Joe Weisenthal On The Business Of Business Media & Why AI Won’t Replace Podcasters

It's been a pretty rough couple of decades for media, but I'm actually kind of optimistic that there's just going to be a sustained, if not growing, number of people who want to hear from people.

Thank you for having me.

Great name.

So, I did like it. If you guys, if Compound Interest wanted to supersede Odd Lots, I'm going to feel really dumb. And then everyone will be like, "Look, Joe brought it on himself by giving them advice at the Washington Square Diner." But...

I don't think name is particularly important. Like, you know, people obsess a lot about that, but I say give by and large, and I would say also, you know, arguably from an Odd Lots perspective, the intro music that we have, our little like Hawaiian guitar, that was also, you know, we put about five seconds of thought into that. Arguably that's been more important. People always come up to us like, you can never get rid of the Hawaiian guitar. Few people hate it, but arguably I would say the intro music's been more important than the title itself.

I know. I wish. I love... You know, I play guitar, but I'm not good. Like, I could not play that. Like, I'm not a good guitar player. I can play chords, few chords can turn into any song, but no, that is just something that we found on a stock music site in 2015 when we started the podcast.

I mean, I would say, look, we're way more news driven than we used to be. But what I would say is like, when we started conceiving of the podcast, we both had other jobs here at Bloomberg. I was doing TV at the time. Tracy also eventually went on to do TV. We're both doing various things with editing for the web, etc. So, it sort of felt like the news itself, the news cycle was pretty well covered on various platforms at the time. And so, when we started the podcast, it's like, well, let's just talk about things that might be interesting that would never sort of fit into a quote news cycle unquote. And so, if you go back to the very early episodes, you see a lot of stuff about like, you know, multiple episodes about the Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s, for example. I think we did three episodes about that. Which is really interesting and like, you know, it's relevant currently or it's always relevant because people want to understand market psychology and the rhythms and the cycles that always take place, but it was not newsworthy in the classical sense. Over time, however, I do think, you know, that even prior to the pandemic, the episodes were starting to become a little bit more I would say news cycle-ish.

And then when the pandemic happened, and this is like a really... this is the thing that I always stress, which is for journalists of all sorts, when there's something novel that happens, nobody is an expert, no one had lived through this period before. Tracy and I felt this intuitively having started our careers during the great financial crisis. This is your moment. This is the great leveler. This is when everyone is sort of starting at zero trying to understand this thing that is emerging around them. And so, you know, during the pandemic, really that's when we started really covering supply chains and semiconductors and shipping and trucking and all these things that sort of became partly our signature. And so, it was news-related, it was the cycle, but it was also like let's take time and sort of understand things about the economy and the world we sort of take for granted, and maybe that is sort of what we've developed into over the last several years.

Yeah, that's right.

No, I mean, they've changed business media in so many ways and I think about this all the time. It's funny though you mentioned like the following each other from like the old Twitter or whatever because when we were in London recently, we did a live show there, and there were some people in the audience that I really like knew from that era. And it did not, you know, 2012 to me at this point does not feel like a long time ago. It feels like a different age. It just feels like at some point there was this discontinuous break. And it's like, "Oh, nice to see you from the old country" or whatever. It does not just feel like that was time distance. It just feels very different to me. But I mean, look, the thinking about the changes in business media are so many. But here's a couple that I always come back to. One is, I think, social media in particular really expanded, and this is where the podcast and myself have always sort of felt comfortable, expanded the pool of people that might be considered an expert in something. You know, you discover all of these voices from out in the world. There's like some guy who really knows X. They really know this domain very well, and they're posting about it. And that was like the core thing that sort of made social media really fun, say 15 years ago, which is there may have been this time where business media in particular had a certain roster of guests and economists and sell-side researchers and so forth that were the names. And suddenly there were practitioners that were just saying, "Well, this is how I do my job." And that was really fascinating 15 years ago. And then they go direct, and there's like, "Oh, you know what? You're much more interesting on the domain of, you know, here is someone who is working on an oil rig, or here is someone who's a trucker, or whatever it is." And they're talking about what they do, and we don't need the sort of standard roster of experts. So I think that was huge. I think that's like what made, you know, that was what was sort of special and that really changed business media forever, our ability to find some of these voices.

I think it's interesting if you like project forward to 2026, like you think about someone who maybe 10 years ago they were a farmer and they were talking about farming conditions and they were cool. And I feel like in 2026, if that person is on social media, A, there's a good chance that their brain has become fried by politics and they're like posting about politics rather than corn. And B, if they do want to post about corn, there's a good chance they're selling it, by which I mean they're selling a newsletter or something like that, which is great and I don't begrudge anyone for being able to like monetize their domain expertise. But I think this is sort of under the rise of the creator, the professional who can sort of monetize their understanding of a distinct thing. I think that's really changed the flavor of social media quite a bit and so you're going to lose some of that public good element and maybe it's rational for the individual level, but makes it less fun at the aggregate level. The fact that a lot of people, if they know something, they're selling it.

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree and that really is it and it's sort of amateurism on multiple levels of like, let's just talk about this. I am interested in this and there's no expectation that this back and forth is about selling something. These are sort of like unmonetized transactions. You could say arguably that, you know, we started it and by we I mean, say like us, the three of us, in that, okay, you identify that there is, as they say in finance, you know, some alpha here. There are people here who are talking about something that is very interesting. It's not being captured anywhere else and so we're like harvesting that alpha. We have articles and podcasts and platforms where we're finding this and the other person didn't. And eventually that sort of disappears, but maybe we were the first to recognize that there were some opportunities and just sort of like listening and putting our ear to the tracks.

I can only speculate and it's probably not even... I don't even think they'd be thrilled if I like speculated. It's like what is the goal of podcasts period? But I do think that, you know, we sit very comfortably in this organization because A, we really do speak to the professional hardcore audience. If you are in finance, if you're at a fund, if you're at a bank, etc., we really do want every episode to be interesting to you and not for it to be sort of like beneath you, novice level. And then we want everyone else who's not in the world of finance to recognize that actually there's a pretty good chance that they could understand it. If they're sort of interested, engaged, willing to give us a little bit of time, that a lot of these topics we talk about, monetary policy, whatever it is, yes, there's a good chance that they can understand it. And what I would say is having done this now over 10 years, the number of emails that we get, and it makes me feel old every time, but I do really like it. I mean, we have people who say, "I started listening to Odd Lots in high school and I just got my first finance internship in New York City or my first job or whatever." But it still feels weird to hear, but I genuinely do think that Odd Lots specifically, a few other things, are like for a lot of young people their first maybe like entree into the world of Bloomberg Media and therefore Bloomberg the company.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you... I mean the thing I think about is I really like my job. I mean it was funny, so you know, obviously we were very fortunate last year and right around our 10th anniversary last August, you know, we got this big profile in the New York Times. That was fantastic, you know, everyone is very gratifying obviously to get that kind of attention. The article was very nice and didn't have anything negative to say. But like people would come and like, "Okay, what next? Like what do you want to do?" And my honest answer and unambiguous is I want to do more episodes of the podcast. And of course there are other things, okay, or you could do more shows or do X. I really like the job of co-hosting Odd Lots. And it I think it is actually kind of that simple in my mind. Like this is a great place to do it and I really like it. And so I don't spend... I know, I mean I see like people having success, but I just... I like my job. I don't know. I really like don't spend a lot of time... like I genuinely don't spend a lot of time thinking about that question. I mostly spend my time thinking about who the next guest should be. And yeah. That's kind of it.

You know what's funny? Like Bloomberg is such a big place that you know, I'm still always turning to Tracy from time to time. For example, saying like, "Wait, who is it that covers X or Y for us here?" And part of the reason it's important to know that is because if we're going to have a guest from a certain domain, it's often good practice just on multiple levels like talk to the reporter who covers them. You know, more than a handful of times someone will send me a DM or something like that. And I'll be like, "Look." And I'll go find the person who would cover it here and I'll say, "Look, I don't know who this person is. They have a weird cartoon avatar. I've never gotten this person's name in my life, but I've interacted with this person and I kind of have reason to think that maybe they know what they're talking about when they say that so-and-so just quit X bank or whatever." And so I say, you know, maybe try to hunt this thing down. That has definitely happened.

[laughter] There was... it was a big departure several years ago for JP Morgan that I think it was like someone, one of the people who I think at one point was thought to be in line for the CEO and I think... and he left. So, yeah. I'll say... I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

Sure.

I mean, I still 100% think that like, you know, it's a lot of other people are addicted to it, too, including a lot of very influential people in media, both in media and tech in particular. And also, you know, still quite a few people in finance as well. And I just think it's from what people are going to be talking about or what's influential. Like I think that for example, a really good recent example is essentially in the last 6 months, if you were not on Twitter in I would say December of 2025, I don't think you would have anticipated or seen like the rise of like Claude Code specifically and the rise of like vibe coding and therefore how big Anthropic was about to get in 2026, sort of coming close to parity with OpenAI. That was a really crisp example to me of like this happened on Twitter. People started talking about Claude Code and therefore these new capabilities on Twitter or X first and then it ended up having some pretty big downstream implications. And now so I think like that kind of thing it just happens there first. At least in sort of at the intersection of business and tech, which is kind of everything these days because, you know, I just feel it. AI is like the sort of blob that seems to be swallowing like every other topic there is and I feel that. But I do feel like at that sort of intersection of business and tech, it's Twitter. And a good example is like, you know, OpenAI's purchase of TBPN and Andreessen Horowitz's launching of their own or, you know, independent streaming network. A lot of really important people in the world of business seem to put a lot of value on Twitter specifically even if most people are on other platforms. That's at least how I justify to myself my addiction. That's the story I tell myself to justify the addiction.

I'm excited. Like I'm actually... I'm a... I don't know if I should say fan. I have an issue there. My feelings are complicated, but I think it's cool that we can put a number on conventional wisdom. So I've never liked the term prediction markets. But I do think that they do a pretty good job... they do a very good job of aggregating conventional wisdom. So, you think like, "Okay, here's some election that's coming up in Canada or whatever." And I think if you want to like know like, "Okay, who do people expect to win?" It's a great place to start the question of, "All right, let's just look at what the odds are." And I think they probably do a pretty good job not because like empirically they have great track records. Although, I think they're not that bad, but more so that in my mind a market is more or less efficient if it's difficult to beat. That's sort of the test that I think of. You know, a lot of people they'll say, "Oh, you know, it's all like these numbers are biased because it's a certain subset of like crypto bros who are using them and they have their blinkers." If that were true, there would be easy opportunities to make a lot of money by taking the other side of them and their bias. I don't think there is.

I'll say two more quick things about prediction markets or maybe three. One, they've existed for a long time. I would say the Fed funds futures market. That's a prediction market. It is a bet on what 12 members of the FOMC are going to decide eight times a year. It's literally what a prediction market is. It's not metaphorically a prediction market. It's a prediction market. Two, you know, they're mostly sports betting sites. And I think this is really important, which is they want... they aspire to be important sites of hedging activity for real economic activity. By and large, they're not and we should be mindful of them. It's like sports and then something like politics and stuff. And then finally, like I worry about like, "Okay, all of this information... certain types of information are now monetizable in a way they weren't." A good example of that might be say like pre-knowledge of the raid of Nicolas Maduro or something like that. I'm very worried about society if like every time two people share something or the number of things that you can comfortably share with someone shrinks because suddenly that is like monetizable information. I think this is going to have probably increased unpleasant effects on society. Well, like I don't think it's great that the Nobel Prize Committee suddenly has to shrink the circle of trust of who can know the name of the winner because they're worried that someone is going to be able to trade on that information. That just doesn't seem great. This is not inherently valuable information until there's a betting market on it. But then I guess on the other hand, you know, these markets aren't going to take off so long as people perceive them to be ridden with insider trading. So, this is just a classic phenomenon and a good reason to argue that insider trading laws should exist and make markets better. People aren't going to participate in any game if you assume that other people are cheating. And so, if they sort of stamp out the concerns about insider trading, that would improve the odds in my view that these become important economic instruments.

Totally.