildings as an exercise in economics, but the entire process is defined by constraints around resources (both physical and financial), and an iconic building can also have a huge impact on the wealth and development of the area around it. So how do you encourage private developers to consider the public good when designing new projects? And how are some countrie
'The Assassin' Fahmi Quadir on How to Survive as a Short-Seller
A short seller is a gumshoe who roots out a particular story about a specific company and brings it to light. And Fahmi Quadir, the founder and CIO of Safkhet Capital, has been labeled "The Assassin" for being one of the most famous, successfully betting against companies like Wirecard and Valeant. In today's conversation with Quadir, recorded at our live show in London at Wilton's Music Hall, she
Why Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman Built The World's Largest Computer Chip
Size is the name of the game for the AI chipmaker Cerebras: Their chips are truly massive, about the size of a dinner plate. According to Andrew Feldman, CEO and founder of Cerebras, that is about 58 times larger than the average chip. That sheer size enables blazing fast inference for AI queries. Feldman joins us on the week of his company's IPO to talk about his core product and how it fits into
Deutsche Bank's Ozan Tarman and Aditya Singhal on Understanding the Macro Risks
It is hard to have a markets conversation that isn't out of date within a minute or two. But we think this one, with Ozan Tarman and Aditya Singhal of Deutsche Bank, is basically evergreen. This conversation, recorded at our live show at Wilton's Music Hall in London, is all about fundamentals: How Tarman, DB's vice chair of global macro, and Singhal, the firm’s head of EM trading across rat
Why the Price of Oil, Beef, Electricity, and Everything Else Makes No Sense
Whether it's the price of a barrel of Brent crude or a pound of beef, it's clear prices are skyrocketing for all kinds of goods and commodities. Price shocks and shortages are, if anything, the way consumers understand the economy right now — at the grocery store or at the gas pump. Certainly, current (and future) shocks can be explained by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But the enviro
Stripe's John Collison on How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape the Internet
The internet is made for shopping. For years, the main inputs for e-commerce transactions involved targeted ads, algorithmic recommendations, SEO, and lots of mindless scrolling. But agentic commerce might represent a sea change for e-commerce: With the rise of AI agents doing shopping on behalf of consumers, how are retailers going to adapt? John Collison, co-founder of the financial services and
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Learn English A2 with Daily News | Simple English Listening Practice
پلی لیست | PlayList
Conspiracy Files with Paige Carter
Bad Friends
