Encore: Inside Joe Weisenthal's brain

Summary

Channels with Peter Kafka

Episode: Encore: Inside Joe Weisenthal's Brain
Date: July 1, 2026
Host: Peter Kafka (Vox Media Podcast Network)
Guest: Joe Weisenthal (Co-host of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast)
Special Mention: Tracy Alloway (Joe’s Odd Lots co-host, occasional participant in conversation)

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the life, philosophy, and career trajectory of Joe Weisenthal, the widely regarded “Internet’s favorite finance geek” and co-host of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. Peter Kafka explores how Joe’s passion for demystifying business, economics, and markets has not only become the nucleus of his brand but also how his “always-on,” deeply curious approach fits the internet era. The conversation covers everything from Joe’s beginnings in digital media, his experiences through financial crises, and lessons from building a personal brand inside large organizations, to his opinions on solo media empires like Substack, and even a detour into his love for country music songwriting.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The "Odd Lots" Approach: Demystifying Business & Markets

• Odd Lots' Editorial Freedom & Format

  • Joe describes Odd Lots as essentially a show about “whatever Tracy and I are interested in now” (04:10), shoehorning a broad range of topics into business, finance, and economics.
  • Emphasis on editorial freedom, allowing exploration of unconventional or tangentially related topics (e.g., the technology of rope or Venezuelan bond restructuring) (04:49).

• The Smart-Stupid, Stupid-Smart Question

  • Odd Lots strives to ask basic, clarifying questions—“the sort of smart-stupid question or the stupid-smart question”—that professionals might skip, making complex topics accessible without dumbing down for either professionals or lay audiences (09:01).
  • Joe: “There’s almost no limit to how simple you can go in these conversations. And people appreciate it from afar.” (09:11)

• Learning with the Audience

  • Both hosts are open about what they don’t know, modeling intellectual humility and letting listeners “learn along with us” (43:12).

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Joe’s Path: From Blogging to Bloomberg

• Origins in Digital Media

  • Joe’s entry into journalism was accidental: moving to NYC for a basic finance data entry job, then starting a blog simply to keep writing and following the news (14:34).
  • He never had a master plan: “I had no idea and I’ve never thought that way... I never operationalized that interest or thought, oh, I could take this interest, and that could be a career.” (13:52)

• How the Great Financial Crisis Shaped His Approach

  • Hired at Business Insider right as Lehman collapsed in 2008. Realized quickly that “there’s no experts” in a crisis (18:12).
  • “Very quickly you realize there’s no experts. Right. The most experienced person only knows marginally more than the least experienced person.” (19:15)
  • Coverage thrived on immediacy and agility, often with little or no editorial “layer,” which Joe credits with building both his skills and his brand.

• Why Joe Never Left for a Substack

  • Despite being a textbook example of a personal media brand, Joe remains happily at Bloomberg, citing a “natural editorial home,” institutional support, high compensation, and alignment with Bloomberg’s core audiences (39:26).
  • Notable quote: “I don’t really believe any of those numbers” (referring to the idea he’d earn far more on his own). “I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to deal with renting studio… It is really easy and nice to be within a large organization, a large organization that has a lot of resources, and again, a large organization whose whole mission so fits with ours.” (41:09)

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Media Evolution: Social, Velocity, and Audience Engagement

• The Twitter/Internet Personality

  • Joe’s persona—curious, opinionated, energized by volatility—fits the Internet era perfectly. Peter Kafka: “I kind of think that Twitter and then very much the podcast are things built for your personality in particular.” (09:16)

• Why Velocity Matters

  • Joe and Peter reminisce about the Business Insider days, emphasizing how velocity and lack of bureaucracy enabled both mistakes and rapid corrections—akin to talk radio (27:53).
  • “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.” — Peter, paraphrasing the BI ethos (17:51)

• On the Critique of Clickbait

  • Joe: “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.” (27:17)

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The Science of a Hit Podcast

• Finding the Perfect Guest

  • The podcast is “always about who is that perfect guest who is deeply knowledgeable and can enthusiastically explain it in clear English.” (11:37)

• Persistence Pays: Six Years Before Odd Lots Broke Out

  • The show didn’t take off for several years, but the lack of attention from management was “the biggest gift” because it allowed them to learn and pivot without pressure (34:31).

• Podcast vs. TV

  • Joe’s takeaway: TV is a ton of effort for little output; podcasting offers more depth and fits his talents better (32:26).
  • “I just like doing the podcast so much more. …That was sort of the beginning of, no, this is—The podcast is really what I wanted to do.” (34:06)

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How to Talk About Wild News Cycles (e.g., Trump Tariffs)

• When Rationality Goes Out the Window

  • Kafka: “Everything that you would normally bring to bear kind of doesn’t work because you’re working with some kind of unknowable psychology.” (45:17)
  • Joe: Leans on “good intuitions about guests” and focuses on practical realities—e.g., what impacted businesses are actually doing in uncertain conditions (45:26, 47:13).

• Markets, Politics & the Illusion of Control

  • Joe’s insight: “Businesses are incredibly resilient… the ones that exist are extremely well run and they find ways to improvise and pivot quickly.” (49:22)
  • On the tariff regime: “It’s not that [tariffs] necessarily mean consumer prices automatically go up in lockstep, but that doing business in America becomes harder. So it’s like throwing some sand in the gears of business. And I think that is true.” (52:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On His Nature (“Always On”):

  • Joe: “…I think I’ll just keep… I have to be posting and I have to be doing newsletters and I have to be writing.” (03:05)
  • Peter: “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.” (03:14)

• On Personal Brand vs. Corporate Platform:

  • Peter: “You are the thing that all the media companies say they want, which is a brand.” (38:27)
  • Joe: “It is really easy and nice to be within a large organization, a large organization that has a lot of resources and again, a large organization whose whole mission so fits with ours…” (41:26)

• On Process & Mistakes:

  • “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…” — Paraphrased by Peter (17:51)
  • Joe: “I thought it was good. I thought it was Informative. I thought we were bringing…” (27:23)

• On American Business Resilience:

  • “People may underestimate the resilience of well-run American companies where the people are paid a lot of money to deal with these disruptions.” (50:22)

• On Country Music Dreams:

  • Joe (on getting a song noticed in Nashville): “That’s all I want. I would, like, sacrifice my entire journalism career just to have one of my songs be played by a recording artist.” (55:07)
  • Joe: “If anyone out there, please just find an artist who will perform one of my songs. That’s all I want.” (56:05)

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Timestamps For Key Segments

• Odd Lots Podcast Style & Audience – 03:55–06:24
• Demystifying Complexity—The Smart-Stupid Question – 06:24–09:01
• Joe’s Career Origins & Blogging Era – 12:44–16:00
• Living the News Cycle at Business Insider – 17:51–19:15
• Building a Media Brand & "Velocity" – 27:53–28:35
• Moving to Bloomberg & TV Experience – 29:03–34:13
• Odd Lots Podcast: Origin Story & Slow Burn to Success – 34:31–36:14
• Why Not Run a Substack? – 39:23–41:43
• Tariffs, Trump, and the Limits of Economic Forecasting – 45:17–53:57
• On Songwriting & Country Music – 54:17–56:12

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Final Takeaways

• Joe Weisenthal embodies the modern journalist: relentlessly curious, unafraid of learning in public, and skillful at translating complexity for a wide audience.
• The strength of Odd Lots lies in its host’s commitment to intellectual humility and fascination with how things work, paired with the resources and credibility of a major institution like Bloomberg.
• Joe’s career is a model of serendipity, persistence, and the value of niche expertise built for the modern internet and podcasting environment—but he’s fully aware of his good fortune and is content right where he is.

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For more, listen to the full episode for insights on business, journalism, financial crises, and—if you’re lucky—a country music lyric or two.

Transcript

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Joe Weisenthal]

Now.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Mint Mobile Ad Voice]

of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes me slow when Network.

[Peter Kafka]

From the Vox Media Podcast network this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That's me today. I'm talking to Joe Wiesenthal, 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. And 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 social media era. So we've talked about how he's turned that mindset into a career. Oh, 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 want to sound smart. Okay, here's me and Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal. I'm here with Joe Wiesenthal. 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 Ed Bloomberg and he publishes the Odd Lots newsletter. Welcome to Channels.

[Tracy Alloway]

Nice to see you, Peter. How are you doing?

[Peter Kafka]

I'm old and tired.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Likewise. Yeah, I feel that. Likewise.

[Peter Kafka]

It's February. It's been a long month.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's been a long month. It's been a busy start to the year.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah, it's. But you love this stuff. You thrive on the news cycle more than maybe anyone I know in journalism.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It is really energizing.

[Tracy Alloway]

I've always loathed it or disliked it

[Joe Weisenthal]

when I see journalists complain about the news or.

[Peter Kafka]

I don't know, we like to complain about everything.

[Tracy Alloway]

I know, I know, I get it. But it's like, this is why we're here. This is. This is why we wake up in the morning.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is why we got into this. And so I do find it. I do find it energizing. I find it easier to wake up in the morning during periods of high volatility and so forth.

[Peter Kafka]

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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I think that's true. I think that's probably true. You know, I sometimes talk.

[Tracy Alloway]

I was like, oh, you know, 10

[Joe Weisenthal]

more years, then maybe I'll do like a retirement job and just teach journalism somewhere or something like that. And then I think to myself, but. But I'd have to be posting and I have to be doing newsletters and I have to be writing.

[Peter Kafka]

Checking your Twitter.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, checking Twitter, et cetera. So I think I'll just keep.

[Peter Kafka]

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. But give people a sense. If they haven't heard Odd Lots, what they get in a. In a. In a. In an episode of Odd Lots, it's you and your co host, Tracey Alloway.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, that's right. It's.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We have a really nice sort of wide berth at Bloomberg. They've really given us extraordinary editorial freedom. And I would say the only thing that the podcast is about is in

[Tracy Alloway]

the broad sense, things that me and

[Joe Weisenthal]

Tracy are interested in now.

[Tracy Alloway]

It's. We say, then we say it's about

[Joe Weisenthal]

business, finance and economics, or markets, finance and economics, whatever that is.

[Tracy Alloway]

But there aren't many stories that can't

[Joe Weisenthal]

sort of be shoehorned into one of those categories.

[Peter Kafka]

Spoken like a true business reporter.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, exactly.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Everything sort of falls into that.

[Tracy Alloway]

But you know, on the podcast, we

[Joe Weisenthal]

recently, 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. He's good, wasn't he who said that the utilities are overbuilding?

[Tracy Alloway]

But then, you know, we did a great episode a couple weeks ago with

[Joe Weisenthal]

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. So.

[Peter Kafka]

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. So what is your audience? What do they want from you?

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I've always thought, just zooming

[Joe Weisenthal]

out in general, you know, thinking about business journalism. You know, you mentioned people aren't probably gonna 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

[Tracy Alloway]

of humility that the people who are especially the professionals, by and large, they're

[Joe Weisenthal]

never gonna like read an article and then it's like, oh, look, this company

[Peter Kafka]

had good big opportunity in rope. I'm gonna get gold long on rope.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, they know about these companies, etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

So I sort of think, you know,

[Joe Weisenthal]

I want to be humble basically and I just want to be interesting.

[Tracy Alloway]

And so interesting can be something that

[Joe Weisenthal]

maybe helps them inform, you know, helps them see a perspective or sometimes inform their view on a possible investment, etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

But it's also just things that the

[Joe Weisenthal]

people who are of this mindset might like to listen to.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah. Talk more about that mindset because I think it's both them and you and they sync up pretty well and it's. I have some ideas about what it is, but you tell me what you think that mindset is.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, first of all, I think

[Joe Weisenthal]

it took us a while to find our, 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 like listeners really started picking up in a real way such that became our full time job.

[Tracy Alloway]

But I think there is this interest

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right now I think that there are some, you know, even here. So you could imagine someone who is

[Joe Weisenthal]

maybe a buyer or a supply chain manager for Walmart, et cetera, even in

[Tracy Alloway]

this space, or even expert. I imagine there are lots of aspects

[Joe Weisenthal]

that they don't think about that much. So for example, you think about, okay, 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I think there's just a lot of things in the business world that

[Joe Weisenthal]

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. And 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

But then if you think about this

[Joe Weisenthal]

big pool of people who have weighed in on quantitative easing, etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

And then you shrink down that pool to the number of people that know

[Joe Weisenthal]

which bonds the Fed actually selects to buy, I think it shrinks quite a bit.

[Tracy Alloway]

So you hear, have this big abstract idea, lots of people, it's like, okay,

[Joe Weisenthal]

the Fed is swapping bonds for liquidity, etc. Well, how do they do that? How do they make that decision?

[Tracy Alloway]

How do each month, how do they

[Joe Weisenthal]

sort of know which securities to go out and purchase? I think actually you find very few

[Tracy Alloway]

people have actually thought about some of these questions. And so what we want to do is we, we can.

[Joe Weisenthal]

What we've found, I guess, is that

[Tracy Alloway]

with a lot of topics we can

[Joe Weisenthal]

appeal to both the professionals and sort of non professionals who are just interested by asking some of these very basic questions about how does this work now? How does this work? What does this term mean? I want to determine.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, and I don't know, there's. We sometimes call them like the sort

[Joe Weisenthal]

of smart, stupid question or the stupid smart question because they're just terms and things we use all the time.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I.

[Peter Kafka]

Wait, explain that to me. Or is that really true exactly.

[Tracy Alloway]

Or what is this term?

[Joe Weisenthal]

What are we actually talking about here?

[Tracy Alloway]

And there's almost no limit to how

[Joe Weisenthal]

simple you can go in these conversations. And people appreciate it from afar.

[Peter Kafka]

I kind of think that Twitter and then very much the podcast are like things built for your personality in particular, where like you're kind of an autodidact. Right. Self didact.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Right.

[Peter Kafka]

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 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, what'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 you'll get. They'll get criticized for like, well, you're the payments processor guy. Why are you pining 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, Business, I think so.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, the one real sort of

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 and no one had heard of this guy, right? And they would start posting about how this thing that a bunch of people are interested in, how it worked, and it's like, oh, who's this guy? He's free.

[Tracy Alloway]

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

[Joe Weisenthal]

getting quoted in the newspaper before, but

[Tracy Alloway]

this guy's in it and he's explaining

[Joe Weisenthal]

how his work works, right?

[Tracy Alloway]

And so, you know, it's 50%, a little bit of a joke at this

[Joe Weisenthal]

point, but also 50% real. You know, almost always we talk about our. We always refer the perfect guest, and now we have the perfect guest to talk about, so forth. It's sort of become just a little bit of a tongue in cheek joke that we repeat every time.

[Tracy Alloway]

But it's also real in the sense that the main thing that we're trying

[Joe Weisenthal]

to accomplish with every episode is finding the perfect guest.

[Tracy Alloway]

Because there's no.

[Joe Weisenthal]

People sometimes ask us like, or 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

It's Always about who is that perfect

[Joe Weisenthal]

guest who is deeply knowledgeable and can enthusiastically explain it in clear English, which is what we're always going for.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I do think that is the

[Joe Weisenthal]

overlap between the sort of Twitter mentality of who is this person who he had never seen before?

[Tracy Alloway]

And again, I think that sort of

[Joe Weisenthal]

faded from Twitter for a bunch of obvious reasons.

[Tracy Alloway]

But that has been, I would say,

[Joe Weisenthal]

the sort of one of the driving.

[Peter Kafka]

I mean, there's a ton of people on Twitter now, but those tend to be usually grifters.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, yeah. There's tons of them who claim to be experts. It's also sad. You know, you come across people that

[Joe Weisenthal]

have, you know, some niche interest, but everyone's been so poisoned by politics. You read that, you read their.

[Tracy Alloway]

It's like, no, I want to see

[Joe Weisenthal]

you post about your field and your industry and not you've, you know, retweeted conspiracy theories and stuff like that.

[Peter Kafka]

So 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 2005, 2006, just to say how old we are. When you were@paid content.org Terrible name, very influential early.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Can we talk about business name business?

[Peter Kafka]

Well, that was a very valuable lesson I learned, which is the name does not matter at all once you establish what your thing is. Yeah, just is, do people identify the name with what you're making?

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, no, we were like, so for

[Joe Weisenthal]

a little while we were competitors because

[Tracy Alloway]

I was paid content, covering mostly the

[Joe Weisenthal]

earnings reports of publicly traded media companies of various sorts and also funding rounds for digital startups.

[Tracy Alloway]

And that's more, that's a big part

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Peter Kafka]

Oh, that's good. In my memory, I was like advocating for you internally, but I've got no idea. It was a long time ago. But, 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?

[Tracy Alloway]

I, I, I truly, I truly say

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 worked. I was a substitute teacher for a while.

[Peter Kafka]

You grew up in Michigan, went to school in Texas. Austin.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I lived in Michigan, moved to New York because there were a few other steps.

[Tracy Alloway]

I lived in Illinois for a while,

[Joe Weisenthal]

lived in Vermont for a while. I went to college in, in Austin though.

[Tracy Alloway]

And then a bunch of friends were

[Joe Weisenthal]

moving to New York, just moved to New York, sort of burnt out of Austin and not going anywhere.

[Tracy Alloway]

And a friend of mine, he had a.

[Joe Weisenthal]

He had a family portfolio management company. And I said, I just need a job, like get me out of Austin, can I? And I did some data entry for him.

[Tracy Alloway]

I.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It was called an analyst, but it was like glorified data entry. That was. 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

[Tracy Alloway]

because, you know, I was in a.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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. And 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And eventually it led to a few writing.

[Peter Kafka]

Did you have a finance slash business head slash ambition? Is this stuff that you were inherently interested in?

[Tracy Alloway]

I got, yeah. I mean, I got. I did. I wouldn't say I had an ambition. I was interested in it, you know,

[Joe Weisenthal]

in high school was during the dot com bubble. And 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 we made a bunch of money. And I actually didn't lose it all. I just lost a good chunk of it.

[Tracy Alloway]

And so it was always something.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is actually something I learned later on.

[Tracy Alloway]

It was always something I was interested in.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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, you know, I didn't grow up in New York. None of my family was in the space. I didn't know anyone who had like gone to work on Wall street or anything like that.

[Tracy Alloway]

So I didn't have Any path groove. The only thing that I knew about

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

But I didn't really know anything about

[Joe Weisenthal]

how they got there or anything like that.

[Tracy Alloway]

And so it was just.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I never operationalized that interest or thought, oh, I could take this interest, and that could be a career that I could have.

[Peter Kafka]

And so you're bouncing around in New York randomish.

[Tracy Alloway]

I did.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I was doing temp work, like going into offices, helping change the light bulbs

[Peter Kafka]

and stuff like that. So I can't remember if you and I worked in the same office for. At all.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I think for like a month maybe. Maybe it's two weeks.

[Tracy Alloway]

I think, actually maybe before my start

[Joe Weisenthal]

date at what was became Business Insider. I think you had already announced that you were leaving.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah. So maybe we barely overlap. But the idea was you were going to run or work for a site. I think it was called Clusterstock.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Talk about bad names.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah. Again, if it worked, it would have been a good name. But the idea was you were going to be Henry Bly. We were covering technology and the Internet at what was then called Silicon Alley Insider. You were going to work on the new business blog to cover earnings, et cetera. I left. And then within a few years, you became this thing, the stalwart. And like, your. 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 gonna say a bunch of shit. Some of it's gonna turn out to be right, some of it won't. We're just gonna keep going. You will always find something interesting that we have to say. We are not bullshitting you.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

But we are also consciously entertaining you.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, I think that's right. You put it well.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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, like, build a site that more or less matched that velocity.

[Tracy Alloway]

There was just so much news, you

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And the nice thing about a crisis,

[Joe Weisenthal]

I think, is that very quickly you realize there's no experts. Right. No one has really been a lot.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, there's people.

[Peter Kafka]

No one's bill for the entire Western financial system might be melting down.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, people have read the history

[Joe Weisenthal]

and obviously there are senior journalists who understand regulations way better, but no one had seen that.

[Peter Kafka]

I remember sitting in the office and Henry was sitting next to us. I remember if you were there or not, he goes, gentlemen, you may never see this again. Goldman Sachs was. It looked like it was going to zero.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

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. Like, no one knows what that means.

[Tracy Alloway]

No one had seen it at all. And so at that moment, I think it's really. It's a leveling. Right. It's a leveling in terms of the

[Joe Weisenthal]

most experienced person only knows marginally more than the least experienced person.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I also think I was very

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I always think to myself, you

[Joe Weisenthal]

know, 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 know, you'd be like the fifth in line to say, cover the Fed or something like that or cover whatever.

[Tracy Alloway]

And we were just thrown into the.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Thrown into the pool in those years.

[Tracy Alloway]

And

[Joe Weisenthal]

there's this buffet of news and we're just posting it as it happened. Another thing I sort of learned at that time, that was very helpful. I didn't have any 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And it clicked to me very early

[Joe Weisenthal]

on that they were roughly in the same.

[Peter Kafka]

Yes.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Business as we are.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That they're just.

[Tracy Alloway]

And it's, it's only it stayed the

[Joe Weisenthal]

same, which is they send out an email report. Right. A sell side analyst, they have a new call on Tesla or whatever. The person receiving that has a hundred different things that they could be opening.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Their inbox is filled, they have tweets, they have headlines, they, whatever. Their job is to grab attention.

[Peter Kafka]

Yep.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Their job is to create something. You know, they, they're in the clickbait game too.

[Peter Kafka]

This was 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 after that. But I remember talking to him when we were at Silicon Valley Insider saying 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 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. You're going to get rewarded for saying this is great, this is terrible, this is going to happen. This is not going to happen.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. And so I learned from that, you know, that these analysts, they were right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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

[Tracy Alloway]

in a way that, you know, I

[Joe Weisenthal]

learned to write a little bit from

[Tracy Alloway]

reading them because I figured, well, the

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

So this was another.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 Wall Street 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, etc. And so we do things like aggressively screenshot charts from the analysts and just post them. And Pete, there was a lot of anxiety at first about that and. But most of the banks liked it. A few complained and filed takedown notices and stuff.

[Peter Kafka]

But I usually ask permission. But they're usually happy to have their chart published. They don't want the entire report published.

[Tracy Alloway]

Report published, but most of the time they were pretty happy.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And the analysts of course, loved it when they had their reports or at least part of it or spotlighted, etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

But because we were a blog or

[Joe Weisenthal]

whatever it was at the time, we

[Tracy Alloway]

could just do that in a way that took several years, I would say,

[Joe Weisenthal]

for the legacy media entities at the

[Tracy Alloway]

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

[Joe Weisenthal]

or New edit could quickly catch up or in some ways supersede what the people had been at it.

[Peter Kafka]

Do you think that exists now? There's a leveling now. And so as you look across all the industries you cover and you 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know what? I, I think it's a little different. I mean, I, One of the things

[Joe Weisenthal]

that I ask myself sometimes is when I look around the landscape, is there any place where, oh, they're doing something really cool and I'm not, you know, or I wish I were there. And by and large answer is not really. I mean there's all kinds of media properties that I admire, et cetera, but

[Tracy Alloway]

there's not really, you know, I, I

[Peter Kafka]

even meant beyond outside of media. Like whether it's like.

[Tracy Alloway]

So the one thing I was gonna. 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

[Joe Weisenthal]

of become the X, to use a Henry Blodgett word on some X E.

[Peter Kafka]

It's the old Wall street term.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

For the dominant analyst, the one who

[Tracy Alloway]

just sort of, you know what? I'm going to own this lane, I'm

[Joe Weisenthal]

going to own this topic and I

[Tracy Alloway]

do think, you know, someone could do

[Joe Weisenthal]

it and the people do do it

[Tracy Alloway]

and like, you know what, I'm just

[Joe Weisenthal]

going to talk all the time about semiconductors and I'm just going to post all the data as it is or

[Tracy Alloway]

you know, the person who becomes the,

[Joe Weisenthal]

the, they just, you know, we're just going to focus on Wall street purchases of single family homes or something like that.

[Tracy Alloway]

So I think, I think there are

[Joe Weisenthal]

opportunities to carve out land for someone sufficiently motivated still.

[Peter Kafka]

I do want to come back to Substack, but is it 2012 with the, the Times Magazine profile of you?

[Joe Weisenthal]

That was 2012.

[Peter Kafka]

Joe Eisenthal versus the Internet.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Was that the title? Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

The photos, you, you're awake and in

[Joe Weisenthal]

bed with the laptop, by the way,

[Peter Kafka]

it's obviously staged because your wife is foe sleeping next to you.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Clearly people thought though that that was a real photo.

[Peter Kafka]

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 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 4 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. Yeah, really. And there were other articles like that. Not about you saying, like, bloggers in the dark, bloggers 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 getting the jobs number out before anybody else. But anyone who actually cares about that jobs number has a Bloomberg terminal, and they get that jobs terminal before Joe even tweets it. So 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, maybe less. You're not quite as frenetic as you were. Right. You're not blogging. You're.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You're doing a Children now, so there's no way.

[Peter Kafka]

And you do a podcast a few times a week, right? In a newsletter a few times a week.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So I definitely don't go back and think anything I was doing was fundamentally wrong.

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, there are things, you know,

[Joe Weisenthal]

in retrospect, or maybe I was comment. You know, there are certainly articles I wrote that don't hold up or I wish I had known more, but by

[Tracy Alloway]

and large, I thought it was. I still think it was the right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It was the right approach.

[Peter Kafka]

That cadence always on the.

[Tracy Alloway]

I just want to, you know, this

[Joe Weisenthal]

is going to sound so obnoxious. Great, but.

[Tracy Alloway]

And look, getting profiled it in 202012

[Joe Weisenthal]

in the new York Times, it was incredible, et cetera.

[Tracy Alloway]

The only thing that I. The only thing I.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

I don't think it was just. I sort of resented a little bit

[Joe Weisenthal]

this idea that we were just high velocity clickbait. We certainly wanted clicks and we certainly

[Tracy Alloway]

put spin on the ball.

[Peter Kafka]

And you're certainly high velocity.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We're certainly high velocity.

[Tracy Alloway]

But I truly think, you know, I truly thought and still think that all

[Joe Weisenthal]

of us in that environment, I was proud of the capital J journalism that we were doing.

[Tracy Alloway]

I thought it was good.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I thought it was Informative. I thought we were bringing.

[Peter Kafka]

I think what he's poking at is like where you would go. I can't remember what the example was with jobs report or some report where you go, calamity. And then you write a new thing five minutes later because you 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. I think you said something to that effect. Our audience likes that. And then on a normal journalist would say, why don't you just figure out the right thing and then publish that.

[Tracy Alloway]

I think, you know, look, if.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I mean, look, there's. That's not wrong either.

[Tracy Alloway]

I think if you look at the market itself.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I mean, the market, say the first. Within the first hour or the first 15 minutes of a report is always whiplash.

[Tracy Alloway]

I think if you look at CNBC

[Joe Weisenthal]

or, or any financial tv, cnbc, Bloomberg, there's a.

[Tracy Alloway]

A range of opinions. It takes.

[Peter Kafka]

The numbers came out, they beat their. 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, different.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's just that we were sort of doing talk radio. I mean, yeah, we were doing talk radio in the written text.

[Peter Kafka]

And then you go from there to Bloomberg, which at the time confused me a little bit because Bloomberg was very staid, had very staid reputation. You 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 the. You did you go so you could go on tv?

[Joe Weisenthal]

So I'll tell you the story which is. I think so I went to Bloomberg in October 2014.

[Tracy Alloway]

I think they had first reached out

[Joe Weisenthal]

to me sometime in 2013 about a TV thing.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, I think this sort of the.

[Joe Weisenthal]

The gap between. At the time Bloomberg sort of stayed approach and me. I mean, that was part of the appeal for them, right?

[Tracy Alloway]

They wanted.

[Peter Kafka]

We're gonna get this weirdo in.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We're gonna get this digital person who gets the Internet and all that stuff and very. And has a big social media presence. I think that was part of the. Part of the appeal for them for sure.

[Tracy Alloway]

The original pitch was tv. And to your point, like, I didn't

[Joe Weisenthal]

have any aspirations for tv. I like the Internet And I didn't watch very much tv by and large. You know, we had it on in the office, but. But I never thought that was the medium of the future.

[Tracy Alloway]

We had, you know, we had some chats and then eventually the sort of

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And the other thing that was going

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 you Clusterstock. But then, you know, there was, by that point there was sports, there was lifestyle, there was career advice, et cetera.

[Tracy Alloway]

And throughout summer of 2014, I sort

[Joe Weisenthal]

of had this decision to make, which

[Tracy Alloway]

is if I was going to stay

[Joe Weisenthal]

in the market's land, 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Or if I wanted to sort of

[Joe Weisenthal]

stay in a place of prominence at Business Insider, I would have to start broadening my interest, which I didn't really want to do.

[Tracy Alloway]

So there were already some structural things

[Joe Weisenthal]

at PI by that point that made it a slightly less natural home for me.

[Peter Kafka]

Were you concerned about business owners prospects? And in retrospect, Henry said, well, there are multiple times where we nearly couldn't hit payroll by 2014.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Not really.

[Tracy Alloway]

I thought it was great. It's just it was becoming a publication

[Joe Weisenthal]

that was different from the one that I joined.

[Tracy Alloway]

It was also, you know, I loved posting directly to the site.

[Joe Weisenthal]

But by 2014, there was editors and all that stuff. I hated editors, you know, so then

[Tracy Alloway]

I was already a little bit sort of thinking about what my next thing

[Joe Weisenthal]

was, but there was nothing else obvious out there.

[Tracy Alloway]

And then the reason that the Bloomberg

[Joe Weisenthal]

opportunity appealed to me was

[Tracy Alloway]

if someone,

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

But if, and if the TV alone thing, that wouldn't appeal to me.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Cause I didn't want to leave digital. But the opportunity for both, I was

[Tracy Alloway]

like, okay, if I don't say yes

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And even though I didn't really aspire to do tv, I thought not many

[Joe Weisenthal]

people get a chance to Co host a TV show. So just for the life experience.

[Peter Kafka]

So what did you learn about TV during that experience? Or what did you learn about yourself doing tv?

[Joe Weisenthal]

I mean, I did have fun doing it. It was.

[Tracy Alloway]

It was fun.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Live TV is fun.

[Tracy Alloway]

From my perspective, TV is a lot

[Joe Weisenthal]

of effort for a modest amount of journalistic output. I mean, you know, the combing your hair and putting on a tie and getting makeup done and all of these things. What?

[Peter Kafka]

A lot of people are involved.

[Joe Weisenthal]

A lot of people are involved.

[Tracy Alloway]

And then, you know, and then you

[Joe Weisenthal]

have a conversation with someone that maybe lasts six or seven minutes or something like that, sometimes longer. You can do depth on tv.

[Peter Kafka]

But I will say the Bloomberg, the people who are on air at Bloomberg are very smart.

[Joe Weisenthal]

They're very smart.

[Peter Kafka]

They're not talking heads. They're not just people who can. No, totally strong jaw who can deliver.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Tracy Alloway]

But it is a lot of time

[Joe Weisenthal]

involved for what ends up being a fairly modest public footprint.

[Tracy Alloway]

The sort of light bulb moment for

[Joe Weisenthal]

me when thinking about, I guess I think it was in 2021. So by that point we could back up at some point and 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

But then the head of TV at

[Joe Weisenthal]

the time had this very good suggestion,

[Tracy Alloway]

which he said, you know, on days

[Joe Weisenthal]

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. Like, ah, it's a very good idea, very obvious. And that was really nice.

[Tracy Alloway]

But that was the moment I realized

[Joe Weisenthal]

those weren't very sad. As you know, you have this really in depth conversation with someone right now,

[Peter Kafka]

let's do the dung.

[Tracy Alloway]

And then a week later you do

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

And that was sort of the beginning of.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, this is. The podcast is really what I wanted to do.

[Peter Kafka]

You were doing it in 2015. You said it didn't click. 2021.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

Six years of it not clicking.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

Why are you doing it for six years if it's not clicking? Why is Bloomberg letting you do it for six years?

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

We did have a few. You know, I may be exaggerating a little bit.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

People were actually starting to listen a little bit. By late 2018, 2019, we started getting

[Joe Weisenthal]

momentum, but we really went years with just. It was cricket. And the only reason we survived is because.

[Peter Kafka]

Why were you doing it if there wasn't an audience?

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Peter Kafka]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I know we're not supposed to say that.

[Peter Kafka]

This is very hard work, Jill. This is the hardest work there is.

[Tracy Alloway]

But it was nice. I mean, especially, you know, you're in

[Joe Weisenthal]

a studio, it's relaxing. There's not cameras all over you and stuff. Oh, the other thing, too.

[Tracy Alloway]

So when we started, you know, I

[Joe Weisenthal]

mentioned we have an episode coming out about the history of rope. Most of our episodes were like that in the beginning, so we were sort of consciously off the news. It's like, let's just do sort of curiosities and we'd talk about historical. We did multiple episodes, for example, in probably 2016, about the Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, there's not stuff that actually, I think to answer the question specifically,

[Joe Weisenthal]

the podcast allowed for a really good outlet to do to talk about things that were not in the news.

[Tracy Alloway]

And that was just really fun.

[Peter Kafka]

We'll be right back with Joe Weisenthal. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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[Peter Kafka]

And we're back. And so now you have this very successful thing. You guys had a big fancy 10 year party at Nine Orchard, pretty fancy hotel, very expensive. You are and you are the thing that all the media companies say they want, which is a brand. 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. Your 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? It seems like we're in a moment right now that is really built for your skills specifically.

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, the honest truth is that

[Joe Weisenthal]

Bloomberg is just, you know, first they pay really well. We'll stipulate that it's a really natural editorial home for us.

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, you know, you mentioned and

[Joe Weisenthal]

it's very real that lots of publications, they want to figure out a way where they could still be the umbrella brand means something, but also the individual sub brand also means something.

[Tracy Alloway]

There's such.

[Peter Kafka]

And they've been, they've historically they're very uneasy with that.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

What happens if we build up so and so then they go off and leave and then they've, they've taken all their brand equity and we're screwed. Now they, now they want the, the solo proprietor as a brand.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, the thing, it's a really good fit. I mean it's, I mean one of

[Joe Weisenthal]

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

[Tracy Alloway]

know, we, we do have this sort

[Joe Weisenthal]

of broad mass appeal and we have a lot of listeners who are not in finance at all.

[Tracy Alloway]

But because we also have a really

[Joe Weisenthal]

dedicated professional finance audience, like it's just a, it's a really natural home for us from an editorial perspective.

[Peter Kafka]

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. Presumably you've done those numbers.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I don't really believe any of those numbers.

[Tracy Alloway]

I genuinely don't. And when you think about the various, the costs involved and the number of people.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

I don't want to deal with renting student, you know, just like I really like it.

[Peter Kafka]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

I suppose I do.

[Peter Kafka]

I mean that's not a bad thing.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, it is really easy and nice to be within a large organization, a large organization that has a lot of resources and again, a large organization whose whole mission so fits with ours, you

[Tracy Alloway]

know, I could imagine, like I do

[Joe Weisenthal]

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,

[Tracy Alloway]

it just, it's a really nice Home. There's. And then there's so much expertise within

[Joe Weisenthal]

the organization about all these topics.

[Tracy Alloway]

Not all the time, but, you know,

[Joe Weisenthal]

we often have people from Bloomberg contribute in some way or reporters or, you know, there's all the Bloomberg BNF people who know all about energy, et cetera. It just fits really well editorially and that makes life very easy and makes it very natural.

[Peter Kafka]

Good for you for knowing what you want.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, it's what I want.

[Peter Kafka]

And also having what you want.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, it's pretty great.

[Peter Kafka]

Pretty good.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

What do you think? We've kind of talked about, 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 entertainment energy, you can talk about the history of rope.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

Is it your lack of knowledge that sort of makes them feel like they're learning? What is the appeal?

[Tracy Alloway]

I think, I mean, the lack of knowledge, you know, I do think helps,

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

But I think by and large it's

[Joe Weisenthal]

that the learning along with the audience, I think really is a big part of it. I think that's, 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. But also the sort of general public audience, the non professional audience, also feels like those questions land at a level,

[Tracy Alloway]

I think one of the things that

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 and we don't know what it is, we're going to stop.

[Peter Kafka]

You don't even explain yield curve to your audience. But if it's a more sophisticated or more esoteric term, and I think we

[Tracy Alloway]

have a pretty good intuition for, like

[Joe Weisenthal]

when we say wait, pause, what does that mean exactly?

[Tracy Alloway]

And that's the kind of thing that I think you can only sort of

[Joe Weisenthal]

build up with practice.

[Tracy Alloway]

And that way you can get the

[Joe Weisenthal]

sophisticated conversation without totally going over everyone's heads.

[Peter Kafka]

What happens when, when that level of sophistication comes up against, I'll just use shorthand, the Trump administration, but chaos, right? Where like, yeah, they're, you know, you go back to April of last year with tariff day, and, you know, there's whatever Donald Trump said about the rationale for the tariffs, there'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 he 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, everything that you would normally bring to bear kind of doesn't work because you're working with some kind of unknowable psychology.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I think the answer is having good intuitions about guests and having talked to people for years and years that we just trust.

[Tracy Alloway]

And again, yeah, like April 2025, that

[Joe Weisenthal]

was a wild time, etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

But the good news, that's very exciting

[Joe Weisenthal]

for you, I assume, right? I mean, we, we, we it.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I remember the week before Liberation

[Joe Weisenthal]

Day, and everyone could. Felt it was coming. I remember we talked to the team. It's 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

[Tracy Alloway]

think what we could do, and everyone had a million questions and no one

[Joe Weisenthal]

really knew what was going on, et cetera.

[Tracy Alloway]

But on any given day, I think

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Peter Kafka]

I was following it not nearly as closely as you were, but it seemed like the commentary 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 kind of beyond, like, they had to say, Donald Trump knows what he's doing, regardless of whether that was true or not. And 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?

[Tracy Alloway]

Well, so that's a good example of like, okay, it's one thing to say

[Joe Weisenthal]

this, none of this makes sense. This is going to wreck the economy.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So maybe that's the April 8th conversation.

[Tracy Alloway]

But by the April 15th conversation, you

[Joe Weisenthal]

know, 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?

[Tracy Alloway]

And then you could step out of

[Joe Weisenthal]

the, you know, step out of the conversation. Is this good, bad or wise? This 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

[Tracy Alloway]

world, which is not that different from

[Joe Weisenthal]

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?

[Tracy Alloway]

So in a way, we're really in our comfort zone there because we had

[Joe Weisenthal]

sort of realized that there's all kinds of people, supply chain people, et cetera, who can just answer, how is this working now? Yeah, how is this working now?

[Peter Kafka]

Not is it a good thing?

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. And so we certainly had those conversations, is it good?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Is it bad? Et cetera.

[Tracy Alloway]

But our best ones at the time was like, let's talk to the shipping guy we Talked to in 2020 about

[Joe Weisenthal]

what's happening at the ports.

[Tracy Alloway]

Let's talk to the retailer about how

[Joe Weisenthal]

they're placing the orders, et cetera, because

[Tracy Alloway]

they didn't have any, you know, they,

[Joe Weisenthal]

again, they don't have the luxury of debating it.

[Peter Kafka]

We'll be right back with Joe Weisenthal, but first award from a sponsor. And 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 tariffs exist. The economy has not collapsed. What did all of the people who thought the tariff regime was going to collapse the economy get wrong in April 2025?

[Tracy Alloway]

I would say a couple. I mean, so look, obviously they came

[Joe Weisenthal]

down to a significant degree, so I think you have to start there.

[Tracy Alloway]

But I think, I think, and again,

[Joe Weisenthal]

I would say it goes back to the lesson from 2020. Businesses are incredibly resilient, or many of them. American companies are incredibly dynamic and the ones that exist are extremely well run and they find ways to improvise and pivot quickly.

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, you probably remember having the same questions in, you know, early 2020.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's like, how is any restaurant going to save, stay in business, etc.

[Tracy Alloway]

But then the restaurants, like, you know what, we're going to shift to takeout and we're going to put a Plexiglas

[Joe Weisenthal]

and they were open the next week, right.

[Tracy Alloway]

And they found a way to do it. And all of the big firms, you know, they were pretty surprisingly agile in

[Joe Weisenthal]

retrospect in the midst of what was the biggest global coordinated shock in history, the pandemic.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I think I've, I've come to think this over time that you know,

[Joe Weisenthal]

people may underestimate the resilience of well,

[Peter Kafka]

you know, the well run American, well

[Joe Weisenthal]

run American companies where the people are paid a lot of money to deal with, deal with these disruptions.

[Peter Kafka]

Given that we're going to have a disruption again, who knows when. Yeah, we're going to have one. How are you going to use that thinking? Because what you want to, you want to over learn the, you don't want

[Joe Weisenthal]

to overlearn the lessons. That's right. It's really tough.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I do think over, I mean

[Joe Weisenthal]

the big lesson that probably 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, it's really hard to know

[Joe Weisenthal]

because the next big shock stock probably won't look like the last one in any respect.

[Tracy Alloway]

And there, you know, I do think,

[Joe Weisenthal]

okay, the resilience of American companies is a very important thing to internalize.

[Tracy Alloway]

There's nothing that can really, you know, company if you have like a broad

[Joe Weisenthal]

general economic downturn where spending really slows down sustained way dramatically, a lot of companies are going to go out of business regardless of how much elan the management team has and so forth.

[Tracy Alloway]

So, you know, there is a limit

[Joe Weisenthal]

to how to how much creativity can save you.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I also, by the Way, you know, I think it's important the story

[Joe Weisenthal]

of the tariffs is not over by any stretch.

[Tracy Alloway]

And one of the things, you know,

[Joe Weisenthal]

after the initial shock, they're all that you probably remember is like, are the tariffs going to set off a wave of inflation? Was the big question.

[Tracy Alloway]

And my view at the time. And one of the things that I, I, I, I think has held up well is, and I, I did say

[Joe Weisenthal]

this going back to last spring, which

[Tracy Alloway]

is that I didn't think the tariffs

[Joe Weisenthal]

would be inflationary per se.

[Tracy Alloway]

The way I conceived of it is

[Joe Weisenthal]

they would raise the cost of doing business, they would make business. It was like throwing some sand at the gears of business. And I think that is true.

[Tracy Alloway]

So it's not that they necessarily that

[Joe Weisenthal]

consumer prices automatically go up in lockstep, but that doing business in America becomes harder.

[Tracy Alloway]

And you already, and you definitely some

[Peter Kafka]

of those costs do go to consumers

[Joe Weisenthal]

and then some of them definitely do or some of the costs.

[Tracy Alloway]

And yet, like, you know, the manufacturing

[Joe Weisenthal]

sector in the United States has really struggled in the last year for, I would say tariffs definitely a part of it. Because even if the idea is to help American, American manufacturing, any sort of reasonably complex business is going to have inputs and raw materials that they import.

[Tracy Alloway]

And you know, you see it, you know, we did, we were in Alaska

[Joe Weisenthal]

last year and we talked to this guy who runs the biggest furniture chain you went to.

[Tracy Alloway]

No, we like talked to this guy and he said, you know, so we're

[Joe Weisenthal]

asking him how he dealt with the

[Tracy Alloway]

tariffs and he's like, well, we've shifted

[Joe Weisenthal]

some of our imports from China to India, but even the Indian exporters, they

[Tracy Alloway]

don't necessarily want to make commitments for a year out. Maybe they only want to make commitments

[Joe Weisenthal]

six months out because they don't know if the tariff schedule is going to change.

[Tracy Alloway]

So this is the kind of thing where he can live day to day

[Joe Weisenthal]

or month to month, month with shifting imports from China to India, but the business is not going to be as efficient because they can't make orders as far in advance as they could.

[Tracy Alloway]

So I think there's a lot of little things like that where they don't

[Joe Weisenthal]

amount to a big bang, but they have this sort of degrading effect on American productivity.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I don't think that story is

[Joe Weisenthal]

over yet in terms of how it shakes out.

[Peter Kafka]

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 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, tell us about that.

[Tracy Alloway]

I love.

[Joe Weisenthal]

All my life I've written music, like, or at least since high school. I love songwriting. I love playing music. I love performing it.

[Tracy Alloway]

A couple years ago, I think maybe

[Joe Weisenthal]

it was 2022, I had a birthday party and I put on some country

[Tracy Alloway]

music, and my friend who is there

[Joe Weisenthal]

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. 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, like, reached out and, like, that's a really good song. Like, I. I could maybe sell this to an artist to get it recorded. And I was like, oh, my God, that's like the dream. That's all I want. I would, like, sacrifice my entire journalism career just to have one of my songs be played by a recording artist.

[Tracy Alloway]

It didn't sell.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 Crew, and we played, like, we played in 22.

[Tracy Alloway]

We played a few shows. We played shows in 2023, 2024, last year.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'll keep playing. You know, it's a sight.

[Peter Kafka]

It's not your music. I hear in the. In the nod lives people.

[Tracy Alloway]

They're like, oh, do you.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Do you write? No, we didn't write that, but.

[Peter Kafka]

And so is that a second slash third career for you, or is that just a hobby?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Unfortunately, I think it's just a hobby.

[Tracy Alloway]

I mean, it is a dream still

[Joe Weisenthal]

to have a song that I wrote get recorded by someone. I love songwriting.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I don't think my voice.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I couldn't really be a successful. My singing voice isn't that strong. I can sing, but it's not really. It's not quite at the.

[Peter Kafka]

All right channels, listeners, if you are in a position to help Joe achieve another one of his dreams, let me know.

[Tracy Alloway]

This is the one.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is the one. And that if anyone out there, please just find an artist who will perform one of my songs. That's all I want.

[Peter Kafka]

Done and done. Joe Weisenthal. Thank you for your time.

[Tracy Alloway]

Thanks. That was a blast.

[Peter Kafka]

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.