Lumber prices have tumbled dramatically in recent weeks, with benchmark futures falling about 20% in the past four months alone. What's more, this is happening at the height of the summer homebuilding season, when there should theoretically be lots of demand for construction materials. In this episode of Lots More, we speak to one of our favorite guests about what's going on in the lumber market right now, and what falling prices might say about this important part of the US economy. Stinson Dean is the founder and owner of Deacon Lumber and he talks to us about why prices are crashing, what he's seeing in the market right now, and how the current environment differs from 2020 and 2021, when lumber prices went parabolic and mills couldn't keep up with demand.

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There aren't many advanced manufacturing success stories in Latin America. And globally, there aren't many companies that can build commercial planes at scale. Yet somehow, one of the world's leading jet makers is Brazilian. Embraer is the third largest maker of commercial planes worldwide after Boeing and Airbus. On this episode, we talk about how the company came to be, what its opportunities are, and what lessons in economic development we can learn from its rise. We speak with two guests for the show. First, is Richard Aboulafia, a managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, to understand the company's role in the aviation ecosystem. Then we speak with Juan David Rojas, a writer on Latin America, to understand the political conditions in Brazilian history that allowed the company to emerge and thrive.

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Brad Jacobs has made a career of starting, consolidating, and growing whole industries. He did a trucking company. He did a warehouse company. He has a freight brokerage. He created an equipment rental company. His new venture, dubbed QXO, aims to reshape the big and sprawling market for building supplies, which can encompass residential, infrastructure and commercial real estate. And he has $4.5 billion of his and his investors' money to go out and buy and build. In this special episode of the Odd Lots podcast, recorded live at the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York City, he talks about where he is in the new process, and what he plans to do once he's made his acquisitions.

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Does it feel to you like society has gone crazy? Well, you're not alone. There's a general view that all around the world, in the realms of politics, culture, business, and so forth, a lot of people are losing their minds. So if this is true, what's the reason for it? On this episode we speak with Dan Davies, the author of the new book The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - And How The World Lost Its Mind. Dan talks about the field of study known as cybernetics, and the inevitable outcomes of systems that grow more and more complex. This complexity -- which describes many things in the modern world, and leads to what Dan calls "accountability sinks," or entities that basically exist just to be blamed for things that have gone wrong. Dan walks us through how these emerged in the modern world, where things are headed, and how the trend could theoretically be reversed.

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Neil Dutta, the top economist over at Renaissance Macro, has generally been sunny and optimistic about the economy over the last four years or so. But now he's warning of a possible mistake by the Federal Reserve. In his view, the central bank is waiting too long to get confirmation that inflation is coming back to target. Meanwhile, unemployment is starting to creep up in a meaningful way. As he sees it, if you're still worried about upside risk to inflation at this point, you need to have a theory about where that inflation is going to come from — and it's really hard to come up with an answer for that right now, given the general downward momentum in hiring and the overall economy. In this episode of Lots More, we catch up with Neil to talk about the risk that the Fed will blow the soft landing.

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From cars to toys to clothes, we're just used to seeing the label "Made In China" on all sorts of things. But how did China become a go-to destination for manufactured goods in the first place? Who actually recognized that there was a huge opportunity to tap the abundant, low-cost labor to sell goods to Western consumers? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Elizabeth Ingleson, a professor at the London School of Economics and the author of the book Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade. Ingleson traces the roots of the US-China trade relationship to a handful of US entrepreneurs in the early 1970s who first went into the country and recognized its opportunity as an export powerhouse. We discuss who these individuals were, the obstacles they had to overcome, and how they reshaped the entire global economy.

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The stock market has had a torrid run in 2024 despite the fact that interest rate cuts haven't materialized in the way people had expected at the start of the year. In fact, outside of a few blips here and there (like spring 2020), US stocks have been phenomenal performers for years. Tom Lee, the founder of Fundstrat and FS Insight has been bullish for a long time, having caught the correct side of this lengthy trend. On this episode, we speak to the former JPMorgan strategist about how he thinks about the market, what he sees happening right now in macro and demographic trends, and why he thinks it’s plausible that the market could roughly triple in the next six years.

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Everyone knows that the AI boom is built upon the voracious consumption of chips (largely sold by Nvidia) and electricity. And while the legacy cloud operators, like Amazon or Microsoft, are in this space, the nature of the computing shift is opening up new space for new players in the market. One of the hottest companies is CoreWeave, a company backed in part by Nvidia, which has grown its datacenter business massively. So how does their business actually work? How do they get energy? Where do they locate operations? How are they financed? What's the difference between a cloud AI and a legacy cloud? On this episode, we speak with CoreWeave's Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo about what it takes to build out operations at this scale.

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Virtually everyone, across the ideological spectrum, has the view right now that it's too hard to build things (or get things done generally) in America. New infrastructure is thwarted by red tape and permitting. New housing is thwarted by YIMBYism. Even something that doesn't require much new construction -- like NYC's attempt to impose congestion pricing -- is difficult to get done after years and years of wrangling. What is the core problem? And what can be done to address it? On this episode, we speak with John Arnold, who started his career as an energy trader at Enron, before going on to found a highly successful energy hedge fund. Now in his role as the co-founder of Arnold Ventures, he works on policy solutions to address these key bottlenecks. We discuss how he goes about philanthropy to affect policy change, the problems he's identified, and what solutions could be put in place to improve domestic development.

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Throughout history, financial markets have struggled with the issue of borders. Borders create friction, add cost and cause headaches for anyone who wants to spend money across them. On top of that, various national currencies can be wildly unstable.

Could a borderless, global currency ease friction and enhance financial inclusion and stability around the world? Cryptocurrencies offer an intriguing possible solution to money’s border problem. And a particular kind of cryptocurrency, called stablecoins, could become a powerful medium of exchange for international payments - and offer people around the world increased economic freedom.

This episode is sponsored by Coinbase.

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