Odd Lots

→ WHAT IT COVERS CoreWeave cofounder Brandon McBee discusses the current state of AI compute demand, infrastructure bottlenecks, customer diversification away from hyperscalers toward enterprise clients like Jane Street, GPU infrastructure financing structures, NVIDIA's continued dominance, and why tradable compute futures markets face a fundamental fungibility problem in the near term.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jeremy Maletz, head of prediction markets at Susquehanna International Group, explains how the firm is acting as a liquidity bootstrapper for institutional adoption of prediction markets, moving beyond sports betting toward economically meaningful hedging instruments for corporations and financial institutions. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Institutional liquidity gap:** Low on-platform volume figures — sometimes just $100,000–$150,000 traded — do not reflect actual available...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Ian Dunning, Head of AI at Hudson River Trading, discusses how HRT applies AI to high-frequency trading across global markets, the escalating GPU compute shortage, counterparty risks in data center contracts, talent acquisition shifts, and whether AI-driven trading signals can operate without human-interpretable logic. → KEY INSIGHTS - **GPU Compute Scarcity:** Securing 6,000 Blackwell GPUs with a full data center solution for Q4 2026 delivery is effectively unavailable at...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon discusses AI's impact on banking jobs, Goldman's hiring trajectory, the Alphabet $90B equity offering Goldman led, the SpaceX IPO mandate won over 20 years of relationship-building, current market valuations versus the 1990s dot-com era, and why human relationship skills become more valuable as AI commodifies knowledge work.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Lewis Hart, head of corporate advisory and banking at Brown Brothers Harriman, explains commodity finance — a $4–5 trillion subset of global trade finance. The episode covers how merchants finance physical commodity shipments, how banks manage collateral risk, and how the Strait of Hormuz closure strains working capital across global supply chains.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Author Tim Queenie, who wrote *Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization*, traces rope's 50,000-year history from Neanderthal cordage to graphene space elevator tethers, explaining the physics of twisted fibers and rope's role in sailing, whaling, bridge-building, and future space travel. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Helix Effect Physics:** Rope's strength comes from three combined forces: fiber friction, twisting, and the helix effect.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Harvard economist and former IMF First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath explains why global interest rates have structurally shifted higher post-pandemic, driven by three converging forces: AI capital demand pushing r-star above 1%, persistent fiscal deficits near 7% of US GDP, and the collapse of central bank bond-buying programs that previously suppressed yields. → KEY INSIGHTS - **R-star shift:** The neutral real interest rate has risen from roughly 0.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Brendan Greeley, author of *The Almighty Dollar*, traces the dollar's origins to a 1520 Bohemian silver mine, arguing that monetary sovereignty is never automatic but must be actively maintained through banking regulation, institutional design, and the decentralized manufacturing of money across five centuries. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Dollar Origins Predate America by 250 Years:** The word "dollar" derives from "Joachimsthaler," a large silver coin minted in a Bohemian valley around...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Oisin Rogers, cofounder of The Devonshire pub near Piccadilly Circus, explains the operational, economic, and cultural mechanics of running one of London's most popular pubs, covering Guinness science, menu pricing strategy, labor sourcing post-Brexit, licensing constraints, sound design, and how complementary co-founder skills drive the business.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Architect Lord Norman Foster, founder of Foster and Partners, discusses integrated design methodology, why Western nations like the UK and US have lost infrastructure ambition compared to China's 54,000-kilometer high-speed rail network, construction productivity stagnation, and how AI will reshape but not replace architectural creativity.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Fahmi Quadir, founder of Safkhat Capital and known as "the assassin," explains how short selling has evolved since GameStop, why consumer debt and healthcare are her current short targets, and why she is launching her first-ever long fund focused on Korean corporate governance reform. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Short Seller Survival:** The GameStop meme stock event of 2021 effectively destroyed institutional appetite for dedicated short funds — even managers who never touched those...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman explains how his company built a chip 58 times larger than any competitor, achieving inference speeds 15 times faster than leading GPUs. The episode covers wafer-scale engineering breakthroughs, inference economics, CUDA's declining relevance, open vs. closed source AI models, and semiconductor supply chain constraints.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Deutsche Bank's Ozan Tarman and Aditya Singhal, recorded live in London on May 7, explain why equity markets keep rising despite geopolitical stress, how traders filter headline noise, and why the West-China manufacturing and AI competition defines the macro framework for the next two to three years. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Positioning as a market driver:** Equity markets continue rising partly because institutional and retail investors remain underinvested — "buses are empty" in...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Recorded live in London on May 7, Bloomberg's Odd Lots hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal speak with commodity specialist Javier Blass and Irish Farmers Journal editor Lorcan Roche Kelly about why oil, food, fertilizer, and electricity prices are behaving unexpectedly amid the Strait of Hormuz closure and global supply disruptions.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Stripe president John Collison explains agentic commerce — AI systems transacting on behalf of humans — covering two distinct categories: consumer-facing friction reduction and B2B developer-led automation. He addresses implications for Internet structure, advertising, microtransactions, stablecoins, and business formation, citing 71% year-over-year growth in new Stripe businesses in Q1.

→ WHAT IT COVERS SocGen global strategist Albert Edwards joins Odd Lots in London to explain why his decades-long "Ice Age" deflation thesis has ended, why fiscal dominance and political inability to consolidate deficits will drive developed markets back toward double-digit inflation, and why US consumer savings and corporate margins signal recession risk.

→ WHAT IT COVERS FT chief economics commentator Martin Wolf analyzes the Iran conflict, US geopolitical incoherence, Europe's structural paralysis, and AI's existential risks with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway in London. Wolf argues that a bewildering superpower is more dangerous than a predictable rival, and that the Trump coalition lacks any unified strategic vision beyond personal loyalty to one individual.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Author Samanth Subramanian explains how roughly 550 undersea fiber optic cables carry nearly all global internet traffic, how ownership has shifted from government telecom consortiums to four dominant US tech companies, and why geopolitical tensions between the US and China are fracturing this critical infrastructure into competing parallel systems.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Bank of England MPC external member Megan Greene explains why she voted to hold rates despite weak UK growth, detailing how successive supply shocks — from COVID to Ukraine to Iran — have embedded inflation persistence through changed household expectations and firm pricing behavior, complicating standard monetary policy responses. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Inflation Threshold Shift:** UK households now notice inflation at 3–3.5%, down from the previous 4% threshold.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Mariana Mazzucato, economist and UCL professor, argues that effective government requires mission-oriented thinking — defining concrete societal goals like healthy school lunches or fossil-free welfare states — rather than sector-based subsidies, while rebuilding internal state capabilities hollowed out by decades of outsourcing to management consultants. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Mission vs. Sector Policy:** Stop directing industrial policy at specific sectors or firm types like SMEs.