Podcasts · Business · News

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

300 episodes

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 page 1 of 6

  1. AI Agents Are Already Changing the Price of Goods

    · 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…

  2. How a Chicago Restaurant Has Stayed Open For Nearly Three Decades

    · 49 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…

  3. The Forgotten Godmother of Economic Literature

    · 44 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.…

  4. Bhaskar Sunkara Thinks the Market Has a Place Under Socialism

    · 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…

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

    · 38 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…

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

    · 30 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…

  7. Don Wilson on the GPU Market's Trillion Dollar Question

    · 27 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…

  8. David Byrne Explains How Forgotten Ideas Come Back to Life

    · 1 h 00 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…

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

    · 48 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…

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

    · 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…

  11. Nate Soares on How AI Really Could Kill Us All

    · 1 h 16 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…

  12. How AI Is Upending the World of Mathematics

    · 1 h 00 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…

  13. What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Economic Problems in Europe

    · 53 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…

  14. Why Treasuries Are 'Risky' Again

    · 51 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…

  15. How Airlines Actually Hedge Higher Fuel Prices

    · 54 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.…

  16. Everything in Markets Is Now Moving Incredibly Fast

    · 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…

  17. Why Building a Crosswalk in LA Is Kafkaesque

    · 22 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…

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

    · 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…

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

    · 28 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…

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

    · 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,…

  21. Introducing: Bloomberg Money

    · 0:30

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

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

    · 33 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.…

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

    · 1 h 00 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…

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

    · 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…

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

    · 1 h 03 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…

  26. Robert Friedland on the World's Monumental Shortage of Copper

    · 1 h 10 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…

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

    · 1 h 05 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…

  28. The Rise of Organized Retail Crime at Big Box Stores

    · 53 min

    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?…

  29. Why Money Launderers Love $100 Bills

    · 55 min

    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…

  30. Why Laser Beams Are the Hottest New Tech in Defense

    · 53 min

    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,…

  31. What's Behind the Big Surge in US Government Bond Yields

    · 37 min

    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…

  32. Adam Posen Thinks Things Could Get Very 'Messy' for the Fed

    · 1 h 00 min

    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…

  33. Richmond Fed’s Tom Barkin on the Surprisingly Resilient Real Economy

    · 31 min

    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…

  34. Austan Goolsbee Is Worried the Economy Is Overheating

    · 47 min

    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…

  35. Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid on the First Jackson Hole of the Warsh Era

    · 29 min

    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…

  36. The Nigerian Industrial Behemoth That Could Reshape the African Economy

    · 58 min

    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…

  37. Jasmine Sun on What the AI Industry Got Wrong About the Public Backlash

    · 52 min

    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…

  38. Nick Bostrom on What Happens if AI Solves All of Our Problems

    · 56 min

    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…

  39. What the OpenAI-Hugging Face Hack Really Tells Us About AI Danger

    · 1 h 00 min

    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…

  40. A Historic El Niño Is Coming That Could Cost the World Trillions

    · 56 min

    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 --…

  41. Trucking Is Booming Again, And Drivers Aren't Happy About It

    · 46 min

    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…

  42. NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Running a Media Brand in the Age of AI

    · 1 h 00 min

    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…

  43. Introducing: Our Town

    · 1:52 · Trailer

    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.…

  44. How a Sardine Gets From the Ocean to a Can

    · 58 min

    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…

  45. Brad Setser on the US's Unusual Japanese Yen Intervention

    · 42 min

    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…

  46. The Tungsten Market Is Warning of an Upcoming War

    · 44 min

    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…

  47. Why Private Credit Got Entangled With Insurance

    · 52 min

    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…

  48. How the Iranian Economy Actually Works

    · 57 min

    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…

  49. Branko Milanovic on What Comes After Globalization

    · 1 h 01 min

    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…

  50. How Financial Advisors Can Grow During the Great Wealth Transfer (Sponsored Content)

    · 18 min

    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…

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them. Explicit shows are for adult profiles only, and children’s profiles hear only children’s shows. More about this list.