Joe Weisenthal on the business of business media and why AI won’t replace podcasters

19:43And we should be mindful of them. It's like sports and it's like politics and stuff. And then finally, like I worry about, okay, all of this information, certain types of information are now monetizable in the 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 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.

20:20But I don't think it's great that the Nobel Prize Committee suddenly has to shrink the circle of trust about 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 riven 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.

20:52People 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.

21:06Liz Hoffman:I totally agree in that like, it's not always the case, but it is like in both the public's interest and these companies' financial interests to solve this problem because no one's going to use a market they don't trust. Totally. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more from Joe.

21:36Liz Hoffman:On the sort of financial influencers, finfluencers, I think is what we're contractually obligated to call them. Yeah. You know, I saw Lloyd Blankfein on Mrs. Dow Jones' podcast just the other day. Oh, incredible. Incredible. And I realize he's selling a book, but the idea that like Bob Rubin or Hank Paulson would be on Mrs. Dow Jones' podcast. And I think the Wall Street Journal has a story up today on what Ryan Cohen told Anthony Pompliano. I mean, how should the legacy media, and I would put sort of ourselves in that, both of us in that bucket, be thinking about chasing the long tail of information that is sometimes genuinely very interesting on these platforms that are not moderated by people who care that much about journalism?

22:11There's so much to unpack there. It's a good question. I mean, first of all, Lloyd is Lloyd. And part of the reason that it's hard to imagine Hank Paulson or others is because, like, Lloyd is a category of one. I love talking to Lloyd. We had him on our show earlier this year. I don't know. Something just incredibly refreshing about talking to Lloyd, like you're talking to a normal human being. There's a couple of things, which is a lot of financial influencers, you know, some of them are good. Some of them are okay. There's a fair amount of this sort of broader fever swamp that Ben has probably been very familiar with in particular in politics.

22:47It's very real in finance as well. It's like conspiracy theories about Vanguard and BlackRock and buying up all the homes. It's like there's like this Twitter influencer macro is like its own new thing of like how a certain type of people online, they're very obsessed with like the BRICS currencies and stuff like that. A lot of them really like talking about the Chinese UN is about to supplant the US dollar and so forth. And, you know, a lot of them are very influential and I can like feel it when I talk to a lot of people who are outside my sort of like media sphere, like how much finance influencers sort of shape the way that they perceive the world and what's going on in markets.

23:28Or, you know, a couple of years ago, we were in North Carolina for a little tour that the president of the Richmond Fed did. And someone had asked him about like central bank digital currencies at this event. And that's like a classic, you know, coming out of these fears of they're going to be able to track all your spending and stuff like that.

23:45Ben Smith:But anyway, like I do think, you know, it creates a lot of it's, you know, there's a lot of conspiracies and misinformation. And, you know, I do not devote a lot of time to thinking about a very important thing is stamping out misinformation. But, you know, I think it's a good, there are good opportunities to like, let's actually try to have what we perceive to be an honest conversation about some of this stuff. And if some people want to hear from like a more credible outlet on the question of say, institutional purchases of single residential homes that's less conspiracy laden or whatever, then maybe legacy media or could be a good venue for that.

24:22Liz Hoffman:But all this new stuff, whether it's influencers that don't ask real questions or like frankly, Twitter accounts themselves, like companies have a lot more ways. Like I remember I was a reporter for Goldman at the journal and Lloyd Blankfein got on Twitter and we wrote a story where the headline was like, welcome to Twitter, Lloyd, you're going to love it. And I pretty quickly got my comeuppance, which is that we'd written a story that he was preparing to step down and for which the company like did not comment, was very tight-lipped. And then about an hour after the story, he tweets, I feel like I'm Tuck fan at my own funeral.

24:51Liz Hoffman:And we're like, should we put it in the story? Like, I don't know. I feel like that's still an evolving conversation about like how much the media should follow those like direct channels that big companies and powerful entities that we cover have. I know. And look, and I, you know, I mentioned, for example, the Andreessen Horowitz streaming service. And you'd see it obviously more in tech, but you also see it in Wall Street because all those places, you know, Goldman has its own podcast and Morgan Stanley has its own podcast. They're actually pretty good. They're pretty good. In many cases. So everyone sort of wants to go direct and everyone would like to cut the three of us here out, I suspect, but also not because I think that there are certain people who are a little bit either denial or delusional about what, say, the media, the traditional media can offer.

25:42It's like, no, we cannot offer like more, you know, eyeballs per se or ears. But I think everyone loves the prestige and everyone loves how it feels. I guess maybe validation or whatever. I myself would say that I'm surprised in the year 2026 to this day, the validating ability of sort of certain legacy media brands.

26:04Ben Smith:So you really liked that New York Times profile? Yeah, of course. But also, I just think that all of the tech people who love to grave dance, incorrectly grave dance on The New York Times, which is doing fantastically, by the way, they all will say yes to The New York Times in a second if a reporter wants to do a story on them. And their publishers would say, yes, absolutely do it in a second. They wouldn't give it a second thought. Yeah, I think like they're a little bit, many of them are a bit delusional when they deny the influence that at least a handful of brands still have.

26:36Liz Hoffman:Ben, you have some theory about this, don't you? About how the prestige of traditional media is actually what's feeding the LLMs?

26:42Ben Smith:Oh, this is a weird little sidelight. But yeah, if you Google like, what is my reputation? What is Bloomberg's reputation? You search that in an LLM or search questions like that. The sources that will feed it are not going to be social media and Reddit. They're going to be articles, often in like trade journals that are almost out of business and have no business model. But suddenly desperate PR people are now trying to get their executives back in these dying or thriving publications because at least right now, like the LLMs are very sensitive to traditional authority. I mean, I'm sure there's many efforts to game them, but it's...

27:14Liz Hoffman:By the way, you know why it's all the trade pubs?

27:15Ben Smith:Why?

27:16Liz Hoffman:Because they're all owned by private equity.

27:17Ben Smith:Oh, interesting.

27:19Liz Hoffman:Like they were the first ones to take the money from the LLMs and say, of course. Yeah. I love that. No, look, I mean, this is such an interesting phenomenon that people have talked about literally more in just the last few months, which is the sort of like the, what is the ideology of Claude and Chachi Petit as sort of like boring normie liberal. And that's very interesting. A few people are starting to talk about this. John Burns Murdoch at the FT, I think was one of the first to sort of flag that this sort of, the Overton window, maybe if you want to call it, within an LLM is like narrower than it was on social media.

27:55Ben Smith:I mean, as somebody, I remember I think I once edited a story at BuzzFeed that was called like Twitter is a truth machine. And I remember when we had these conversations about social media, about how great it was at getting to the bottom of things and getting rid of bullshit and crowdsourcing the truth. And I don't know. I think the LLMs are going to get really, really good at feeding you into your own bubble of delusion and insanity the way social media was. Yeah, and I do think the psychofancy is a really big problem. I would actually say a much worse problem in my view than the so-called hallucinations, which are not as big of a deal as many people think.

28:30And look, AI psychosis where people think like, oh, I'm very close to, you know, cracking like Fermat's last theorem or some resolving the tension between Newtonian physics and whatever physics or quantum physics. Like, I think there is a lot of like that sort of psychosis and it would absolutely create new pathologies and so forth. I guess my issue, what I would say is a lot of the criticisms that people have towards the emerging AI world, which feels like we're entering into, really just feel like descriptions of the past. We've already had this intense war on everyone's attention span. That's the story of the last 15, 20 years.

29:11Like that happened, political polarization in the rise of like weird extremist ideology. That is the story of the last 15, 20 years. And then the other big one, of course, is the concerns about wealth inequality, which maybe AI will exacerbate wealth inequality, But that's just basically the story of the rise of tech over the last 20 years. I am very open to the idea that AI or LLM specifically could surprise us in ways that are not just let's just draw a straight line beyond the trends that we've seen from social media.

29:43Liz Hoffman:Wait, can I poke at that really quick? Sure. Which is the wealth inequality, because it's something I've been thinking a lot about. I think when Google went public, it was worth like$23 billion. It's worth$4 trillion today. All of that accrued in public hands. And you could say more people should own stocks than do. But like Anthropic is five years old and is as valuable as Amazon was when it was 25 and had been public for 15 years. So like, what do you make of that? No, you're right. And it's a really good question. It is extraordinary concentrations. And that is a way in which it does seem like the inequality of the last 15 years does seem to be turbocharged.

30:19I don't know. There are weird things. I mean, the other, it's important to remember that we don't know when or if any of these companies are going to get remotely like profitable, right? And so, yes, it's true that equity values have gone a lot. But in terms of sort of accounting profits, that is very different than Google, et cetera, where these companies are intensely profitable. It could be that just one wins out, you know, and then that would be sort of scary for its own reasons. But then you have like a bunch of people who are billionaires today and won't be billionaires tomorrow, et cetera.

30:49There's a lot of volatility here in terms of how this plays out. And so sort of my impulse is to just sort of try to not be too rigid in my expectations. That is what I'm just trying to instill in myself as a sort of operative principle here.

31:06Liz Hoffman:It's also a pretty good argument against the wealth tax. It's the one they're all using. Yeah, but you know, this is, so like this is interesting. I was in London last week and of course there it's also a big deal because, you know, a lot of people are fleeing. I do think we're going to have to figure some things out potentially as a society. We haven't figured out how to do like a wealth tax yet. Seems sort of difficult to implement both politically but also mechanistically if people can flee, etc. Obviously, we know about some of the ongoing debates happening in California. But given the degree to which wealth rather than income is the channel via which a lot of very powerful people live their lives and from which they consume, boom, we're going to sort of have to figure this out.

31:47And I don't think we are. We don't seem particularly close either.

31:51Ben Smith:A narrower question on AI, which is like what it means to us. Verdi got AI basically writing up the snap stories of the earnings reports. You see them all over kind of Google News. Yeah. Maybe on the other end of that journalistic spectrum is odd lots. What of financial media and a business media do you think survives AI? What doesn't? Yeah, I mean, look, Look, I do think that it does seem like some people like people. You know, just before I came on here, I saw a headline that I did think was interesting. It was that Charles Schwab is going to use AI to expand its services to less affluent clientele, which I sort of observed like could be read in two ways.

32:29Like one is here are some premium services that were only economical for Charles Schwab to offer to rich people before. And now they can offer them to more people via AI.

32:39Ben Smith:I don't know what they are, but let's say in theory that's great. But then the other flip side is that, okay, for the masses get to talk to an LLM and the very elite get to talk to a human. And I do think that there is just going to be like getting, you know, communicating or listening to a human. It's probably going to be somewhat of a luxury thing and become valuable. I'm actually optimistic about this. Like I'm not just saying this. You know, for years it's like there's, oh, journalism is really tough and only go into it if you have to because it's so awful, et cetera. And I don't know, like it was pretty it's been a pretty rough several couple of decades for media.

33:17But I'm actually kind of optimistic that there's just going to be the sustained, if not growing number of people who want to hear from people. And then, you know, I think the other thing, too, and this is something that I haven't seen much talk about. But remember, like 15 years ago, every newsroom got a data team. Right. And every suddenly like every publication had a team that was doing great data visualization. and charts and stuff like that. And that was the hot thing for a while within journalism. I think LLMs actually are going to create a bunch of opportunities like that. I haven't really seen it yet.

33:51But I think that if you're a journalist listening to this, you might be shocked at how easily you, with no expertise, could build a machine learning model that could distinguish between X or Y. And it's like, okay, which politician is the most pro-crypto? Or did a politician's speeches has become more pro-crypto after X or Y. And you probably could build a machine learning model without any formal technical background that actually answers that question. I'm very optimistic about new sort of things that journalists can do that we didn't have the technical capacity to do before. Sure, you want to like get a sanity check on all this stuff.

34:30You know, setting aside summaries of news by the chatbots, which is whatever. I think there's just exciting things that we can now do technically with AI that we couldn't have done a couple of years ago.

34:40Liz Hoffman:But is the free version of Odd Lots in the future your agent interviewing the guest agent and then AI putting the podcast together and then the one that I pay for is actually you and them and Tracy in a room? I doubt it. I mean, I doubt it. I think people like, if you're gonna, here's the thing is like, if you're gonna allocate time, I think you probably generally want to talk to a person and I think they'll be valued. Like, I don't, I could be totally wrong. I mean, for one thing, right? Like, currently, AI can't do an interview because it can't interrupt right now. I mean, it's, there's actually, this was the thing I saw this week, which is that Miramirati's new startup.

35:16Liz Hoffman:I just saw it. It can interrupt you. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. So that actually is kind of potentially a big deal. But these are really important things. Like, there's a pretty big gap still between LLMs and even the voice ones and anything that we would call human conversation. precisely because humans just talk with all these ticks and half sentences that AI never does. So I do think we're actually still kind of a ways away from that. But I think if you wanted to allocate your time to X or Y, I mean, if you want a summary of something, that already exists. If you just want to read the CliffsNote, that already exists.

35:52It's actually funny, frequently when I tweet one of our episodes out, there's some company, they're kind of annoying because right underneath my tweet, they're like, here's a summary of today's odd lots and they'll reply to it. And it's AI generated. It's really good. Like, I hate to say it, but it's really good. It's like really thorough. And they generated it in about 30 seconds afterwards. But I think that, you know, these things, they exist. And I can't perceive them as having like meaningfully changed the trajectory of listenership, etc. I think all these things are out there anyway. And if people wanted them, they could have taken them.

36:25So I do remain like unironically and not just in that sort of like journalism school professor way, optimistic about human reported media.

36:35Ben Smith:I think we've just got a couple of minutes left, so I'm going to ask you a complicated question and ask you to compress the answer. Okay, I can do that. You mentioned just the power of AI tools for us to play with. And I know you've been playing with these tools around your obsession with orality and with the difference between spoken and written language, spoken and written culture. I'm curious how you see that kind of shift toward a more oral culture kind of flowing through the media, really. So, I mean, look, I think the fact that like every news organization in the world, not podcasts, the fact that they all put their reporters with the little tiny mic and make them talk to the vertical video, that is like the sort of ultimate peak of this phenomenon that everyone is just talking all the time.

37:20That talk and conversation and orality, et cetera, is truly just the sort of like dominant theme of our time. And these organizations such as the New York Times that sort of built themselves on like perusing, reading a physical thing, they still do a lot of great real reporting. So I don't want to like – I'm a true New York Times admirer and defender.

37:40Ben Smith:But, you know, a lot of it is still the person with the tiny mic. And I just think this is like such a thing. Everything is constantly conversation. Everything is back and forthness. Everything is trying to one-up each other and impress each other, et cetera. everything is fluid and if you didn't see it, it didn't exist. And people are like, oh, why didn't the mainstream media cover this? And it turned out the only reason they say that is because they just didn't go bother to look at literally any website and wish it would have been right there on the thing. These are all the markers of a sort of oral dominated society where everything is evanescent and it talks and then it's gone a second later and you move on.

38:18And the thing that we're all talking about, it's the character of the day or whatever. This is the landscape we're in. And podcasts are almost like a small part of it. I almost think they're almost harking back more to the literate tradition because at least in the literate tradition, it was carving out a time of your day or you're like, I'm gonna allocate time to this with more or less no distractions. And I'm gonna, in this case, listen to people talk instead of read. Maybe podcasts are the sort of the holdout in some elements of like what we might call like patterns of literacy.

38:50Ben Smith:Joe, you're so optimistic about everything. Are you optimistic about the end of literacy? No, I'm like a doomer. I'm like, I scroll at night and I look at my phone and I'm like, oh God, sorry. But I don't know, like on media things specifically, look, I like doing what I do and I hope to do it for a long time.

39:08Liz Hoffman:Well, I think we are out of time. That is a fun place to leave it. I think as they say, we did not interview you. We were in conversation with. This was great. I loved being in conversation. That was fantastic. Thank you, Joe. That was fun. And thanks for helping us get compound interest off the ground. Thanks, Joe.

39:40Liz Hoffman:All right, Ben, what'd you think?

39:41Ben Smith:I mean, I am struck by Joe's optimism. You know, I basically share it. It's hard to have been in media this long and kind of ridden these waves without having a sense of excitement about what's next. And he's been just sort of like let his curiosity about the world just kind of pull him forward in a way that I find very impressive and kind of inspiring, honestly.

40:01Liz Hoffman:Yeah, I know a lot about morality now because I ordered a book that he wouldn't stop talking about on Twitter. And it's actually like, it's interesting. And I think like a real challenge for people in our business. I mean, I didn't even start my career. The early middle innings of my career, I was writing earnings stories. I was waking up at 4.30 in the morning. I was going into the Wall Street Journal's offices in Midtown when it was still dark. and I was reading press releases and writing stories that then were printed on paper. And the whole thing just seems, like you said, just like a different age.

40:29Liz Hoffman:And I guess the fact that we're talking to him on our podcast shows that there is a real conversation happening. And obviously we do it. It happens a lot on our stages. But there is something, there's something like ambient about it.

40:40Ben Smith:Do you have nostalgia for the sort of more buttoned down, printy, deadline oriented, switches on, switches off media that you came up in, the financial media in particular? Or do you think we're doing a better job now?

40:51Liz Hoffman:Not at all nostalgic for it. People ask me a lot about kind of what's different at Semaphore. And I say a lot of things, but actually just the psychological unchaining from that 4 p.m. page one deadline is just like actually massive. And I'm sure people at legacy media organizations with print arms will tell you that they don't operate that way. I assure you that they psychologically do. Not nostalgic for it, but I do think it informed kind of the reporter that I am, which is that like when you start working at a newspaper, your story is immediately at the bottom of a birdcage. You know, just like it didn't happen.

41:20Liz Hoffman:Yeah. I don't know. It's maybe informed the way I kind of think about coverage, which is, well, just write it again.

41:26Ben Smith:Yeah, it's funny what he said about orality, because that's actually always been true of the Daily News product. It just exists for the moment. It's not relevant or comprehensible five years later.

41:34Liz Hoffman:Yeah. And finance, I think, is in some ways really adapted to that in that markets open all the time, moves every day, and there's a story every day about what it did. But, I mean, it's incredibly, it's a numeric kind of reporting fundamentally. And you're saying, okay, how does this number compare to that number? And so it always is kind of like living in some time lapse and the medium and the media can change. But I think did Google make more money this year than it did last year is still a question that people are going to care about. It's not a question that I'm going to get up and, you know, read a press release and write 400 words on in the morning.

42:05Ben Smith:Well, actually, we have a meeting after this to discuss that.

42:10Liz Hoffman:Surprise for everything, Ben. Well, that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening to another episode of Compound Interest. Our show is produced by Josh Billinson, with special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Catherine Bilgore, Claire Einstein, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kaur, Valana Wang, Garrett Wiley, Stephanie Chang, and Daniel Haift. Our engineer is Bob Mallory, and our theme music is by Steve Bone. If you want more Semaphore, you can sign up for our email newsletters in your inbox at semaphore.com. And listen and subscribe to Compound Address wherever you get your podcasts.

42:48You