Odd Lots - How a Fund Manager's Trying to Fix Some of the Mideast's Issues

Episode Date: May 5, 2017

When you think about the Middle East what springs to mind? Perhaps oil, maybe political instability, terrorism or even war. On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast we speak to someone who's trying to tackle the region's biggest issues in new and creative ways. Emad Mostaque is the co-chief investment officer of Capricorn Fund Managers Ltd. and a long-time specialist in Gulf markets who successfully predicted the collapse in oil prices that's currently causing a headache for many Middle Eastern economies. He talks about his proposal to give OPEC a brand new tool to control the crude market in the face of rising U.S. production, as well as a new project to use big data and technology to fight Islamic extremism and help Syrian refugees find jobs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, analysts, analytics. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, analysts, lists and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Put knowledge to work and grow your business with CIT. From transportation to health care to manufacturing, CIT offers commercial lending, leasing,

and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at CIT.com. Put knowledge to work. Hello and welcome to another edition of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. So, Joe, do you know it's been almost a year to the day that I've been. been living out in the Middle East.

I did, the time has, wait, I'm trying to think, I was going to say time has flown by, but I don't, but that would be the opposite of, it's felt so long, it's felt like an eternity. I can't believe, it's, I can't believe it's only been a year because it just seems like an eternity since you were here. Thank you. I'm trying to think of which is the way to frame it. Yeah, good save, I think. Okay, okay.

Right. I mean, that actually means that we've been doing odd lots, um, internationally for longer and we actually did it together in the same studio, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. That is pretty amazing. All right. What's the point, though? What's the point of this intro? Okay.

So when you think about the Middle East, obviously a lot of people think about it as a rather troubled region. What are some of the major issues that spring to mind when you think of the Middle East? Well, obviously one of them from an economic standpoint is the reliance of many countries. on oil and the future of the petroleum economy. And then, of course, you know, what you were saying is the troubled aspects that sort of continued tension regarding, you know, political systems and stuff like that. I think you want to say religion as well, right? That as well, yeah.

All of that, all of that, when I think of the Middle East, all of that seems combined, the tension of religious interests, political interest, opening up to sort of of attempts at democracy and a version of capitalism all seem to swirl around when I think of what's going on in the Middle East. All right. Well, to celebrate my one-year anniversary, I guess, we're going to be discussing all these issues with someone in finance who is trying to solve pretty much all of them. So quite a hefty task, as you might imagine. That does sound like a hefty task.

All right. We're going to have on Imod Mostak. He is the co-chief investment officer for Capricorn fund managers, and really, I think, one of the smartest guys around when it comes to emerging markets. Amad, thanks so much for coming on. It's my pleasure. It's your kind. So, Amad, we got to it a little bit in the intro, but for the past year, I've really had a front row seat to see the impact of low oil prices on Gulf economies. and a lot of these economies have really built themselves around the energy industry, and it's really interesting to see them try to wean themselves off of it now. Why is it so or seemingly so difficult for them? Well, I think that ultimately what you have is you've had a very established social contract

for a number of years, and this is something we've seen across the world. It's like, what is the fundamental basis of your relationship with the governments? In the Middle East, it was a case of they extracted. energy rents and they provided almost a jobs guarantee for their citizens and they bought an expatriate labour to actually have productive work. That's being rewritten now because it's a question of can you keep on with these public sector jobs in particular when the oil prices have collapsed such a degree. Is this a cyclical collapse where the oil price is going to 50 or go back to 100 and then you know it'll keep on weaving or is it permanently at $50 or lower? And that's something that's really

concerned them because they're like, maybe we can't afford to employ these millions of young people who are kind of coming through. You know, when you think about, there's sort of a famous fact that economies that are highly dependent on natural resources, they get trapped. They get these overvalued currencies. They get overly dependent on that specific resource. The rest of the economy kind of atrophies. If you're not in that resource, then you really have nothing going for.

for you. This idea of transitioning away from oil dependency, is it really plausible? I mean, it's a great thing to talk about diversifying the economy, but is it something that can actually be done? Well, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. I think all economies, when the core driver starts to come away, the question mark is always, can it rebalance? I mean, China has been reliant upon debt, plus obviously the base growth effect. these ones have been reliant upon the resource curse, can they move away? And I think you need two things. First of all, you need to have that like impetus,

and then you need someone with a very strong hand to push it through. If you look at countries like Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, they have so much cash that for the moment the impetus isn't really there. You look at somewhere like Saudi Arabia, it's coming from a very low base, but there's tremendous potential for reformation there, and you have this millennial deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, really trying to push through everything possible, in terms of societal, economic, kind of corporate reformation there, Aramco IPOs and things like that.

Will they be successful? Well, they're not going to achieve Vision 2030 because it's just far too aggressive. But definitely you will have improvement from where we are now because you have to have improvement from where we are now. Or you're going to have increasing social tension. I'm glad you brought up Saudi Aramco. This is a huge story both in Gulf markets and internationally. it's the listing of Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company. And I'm glad you brought it up because I wanted to pick up on your point earlier.

Do you think the downturn in oil prices is cyclical or is it something more structural? Because there are some analysts who have talked about Saudi Arabia listing a RAMCO because the country basically thinks that oil demand is eventually going to peak. Well, I mean, I think that if you are a sensible leader of a country, that's so reliant on oil with 86% of a revenue is coming from it, you do need to diversify. I think realistically, the Saudis don't know. Nobody knows if this is cyclical or secular.

But you have to be prepared for these eventualities. And what Saudi Arabia is effectively doing, if you read between the lions for their kind of pension fund, putting $2 trillion offshore, kind of trying to get FDI to come in and stabilize the real, because oil receipts aren't there, is they're trying to shift from basically having oil rents to having rents,

from dividends and you know from the creativity of others abroad I mean this is why they're investing in things like uber with three billion dollars they will eventually invest in companies like Tesla I'm sure they're gonna do massive investment into US infrastructure I mean there was the hundred billion dollar fund with soft bank half of that of which they're providing 45 billion dollars is gonna go into the US so I think it's they're just trying to swap some cash flows now just in case because they don't want to be caught out just as they've been caught out over the last few years and now is the time to do it

it when the pressure is on so they can make these social changes as well as economic changes. I get that idea that they have all this cash and what they want to do is have all these investments abroad and then hopefully those investments pay off and they pay a recurring dividend and that sort of replaces the, you know, the month, the money they get all the time from oil. But what about long term in terms of the domestic economy in terms of all these people, in terms of jobs and stuff like that, new industries. Is there any thought or is there any progress being made to new domestic industries that will replace oil if it eventually sort of fades away?

I mean, definitely. There's obviously massive plans and things like that. But the bottom line is you've got 600,000 young Saudis coming through, increasing amounts of women in the workforce. You need to create jobs for them. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to cluster around big industries, and really encourage SMEs to come through. Whether or not it'll be successful, I think it's going to take time.

I mean, you can't change the mentality of a country overnight from basically being guaranteed a public sector job with 60% of Saudis in the public sector to having to work in the private sector. But, you know, initiatives such as saying, well, foreigners are no longer allowed to work in malls. It must be Saudis and things like that. They're kind of stealth tax on the private sector,

but they are getting more people into the workforce who are Saudis. But like I said, this thing's going to take time. And the question mark is, do they have enough time? I think the jury is still out on that. So let's take a step back because, of course, diversifying the economy and building up domestic industries is something that's going to take time. You can't really snap your fingers and have it happen. Let's talk about the low oil prices themselves. This is obviously a hot topic in markets. And it seems like not a day goes by that we don't have a headline that says something about OPEC versus the U.S. shale industry and a headline questioning OPEC's ability to actually impact prices. in the face of rising American production. What power do Middle East producers actually have when it comes to influencing the price of a barrel of crude? I mean, I think just on one quick final point about the previous thing, the template there is Dubai,

where it took about 10 years to re-diversify because they ran out of oil. Now, hopping on to the question you just asked, look, OPEC is not a cartel. There have been lots of studies done. It's just too diversive. too many competing interests. Everyone's kind of tapped out when all prices are low because they overspend when all prices are high for it to be a cartel.

What it approximates in kind of economic terms is the Stackleberg competition. And what happens there is the leader moves and everyone else follows. But the only way that they can punish, in this case Saudi Arabia, everyone for not following is to just increase production and collapse the prices. And that's kind of like what you saw in 2014. When Saudi Arabia wants to try and push out shale, but also it played out the scenarios.

If we cut, are we going to get into repeat of the 1980s when we went from like 10 million barrels down to 2.5 million barrels and everyone else will cheat and shell will just come and take the money that we're leaving on the table? That was the dynamic in 2014. Right now, I don't think anyone is thinking

that there won't be an extension of the OPEC cut and it has stabilized oil prices. Why is that? It's because Amman, Saudi, everyone are starting to cash in on the long-term cash flows of their oil production through bond issuances and equity assuances. So the payoff structure for them is different. You know, it costs Saudi Arabia $4.5 billion a quarter at $50 oil to cut to the amount that they have.

They just raise a $17 billion bond. You know, the Aramco IPO, $50, $100 billion crystallized. The payoff is very different to the extent that I think they can cut probably 2 million barrels by themselves if they really, really need to and still come out ahead on cash terms. That would impact the market because the oil market is fascinating because you have 96 million barrels of production. But oversupply is only 1, 2 million barrels in each direction. But the price moves, it doubles, it halves. It's incredibly sensitive to small shifts in production.

It's just that OPEC can't get its act together to actually synchronise that usually, and definitely to overextend from where they are now. So moving from 1.2 million barrels to 2, you'd need to see the oil price drop below 40 again probably, as an example. So they're kind of in the comfort zone. So just to be clear, going back to what you said, what's different now is the ease with which the oil producing countries are able to monetize future production via the bond market, which sort of makes it a little more economical to hold production down. Am I understanding that right? Yeah, I think that it's a change in mentality. You know, in 2014, they didn't know what the elasticity of Shell would be.

They've got some points of that. You're starting to see US Shell come back online, but obviously the easiest stuff. And you're not getting into the harder stuff and oil service companies, prices are going up and things like that. But they didn't know what that response function would be. And the payoff was just different. Now they've done all the groundwork, led by Saudi Arabia. They can start having these cash flows. Because really, without Saudi Arabia, you can't have any cuts.

So it comes down to, do Saudi Arabia want cuts or not? That's why, like I said, if you model it as a Stackleberg competition, which is one where everyone follows the leader, as it were. Because if Saudi didn't move, you wouldn't have an OPEC deal, right? Let's pause for a second and take a short break to hear from our sponsor. But first, we want to take a quick moment to let you know about something really new that's cool from Bloomberg. Starting right now, you can use our iOS app or Google Chrome extension to scan the news, look at any story on any website, and instantly bring up news and information from Blumbron.

Bloomberg relevant to what you're reading about. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So it means that no matter where you're reading the news, you can basically bring all the data and information that's on the Bloomberg with you. It's kind of fun to test out, right, Joe? Right. So if you're reading a story about Tesla or Microsoft or Apple or Facebook, or if you're reading something about oil as in related to today's episode,

you can immediately bring up news and data from Bloomberg. and, of course, we have all the news and data in the world. It's really awesome. You should check it out by downloading the iOS app or search the Bloomberg extension on the Chrome store to try it out. Yeah, and it's called Lenz. We should probably say what it's called, right? Oh, right, right.

It's called Lens. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash Lens. Put knowledge to work and grow your business with CIT. From transportation to health care to manufacturing, CIT offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at cit.com. Put knowledge to work. And we are back with imad moustak of capricorn fund management. Amad, you were just making the point that the price of oil or oil prices tend to be very, very affected by relatively small swings in

production, two million barrels, I think you said. If that's the case, then how come OPEC can't get its act together and actually control the price of oil in the way that some people, you know, used to think that it actually did. Well, I think that if you look historically at proper cartels, diamond, tin, etc. The cartel members typically controlled 70, 80% of the market, but the dynamics were a bit different. In the case of OPEC and oil, what they're really focusing on at the moment is the supply side of things. And the methodology in terms of OPEC cuts is a very crude methodology. You know, we will cut 1.2 million barrels over the next six months.

That's the current cut. That's cost them $10.5 billion of lost income from the barrels they didn't produce and sell if you assume $50 oil. If the market shifts, if, you know, there's too much heavy versus light, but they're only cutting heavy crude, they can't really adapt for that. And you can't really enforce it either. The enforcement this time in terms of compliance, so that should be very good compared to previous cuts. But then once party starts cheating, historically, everyone starts cheating. And then it's just

Saudi left by themselves at two and a half million barrels, while Iran kind of makes merry with lots and lots of cash. Because you don't find out. I mean, we've seen all these discussions about the OPEC monitoring and things like that. And loads of people saying, well, this is the number. Iraq saying, no, this is the number. It takes two to three months to actually see if anyone's cheating. So it just doesn't have the enforceability. It doesn't have adaptability. And that's why it's so difficult to really get everyone together on the same page unless they're terrified. So let's go back when we started the episode. Tracy introduced you as someone who had, was working on the solutions to some of the

region's biggest vexing problems. And so let's get into this from an oil perspective. How could the Mid-East oil producers sort of rearrange their affairs such that they didn't get, such that they weren't so susceptible to these traps. Yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to give my kind of tuppence and try and help out wherever I can. But my suggestion is what I call the tactical petroleum fund, which is to flip the focus from supply onto demand

and effectively create a marginal consumer for oil. So rather than have this very blunt instrument where you cut X million barrels and you lose $10 billion every single six months, instead if the aim is to remove barrels from the market now because you think now there's oversupply in the future there will be under supply because you're not doing the investments the trillions of dollars that have been cancelled to maintain the future supply in the face of declining production because you know you lose four five million barrels a year from existing fields of production that's huge and shale can fill some but it can't fill that oil

my question is that rather than cut X% of your production put half of that amount equivalent produce at maximum and put it into a fund and then what the fund can do is the fund can leverage up two to three times because you can effectively hedge against the oil price dropping 20, 30, 40%, and go out and purchase barrels from the market

and move them off the market being available to the market because the most fascinating thing for me for the oil prices and the oil market is that not every barrel is equal. When you get a headline out of Iraq, you know, Cheyenne Kirkuk pipelines down, 400,000 barrels a day, 200,000 barrels a day, or Nigerian crew down 300,000, 400,000 barrels a day,

the market often doesn't even flinch. A little bit of a shift on US shale, and the market goes ballistic. Oil in a strategic petroleum reserve is treated as effectively not available to the market. Oil in US inventories, which is the current focus, is treated as massively available to the market. So what you need to do,

do is effectively create a buffer stock just like Joseph in the Bible you know with seven years of feast and seven years of famine whereby you take these barrels and you just move them off the market and because you don't actually care about going to zero on that fund there are so many ways you can do it and you can really have things like if you've got too much light oil you can move the light oil too much heavy oil you can remove the heavy oil if the oil curve and the oil market is not in oversupply you don't make any purchases you know you have that flexibility and importantly you have enforceability because it's not a case of two months later

have you cut production no it's have you paid at the start of this month yes or no so it's also a lot fairer because for example now Saudi Arabia is cutting 30 percent they produce 30 percent of production but they're bearing 45 percent of the cost of this OPEC cut so realistically given the dynamics within OPEC and you know what we've seen so far what do you think are the chances that they would do something like this, because in some ways it means you have to seed a little bit of influence to an independent party, right? Like, I'm assuming the oil fund would be somewhat independent from individual producers. Yeah, I mean, I think the typical way that these types of buffer stock systems, although there hasn't been common quite like this given the interesting nature of the

oil market, is that anyone who participates gets a vote in a share, and you get kind of a view into that. it becomes a bit of an invisible hand in the market. And what it can do is it can smooth out the volatility of the price, but then if you start to get greedy, you will eventually get taken out. I think probably the optimal solution is once they've game through the scenarios, and, you know, the lessons can do this at home. Just introduce this as a player into the game. It works out a lot better financially, is to have a hybrid system,

whereby you have an OPEC cut just as you have now, but then you introduce this as a small player in the market and see where is it balancing, just like, Saudi Arabia want to see how is shale going to balance the market? Because it becomes very interesting there. So you don't, it's not either or you can have a hybrid. But I think in the long term, this, well, you can show mathematically. You can show qualitatively. This is a superior option than very crude OPEC cuts. Let's take a turn a little bit from this. Tracy, also in the beginning, we were talking about some of the other tensions that existed in the region beyond just the challenges of

oil economics, the questions about the long-term viability, the sort of game theory aspects of how the OPEC countries deal with each other. There's obviously a lot of issues related to politics, religion, there's the refugee crisis emanating out of Syria, all kinds of things that people sort of see as never-ending issues one after another in the Mideast. You also are very interested in those areas and you've sort of thought through some ideas. Tell us a little bit about some of the stuff that you're working on there? So, yeah, I mean, I think that there are two main things. One is on religion and one is on kind of the refugee crisis.

Just a touch on the religion one, because I can't talk too much about it. You know, we've done a lot of work in terms of really understanding extremism and Islam and kind of the various aspects of that. Because obviously you have the Sunni-Shiya divide and then you have these extremists burning up the place in Syria. when you start kind of really doing and analyzing Islam in a very structured way, it becomes very clear that kind of the politicization of it, as with many other religions, stems from a lack of access to available information.

And it's actually quite fascinating because when you see in terms of jihadist recruitment, is that they provide a little bit of information, which is more than you get from the established authorities, and then people believe they know everything. and what happens then is when you believe you know everything that's when you are the most dangerous in many different fields right and this has been shown and this is what allows people to think well I know better than that person and then I can go and kill or do all sorts of dangerous things

the most optimal solutions are where you know a bit and you know you don't know that much or when you know a lot and you know you don't know that much and so my question is kind of how can you provide a resource to avoid this because when you look at the data I don't know if you guys know but any engineers are 10 times more likely to become extremist than any other group, as an example. Huh. Why is that? It's because if you think about what you do as an engineer or an educated individual, you build models, right? And so if they get information that's a little bit better than what's publicly available, it seems like a plausible, coherent whole, the message of these

jihadists, especially if they are marginalized for some reason or another, usually political. And so that for me was the most fascinating thing. And then I thought about how do individuals access information? How does Islam work? Just in kind of one minute, how Islam works, or Sunni Islam, should I say, is that during the time of the Prophet, it was really easy to find out what Islam was, because you asked him and he had revelation. When he died, it became a bit more complex.

And then everyone, all his disciples, disciples, the disciples said all sorts of things. So three centuries after, they decided to codify it. by getting the eternal Quran and building a picture of the temporal life of the prophet and figuring out the links between them and applying it to today. That's actually quite an interesting thing because what's objective versus subjective in the religion? Because in certain religions you have this hierarchy

where you have a large amount of subjectivity because of revelation, whereas Islam is actually quite ordered. So one of my projects, Ananas, is an attempt to provide the information access in an ordered basis. And we're starting with the... Quran and having a really nice version of the Quran where you could have full contextual access in terms of being able to dig in as much depth as you want into the language, into all of the sources, really consumified. And hopefully by building that up and doing the same for Shia, Islam and other religions,

we'll have a kind of standardized kind of Wikipedia Google Age system where you have reliable access to all of these sources and you can start to compare and contrast. because the differences between Shia and Sunni aren't that big, right? The differences between mainstream and fundamentalist is that fundamentalists believe they know everything. If you can provide resources where you can objectively show they don't know everything or introduce that element of doubts, maybe that will have an impact. You know, and so that is kind of what I'm hoping, because like I said, when I start breaking it down and from the research we've done,

there isn't that much difference between some of these groups warring with each other on an ideological basis, and definitely these extremists, they literally cherry pick. But sometimes people don't know better. More people Google ISIS than Islam now. So what are they going to think? Can I ask, I know you can't say that much about this, but can I ask a very quick question? You said you're starting out with the Quran. How do you plan on dealing with the Hadiths?

And I should say, you know, I'm an outsider looking in, but my understanding is the Hadiths, which are basically the reports of what the Prophet said while he was living, and they kind of exploded after he died. How are you going to go about treating those? Because that seems to be where some of the confusion comes from. Yeah. So, I mean, as you said, the Hadith of the Stories of the Prophet, and three generations after the Prophet died,

these were collated to build a picture of the life of the Prophet, which is what's called the Sunnah, which is why the major group of Muslims is called the Sunnis. They're the ones who followed this model. But you know how you have this whole thing about fake news now, right? How do you judge authority? There's a whole science in Islam about trying to figure out which of these are true and which of these are fake. And a lot of the issue comes where things with bitter dubious quality, potentially, in terms of only one chain of narrators, for example, versus lots of people saying the same thing, Chinese whisper style from Gibraltar to Kazakhstan and agreeing on the content, those come through.

So people just hang their hats on just this one transmission and then say that women can't. drive as an example. I think that, again, that needs to be systemized with the help of the scholars, because what I see from my studies of Islam and kind of the research we've commissioned is that, look, you had a thousand years of Islamic caliphate, and it wasn't like ISIS. It wasn't great. It wasn't perfect. But what you had was process and reasonable doubt. For example, for amputation, you know, the whole Aladdin thing, Princess Jasmine gets a hand grab because she's stolen an orange and they go top it off. There were 84 preconditions for that under a thousand years, you know. They had to have seen you stealing three and a half thousand dollars worth of stuff from someone's pocket and you can't have been hungry.

And you had to have two witnesses to that. You know, this whole stoning for adultery. You need to see four witnesses to penetration, which is kind of weird. But if you didn't have four witnesses to penetration, then the accusers would get lashed 80 times. What you had was harsh punishments, but a massive amount of process. You've lost that process now. and that's why you're seeing the really negative side of things. But again, this needs to be systematically done

with the whole community backing. But this is the fun thing about data now, right? We can assemble data. It just needs to be done systematically. So, you know, hopefully I'll plant the seed and those working with me well, and then it's up to the Islamic community to kind of take that forward.

Kind of Google Wikipedia for Islam with a little bit of AI thrown in. We'll see how it grows. Again, this is going to take most of my life. But if it works, you know, It'll help my kids at the very least. I really like that perspective. Before we wrap up, we just have a couple more minutes.

But tell us a little bit about you also are interested in pursuing things regarding the refugee crisis. Tell us quickly about what you're working on there. Yeah, so this is actually my wife's project. It's called Humanitary. Basically, hopefully in the next, by 2020, she wants to give every refugee a biometric smartphone. So Galaxy S4 equivalent costs about $42.45. Now this is really interesting because what you have is a group who really need to have help and access to information who have lost their identity. Biometrics have a lot of ethical issues around them in terms of fingerprint, iris scans.

But imagine giving a refugee a phone in coming to the UK. They can suddenly get a bank account, oyster card for the transport. But the most interesting thing is they can suddenly have access to work. And this is about we've got us thinking about the future of work. work in terms of you go, you log in, you can start working for a charity, you can build up a biometric CV for yourself, which shows who you are. And that's incredibly important giving people back their identity. And again, it's kind of like, it's going to be difficult, but I think it's achievable because everyone wants to help the refugees. This is $40,50 when the average refugee

costs $3,000 to $30,000 a year. And, you know, as you can start building this, at least it's an option because I don't know about you guys, but I'm scared about kind of the next five, 10 years, kind of looking where global trade is going, looking where artificial intelligence is going, looking where jobs are going. So, you know, again, trying to do our little bit to help, but really trying to pull together a lot of different strings to do so. All right, Imad Mostak, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us. So, Joe, I think, well, I think Imod has given himself a pretty hefty workload, right?

Yeah, solve the sort of game theory stuff that's vexed OPEC for decades, defeat extremism, and solve the refugee crisis. But I loved that conversation. I mean, I've talked to Ahmad before on TV. He's definitely one of the sort of more interesting people around. And I like that rather than just talk about all this stuff, which we all do all the time, he actually has ideas that he's putting into practice or trying to put into practice. Yeah, I think there's a tendency in market sometimes to just kind of throw your hands up and say,

well, that's the way it's always been. Yes. And people don't really think about, well, could you actually change the structure and make it different? So it's really interesting to hear from someone who's actually trying to do that on a number of levels. Absolutely, right. Like we just sort of accept, okay, this is how OPEC works. or this is the information asymmetry that allows extremism to thrive. In fact, I thought that was really interesting because it related to his ideas related

to a conversation that we had several months ago with Graham Wood, who wrote that book about ISIS. And it is very similar stuff, which is that in Graham's view, the solution to combating extremism was not to dismiss the extremists or say something, say catchphrase it like, oh, that's not really Islam or whatever. but to actually sort of compete with them on the information front and say, no, here's more information and actually out-argue them with data. And so here's an example of what Amad's doing that's very much along those lines. Yeah.

Well, we'll have to get him on once the project has moved a little further and see how it's going. Yeah, no, but I think it's really cool. And also, again, like the refugee stuff, we always talk about how awful it is, but how many people are actually trying to think of something new that might address it. Yeah, didn't you ask me once where refugees charge their phones? That was that actually, yeah, I mean, because you see all these photos of, you know, you hear about, you know, refugees using their phones to get across waters and stuff like that. And I was just thinking about the logistical aspects of that. It's not surprising that refugees have phones. Of course, it's a mainstay technology all around the world. But, you know, you just think

about like the challenge of actually using a phone while you're dealing with, you know, the challenges of being refugee. So the technical aspects are still very interesting to me. Yeah, for sure. I guess soon you might be asking where they're charging their biometric phones, right? Hopefully so. And then we can see how the project is working. All right. Should we leave it there? Let's do it. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart, and you can follow Imad at Emostock.

Put knowledge to work and grow your business with CIT. From transportation to health care to manufacturing, CIT offers commercial lending, leasing, and treasury management services for small and middle market businesses. Learn more at cIT.com. Put knowledge to work. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all.

Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Rafini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture.

On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern.

Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you. get your podcasts. What separates good leaders from transformational ones? I'm Jessica Chen, and in season two of Leading By Example, we'll sit down with executives like Grace Chen of Bertie Gray to find out. It's important to understand where you spike, but also really acknowledge where you don't and find people who can fill those gaps. Listen to Leading by Example, executives making an impact on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts.