Central Banks Face Repeated Inflation Amid Supply Shocks
NEW ODD LOTS Monetary Policy in the Age of Supply Side Shocks @tracyalloway and I talk to the great Megan Greene —- always @economistmeg to us — about how central banks are dealing with one inflationary episode after another https://t.co/y1tj2H3kJm
Seeking Neuroscientist for Feasible, Ethical, Affordable Experiment
I have an idea for what I believe would be a feasible, ethical, and (probably quite) affordable neuroscience experiment. Do I know anyone in the field (or know anyone who knows anyone) who’d be up for chatting with me for...
AI Hallucinations Minor Concern; Language Naturally Produces Nonsense
If you look at the replies here, you’ll see a lot of people confidently giving both possible answers. This is one reason why “hallucinations” are very low on my list of reasons to be worried about AI. Bullshit is just...
Figma IPO Price Isn’t Proof Merger‑blocking Fuels Wealth
Remember when some antitrust folks were using Figma’s successful IPO as evidence that merger-blocking was also great for capitalist wealth creation? This isn’t to say the block was wrong based on the law. But the (initial) high share price was never...
Sci‑fi Author, Not Tech Firm, Fuels AI Villainy
Everyone loves this tweet, but it got it completely wrong. It is the sci-fi author — not the tech company — who is the true villain, for having put the story of the Torment Nexus into the training data. https://t.co/ScikINGM0T
Doing Real Work Signals Claude‑generated Text
You should add the phrase “doing real work” to the list of signs that the text you’re reading was probably generated by Claude.
Britain Tonight: Elections and Live Show Could Shift Markets
TWO BIG REASONS TO WATCH BRITAIN TONIGHT: I wrote the the local elections taking place here, as well as our live show in London. One could contain highly consequential signals for global markets and the other could be a good night...
Iran War Triggers Diet Coke Can Shortage in India
"The Iran war has caused a shortage of Diet Coke in India, where it is sold only in aluminium cans that have run short because of delayed shipments from the Gulf caused by the Iran war." https://t.co/uky4g78BIA
Cities Can Revive Manufacturing Within Urban Limits
NEW ODD LOTS: How American cities can become hubs of manufacturing. @tracyalloway and I had an amazing chat with Allentown PA mayor Matt Tuerk about the case for having manufacturing inside the city limits, and what it takes to bring these operations...
Singularity Predictions Rely on Naive Linear Progress Myth
Never read anything quite like The Singularity Is Near. In 2004, Ray's writing stuff like "Sometime in the 2020s, we'll have AI that begin can work on their own successors" and his evidence is basically a straight line time series...
Discover Justin Townes Earle’s Life in New Biography
Lovely interview with the author of a new biography about Justin Townes Earle, someone who's music I've gotten really obsessed with in the last few years. https://t.co/2Kb2Dx2yE0 https://t.co/nOMe6Jat8z
Cities Thrive on Dense Communities of Interesting People
I loathe cities discourse. But. The correct answer is the density of interesting people doing interesting things. If you want to be in a packed room of people all smarter than yourself, that you can learn things from (which to...
Tool AI Inevitably Evolves Into More Useful Agentic AI
Great line from Zvi: "And I’ve been saying, for years, that the problem with this ‘mere tool’ approach, the quest for Tool AI, is that the first thing people would do to Tool AI is turn it into Agentic AI, because...
AI May Forge a New Shared Reality Beyond Hallucinations
Great piece from @JerusalemDemsas. For as much as people like to talk about AI "hallucinations", the much bigger story might be how often what they say is actually true, and that perhaps AI (as post-social media) may usher in a...
Ranchers Profit From Calf Shortage, Driving Beef Prices
Absolutely fantastic piece about why beef prices are so high. Contrary to what many people may surmise, it's not the meatpackers getting margin right now. It's the actual ranchers, who are benefitting from an overall scarcity of calves https://t.co/kCJ8qf30ZE https://t.co/AAAodfrc0H
Country Stars Can Franchise Their Brand Internationally
If you’re a country singer, you can franchise out your own identity in another country. Just found out the UK has its own Luke Combs https://t.co/8eilwuREse
China Directs Firms to Defy U.S. Sanctions
"China has ordered its companies to ignore US sanctions, an unprecedented act of defiance...." https://t.co/OAdUIaZIyP
Baltimore Mayor Tackles Vacant Homes to Revive Growth
NEW ODD LOTS: How Baltimore's mayor is fighting the city's vacant housing crisis @tracyalloway and I talk to @MayorBMScott a very different type of real estate problem than many cities have, and what it takes to bring in investment and population https://t.co/SMX8zfpera
Hipster Loft Era Ended Before We Even Arrived
One funny thing about this discussion. Having moved to North Brooklyn in 2004, I think we had the sense even then that the golden days of the “hipster loft” was already in the past. Important lesson in that.
ChatGPT Wins over Claude for Built‑in URL References
Really noticed myself using ChatGPT more than Claude lately, in large part because it more frequently defaults to including external URLs, rather than just synthesizing ideas.
Jackson Hole Speech Marks Most Hawkish Remarks Yet
His speech at Jackson Hole that year is the most hawkish speech in the entire corpus IIRC
Fedlock's Hawkishness Score Climbs Sharply with Recent Statements
As discussed below, Fedlock's aggregate hawkishness score continues to rise noticeably, with the latest communication from Kashkari, Powell, and Hammack all registering high relative to their recent comms https://t.co/b7k8lndodx
Websites Are Suddenly Cranking Up Bot Blocking
Have websites suddenly gotten more aggressive about blocking scrapers/bots like just in the last few weeks? EG Claude Code telling me it can't extract Kashkari's new statement out today, due to a 403 error. Can't remember that having been an...
Taiwan: World's Most Perilous Chokepoint Threatening Global Stability
NEW ODD LOTS: Taiwan is the world's most perilous chokepoint @tracyalloway and I talk to @eyckfreymann, author of the new book 'Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, about the high stakes and high risk if China moves on Taiwan...
UAE's OPEC Exit Driven by Saudi Rift
Good read on some of the political context, particularly its growing rift with Saudi Arabia, behind the UAE’s exit from OPEC https://t.co/yn0CJC4TLg
Apple’s AI Role Questioned as Macs Sell for LLMs
This might a dumb question but why do people talk about Apple not being a player in AI at the same time as people talk about Macs instantly selling out because people use them for self-hosting LLMs?
Dynamic Currency Conversion Lets Merchants Choose Euro or Dollar
Question for a payments expert. What I pay for something by card in Spain, the reader offers me the choice to pay in euros or dollars. Obviously dollars are removed from my account. And the cafe gets euros. So what’s really going...
Appreciating Fukuyama, Yet Questioning a Highlighted Passage
There’s a lot to like in The End of History. It’s a good book. Fukuyama is very insightful in it on a number of things. But I don’t get what’s so great about this particular passage.
NYC Craves Next Taiwanese Fried Chicken Boom
Mike is speaking the truth here. NYC really needs a Taiwanese fried chicken boom the way we had one with Korean fried chicken about 15 years ago.
Exploding Model Capabilities Chart Is Key Benchmark
NEW EPISODE: Understanding the most viral chart in AI @tracyalloway and I talk to @ChrisPainterYup and @joel_bkr of @METR_Evals about what this chart of exploding model capabilities is actually showing, and why they think it's the key benchmark to watch https://t.co/11P3UKZkE8 https://t.co/Dt3HYNOWyu
US Stocks Surge Post‑War, Outperform Global Markets
American stocks had been underperforming the rest of the world for several months. And the very bottom was of this was on February 27th, right before the war started. The US started a war, and since then its stock market...
Opus 4.7 Adopts a Subjective, Opinionated Tone in Responses
I basically never use LLMs for "chat" so I don't really notice when their "personalities" change. But does Opus 4.7 have a greater proclivity to talk as though it has a subjective view of the world. I gave it a...
Exploring AI-Driven Diagnostics for Vintage Hardware
Has anyone experimented with using Claude Code or Codex for device diagnostics? Like if you, say, plugged in an old laptop or Nintendo or Commodore 64 into your computer, could the AI take control of that device and retrieve data...
ARKK Stagnates Year‑to‑Date, No 2021 Euphoria
$ARKK is flat on the year. This is not a generalized market euphoria like 2021
Bull Market Thrives Even as Consumer Sentiment Hits Historic Low
THE COMPLETELY RATIONAL, CRAZY BULL MARKET In today's newsletter, I wrote about how it makes total sense for the stock market to be surging to all time highs almost every day, even as consumer sentiment plunges to its lowest level in...
Indonesia's Three Straits Outpace Pre‑War Hormuz Traffic
Very interesting table from @ByMeganONeil on some other maritime chokepoints that could theoretically become toll ways. Interesting how Indonesia is adjacent to three distinct Straits that each have more ship traffic than Hormuz did pre-war. https://t.co/FpJ3aWYqyd
X‑bar Trees Reveal AI Isn’t Merely a Next‑token Predictor
Something that's extremely meta is asking Claude to create an x-bar tree of a sentence, and then watching how it fills it in. Because the x-bar format explains how the human brain isn't a "next token predictor" and you can...
Independent Fed's Inflation Focus Could Thwart AI Takeover
Has anyone made the argument yet that an independent Fed, firmly focused on its inflation target, will be one of our most important bulwarks against complete AI takeover? As long as policy prioritizes stable *consumer* prices, that puts a brake resource...
User Seeks GPT‑5.5 API Release for Chess Benchmark
When will GPT 5.5 be available via API? I need to see how it performs against other models in my benchmark, where I show it random chess positions and ask it to guess the last move that had been played....
Trust Andrey's Books—Read His Latest Release
I typically don’t like to recommend anything until I’ve read it. But all of @Andrey4Mir’s past books are great, and I’m sure this one will be. I plan to read it and you should too.
Search Bars Still Matter in an AI-Driven Future
NEW ODD LOTS: @tracyalloway and I talk Google’s VP of search Liz Reid about the future of the good old fashioned search bar in an AI-dominated world https://t.co/XvWg2rZbDG
Private Market Hype Debunked: Boring Insulation Acquisition
All the stuff about how the only good returns are happening in private markets is straight up disinfo from grifters. Here is a chart of the insulation co that $QXO is buying. Literally just insulation. So many charts out there...
Postman’s Shift: From Tech Embrace to Cultural Counterbalance
Early in his career, Neil Postman wrote a book about how educators needed to get with the times and incorporate technology into the classroom. Then later he totally changed his mind and realized that education needed to provide a thermostatic counterbalance...
Testing Pre‑1900 LLM's Ability to Predict Modern Slang
This can be tested right now. @status_effects is building an LLM that is only trained on pre-1900 text. So you can just see whether the model is capable of predicting the slang that emerged in the 20th century.
ChatGPT Image Generator Repeatedly Invents “Kai” Persona
This is kind of funny and weird. So I checked out ChatGPT's new image builder, and gave it the same prompt -- to create a screenshot of an annoying LinkedIn bro's page -- and once again, the AI fabricated...
Real-World AI Adoption: How Companies Actually Use It
This is such a great read from @milkkarten about what companies "using" AI looks like in practice. https://t.co/rqq2gBeDFG https://t.co/L7SWGqlZGN
Economics of Crafting a Perfect Pub Menu
Guest announcement Very excited that @tracyalloway and I will be joined by @APWChef, co-founder of The Devonshire, at our LIVE London Odd Lots on May 7. Get your tickets here, and watch us talk about the economics of designing a perfect pub...
Brad Jacobs Explains QXO's $17B Insulation Acquisition
Brad Jacobs dropped by Odd Lots to talk with me and @tracyalloway about why his company $QXO is buying an insulation company for $17 billion. https://t.co/a9rTLDb9rs
Willie Nelson’s Decade of Songs: High‑life Themes Continue
Every new Willie Nelson single for the last ten years has been about getting high or not having much time left on earth. Today’s is about the former. https://t.co/b04d9BSPxr
Inside Independent Oil Business: Costs, Price Sweet Spot, Ladnman Reality
NEW ODD LOTS: The truth about running an independent oil and gas biz @tracyalloway and I talk to @Jack_McClendon, CEO of Siena Natural Resources, about rising costs, the sweet spot for oil prices, and how realistic the show Ladnman really is. https://t.co/Wcl305efUH