With Mike Woodford's Nobel Prize, this has been a week of extreme joy at his well-deserved recognition (and Bob Hall's, of course). Yet, I won't deny it, also a week of some self-reflection and personal crisis. You see, he was my main advisor at Princeton. Now, looking at my other advisors, one cannot help but wonder: What value added could I possibly have contributed to my own research agenda, formulated in the early 2000s at Princeton? As it turned out, the coming years would be eventful for my other three advisors: Krugman (Nobel 2008), Sims (Nobel 2011), Bernanke (Nobel 2022). With this sample of three establishing Granger causality (predictive, not causal, whatever the name suggests; Sims himself did much to bring the concept into macroeconomics), I confidently stated the inevitable conclusion in 2022 on Twitter (now X): considerable money could be won in betting markets by placing a bet on Woodford getting the Nobel Prize in the coming years. I am not a betting man, but I hope somebody made money. Yet, there is a twist to the story. How does one define one's PhD committee? The way I have defined it is the people you worked the most with, who wrote you letters of recommendation when you went on the job market, and who then signed off on your thesis later. At Princeton, there was a rather liberal policy on when the actual formal defense took place. At that time, your main advisor dragged in whoever happened to be around to listen to you talk for 30 minutes or so. I don't remember who was actually around for the formalities, except Mike and, hard to forget, Chris Sims. Characteristically, Chris sent me an email the night before telling me that he thought Markov perfect equilibrium made no sense, which generated a lively exchange. Those who did not know Chris might have thought this was inconsiderate, as if he were trying to block my defense. It was quite the opposite. Chris was just the quintessential scholar. He was reading the thesis and just wanted to talk about it. But back to this week's reflections. I would be remiss not to mention that there was another, perhaps unexpected by those familiar with monetary economics, utility player at Princeton during my time. And this utility player actually happened to be one of the people I spoke the most with, for I was closest to him in age, TA'd his grad classes for him and, memorably, a Money and Banking class where he taught the entire class using a microfounded IS-LM model based upon a two-generation OLG model. I still remember the puzzlement on one of the students' faces as he asked me in a TA class: So prices are fixed for ... 30 years? And he DID write a letter for me (bringing the total of this group to five!). So, fellow economists, prepare your bets. Given my research agenda in monetary economics, he may seem to be coming a bit out of left field. Then again, he is one of those economists who could advise anyone on anything. The utility player was none other than the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago: Robert Shimer. He's much younger than the others, so it may take some time. But you heard it here first: Prepare your bets! PS. Picture taken at a conference in honor of Mark Gertler recently. Paul and Rob added, courtesy of AI, ex post.