The AMA Episode: Tracy and Joe Answer All Your Questions

a little narcissistic. I usually like being I like I like asking questions more than answering questions, right, That's why we all became journalists. But you're right, this is a special one for us. We asked people to send in audio recordings of them asking us questions, and we are now going to attempt to answer them. We also are doing this in in junction with our producer, Carmen Rodriguez. She is here with us right now. And Carmen, you put together some questions of your own, right I have?

I have, And I just feel like I'm being robbed of my moment to say thanks for having me, so thanks for having me jumped right into the perfect way. I guess You're not the perfect guest, the perfect coast, the perfect host, the perfect co host, but it is exciting that the listeners are hearing your voice for the first time. I guess maybe they heard it on some of those live episodes. Maybe maybe. Anyway, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here, even the I'm

here every day we are. We are happy to have you in front of the camera and the microphone UM as opposed to behind it for once. Uh, what's your first question? My first question is how did you meet and how was odd Lots born. I guess I'll start with the beginning, which is I remember the first time I met Joe, and you know, we we had both been covering UM finance and markets for a long time.

Joe was at Business Insider at the time and I was at the Financial Times, And I remember I met him in a bar in Midtown and it must have been like two thousand twelve or it was in the midst of the Eurozone crisis, and we were having a sort of finance Twitter gathering, but Joe and I showed up first. And I remember, for those who have never met Joe in person, he can be intense and I remember there was no like, no chit chat. It was

just like, Hi, I'm Tracy, Hi I'm Joe. And then Joe's first question was like, so you think the Eurozone is going to collapse? That was a yeah, no, yeah, that's Tracy is right about that. I'm not good at like, you know, chit chat and stuff like. I just want to get right into it. But anyway, obviously, um, you know, we hit it off pretty well despite the lack of chip.

I joined Bloomberg in late so basically exactly eight years ago, and as part of like my job at Bloomberg is like evolved numerous times since then, like I've done numerous different things and different permutations. But one of the first things I was given the opportunity to do is Okay, we're gonna do something digital. Wasn't a podcast or anything like that yet, and I had a chance to go out and hire some people to work, and Tracy was

the very first person that I wanted to hire. Clearly, I answered the your zone question correctly, you got it right. I don't remember what you said, but clearly you got it right. Because I had always been a fan of Tracy's work when she was at the f t and uh, yeah, she agreed to come on, and you know, it's like she had been at Bloomberg once, so there was like a little like bureaucracy like getting back and all that stuff.

But we didn't really know what we were doing. But I was excited and that yeah, and so um that's how we both both wounded up here nice great so on the then and then I guess I'm like the podcast question and it just before we forget about that. We sort of like didn't know what we were doing and we're doing a lot of different things, and I remember like one day I like turned to Tracey. I was like, we do a podcast together. And you know, we sort of like at the time, podcast weren't nearly

as big as they are now. Not every media company like had their whole podcast strategy and all these podcast startups and Bloomberg was like, yeah, okay, you guys can We don't know what it's gonna be about or anything like that, but all right, we'll give you like an hour of radio studio once a week or something to do whatever. We didn't know what odd Lots was going to be about, but turn on the microphone. And that was late twenty fifteen who've been doing it like seven years.

Did you ever have a moment when you were like, Okay, we should really hone in on what it is that we're doing here because we're all over the place like at the beginning, or did it just kind of naturally form itself into what it is now? I mean, I think I think that kind of flexibility is in my mind, a strength of odd lots, and it means that, like, we haven't confined ourselves to one topic in particular, and it means that we've been able to evolve along with

the news cycle. So if you go back and look at some of our early episodes, some of them are really out there. Like I remember we did one on Nana's basically because I'd read a book about bananas. For nowadays, we would look at that episode and say, it's a banana supply chain episode. But then we did a lot of finance stuff. You know, we just sort of like went along with the news cycle until we arrived at where suddenly a lot of it was about things happening

in the real economy. And I think that's really benefited us that we haven't said, you know, this is a podcast specifically about this and then been bossed in. I do think, you know, maybe late nineteen, like it's tracy, like the first episodes, you could go back and look like they're super random, like bananas. We did a few episodes about like Florida real estate. We did an episode about catfish, the catfish bubble, the catfish bubble. We did an episode I think about cattle trade, and he was

there kind of all over the map. I think it was like late nineteen we started like finding it a little bit, you know. We did some of the uh we did an episode I think with resulting in when uh, they'll look qudity and the repo stuff and the federal reserves are draining. But it really was early with the pandemic that it felt like we were starting to get a groove in terms of what is the show kind of about and what is our relationship between the episodes

and the news cycle. And I think that's what we really found out rhythm. On that note, I also wanted to, you know, to continue that basically. So I've seen you sort of follow the pulse of what's going on in markets and that kind of dictates a lot of the programming.

But every now and then you kind of get these like weird, unexpected connections, and I think that's very particular to the Odd Lots brand, And so I want to know, have you ever seen these unexpected connections directly or somewhat directly affect the market structures that aren't the more cyclical

things in the stories or anything like that. You are, yeah, well, I think I think, like the way I think about markets is it's sort of this tangled web, and some bits of the web are more obvious than others, but some of them are really hidden. And so I think whenever you have something big happens, or you have a crisis of some sort, you kind of start to pull

the threads and you start to see these connections. And the great thing about All Lots is we will have a conversation about one thing um like semiconductors, and then it just leads us down a rabbit hole to the next thing. And the global economy and markets right now are so interconnected that you are always finding those hidden relationships, and so it's almost like it's really easy to book episodes now because one episode will naturally lead into five

other episodes. And we always joke about it that we come away with an episode with five other episode ideas, but it's really true. Yeah. You know. The other thing I would say these days too that makes it easy is and we've talked about this and listeners have talked about this, like for years. I would definitely say our

episode topics financial for obvious reasons. You know, it's coming out of the financial crisis and you know, and then are like episode with COVID and the pandemic started screwing more towards physical supply change, and so now you just see it everywhere, right, like you just whether it's like prices on the menu or everyone experiencing a shortage of something. And so then we sort of it's all like the

physical visible world becomes a really big source. Now you just like see it everywhere, and so trade like there's too many topics for us to possibly discuss, Like there's always more things we want to talk about that we could talk about like in a given month or a given week, just because like you look around like, oh that'd be interesting, that'd be interesting, And so yeah, there's just a it's a it's an endless fire hose of topics that we see from just observing the real world.

Do you have a favorite unexpected moment, unexpected connections moment. Oh, I have one, and I only know this because I wrote about it, But it's um, sawdust and housing and milk prices. So so you know when we're talking about this sort of web of relationships in the real economy.

And this is a good example, which is that after two thousand eight, you had a rise in milk prices and there was someone who like dug into why that was happening, and they found out that the reason it was happening was because the housing bubble had burst, so there wasn't as much housing construction, which meant that there wasn't as much sawdust being produced. And it turns out that cows really like to sleep on beds of sawdust.

So basically, because of two thousand eight and the housing bubble bursting, a bunch of cows were unhappy and we're producing less milk, which translated into higher milk prices. I just want to jump in here really quick and say that that reading that before you said this um actually won me at trivia the other night because someone was like, do cows produce more or less milk when they sleep on sawdust? And I'm like, I don't know who wrote this question. It was one of those card games you

have to guess whether it's true or false. And I was like, that is you knew? They like, yeah, it has to be more sawdust because you have to be comfortable and happy so that they make my milk. Anyway, I just want to say thank you. I did win. Yes, yes, I think the recent one we did with Ken Jerash where he mentioned that because of the semiconductor shortage, they produced fewer cars. Because they produced fewer cars, they had

less demand for hides for seeds. Because there was less demand for hides for seeds, there was less gelatin produced from as a byproduct, and that impaired the production of gummy bears. It was like a really amazing one that I would have never thought of. But I do think it speaks to like the complexity of the Like there is sort of this obvious complexity to supply chains, right, it's like point A, point B, point ce you just

roup something than the whole ripple effects. But I think it's like seeing these sideways things where it's like the even Ken I think in that episode he's like, it's not a supply chain, it's a supply web, and that was really interesting, Like there's not just like some start product and end product. There's like all these sideways moving from all the by products that get created, the waste

products that get used, and the other things. And I think it's really hard explains why it's really hard to know how huge disruptions to society like a pandemic are really going to play out because no one talks about these things in normal time. It's like they're so submerged, so invisible during normal times. You only see them after the fact. Like shoot, the impairment of cars affected gummy bears, no one would ever talk about that relationship prior to

it having been exposed. And that's for your next trivia game, listeners, Yes, do you have anything that you now can't stop thinking about? Like I think an example where for me would be I'm eating Anthony Bourdain's I'm reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, and he describes about how how chefs designed their menu based off of what's available and when when they're delivered.

Like if you're lady, if you're ordering fish on a Thursday, that might not be the best day because it's not as fresh, whether or not this is true now It's all I can think about whenever I look at a menu, So like, have you learned anything via odd lots that

still sticks with you in the same capacity today? I think, for me, the one thing and it's not like some sort of like necessarily idiosyncratic thing like that, but I'm and maybe it's not even the odd lots, but I'm very I really notice energy waste in heat, particularly after all the episodes we've done on European energy costs and having to turn down the temperature and stuff like that. Like a few months ago, Joe has turned into like the ultimate Dad where you just wander around the house

like flipping off light switches and turning down the third step. Well, a few months ago I went to a public beach and it was like a shot hour at the beach and you know, like clean off your feet and stuff like that, and the shower had a warm water option, and I'm like, what are you doing, Like people don't need warm waters at a public shower at a beach to white to wash up your feet. I was like,

this is a really scandalous waste of energy. Like two years ago, like oh, like turn on the showers like nice warm water for feet, But I was like, this is a huge waste. Why didn't they even give this option? So I do think that like energy waste and heat in particular, like I just like think about all the time all the time. Now, yeah, I don't take it for granted anymore. I mean I guess on a similar note, I think about supply chains a lot more than I used to. But I also, you know, setting the real

economy stuff post side. I also think a lot about incentives and why people do the things they do, like often have to do much more with short term incentives than necessarily like rational long term outcomes. For instance, if you if you're talking about like wire invest or is investing in risky, higher yielding stuff, Well it's because they have a bunch of new inflows and they have like

a yield bogey that they need to actually meet. And so I think about that a lot more like how are the incentive set and how does that influence what people are actually doing? Pivoting away now and talking about crypto. Was there a moment when you decided like, okay, we should actually start paying attention to this and taking it seriously, at least for the newsake. I would love to know if you had a moment like that, Joe, you go first, well, you know, like, look, so I'm a market s reporter.

I always have been, and people ask me what's market and I would say completely and ironically, it's like it's a line that goes up and down. If there's a line on a screen that goes up and down, it's probably a market story. Uh, And Crypto is like the ultimate line that goes up and down. And you know, in the beginning, I think it was. It didn't take very long for me not to like take it seriously per se, but to realize that maybe some of my assumptions about like oh this is just a flash in

the pan, like we're gonna be wrong. And I probably like wrote some like Crypto obituaries and like twenty eleven or something like that, and then like eventually, like it didn't die, and I kept thinking it would. So at some point I guess I was like, well, tried to wrap my head around like what is this, like what

is actually going on? And after like a decade, like I still don't really have like an opinion or review or an idea where it's going, but I guess if eventually, like something doesn't die long enough, if it goes on, then naturally I think if you're a journalist or if you're anyone, you should sort of have some like, Okay,

what am I getting wrong? Maybe I should actually like pay attention so something we are in I remember writing a piece four Business Insider, and I was like I was wrong, like about crypto, and I sort of like admitted it. And I did not like, oh, bitcoin is gonna become the world's reserve currency or something or anything like to capitulatory, but I did say, like, okay, like I it hasn't died, and I don't think it's going to. And there's some interesting problems that it seems to solve,

like it in computer science. And ever since then, I've just sort of had this like tried to be like open mind and curious, and after all this time, I still don't have a view, but you know, I try to be trying to be open minded that like there's something there. So two things, they're one I totally agree with the idea of crypto is like the ultimate expression of lines going up or down, like the ultimate momentum play. And so if you cover markets like you know, there

is a natural interest. The second thing is someone once described it to me as far more interesting than it is important, which I thought was a really good way of putting it, because you're talking about the creation you know, you're talking about new technology, but you're also talking about the creation of a new type of money, and that just opens up all these interesting questions about well, what is money? And how do you design a new financial system?

And then lastly, the one other thing I would say is I think we made a conscious decision to engage with the space and try to ask some of the harder questions like where does the yell to actually come from? What is the use case for this brand new technology

that you say is going to change the world. And you know, we have asked those questions in various iterations for many many years now, um, and it's an open question about whether or not we've gotten a satisfactory answer, but like we have tried to engage with the space

to ask those hard questions. Yeah, I think like engaging with the space like in good faith and like you know sort of and it's like let's engage with it on its own terms, and like talk to people who un ostensibly are its best, uh, you know, the best, most involved characters who should have the best answers, and to sort of like come at it with it's like, yeah, clearly we have skepticism. We don't really know what it's forwards going. We want to like hear honest answers and

have like genuine questions. But it's true that even after all this time, like I literally have no idea like what it's ultimately going to be used for, if anything. So we're going to get to the questions for the audience soon. But do you have a favorite guest that you've had on over the years. I think, I mean, we have so many. Um it's like asking us to name favorite children. Um. I I really enjoyed having this was before your time, Carmen. This was way in the beginning.

We had on the archaeologist Arthur Demorrist, who's been at various times described as the real life Indiana Jones. And I have like a very small hobby where I like to read archaeology and anthropology books and so talking to him was fascinating, and I remember the conversation was about the collapse of civilizations. I think about that episode a lot. I don't know if I you know, I really liked a recent episode with Gordon McGill, which I don't know.

It's like, oh, is he my favorite guest? I would not necessarily say that, but I would say, like, in terms of what I would say if I wanted to identify, if I wanted to send someone what I would think. It's like a very like quint to Central episode of Odd LODs would be something like that, we like dive

into something deep. We talked to a guest who was not like a huge household name, which is one of the things I really like about having done this show for years, Like we have had some really big guests on, like big names, and I'm really like thrilled that they'll come on, Like it's cool. How often like say Neil cash Cary, the head of the Minneapolis Fed, has come on,

or Jan Goldman Sacks for people like that. But I have to say, for me, like, the most satisfying thing or one of the most satisfying things that we do is when we find someone Tracy mentioned Arthur, people who aren't necessarily household names, and people are like, oh, this is someone who really uh is good? You know? Stincent Dean The lumber Trader is another one. Kind of like that.

People who are like really in some area aren't nearly huge, but because of their localized expertise, can really speak to some really big macro topic. Should we take some questions from the audience? Hi, Tracy and Joe, This is well thanking from London. Over the last couple of years, Odd

Lots has become a favorite podcast. I have to admit, though there are episodes like those on market structure, what my comprehension level is in the most optimistic estimate, given the breadth of topics you gets covered with the perfect guests to each of you have a comprehension of of your episodes, Thanks and keep up the great work. Uh

do we actually understand what we're talking about? I mean, I would say, like, we cover a lot of stuff, and I think it would be unrealistic to assume that, like both Joe and I arrive at every episode with a total understanding of the particular market or topic that we're speaking about. And I think that actually lends itself to a better show because we are starting at the same level of knowledge as your average listener, and so we can ask the basic questions like what do we

mean when we say like whatever? Um? And then the other thing I would say is uh, I don't know if our listeners know, but Joe and I UM. We go through all the transcripts of our show and we edit them ourselves and we publish them, and it takes hours to do. But I actually kind of like doing it because it gives you a chance to go back and read everything and really like internalize it in a way that maybe you didn't have the chance to do when you were actually speaking. So from that perspective, the

transcripts help. I couldn't agree. I couldn't agree. More like, first of all, there are episodes particularly related to market structure or bond market liquidity or fed plumbing, etcetera. I'm like, I think I'm just going to sort of sit back and listen to Tracy and I guess talk because I

feel like I know the less. But as Tracy pointed out to like, that's really like I I do think it worked often coming to topic with like not that much knowledge or maybe not that much prep because then you are sort of like asking the questions that naturally. Like when I think of like odlats, I think like we have a very intelligent listener listener base, but you know, like anyone else, like there's only there's a limit to

how much you can be informed on. So I think a lot of our questions are sort of like what are like a fairly smart, plugged in person asked about a subject with which they really were unfamiliar. And I think that is sort of the top the approach that Tracy and I take to a lot of these interviews.

For what it's worth, I think that's a strength of the show because a lot of people come in and, like this person said, they don't really know everything, but by the end of it, like, well I understood some of it now, so I really just a little bit Well, even if you're putting you're just putting something on someone's radar so that they can, you know, go off and learn about it more after the episode. I think that's

important to should be here. The next one, this is Leo from Massachusetts, and my question is what are your uncut thoughts on MMT? That once for Tracy and for Joe, what are your uncut thoughts on Austrianism? Thanks shall go first with m m T for it. I'm not sure I can do totally uncut thoughts um okay uh A nice thing. First. So I'm on the record this year as saying that my most MMT adjacent thought is that if a problem can be solved with money, then it's

probably not that big of a problem. And I think that reflects m m t s emphasis on real resources, and I think like that part of it has genuinely been useful for the past couple of years. I guess the bit that I'm a little bit less convinced by is, you know, the emphasis on the constraint to government spending is inflation. Like that's what mm T tells you. It's not that a government has a budget like a household. It's that is what they're spending on actually going to

cause inflation in the short term or long term. And so you hear a lot about, you know, people saying, well, MMT change the narrative. So now we don't have politicians who go, oh, we can't afford this. Instead we have discussions about is this inflationary or not? And I really think one of the things we've learned from the past two years is that actually we do not have a good understanding of what causes inflation or how it works. So I'm not sure passing the buck from like can

we afford this or not? Too? Is this going to cause inflation or not? Is that useful? And I think like the idea of politicians getting together in real time and trying to figure out like if we do this, is that going to cause a price spike? Like basically I think you're you're trading one debate for another. That's it. I like. I like both those answers, the plus and the minors. Okay, Austrian is um you know when I

was like a kid in college. I still have. I have a copy of Human Action Lidwig Vonsis book on my in fact, Nathan Tanks recently he was at my house face only, and he tweeted a photo of me. Hold as you can go and find it. So that's proof. I have read a fair amount of Austrian economics. I don't know like the thing. I don't find it that useful. I don't find it that interesting. If I'm being totally honest, like I've read a fair amount. Seems kind of repetitive.

I'm not really sure if it has much connection. I want to say something like nice about it. I don't think that like assuming that the starting point of like the economy is this, like pure market, is even that useful even in the most abstract sense. Um, I'm trying to think of something like nowice like that like incorporated Austrian thinking. By and large, it just seems like to imagine a world and a set of scent incentives that strict me is pretty divorced from anything real or useful.

I'm sorry. I wanted to say something kind of nice like Tracy did, and I have some some of my best friends are Austrian. Now I have some I have some choke say about it. I don't know, Yeah, alright, sorry, I wish I could say something. I wish I could say something like more. But in all that kind of it's all good. We can we can go onto the next one. So in when I started listening, a lot of the financial conversations were around financialization and plumbing in

the financial system. So the switch from liberal to sufur reverse repo rate spiking UM just generally questions around whether the zero interest rate policy was actually working and whether the natural interest rate had changed. UM, and we were in a new era, and now the question seems to have shifted to more real economy topics, geopolitics, oil, um,

a lot of issues around inflation, supply chains. So my question is, are we in a true paradigm shift where for the next decade or so we can expect the questions to stay focused on the real economy as opposed to financialization. Thank you. You know, it's a good question. And I don't know, like obviously, like as the question or as Jonathan notes, like, yeah, absolutely, um, there's been this like shift and we've alrea and we've talked about it,

paradigm shift. I suspect I do think that the twenty tens for certain things like energy security, semiconductor availability, certain

things like that. I think a lot of governments kind of we're a little bit asleep at the wheel, assumed that a lot of these things were taken care of, and that, like particularly with energy security, it was just not top of mind, and it was sort of like, Okay, fossil fuels are going to ride off into the sunset, and we're going to replace them by electrical cars and other forms of renewable energy. And this is the final chapter. And I think we did get a pretty rude awakening

over the last year about how difficult. This process is how much governments have to take energy security again, how unstable even the source of the commodities for electrification are going to be. Even if things settle down, and even if prices come down and we don't end these supply chain disruptions fade and inflation comes down, I don't think it'll be a while before we can forget the physical world is, so to speak, like these are long cycles, and so I think these are now, regardless of price,

going to be pretty top of mind topics for some time. Yeah, I would agree with that, And it actually it kind of goes back to what we were discussing with with MMT, which is like, so if you can throw money at a problem and solve it, it's probably not that big of a problem. And I think this might be one reason why we moved away from UM a lot of

financial episodes, although we still talk plenty about it. But you know, one thing we learned, I think between two thousand and eight and two is that there's a sort of like endless number of things that central banks can do to prop up a market or fix a particular

liquidity issue. So when you get these big financial crises, like like oh, well, the FED just came out and supported the entire U S treasury market, or they announced the corporate bond buying program and things like that, Whereas some of the real economy issues that were thrown up by the disruptions of they are much more difficult to solve, I think, because you're also dealing with two graphic restrictions like you know who has oil and who doesn't, and

how do you actually move it from one place to another? And so I think those relative shortages like have just been thrown into sharp relief by and I think it's going to be hard for governments to forget that, which is why you've seen more of an emphasis on how we actually build up strategically critical infrastructure and resources and things like that. This is Fam Glover calling in from Chicago. Ifewer go back a medium amount of time, so like five to ten years, what is the take that you

had at the time that is most wrong today? And why? Oh wow? I mean, I'm pretty sure I wrote at least two or three bitcoin obituary throughout my career, which makes me reluctant to write another one. So the so then it's then it really is going to die this time, now that you're now that you're reluctant. Oh, that is a that is a good question. I think I probably would have assumed that, I mean, I definitely was wrong.

You know, I would. I would. I did not think that we would have like a big inflationary spike like this. I would have assumed that it would have taken a lot more, either from a real economy standpoint or a spending capacity or a sort of political collapse standpoint, to get the sort of level of inflation that we've seen over the course of two Also, like Tracy, you know, probably many big, many cryptocurrency takes I've completely gotten wrong trying to think those. I guess those are probably the

two big ones, two huge things. Basically, Yeah, two huge things that I've gotten wrong. Great, should we hear from another Joe from Justin? This is just Joe asking question. And I am, by the way, for listeners, I am in Austin. So the fact that we have another Austin, Texas, we're desperately trying to keep things weird. My question for you is, what's the weirdest thing you've ever seen someone like a boatload of money trading? Oh? You know, um, we did a Beanie Baby episode back in the day.

And I don't think I can't remember if I mentioned this or not, but in like six or ninety eight, like at the top of the beanie baby bubble, when I was ten or eleven years old, I sold a tie ed eyed colored lizard beanie baby at some like market event for two hundred dollars and that was like the most amount of money that I had ever seen or had, And that was a highly successful trade for me that I have never never since replicated. You know,

I had a trade. So I when I was after my freshman year of high schools, like during the dot com bubble, and I was like trading with a friend and we did very well because everyone was doing well in those days, and we took we had, like, um, both of us, like took two thousand dollars from a summer job, and like by the end of the summer we had turned it into twenty thous dollars, which was like pretty great obviously, but uh, by the end we started getting really good and we like figured out there's

like weird glitch. We started trading like penny stocks, and it was like we found some patterns that were like pretty easy to replicate day after day. And it was like one stock that I traded and I knew it was going to go up a lot the next day, and but I was also flying, I had, I was studying abroad, and so I couldn't do anything with it. And if I had like pushed back my flight to Switzerland from study for studying abroad one day, I think

I would have made like fifty thou dollars overnight. I've gone from twenty thousand to fifty thou and I didn't. So it was sort of like I was like, so I my biggest sort of like shocking thing was, you know, are the biggest thing that I remember was uh, not making a lot of money on one day. I can tell the whole story some other time. So now still keeps him up at night. Yeah, you know, we've never actually done an episode which was like Joe's lessons trading

penny stocks. We should do those. Yeah, I think that'd be interesting. Cool. Hi Tracy, Hi Joe, This is David calling to Berlin, Germany. First time caller, longtime listener. I was wondering what do you too plan on doing for retirement, like how, when and where if you plan to kick the bucket in front of a terminal at the Bloomberg office. That's fine too, but I think you've got a broad enough variety of listeners. Were all on a different route. Oh, Matt, do we do we plan to die in front of

our terminals in the Bloomberg? Yes. I do not see myself doing anything else for the rest of my life. I mean, like, if I retired, I would just will just be at my computer posting and tweeting. So it's like as long as Twitter exists, So I don't really see my achieve whether I'm technically employed or not employed

in terms of what I do. UM. I believe Joe when he says that I think one of the great things about add lots is it does give you an opportunity to talk about virtually anything that we're interested in. So I mentioned, you know, archaeology and anthropology before, and I would love to get an anthropologist on at some point to talk about cryptocurrencies, UM and Wall Street in general. So it does give you this opportunity to do a

bunch of different things. That said, I am a big fan of like just going out and learning new skills and doing new things. So it's it's hard for me to imagine that like my entire life, I'm going to be writing about finance and markets. I feel like I will do something maybe alongside it at some point, you know, before I forget the one other thing. I really want to do something with music in my life, either like sell a song or like play some concerts. I write

music I've played. I really like country music, So that would be the one other thing I hope to achieve something and the rest of my years beyond this is like something or other to do with music. But even that, all thoughts provides an outlet, Like we have done live shows where you're perform We have a new genre of music called financial country music. You have Joe to blame. We could do that for We could do that by

this year. Cool. So we got some questions in from Twitter, and there's no voice memos for those, but I'll read them out loud from J. M. Cambreras. Question for you both which role plays Twitter and building the topics for your episodes in terms of finding guests, searching trends, getting background, et cetera. Thanks for odd lots. It's awesome, huge. I mean, you know it's not everything, but it's like a huge source of inspiration in terms of literally meeting people, seeing

what people are talking about niche industry experts. That's actually one of the main reasons I'd be concerned of like Twitter everyone away the ability to find like random niche people who know one specific thing and have them sort of service too abroad to I can't think of another

platform that does it that well. I mean, I think I I'll take the opposite side of that, which is like, you know, Twitter, Twitter, um, Twitter like can be a massive distraction, but it's also really helpful from a productivity point, and I think it basically just allows you to do stuff that you would be doing in the normal course

of journalism, but just slightly faster. So instead of like emailing a bunch of people and going like, oh, hey, do you know anyone who might be good to talk about the number prices or whatever, you can send out a tweet and immediately have it go to thousands of people who can direct you to the right person. So to me, it's a productivity tool. I you know, would I be sad if if it went away? Part of me would be and I would probably spend more time

sending emails and stuff like that. But like I think, I think we could still find good topics and good guests. I mean, this episode would have been way harder to make if it wasn't for Twitter. So I'm also nobody asked me, but I'm team Twitter. Um Okay, So one last question from Twitter. Speaking of um and at end, drone In says Matt King of City has said twice on your show that it's never the analyst recommending to

the portfolio manager to buy something. It's always the PM that says that we have new inflow and we have to put the money somewhere. So doesn't this suggest that there's too much investable money and not investable opportunities after us since two thousand global GDP doubled and increased again by half, and that money has to go somewhere. So I have a lot of thoughts on this, mostly because I think about Matt King's research a lot. But this is so I coined the term China's Great Ball of Money.

This idea that you just have a bunch of like extra money that's in a closed financial system and it's just rolling from thing to things, so it will go into housing and then it will go into stocks, and

then it will move back somewhere else. But if you expand that, you know, China is an extreme example of that, but if you expand that to the whole world, I don't think it's like a massive stretch to say that there is a lot of excess liquidity slashing around the financial system and it needs to find a home somewhere, and so sometimes it goes into things kind of indiscriminately, which also ties into another one of my favorite sayings, which is flows before pros, which is also based on

a Matt King note, and the idea there is that like, sometimes the way to make alpha is just to invest in the thing that everyone else is investing in or will invest in early. And so, you know, in an era of sluggish economic growth, which um our our question are alluded to, like maybe the way to outperform is just to do pure momentum plays. And so that's like, that's kind of how yeah, I think about that in the context of crypto, which we already mentioned is the

ultimate momentum play. But I also think that more and more of the market is like being driven by just pure flows, and a lot of people are sort of embracing that so, for instance, the explosion in short dated um equity options like zero day options and stuff like that, that to me is just people like purely betting on like outcomes and flows. At that point, I just I'm just gonna I agree with what Tracy said. Okay, that's the right answer. Thanks, Joe, Yeah, I just agree with you.

I just agree with what you said. Should we leave it there, Tracy? Are we going to leave it there? Let's leave it there? Well. Thank you to everyone for your questions. Thank you to Carmen for coming on the podcast making our first front of camera appearance, and for all your great questions as well, and all your help

producing over the past year. For those who don't know, Carmen was kind of thrown in at the deep end of odd lots um and there's a lot, a lot to do, so you've definitely like stepped up to the plate and had defend. Absolutely. Thank you. I'm going to go blush in a corner now. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Isn't Though. You can follow me on Twitter at

the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman and Dash Bennett at Dashbot, and check out all of our podcast Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts and more odd Lots content go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots when we post those transcripts, we blog, and we write a newsletter once week you should subscribe to. Thanks for listening to