On a recent Thursday evening at Racket NYC, a music venue in Chelsea that typically features the high-decibel likes of Faster Pussycat and King Lil G, the mostly male, mostly younger standing-room-only crowd was wearing a lot of button-down shirts. It had come for an evening of economic and markets talk.

The Bloomberg podcast “Odd Lots”— hosted by the journalists Joe Weisenthal, 44, and Tracy Alloway, 41 — was putting on a live event. The first guest to go onstage was Charlie McElligott, an exuberantly bearded managing director of cross-asset macro strategy at the Japanese investment bank Nomura. Despite the global chaos of tariffs, war and technological and political disruption, Mr. Weisenthal noted, stocks were at an all-time high.

“You have to admit,” he goaded Mr. McElligott, “it’s kind of weird.”

Mr. McElligott rattled off a sophisticated analysis of the state of the market using lots of Wall Street-isms. (“With the amount of short-dated volatility selling, when dealers are stuffed on gamma, it compresses the distribution of outcomes.”) The audience listened raptly. Many people there were finance professionals, but even those who weren’t could feel that they had received a sophisticated analysis. Part of the appeal of “Odd Lots” is a privileged sense of eavesdropping while insiders talk to one another without dumbing anything down.

Turbulence was an overriding theme of the evening, with guests including Nassim Taleb, a contrarian investor and author (“I don’t think we are experiencing real volatility”); Emily Sundberg, a Substack influencer (“one thing that’s very clear about Gen Z is that they’ve been repeatedly told nobody is coming to save you”); and Jim Chanos, a noted short seller (“the animal spirits are definitely back”).

Even a panel of experts on U.S. government bonds, normally one of the most boring areas of finance, enthralled the crowd by making sense of volatility in the prices of Treasury bills. “Odd Lots” would later air this discussion as an episode titled “The Greatest Ever Panel on the World’s Most Important Market.”

Lobby merchandise included a $35 baseball hat featuring the “Odd Lots” logo — a box overstuffed with a truck, an ear of corn, a chicken, a semiconductor, a house, gold bars and two gummy bears, which referred to an episode in which a Chicago bakery owner, discussing the complexity of supply webs, described a gummy bear maker in Mexico that couldn’t get enough gelatin because fewer hogs were being slaughtered, because less hide leather was needed for car seats, because fewer cars were being made, because the requisite chips from Taiwan weren’t available.

This, a Taiwanese semiconductor shortage resulting in worldwide gummy bear scarcity, was a canonical example of the podcast’s fusion of micro and macro.

Rasmi Elasmar, an A.I. researcher sitting in the fourth row at Racket NYC, said he had begun listening to “Odd Lots” five years ago.

“I love these little parts of the world, humming along in the background,” which are “consequential,” he said. A 2024 episode, “Pierre Andurand Says the World Could Run Out of Cocoa Inventories,” started Mr. Elasmar and his partner, Madeline Rita, angsting about the supply of baking chocolate. She hastened to Trader Joe’s and stocked up on 10 pounds of it.

“We’re still working our way through that,” Mr. Elasmar said.

The ‘Odd Lots’ Coalition

Over its nearly 10-year existence, the podcast has become a reliable decryption key for a world upended by geopolitical and macroeconomic change. But since “Liberation Day,” President Trump’s announcement of extreme tariffs on April 2, few media outlets have felt as essential as “Odd Lots” to understanding the economic moment.

The numbers bear this out. “Odd Lots” averaged one and a half million monthly downloads in the first half of 2025, according to a Bloomberg spokesperson; its downloads in the second quarter grew 52 percent from the first quarter, and in April they hit a new high of 2.5 million. That month, the show, which had been releasing two or three episodes a week, put out 23.

“April was truly insane just from a sheer volume of news standpoint,” Mr. Weisenthal said in an interview. (That month, Mr. Weisenthal, who said he used the nicotine product Zyn “probably more than is optimal,” was going through a full 15-pouch can a day.)

Listeners have come to expect several things from an “Odd Lots” episode. True to the podcast’s name, drawn from a term that equities traders use for a nonstandard quantity of shares, the topics range giddily: “The ‘Lentil King of Saskatchewan’ on World Trade”; “How Do We Define a Currency?” Some are right on the news: “The Big Gulf AI Deal That’s Divided the White House.” Others concern a slender topic with broad ramifications: “What Math Models of Herding Cows Can Teach Us About Markets.”

Ms. Alloway and Mr. Weisenthal will find a particular vein they like and then, over time, exhaustively mine it. Nary a link in supply chains has gone unexamined. Last year brought “Beak Capitalism,” a three-part series on the chicken industry.

What all episodes have in common is Mr. Weisenthal and Ms. Alloway’s penchant for going deep and unapologetically granular. What saves the podcast from being bland or impenetrable, for the most part, is that it will book an expert who is almost invariably described as “the perfect guest” to illuminate the topic. Sometimes prominent, more often obscure, this person will provide a ground-level, human’s-eye, often physical view of an economy that is more often described with arid abstractions.

“It does all boil down to people doing things, and people often making very, very big, life-altering bets on things,” Ms. Alloway said in an interview.

She and Mr. Weisenthal aren’t faking their enthusiasm. They’ll say things like, “Here at ‘Odd Lots,’ one of our favorite topics is market structure.” Mr. Weisenthal’s excitability manifests in episode titles like “The World’s Most Controversial Interest Rate Is Haunting Us Again” and “Why Tractor Supply Is One of the Most Interesting Retailers on the Planet,” and Ms. Alloway will talk about her gonzo experiments with trying to buy a barrel of crude oil or to ship a teddy bear from Hong Kong to the United States during peak supply-chain snarl.

“Odd Lots” brings in more revenue than any other of Bloomberg Podcasts’ more than 20 original shows, according to the spokesperson. And although Bloomberg’s financial-information gigafactory, with more than 3,000 journalists and analysts, has largely resisted the trend of individual journalists with stand-alone reputations, Mr. Weisenthal and Ms. Alloway have a borderline cult following.

That cult, which the journalist Matthew Zeitlin has called “the ‘Odd Lots’ coalition,” includes Wall Streeters, technologists, curious generalists and a significant number of plausible Zohran Mamdani voters who have taken to heart the argument for reading the financial press, apocryphally attributed to Noam Chomsky: “Capitalists will lie to you, but they don’t lie to themselves,” as an “Odd Lots” fan, Henry Williams, put it. (Mr. Williams, an economics researcher turned artificial intelligence analyst, has also described “Odd Lots” as a key part of a “Cambrian explosion” that blew open the “neoliberal hegemony” of economic discourse over the past decade.)

Recently, Vice President JD Vance retweeted Mr. Weisenthal on a lower-than-expected rise in the Consumer Price Index. More than 11,000 people belong to the “Odd Lots” community on Discord, where they maintain an episode Hall of Fame, recommend books to one another and chat about everything from the roots of the Eurodollar to “the historically low cost of asphalt.”

For a podcast that thrives on complexity and uncertainty, the first half of this year has yielded a natural fit between product and market. Unlike the financial crisis of 2008, say, when policymakers were rowing in the same direction to avoid bank runs and reverse the market decline, or Covid-19 in 2020, when there was a clear consensus to restore public health and restart the economy, the Trump tariffs of 2025 ushered in a new kind of fog.

‘What’d I Miss?’

Both Mr. Weisenthal and Ms. Alloway were forged, in their own ways, by the financial meltdown nearly two decades go. Ms. Alloway was writing for The Financial Times’s Alphaville blog, Mr. Weisenthal for Business Insider.

“Crises, from a news perspective,” Mr. Weisenthal said, “are these clearings in the woods, where new ideas can emerge, and new platforms, new voices.“

Even among their cohort of fast-twitch, digital-native bloggers, Mr. Weisenthal was seen as a maniac. Every morning, he would wake at 4 and tweet, “What’d I miss?” — the first of the 150 daily tweets he averaged during that period. He drank up to eight cups of coffee a day. This newspaper called him “a journalistic speed freak.”

When Bloomberg set out in 2014 to broaden its appeal beyond the meat and potatoes of its financial-information terminal, it recruited a number of voice-y, name-brand journalists, including Mr. Weisenthal, who was brought in to start a markets and finance website and to host a TV show, “What’d You Miss?”

Ms. Alloway was one of the first people Mr. Weisenthal sought to hire. In 2015, he turned to Ms. Alloway, who by then sat next to him in the Bloomberg newsroom in Manhattan, and floated the idea of a podcast. It took a few years to find its footing. The pandemic, that gusher of news and accelerant of podcast listening, gave “Odd Lots” its breakout. Sweeping change was making the world harder to understand. It was another clearing in the woods, and “Odd Lots" was well positioned to make sense of the moment.

Logistics are a particular source of fascination. Ms. Alloway and Mr. Weisenthal can’t get enough of ports and semiconductors and trucking. They have done over a dozen episodes on how the trucking markets work, “and there’s a hundred more we could do,” Mr. Weisenthal said. Are they both equally interested in trucking? “Yeah,” they said in near unison.

“The main thing we try to do is find the smartest person in the world” on a topic, Mr. Weisenthal said. “It literally is the entire thing. There’s no scarcity of stories ever. The scarcity is in finding the perfect guest.”

They have happily hosted big names, such as Ray Dalio and Lina Khan, and hold out hope for certain dream guests, including CNBC’s Jim Cramer, any of the world’s major central bankers and China’s president, Xi Jinping. But they are happiest to find someone you have never heard of. The perfect guest is someone who can enthusiastically explain something technical in plain English and, as Ms. Alloway said, “get you really interested in it.” (The two tend not to challenge guests; the vibe is more often friendly and curious.)

They found a lumber trader named Stinson Dean because he was posting on X a lot about rising lumber prices. “It turns out,” Ms. Alloway said, “that the person obsessively tweeting about their niche interest is often the perfect ‘Odd Lots’ guest.”

“Odd Lots” also isn’t shy about having a guest come back repeatedly. The episodes that get the strongest numbers tend to feature people who are household names not in society at large but among the “Odd Lots” faithful. Brad Setser, a trade economist, has been on at least 10 times.

By 2022, Mr. Weisenthal, who was running Bloomberg’s U.S. News desk and still doing the TV show, and Ms. Alloway, who led the Asia Pacific News desk, gave up those roles to devote themselves full time to “Odd Lots.” They made live events more regular, introducing an annual pub quiz featuring questions like “The chair of the Federal Reserve is a fan of what iconic band?” (Answer: the Grateful Dead.)

They made news with an episode in which Sam Bankman-Fried spoke, with shocking frankness, about crypto “yield farming” as essentially a Ponzi scheme. (This was before his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, went bankrupt and Mr. Bankman-Fried was arrested, and ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison, on fraud and other charges.)

‘Why Are the Cranes Different Colors?’

Mr. Weisenthal is the son of academics (physicist father, linguist mother), and nothing sets his fingers drumming on his desktop as reliably as a line on a chart. Visiting Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, to cover the Fed’s annual Economic Symposium, he tweeted a majestic landscape photo of two mountain peaks and wrote that “all I can see is US CPI from 1973-1985.”

“For what it’s worth,” he said in self-defense, “the Grand Tetons actually do look proportional to the 1970s inflation wave.”

Ms. Alloway, daughter of an Air Force and commercial airline pilot and an executive assistant in the Austrian foreign service, grew up mostly in Tokyo and brings a more global perspective. Where Mr. Weisenthal may intuitively connect far-flung dots to spitball off-the-cuff conjectures, Ms. Alloway tends to ask considered, analytical questions informed by preparation of a more traditional journalistic sort. (She has been a reporter at Bloomberg and The Financial Times.)

Paul Williams, who runs an economic-policy think tank and is in a country band with Mr. Weisenthal called Light Sweet Crude (songs include the Weisenthal-penned “Old Trader,” with the chorus “You can always go down another 100 percent”), cited a recent episode featuring the director of the Port of Los Angeles.

“Tracy was asking questions like ‘What changes did you make that will allow you to process more volume if another shake-up causes the market to boom or bust?’” Mr. Williams recalled with mild hyperbole. “And Joe was like, ‘Why are the cranes different colors?’”

Part of the charm of “Odd Lots” is the amused collegiality between Mr. Weisenthal and Ms. Alloway. Mr. Weisenthal’s curiosity, while infectious, can distract him. The first time he had Ms. Alloway over to dinner at his apartment, he asked in advance about her food preferences, and she said she didn’t love seafood. He served tuna poke.

“I was in a big poke phase,” Mr. Weisenthal said sheepishly, after Ms. Alloway shared this story with listeners.

Where he has broadly mocked Bitcoiners and goldbugs, among other groups, she can be sharper with her opinions: The mourning dove “is an idiotic bird”; “I hate intermittent fasting so much.” Mr. Weisenthal calls Ms. Alloway “the slightly more moral conscience of some of the episodes.”

Mr. Weisenthal claims to have chilled out in middle age. He has reduced his coffee intake to two or three cups a day, and said he mostly now woke up at a civilized 6 a.m. He got some therapy, had children, got older. He likes to read books about the Cold War.

“I actually had to get to the point where I was comfortable mentally with it’s OK to sleep a little bit more,” he said. “The world is not going to end. No one actually cares if you don’t get up at 4 a.m. and tweet, ‘What’d I miss?’ By the end, I was like, these are damaging patterns that I need to break up.”

Told how many times he had tweeted — more than 442,000 — he said: “That’s insane. That’s a lot.” (At Racket, Ms. Alloway suggested to the crowd that Mr. Weisenthal still has a posting problem: “When we’re trying to get Joe’s attention, we send a DM.”)

“We hope this will keep going,” Reto Gregori, deputy editor in chief of Bloomberg News, said of its standout podcast. “Could there be an ‘Odd Lots’ TV show? God knows.”

“There’s just no shortage of things that could be done,” Mr. Weisenthal said. “We’ve never done an episode on why it’s illegal to trade onion futures in the United States. That gets requested a lot.”

“Maybe that needs to be a series,” Ms. Alloway said.