Joe Weisenthal (Odd Lots) and I do a show about nothing

I know, it's crazy. I can't believe it. I don't know, it's funny. People were asking me things like the other day. They're like, 'Oh, did you ever think that Odd Lots would go 10 years?' And it's so hard for me to answer that question because for the first four or five years of Odd Lots' existence, it was such a very, like, it was a very minor aspect of my life. It was not particularly important. Not very many people listened to it. I had other things going on. I was doing TV for a lot of time. I was an editor, was in the Bloomberg newsroom for a while, and then Odd Lots was just this like little side project. And once we had like hardly promoted it, and it was just an excuse to talk to people that we found interesting. And then it sort of blew up in 2020 and 2021, and it went from being this sort of fairly nothing aspect of my life to like my entire job. It basically, you know, by 2022 it became my full-time job, etc. And so then it was like, yeah, clearly. But you know, those early years, the question of would we be doing it in 10 years, I don't think I was, it would have never been asked. I would have never even like thought about the question just because it was not on, like, was not that kind of project.

Yeah, which is kind of where a lot of people get most of their news.

It's a really complicated question. You know, younger journalists will sometimes ask me, they're like, 'Do I have to be a brand?' They're like, 'I want to be...' they're like asking for, you know, career advice. 'Do I have to be a brand?' And I hate to say it, but a lot of times it's like you kind of, like, it's kind of important. Like I don't think you absolutely have to be, but the number of sheer just like sort of, you look around the media industry, the number of sheer like sort of staff jobs where you can just be a reporter, it's not growing. Yeah, you know, it's pretty obviously not growing. Now, all that being said, I think today, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think I worry less about format evolution than I used to because there's always going to be new formats. There's going to be short-form video. There's going to be whatever. There was the pivot to video thing that a lot of newsrooms tried in like 2016 or whatever. There's going to be live streaming, etc. There's always going to be new stuff, right? And we don't know what they're going to be, and it is impossible to know. I sort of think that basically people shouldn't worry about it so much, that it's actually all a little bit overhyped, that if you have something to say, that if you can find good guests, that if you're a domain expert in some area, you're probably going to do okay even if the expected format evolves over time. The absolute most important thing, I think, though, is to have a lane and to at least be deeply knowledgeable in some area. I don't know that, but on the question of good or bad for America, I don't love it. I think that there is, I think that the era of newsrooms with a capital N, and of course there are still some newsrooms that are thriving. Bloomberg is one, Wall Street Journal one, New York Times one, there are others, etc. I think newsrooms are good. I think, you know, they all have their biases, whatever, but I think the idea, like, there are a lot of bad incentives from the sort of individual independent journalist creator form of media. I think there are some amazing individual news writers, amazing podcasters, etc. But I do think it creates some not good, not great incentives where everyone is clawing for personal attention for them, where the person is so intimately bound up with the words. I think that is actually the key thing. Look, everyone wants attention. The idea of chasing eyeballs is not some new thing that exists from the era of short-form video. It's not some new thing that exists from the internet. TV networks were chasing eyeballs forever, right? And newspapers have always been chasing audience, etc. So that itself isn't news. If it bleeds, it leads. These are things that people have been talking about forever.

Newspapers famously in America, historically incredibly sensationalistic, etc. I don't think that is the issue. People have always tried to get attention. What I think concerns me more than anything else in the development, the trajectory of media, is this idea that there's no separation between the words and the person. By which I mean, you read some text in a book or you read some text in a newspaper. You evaluate the text. Is it compelling or not? Are the arguments, the arguments fact? Is it, does it seem factual? Is it sound? Is there a logical structure to it? When there is no separate, nowadays I look and see like, no, it's Jordan to me talking through this screen, etc. And I might have some opinions about you. I might have some opinions about the way you look. I'm, whatever it is. And so I'm not just in your words. It's Jordan talking to me. And so I no longer am evaluating the text or the words on their own. It's part of a person. And I don't think that is great because when it's person-to-person, then we try to impress each other. We try to combat each other. We try to one-up each other. We judge each other on the individual basis beyond the arguments. And I think that's the part that worries me, which is that there's this direct fusion of the content and the person, and that distracts from evaluating the written word on its own merits.

Yeah, I think that makes all... but that's not everyone, that's most people actually. But you're right in which, you know, that I think we are all playing something of a long game ideally and, you know, one episode of anything is just not that big of a deal. One edition of our newsletters, it's not that big of a deal. It's funny. You know, sometimes at the end of the year or something like that, you know, there'll be journalism prizes or whatever and they go, submit, submit your favorite, you know, submit the favorite things that you wrote for this prize or submit your favorite episodes. And I have to say, excuse me, I have to say, I have to say I don't think along those lines at all. Like I never think in terms of my favorite episode of the year. I mean sometimes, but to my mind the unit of journalism that we're talking about is the series of podcasts itself. It's the role in conversation. It's the community. It's the sequencing, etc. They all go together. No one episode is particularly important. It's the fact that we're on this process of we're learning about something over time. We're on a hunt to find the most interesting guests. We're learning along with our audience about this topic or that topic. It's all new to us just like ideally it's all new to our audience and so forth. The entire thing together combined is the sort of work product that we're aiming for. Whereas I think in a very, in an earlier form of media really was like that big investigative piece, that big feature piece, etc., the scoop, etc. That was the sort of the unit of journalism. And again, there's still plenty of room for that. And it's not like that's going away. But for like what you and I do, what we do, I do sort of think it's like the whole thing is the thing.

That's exactly, who knows, I love books. I read, I read a lot of books. I love them. I don't think, I mean, to your point, yes, absolutely. I feel, I mean, that's exactly how I feel. On the specifics though, it's like, man, write a book seems like a lot of work and I don't know what I'd write a book about and the thought...

How many, yeah. I know, I know.

Well, that's why you can only write history books. You can't write any other book.

No, certainly right now I do not have the time. So let's, I could, yes, that's my simple answer there.

Right. Yeah. That is the common thread. It's just what we are interested, who and what we are interested in talking about that day. There's no, I mean, we say that Odd Lots is a podcast about, you know, markets, finance and economics, which it kind of is. But that's, but that's just like a, the Venn diagram. Yeah, that's right. This is the Venn today. We're recording this December 15th. We had an episode with this guy who owns a media company for outdoorsmen, for hunters. And we talked about the history of hunting in America, how hunting was very important in terms of the early, one of the early industries of the 13 colonies, how hunting is different and was different in the New World versus in Europe and why that contributed in parts of the revolution. And then also how hunting is the rare industry in which the hunters themselves wanted to be taxed as a conservation effort so that hunting could exist in perpetuity. Anyway, the point is we just thought that was not the trade war. It's not anything that's, it's not, you know, you're not going to make a trade based on that, etc. It was just interesting to us in that moment. Tracy met the guy and she thought he was interesting and we chat with him and it was a fantastic conversation and learned a lot. But was there some like, you know, is no, is it, I guess it's markets, finance and economics somehow, but not really. It's just what we're interested in. And the only way to do that, you know, it's like you have, it's like you build the trust of your audience. And so when they're tuning in, they're like, you know what, Jordan has a good track record of being able to identify good things and he interesting conversation. That's the same thing. People tune in, they're like, 'If Tracy and Joe are interested in it, there's a good chance they'll be interested, but that's where we're going to.' Yeah, that's it. And I guess that's the only thing.

So we had our 10-year party and I said this there. You know, this could have only been Odd Lots. Bloomberg was just the best, the best home for Odd Lots because, and because at the beginning no one was listening to Odd Lots and Bloomberg was big enough such that nobody knew where it is. Nobody was noticed. And then as soon as people started listening to it, then Bloomberg really like gave us an incredible amount of resources to lean into it. Like once we had that momentum and once like we sort of like found real traction, then we, the whole sort of power of Bloomberg came behind us. Literally in both the, the runway, because I look at media projects now and it, it sort of, you, you see it all the time, especially at legacy media organizations, something will get tried and they'll pull the plug on it after like six months or three months. Like I go, it didn't hit, it didn't land. I'm like, three months, how can you know? Like whatever happened to giving something years? Whatever happened to giving the author a voice?

I'm not. It's just, I mean, you go back and listen to the first couple years of Odd Lots and like, well, I would never go back because it's too painful to listen to the first couple years of Odd Lots, but it's just a matter of, it's just a matter of practice and just putting in the reps and doing it over and over again and figure out what, what makes a good episode and the patterns and all these things. But there is no substitute for now having done it, you know, I guess a thousand times.

I'm just more comfortable. So I, I know what a good episode is. I know like this is, I know, so I know what a good episode is. I know it's someone who has a deep reservoir of technical knowledge and can enthusiastically talk about that in plain English that is understandable to anyone. So I don't even know if I could have articulated that to the same degree a few years ago. Just like knowing what a good episode is. And it's also like queuing, like understanding those five clauses in the sentence based off an article someone wrote or like watching 10 minutes of someone talk on YouTube, that like understanding that translation you need to map that, having done all the shows and see who's good and see who kind of doesn't live up to their, to their written material. You know, one thing that I always say is like the highest praise that we can get for an episode is someone says something like, 'Oh, you know what? I was listening to that and I was hoping you would ask that question and that was the next question you asked.' And that kind of thing, that's practice, I suppose. I think just sort of having, building that intuition of where the conversation should go. I'm just more comfortable in, in front of a microphone than I used to be. I mean, I used to just be much more nervous, etc. I've tried to, without complete success, wean all the little ums and likes out of my talk, out of my conversation. I think I'm better at that today than I was several years ago. And I'm going to get very self-conscious about all the verbal tics that I say.

I'm better about that. I'm definitely, I think we're definitely better at, you know, we called the podcast Odd Lots in part because in finance an odd lot is a trade in which the numerical quantity of the traded instrument is not some round 100. So if you buy, you know, 87 shares of Tesla instead of 100 or something like that, that might be considered an odd lot and pricing might change in some manner on that. But it was, you know, the idea is like, okay, this doesn't quite fit into the traditional news flow. These are stories that don't nicely fit in. We were much more off the news than we are now. Now it's a bit of a mix. So we'll have very timely episodes. We'll talk about something that just happened in the market. We'll talk about some development in the trade war or whatever, but we'll also have the, you know, the occasional episode that has nothing to do with anything in the news, such as today's hunting episode. But I think our, our, our story intuition has gotten better about, okay, when do we need to hit this? When do we need to lean into this topic, etc. I think if you go back and listen to the first few years of the podcast, we basically did nothing that was sort of news related and I think that was sort of too far in the other direction. Then I think you get times like April 2025 where it's just every episode is right on the news, etc. Finding that sort of middle ground where...

No, look, I mean, I think you have to be excited about it when, when the beat comes around. I mean, this is what I, here's how I think about it, which is, do you ever play, you play poker ever? Anyway, you like, you get dealt pocket aces. No, pocket aces are a tricky hand, but you get dealt pocket aces. Anyone can in theory win a hand with pocket aces. You just go all in, pre-flop, etc. Let's say you flop a set. Anyone can flop a set and win the pot most of the time, etc. It's very easy to do. The, what differentiates one person from the next is extracting the maximum value from sure the flopping the set. You know what, so the way I think, you know, like your beat is the ex-, is chip export controls. You cannot force the news cycle, right? You cannot force that to be in the news. You cannot force that to be top of mind, etc. That's never going to be. But the way I think about it is when it comes around every year, every six months, when the new, when the stars align such that they're perfectly on your beat, at least in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, we got to maximize this. We have to use this opportunity. This is why we get up in the morning. This is why we're here, etc. It's for this moment. So I get, you know, April 2020, I was just completely, I was completely energized because to my mind was like, this is why we're here. This is why we're in the, this is why we're, this is why we're in the news space.

Yeah, completely.

I just think if we have any, you know, I think the most, the thing that you can always do, what do we do? I mean, you know, hopefully, for one thing, I think we have fewer of them than we used to. Yeah. We've gotten better about, again, it goes back to this thing is because we actually know what a good episode, what constitutes a good episode in a way that we can articulate, in a way that we might not have been able to articulate a few years ago. I think we just have, I think both our guests are very good. You guys are consistently very good, but some are still better than the others. I think the most important thing is to just ask about very specific things to get away as fast as you can from generalities as fast as you can. It's like, what did you do this morning? What did you do when you logged into your computer? What was, what kind of emails did you, whatever it is, try to get as specific as you can where they're just answering things that no one else could possibly know the answer to already. The worst episodes are ones, and you know, so happens, where like a guest just talks once, like they're implicitly selling something. You know, we don't do a lot of episodes with elected officials. We do sometimes, but we don't do many.

Famous, so politicians and CEOs, I think are, are what I would, I don't, what I would put in the category of high-risk guests. Yeah. By which there is a good chance that this person is just going to come on, that they're going to be incredibly media polished, that they're going to have been trained to say five things over and over again. You can really sort of cut off a lot of left tail risk, I would say, by just being aware of the fact that certain types of guests have come with a certain types of risk. They're going to be salesmany. They're going to be speaking generalities. They're just going to sell themselves, etc. You know, even we've had good conversations with CEOs and what we try to emphasize with them is like, yes, we know you're going to talk about your company. It's inevitable. That's fine. Go ahead. But we're really here to learn about the industry and we want to learn how our, our listeners are not going to like it if you're just like pitching your company. That's not why you're here. But if you can explain, we did, I thought we had a great episode recently with Max Levchin, the CEO of Affirm, which is one of these buy now, pay later companies.

Because the executives, they do have unique... they definitely have many of them. Yeah. That's so, that's right. If you get them in the right moment, if they understand why they're there and they're not like scared, and I get them not scared.

Yeah, or how great Affirm is, how everyone should just switch to Affirm, no one's going to like that episode. It's not going to be, it's not going to do anything for you. But if you say, look, like we have a, we always tell them, we have, and I believe this is true, I say we have the most sophisticated audience in the world. There is no amount of technical depth that will ever be too much for our audience. If you say some acronym or mention some deep piece of data that we have never heard of, that is fantastic. We may stop you and say, wait, tell us what that acronym means or put it in plain English. Yeah, but go ahead. We always say if you're like at an industry conference, imagine that you're at some industry conference on stage talking to all your professionals. Feel free to go at that level and then again, if there's something that we don't understand, we'll say, wait, stop and clarify that. So I think actually one, one way to just sort of like, yeah, eliminate the possibility of a sort of dud episodes is to just talk with them in advance so they understand like, okay, this is what will constitute a good discussion. You know, another like, is this good or bad for America thing is the rise of these creator-led podcasts as like the center for even political discussion, right? And there is this bias towards being nice to the people when it's like your show, be nice to the guest when it's your show, they're for their hour, you know, like I watch these like British interviews with politicians and, well, just like I think the people who do that are not the ones who are getting the most, are just like rising in the charts. It's the ones who come at it with a little more like open-ended whateverness. I mean, I guess like Tucker and like Candace Owens kind of an exception, but I don't know. There's something, there's something like interesting and exciting about seeing presidential candidates do two-hour long interviews. And there's something also where it's like, like the Nelk boys are not going to do their homework and like ask a real question about someone's record, right? So, I mean, you know, one thing I will say about politician interviews or quote tough politician interviews is like I think it's very important when you're talking to someone who's a public official or even a CEO, etc. or anyone in an important role. I think it's important to, to ask them difficult questions. You can't just lob up softballs. That's not fun, etc. On the other hand, I will say I do think that there are certain people who have this sort of fantasy about what happens if a journalist asks a sort of like hard-hitting question where it's like, 'Oh, if you had only asked him this, then he would have like broke down.' He's like, 'Yes, I'm a fraud. I'm a scam.' These guys pros, man. It's like, 'You got me. You nailed me. It's all over.' And I do think there is this sort of like fantasy of like what can happen if the interviewer is like sufficiently adversarial, etc. that is like not particularly ground in reality. So I think it's important to like, you know, ask like probe questions that are genuinely difficult, not softballs. On the other hand, I want to, when I go into a conversation, my goal is I really want to learn something and I really want to hear the strongest version of the person's argument, whether I am skeptical of it, whether I'm inclined towards it, whatever. Most of the time what I hope to get out of an episode is that I learn the strongest version of their argument and that it's a real, that it's a conversation, that it's just a, that it's a conversation. So, you know, again, the appropriate level of like toughness to take obviously varies and when you're talking to someone who's in, you know, public official of sort, I think it is very important to like, you know, not take it easy on them, but I sort of want to have a conversation with them, learn something from them, ideally. I want to learn what they're all about. It's, it's, you know, we don't, again, we don't do a lot of elected official episodes for precisely this reason unless there's like a story there that makes it, you know, we like hit Zohran on several months before he won the primary. I, there was like, it was interesting to me that there was this candidate who was proposing things like city-led grocery stores and stuff like that, freezing the rent, etc. who was like getting like, that was his race was a story, right? I wanted to learn about what his deal was in that conversation and so, you know, I'm glad we did that. But like...

We've done a, we've done a couple. We want to do more. And we will do more. We have done a few. We did a great one with the FTC chair. We did, we did a live episode with him in Washington, D.C. Stephen Myron came on the podcast earlier this year, so he was the chair. Now he's at the Fed. We have more coming up. Yeah, you know, it's fine. Plenty more to come.