Tracy and Joe Answer All Your Questions

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

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

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Joe, it is the holiday season. I am very much looking forward to it. One reason I'm looking forward to it is because we always do an annual Ask Us Anything show.

Joe Weisenthal (0:35)

Yeah, you know, I think I liked it in the podcast. You know, it's really not about us. I mean, the show is about what we're interested in, but it really is about the perfect guests. But every once in a while, I suppose it's nice to sort of have the microphone turned in the other direction, so to speak.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

Yeah, the other thing I would say is we're already pretty accessible. Like, there's a whole Odd Lots Discord that we're on. There's Twitter, obviously. There's instant messages on IB. And mostly we respond depending on how busy we are. So feel free to contact us there, too. But we did get some pretty interesting questions from a bunch of listeners.

Joe Weisenthal (1:13)

Yeah, and I like the fact that we can put, in many cases, listeners' voices on the air, bring back some of the old time radio call-in shows, the likes of which I used to listen to when I was a young kid, riding in the car with my dad.

Tracy Alloway (1:26)

Call-in shows are Lindy.

Joe Weisenthal (1:28)

The call-in shows are definitely Lindy.

Tracy Alloway (1:30)

All right. Shall we start?

Joe Weisenthal (1:31)

Yeah, let's take a listen to some.

John Lazzaro (1:33)

John Lazzaro, age 63, Berkeley, California. Sometimes, when you finish recording an episode, do you look at each other and say, this doesn't meet our standards, and kill the episode? Or is it more like skiing? Once you commit to riding the chairlift, you commit to skiing down the mountain.

Tracy Alloway (1:52)

Well, I can't ski. I'm the only Austrian in the world, possibly, who cannot ski. So we have killed episodes in the past. In fact, there's kind of a funny story where we did an episode. It really wasn't going very well. The guest seemed very nervous and just sort of like not at his top performance. And in the end, after we recorded, we told them, you know, we're just going to kill this episode. And he was actually really happy about that because he felt he hadn't done his best work either. And then the other thing I would say is I actually think journalists should kill a lot more stories. We should be more selective. And if you think about the German word for reductor, reductor, it sounds a lot like redact, right? Which gives you, you know, some sense of what editors are supposed to be doing, which is taking away as opposed to adding.

Joe Weisenthal (2:50)

Yeah, it is very rare. We have, I mean, the number of episodes that we've fully recorded that we actually did not release, I think it's less than you could count on one hand, right? It's not that many. But there have been a few which is for whatever reason, the guest was not on their game or whatever. It didn't work. And I agree. I agree with Tracy. I think we should do more in general. I mean, I think journalists as a whole should do more. It's like, just release the good stuff, you know, just release ones you're you're genuinely proud of. I don't want to release anything anywhere when I can't say I'm really proud of this work. And normally we are proud. But occasionally it's like, no, this is this is not awesome. All right, let's go on to the next one.

SPEAKER_6 (3:29)

Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Tracy. I was really inspired by Joe's tweets on Moby Dick. So this question is for him. What did you read after Moby Dick? Thanks, guys.

Joe Weisenthal (3:43)

Thanks for listening. It's a very easy one because I was such in such a mood to keep after reading Moby Dick. I didn't want to read anything besides Moby Dick. I sort of just thought about rereading it again, and I probably will sometime in the next year or two. But because I was in that mood, I read a book by the historian writer CLR James, who wrote a book about Moby Dick. It was a book called Mironers, Renegades and Castaways by CLR James. And it basically made the argument that Herman Melville, with the Ahab character specifically, anticipated many of the pathologies of the 20th century, the rise of fascism, dictators, and so forth. All of the crises of sort of Western civilization that we experienced in the 20th century. Fantastic book, almost as good as Moby Dick itself.