Odd Lots Live: What to Watch on Election Night and Beyond

Brad Setser (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Tracy Alloway (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:26)

Joe, this is very special. This is actually, this must be our fastest turnaround time on an episode ever.

Joe Weisenthal (0:32)

Well, it is election day.

Tracy Alloway (0:34)

Yes.

Joe Weisenthal (0:34)

I think we had technically a faster turnaround day on the day of the Baltimore Bridge collapse.

Tracy Alloway (0:39)

Okay, fine. But this was like four hours of content that we are squeezing into a very timely episode. So what you are about to hear is a live recording of the Odd Lots podcast, multiple panels, multiple conversations that took place on November 4th at a recording in front of a live audience in New York.

Joe Weisenthal (1:01)

That's right. So today is election day. Last night was election eve. We figured a bunch of people, if they have preferences in this election, we're probably anxious looking for something to do other than just sort of refresh the internet and refresh Twitter all night. So we figured, why not get some of our favorite guests over the years from the podcast, and get our fans who we always love seeing, our listeners, and hang out and talk politics and policy for a little while.

I didn't drink actually, but some people drank.

Tracy Alloway (1:30)

I stress drank. You did? Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (1:32)

I didn't.

Tracy Alloway (1:32)

But what better way to spend election day than listening to some live recordings of the Odd Lots podcast. So what you are about to hear is a selection of the conversations. We had some amazing guests. So we started with Zoe Liu. She is of course a Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. We had her with Jordan Schneider of the China Talk podcast. We've spoken to both of them before, but we had a great conversation about what's going on in China right now, and what could possibly happen with US-China trade.

Joe Weisenthal (2:05)

Right. Then where this particular episode will pick up, then we had a conversation with Neil Dutta of Renaissance Macro Research, Skanda Amarnath, Executive Director at Employ America, and we had a special guest that we have to explain here for a second, because otherwise some of the conversation might not make any sense. We had Zvi Mowshowitz, and he is a prediction markets better. He's a writer. He's a legendary designer of Magic the Gathering decks. He's an advisor to Polymarket. He used to be a Jane Street trader. We're going to have to have him on sometime, Tracy, just like a totally separate thing.

Tracy Alloway (2:42)

He was great. I just want to talk to him about deck construction.

Joe Weisenthal (2:44)

Deck construction and Jane Street. Let's do like that episode.

Tracy Alloway (2:48)

OK. But Zvi, in addition to all those things, set up a betting pool on Manifold for which podcast he would actually appear on in 2024 And one of those options was Odd Lots.

Joe Weisenthal (3:01)

Right. He set it up at the beginning of the year. And so there's all these different possibilities. Which podcast will Zvi appear on? And just again, to sort of set the stage, we never announced that Zvi was going to be part of this.

Tracy Alloway (3:14)

He was our mystery guest.

Joe Weisenthal (3:15)

He was our mystery guest. But we flashed the market onto the screen behind us while we were at Caveat, the place where we recorded the episode. And then during the conversation, we watched as the market slowly repriced.

Tracy Alloway (3:30)

Repriced up and down.

Joe Weisenthal (3:32)

It was very strange. My belief in efficient markets has been completely debunked.

Tracy Alloway (3:36)

You know what it was. This is actually really interesting. There was someone in the audience who was using free manifold tokens to bring the probability down even as Zvi was actually on stage. So a live experiment in how prediction markets work.

Joe Weisenthal (3:50)

How they actually work, right. Well, actually, one of the things you'll hear is Zvi talks a lot about one of the constraints in prediction markets being capital constraints among traders. So here is a guy who apparently had no capital constraints because he had free tokens. And you see how much that destroys that. So we started off that conversation to about all things markets, finance, what to watch for, polling, what to watch for in tonight's election.

Tracy Alloway (4:13)

Yep. And then our headliner of the evening was Brad Setser. He is of course a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, one of our favorite guests we've had him on. I can't even remember how many times now.