Odd Lots

→ WHAT IT COVERS Odd Lots examines Maria Edgeworth, a Regency-era novelist who outsold Jane Austen while embedding early economic theory into fiction, shaped ideas around comparative advantage, labor value, and utility theory, and whose contributions to economics were largely erased from the historical record despite influencing her nephew F.Y. Edgeworth's foundational microeconomic models.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin Magazine and co-author of *The Blueprint*, outlines a market socialism model where worker-owned cooperatives, public banks, and socialized land replace wage labor and private capital accumulation while preserving consumer markets and price signals as coordination mechanisms. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Market Socialism Structure:** New businesses under this model apply for financing from public banks at risk-adjusted interest rates, then...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Nobel Prize-winning economist James Robinson, author of Why Nations Fail, joins Odd Lots live in Chicago to explain why inclusive versus extractive institutions determine economic outcomes, assess current U.S. institutional health, and predict China's eventual growth slowdown despite its remarkable economic rise since 1978. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Inclusive vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS CME Group chairman Terry Duffy, in a live Chicago taping, critiques the current regulatory environment under the second Trump administration, covering prediction markets, perpetual futures, Hyperliquid's legal compliance issues, 24/7 trading infrastructure barriers, and GPU futures as an emerging asset class. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Regulatory Capture Signal:** Since the second Trump administration began, 2,500 self-certifications were submitted to the CFTC and not one was denied.

→ WHAT IT COVERS DRW founder Don Wilson explains why GPU compute futures markets need to exist, how they would lower capital costs for neoclouds like CoreWeave, what regulatory hurdles remain before a November 9th listing deadline, and why token futures and a "crunch spread" derivative could emerge next. → KEY INSIGHTS - **GPU Futures & Capital Costs:** Neoclouds selling compute to lower-credit customers face elevated borrowing costs, evidenced by CoreWeave bonds yielding 15%.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Musician and author David Byrne joins Odd Lots to discuss his book *Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up*, examining how forgotten concepts — from Hyman Minsky's behavioral economics to 2,000-year-old Roman self-healing concrete — resurface during crises, and what patterns help identify dormant ideas still waiting to be rediscovered.

→ WHAT IT COVERS France's political fragmentation is driving sovereign debt stress in the eurozone, with 2027 presidential election polls showing no viable centrist candidate. Former Macron advisor Shaheen Vallée explains why the ECB backstop mechanism that resolved the 2011 crisis cannot easily be deployed this time, and what a credible circuit breaker would require.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan explains how his blockchain protocol aims to house all global finance by enabling permissionless deployment of perpetual futures markets for any asset — from Bitcoin to NVIDIA stock — through a decentralized validator network currently processing trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Deployment Mechanics:** Any entity can deploy a perpetual futures market on Hyperliquid by staking 500,000 HYPE tokens, then winning a daily...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Nate Soares, president of MIRI and co-author of *If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies*, explains why current AI development trajectories lead toward catastrophic outcomes. He argues that AI systems are "grown not programmed," develop unintended goals through training, and that lab safety cultures remain fundamentally reactive — unable to contain systems that could eventually outpace human control.

→ WHAT IT COVERS MIT Associate Dean of Engineering Justin Solomon joins Odd Lots to examine how AI models are reshaping mathematics — from the recent AI-assisted Navier-Stokes counterexample to collapsing academic peer review systems. The conversation covers proof verification tools like Lean, credit attribution challenges, and how math education at institutions like MIT is restructuring around experiential learning rather than problem sets.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Economist Dominic Leuster challenges the prevailing narrative of European economic decline, arguing that flawed GDP measurement methodology, not actual productivity gaps, drives most competitiveness alarmism, while identifying Germany's manufacturing exposure to China as a genuine structural crisis requiring urgent policy response. → KEY INSIGHTS - **GDP Measurement Flaw:** The Draghi report's core statistic — that European productivity fell from 90% to 70% of U.S.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Carolyn Pfluger, University of Chicago economist and Chicago Fed visiting scholar, explains how Treasury bonds have shifted from safe-haven assets back toward risky instruments, connecting this transformation to the Fed's perceived policy reaction function, bond-stock correlations, and the historical link between military hegemony and sovereign borrowing costs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Former Qatar Airways Group Treasurer David Kang explains the mechanics of airline fuel hedging, covering instruments from plain vanilla swaps to exotic structured products, how airlines use ticket surcharges as a natural oil hedge, and why Qatar Airways once tankered fuel from Dubai to Doha to avoid paying inflated prices from its own national petroleum company.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Luke Kawa, head of markets at Sherwood News, joins Odd Lots to analyze the defining characteristics of 2026 markets: extreme speed of price movements, dangerous concentration in AI-related stocks, deteriorating market breadth, rising bond yields driven by strong global growth, and the structural shift away from housing toward AI as the primary economic cycle driver. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Market Breadth Warning:** The S&P 500 sitting 0.5% from record highs while only 51.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Recorded live in Hollywood, Odd Lots speaks with housing analyst Bill McBride of Calculated Risk and developer Zach Lazzari of The Western Company about LA's zoning constraints, the collapse of financial-engineering-driven real estate, and what it actually takes to build walkable, community-oriented neighborhoods in a car-dependent city.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Hollywood writer Hayes Davenport joins Odd Lots live in Los Angeles to examine the structural collapse of the entertainment industry, tracing how LA shoot days fell from 40,000 in 2016 to under 20,000 by 2025, driven by streaming disruption, production tax incentives, labor strikes, and emerging AI pressure. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Shoot Day Collapse:** LA production volume has declined by more than 50% since its 2016 peak of 40,000 annual shoot days, reaching under 20,000 in 2025.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Recorded live in Los Angeles, Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway speak with journalist Taylor Lorenz and social media consultant Rachel Carton about how AI is reshaping the creator economy, brand marketing strategies, platform dynamics, and what it takes to grow a social media audience in 2025. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Boss-Driven AI Adoption:** The primary way AI enters marketing teams is through management pressure, not organic adoption.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Recorded live in Hollywood, Odd Lots features Hadrian founder Chris Power and Impulse Space founder Tom Mueller — SpaceX's first employee — examining why Southern California is emerging as a hardware and defense manufacturing hub, and what it actually takes to rebuild American industrial capacity. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Reserve Currency & Industrial Power:** Every dominant empire — Dutch, British, American — followed the same pattern: build industrial supremacy, win wars, grow...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Gene Sykes, Goldman Sachs co-head of Global M&A and U.S. Olympic Committee chair, covers the 2028 LA Olympics structure, the record-breaking 2025 M&A market driven by AI, enterprise AI adoption rates at 2%, and how AI reshapes media valuation and dealmaking workflows. → KEY INSIGHTS - **2028 LA Olympics Funding Model:** The LA games operate on an essentially private funding model — no government subsidies beyond federal security costs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Princeton economist Owen Zidar and Chicago Booth's Eric Zwick reveal findings from IRS pass-through business data showing that America's wealthiest class consists not of tech billionaires but millions of private business owners — auto dealers, beverage distributors, dentists, and contractors — who collectively drive more than half of rising U.S. income inequality.