Tracy and Joe Answer All Your Questions

It's that time of the year. On this episode, Tracy and Joe answer questions from listeners that were submitted via voice note. We talk about everything from Chinese history to whales to whether or not we ever hold an episode without publishing it. Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 1:08Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  The world of business is constantly evolving, and Comcast business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2:00 a.m. like it's 2 P. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast business.

• 2:19Speaker 03

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• 2:51Speaker 03

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 3:06Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 3:11Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 3:13Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, it is the holiday season. I am very much looking forward to it. One reason I'm looking forward to it is because we always do an annual Ask Us Anything show.

• 3:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you know, I think I like that in the podcast, you know, it's really not about us. I mean, the show is about what we're interested in, but it really is about the, the perfect guests. But every once in a while, I suppose it's nice to sort of have the microphone turned in the other direction, so to speak.

• 3:39Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, the other thing I would say is we're already pretty accessible. Like, there's a whole All Thoughts Discord that, that we're on. There's Twitter, obviously, there's instant messages on IB and mostly we respond depending on how busy we are. So feel free to contact us there, too. But we did get some pretty interesting questions from a bunch of listeners.

• 4:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, and I like the fact that we can put, in many cases, listeners' voices on the air, bring back some of the old time radio call-in shows, the likes of which I used to listen to when I was a young kid, riding in the car with my dad.

• 4:15Tracy Alloway?

  Call-in shows are Lindy.

• 4:17Joe Weisenthal?

  The call-in shows are definitely Lindy.

• 4:19Tracy Alloway?

  All right, shall we start?

• 4:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, let's take a listen to some.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  John Lozaro, age 63, Berkeley, California. Sometimes, when you finish recording an episode, do you look at each other and say, "This doesn't meet our standards," and kill the episode? Or is it more like skiing? Once you commit to riding the chairlift, you commit to skiing down the mountain?

• 4:39Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I can't ski. I'm the only Austrian in the world, possibly, who cannot ski. So we have killed episodes in the past. In fact, there's kind of a funny story where we did an episode. It really wasn't going very well. The guest seemed very nervous and just sort of like not at his top performance. And in the end, after we recorded, we told him, you know, "We're just gonna kill this episode." And he was actually really happy about that because he felt he hadn't done his best work either. And then the other thing I would say is, I actually think journalists should kill a lot more stories. We should be more selective.

• 5:23Tracy Alloway?

  And if you think about the German word for reduktor, it sounds a lot like redact, right? Which gives you, you know, some sense of what editors are supposed to be doing, which is taking away as opposed to adding.

• 5:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it is very rare. We have, I mean, the number of episodes that we've fully recorded that we actually did not release, I think it's less than, you could count on one hand, right? It's not that many.

• 5:50Tracy Alloway?

  No.

• 5:51Joe Weisenthal?

  But there have been a few, which is for whatever reason, the guest was not on their game, or whatever, it didn't work. And I agree, I agree with Tracy. I think we should do more in general. I mean, I think journalists as a whole should do more. It's like, just release the good stuff, you know? Just release ones you're genuinely proud of. I don't want to release anything, anywhere, when I can't say, "I'm really proud of this work." And normally, we are proud, but occasionally, it's like, "No, this is not awesome." All right, let's go on to the next one.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Tracy. I was really inspired by Joe's tweets on Moby Dick, so this question is for him.

• 6:28Speaker 06

  What did you read after Moby Dick? Thanks, guys.

• 6:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks for listening. It's a very easy one because I was in such a mood to keep after reading Moby Dick. I didn't want to read anything besides Moby Dick. I sort of just thought about rereading it again, and I probably will sometime in the next year or two. But because I was in that mood, I read a book by the historian writer C.L.R. James, who wrote a book about Moby Dick. It's a book called Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways by C.L.R. James, and he basically made the argument that Herman Melville, with the Ahab character specifically, anticipated many of the pathologies of the 20th century, the rise of fascism, dictators, and so forth, all of the crises of sort of Western civilization that we experienced in the 20th century. Fantastic book, almost as good as Moby Dick itself.

• 7:17Tracy Alloway?

  Also, I've been recommending two books to you. One of them is The Heart of the Sea, which is about the whale ship Essex, which is the ship that actually inspired Moby Dick. And then there's another one I'm reading just now called A Marriage at Sea, and it's about a couple who are out sailing around the world, and their ship gets destroyed by a whale, and they have to survive on like a little raft. I actually don't know if they survive yet, so I guess we'll find out.

• 7:48Joe Weisenthal?

  I promise I will read both of those in 2026.

• 7:50Tracy Alloway?

  Both of them are excellent.

• 7:52Joe Weisenthal?

  I promise I'll read both. Let's hear the next question.

• 7:55Speaker 07

  Hi, gang. Longtime listener here. My name is Sturm. I'm 32, and I live in Puerto Rico, and I have a question for Joe. I know you're an efficient markets guy, but if EMH is true, how have portfolio managers accumulated such vast wealth?

• 8:11Joe Weisenthal?

  This is a really good question. I wonder about why the financial system overall exists. Why are people putting targets on prices? And why are there pundits on TV? And why is there financial TV? And why is there trading and so forth? I still don't really know the answer of why anyone has made any money. But my guess is that there are other services that people on finance provide other than... High quality security selection that whether it's like, okay, I don't really like know how to manage risk or whatever it is, or I'm anxious about the thought of investing, all kinds of things. I guess, you know, there probably are people who are able to obtain information that maybe counts

• 8:56Joe Weisenthal?

  as alpha, it probably exists. I don't know. I remain unsatisfied. I've asked this question myself. I don't fully know the answer, but my guess, my best guess intuitively is that within this world that we call finance, there are things that produce value other than sort of, you know, making good trades and so forth, that maybe are harder to articulate and so forth. And thus they are providing a valuable service on that front, but I

• 9:21Tracy Alloway?

  Counseling your customers.

• 9:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, counseling something. I don't know.

• 9:25Tracy Alloway?

  But I mean,

• 9:26Joe Weisenthal?

  What do you think Tracy?

• 9:27Tracy Alloway?

  I would just add on to that, like it, it seems just on the EMH stuff. It seems on a simplistic level, if EMH was real, you would never get a bubble, right?

• 9:39Joe Weisenthal?

  This is what, yeah.

• 9:39Tracy Alloway?

  And in fact, one of my favorite moments on the podcast was when we interviewed Eugene Fama, the, the father of the EMH idea. And I think I got him to say that like bubbles exist, right? Which I was surprised.

• 9:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I know. They really, they hate, like, they really wrestle with, like, this is their one thing they hate, this phenomenon. So they come up with all this stuff. But, um, yeah, um, we will continue asking the question of why, why do we exist? Why does financial media and coverage and pundits and all this stuff exist? We'll continue answering this question in 2026. Maybe we'll have an answer.

• 10:15Tracy Alloway?

  Only the big questions. Why are we here?

• 10:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Why are we here?

• 10:19Tracy Alloway?

  All right, let's listen to the next question.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Max Niederman. I'm 19 and I live in San Francisco. Supposing that AI does end up being as transformative as people claim, where do you think the value that that creates will accrue? From their valuations and how people talk about it, at least in SF, it seems people expect the labs to capture a massive chunk of that value. On the other hand, the labs have never been profitable. And even then, hardware companies like Nvidia and TSMC seem to trade at lower multiples despite being near monopolies with very good margins. So my question is this, when all things are said and done, which parts of the supply chain will be commoditized? And which will capture all the value?

• 11:09Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I think that's a very fair question. And I think, you know, it's difficult to predict if tech at some point is going to produce the or invent the proverbial AI god, like this thing that solves all of our problems. I would be a little bit skeptical of that. It seems to me like it's going to be a productivity improvement kind of at the margin for now. So maybe you use it instead of Google search. You can use it to explain certain terms much more quickly. Some industries are probably going to use it to design new products. I know there's a lot of excitement around medicine. But where the value will accrue.

• 11:53Tracy Alloway?

  I mean, some of the big tech companies are so expensive right now in the US. I keep describing this as the coffee pod theory of AI, which is some tech companies are choosing to basically produce the world's most expensive sophisticated cappuccino machine. And they're saying that, you know, it produces the best coffee that you've ever had. And crucially, what they're doing is targeting a market for this machine. Let's say it costs like $2,000. That's basically the entire world. And I'm not sure that approach works. And then, you know, some other companies are taking a very different strategy.

• 12:36Tracy Alloway?

  And they're producing something that's relatively cheap and standardized, sort of like a coffee pod, coffee maker, and it's much cheaper. And again, targeting the total market of the world. And, you know, if you think about it that way, I kind of have a sense of where it's going.

• 12:56Joe Weisenthal?

  I really have no idea. You know, the one thing I'll say is I think there is this view that, okay, AI can replace human labor and therefore lots of workers are very vulnerable and therefore there is going to be this tremendous, like it will be this very, a force of inequality, so to speak, right? So it's gonna be, there's gonna be the model makers, and I think in this vision that you're asking about, these model makers, and they're gonna make a fortune and the rest of us are gonna have to like get by on UBI or whatever because they've put us all, the models have put us all out of work. And, look, I think that's possible. The one thing I'll say, though, is that like, the tech as a force for like, financial inequality, that's already been

• 13:38Joe Weisenthal?

  the story. We don't even need to talk about AI. With the existing tech giants that we've seen that have built over the last 15, 20 years out of San Francisco, we've already seen this incredible rush of sort of wealth and income, etc. to this fairly like small, you know, this one industry, this is very like, you know, very small, fairly small concentration of software engineers and executives and VCs and so forth. And as such, I do wonder, like, could it be that somehow it's like totally the opposite, that it goes in the other trajectory and that really it's sort of like a force for equality or something and that it ends up being a situation in which people were like capital itself is not as valuable as it used to be? I don't know. I just think we should

• 14:23Joe Weisenthal?

  possibly consider the idea that what people are predicting that will happen with AI is that what is literally just an extension of what we've already seen and that to the extent that AI is something new, maybe that'll put us on a new trajectory.

• 14:53Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets, fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume, so writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk, and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices. But according to recruiters,

• 16:04Speaker 01

  advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 16:43Joe Weisenthal?

  All right, let's take another question. Hi, Tracy and Joe. This is Jennifer, 30, calling from Seattle, long time, first time. This question is for Joe. Joe, what drew you to your interest in Chinese history, particularly its modern era? Have you ever considered going?

• 16:59Speaker 06

  More back in time. I ask because I'm Chinese American with parents who've said very little about their lives during the Cultural Revolution and the 80s, when the country started opening up. So I often learn through Joe's tweets and book recommendations. But I had also noticed in my last trip to China that the one historical figure cities pay the most homage to is not Mao or Deng Xiaoping, but actually Sun Yat-sen, who was the precursor to these leaders. Thanks. Love the show as always.

• 17:27Joe Weisenthal?

  So obviously, we do a lot of contemporary China episodes, and it sort of seemed like, you know, I should probably understand a little bit more about the history. I started with the ancient stuff. I was like, oh, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go back and I'm gonna read about the old dynasties and then I'll get to the present. And I sort of like, I found it a little bit hard. It wasn't grabbing my attention, the ancient stuff. But then I remembered a couple of years ago, we did an episode with Adam Posen at the Peterson Institute a couple of years ago at Jackson Hole. And he had just sort of mentioned offhand that he had read Ezra Vogel's biography of Deng Xiaoping. And I was like, oh, maybe I'll just start there. That seems like more recent and tractable, and I could sort of slot that into my head into something. And I read that and I found it very, very compelling, as Adam suggested.

• 18:11Joe Weisenthal?

  And I think that sort of set off like, I think a reading 20th century Chinese history helps me to some extent, understand the present day. I've never read a Sun Yat-sen biography, but I'm very interested in him. One of the rare figures who is sort of revered in both Taiwan and mainland. And so therefore, someone who is an inspiration to both the nationalist and the communist, which is kind of weird. And he was like, sort of a, you know, a, an early pioneer of land reform and silver. So I think maybe that'll be another thing I aim to read in 2026, a good Sun Yat-sen biography.

• 18:47Tracy Alloway?

  I really like the older Chinese history. I read a really good book. I can't remember the title now, but it was all about the Chinese bureaucracy and government system, how it used to be. And, you know, one of, one of the most rigorous systems in the world. Arguably, you had to take this insane test to get the position. And I remember I also did a bunch of research around the sort of late 1800s, early 1900s, the fall of the imperial family and what it means for debt markets. That was a really fun story.

• 19:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I should go back and read the ancient stuff as well. I'm going to add that to the 2026 list.

• 19:29Tracy Alloway?

  OK, let's take another question.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Hi, Joe and Tracy. My name is Daniel Bestov. I'm 26 years old and currently based in New York, where I'm doing my masters at Colombian Financial Economics. I'm a huge fan of the pod. And Spotify told me in the last year, I was in the top half percent of listeners and maybe now a first time caller as well. My question is this. You have such a wide range of guests with very different backgrounds, and you cover an enormous amount of information. How much of that are you able to retain and naturally call back in everyday conversations or when you do follow up episodes? And how much do you rely on note taking or revisiting past episodes to connect your ideas over time?

• 20:09Tracy Alloway?

  This is a really good question. This is a sort of journalistic process question. By the way, thank you for being in the top, top percentage of Odd Lots listeners. We appreciate that.

• 20:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's get coffee sometime.

• 20:20Tracy Alloway?

  But going back to the question, you know, it kind of, this is obvious, but it kind of depends on the guest. And if the guest says something memorable or something that you really think is insightful, I think we do retain some of that information. I used to retain a lot more when we were editing our own transcripts and publishing them. I really value transcripts, but it was just so much work and took forever. So we stopped doing it. We're hoping to come up with some sort of solution soon. And the biggest compliment I can pay a guest is saying that, like, I'm going to go back and read the transcript because there's so much knowledge there, so much information.

• 21:04Tracy Alloway?

  I just have to absorb all of it.

• 21:07Joe Weisenthal?

  It was funny. I was at dinner the other night with someone, and I said to them, have you ever actually learned anything from listening to a podcast? Because I do sometimes wonder if I ever remember anything. No, that's not totally true. I do, but. I also sometimes wonder, setting aside podcasts and recall of specific facts, I also have the same thing with books. You know, we were just talking about that Deng Xiaoping biography. And if someone's like, oh, Joe, you just spent three weeks of your life reading a biography of Deng Xiaoping. What did you learn? And I'd be like, ah, he sort of opened up. And for a while, he was sent down to work on a tractor factory. And then he opened up and I'd be like, you know, there's like, I was like, oh, did I really need to spend three weeks of my life to be able to recall three or four basic facts?

• 21:52Joe Weisenthal?

  I suppose that there are things that I don't know that I remember in like my deep storage part of my memory that would be, you know, that would come out in a conversation. But I do, going back to questions of like, why are we all here and so forth? I do sometimes have these thoughts of like, do you know, how much, how much do we really learn and internalize? And how much is it just fun to have these conversations?

• 22:15Tracy Alloway?

  Sometimes we surprise ourselves, right?

• 22:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, we do.

• 22:18Tracy Alloway?

  Like, sometimes we come up with some random fact that's kind of interesting that we learned from somewhere. Uh, just on the note taking part of the question, we generally don't take notes. In the interview, we might jot down like a word or two, just to remember to come back and ask a follow-up question. But um, yeah, mostly it's, it's a genuine conversation between three people and we try to keep it as natural as possible.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  Hey, Joe and Tracy, AJ Toss here. I'm 37 years old and I'm from Lafayette, Louisiana. Go Cajuns. I have a question for you about Bitcoin. You guys have spoken about how the narrative around Bitcoin changes every cycle. And so I'd actually like to ask you to make a prediction, whether you think there will be another cycle for Bitcoin where it way outperforms everything else. And assuming that it does, uh, what would the narrative be this time? Thanks, guys.

• 23:18Tracy Alloway?

  That is a really good question. So the narrative theory of Bitcoin is this idea that because Bitcoin is essentially nothing, it is able to transform itself into anything. So we've seen it go through these various cycles of transformation, reinventing itself. You know, in the beginning, it was supposed to be just a digital payment system. And there's the famous incident of the guy that bought a pizza and lost a lot of money that he otherwise would have gained. And then it kind of, you know, it turned into an inflation hedge. More recently, it's turned into a Trump vehicle.

• 23:58Tracy Alloway?

  I actually had it, I had an idea for a narrative that comes next, but I'm blanking out on it totally. I feel really bad.

• 24:07Joe Weisenthal?

  You'll tweet it if you remember.

• 24:09Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I'll tweet it. It was like two days ago.

• 24:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, man.

• 24:11Tracy Alloway?

  And I had this idea and sorry, I'm very tired.

• 24:14Joe Weisenthal?

  It'll come back to you.

• 24:14Tracy Alloway?

  It's the end of a busy season.

• 24:16Joe Weisenthal?

  It's been a, it's been a busy season and busy year. Look, I have no, you know, I was like, oh, now I'm going to give the official odd lots for Bitcoin price target for 2026. No, I really have no idea. I don't have any idea if it'll outperform again. You know, of course, it has been pronounced dead several times, many times over the years. So perhaps that's always the reason to discount the idea of, okay, this time is dead. That being said, you know, look, like the, I thought one of the most compelling arguments that had of the various narratives over time, I thought one of the most compelling ones had been that it would be sort of this, you know, post sovereign money and therefore

• 24:55Joe Weisenthal?

  kind of like a digital gold safe haven. It has not been behaving like one in 2025. I mean, this is one of the most volatile years on memory from like a deglobalization, a geopolitical standpoint. If you think there'd be one year where it's like, okay, people want some sort of money that is disconnected from governments, maybe this would be the year. Maybe they do, but they're choosing for gold. They're choosing the actual safe haven. Bitcoin meanwhile has underperformed US treasuries. So the US treasury is yet another safe haven that is outperforming Bitcoin. Bitcoin in 2025. So I really don't know, but I do think that the poor performance in in 2025 should be something of a concern. Again, people always said, oh, it's a it's

• 25:40Joe Weisenthal?

  a tech stock hedge. Well, tech stocks have had or a tech stock proxy. Tech stocks have done great this year. So it hasn't even it hasn't even satisfied that requirement. And then the last thing I'll say is that there is a lot of, I think, legitimate enthusiasm about crypto, particularly in the realm of stable coins, getting back to maybe the original ideas Tracy mentioned of a payments platform. But all of that is happening on other chains besides Bitcoin. And so even if crypto becomes more of a thing in the financial system, it's not obvious, it's possible, but it's certainly not obvious that Bitcoin would see any benefit from it.

• 26:16Tracy Alloway?

  I do think, though, we shouldn't underestimate Bitcoin's ability to reinvent itself. And this actually took me a long time to realize. And, you know, you mentioned the obituaries for crypto. I wrote some of those, like, I think in 2012, I wrote one. So

• 26:34Joe Weisenthal?

  We've all learned our lesson.

• 26:35Tracy Alloway?

  Mea culpa on that. We'll see what happens.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 28:16Speaker 02

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• 29:01Speaker 02

  for companies of every size, all around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business.

• 29:10Joe Weisenthal?

  All right, let's take another question. Hello, Joe and Tracy. This is Cynthia from Vancouver, Canada. What is something the market seems really confident about that you think deserves more questioning or more nuanced discussion? You know, first of all, thanks Cynthia for calling in. The first thing that comes to my mind is, I have been, I wrote about this recently in the Odd Lots newsletter. I am kind of surprised about how well-anchored market-based expectations for inflation have been. Because there is, I think, pretty legitimate, there's two things going on. One is, you know, the Fed hasn't missed its inflation Target for years. And so there's perhaps reasons to think that just already that the Fed

• 29:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Hasn't been as serious about 2% as it had been before. But then also, I do think there are Good reasons to think that in the future, the Fed will not have the same capacity to target Stable prices, the way it used to due to politicization, due to the general sort of like populist trend In politics, which is not something distinct to the Trump administration. Certainly, I think The Trump administration has accelerated that process with a lot of the criticism of the Chairman and so forth. And so like, I am a bit surprised that if you look at various market Based measures of future inflation, five year, five year breakevens, and so forth, that it has

• 30:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Been pretty stable, because that feels disconnected from the way that we basically talk about this

• 30:42Tracy Alloway?

  Topic. Mine is also related to inflation. I think far more people need to figure out how the CPI Official numbers for inflation are actually calculated and produced. And, you know, ultimately, A lot of it is a series of numbers that are estimated. Those are called imputed numbers, And a lot of them are actual observations of prices, which Bureau of Labor Services people Go out and collect. It's actually a really labor intensive thing to do. And most people, You know, they treat them like as a simplistic number. And I think it's much more important

• 31:22Tracy Alloway?

  To look at the different components. And actually, we're recording this on December 18, And we're seeing a really good example of why it's important to know how CPI is actually calculated, Because, you know, the number just came out much lower than expected. And it's interesting, If you start to break it down to see what assumptions were made and what's actually moving.

• 31:47Joe Weisenthal?

  All right. For our next question, this one was just written as opposed to an audio note, but it's a really fun one where Tracy and I kind of see the world a little bit differently. So we have a chance to get into that. This question comes from Diego Aguilar Canabel. He asks, where did my intellectual beef with the idea of the term premium start? And look, so this is something that's come up. People talk about the term premium in the in the yield curve. And I'm always like, what exactly does that mean? So, you know, the way like, I guess, Tracy, let's start with you. What is the term premium? Don't ask me. I'm not going to define it. How do you, what is the term premium?

• 32:24Tracy Alloway?

  It is basically the extra compensation or premium that investors demand to hold debt, you know, out longer term.

• 32:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. So here's what I don't get. Why do they deserve extra compensation? Why don't they just deserve the appropriate compensation? Like, I buy stocks. Do I, oh, I deserve extra compensation because they're risky? No, I deserve appropriate compensation. I deserve to be compensated, I suppose. But I hate this idea of like, extra compensation. We always want extra compensation. But then also, I guess my other issue is that, like, I think if you knew, if you, if you had a crystal ball and you knew for sure what the Fed was going to do in every policy meeting, it would make for the next 10 years, you know, there's 80 years of the next 80 meetings. If you knew what that was going to be, I think you would know the exact price that 10-year yields should trade at. And so I don't really understand

• 33:17Joe Weisenthal?

  why we can't just say that the yield curve is the market's expectation of overnight rates for the next 10 years.

• 33:25Tracy Alloway?

  Well, it's, it's in comparison. So the extra premium is in comparison to shorter term bonds. And there are some calculations that go into that. I think it's, it's, you know, not the be all and end all of the market, but it's certainly an interesting thing to look at. And when we get big moments in the term premiums movement, you know, if it flips from positive to negative, it kind of tells you a lot about where the market's going.

• 33:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. On this point, though, let's just to press further there. I think there's really key. Which is so they're right. They'll everyone admits these are unobservable. Right. These are models. These are models that indicate what this notional term premium is. The fact that it can flip to negative and it was negative for much of the 2010s suggests to me like, that's another reason. Like, I don't understand how this idea that there is holders of long term debt per se need extra because of extra protection or whatever, because apparently they were actually getting a discount on it if we go by the model, what the models said in the 2010s. So I just find the whole thing. I just find it all very unsatisfying.

• 34:34Tracy Alloway?

  I would also say the term premium beef, we play it up a little bit for the show.

• 34:39Joe Weisenthal?

  We play it up for the show.

• 34:40Tracy Alloway?

  We hope you enjoy. All right. This is going to be our final question. Again, this one was written in rather than a voice note. So here we go. It is from Michael Khan. He asks a non-markets question, more specifically for for me, Tracy. What was your favorite Magic the Gathering card and what critical function did it serve in your deck? Bonus question, if you and Joe were a Magic card, which ones would you be? Um, that's a very fun question. Okay. So my favorite was probably my Siobhan dragon. I like the idea of dragons and it had really nice art and at the time it was a really valuable

• 35:23Tracy Alloway?

  and powerful card. By the way, I don't know if I'm pronouncing Siobhan right, whether it's Siobhan or Shyvan, like we, we didn't have a lot of pronunciation guides when I was in middle school. And I also just don't remember how people were saying these things. It was like 30 years ago. And I say that just because someone, someone on Twitter or Reddit was criticizing me for not knowing that a card that Joe mentioned was an actual card. Yeah, I didn't know that. I thought you were making it up. I mean, it sounds like, you know, an obvious Magic card.

• 35:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I know nothing at all about Magic. I've never played it. I really, I just, I don't know how the game works, etc. All I only remember one fact, which is That one of my good friends, younger brother in high school, had a call called Wall of Brimbles. Actually, this gets to like the question about memorization. Who the heck knows how that random fact got stuck in my head or what's? But this is, I hear magic and I just remember this card. I just looked it up. It looks like this card would cost somewhere between 25 and 30 cents. So I'm certainly not memorizing it because it is a particularly valuable or important card.

• 36:33Tracy Alloway?

  And then what role did the dragon play in my deck? I think I said this on the podcast. I, I really enjoyed the collecting side of Magic the Gathering more than I enjoyed actually playing it. You know, there was some gender imbalance at the time and it like sometimes felt weird to, you know, go to war with a bunch of guys. But I really enjoyed putting together the decks and sort of strategizing. And I guess I didn't enjoy testing them out that much. What would we be if we were?

• 37:09Joe Weisenthal?

  If Odd Lots were a card, Tracy, you gotta, you gotta answer this one.

• 37:12Tracy Alloway?

  If Odd Lots or if us? It says if you and Joe were a magic card. So give me a second.

• 37:20Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, full disclosure, I just asked ChatGPT because this seems like a kind of fun question. And the AI-generated answer is we would be a blue-red legendary creature that rewards drawing cards, talking about weird market mechanics, and turning every small data point into a big compounding advantage. I'm not sure how you would incorporate discussions about markets into a Magic the Gathering game. But, you know, it's nice to hear we could be a dragon. I would say like, maybe we would be a Vesuvan doppelganger. And I say that partly because I'm, I'm sort of biased to the, the older cards,

• 38:04Tracy Alloway?

  the Ice Age cards that came out in the, the mid 90s for obvious reasons. And I think the doppelganger, you know, they obviously complement each other and their actual power in the game, from what I remember, is they can take on the characteristics of any creature that's actually in play, or most of the characteristics. And I think that's, you know, that's kind of what we do. We try to adapt

• 38:32Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 38:33Tracy Alloway?

  to every conversation to get the best result.

• 38:37Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. I also asked Chad GPT, I didn't really understand. I don't, I don't even understand its result. But then it said, why this works, it said, Joe generates flow, motion, liquidity, and Tracy imposes structure, friction, and narrative discipline, which I think many listeners would actually sort of agree with. It's sort of, it doesn't sound totally off. So I'm

• 38:57Tracy Alloway?

  That's not bad, but it's not a Magic the Gathering card.

• 38:59Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, no. I didn't even understand, like, all this. I can't even, I don't, two, you are a legend. I don't know what any of this stuff is.

• 39:07Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I do have some good news, which is, remember I said that I had lost all my Magic the Gathering cards and I didn't know where they were? My mom actually found them in her basement. They were sort of hidden away. The bad news is, I really don't have any valuable ones. I still have the chiffon dragon and I have one that was signed by the artist, but that's about it.

• 39:31Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm surprised, there's not one in there? Like, is there like an Antiques Roadshow style show for Magic the Gathering cards? Like, maybe we could do an episode, like, it's some, some guy here, some dealer, and like, talk through the cards or something like that. I would do that.

• 39:44Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, that would be really fun.

• 39:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's do that episode.

• 39:46Tracy Alloway?

  So, this is the end of the AMA. Thank you, everyone, for sending in all these great questions. We had a lot of fun answering them.

• 39:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. And thank you, everyone, just for, I mean, end of the year, crazy year, great year. So really thank you to everyone who, everyone who's listened.

• 40:03Tracy Alloway?

  And yeah, we definitely hope you listen in 2026, because we have some excellent episodes coming up. So. Shall we leave it there?

• 40:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 40:12Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 40:19Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Definitely follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, Ed Carmen Arman, Dashal Bennett, Dashbot, and Kale Brooks. And Kale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 40:40Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you want us to go on an Antiques Roadshow for Magic Gathering cards, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 41:35Tracy Alloway?

  Congratulations, you've built a dashboard. But now comes the follow-up question, and the follow-up to the follow-up, and the dashboard for that. Meet Hex. Give everyone the power to ask their own questions, explore data, and build with AI, all in natural language. Because every answer should spark another question, limited only by your curiosity, not your data team's bandwidth. Go deeper than dashboards. Visit hex.ai.

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