← Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Joe Weisenthal on the business of business media and why AI won’t replace podcasters
00:42:54
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- [00:01]
Ben Smith
Hi, it's Ben Smith and we'll be back with our usual episode on Friday, but I wanted to drop into the feed this week a special interview that we did on another Semaphore podcast, Compound Interest, Liz Hoffman and Rohan Goswami's great show about how business is changing. The kind of strange and complex and new things happening at the frontiers of business. I'm guest hosting the show with Liz this week and our conversation was about the changing nature of business media, which I figured would be of interest to mixed signals listeners. And our guest is Joe Weisenthal, the great co host with Tracy Alloway of Odd Lots and a person who spent his whole career right at the frontier of financial media. So enjoy the conversation and please do sign up for Compound Interest.
- [00:41]
Joe Weisenthal
It's been a pretty rough several couple decades for media, but I'm actually kind of optimistic that there's just going to be this sustained, if not growing, number of people who want to hear from people.
- [00:56]
Liz Hoffman
Welcome back to Compound Interest from Semaphore Business, where we explore the ways that business and finance are changing. I'm Liz Hoffman, Semaphore's business and finance editor, and joined this week by a special guest, Semaphore's editor in chief, Ben Smith, my boss. Because the topic of conversation is the business of business media. Ben, what would you say is your business media diet?
- [01:16]
Ben Smith
You know, I was thinking about this. I think it's about a third Semaphore business in your great newsletter, a third pseudonymous Twitter accounts, and one third Squawkbox.
- [01:26]
Liz Hoffman
That is a heady, heady brew. I ask because our guest this week is Joe Weisenthal, one of the co hosts of Odd Lots, which is Bloomberg's great finance podcast. And probably like a little bit of the DNA of this show, we can get into it with Joe, but we picked his brain a bit as we were putting compound interest together. But you know Joe from the early days of the Internet, right? What have you made of his career over the years?
- [01:48]
Ben Smith
Yeah, Joe has always been right at the frontier of business media. In 2004, when I was a weird political blogger, he was a weird business blogger who then got picked up by what would become Business Insider. And then gradually, as the energy shifted from a website to Twitter, became this massive figure on Twitter and then jumped to Bloomberg, where he and Tracy Alloway developed a podcast that for many years was sort of a curiosity and now I think is this just massive pillar of the way people understand business in the United States.
- [02:17]
Liz Hoffman
I'm a huge fan, you know, we, we both listen to it. It's an interesting fit inside Bloomberg, which is like a pretty straight laced place. Famously a very walled garden sells these terminals that sort of hook its users into its proprietary trading data. And I mean, it has decades of basically market data that you can't get anywhere else, for which they charge a gajillion dol a year. And then you have Joe and Tracy doing these really quirky, interesting deep dives on undersea cables and the black market for dinosaur bones. And it's always been a really interesting kind of front face of that super corporate business that is worth a ton of money for totally unrelated reasons. So excited to get into all of that with Joe Weisenthal. All right, Joe Wiesenthal, welcome to the show.
- [03:12]
Joe Weisenthal
Thank you for having me.
- [03:14]
Liz Hoffman
So you are, I think, slightly to like credit or blame for this entire endeavor, which is that we met for lunch at the Washington Square Diner, I think just before Christmas when this show was kind of inchoate and we asked you for some advice. And the one that I remember was that you liked the name Compound Interest. We were on the fence about a few.
- [03:29]
Joe Weisenthal
It's a great name.
- [03:31]
Liz Hoffman
You said, hey, it doesn't really matter. But also, I like that one.
- [03:33]
Joe Weisenthal
So I did like it. If you guys, if Compound Interest wanted supersedes Odd Lots, I'm gonna feel really dumb. And then everyone will like, look, Joe brought it on himself by giving them advice at the Washington Square Diner that day. But.
- [03:45]
Liz Hoffman
Well, you actually said it's Oddlauds is kind of a stupid name, but the show works, so the name works.
- [03:50]
Joe Weisenthal
I don't think Name is particularly important. Like, people obsess a lot about that. And I would say also, you know, arguably, from an Odd Lots perspective, the intro music that we have, our little, like, Hawaiian guitar, you know, we put about five seconds of thought into that. Arguably, that's been more important. People always come up to us like, you can never get rid of the Hawaiian guitar. Few people hate it. But arguably, I would say the intro music's been more important than the title itself.
- [04:14]
Ben Smith
You know, I was under the impression for many years, like seven years, that you were the one playing that music and only just learned that it was not you.
- [04:21]
Joe Weisenthal
I know. I wish I could not play that. Like, I'm not a good guitar player. I can play chords. Few chords can turn into any song. But no, that is just something that we found on a stock music site in 2015 when we started the podcast.
- [04:38]
Liz Hoffman
Well, it's working. But let's start with Odd Lots it has this, like, very specific editorial instinct. You go deep on things that are quirky and weird and generally, I think, resists the pull of the news. How did you and Tracy land on that? And when do you sort of succumb to there is one big story in the world and we've got to follow it?
- [04:54]
Joe Weisenthal
I would say, look, we're way more news driven than we used to be. But what I would say is like, when we started conceiving of the podcast, we both had other jobs here at Bloomberg. I was doing TV at the time. Tracy also eventually went on to do tv. We were about doing various things with editing for the web. So it sort of felt like the news itself is in. The news cycle was pretty well covered on various platforms at the time. And so when we started the podcast, it was like, well, let's just talk about things that might be interesting that would never sort of fit into a, quote, news cycle, unquote. And so if you go back to the very early episodes, you see a lot of stuff about, you know, multiple episodes about the Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s, for example. I think we did three episodes about that, which is really interesting. And like, you know, it's relevant currently or it's always relevant because people want to understand market psychology and the rhythms and the cycles that always take place. But it was now news worthy in the classical sense. Over time, however, I do think, you know, that even prior to the pandemic, the episodes were starting to become a little bit more, I would say, news cycle, ish. And then when the pandemic happened, this is the thing that I always stress, which is for journalists of all sorts, when there's something novel that happens, nobody is an expert. No one had lived through this period before. Tracy and I felt this intuitively, having started our careers during the great financial crisis. This is the great levelize. This is when everyone is sort of starting at zero, trying to understand this thing that is emerging around them. And so, you know, during the pandemic, we really. That's when we started really covering supply chains and semiconductors and shipping and trucking and all these things that sort of became partly our signature. And so it was news related, it was the cycle. But it was also like, let's take time and sort of understand things about the economy and the world we had sort of taken for granted. And maybe that is sort of our. What we've sort of developed into over the last several years.
- [07:00]
Ben Smith
I spent a fair amount of the pandemic listening to you guys, but followed you in the early Internet as a blogger and an early Twitter person with a weird Twitter handle before that got standardized. And I wonder, as you jumped from blogs to website to Twitter to podcast, if you sort of have reflections on the ways in which these technologies really have changed business media.
- [07:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, no, I mean they've changed business media in so many ways and I think about this all the time. It's funny though, you mention like the following each other from like the old Twitter or whatever because when we were in London recently, we did a live show there and there were some people in the audience that I really like knew from that era and it did not, you know, 2012 to me at this point does not feel like a long time ago. It feels like a different age. It just feels like at some point there was this discontinuous break and it's like, oh, nice to see you from the old country. Country or whatever. It does not just feel like that was distance. It just feels very different. The changes in business media are so many. But here's a couple that I always come back to. One is I think social media in particular really expanded the pool of people that might be considered an expert in something. You discover all of these voices from out in the world. It's like some guy who really knows X, they really know this domain very well and they're posting about it. And that was like the core thing that sort of made made social media really fun, say 15 years ago, which is there may have been this time where business media in particular had a certain roster of guests and economists and cell side researchers and so forth that were the names. And suddenly there were practitioners. They were just saying this is how I do my job. And that was really fascinating 15 years ago. And then they go direct and it's like, oh, you know what, you're much more interesting on the domain of, you know, here is someone who is working on an oil rig or here is someone who's a trucker or whatever it is and they're talking about what they do and we don't need the sort of standard roster of experts. You know, that was what was sort of special and that really changed business media forever. Our ability to find some of these voices. I think it's interesting if you like, you know, project forward to 2026, you think about someone who maybe 10 years ago they were farmer and they were talking about farming conditions and they were cool. And I feel like in 2026, if that person is on social media a, there's a good chance that their brain has become fried by politics and they're like posting about politics rather than corn. And B, if they do want to post about corn, there's a good chance they're selling it, by which I mean they're selling a newsletter or something like that, which is great. And I don't begrudge anyone for being able to like monetize their domain expertise. But I think this is sort of an under the rise of the CR creator, the professional who can sort of monetize their understanding of a distinct thing. I think that's really changed the flavor of social media quite a bit. And so you kind of lose some of that public good element. And maybe it's rational for the individual level, but makes it less fun at the aggregate level. A lot of people, if they know something, are selling it.
- [10:16]
Ben Smith
Yeah, totally. And I think kind of the golden era that we both, you know, are nostalgic for was really about a kind of amateurism.
- [10:22]
Joe Weisenthal
That. That really is it. And it's sort of amateurism on multip levels of like, let's just talk about this. I am interested in this. And there's no expectation that this back and forth is about selling something. These are sort of like unmonetized transactions. You could say arguably that, you know, we started it. And by we, I mean say like us, the three of us in that, okay, you identify that there is, as they say in finance, you know, some alpha here. There are people here who are talking about something that is very interesting, it's not being captured anywhere else. And so we're like harvesting that alpha. We have articles and podcasts and platforms where we're finding this and the other person didn't and eventually that sort of disappears. But maybe we were the first to recognize that there were some opportunities and just sort of like listening and putting our ear to the tracks.
- [11:14]
Liz Hoffman
So Bloomberg is a maybe break, even, maybe slightly profitable media business attached to a giant trading proprietary data business that prints money. Where does odd lots fit into that?
- [11:24]
Joe Weisenthal
I can only speculate. And it's probably not even. I don't even think they'd be thrilled if I like speculate. It's like, oh, what is the goal of podcasts, period? But I do think that we sit very comfortably in this organization because a, we really do speak to the professional hardcore audience. If you are in finance, if you're at a fund, if you're at a bank, et cetera. We really do want every episode to be interesting to you and not for it to be sort of beneath you, novice level. And then we want everyone else in the world who's not in the world of finance to recognize that actually there's a pretty good chance that they could understand it if they're sort of interested and engaged, willing to give us a little bit of time, that a lot of these topics we talk about, monetary policy, whatever it is, there's a good chance that they can understand it. And what I would say is having done this now over 10 years, the number of emails that we get, and it makes me feel old every time, but I do really like it. I mean, we have people who say, I started listening to Odd Lots in high school and I just got my first finance internship in New York City or my first job or whatever. It still feels weird to hear, but I genuinely do think that Odd lot, specifically a few other things are like, for a lot of young people, they're first maybe like, entree into the world of Bloomberg Media and therefore Bloomberg the
- [12:47]
Ben Smith
company in that context. The one kind of like, trend that you've resisted as you've. As you've morphed through digital media as we all have, is this, this twist in a way toward this, this creature, the creator economy. And I don't, I'm really. And we're not trying just to, like, cause your give. Give aneurysms to your bosses at Bloomberg here, but there have been a lot of people, like you would quit and go independent. How do you think about that?
- [13:08]
Joe Weisenthal
The thing I think about is I really like my job. I mean, it was funny. So, you know, obviously we were very fortunate. Last year, right around our 10th anniversary last August, you know, we got this big profile in the New York Times that was fantastic. Very gratifying, obviously, to get that kind of attention. The article is very nice and didn't have anything negative to say. Like, people would come with, like, okay, what next? Like, what do you want to do? And my honest answer, unambiguously is I want to do more episodes of the podcast. And of course, there are other things. Okay, yeah, you could do more shows or do X. I really like the job of co hosting Odd Lots, and I think it is actually kind of that simple. In my mind, this is a great place to do it and I really like it. And so I don't spend. I know, I mean, I see, like, people having success, but I just, I like my job and I really, like, don't spend a lot of time thinking about that question. Yeah, I mostly spend my time thinking about who the next guest should be. And that's kind of it.
- [14:11]
Liz Hoffman
Do you ever run into story tips like that? You talk to a lot of people, but you're not, I think, a breaking news reporter. So where do you send them?
- [14:18]
Joe Weisenthal
You know, it's funny. Bloomberg is such a big place. You know, I'm still always turning to Tracy from time to time, for example, saying, like, wait, who is it that covers X or Y for us here? And part of the reason it's important to know that is because if we're going to have a guest from a certain domain, it's good practice just on multiple levels, like, talk to the reporter who covers them. You know, more than a handful of times, someone will send me a DM or something like that, and I'll go find the person who would cover them here. And I say, look, I don't know who this person is. They have a weird cartoon avatar. I've never gotten this person's name in my life. But I've interacted with this person, and I kind of have reason to think that maybe they know what they're talking about when they say that, so and so just quit X Bank or whatever. And so I say, you know, maybe try to hunt this thing down. That has definitely happened multiple times.
- [15:09]
Liz Hoffman
What is your biggest uncredited scoop?
- [15:14]
Joe Weisenthal
It was a big departure several years ago for JP Morgan that I think it was one of the people who, I think at one point was thought to be in line for the CEO, and I think he left. So, yeah, I'll say. I'll leave it at that.
- [15:30]
Liz Hoffman
All right, I'm gonna go do some sleuthing. We were talking a minute ago that you are, I think, still hopelessly addicted to Twitter. A. What value do you think still remains there? And is there something about sort of peak finance Twitter that you think nothing that's come since it has. Has totally captured or replaced?
- [15:46]
Joe Weisenthal
I mean, I still 100% think that, like, you know, it's. A lot of other people are addicted to it, too, including a lot of very influential.
- [15:56]
Liz Hoffman
Ben.
- [15:56]
Joe Weisenthal
Ben is addicted to media. Yeah, both influential, both in media, in tech in particular, and also, you know, still quite a few people in finance as well. And I just think it's from a. What people are going to be talking about or what that's influential. Like, I think that, for example, a really good recent example is essentially in the last six months. If you were not on Twitter in, I would say, December of 2025, I don't think you would have anticipated or seen, like, the rise of Claude Code specifically and the rise of vibe coding and therefore how big anthropic was about to get in 2026 sort of achieved coming closer to parity with OpenAI. That was a really crisp example to me of like this happened on Twitter. People started talking about Claude code and therefore these new capabilities on Twitter or X first, and then it ended up having some pretty big downstream implications. And now. So I think like that kind of thing, it just happens there first at least in sort of at the intersection of business and tech, which is kind of everything these days. Because, you know, I just feel it. AI is like the sort of blob that seems to be swallowing like every other topic there is. And I feel that. But I do feel like at that sort of intersection of business and tech, it's Twitter. And a good example is like, you know, OpenAI's purchase of TVPN and Dreeson Horowitz is launching of their own or, you know, independent streaming network. A lot of really important people in the world of business seem to put a lot of value on Twitter specifically, even if most people are on other platforms. That's at least how I justify to myself my addiction.
- [17:46]
Ben Smith
How do you think about the relationship between, I mean, another big Twitter obsession, prediction markets.
- [17:51]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh, yeah.
- [17:51]
Ben Smith
And the way they're shaping financial journalism in specific, journalism and the media in general.
- [17:56]
Joe Weisenthal
I'm excited. Like, I'm actually, I may. I don't know if I say fan. My feelings are complicated, but I think it's cool that we can put a number on conventional wisdom. So I've never liked the term prediction markets, but I do think that they do a pretty good job of aggregating conventional wisdom. So you think like, okay, here's some election that's coming up in Canada or whatever. And I think if you want to know, like, okay, who do people expect to win? It's a great place to start. Start the question of, all right, let's just look at what the odds are. And I think they probably do a pretty good job. Not because, like, empirically they have great track records, although I think they're not that bad, but more so that in my mind, a market is more or less efficient if it's difficult to beat. That's sort of the test that I think of. You know, a lot of people, they'll say, oh, you know, it's all like these, these numbers are biased because it's a certain subset of like crypto bros who are using them and they have their blinkers. If that were true, there would be easy opportunities to make a lot of money by taking the other side of them. And their bias. I don't think there is. I'll say two more quick things about prediction markets or maybe three. One, they've existed for a long time. I would say the Fed Funds futures market. That's a prediction market. It is a bet on what 12 members of the FOMC are going to decide eight times a year. It's literally what a prediction market is. It's not metaphorically a prediction market, it's a prediction market. Two, you know, they're mostly sports betting sites and I think this is really important, which is they aspire to be important sites of hedging activity for real economic activity. By and large they're not and we should be mindful of them. It's like sports and there's some 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 Nicholas 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. But like 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 INS trading laws should exist and make markets better. People aren't going to participate in any game if you assume that other people are cheating. And so if they sort of stamp out the concerns about insider trading that would improve the odds in my view that these become important economic instruments.
- [21:07]
Liz 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. On the sort of financial influencers finfluencers I think, is what we're contractually obligated to call them. I saw Lloyd Blankfein on Mrs. Dow Jones's podcast just the other day. Oh, incredible, Incredible. And I realize you sell in a book, but the idea that, like, Bob Rubin or Hank Paulson would be on Mrs. Dow Jones's 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, 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?
- [22:12]
Joe Weisenthal
There'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, because Lloyd. Lloyd has won a category of 1. 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 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 is very real in finance as well. It's like conspiracy theory 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 Yuan is about to supplant the US Dollar and so forth. And, you know, there are 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 influencer sort of shape the way that they perceive the world and what's going on in markets or, you know, a couple 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. But anyway, like, I do think it, 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, 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 could be a good venue for that.
- [24:23]
Liz Hoffman
But all this new stuff, whether it's influencers that don't ask real questions or frankly, Twitter accounts themselves, companies have a lot more ways. I remember I was beat 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 gonna 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. 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.
- [25:05]
Joe Weisenthal
I know and look and I, you know, I mentioned, for example, the Andreessen Horowitz streaming service. And you 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 pret. Pretty good. They are 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. It'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.
- [26:05]
Ben Smith
So you really liked that New York Times profile?
- [26:07]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah. Of course. But also I just think that all of the tech people who love to 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. And 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.
- [26:36]
Liz 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.
- [26:42]
Ben 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 are 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, or at least right now, like these LLMs are very sensitive to traditional authority. I mean, I'm sure there's many efforts to game them, but it's.
- [27:14]
Liz Hoffman
By the way, you know why? It's all the trade pubs.
- [27:16]
Joe Weisenthal
Why?
- [27:16]
Liz Hoffman
Because they're all owned by private equity.
- [27:18]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh, interesting.
- [27:19]
Liz Hoffman
Like they were the first ones to take the money from the LLMs and say of course.
- [27:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, yeah, I love that. No, look, I mean, 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 ChatGPT? It's 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 within an LLM is like narrower than it was on social media.
- [27:55]
Ben Smith
I mean, as somebody I remember, I think I once edited a story at Buzz Feed 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.
- [28:17]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, and I do think the psycho fancy 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. And 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, 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 and 20 years. Like that happened political polarization and 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.
- [29:44]
Liz Hoffman
Wait, can I poke at that really quick?
- [29:45]
Joe Weisenthal
Sure.
- [29:45]
Liz Hoffman
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 dollars. I know it's worth 4 trillion today 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?
- [30:06]
Joe Weisenthal
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. I don't know, there are weird things. I mean the other. It's important to remember that yet 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 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, though, 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. There'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.
- [31:07]
Liz Hoffman
It's also a pretty good argument against the wealth tax. It's the one they're all.
- [31:10]
Joe Weisenthal
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. Like, 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, et cetera. 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, we're going to sort of have to figure this out. And I don't think. I don't think we are. We don't seem particularly close either.
- [31:52]
Ben Smith
A narrower question on AI, which is like, what it means to us. You've already got AI basically writing up the snap stories off the earnings reports. You see them all over kind of Google News, maybe. On the other end of that journalistic spectrum is odd lots. What a financial media and a business media do you think survives AI? What doesn't?
- [32:11]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I mean, 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. Like 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. 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 decades for media, but 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 I. 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 visualizations and charts and stuff like that. And that was the hot thing for Wall Street. While within journalism, I think LLMs actually are going to create a bunch of opportunities like that. I haven't really seen it yet, but I think that, like, if you're a journalist listening to this, you might be shocked at how easily you, with no expertise, like, could build a machine learning model that could distinguish between X or Y. And it's like, okay, which politician, you know, is the most pro crypto? Or did a politician's speeches 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 get a sanity check on all this stuff. 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
- [34:40]
Liz Hoffman
of years ago, 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.
- [34:53]
Joe Weisenthal
I doubt it. I mean, I doubt it. I think people like, if you're gonna. Here's the thing. It's like, if you're gonna allocate time, I think you probably generally wanna talk to a person and I think there'll be value. 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 interact. Interrupt right now. I mean, it's. There's actually this was the thing I saw this week, which is that Mira Moradi's new startup just saw it.
- [35:18]
Liz Hoffman
It can interrupt you. It's great. Yeah, yeah.
- [35:20]
Joe Weisenthal
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, there's a. It'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. Good. Like, I hate to say it, but it's really good. It's like, really thorough. And they generate it in about 30 seconds afterwards. But I think that, you know, these things, they exist and that it's. 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. So I do remain, like, unironically, and not just in that sort of, like, journalism school professor way, like, optimistic about human reported media.
- [36:36]
Ben Smith
I think we've just got a couple of minutes left, so I'm gonna ask you a complicated question and ask you to compress the answer.
- [36:42]
Joe Weisenthal
Okay, I can do that.
- [36:43]
Ben Smith
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 in written culture. I'm curious how you see that kind of shift toward a more oral culture kind of flowing through the media, really.
- [37:01]
Joe Weisenthal
So, I mean, look, I think the fact that every news organization in the world, not podcasts, the fact that they all put them. They're reporters with the little tiny mic and make them talk into the vertical video, that is like the sort of ultimate peak of this phenomenon that Everyone is just talking all the time. That talk and conversation and orality, et cetera, is truly just the sort of, like, dominant theme of our time. 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, but, you know, a lot of it is still the, you know, the person with the tiny mic. And I just think this is like such a thing. Everything's constantly conversation, everything's 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 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. And 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 that I almost hearkened 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 am going to allocate time to this with more or less no distractions. And I'm going to, 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.
- [38:50]
Ben Smith
Joe, you're so optimistic about everything. Are you optimistic about the end of literacy?
- [38:54]
Joe Weisenthal
Say, 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. 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.
- [39:08]
Liz 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.
- [39:14]
Joe Weisenthal
This was great. I loved being in conversation. That was fantastic.
- [39:17]
Ben Smith
I had a lot of fun. Thank you. That was fun. And thanks for helping us get compound interest off the ground.
- [39:21]
Liz Hoffman
Thanks, Joe. All right, Ben, what'd you think?
- [39:42]
Ben Smith
I mean, I. 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. 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.
- [40:01]
Liz 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 early at 4:30 in the morning and 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. And I guess the fact that we're talking to him on a 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 some kind of ambient about it.
- [40:40]
Ben Smith
Do you have nostalgia for the sort of more button 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?
- [40:51]
Liz 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 4pm page one deadline is just 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 when you start working at a newspaper, your story is immediately at the bottom of a birdcage, just like it didn't happen. I don't know, it's maybe informed the way I kind of think about coverage, which is just write it again.
- [41:27]
Ben 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.
- [41:35]
Liz 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 new merit 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 read a press Release and write 400 words on in the morning.
- [42:05]
Ben Smith
Well, actually, we have a meeting after this to discuss that.
- [42:10]
Liz Hoffman
So price 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 Pisino, Katherine Bilgore, Claire Einstein, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kaur, Valena Wang, Garrett Wiley, Stephanie Chang, and Daniel Haft. 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@semaphore.com. and listen and subscribe to Compound Interest. Wherever you get your podcasts.