In short
A conversation with Joe Weisenthal (Channels) about how his “Internet’s favorite finance geek” communication style and curiosity shaped his career, and what makes the Odd Lots podcast work. It also touches on media strategy (speed vs accuracy), podcasting vs TV, and how business journalism can explain “how it works” with simple questions.
Guests
Joe Weisenthal (hosted by Peter Kofka). No other guests appear in the transcript.
Guest background
Weisenthal is a former Business Insider writer, spent about a decade at Bloomberg, and co-hosts Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway. He also publishes the Odd Lots newsletter.
Key claims
The news cycle is energizing; “humility” matters in business journalism; the show succeeds by asking “smart, stupid” questions (clarifying terms without dumbing down); and TV offers less depth per time than podcast conversations. He argues there’s a “leveling” effect where newcomers can become dominant analysts by mastering a lane.
Notable examples
Odd Lots episodes on Trump’s Kevin Warsh central bank nomination, data centers, Venezuela sovereign bond restructuring, and even the history of rope; Business Insider’s crisis-era coverage after Lehman’s collapse; and the “tariffs cocktail party” discussion reference.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOJoe's Passion for News
0:25 to 0:48
Understand Joe's enthusiasm for journalism and the news cycle.
“where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone.”
Joe's Passion for News
3:33 to 5:05
Understand Joe's enthusiasm for journalism and the news cycle.
“Okay, here's me and Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal.”
The Odd Lots Podcast Experience
5:06 to 7:20
Learn about the Odd Lots podcast and its diverse topics.
“You seem like you're relatively healthy.”
Engaging with the Audience
7:21 to 10:40
Discover the mindset and audience of Joe's podcast.
“And so interesting can be something that maybe helps them see a perspective or sometimes inform their view on a possible investment, et cetera.”
The Search for Perfect Guests
10:41 to 13:26
Explore how Joe and his team select guests for their podcast.
“We're like you're kind of an autodidact, right?”
Joe's Journey in Media
13:27 to 14:02
Reflect on Joe's career path and experiences in media.
“There's tons of them who claim to be experts.”
Starting Out in Media
14:02 to 16:42
Learn about Joe Weisenthal's early career and his journey into media.
“Terrible name, very influential, early business.”
The Rise of Business Insider
16:42 to 19:10
Explore how Joe navigated the early days of Business Insider during the financial crisis.
“And eventually it led to a few writing jobs.”
Lessons from the Financial Crisis
19:10 to 22:44
Discover insights Joe gained about the media and financial industries during a tumultuous time.
“You will always find something interesting that we have to say.”
Navigating Media and Clickbait
22:44 to 24:19
Discuss the balance between attention-grabbing headlines and genuine journalism.
“And so I learned from that, you know, that these analysts, they were writing, you know, they've been doing this for years before blogs, right?”
Show all 24 chapters
Reflection on the Past
24:19 to 28:00
Joe reflects on his early career, the New York Times profile, and the evolution of his work.
“So, again, another one of these sort of leveling things going on at the time where someone just sort of junior or new at it could quickly catch up or in some ways supersede what the people who had been at it.”
The Evolution of Digital Journalism
28:00 to 31:05
Explore Joe Weisenthal's journey in digital journalism and his experiences at Business Insider and Bloomberg.
“But—and look, getting profiled in 2012 in The New York Times, it was incredible, et cetera.”
Transitioning to Television
31:05 to 36:28
Joe discusses his transition from digital media to television and what he learned about both mediums.
“I like the Internet, and I didn't watch very much TV by and large.”
The Podcast Journey
36:28 to 38:36
Learn about the origins of Joe's podcast, its evolution, and why he found it fulfilling despite initial challenges.
“But we really went years with just, it was crickets.”
The Podcast Journey
38:43 to 39:13
Learn about the origins of Joe's podcast, its evolution, and why he found it fulfilling despite initial challenges.
“Zazzle is a custom marketplace where you pick any product, a mug, a card, a tote, a phone case, and make it personal.”
Success at Bloomberg
39:13 to 42:00
Joe shares insights into his successful career at Bloomberg and the appeal of being part of a large organization.
“during the 4th of July mega sale at blinds.com.”
The Comfort of a Stable Organization
42:00 to 43:20
Explore the advantages of working within a large organization like Bloomberg.
“you can make 4x what you're making at Bloomberg, blah, blah, blah, whatever the numbers are.”
What Makes the Show Work for Listeners?
43:20 to 45:51
Discusses the appeal of the show and the learning experience for listeners.
“Not all the time, but, you know, we often have people from Bloomberg contribute in some way or reporters or, you know, there's all the Bloomberg B &F people who know all about energy, et cetera.”
Navigating Economic Chaos During Trump's Administration
45:51 to 47:24
Examines how the hosts tackled complex economic discussions during chaotic political times.
“What happens when that level of sophistication comes up against, I'll just use shorthand, the Trump administration, chaos, right?”
Realities of Business During Economic Disruption
47:24 to 49:40
Highlights how businesses adapt and respond to economic shocks and chaos.
“But on any given day, I think the one thing that we really had was we had people that we liked and knew, who we trusted, who we thought had good judgment, who were informed and understood things.”
Resilience of American Businesses
51:41 to 54:39
Discusses how American companies show resilience in the face of disruptions.
“New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.”
Tariffs and Their Impact on Businesses
54:39 to 56:02
Explores how tariffs affect American businesses and economic dynamics.
“So, you know, there is a limit to how much creativity can save you.”
Impact of Tariffs on American Manufacturing
56:02 to 57:21
Learn how tariffs are affecting productivity and efficiency in U.S. manufacturing.
“And yet, like, you know, the manufacturing sector in the United States has really struggled in the last year.”
Joe Weisenthal's Musical Aspirations
57:21 to 59:36
Discover Joe's journey as a songwriter and his passion for music.
“So we established at the beginning of this conversation that you're going to keep doing this no matter what because you're just sort of built for it.”
Transcript
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1:58from the vox media podcast network this is channels with peter kofka that's me today i'm talking to joe weisenthal who in some ways is like a lot of the creators i've talked to over the past few years who are running one person media operations based around their personal brand in joe's case that brand would be guy who's broadly interested in business and markets and finance and has lots of ideas and opinions and wants to talk about them in real time, all the time. The difference is that Joe isn't on his own. After making a name for himself at Business Insider, he spent the last decade at Bloomberg and for the last five years has spent most of his time on Odd Lots, the nerdy and excellent show he co-hosts with Tracy Alloway.
2:42And as we discussed, Joe really does seem like the kind of guy who could leave his big media job to do his own thing. But unless he's BSing me, he seems like he's very happy staying put, which is maybe a lesson for both creators and companies that employ them. There is a way to let people build big brands around themselves and keep them working for you. Also, Joe is someone I've known a tiny bit for a long time, and I'm always marveled at his approach to communicating, which in another time may not have worked well at all, but turns out to be perfect for the internet slash social media era. So we've talked about how he's turned that mindset into a career.
3:24Oh, and if you listen through, Joe has some thoughts about tariffs you can use at your next cocktail party. If it's that kind of cocktail party and you wanna sound smart. Okay, here's me and Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal.
3:39I'm here with Joe Weisenthal. He was just explaining all the various titles he has had over his long career. Today we call him Joe Weisenthal, Internet's favorite finance geek, I would say. He's the co-host of Odd Lots at Bloomberg, and he publishes the Odd Lots newsletter. Welcome to Channels. Nice to see you, Peter. How are you doing? I'm old and tired. Likewise. Yeah. I feel that likewise. It's February. It's been a long month. It's been a long month. It's been a busy start to the year. But you love this stuff. You thrive on the news cycle more than maybe anyone I know in journalism. It is really energizing.
4:15I've always loathed it or disliked it when I see journalists complain about the news or, I don't know. We like to complain about everything. I know, I know, I get it. But it's like, this is why we're here. This is why we wake up in the morning. This is why we got into this. And so I do find it energizing. energizing. I find it easier to wake up in the morning during periods of high volatility and so forth. And to be clear, you're a genuine weirdo. Like you would be doing this stuff, I think, even if you weren't getting paid to do it. I think that's true. I think that's probably true. You know, I sometimes talk, it's like, oh, you know, 10 more years, then maybe I'll do like a retirement job and just teach journalism somewhere or something like that.
4:55And then I think to myself, but I'd have to be posting and I have to be doing newsletters and I have to be writing. Checking your Twitter. Yeah, checking Twitter, et cetera. So I think I'll just keep doing it forever. This is not supposed to be a healthy way to live life. You seem like you're relatively healthy. We can talk more about your work lifestyle. But give people a sense, if they haven't heard Odd Lots, what they get in an episode of Odd Lots. It's you and your co-host, Tracy Holloway. Yeah, that's right. We have a really nice sort of wide berth at Bloomberg. They've really given us extraordinary editorial freedom.
5:27And I would say the only thing that the podcast is about is, in the broad sense, things that me and Tracy are interested in. Now, then we say it's about business finance and economics or markets finance and economics, whatever that is. But there aren't many stories that can't sort of be shoehorned into one of those categories. Spoken like a true business reporter. Yeah, exactly. Everything sort of falls into that. But, you know, on the podcast, we recently did an episode about Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh to lead the central bank. We had a recent episode coming out about data centers from this analyst.
6:04Just listening to that on the way here. He's good, wasn't he? Yeah. Who said that the utilities are overbuilding. But then, you know, we did a great episode a couple of weeks ago with this legend of the sovereign bond restructuring world talking about Venezuela and their defaulted bonds. We have an episode coming out about the history of rope as an important technology for civilization. And who do you think is listening to you? Because it's obviously if you're trading, it's not like people are going to invest based on what you're talking about. You're not. Sometimes you're on the news, but often you're not because you're doing the history of rope.
6:38Yeah. So what is your audience? What do they want from you? Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I've always thought just zooming out in general, you know, thinking about business journalism. You know, you mentioned people aren't probably going to invest based on an episode, right? And I actually think that, by and large, this applies to all business media, that we should have a certain amount of humility, that the people who are, especially the professionals, by and large, they're never going to, like, read an article. And then it's like, oh, look, this company had good opportunity. Big opportunity, right?
7:11I'm going to get gold long on rope. Yeah, they know about these companies, et cetera. So I sort of think, you know, I want to be humble, basically, and I just want to be interesting. And so interesting can be something that maybe helps them see a perspective or sometimes inform their view on a possible investment, et cetera. But it's also just things that the people who are of this mindset might like to listen to. Yeah, talk more about that mindset because I think it's both them and you, and they sync up pretty well. I have some ideas about what it is, but you tell me what you think that mindset is.
7:48You know, first of all, I think it took us a while to find our voice for the podcast. It took us actually several years. We can get into that because I think that part is interesting and figuring out what we do best and why we exist and why anyone listens to us. It was really around the pandemic that listeners really started picking up in a real way such that it became our full-time job. But I think there is this interest in sort of on a real nuts and bolts level understanding how the world works or how the world of business works. So, for example, you know, we did a lot of episodes during the pandemic and right afterwards about supply chain stress, right?
8:29Now, I think that there are some, you know, even here, so you could imagine someone who is maybe a buyer or a supply chain manager for Walmart, et cetera. Even in this space, you have an expert. I imagine there are lots of aspects that they don't think about that much. So, for example, you think about, OK, the ships are coming into the port. Well, who unloads the goods from the ships and put them on the trucks? Or who unloads the goods from the trucks, et cetera? And I think there's just a lot of things in the business world that tend to get abstracted over. Another example I think about all the time is quantitative easing and the Fed buying bonds or selling bonds or whatever.
9:10And lots of people in finance have opinions about this. Probably one of the most controversial or sort of, yeah, topics of the last 15 years or so since the financial crisis. But then if you think about this big pool of people who have weighed in on quantitative easing, et cetera, and then you shrink down that pool to the number of people that know which bonds the Fed actually selects to buy, I think it shrinks quite a bit. So you have this big abstract idea. Lots of people say, OK, the Fed is swapping bonds for liquidity, et cetera. Well, how do they do that? How do they make that decision? Each month, how do they sort of know which securities to go out and purchase?
9:52I think actually you find very few people have actually thought about some of these questions. And so what we want to do is we can – what we've found, I guess, is that with a lot of topics, we can appeal to both the professionals and sort of nonprofessionals who are just interested by asking some of these very basic questions about how does this work? No, how does this work? What does this term mean? I'm curious. Yeah. And I don't know. We sometimes call them like the sort of smart, stupid question or the stupid, smart question because they're just terms and things we use all the time. Wait, explain that to me, or is that really true?
10:28Yeah, exactly. Or what is this term? What are we actually talking about here? And there's almost no limit to how simple you can go in these conversations, and people appreciate it. From afar, I kind of think that Twitter and then very much the podcast are like things built for your personality in particular. We're like you're kind of an autodidact, right? Self-didact, right? You've taught yourself a lot. You're curious about a lot of different things. You have a lot of opinions. You're happy to let them out into the world. You're not unhappy if those opinions turn out to be wrong. And you're just more interested in like what's the new thing?
11:07What's the next thing? Oh, if this, then what that? And I think that really syncs up well with, one, just a whole cohort of people that I'm familiar with in tech. Yeah. They all think that way. And oftentimes they'll get criticized for like, well, you're the payments processor guy. Why are you opining about macroeconomics or whatever it is? Those guys all love it. They're really into that. And then more broadly, I think the Internet rewards curiosity that is you're all over the place, but you're also kind of in a lane being business-y stuff. I think so. You know, the one real sort of overlap between being on Twitter from the early days and podcasting, and Twitter has definitely gotten worse on this dimension, but you probably remember it, especially in the first half of the 2010s, how these experts on various topics would show up.
11:57And no one had heard of this guy, right? And they would start posting about how this thing that a bunch of people were interested in, how it worked. And it's like, oh, who's this guy? And it's free? Yeah, and it's free. And, you know, this is not someone that we had seen on TV before. And this is not someone who was getting quoted in the newspaper before. But this guy's in it and he's explaining how his work works. Right. And so, you know, it's 50 percent a little bit of a joke at this point, but also 50 percent real. You know, almost always we talk about our we always refer the perfect guest.
12:31And now we have the perfect guest to talk about. So that's sort of become just a little bit of a tongue in cheek joke that we repeat every time. But it's also real in the sense that the main thing that we're trying to accomplish with every episode is finding the perfect guest. Because there's no—people sometimes ask us, like, what are you interested in talking about? And I could rattle off a ton of things. Or do you ever worry about running out of topics? The answer is always no. There's an infinite number of topics to talk about. That's not a problem. It's always about who is that perfect guest who is deeply knowledgeable and can enthusiastically explain it in clear English, which is what we're always going for.
13:11And I do think that is the overlap between the sort of Twitter mentality of who is this person who we've never seen before. And again, I think that sort of faded from Twitter for a bunch of obvious reasons. But that has been, I would say, the sort of one of the driving things. I mean, there's a ton of people on Twitter now, but those tend to be usually grifters. Yeah, yeah. There's tons of them who claim to be experts. It's also sad, you know, you come across people that have, you know, some niche interest, but everyone's been so poisoned by politics. You read their, it's like, no, I want to see you post about your field and your industry and not, you know, retweeted conspiracy theories and stuff like that.
13:50So now that we've set this up, we've explained who you are, let's talk a little bit about how you got here. I probably bumped into you. I definitely was reading you. We're like 2005, 2006, just to say how old we are. When you were at paidcontent.org. Terrible name, very influential, early business. Can we talk about the name? Business. Well, that was a very valuable lesson I learned, which is the name does not matter at all. I guess it does, it doesn't. Once you establish what your thing is, do people identify the name with what you're making? Yeah, no. We were like, for a little while, we were competitors.
14:24Because I was in paid content covering mostly the earnings reports of publicly traded media companies of various sorts and also funding rounds for digital startups. And that's a big part of what you were covering. You were at Silicon Alley Insider at the time. And we were kind of covering the same thing. And then I've told this before, but, you know, I ran into your boss at the time, Henry Blodgett, that was at a party at Gracie Mansion during Tech Week. and he knew my stuff because I guess competing. Oh, that's good. In my memory, I was like advocating for you internally, but I've got no idea.
15:01It was a long time ago. But what was your, so you're in New York, you're working at a digital trade pub covering media. What did you want to be doing? What was your plan coming out of college? I truly say this without any, you know, false modesty or anything like that. I had no idea and I've never thought that way When I graduated, I was a substitute teacher for a while. You grew up in Michigan, went to school in Texas, Austin. I lived in Michigan. Moved to New York because? There were a few other steps. I lived in Illinois for a while, lived in Vermont for a while. I went to college in Austin, though.
15:37And then a bunch of friends were moving to New York. Just moved to New York because it's a fun place to live. And I was sort of burnt out of Austin and not going anywhere. And a friend of mine, he had a family portfolio management company. And I said, I just need a job. Like, get me out of Austin. And I did some data entry for him. It was called an analyst, but it was like glorified data entry. I moved here in 2004. And then blogs were a thing. And I thought that was really cool. I just thought it was awesome that people were posting online and it seemed fun. And so I started one with actually a colleague and it worked out well, kind of, because, you know, I was in a working at this small investment company, but I really did not have any real skills that I could say transfer to Wall Street or something.
16:25And the company that I was working for, they left their New York City office after one year. And I sort of had to decide what to do. And I stayed in New York. But I kept the blog going because I was like, well, this will just keep me in practice and writing and stuff like that and make me pay attention to the news and all this stuff. And eventually it led to a few writing jobs. Did you have a finance slash business head slash ambition? Is it stuff that you were inherently interested in? I got, yeah. I mean, I got, I did, I wouldn't say I had an ambition. And I was interested in it, you know, in high school was during the dot-com bubble.
17:00And that was just really exciting. It was just, it seemed really fun. One year, one summer in college in the very peak, like summer of 99, my friend and I day traded together and made a bunch of money. And I actually didn't lose it all. I just lost a good chunk of it. And so it was always something, this is actually something I learned later on. It was always something I was interested in, but I had no idea how I would take an interest and turn that into a career. I didn't know anyone in finance, none of my family. I didn't grow up in New York. None of my family was in the space. I didn't know anyone who had gone to work on Wall Street or anything like that.
17:39So I didn't have any path groove. The only thing that I knew about Wall Street is that there were people who appeared on CNBC who were stock analysts. And so I thought that was kind of the only job on Wall Street was being a stock analyst. But I didn't really know anything about how they got there or anything like that. And so it was just I never operationalized that interest or thought, oh, I could take this interest and that could be a career that I could have. And so you're bouncing around in New York. Yeah. Random-ish places. I was doing temp work, like going into offices, helping change the light bulbs and stuff like that.
18:11And so I can't remember if you and I worked in the same office at all. We did. I think for like a month. Maybe. Maybe a month max. It might have been two weeks. I think actually maybe before my start date at what became Business Insider, I think you had already announced that you were leaving. Yeah, so we barely overlapped. But the idea was you were going to run or work for a site. I think it was called Cluster Stock. Okay, talk about bad names. Yeah, again, if it worked, it would have been a good name. But the idea was you were going to be Henry Blod. We were covering technology and the Internet at what was then called Silicon Valley Insider.
18:43You were going to work on the new business blog and cover earnings, et cetera. I left. And then within a few years, you became this thing, the stalwart and like your Twitter handle seemed to be as important as your, as what you were publishing and your ethos and the ethos of what was then called Business Insider all sort of merged, it seemed like, which is like, we're going to say a bunch of shit. Some of it's going to turn out to be right. Some of it won't. We're just going to keep going. You will always find something interesting that we have to say. we are not bullshitting you, but we are also consciously entertaining you.
19:18Yeah, I think that's right. You put it well, because there was a lot of alignment of things that came together at the right place at the right time. You know, one was just the velocity of social media and trying to build a site that more or less matched that velocity. There was just so much news. And, you know, so one thing that I've a lesson, another lesson that I've taken away and I've tried to impart this on people. You know, I started in October 2008 at Business Insider, which was right when Lehman Brothers collapsed. And the nice thing about a crisis, I think, is that very quickly you realize there's no experts, right?
19:58No one has really been a lot. You know, there's people that know. No one's built for the entire Western financial system might be melting down. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, people have read the history, and obviously there are senior journalists who understand regulations way better. But no one had seen that. I remember sitting in the office, and Henry was sitting next to us. I don't remember if you were there or not. He goes, gentlemen, you may never see this again. Goldman Sachs looked like it was going to zero, sort of ticking down minute by minute, and it looked like Goldman Sachs might go out. And he was sort of fascinated by it, but also just sort of sitting back going, whoa.
20:28Like, no one knows what that means. No one had seen it at all. And so in that moment, I think it's really it's a it's a leveling, right? It's a leveling in terms of the most experienced person only knows marginally more than the least experienced person. And I also think I was very lucky to be at Business Insider. You know, we were just at that time, there was almost no editing layer and we were just posting whatever straight to the Web. And I always think to myself, if I had, say, been a junior reporter at The Wall Street Journal, which would be a great role at that time in my life, you'd be like the fifth in line to say cover the Fed or something like that or cover whatever.
21:08And we were just thrown into the pool in those years. And it was just – there was this buffet of news and we were just posting it as it happened. And another thing I sort of learned at that time that was very helpful, I didn't have any like real journalism training other than just posting. But I started getting on the mailing lists of the Wall Street analysts, the sell-side analysts who would do reports. And it clicked to me very early on that they were roughly in the same business as we are, right? That they're just – and it stayed the same, which is they send out an email report, right? A sell-side analyst, they have a new call on Tesla or whatever.
21:50The person receiving that has 100 different things that they could be opening, right? Their inbox is filled. They have tweets. They have headlines. They whatever. Their job is to grab attention. Their job is to create something. You know, they're in the clickbait game, too, so to speak. The reason Henry Blodgett is who he is is because he said Amazon's got to go for 400 back when it was 100 or 50 or whatever it was. and that became news that this guy at this like kind of pretty obscure bank had made this call that made his name a whole bunch of other things happened uh after that but i remember talking to him when we were at silicon alley insider say that's kind of the core lesson i've learned and it's also by the way how most media works that's why on talk radio no one says well let's all agree about the same thing it's let's have conflict about the about something um and that no one's going to reward you for sort of a down the middle considered opinion that says well maybe this could happen or maybe that could happen.
22:44You're going to get rewarded for saying, this is great. This is terrible. This is going to happen. This is not going to happen. Yeah. And so I learned from that, you know, that these analysts, they were writing, you know, they've been doing this for years before blogs, right? And they're trying to get the attention of their clients. But they're also writing in a way that, you know, I learned to write a little bit from reading them because I figured, well, the way they're writing is the way the Wall Street community must implicitly want to read, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this. They're also very chart heavy.
23:17So this was another, when I say the alignment of sort of opportunity, which is you think about legacy media at the time, it was a big deal thinking back to those years that say the New York Times, the Washington Journal would even put a chart in a story, right? That was sort of a rarity, the use of graphics. But the sell side reports were always filled with charts, et cetera. And so we do things like aggressively screenshot charts from the analysts and just post them and And, Pete, there was a lot of anxiety at first about that. But most of the banks liked it. A few complained and they filed takedown notices and stuff.
23:50I usually ask permission, but they're usually happy to have their chart published. They don't want the entire report published because that's their business. No, no, no, they don't want the entire report published. But most of the time, they were pretty happy. And the analysts, of course, loved it when they had their reports, or at least part of it, or spotlighted, et cetera. But because we were a blog or whatever it was at the time, we could just do that in a way that took several years, I would say, for the legacy media entities at the time to familiarize themselves with that. So, again, another one of these sort of leveling things going on at the time where someone just sort of junior or new at it could quickly catch up or in some ways supersede what the people who had been at it.
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24:32Do you think that exists now? There's a leveling now. And so as you look across all the industries you cover and go, oh, if I'm if I'm new young Joe in 2026 and I'm coming in basically knowing nothing, where would I want to be? Where my lack of knowledge would not be a hindrance? You know, I think it's a little different. I mean, one of the things that I ask myself sometimes is when I look around the landscape, is there any place where they're doing something really cool and I'm not? You know, or I wish I were there. And by and large, yes, there's not really. I mean, there's all kinds of media properties that I admire, et cetera, but there's not really, you know.
25:11I even meant beyond outside of media, like whether it's like. So the one thing I was going to, the one thing I'll say more specifically, I do think, especially in the age of like substacks specifically, that there still are opportunities for someone to just sort of become the ax, to use a Henry Blodgett word, on some. It's A-X-E. It's the old Wall Street term. Yeah, yeah. For the dominant analyst. The one who just sort of, you know what, I'm going to own this lane. I'm going to own this topic. And I do think, you know, someone could do it and the people do do it. And like, you know what, I'm just going to talk all the time about semiconductors.
25:45I'm just going to post all the data as it is. Or, you know, the person who becomes the, they just, you know, we're just going to focus on Wall Street purchases of single family homes or something like that. So I think there are opportunities to carve out lands for someone sufficiently motivated still. I do want to come back to Substack. But is it 2012 with the Times Magazine profile of you? That was 2012. Joe Weisenthal versus the Internet? Was that the title? Yeah, yeah. The photo is you. You're awake and in bed with a laptop. Which was staged, by the way. It's obviously staged because your wife is faux sleeping next to you.
26:19People thought that that was a real photo. Well, people should grow up and understand how the world works. But it's an amazing article because, one, it's just a great profile of you in a moment of time. And it's also very clearly a New York Times writer going, what the fuck is going on in the world? Not just you. And he's describing you as a weird character who gets up at four in the morning, basically tweets and types all day long, never puts your phone aside until you pass out and you barely see your wife. And really, and there were other articles like that, not about you saying like— No, there were a lot of bloggers in the dark.
26:50Bloggers are dying doing this. But it was also just like, how can this thing be a product? How can this be a business? Just kind of marveling at it. Like, also, this guy's like obsessed with speed and he's obsessed with, you know, getting the jobs number out before anybody else. But anyone who actually cares about that jobs number has a Bloomberg terminal. Right. And they get that jobs terminal before Joe even tweets it. So, like, to what end? Do you ever go back and look at that time and go, oh, what I was doing back then made sense at the time, but it's fundamentally wrong? or actually what I was doing back then made sense and it's what I still want to be doing.
27:25Maybe less, you're not quite as frenetic as you were, right? You're not blogging, you're doing a podcast. I have two children now, so there's no way. Two kids and you do a podcast a few times a week, right? And a newsletter a few times a week, so. I definitely don't go back and think anything I was doing was fundamentally wrong. I mean, there are things, you know, in retrospect, maybe I was commenting, you know, there are certainly articles I wrote that don't hold up or I wish I had known more. But by and large, I thought it was—I still think it was the right—it was the right approach at that moment.
27:56That cadence, that just sort of always on. I just want to, you know—this is going to sound so obnoxious. Great. But—and look, getting profiled in 2012 in The New York Times, it was incredible, et cetera. The only thing that I—the only thing I—and I thought this at the time, and I was really proud of the work we were doing at Business Insider. I thought it was good. I don't think it was just I sort of resented a little bit this idea that we were just high velocity clickbait. We certainly wanted clicks and we certainly put spin on the ball. And you're certainly high velocity. We're certainly high velocity.
28:35But I truly think, you know, I truly thought and still think that all of us in that environment, I was proud of the capital J journalism that we were doing. I thought it was good. I thought it was informative. I thought we were bringing voices. I think what he's poking at is like where you would go, I can't remember what the example was, was Jobs Report or some report where you go, calamity. And then you write a new thing five minutes later because you've thought about it five more minutes ago. Maybe not. And then, you know, an hour later, actually, the thing I said an hour ago was wrong, which on the one hand, you can say, well, that's just someone learning as they go.
29:09I think you said something to that effect. Our audience likes that. And then a normal journalist would say, why don't you just figure out the right thing and then publish that? I think, you know, look, I mean, look, that's not wrong either. I think if you look at the market itself, I mean, the market, say, within the first hour or the first 15 minutes of a report is always whiplashy. I think if you look at CNBC or any financial TV, CNBC, Bloomberg, there's a range of opinions. The numbers came out. They beat their estimates, but the stock's down. Why is that? They throw out an initial idea and then it gets massaged and then eventually there's a conventional wisdom minutes to an hour later.
29:50It's like that different. It's just that we were sort of doing talk radio. I mean, yeah, we were doing talk radio in the written text. And then you go from there to Bloomberg, which at the time confused me a little bit because Bloomberg was very staid, had a very staid reputation. Yeah. You don't are not a staid person. And you also additionally confusing to me was you were going on TV. You did not seem like someone who one wanted to be on TV or that would be successful on TV. And I was confused about was that that you did you go so you could go on TV? So I'll tell you the story, which is I think so.
30:31I went to Bloomberg in October 2014. I think they had first reached out to me sometime in 2013 about a TV thing. You know, I think the sort of the gap between at the time Bloomberg sort of stayed approach and me, I mean, that was part of the appeal for them, right? They wanted— We're going to get this weirdo in. We're going to get this digital person who gets the internet and all that stuff and has a big social media presence. I think that was part of the appeal for them for sure. The original pitch was TV. And to your point, like, I didn't have any aspirations for TV. I like the Internet, and I didn't watch very much TV by and large.
31:11You know, we had it on in the office, but I never thought that was the medium of the future. We had some chats, and then eventually the sort of the offer was do TV and have this role doing digital within the newsroom and help them figure out getting the Internet and stuff like that. And the other thing that was going on at the time was Business Insider by 2014 had gotten very broad. So, you know, it started off with you, Silicon Alley Insider, and then Clusterstock. But then, you know, there was, by that point, there was sports, there was lifestyle, there was career advice, et cetera. And throughout summer of 2014, I sort of had this decision to make, which is if I was going to stay in the market's lane, which is what I really love, my role at Business Insider would get more and more narrow because the site was expanding so far horizontally.
32:05Or if I wanted to sort of stay in a place of prominence at Business Insider, I would have to start broadening my interests, which I didn't really want to do. So there were already some structural things at BI by that point that made it a slightly less natural home for me. Were you concerned at all about Business Insider's prospects? In retrospect, Henry said, well, there were multiple times where we nearly couldn't hit payroll. By 2014, not really. I thought it was great. It's just it was becoming a publication that was different from the one that I joined. It was also, you know, I loved posting directly to the site.
32:39But by 2014, there was editing, there was editors and all that stuff. I hated editors, you know. So then I was already a little bit sort of thinking about what my next thing was. But there was nothing else obvious out there. And then the reason that the Bloomberg opportunity appealed to me was if someone – if another publication had just said, let's do digital stuff, I was like, I already have a great job in digital media. And so I don't need to leave BI really. But if – and if the TV alone thing, that wouldn't appeal to me because I didn't want to leave digital. But the opportunity for both – Do both.
33:16I was like, okay, if I don't say yes to this role, then what am I ever going to say yes to? Because, you know, you think, all right, if I don't say yes to this, then I'm really here for the long haul because no one else can put together that combination. And even though I didn't really aspire to do TV, I thought not many people get a chance to co-host a TV show. So just for the life experience, why not? So what did you learn about your TV during that experience? Or what did you learn about yourself doing TV? I mean, I did have fun doing it. It was fun. live TV is fun. From my perspective, TV is a lot of effort for a modest amount of journalistic output.
33:55I mean, you know, the combing your hair and putting on a tie and getting makeup done and all of these things. What? A lot of people are involved. A lot of people are involved. And then, you know, and then you have a conversation with someone that maybe lasts six or seven minutes or something like that, sometimes longer. You can do depth on TV. But I will say the Bloomberg, the people who are on air at Bloomberg are very smart. They're very smart. They're not talking heads. They're not just people who can with a strong jaw who can deliver. Yeah, yeah, totally. But it is a lot of time involved for what ends up being a fairly modest public footprint.
34:34the sort of light bulb moment for me when thinking about, I guess, I think it was in 2021. So by that point, we could back up at some point, talk about the genesis of the podcast, but we had started the podcast in 2015 as a side, side project. Both me and my co-host Tracy had, you know, multiple other roles within the newsroom. But then the head of TV at the time had this very good suggestion, which he said, you know, on days when you have a podcast episode out where it works, you should invite the guest on TV for a segment and talk to them live and then say, and if you want to hear a full, you know, 45-minute conversation with that person, listen to the Outlaws podcast.
35:15I was like, ah, it's a very good idea, very obvious. And that was really nice. But that was the moment I realized those weren't very sad. You know, You have this really in-depth conversation with someone. Right. Now it's with a dumb version. And then a week later, you do this really condensed version. And it's like, I just like doing the podcast so much more. I really like the time that you get to spend with the person. And that was sort of the beginning of, no, this is the podcast is really what I want to do full time. You're doing it in 2015. You said it didn't click. Yeah. 2021. Yeah. Six years of it not clicking.
35:49Yeah. Why are you doing it for six years if it's not clicking? why is Bloomberg letting you do it for six years? Because for several years, Bloomberg didn't have a podcast team. And so there was no one paying attention to the fact that no one was listening, which was the biggest gift. It was incredible luck because we really didn't know what we were doing. I can't go back and listen to those old episodes. It's too painful. We did have a few, you know, I may be exaggerating a little bit. We actually put on a live show in, I want to say November 2019, right before the pandemic and a bunch of people came out.
36:21People were actually starting to listen a little bit. By late 2018, 2019, we started getting momentum. But we really went years with just, it was crickets. And the only reason we survived is because - Why were you doing it if there wasn't an audience? I think it was fun. I think we really liked, it was a break. It was a different format. I mean, it's kind of easy. It's fun to talk to people. Yeah, I know. We're not supposed to say that. This is very hard work. Joe, this is the hardest work there is. But it was nice. I mean, especially, you know, you're in a studio. It's relaxing. There's not cameras all over you and stuff.
37:02Oh, the other thing, too. So when we started, you know, I mentioned we have an episode coming out about the history of Rope. Most of our episodes were like that in the beginning. So we're sort of consciously off the news. It's like let's just do sort of curiosities. And we talk about historic. We did multiple episodes, for example, in probably 2016 about the Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s. You know, there's not stuff that actually I think to answer the question specifically, the podcast allowed for a really good outlet to do to talk about things that were not in the news. And that was just really fun.
37:39We'll be right back with Joe Weisenthal. But first, a word from a sponsor. Thank you. There's the part of me that everyone sees. I'm Howie Mandel, the comedian. Apparently, I know what funny is. Funny bought me a house, but I also know what isn't funny. OCD. I've lived with OCD my entire life, and people throw the term around like it's no big deal. But OCD is severe, often debilitating. It's a mental health condition that involves unrelented, unwanted thoughts that can make you question your character, your beliefs, even your safety. General therapy can help with some things, but for OCD, it can actually make things worse.
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39:47And we're back. And so now you have this very successful thing. You guys had a big fancy 10-year party at Nine Orchard, very fancy hotel. That's right. Very expensive. You are the thing that all the media companies say they want, which is a brand. Yeah. They want these people who are brands. They're looking in the world of sub stacks and going, oh, how do we get so-and-so who's got a substack to come work with us? Or how do we generate the next person who could be that person? But you seem like you would also be in really, really good fit for that substack lifestyle. You could take what you're doing and go start a substack or whatever.
40:28Your podcast, I'm sure, could monetize really well if you took it out. However you and Tracy have talked about it. Why are you still at Bloomberg instead of going off being a solo practitioner? or it seems like we're in a moment right now that is really built for your skills specifically? I mean, the honest truth is that Bloomberg is just, you know, first of all— They pay really well. We'll stipulate that. It's a really natural editorial home for us. I mean, you know, you mentioned, and it's very real, that lots of publications, they want to figure out a way where they could still be a—the umbrella brand means something, but also the individual sub-brand also means something.
41:06There's such a - And they've been, historically, they were very uneasy with that. Yeah, totally. What happens if we build up so-and-so, then they go off and leave, and then they've taken all their brand equity, and we're screwed. Now they want the solo proprietor as a brand. Yeah. The thing, it's a really good fit. I mean, it's, I mean, one of the things that a lot of people listen to, you know, we have a lot of terminal users who are fans of the podcast. It's a really natural alignment of, you know, we do have this sort of broad mass appeal, and we have a lot of listeners who are not in finance at all.
41:38But because we also have a really dedicated professional finance audience, like it's just a, it's a really natural home for us from an editorial perspective. But I'm also assuming that you have run the numbers and or the people have come to you and run the numbers and said, if we just port what you're doing right now and you just own this podcast or you and Tracy own the pod, whatever it is, you can make 4x what you're making at Bloomberg, blah, blah, blah, whatever the numbers are. In theory, there should be a lot of opportunity available for you financially that could say, well, and the Bloomberg people can still listen to us because they already know where we are, et cetera.
42:17Presumably, you've done those numbers. I don't really believe any of those numbers. I genuinely don't. And when you think about the various, you know, the costs involved and the number of people, you know, we have three full-time producers working on the podcast. And you start thinking about all of these headaches, like, I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to deal with renting, you know, just like, I really like it. You don't want to run your own business. You like the comfort of having someone else run the business and you be the talent. I suppose I do. I mean, that's not a bad thing.
42:46No, it is really easy and nice to be within a large organization, a large organization that It has a lot of resources. And again, a large organization whose whole mission so fits with ours. You know, I could imagine, like, I do think, I genuinely can't overstate the importance of how well we fit within that organization. Honestly, even just having access to Bloomberg terminals, which would be another whole thing. It's a really nice home. And then there's so much expertise within the organization about all these topics. Not all the time, but, you know, we often have people from Bloomberg contribute in some way or reporters or, you know, there's all the Bloomberg B &F people who know all about energy, et cetera.
43:37It just fits really well editorially. And that makes life very easy and makes it very natural. Good for you for knowing what you want. Yeah, it's what I want. And also having what you want. Yeah, it's pretty great. Pretty good. Yeah. What do you think, we've kind of talked about it, but what do you think makes the show work for an average listener? Is it the broad knowledge that you and Tracy have? Because you can jump in, you can talk about energy, you can talk about the history of rope. Yeah. Is it your lack of knowledge that sort of makes them feel like they're learning with you? What is the appeal?
44:12I think, I mean, the lack of knowledge, you know, I do think helps. You know, I think neither of us ever really were informed and, you know, several of the things we've talked about, we've been covering our entire adult lives and we know quite a bit about. But I think by and large, it's that the learning along with the audience, I think, really is a big part of it. I think that's a huge aspect of it. Just explain this. And the fact that, again, our sort of mission is to ask those simple questions, clarifying questions that somehow work where the professional audience doesn't feel talked down to, because I think they appreciate it as well.
44:55But also the sort of general public audience, the nonprofessional audience also feels like those questions land at a level. I think one of the things that we tell our guests prior to the recording when we're sitting down, we always say we have the most sophisticated audience in the world. Feel free to go as deep and technical as you can. You know, imagine you're at a conference of your industry peers and that is the sort of register that you should be speaking at. But when you say an acronym or you refer to something, we don't know what it is. We're going to stop. You don't even explain yield curve to your audience.
45:30But if it's a more sophisticated or more esoteric term, you'll stop them. And I think we have a pretty good intuition for like when we say, wait, pause. What does that mean exactly? And that's the kind of thing that I think you can only sort of build up with practice. And that way you can get the sophisticated conversation without totally going over everyone's heads. What happens when that level of sophistication comes up against, I'll just use shorthand, the Trump administration, chaos, right? You go back to April of last year with Tariff Day, and there's whatever Donald Trump said about the rationale for the tariffs.
46:07There's whatever math they did or didn't do to come up with the tariffs. There's the fact that then the tariffs move around day to day, and then it comes up with new rationale. And so everything that you would learn that a normal rational person would learn to assess how markets work, how economics work, kind of goes out the window because there's just – what's the John Mulaney bit? There's the horse in the hospital running through the hospital where everything that you would normally bring to bear kind of doesn't work because you're working with some kind of unknowable psychology. I think the answer is having good intuitions about guests and having talked to people for years and years that we just trust.
46:46And again, yeah, like April 2025, that was a wild time, et cetera. But the good news. It was very exciting for you, I assume, right? I mean, we had—I remember the week before Liberation Day and everyone felt it was coming. I remember we talked to the team. I was like, this is going to be a huge month for us. This is going to be a historic month for us. So, you know, lock in, everyone, because we're going to work like crazy, and we're going to get as many episodes out as possible, and we're going to—yeah, we're not going to take any breaks for the whole month. But I think what we could do—and everyone had a million questions, and no one really knew what was going on, et cetera.
47:24But on any given day, I think the one thing that we really had was we had people that we liked and knew, who we trusted, who we thought had good judgment, who were informed and understood things. And the thing that we did was found good people that could help make sense of the world. I was following it, not nearly as closely as you were, but it seemed like the commentary that was essentially Donald Trump's crazy. This goes against every sort of like basic understanding of how economics and trade works. And then anyone who defended it was just sort of a Trump flunky. And so it kind of beyond like they had to say Donald Trump knows what he's doing, regardless of whether that was true or not.
48:04And so there was kind of pointless to talk to them. And then after you talk to the first couple people who say Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing, what else can you learn? Well, so that's a good example of like, okay, it's one thing to say, none of this makes sense. This is going to wreck the economy, right? So maybe that's the April 8th conversation. But by the April 15th conversation, we were talking to clothing retailers and just asking, well, what are you doing right now? How are you thinking about your orders for the next year? And then you could step out of the conversation, is this good, bad or wise.
48:38This is just reality. So how are people dealing with that reality? So a lot of our really good episodes from the time were really just talking to various businesses who didn't actually have the luxury of debating whether this is good or bad or smart or whatever. They just had to live in the world, which is not that different from spring and summer 2020, you know, when the lockdowns happened, et cetera. A bunch of people didn't have the luxury of debating things. They just had to figure out, well, how am I going to keep my business open? How am I going to place orders? How am I going to do X? So in a way, we're really in our comfort zone there because we had sort of realized that there's all kinds of people, supply chain people, et cetera, who can just answer how is this working now?
49:21Not is it a good thing? Yeah. And so we certainly had those conversations. Is it good? Is it bad? Et cetera. But our best ones at the time was like, let's talk to the shipping guy we talked to in 2020 about what's happening at the ports. Let's talk to the retailer about how they're placing the orders, et cetera, because they didn't have any, you know, again, they don't have the luxury of debating it. We'll be right back with Joe Weisenthal, but first a word from a sponsor. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back.
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50:27because between the tracking pixels following you around the internet, the FOMO drops, and the influencer hauls, someone is always trying to get your money. I'm sharing my best-kept secrets for scoring designer pieces for less, why secondhand shopping is having its biggest moment ever, and the one rule I use before buying anything new. Plus, I'm answering your questions, including how to dress well when you have zero dollars to spend, how to upgrade your wardrobe for as little as possible, and what signs actually give away that someone is truly wealthy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash yourrichbff.
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51:53And we're back. One of the things I wanted listeners to get out of this was one tidbit of information they could use at a cocktail party or whatever qualifies for a cocktail party in 2026. So let's make it a terrorist question. Okay. April 2025, total chaos. All the smart people are saying this is going to blow up the economy. Trump tacos on a bunch of stuff. But still a lot of those terrorists exist. The economy has not collapsed. Right. So what did all of the people who thought the tariff regime was going to collapse the economy get wrong in April 2025? I would say – I mean, so look, obviously they came down to a significant degree.
52:40So I think you have to start there. But I think – and again, I would say it goes back to the lesson from 2020. Businesses are incredibly resilient, or many of them. And American companies are incredibly dynamic, and the ones that exist are extremely well run, and they find ways to improvise and pivot quickly. I mean, you probably remember having the same questions in early 2020s, like how is any restaurant going to stay in business, et cetera? But then the restaurants are like, you know what? We're going to shift to takeout, and we're going to put up plexiglass, and they were open the next week, right?
53:20And they found a way to do it. And all of the big firms, you know, they were pretty surprisingly agile in retrospect in the midst of what was the biggest global coordinated shock in history, the pandemic. And I think I've come to think this over time that, you know, people may underestimate the resilience of a well-run American business. Well-run American companies where the people are paid a lot of money to deal with these disruptions. Given that we're going to have a disruption again, who knows when, that we're going to have one, how are you going to use that thinking? Because what you want, you want to overlearn the old lessons.
54:03I don't want to overlearn the lessons. That's right. It's really tough. And I do think, I mean, the big lesson that people overlearned was sort of assuming after COVID that we would have some sort of long quasi-recession or something like that because that was the experience of 2008, 2009 and the slow growth after that. You know, it's really hard to know because the next big shock probably won't look like the last one in any respect. And, you know, I do think, OK, the resilience of American companies is a very important thing to internalize. There's nothing that can really, you know, company, if you have like a broad general economic downturn where spending really slows down sustained wage dramatically, a lot of companies are going to go out of business, regardless of how much Elon, the management team has and so forth.
55:03So, you know, there is a limit to how much creativity can save you. And I also, by the way, you know, I think it's important, the story of the tariffs is not over by any stretch. And one of the things, you know, after the initial shock, you probably I remember it's like, are the tariffs going to set off a wave of inflation was the big question. And my view at the time and one of the things that I think has held up well is, and I did say this going back to last spring, which is that I didn't think the tariffs would be inflationary per se. The way I conceived of it is they would raise the cost of doing business.
55:42They would make business. It was like throwing some sand at the gears of business. And I think that is true. So it's not that they necessarily – that consumer prices automatically go up in lockstep, but that doing business in America becomes harder. And you definitely see that. When some of those costs do go to consumers. And then some of them definitely do. Or companies eat some of the costs. And yet, like, you know, the manufacturing sector in the United States has really struggled in the last year. for, I would say, tariffs are definitely a part of it, because even if the idea is to help American manufacturing, any sort of reasonably complex business is going to have inputs and raw materials that they import.
56:22And, you know, you see it, you know, we did, we were in Alaska last year, and we talked to this guy who runs the biggest furniture chain. You went to Alaska. Yeah, yeah. No, we like talked to this guy, and he said, you know, so we were asking him how he dealt with the tariffs. And he's like, well, we've shifted some of our imports from China to India, but even the Indian exporters, they don't necessarily want to make commitments for a year out. Maybe they only want to make commitments six months out because they don't know if the tariff schedule is going to change. So this is the kind of thing where he can live day to day or month to month with shifting imports from China to India.
57:00But the business is not going to be as efficient because they can't make orders as far in advance as they could. So I think there's a lot of little things like that where they don't amount to a big bang, but they have this sort of degrading effect on American productivity. And I don't think that story is over yet in terms of how it shakes out. So we established at the beginning of this conversation that you're going to keep doing this no matter what because you're just sort of built for it. So whether you're not, you're at Bloomberg or anywhere else, this is sort of what you're going to do. But I also know that you are a country music aficionado slash aspiring songwriter, guitar player.
57:39Yeah. Tell us about that. I love all my life I've written music, or at least since high school. I love songwriting. I love playing music. I love performing it. A couple of years ago, I think maybe it was 2022, I had a birthday party and I put on some country music. And my friend who is there is like, who doesn't like country, said, I'm going to drink till I like country. And I was like, oh, that's a great title for a song. And so I wrote one over the weekend and I uploaded it to SoundCloud. I played it into my phone. I uploaded it to SoundCloud. And someone from Nashville reached out and like, that's a really good song.
58:16I could maybe sell this to an artist to get it recorded. And I was like, oh, my God, it's like the dream. That's all I want. I would sacrifice my entire journalism career just to have one of my songs be played by a recording artist. It didn't sell. The label put a hold on the song, and then they shopped it around to their artists, and none of them bit on it. But then I really got the bug to get back into music. And then some friends and I, we started a band called Light Sweet Crude, and we played a few shows. We played shows in 2023, 2024, last year. I keep playing. You know, it's a sight. That's not your music I hear in the odd lots.
58:56People have always asked, do you write? No, we didn't write that. And so is that a second slash third career for you, or is that just a hobby? Unfortunately, I think it's just a hobby. I mean, it is a dream still to have a song that I wrote get recorded by someone. I love songwriting. And I don't think my voice, I couldn't really be as successful. My singing voice isn't that strong. I can sing, but it's not really, it's not quite at the level. All right, channels listeners, if you are in a position to help Joe achieve another one of his dreams, let me know. This is the one that if anyone out there, please just find an artist who will perform one of my songs.
59:34That's all I want. Done and done. Joe Weisenthal, thank you for your time. Thanks. That was a blast. Thanks again to Joe Weisenthal. He is a fun guy to talk to. Highly recommend. Thanks to our advertisers and my producer, Charlotte Silver, and to you guys. See you soon.
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From the publisher
We originally published this interview with Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on Feb. 11, 2026, and it's one of my favorite chats of the year. We'll be back with a new conversation on July 8.
If Joe Weisenthal didn’t exist, the internet would have to invent him. Because Joe Weisenthal is built for the internet — more specifically, an internet personality: Knows a lot, curious about even more, often right, happy to be wrong, always has something to say about anything.That persona/personality did wonders for Joe in the early days of Business Insider — which, not coincidentally, were also the early days of Twitter, where Joe really took off. Then he took his talents to Bloomberg, and since then has turned himself into a successful business/finance podcaster: Along with co-host Tracy Alloway, they’ve turned “Odd Lots” into a project no one at their employer knew or cared about into a genuine hit.Discussed here: Why Joe is still at Bloomberg, instead of doing the indie media route that could make him a gazillion dollars; what makes a perfect podcast guest; and Joe’s semi-secret country music ambitions. Plus something smart you can say about tariffs, if you’re in a place where people are talking about tariffs.
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