Odd Lots

Inside the Booming Market for Dinosaur Fossils

02 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction...

How Taiwan Became the World's Most Perilous Geopolitical Chokepoint

01 May 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has highlighted the potential for long-running theoretical chokepoints to turn into reality, with dramatic results...

BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance

30 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The last few decades have been marked by a number of megatrends in finance including the extraordinary growth of asset managers, the rising importance...

What's Actually Going On With Private Credit

27 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The private credit market has grown enormously fast in recent years — so much so that by some estimates it's now bigger than the market for junk...

Presenting Foundering Season 6: The Killing of Bob Lee, Part 1

26 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Killing of Bob Lee, Part 1: San Francisco Has Blood On Its Hands Three years ago, Bob Lee, a tech executive famous for creating Cash App, was foun...

Understanding the Most Viral Chart in Artificial Intelligence

25 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We live in an era of charts that are going up and to the right. This image obviously describes the stock market, particularly any company whose busine...

James Bosworth on the "Orange Wave" Happening Across Latin America

24 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We're living in an extraordinary moment for Latin American politics. From the ousting of Maduro to the ongoing oil blockade of Cuba to Javier Milei re...

Google's Liz Reid on Who Will Own Search in a World of AI

23 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Not too long ago, search engines were the dominant form of querying the internet. But that's changing since the rise of large language models like Cha...

Daniel Yergin Sees a 'Different World' Emerging After the Hormuz Crisis

22 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to the history of oil and energy, nobody is more famous or well respected than Daniel Yergin. He is the Vice Chairman of S&P Global,...

Brad Jacobs on His Big Bet on Building Insulation

21 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

He's done it again. On Sunday night, building supply company QXO announced that it would be acquiring TopBuild for $17 billion. TopBuild sells and ins...

Jack McClendon on Why It's So Hard to Create a New American Oil Boom

20 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The White House wants gasoline prices to be lower, and it wants to see American oil companies drill for more oil. But of course, these ideas are in te...

Alex Imas on Why Economists Might Be Getting AI Wrong

18 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone knows that new technologies can be really disruptive to the labor market, but eventually new jobs emerge and things come back into balance. A...

Planet Money Turned Everyday Annoyances Into an Economics Book

17 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There are a lot of things to be annoyed about in modern life. The high cost of food and housing and childcare. Dating apps that don't seem to work. Th...

Brad Setser on the War in Iran and the Future of the US Dollar

16 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It's possible that the war in Iran could reshape financial flows in significant ways. Perhaps the Gulf states will end up as less desirable places to ...

War in Iran Is Already Reshaping East Asia's Energy Future

15 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The war in Iran has caused the price of all kinds of commodities to surge, and that has a negative economic impact almost everywhere. But the squeeze ...

Presenting What Next TBD: Why Everyone is Freaking out About Private Credit

14 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It's fueling the A.I. bubble, it's coming to your retirement portfolio—and it's flashing a lot of warning signs right now.In the wake of the 200...

Ziad Daoud Explains How War with Iran Will Reshape the Gulf

13 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Regardless of whether the war with Iran continues, it seems likely to have a lasting impact on the Gulf states. They may have to rebuild damaged pipel...

The Big Macro Force That's Been Driving Stocks Higher for Years

11 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Stocks have gone up over the years because corporate earnings continue to grow. That part is straightforward. But in addition to rising stock prices, ...

How Shipping Insurance Really Works During a War

10 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When the conflict with Iran started, some of the first headlines we saw had to do with shipping insurance. Marine insurers were said to be canceling w...

Thomas Peterffy on Interactive Brokers' Plan to Professionalize Prediction Markets

09 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Right now, when you think about prediction markets, you basically think about two main companies: Polymarket and Kalshi. And then when you think of wh...

Search Engine Presents: Are you a good driver?

08 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The story of how a secret project at Google led to driverless cars on American roads. And, an answer to the question: are the robots actually safer dr...

Gina Raimondo on How European Industry Is Getting Crushed

06 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The relationship between the US and Europe is deteriorating along both security and economic dimensions. The Trump administration has imposed tariffs,...

Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day

03 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There's obviously a lot of talk these days about AI and possible destruction of white collar jobs. Intuitively bankers might be expected to be victims...

This Is How to Tell if Writing Was Made by AI

02 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When you consider the fact that many people don't know how and where to place a comma, it's safe to say that AI is already better than most people at ...

Javier Blas on Why Oil Could Go Much, Much Higher

01 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Oil has shot up by a lot since the start of war with Iran. But it could still get much worse. So far, the massive disruption (due to the closure of th...

Why NASA Hired a Chief Economist

31 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This week, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II, a mission that will send astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But t...

Goldman CIO Marco Argenti on the Warp-Speed Improvements in AI

30 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When we last spoke to Marco Argenti, chief information officer at Goldman Sachs, we were talking about how the bank was deploying AI, including the de...

Anthropic, the Pentagon, and the Future of Autonomous Weapons

28 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The last big story right before the war in Iran started was the collapse in the relationship between the Pentagon and Anthropic, with the latter objec...

Now There's a Helium Shortage and It Affects More Than Balloons

27 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in heli...

This Is How Big Money Is Trading the War in Iran

26 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Markets are often said to be "headline-driven," but that cliché has rarely felt more true than it does right now. A single tweet or Truth Socia...

The Petrochemicals Shock That's Already Rippling Through Plastics

25 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone knows by now that war in Iran is curbing the flow of oil around the world. But oil isn't just a gasoline and jet fuel story, of course. It's ...

David Shor and Byrne Hobart on the Politics of a White-Collar Wipeout

24 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Nobody knows when or if AI will lead to mass displacement of white-collar work. But the anxiety is clearly here now, and there's very little evidence ...

What the Iran War Means for Dubai's Luxury Boom

23 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dubai has become a huge destination for the rich, with an influx of high-net-worth residents driving up property prices and boosting the UAE's tax rev...

Introducing: Leaders with Francine Lacqua

22 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What makes a leader successful? Francine Lacqua interviews top CEOs and global industry leaders for candid lessons on leadership, management, and the ...

Here's Why The Iran War Is Prompting A Safe Haven Rethink

21 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Here's Why is Bloomberg’s short explainer podcast, where we take one big news story and break it down in just a few minutes with help from ...

Greg Brew on Surging Energy and the 'Strategic Trap' of the War in Iran

20 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The war in Iran has already lasted longer than many people might have expected. There was an initial assumption, after oil prices started surging, tha...

How War in Iran Will Squeeze America's Farmers Even Further

19 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

America’s farmers can’t seem to catch a break. Years of thin margins and rising costs have already stretched them to the limit. And now, w...

War in Iran Is Redrawing the Map for Natural Gas

18 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Mostly, the world has been watching the price of oil skyrocket amid the war in Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But there's more...

War in Iran is Chewing Through American Missile Stockpiles

16 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The war in Iran has been fought almost entirely in the skies, with both offensive missiles, as well as anti-missile defense systems. But the math is b...

What War in Iran Means for China's Teapot Oil Refineries

13 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the wake of the war in Iran, oil prices have shot up for everyone. But not all oil is exactly equal. And, obviously, a lot of Iranian oil goes to C...

Legendary Hacker Matt Suiche on Cyberwar in the Age of AI

12 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We tend to think of warfare in two distinct arenas: the physical and the digital. Increasingly, however, those lines are blurring. Last week, Iran lau...

War in Iran Is Creating a Fertilizer Crisis Like Never Before

11 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We all know that the war with Iran has sent oil prices spiking. But it’s also pushing up the cost of all sorts of chemicals, including fertilize...

Rory Johnston on How Oil Could Surge to Over $200 a Barrel

10 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Oil has obviously spiked massively since the start of the war with Iran. And if you look at various end products, such as jet fuel, the surge is even ...

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Tokenization and Prediction Markets for Everything

09 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Last year, we had Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on the podcast to talk to us about his company's plans to tokenize shares of private companies. The idea is...

Henry Blodget on the Software Selloff Hysteria and the Problem for OpenAI

07 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a do...

Lots More on the Seaborne Chaos Around the Strait of Hormuz

06 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

With war breaking out in Iran, the price of oil is surging, in part due to the destruction of oil energy infrastructure, but also the ability of anyth...

Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on Why He Doesn't Tweet

05 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Lloyd Blankfein was CEO of Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, riding the trading boom to the top of the storied investment bank and steering it thr...

How the Speed of a Trade Got Down to Nearly the Speed of Light

02 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The average person can enter a stock trade on their computer, hit refresh, and the trade is done. As fast as that seems, there are professional trader...

Introducing: Bloomberg This Weekend

01 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

'Bloomberg This Weekend' features unique conversations on business, news, lifestyle and culture. Join David Gura, Christina Ruffini and Lisa Mateo Sat...

James van Geelen on His Viral AI Doom Scenario

28 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Something very unusual happened in the market in the last week of February. It sold off, in part, thanks to an article on Substack. James van Geelen i...

The Scramble Is On for Businesses to Get Their Tariff Refund Checks

27 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs were illegal. And now basically every importer who paid those tariff...

How Insurance Costs Make NYC Construction So Expensive

26 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It's hard to imagine New York City becoming significantly more affordable as long as it remains so expensive to build things. Whether we're talking ab...

Alison Roman's Plan to Conquer the Tomato Sauce Market

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Alison Roman is a cult figure in the world of food media. She's written multiple hit cookbooks and several of her recipes have gone viral. And her new...

Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics

21 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has certain ideas that make mainstream economists' head explode. Anything in the ballpark of rent control, specifically, is w...

A16Z's David George on How Private and Public Markets Fused Into One

20 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This year could be a big one for IPOs. From Anthropic to SpaceX to OpenAI, we could see some gigantic companies hit the public market. But of course, ...

Jared Sleeper on Which Software Companies Will Survive the "SaaSpocalypse"

19 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The start of the year has been an absolutely brutal one for software companies. There’s a big fear that the rise of AI and advanced coding model...

Ray Wang on How AI Is Causing DRAM Prices to Surge

16 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

For years, DRAM -- or Dynamic Random Access Memory -- was kind of a sleepy, commoditized aspect of chip industry. Growth was steady, but modest, and p...

The Sixth Bureau, Episode 1: Your Friend From Nanjing

15 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

It’s an open secret that the Chinese government has engaged in a global campaign to acquire intellectual property from foreign rivals. At the ce...

Why Adam Posen Thinks Inflation Will Surge Back to 4%

13 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The future is always tough to predict, but generally when it comes to inflation, a lot of the debate is about how long it will take the Federal Reserv...

New CFTC Chairman Michael Selig on How to Regulate Prediction Markets

12 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We are rapidly entering a world in which there are odds on virtually everything. During the recent Super Bowl, the big prediction market platforms did...

Ricardo Hausmann Explains How the Venezuelan Economy Collapsed

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Ricardo Hausmann is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of Harvard's Growth Lab. We've talked to him multiple times in the past...

Evolving Money: The Tokenization Tipping Point (Sponsored Content)

08 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In less than three years, the amount of tokenized real-world assets has grown eightfold, to more than $30 billion across equities, fixed income, priva...

Lots More With Charlie McElligott on This Week's SaaSpocalypse

06 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This week has been a pretty wild one in markets. Some of the most popular trades of recent years — like going long software, crypto, or gold &md...

How a Former Fed Vice-Chair Is thinking About the Next Fed Chair

06 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The nomination of Kevin Warsh to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve obviously has big implications for markets. But it also comes with some inte...

This Is How The US Can Become a Player in Rare Earth Metals

05 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

China's dominance of the rare earths market is well known. This not only creates potential vulnerabilities for companies, should access to those rare ...

The Surprising Similarity Between the US and Chinese Internets

03 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the 90s, there was a lot of talk about how the Internet would be a liberalizing force in the world. Bill Clinton famously predicted that it would b...

The Utilities Analyst Who Says the Data Center Demand Story Doesn't Add Up

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Utilities analysts are having a moment as the energy sector gets a boost from AI. With an extra 94 gigawatts forecast to be needed by 2030 to power al...

013026_Lots_More_Skanda_Amarnath_Edit_v1

30 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Trump has announced that former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh is going to be his nominee to succeed Jerome Powell. The responses to the news are split amon...

Jeff Currie on the Crazy Surge in Metals, And Why The Supercycle Has Years to Run

30 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The big story this year is the surge in metals. And it's really all metals. The ultimate industrial metal, copper, has been on a massive tear, but so ...

What It's Like to Do Big Ag Business in Venezuela and Ukraine

29 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Trump administration says it wants to kick start private investment in Venezuela now that it's captured Maduro. And Ukraine is eventually going to...

What It Takes to Build One of the World's Biggest Banks

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

One of the mega-themes of the economy is that the big keep getting bigger. You see it in technology, where the megacap software companies are outperfo...

Blackstone's Michael Zawadzki on How Private Credit Got so Big

23 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

We talk all the time about private credit. And we increasingly talk about it from the perspective of the AI buildout, and how all of these datacenters...

Pimco CEO Manny Roman on Japanese Bonds and the Sell America Trade

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Earlier this week, we saw something unusual happen in markets. The S&P 500 fell 2%, US Treasury yields rose, and the dollar simultaneously decline...

Why the Tech World Is Going Crazy for Claude Code

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the AI industry, there's always a hot new thing. First it was ChatGPT. Then it was the image generators. There was the DeepSeek moment. In the latt...

Lots More on the Protests and Financial Crisis in Iran

16 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

One of the extraordinary elements of the civil unrest taking place in Iran is that it's almost impossible to know what's going on. There's a virtually...

How to Make Money From the Booming Demand for Energy

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

One thing we can all agree on is that demand for energy, and in particular electricity, is growing by leaps and bounds. But past that, there is going ...

The Fight Over Fed Independence Just Got Taken To a Whole New Level

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Even before Trump's victory in 2024, it was becoming clear that the Fed would come under political pressure like never before. The first year of the n...

Cullen Roche on the Art of Building a Perfect Portfolio

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

For a long time, you could make plenty of money and sleep easy at night with a simple 60/40 portfolio. You put 60% of your money in stocks and 40% in ...

Greg Grandin on how the Monroe Doctrine Became the Donroe Doctrine

09 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In some sense, the arrest of Maduro is nothing unusual. For over 200 years, the US viewed the entirety of the Western hemisphere as its legitimate dom...

Here's What Could Happen to Venezuela's Messy $170 Billion of Debt

08 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

There are a bunch of questions right now about the future of Venezuela, and one of the big ones is what's going to happen to its circa $170 billion pi...

This Is What Maduro's Arrest Means for the Oil Market

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Venezuela is sitting on, by some measures, the biggest oil reserves in the world. And yet, in the immediate wake of Maduro's capture by US forces, the...

What Really Happens at a Fed Research Conference

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Every year, regional Federal Reserve banks host some of the most substantive — and under-the-radar — events in the central banking world: ...

The Business of Butterworth's, the Hottest New Restaurant in Washington DC

02 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When the Odd Lots team was down in Washington DC earlier this year, we had a phenomenal meal at a restaurant called Butterworth's. As it turns out, th...

Tracy and Joe Answer All Your Questions

01 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 everythin...

Goldman's Hatzius and Snider on the Outlook for 2026

29 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

2025 was an extraordinary year, with the real economy defying recession worries and equity markets putting up monster returns. So can this be repeated...

Merryn Talks Money: John Law, The Gambler Who Invented Modern Money (Part 1)

26 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hello Odd Lots listeners! As we take a break for the holidays we'd like to take a moment and bring you an episode by one of our sister shows here at B...

Scott Kupor's New Plan to Bring Tech Workers Into the Federal Government

25 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If you're a high-skilled tech worker, then potentially huge fortunes await you working for a startup or one of our booming AI giants. But the governme...

Why Americans Are Falling Behind on Auto Loans At Their Highest Level Ever

22 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By and large, American households are in a healthy economic position. Yes, unemployment has been rising, but it's still at fairly low levels. Consumer...

The Booming Business of Chinese Peptides

19 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

You probably already know someone doing peptides — the amino acids that form the basis of popular new drug treatments like Ozempic and Wegovy. T...

Meet the Politician the AI Industry Is Trying to Stop

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The politics of AI are already exploding. Whether we're talking about data centers, electricity prices, labor displacement, water consumption, competi...

MeatEater's Steven Rinella on the Economic History of Hunting

15 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we think about America’s economic rise, we usually point to agriculture or the industrial revolution. But in the early days of colonization...

D.A. Wallach Explains Why Biotech VC Is So Different

12 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Most people think of venture capital as funding software startups or, these days, some new AI tool. But VC also plays a major role in developing new m...

This Is What It Takes to Get a Data Center Financed

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Data centers are weird things. They're partly real estate assets. They're partly extremely advanced technological products. And they have to find a wa...

Dan Ivascyn Is Excited About a New Era in Fixed Income

08 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the years since the financial crisis, bond investors didn't get much return for taking on risk. With low interest rates and little sign of inflatio...

How Microsoft Excel Conquered Corporate America

07 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Excel. If you work in corporate America, that word either inspires laser-focused productivity or pure dread. Over the last 40 years, the spreadsh...

Affirm's Max Levchin Breaks Down How Buy Now, Pay Later Really Works

05 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Max Levchin probably knows as much about online payments as anyone. He was part of the original "PayPal mafia" before going on to become co-founder an...

AI Can Tell Us Something About Credit Market Weakness

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There have been some wobbles in credit markets lately. It hasn't been too dramatic, but we've had some blowups, leading Jamie Dimon to speculate about...

Travis Kavulla Explains Why Electric Bills Shot Up

01 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There's an incredible amount of focus on the grid this days. That's notable because for a long time, the grid was hardly of any interest. For years, l...

This Is Why Credit Card Interest Rates Are So High

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Some people pay off their credit cards at the end of each month. They use the cards as a payment method and collect points and rewards, and never have...

Graham Allison on the Risks of a US-China War

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The US and China are in a "Thucydides Trap," whereby the risk of war is heightened when an established power is threatened by a rapidly rising power. ...