Odd Lots

Is Hollywood just screwed? Writers are earning less. There are fewer shoots taking place in Los Angeles. And people are freaked out about AI. But according to Hayes Davenport, things were starting to feel bad in Hollywood before chatbots showed up to the scene. Davenport — who’s written for shows like Family Guy and is now creative director of LA Material and the co-host of the fantastic...

Social media is really strange these days: Increasingly, our feeds are starting to look uncanny, as AI slop proliferates all over the Internet. And for the professionals who are tasked with making content, whether it is social media managers or creators, it has been a head-spinning time of change....

The story you hear nowadays is that America is struggling to make things and can't compete with China when it comes to advanced manufacturing. But of course, there's tons of high-tech stuff being produced in the US, and more and more companies are doing it out of Southern California, with factories sprouting up around Los Angeles to build things like precision metal parts and jet engines. Two founders who are actively engaged in bu...

We're in an era of megadeals, with Goldman Sachs reporting a record year for big deal volumes as companies scramble to compete with AI. Gene Sykes has seen multiple deal cycles come and go over his multi-decade career. The co-chair of global mergers and acquisitions has worked on famous transactio...

In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan...

Francis Fukuyama's essay “The End of History?” was published in the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The essay's argument — that liberal democracy would not only defeat communism, but that its partisans might, in victory, miss the “courage, imagination, and idealism” that defined the ideological battle — lives on as one of the most c...

According to OpenAI President Greg Brockman, the models that escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face's servers had yet to go through alignment training. That they were able to break free of the testing environment was not a surprise to OpenAI, but what has happened since has forced them to rethink some things. Today, we talk to Brockman about what OpenAI has learned since the hacking inci...

Copper demand is booming, with the metal surging another 15% this year. Copper demand has always been tightly linked to economic activity, but now it's in overdrive, thanks to data centers, electric cars, and the global push to reindustrialize everywhere. Copper prices are also rising because it's caught in the crossfire of trade wars and resource nationalism; the US is expected to place tariffs on the refined metal. According to t...

Greg Jensen was one of the earliest backers of both OpenAI and Anthropic, and at Bridgewater Associates, where he is the managing chief investment officer, he leads the hedge fund’s AI strategy. As an early adopter of the technology, he has a lot of thoughts on where things stand right now in terms of model capability and safety, as well as the broader economic impacts of AI. Just recently, he published an op-ed in the New Yo...

If you walk into a local pharmacy in New York City, more likely than not, lots of the merchandise is locked behind closed doors as a measure to mitigate shoplifting. So how big is the “retail shrink” problem really? And why are stores willing to sacrifice customer experience to protect their inventory? According to today’s guest, the Home Depot’s VP of Asset Protection Scott Glenn, shoplifting is just the ti...

Hardly anyone nowadays seems to carry much cash, never mind carrying around a bunch of $100 bills. So why does the amount of physical cash in circulation — especially big denominations like the $100 bill — keep increasing? There's a pretty obvious answer. All those dollars are being laundered and used by criminal enterprises. In this episode, we speak with journalist Oliver Bullough, author of Everybody Loves Our Dollar...

Our guest today is Colonel Sanders. More precisely, we speak with Wayne Sanders, a retired US army colonel who is currently senior defense research analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. During his military career, Sanders specialized in cybersecurity and weapon systems research and his work for BI h...

Global bond yields are at their highest level since 2008, with the 30-year US Treasury touching 5% just before Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a surprise increase of his department's bond buyback program and Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh made his hawkish speech at Jackson Hole. So what's driving yields higher? And what options do policymakers have to bring them down? In this episode we speak with Stanford Professor Darrell Du...

Kevin Warsh gave a hawkish speech at this year's annual Kansas City Fed Symposium in Jackson Hole, but that doesn't mean the challenges are over. Will the Fed actually pull the trigger on rate hikes? What happens if the central bank doesn't act quickly enough to curb inflation? And how exactly will the new chair want to leave his mark on the Fed? In this episode, we speak with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for Int...

The implications of Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech are pretty clear: Traders expect a rate hike given the hawkish hints littered in his address, largely focused on inflation. There are still a number of open questions and Warsh's lack of forward guidance does not exactly lend clarity ...

Inflation remains high and the 2% target is farther away than it was this time last year. There are signs all over that the economy is overheating — the strange labor market where hiring and firing remains low, while GDP is growing, but mostly due to AI and the data center buildout — and Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee is worried about how uncertain central bankers are about what to do to cool the economy. The nex...

We are back in Jackson Hole! And this year's Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium on monetary policy might be one of the most interesting editions in years. It marks the first under new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh, and Fed observers all over the world will be closely watching his Friday speech for signs of how he might further distinguish himself, and the institution he is in charge of, from the Jerome Powell era. This meetin...

Earlier in August, it was reported that Nigeria's Dangote Refinery secured a $1 billion underwriting for its upcoming stock market listing, which is set to become Africa's largest IPO. Indeed, the whole the continent has seen lots of economic growth in the last few years: According to the United Nations, growth across Africa was expected to reach 4.0% in 2026. The history of economic development on ...