Odd Lots - Tracy and Joe Answer All Your Questions

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

It's that time of the year. On this episode, Tracy and Joe answer questions from listeners that were submitted via voice note. We talk about everything from Chinese history to whales to whether or not... we ever hold an episode without publishing it. Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:54 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. In Brue Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthaw. 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. Yeah, you know, I think I liked it in the podcast, you know,
Starting point is 00:01:47 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 everyone's in a while, I suppose, it's nice to sort of have the microphone turn in the other direction, so to speak. Yeah, the other thing I would say is we're already pretty accessible. Yes. Like, there's a whole All Thoughts 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.
Starting point is 00:02:21 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. Call-in shows are Lindy. The call-in shows are definitely Lindy. All right. Shall we start? Yeah, let's take a listen to some. John Lazzaro, age 63, Berkeley, California. Sometimes, when you finish recording an episode, do you look at each other and say,
Starting point is 00:02:50 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. 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.
Starting point is 00:03:16 The guests 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. Yeah, it is very rare.
Starting point is 00:04:00 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 can count on one hand, right? It's not that many. But there have been a few just for whatever. reason the guest was not on their game or whatever it didn't work and uh 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
Starting point is 00:04:32 it's like no what this is uh this is not awesome all right let's go on the next one 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. Thanks for listening. That's a very easy one because I was 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 the next year or two.
Starting point is 00:05:04 But because I was in that mood, I read a book by the historian writer, C.L.R. James, who wrote a book about Moby Dick. It was a book called Miriners, Renegades and Castaways by C.L.R. James. And it basically made the argument that Herman Melville, with the A. Hab 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. book almost as good as Moby Dick itself. Also, I've been recommending two books to you. One of them is the heart of the sea, which is about the whale ship Essex, which is the ship that actually inspired Moby Dick. And then there's another one I'm reading just now called A Marriage at Sea, and it's about a couple who are out sailing around the world and their ship gets destroyed by a whale. and they have to survive on like a little raft.
Starting point is 00:06:04 I actually don't know if they survive yet, so I guess we'll find out. I promise I will read both of those in 2026. Both of them are excellent. I promise I'll read both. Let's hear the next question. Hi, gang, long-time listener here. My name is Sturm.
Starting point is 00:06:18 I'm 32, and I live in Puerto Rico. And I have a question for Joe. I know you're an efficient markets guy. But if EMH is true, how have portfolio managers accumulated such vast wealth? That's a really good question. I wonder about why the financial system overall exists. Why are people putting targets on prices and why are their pundits on TV and why is their financial TV and why is their trading and so forth? I still don't really know why the answer of why anyone has made any money. But my guess is that there are other services that people on finance provide other than high quality security selection. That whether it's like, okay, I don't really like know how to manage risk or whatever it is or I'm anxious about the thought of investing. All kinds of things, I guess, you know, there probably are people who are able to obtain information that maybe counts as alpha.
Starting point is 00:07:15 I don't know. I remain unsatisfied. I've asked this question myself. I don't fully know the answer, but my best guess intuitively is that within this world that we call finance, there are things that produce value other than sort of, you know, making good trades and so forth that maybe are harder to articulate and so forth. And thus, they are providing a valuable service at that front. But I agree. Counseling your customers. Yeah, counseling something. I don't know. But I mean, I would just, I would just add on to that, like, it, it seems just on the EMH stuff, it seems on a simplistic level, if EMH was real, you would never get a bubble, right? And in fact, one of my favorite moments on the podcast was when we interviewed Eugene Fama, the father of the EMH idea. And I think I got him to say that like bubbles exist, right? Which I was surprised. Yeah. I know they really, they hate like they really wrestle with it. Like this is their one thing. They hate this phenomenon. So they come up with all this stuff. But yeah, we will continue asking the question of why. Why do we exist? Why does financial?
Starting point is 00:08:28 media and coverage and pundits and all this stuff exist. We'll continue answering this question in 26. Maybe we'll have an answer. Only the big questions. Why are we here? Why are we here? All right. Let's listen to the next question. Hi, I'm Max Niederman. I'm 19 and I live in San Francisco. Supposing that AI does end up being as transformative as people claim, where do you think the value that that creates will accrue? From their valuations and how people talk about it, at least an SF. It seems people expect the labs to capture a massive chunk of that value. On the other hand, the labs have never been profitable. And even then, hardware companies like Navidia and TSM seem to trade at lower multiples, despite being near monopolies with very good
Starting point is 00:09:18 margins. So my question is this. When all things are sudden done, which parts of the supply chain will be commoditized and which will capture all the value? Yeah, I think that's a very fair question. And I think, you know, it's difficult to predict if tech at some point is going to produce the or invent the proverbial AI god, like this thing that solves all of our problems. I would be a little bit skeptical of that. It seems to me like it's going to be a productivity improvement kind of at the margin for now. So maybe you use it instead of Google search, you can use it to explain certain terms much more quickly. Some industries are probably going to use it to design new products. I know there's a lot of excitement around medicine, but where the value will accrue, I mean, some of the big tech companies are so expensive right now in the U.S. I keep describing this as the coffee pod theory of AI, which is some tech companies are choosing to basically produce the world's most expensive, sophisticated cappuccino machine.
Starting point is 00:10:32 And they're saying that, you know, it produces the best coffee that you've ever had. And crucially, what they're doing is targeting a market for this machine. Let's say it costs like $2,000. That's basically the entire world. And I'm not sure that approach works. And then, you know, some other companies are taking a very different. strategy and they're producing something that's relatively cheap and standardized, sort of like a coffee pod, coffee maker, and it's much cheaper, and again, targeting the total market of the world.
Starting point is 00:11:09 And, you know, if you think about it that way, I kind of have a sense of where it's going. I really have no idea. You know, the one thing I'll say is I think there is this view that, okay, AI can replace human labor. therefore lots of workers are very vulnerable, and therefore there is going to be this tremendous, like it will be this very, a force of inequality, so to speak, right? So it's going to be, there's going to be the model makers. And I think in this vision that you're asking about, these model makers, and they're going to make a fortune and the rest of us are going to have to, like, get by on UBI or whatever, because they've put us all, the models that put us all
Starting point is 00:11:47 out of work. And look, I think that's possible. The one thing I'll say, though, is that, like, tech as a force for like financial inequality, that's already been the story. We don't even need to talk about AI with the existing tech giants that we've seen that have built over the last 15, 20 years out of San Francisco. We've already seen this incredible rush of sort of wealth and income, et cetera, to this fairly like small, you know, this one industry. This is very like, you know, very small, fairly small concentration of software engineers and executives and VCs and so forth. And as such, I do wonder, like, could it be that somehow it's like totally the opposite, that it goes in the other trajectory and that really it's sort of like a force for equality or something and that it ends up being a situation in which people where like capital itself is not as valuable as it used to be? I don't know. I just think we should possibly consider the idea that when people are predicting that will happen with AI is that what is literally just an extension of what we've already. already seen, and that to the extent that AI is something new, maybe that'll put us on a new trajectory. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now.
Starting point is 00:13:17 I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed. Yes, there are other products like this from a very first. variety of news organizations. But they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day.
Starting point is 00:13:43 That's not what we do. We create customized episodes that can only be heard on Bloomberg News Now. And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. All right. Let's take another question. Hi, Tracy and Joe. This is Jennifer, 30 calling from Seattle, long time first time. This question is for Joe. Joe, what drew you to your interest in Chinese history, particularly its modern era?
Starting point is 00:14:26 Have you ever considered going more back in time? I ask because I'm Chinese American with parents who said very little about their lives during the Cultural Revolution and the 80s when the country started opening up. So I often learned through Joe's tweets and book recommendations. But I had also noticed in my last trip to China that the one historical figure cities pay the most homage to is not Mao or Deng Xiaoping, but actually Son Yat Sen, who is the precursor to these leaders. Thanks. Love the show as always. So obviously we do a lot of contemporary China episodes and it sort of seemed like, you know, I should probably understand a little bit more about the history. I start.
Starting point is 00:15:04 with the ancient stuff, I was like, oh, I'm just going to, I'm just going to go back and I'm going to read about the old dynasties, and then I'll get to the present. And I sort of like, I found it a little bit hard. It wasn't grabbing my attention to the ancient stuff. But then I remember a couple of years ago, we did an episode with Adam Posen at the Peterson Institute a couple years ago at Jackson Hall. And he had just sort of mentioned offhand that he had read Ezra Vogel's biography of Dengh. And I was like, oh, maybe I'll just start there. That seems like more recent intractable and I could sort of slot that into my head into something. And I read that and I found it very, very compelling, as Adam suggested. And I think that sort of set off. I think a reading 20th century
Starting point is 00:15:44 Chinese history helps me to some extent understand the present day. I've never read a Sun Yat-Sin biography, but I'm very interested in him, one of the rare figures who is sort of revered in both Taiwan and mainland. And so therefore, someone who has, was an inspiration to both the nationalist and the communist, which is kind of weird. And he was like sort of a, you know, an early pioneer of land reform and so forth. So I think maybe that'll be another thing I aimed to read in 2026, a good Sunnetson biography. I really like the older Chinese history. I read a really good book. I can't remember the title now, but it was all about the Chinese bureaucracy and government system, how it used to be. And, you know, one of one of the
Starting point is 00:16:30 most rigorous systems in the world, arguably, you had to take this insane test to get the position. And I remember I also did a bunch of research around the sort of late 1800s, early 1900s, the fall of the imperial family. And what it means for debt markets, that was a really fun story. Yeah, I should go back and read the ancient stuff as well. I'm going to add that to the 2026 list. Okay. Let's take another question. Hi, Joe and Tracy. My name is Daniel Bestoff. I'm 26 years old and currently based in New York where I'm doing my master's at Colombian financial economics. I'm a huge fan of the pod. And Spotify told me, in the last year, I was in the top half percent of listeners. And maybe now, first time caller as well. My question is this. You have such a wide range of guests with very different backgrounds and you cover an enormous amount of information. How much of that are you able to retain and naturally call back in everyday conversations or when you do follow-up episodes? and how much you rely on note-taking or revisiting past episodes to connect your ideas over time? This is a really good question. This is a sort of journalistic process question. By the way,
Starting point is 00:17:42 thank you for being in the top-top percentage of odd lots listeners. We appreciate that. Let's get coffee sometime. But going back to the question, you know, this is obvious, but it kind of depends on the guest. And if the guest says something memorable or something that you really think is insightful, I think we do retain some of that information. I used to retain a lot more when we were editing our own transcripts and publishing them. I really value transcripts, but it was just so much work and took forever. So we stopped doing it. We're hoping to come up with some sort of solution soon. And the biggest compliment I can pay a guest is saying that, like, I'm going to go.
Starting point is 00:18:27 back and read the transcript because there's so much knowledge there, so much information. I just have to absorb all of it. It was funny. I was at dinner the other night with someone and I said to them, have you ever actually learned anything from listening to a podcast? Because I do sometimes wonder if I ever remember anything. No, that's not totally true. I do.
Starting point is 00:18:47 But I also sometimes wonder, setting aside podcasts and recall of specific facts. I also have the same thing with books. you know, we were just talking about that Deng Xiaoping biography. And if someone was like, oh, Joe, you just spent three weeks of your life reading a biography of Dung Chopang, what did you learn? And I'd be like, he sort of opened up. And for a while he was sent down to work on a tractor factory. And then he opened up.
Starting point is 00:19:14 And I would be like, you know, there's like, I was like, oh, did I really need to spend three weeks of my life to be able to recall three or four basic facts? I suppose that there are things that I don't know that I remember in like my deep storage part of my memory that would be, you know, that would come out in a conversation. But I do, going back to questions of like, why are we all here and so forth, I do sometimes have these thoughts of like, do, you know, how much do we really learn and internalize and how much is it just fun to have these conversations? Sometimes we surprise ourselves. Yeah, we do. Like sometimes we come up with some random fact that's kind of interesting that we learned from somewhere. Just on the note-taking part of the question,
Starting point is 00:19:54 We generally don't take notes in the interview. We might jot down like a word or two just to remember to come back and ask a follow-up question. But yeah, mostly it's a genuine conversation between three people and we try to keep it as natural as possible. Hey, Joe and Tracy, AJ Toss here. I'm 37 years old and I'm from Lafayette, Louisiana. Go Cajuns. I have a question for you about Bitcoin. You guys have spoken about how the narrative around Bitcoin changes every cycle.
Starting point is 00:20:29 And so I'd actually like to ask you to make a prediction whether you think there will be another cycle for Bitcoin where it way outperforms everything else. And assuming that it does, what would the narrative be this time? Thanks, guys. That is a really good question. So the narrative theory of Bitcoin is this idea that because Bitcoin is, because Bitcoin is, is essentially nothing. It is able to transform itself into anything. So we've seen it go through these various cycles of transformation, reinventing itself. In the beginning, it was supposed to be just a digital payment system. And there's the famous incident of the guy that bought a pizza
Starting point is 00:21:13 and lost a lot of money that he otherwise would have gained. And then it kind of, you know, it turned into an inflation hedge. More recently, it's turned. into a Trump vehicle. I actually had it, I had an idea for a narrative that comes next, but I'm blanking out on it totally. I feel really bad. You'll tweet it if, uh, if you remember it. It was like two days ago.
Starting point is 00:21:39 Oh, man. And I had this idea and sorry, I'm very tired. It'll come back to you. It's the end of a busy season. It's been a busy season and busy a year. Look, I have no, you know, I was like, oh, now I'm going to give the official odd lots for Bitcoin price target. for 2026. No, I really have no idea. I don't have any idea if it'll outperform again.
Starting point is 00:21:59 You know, of course, it has been pronounced dead several times, many times over the years. So perhaps that's always the reason to discount the idea of, okay, this time is dead. That being said, you know, look, like the, I thought one of the most compelling arguments that had, of the various narratives over time, I thought one of the most compelling ones had been that it would be sort of this, you know, post-sovereign money and therefore kind of like a digital gold safe haven. It has not been behaving like one in 2025. I mean, this is one of the most volatile years on memory from like a de-globalization and geopolitical standpoint. If you'd think there'd be one year where it's like, okay, people want some sort of money that is disconnected from governments.
Starting point is 00:22:45 Maybe this would be the year. Maybe they do, but they're choosing for gold. They're choosing the actual safe haven. Bitcoin, meanwhile, has underperformed U.S. Treasuries, so that U.S. Treasury is yet another safe haven that is outperforming Bitcoin in 2025. So I really don't know, but I do think that the poor performance in 2025 should be something of concern. Again, people have always said, oh, it's a tech stock hedge. Well, tech stocks have had, or tech stock proxy, tech stocks have done great this year. So it hasn't even, it hasn't even satisfied that requirement. And then the last thing I'll say is that there is a lot of, I think, legitimate enthusiasm about crypto, particularly in the realm of stable coins, getting back to maybe the original ideas Tracy mentioned, of a payments
Starting point is 00:23:30 platform. But all of that is happening on other chains besides Bitcoin. And so even if crypto becomes more of a thing in the financial system, it's not obvious, but it's possible, but it's certainly not obvious that Bitcoin would see any benefit from it. I do think, though, we shouldn't underestimate Bitcoin's ability to reinvent itself. And this actually took me a long time to realize. And you know, he mentioned the obituaries for crypto. I wrote some of those. Like, I think in 2012, I wrote one. We've all learned our lesson. Maya Kopa on that. We'll see what happens. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist. And I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to Fashion
Starting point is 00:24:31 icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacois wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's take another question. Hello, Joe and Tracy. This is Cynthia from Vancouver, Canada. What is something the Marquis seems really confident about that you think deserves more questioning or more nuanced discussion? You know, first of all, thanks Cynthia for calling in. The first thing that comes to my mind is I have been, I wrote about this recently in the Oddlots newsletter. I am kind of surprised about how well anchored market-based
Starting point is 00:25:19 expectations for inflation have been because there is, I think, pretty legitimate. There's two things going on. One is, you know, the Fed hasn't missed its inflation target for years. And so there's perhaps reasons to think that just already that the Fed hasn't been as serious about 2% as it had been before. But then also, I do think there are good reasons to think that in the future, the Fed will not have the same capacity to target stable prices the way it used to, due to politicization, due to the general sort of like populist trend in politics, which is not something distinct to the Trump administration. Certainly, I think the Trump administration has accelerated that process with a lot of the criticism of the chairman and so forth. And so like I am a bit surprised
Starting point is 00:26:08 that if you look at various market-based measures of future inflation, five-year, five-year break-evens, and so forth, that it has been pretty stable because that feels, disconnected from the way that we basically talk about this topic. Mine is also related to inflation. I think far more people need to figure out how the CPI official numbers for inflation are actually calculated and produced. And, you know, ultimately, a lot of it is a series of numbers that are estimated. Those are called imputed numbers.
Starting point is 00:26:45 And a lot of them are actual observations of prices, which, Buremberg, of labor services people go out and collect. It's actually a really labor-intensive thing to do. And most people, you know, they treat them like as a simplistic number. And I think it's much more important to look at the different components. And actually, we're recording this on December 18th. And we're seeing a really good example of why it's important to know how CPI is actually calculated because, you know, the number just came out. out much lower than expected. And it's interesting if you start to break it down to see what assumptions were made and what's actually moving. All right. For the next question, this one was just
Starting point is 00:27:31 written as opposed to an audio note. But it's a really fun one where Tracy and I kind of see the world a little bit differently. So we have a chance to get into that. This question comes from Diego Aguilar, Conabelle. He asks, where did my intellectual beef with the idea of the term premium start? And look, so this is something that's come up. People talk about the term premium in the yield curve. And I'm always like, what exactly does that mean? So, you know, the way, like, I guess, Tracy, let's start with you. What is the term premium?
Starting point is 00:28:02 Don't ask me, I'm not going to define it. How do you, what is the term premium? It is basically the extra compensation or premium that investors demand to hold debt, you know, out longer term. Okay. So here's what I don't get. Why do they deserve extra compensation? Why don't they just deserve the appropriate compensation? Like I buy stocks.
Starting point is 00:28:20 Do I, oh, I deserve extra compensation because they're risky? No, I deserve appropriate compensation. I deserve to be compensated, I suppose. But I hate this idea of like extra compensation. We always want extra compensation. But then also, I guess my other issue is that like, I think if you knew, if you, if you had a crystal ball and you knew for sure what the Fed was going to do in every policy meeting it would make for the next 10 years, you know. there's 80 years, so the next 80 meetings. If you knew what that was going to be, I think you would know the exact price that 10-year yields should trade at. And so I don't really understand
Starting point is 00:28:58 why we can't just say that the yield curve is the market's expectation of overnight rates for the next 10 years. Well, it's in comparison. So the extra premium is in comparison to shorter term bonds and there are some calculations that go into that. I think it's, it's, you know, not the be-all and end-all of the market, but it's certainly an interesting thing to look at. And when we get big moments in the term premiums movement, you know, if it flips from positive to negative, it kind of tells you a lot about where the market's going. Okay, on this point, though, just to press further there, I think there's really key, which is so they're, right, everyone admits these are unobservable, right? These are models that indicate what this
Starting point is 00:29:46 notional term premium is. The fact that it can flip to negative, and it was negative, for much of the 2010s, suggests to me, like, that's another reason. Like, I don't understand how this idea that there is holders of long-term debt per se need extra, because of extra protection or whatever, because apparently they were actually getting a discount on it if we go by what the model said in the 2010s. So I just find the whole thing, I just find it all very unsatisfying. I would also say the term premium beef, we play it up a little bit for the show. We play it up for the show. We hope you enjoy. All right, this is going to be our final question. Again, this one was written in rather than a voice note. So here we go. It is from Michael
Starting point is 00:30:31 Khan. He asks a non-markets question, more specifically for me, Tracy. What was your favorite magic the gathering card and what critical function did it serve in your deck? Bonus question, if you and Joe were a magic card, which ones would you be? That's a very fun question. Okay, so my favorite was probably my Chavon Dragon. I like the idea of Dragons and it had really nice art. And at the time, it was a really valuable and powerful card. By the way, I don't know if I'm pronouncing. Chavon right, whether it's Chavon or Chyvon. We didn't have a lot of pronunciation guides when I was in middle school. And I also just don't remember how people were saying these things. It was like 30 years ago. And I say that just because someone on Twitter or Reddit was criticizing me
Starting point is 00:31:29 for not knowing that a card that Joe mentioned was an actual card. Yeah, I didn't know that. I thought you were making it up. I mean, it sounds like, you know, an obvious magic. card. I know nothing at all about magic. I've never played it. I really, I just, I don't know how the game works, et cetera. All, I only remember one fact, which is that one of my good friends, younger brother in high school had a call called Wall of Brambles. Actually, this gets to like the question about memorization. Who the heck knows how that random fact got stuck in my head or what's, but this is, I hear magic and I just remember this card. I just looked it up. It looks like this card would cost somewhere between 25 and 30 cents. So I'm certainly not memorizing it because it is a
Starting point is 00:32:12 particularly valuable or important card. And then what role did the dragon play in my deck? I think I said this on the podcast. I really enjoyed the collecting side of Magic, the Gathering, more than I enjoyed actually playing it. You know, there was some gender imbalance at the time and it like sometimes felt weird to, you know, go to war with a bunch of guys. But I really enjoyed putting together the decks and sort of strategizing. And I guess I didn't enjoy testing them out that much. What would we be if we were a magic card? If oddlots or a card, Tracy, you got to answer this on.
Starting point is 00:32:53 If oddlots or if us? It says if you and Joe were a magic card. So give me a second. Okay, full disclosure. I just asked chat GPT, because this seems like. a kind of fun question. And the AI generated answer is we would be a blue, red, legendary creature that rewards drawing cards, talking about weird market mechanics, and turning every small data point into a big compounding advantage. I'm not sure how you would incorporate discussions about
Starting point is 00:33:29 markets into a magic the gathering game. But, you know, it's nice to hear we could be a dragon. I would say, like maybe we would be a Visuven doppelganger. And I say that partly because I'm sort of biased to the older cards, the Ice Age cards that came out in the mid-90s for obvious reasons. And I think the doppelganger, you know, they obviously complement each other and their actual power in the game from what I remember is they can take on the characteristics of any creature that's actually in play or most of the characteristics.
Starting point is 00:34:09 And I think that's, you know, that's kind of what we do. We try to adapt to every conversation to get the best result. That's right. I also asked CHET, GPT, this. I didn't really understand. I don't even understand its result. But then it said why this works, to Joe generates flow motion liquidity.
Starting point is 00:34:29 And Tracy imposes structure, friction, and narrative discipline, which I think many listeners, actually sort of agree with. It doesn't sound totally off. That's not bad, but it's not a magic the gathering card. No, no, no. I don't even understand like all this stuff. I can't even, I don't know, too you are legend.
Starting point is 00:34:47 I don't know what any of this stuff is. Oh, I do have some good news, which is, remember I said that I had lost all my magic, the gathering cards, and I didn't know where they were. My mom actually found them in her basement. They were sort of hidden away. The bad news is, I, really don't have any valuable ones. I still have the Chavon Dragon and I have one that was signed by the artist, but that's about it. I'm surprised. There's not one in there? Like, is there like an
Starting point is 00:35:16 antiques roadshow style show for Magic to Gathering cards? Like maybe we could do an episode like at some some guy in here or some dealer and like talk through the cards or something like that. I would do that. Yeah, that would be really fun. Let's do that episode. So this is the end of the AMA. Thank you, everyone, for sending in all these great questions. We had a lot of fun. answering them. Yeah. And thank you everyone just for, I mean, end of year, crazy year, great year. So really thank you to everyone who, everyone who's listened. And yeah, we definitely hope you listen in 2026 because we have some excellent episodes coming up. So shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allo. You can
Starting point is 00:35:58 follow me at Tracy Allo. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Definitely follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashel Bennett, at Dashbaot, and Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks. For more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7
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