The Odd Lots AMA Episode: Tracy and Joe Answer Listener Questions

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:05)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

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

Tracy Alloway (0:25)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Tracy, it's time for our annual AMA episode.

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

The annual call-in show. This is my favorite time of the year, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

Totally. It's a weird time of year, actually.

Tracy Alloway (0:37)

The thing is, I feel like we're always answering questions that people ask us, right?

Joe Weisenthal (0:43)

Really?

Tracy Alloway (0:43)

Maybe we are too accessible.

Joe Weisenthal (0:45)

No, I never feel that way. I feel like all we do is ask questions, and no one ever asks us questions.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

I feel like if people want to ask us questions, it's pretty easy to do so, but we still have this call-in show.

Joe Weisenthal (0:55)

It's amazing that your entire job is you ask questions to people multiple times a week, every week for the entire year, and your main takeaway from the year is that you answer too many questions.

Tracy Alloway (1:06)

That's not my main takeaway.

Joe Weisenthal (1:07)

No, that's really interesting. That's very relevant.

Tracy Alloway (1:09)

That was not my main takeaway. My main takeaway was we are question platform agnostic. It doesn't really matter what format the questions come in, whether they're called in, like in this show, or whether they're typed in via the Discord, or on Blue Sky, or Twitter, or something else.

Joe Weisenthal (1:25)

This is fair. I like talking to people. I like answering questions, but I like the call in format. I miss the old days of, you know, it would be fun to do a live radio show with Collins.

Tracy Alloway (1:34)

It would be fun to do it live.

Joe Weisenthal (1:35)

When I was a kid, I called in to Sports Talk Radio sometimes, and I sort of missed that platform. And you don't really get that with podcasts so much.

Tracy Alloway (1:42)

What did you say on sports radio?

Joe Weisenthal (1:45)

I don't remember, you know, I think that I used to follow baseball really closely, and I would say like, oh, I think the Toronto Blue Jays have a lot of momentum down the stretch, and I think they're going to win the American League, or it's just some nonsense like that.

Tracy Alloway (1:59)

Sports analysis and commentary is just something I really struggle to get into, because it's either, well, the team played well, or I think the team could play better. That's it. That's the sum totality of what people say on those things.

Joe Weisenthal (2:13)

So yes, we are going to be, we were invited listeners to record a voice memo, and then e-mail that to oddlots at bloomberg.net. And let's take a list of the sum, and Tracy and I will do our best to answer them.

Tracy Alloway (2:24)

We'll pretend that we're live.

Joe Weisenthal (2:26)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (2:26)

This is Steve from Northville, New Jersey. I would like Tracy and Joe to set up a cage match type hardcore debate on the value of cryptocurrency. Every sane analyst says it's a pointless scam which uses tons of energy to create valueless tokens that have been bid up to insane prices and at the same time greatly facilitate many criminal transactions. On the other side, there are a host of promoters that say it is the future of finance.

Tracy Alloway (2:53)

First off, Steve, that's not a question. That's a request. But you know what? We'll take it. We'll take what we can get. I think it's a good request. I would like to see a cage match on crypto.

Joe Weisenthal (3:02)

Yeah. So, you know, I've said it before. I have people from time to time to ask us, you know, we should do a debate topic. And we may have done one or two of theirs.

The reason I'm skeptical about, well, I mean, if we're talking about a literal cage match where people beat people up, that's fine. But if we're talking about a figurative one where it's some sort of debate, debates, to my mind, are only interesting if the two sides agree on like 99% of premises or they agree on all definitions, etc. And there is a very specific thing. Most debates on crypto, you get some sort of mainstream Keynesian economist and then some sort of crazy laserized person that don't agree on anything. They just talk past each other. Not a particularly productive use. And I think most debates in public forums are like that. But if we can find the right guess who largely agree and then disagree on something specific, maybe that's a good 2025 ambition.