Odd Lots

Social media is really strange these days: Increasingly, our feeds are starting to look uncanny, as AI slop proliferates all over the Internet. And for the professionals who are tasked with making content, whether it is social media managers or creators, it has been a head-spinning time of change. In this conversation, recorded at the Vermont in Hollywood, we get a primer on social media's AI era with two veteran Internet commentators, Rachel Karten (social media consultant and the author of the Link in Bio newsletter) and Taylor Lorenz (founder of User Mag). We discuss why people are afraid to admit that they love some genres of slop, why the AI discourse is evolving so rapidly, and whether our time online is moving away from scrolling feeds to engaging with chatbots.
Read more:US Rebukes Australia for Plan to Target Social Media AlgorithmsMeta’s New Muse AI App Tops Charts, Draws Strong Reviews
Only http://Bloomberg.com 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
Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The story you hear nowadays is that America is struggling to make things and can't compete with China when it comes to advanced manufacturing. But of course, there's tons of high-tech stuff being produced in the US, and more and more companies are doing it out of Southern California, with factories sprouting up around Los Angeles to build things like precision metal parts and jet engines. Two founders who are actively engaged in building things in LA are Tom Mueller, founder of Impulse Space (and Employee No. 1 at SpaceX), as well as Hadrian founder Chris Power. Impulse Space is building in-space transport vehicles while Hadrian is creating autonomous factories. This episode, which was recorded live at the Vermont Hollywood, is from our first ever Odd Lots live show in LA . We talk to Chris and Tom about how the US lost its manufacturing edge and why LA is becoming a destination for people who want to make and build hardware.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bloomberg Money takes the pulse of your financial life, powered by the reporting of our global newsroom.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're in an era of megadeals, with Goldman Sachs reporting a record year for big deal volumes as companies scramble to compete with AI. Gene Sykes has seen multiple deal cycles come and go over his multi-decade career. The co-chair of global mergers and acquisitions has worked on famous transactions like Comcast's purchase of Universal and Disney's buyout of Pixar. In addition to being "the most-influential M&A banker you've never heard of," as New York magazine has put it, he has also spearheaded Los Angeles's successful bid to bring the Olympic Games to the city in 2028. In this conversation, recorded live at the Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach, California, we discuss how a city pays for a big event like the Olympics, and parallels between the early 2000s TMT environment and now.
Read more:Port of LA Foiled Around 120 Million Cyberattacks Last MonthGoldman’s Snider Says Fears of US Earnings Bubble Are Misplaced
Only http://Bloomberg.com 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
Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL.
Read more:Tech’s New Rich Are Suffering From ‘Sudden Wealth Syndrome’Jobless Tech Workers Are Being Left Out of San Francisco’s AI Boom
Only http://Bloomberg.com 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
Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.