Joe Weisenthal loves “watching the line go up on a chart,” and Tracy Alloway has “existential angst” about the state of the world. Together, the financial journalists—who cohost Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast and cowrite a newsletter—were ideally situated to cover the market meltdown caused by Donald Trump’s tariff rollout and abrupt reversal.
Both of them have been working on very little sleep, with Alloway telling me she’s been staying up till around 2 a.m. each night. On Tuesday, Weisenthal got about four hours of sleep, accidentally crashing on the couch in the middle of refreshing his Bloomberg app for updates, as he recalls. “Then at some point my alarm clock went off at 4:30 a.m,” he says. He admits that after several days without any Zyn nicotine pouches, he “finally cracked” on Wednesday night.
“I crash really hard every night, and I’m really exhausted and like, I hate my life,” Weisenthal says, adding, “Then the next day I’m like, I love this. Let’s go. So it’s just been that. I would like some break from that, but that has basically been my cycle.”
The duo is very much aware that their audience size and content engagement are inextricably linked to poor market conditions, like the volatility seen as a result of Trump’s trade wars, and they’ve upped their usual three weekly episodes, posting content basically every day to keep their audience up to date on the lightning-speed developments. The “Odd Lots” newsletter, one of Bloomberg’s fastest-growing subscription newsletter offerings, has so far seen a 142% increase in sign-ups this month compared to the average in March, according to the company. Additionally, the podcast has seen a nearly 72% week-over-week increase in downloads since the tariff plan was announced last week. Generally, the podcast reaches more than 1 million downloads per month.
“I’m pretty sure our download traffic is correlated with the VIX volatility index,” Alloway quips in our interview. “Anytime there’s massive interest in these things,” Weisenthal tells Vanity Fair, “it’s never once been during a period of economic tranquility.”
Weisenthal has also been posting incessantly on X throughout the past week, giving frequent updates to his more than 400,000 followers. The showing marks a brief return to the relentless pace Weisenthal kept up more than a decade ago, when The New York Times profiled the “market obsessive” and his ubiquity on social media. Weisenthal had since scaled back his posting on weekends, but these days, he says, “it’s just nonstop.” Alloway, who boasts nearly 200,000 followers, was also regularly dropping news and insights throughout the week.
“This is a form of news that lends itself very well to headlines and charts, which is an amazing thing that the Bloomberg terminal has in spades,” Weisenthal adds. “So it is not an accident that all of what’s happening right now is playing out on social media.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: You wrote [Wednesday morning] that all Trump has to do is snap his fingers and this will all go away. Well, he kind of did. What happens now?
Joe Weisenthal: I was kind of being facetious in that piece because there are all these underlying anxieties that haven’t gone away. Just go back to a few months ago, all this anxiety about the decline of Tesla relative to BYD, DeepSeek, high interest rates, etc. So it’s funny because he did kind of snap his fingers a few hours later and a bunch of tariffs were pulled, and we got this brief respite in the market, and everyone cheered. And all these people think, Oh, brilliant, art of the deal. And now we’re here again, and I guess it’s Thursday at 1 p.m. and the market’s tanking again, because we realized that we have a minimum 90 days more of uncertainty and massive tariffs against this gigantic trading partner that’s huge for consumer goods. So I thought we were going to get a little rest. I thought it was going to be like, Oh, finally. But no. No rest for us.
