How Josh Brown Created A Financial Media Empire

Joe Weisenthal (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:05)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:25)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Tracy, I know I'm biased. We're probably biased. I'm certainly biased.

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

Speak for yourself, Joe. I myself have no emotions or opinions about anything.

Joe Weisenthal (0:37)

I do have some biases.

Tracy Alloway (0:38)

That's why I host a podcast.

Joe Weisenthal (0:39)

That's right. We're the question askers. We're not the answers. But I am sort of biased about anyone who sort of grew up in financial media in like the 2008, 2009 era, 2007 You know, like we're just a different breed. We're just a little cut above, I think.

Tracy Alloway (0:55)

It was definitely a moment in financial media that I think has yet to be recaptured because there were two things that were happening simultaneously. So one, you had the financial crisis where everything was going haywire and it was all going haywire in a relatively new way. People had to suddenly learn what synthetic CDOs were, how the repo market worked.

Joe Weisenthal (1:19)

I never learned, by the way. Will you tell me after the show?

Tracy Alloway (1:21)

Okay. How the repo market worked.

Joe Weisenthal (1:23)

No, that I definitely didn't learn.

Tracy Alloway (1:24)

All of that. And then at the same time, you had a big format change because you had all these blogs that suddenly burst out of nowhere. And at that time, the combination of the new blogging format plus the news cycle itself, which was so weird and so fast paced, really meant that blogs were kind of the perfect platform to cover the financial crisis. They had an edge at that time. And I feel, again, to your point, probably a bit of personal bias there, but like, I feel like it was a very special moment.

Joe Weisenthal (1:57)

It was. You nailed it exactly. It was the two things happening at once that made that a distinct time, which is right. All this stuff was happening and there were just new formats and then Twitter came around then. So, do you know when I joined? I tweet a lot. Do you know when I joined Twitter?

Tracy Alloway (2:15)

2009?

Joe Weisenthal (2:17)

No, March 2008

Tracy Alloway (2:19)

Okay.

Joe Weisenthal (2:19)

And I was at South by southwest when Bear Stearns collapsed.

And, you know, it was before everyone knew that the world was totally melting down. But also then I remembered, I have like distinct memories of that time because, you know, JP Morgan made that $2 per share offer for Bear Stearns. Oh yeah. A week before Bear Stearns had been trading at like 60 or something like that. And I very distinctly remember a few people on Twitter talking about like, no, because people thought there was a typo. Remember, like, oh, there must be 20 or something like that. And I saw these voices who actually knew what they were talking about. Like, no, this $2 makes sense. This is a real number, et cetera. Eventually, I think they bought them for like $10 a share because the government pressured them. But that was the first place it was like, I was getting information from people who knew what they were talking about.

Faster and sharper than I was getting at any other platform at the time.

Tracy Alloway (3:12)

And who were those people, Joe?

Joe Weisenthal (3:15)

I think one of them was Howard Linsen. And I think another one was Roger Ehrenberg, which were like two of the names who are like, you know, these two. But anyway, there were many other names, including someone we're going to talk to right now.

Tracy Alloway (3:25)

I am very excited. So the person we're about to speak to, I remember linking to his stuff, right? When I started financial blogging, which was September 2008 on FT Alphaville, and again, the world blowing up around that time, Lehman collapsing, all of that. And I remember constantly linking to his stuff at the time. And then the other thing, this is kind of weird, but the other thing I associate with our guest, the first time I ever met him in person was in New York. And that was the last time I ever drank a Blue Moon. Because I think I had like three of them that night.

Joe Weisenthal (4:03)

I think he's a good guy to drink a Blue Moon.

Tracy Alloway (4:04)

Yeah, but it was too much. And ever since then, never again, no Blue Moons. But yes, lots of our guests, for sure.