History is littered with ideas that have been tossed aside, only for them to gain relevance at some later date. Think of Moby-Dick: forgotten in Melville's time, but now regarded as the great American novel. Or the work of economist Hyman Minsky, which became influential a decade after his death, when the 2008 financial crisis made “the Minsky Moment” a mainstream term. These are just a couple of the things we talk about with the legendary musician David Byrne on today's podcast. Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, looks to categorize numerous “sleeping beauties” - ideas that were lost but then rediscovered. Besides Melville and Minsky, we also talk about the lost Roman recipe for concrete and we get into Byrne's thoughts on how to write a song and his own experience of having his music rediscovered by a new generation. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just about everyone is worried about what is going on in France right now: the country's public finances are in sorry shape and there are fears that the French bond selloff, and the country's growing debt crisis, might spillover into the rest of Europe. On top of that, the 2027 elections have investors worried: The two leading candidates, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, aren't seen to be up to the task of taming France's fiscal turmoil. Shahin Vallée was an advisor to Emmanuel Macron when he was an economic minister and during his first presidential election campaign. Since then, he's paid close attention to the situation in France — he is currently a senior fellow at the German Council of Foreign Relations and he advises institutional investors — and he understands, better than most, what went wrong during Macron's nine years in office. Today, he speaks to us about the origins of the current French debt crisis, how similar it is to the challenges Greece faced during the first euro crisis, and why the 2027 elections are making an unstable situation even worse. Read more:Market for Funding Bonds in France Shows Crisis Is Way OffBank of France Survey Shows Sharp Jump in Business Uncertainty 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Traders and market watchers around the world started talking about a crypto platform called Hyperliquid earlier this year, when speculators used markets built on top of it to trade crude oil after war broke out in Iran. What Hyperliquid allowed for was a 24/7 market on the blockchain. Then in August, President Trump said the CFTC was working on bringing “Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion.” Hyperliquid currently operates outside the US, but that hasn't stopped it from growing prodigiously in the last year. Jeff Yan, CEO and co-founder of Hyperliquid Labs, joins us today to explain how exactly the platform works: He walks us through the protocol he and his co-founders built, the ecology of actors and assets that are tied to Hyperliquid (like the platform's cryptocurrency HYPE), how perps are bought and sold on the platform, he explains what a blockchain oracle is, and he discusses what has to happen for Hyperliquid to start operating in the US. Read more:Strategy’s Saylor Sees Bitcoin Moving Back Up Beyond $100,000 A $90 Million Spyware Hack Sparks Review of Crypto Wallet Sales Only http://Bloomberg.com 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since the Hugging Face incident, concerns over AI doomsday scenarios has entered the mainstream. But of course, some people have been warning about this for years, long before LLMs or ChatGPT. In their 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky spelled out their vision of humanity's inevitable demise once superintelligent AI is built. In this episode, we speak with Soares, who serves as president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, about why he believes it's impossible to "align" superintelligent AI, and how exactly the technology can and will go rogue as it gets more and more advanced. Read more:Anthropic IPO Investors Struggle to Put a Price on Rogue AI RiskAI Bubble Risks Worst S&P 500 Crash Since 2008, Strategist Says Only http://Bloomberg.com 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last month, OpenAI announced that it had produced an AI-generated proof for the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the most famous unsolved questions in mathematics. LLMs used to be bad at counting, but now they are solving math problems that have stumped humans for decades. Meanwhile, at universities, the problem of AI in education continues: Now that LLMs can do a student's homework, teachers are struggling to keep up. It is clear that AI is very quickly changing how math is taught and how it is practiced by professionals. On this episode, Justin Solomon, who is the associate dean for engineering education at MIT, gives us a primer on how mathematicians (both pure and applied) are responding to all the advances in AI. He also explains what exactly the Navier-Stokes problem is and why the OpenAI proof is hard for even the pros to parse, what movies get wrong about how mathematicians do their jobs, and how he's changing his pedagogical approach in the age of AI.See Odd Lots live in Chicago! Tickets on sale hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In so many conversations, there's a widespread view that Europe is falling behind. Or it's in trouble. It has been two years since the publication of the Draghi report and the problems the report identified about European competitiveness are far from solved: Demographic challenges, rising energy costs, and a lagging tech sector still cast a shadow over Europe. But according to the economist and policy analyst Dominik Leusder (who also writes the Leusder of Last Resort Substack) the Draghi report might have mismeasured the true scale of Europe's issues, and he asks if the popular narrative of European decline is an accurate one. We also speak about whether Europe needs a frontier AI model, why long, wine-soaked lunches are not a good way to measure productivity, and the state of Europe's vexed relationship with China as a trade partner and competitor. Read more:EU Plans Import Cap on Chinese Hybrid Cars to Protect SectorAlibaba’s Joe Tsai Says Open Source Is Europe’s Best Shot at AI 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all know that US Treasury yields have been surging, alongside bond yields all around the world. So what explains the selloff and does this mean that bonds are becoming fundamentally riskier? What happens if investors can no longer hedge stocks with government debt? And how do expectations of the Federal Reserve's "reaction function" fit in? In this episode, we speak with Carolin Pflueger, associate professor at the University of Chicago and a resident scholar at the Chicago Fed Bank, about her work on the bond market and central banks. We discuss why bonds have become more stock-like, what that means for yields, and the role of the Fed's credibility in making bonds “bond-like” again. See Odd Lots Live in Chicago!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fuel is a huge expense for airlines, and even on a good day, jet fuel prices are pretty volatile. Throw in two major wars now effecting energy infrastructure, and fuel prices across the board are higher and higher. Airlines have long tried to manage this expense through fuel hedging, using things like swaps and options to hedge against future increases in the price of jet fuel. David Kang, former group treasurer at Qatar Airways, has firsthand experience hedging for a large carrier, and he tells us exactly how it all works. He also explains why airlines use heating oil as a proxy for jet fuel, how much they can make by raising ticket prices and fuel surcharges, and why airlines and oil refineries aren't so different. Read more:War Exposes the Cost of the West’s Retreat From Oil RefiningJPMorgan and Goldman See Mideast Oil Flows Near Pre-War Levels Only http://Bloomberg.com 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The market is acting in ways that make it very hard to get a handle on what exactly is going on right now. The overall indices are surging, while many individual stocks are doing badly. Rates are rising, but the economy is still robust. There's capex spending and the AI trade. There's the war in Iran. And of course there's persistent inflation and the Federal Reserve's ongoing tightening cycle. On this episode, we speak with our former Bloomberg News colleague Luke Kawa, who is now head of markets at Sherwood News. We go over all the big market themes, and he explains why the one consistent theme of this moment is the sheer speed of the moves and the pace of the news itself.See Odd Lots Live in Chicago!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill McBride did not just predict the 2008 housing bubble, he helped invent financial blogging with his Calculated Risk newsletter. Zach Lasry, meanwhile, is much newer to the scene, but in his career as a real estate developer, he is already responsible for building one of LA's hottest new neighborhoods — Melrose Hill. We spoke to both of them at our live show at the Vermont Hollywood, for a wide-ranging panel discussion on LA real estate. We talk about the difficulty of sourcing construction components, the Kafkaesque process of getting a crosswalk built in LA, and how self-driving cars might help reshape the city and solve its longstanding issues with parking. Read more:Mortgage Rates at 7% Are Forcing Home Sellers to Slash PricesAI Data Centers Release Heat, Posing New Problem for Cities 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.