Joe Weisenthal responds to the dire predictions of what AI will do to jobs, wealth inequality, and even human literacy with the sunny curiosity that will sound familiar to listeners of Odd Lots, the hit finance show he co-hosts on Bloomberg with Tracy Alloway.
“There’s going to be this sustained, if not growing, number of people who want to hear from people,” he said on the latest episode of Semafor’s Compound Interest show. He doesn’t see a future where his and Alloway’s bots are interviewing the guests’ bots on a free Odd Lots feed, with a paid premium version for listeners who want the real thing. (For one thing, AI can’t interrupt, though that might be changing.)
Weisenthal greeted news that Charles Schwab will provide AI financial advice to less wealthy people less as a warning sign of a two-tiered economy than a way to expand the pie of who gets financial advice. He’s also sanguine about AI’s effect on white-collar jobs, including his own: “I don’t think AI is still as good with numbers and finance as many of the hype people would say.”
“A lot of the criticisms that people have towards the emerging AI world really just feel like descriptions of the past,” he said. “My impulse is to just try to not be too rigid in my expectations.”
Weisenthal’s career has tracked the evolution of financial media, from blogs to the traffic-chasing sites like Business Insider, where he worked from 2008 to 2014, to the golden era of Twitter. He’s still addicted to the platform, and while he admits it’s gotten less fun — the amateur experts who made early fintwit a quirky marketplace of ideas are now selling their expertise in niche newsletters, not giving it away for free — it still surfaces coming trends better than other forms of media. “If you were not on Twitter in December of 2025, I don’t think you would have anticipated the rise of Claude Code,” he said.