Michigan's Senate race between Republican Mike Rogers and populist Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is shaping up to be a lynchpin in the midterm elections, and not just because it could mean the difference between majority and minority. El-Sayed's message of Money in Your Pocket and Medicare for All has clearly resonated with the season's most energized voters, and his anti-corporate bonafides led him to victory over the more establishment Democrat, Haley Stevens. Today on the show, Matt and David sit down with El-Sayed to discuss markets and his anti-monopoly platform, how Medicare for All will create more competition, the uselessness of PBMs, the way big agriculture bullies Michigan's cherry farmers, beef and meatpacking regulation, the AI bubble, and the importance of Democrats actually doing something if they retake congress.

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We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode. And here’s a link to this week’s transcript.

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One of Trump’s staunchest constituencies, cattle ranchers (and their congressional representatives) are in revolt. You might think rising beef prices would be good for ranchers, but in fact, most ranchers have little say in how much their stock sells at market, and see little return on what consumers pay. It’s because of a complex, but highly concentrated system of ranchers, feeders, packers, and processors which squeeze the little guy—now exacerbated by weak herds, tariff shenanigans, and an unpopular Trump-backed scheme to import mystery beef.

Today on the show, Matt and David are joined by Mike Callicrate, owner of Ranch Foods Direct and rancher advocate to help explain how beef gets from the ranch to plate, the ways the system exploits independent ranchers, and why ranchers have finally had enough of Trump’s beef policy, despite their usually-unwavering loyalty. We also discuss the incentives the big meat producers have to push people away from beef and towards chicken and pork, Mike’s incredible class action case against Tyson, and legislative and community solutions for a more equitable food ecosystem.

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We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode. And here’s a link to this week’s transcript.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

This week, a solo-David is joined by Dan Jacobs, chef, restaurant owner, and active member of the Independent Restaurant Coalition to discuss a looming threat to neighborhood restaurants: the proposed merger between the food giant Sysco, and the cash-and-carry Restaurant Depot.

Restaurants already operate on thin margins, but this merger threatens to cut off a major source of restaurant bargaining power and a competitive check on the market. As a result, this merger could reverberate through the restaurant industry and local economies, forcing limited menus, thinner margins, and even closures. We also discuss how restaurants are being squeezed by post-pandemic changes in food prices and the labor market, child care needs, and credit card swipe fees. We also get into the value of small restaurants organizing and potential legislative solutions to help keep local dining thriving.

Finally, we end on another edition of Makan’ Fun, our now-regular segment on the ongoing drama surrounding the Paramount Warner Brothers merger.

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We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode. And here’s a link to this week’s transcript.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

We've discussed the financial aspects of the AI boom and bubble in previous episodes, but today we're trying to demystify the technology itself. This week we're joined by Gary Marcus, scientist and author of many books about AI and the Marcus On AI Substack. We discuss how chatbots like ChatGPT work, how they've advanced in recent years by harnessing large language models to more traditional symbolic AI systems, and also how the technology still feels stuck in the mud. We also discuss the economic problems these technologies have to overcome, whether there's really demand for AI compute, get into the recent hype for AI "hacks" and math breakthroughs, and finally get into regulatory solutions, based on Gary's congressional testimony on AI.

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We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode. And here’s a link to this week’s transcript.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Of all New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises, his plan for government-subsidized grocery stores has resulted in the strongest, and sometimes strangest, ire. Critics have called it bad policy, bad business, and even the tipping point on our slide towards Venezuelan socialist oblivion, oh no!

Today on the show, we have one of the people who consulted with the mayor on his grocery plan: Errol Schweizer, grocery expert, host of the Grocery Nerds podcast, and writer at the The Checkout Grocery Update newsletter. Errol argues that far from an untested policy, many Americans already love government-run grocery stores; they just don’t realize it. Errol also dismantles much of the criticism the pilot program has received as we discuss the logistics of scale and how the private sector will actually run the stores. Among many things, we get into how the subsidies will work, grocery policy at large, and get a very frank assessment of what to make of the criticism coming from think tanks like the Manhattan Institute.

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We’re back with an update on the Paramount merger! We continue to make fun of Makan Delrahim’s legal strategy, David Ellison’s op-ed in the New York Times, and poke holes in the Paramount-engineered framing of the story as a first-amendment issue about CNN.

See you for a regular episode tomorrow. You can watch this episode here.

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Kay Sharaf started a Kitchen Tune-Up franchise business to provide for her family. Five years later, it has nearly bankrupted her, and she’s fighting back. Today on the show, Kay and Keith Miller of Franchise Advocacy Consulting (who is also a Subway franchise owner), are here to discuss the wild world of franchising.

Franchise businesses run the gamut from serious, healthy businesses where local and national branches can coexist, to schemes designed to extract money from the franchisee, to the benefit of the franchiser and other middlemen. Kay and Keith help illuminate this underknown corner of the business world, which is often shrouded in arbitration, NDAs, and non-disparagement clauses. Finally, we discuss the regulatory steps we need to make franchising more equitable.

Check out Kay’s youtube channel, and read David’s reporting on franchising in The American Prospect.

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Comedian and podcaster Adam Conover is here to help ruin the Paramount merger, literally! Today on the show we break down the breakdown in the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, as the state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America West lawsuits have led to a pause until next year. We cover the events leading up to this turn, then get Adam's take on the situation. Adam is especially well-suited to comment on the merger, both as a creator and as board member of the WGAW, where he ran on an anti-consolidation platform. They discuss how the merger will result in fewer buyers, fewer platforms, and fewer opportunities in general. In this surprisingly optimistic Organized Money episode, we also get into the groundswell of anti-monopoly energy that is appearing in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and how to channel that energy through organization.

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It’s summer break over here at Organized Money, but don’t worry, we have a great story for you from our friends over at An Arm And A Leg: A show about why healthcare costs so damn much, and what we can do about it. Last year they did a series called The Prescription Drug Playbook, documenting all the ways we get screwed in the marketplace, and how we, individually, can make the best of an unfair situation. You’ll meet a dad on a mission to get his daughter’s epilepsy medication at a fair price, a pharmaceutical tech with a brilliant price hack, and even a Medicare coach: someone whose job is to help save seniors millions on their medication.

Originally presented as a series of episodes, here they’ve compiled everything into a one-stop handbook for navigating the weird world of prescription drugs. You can check out their newsletter, First Aid Kit, to go even deeper, and subscribe to the An Arm And A Leg Feed for more.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Last week, the Supreme Court handed down two seemingly contradictory rulings: one allowing Trump to fire the independent commissioners on the FTC, and the other protecting the independence of the federal reserve from executive whim. To make sense of these two cases, we’re bringing back one of those fired FTC commissioners (and Organized Money MVP) Alvaro Bedoya, host of The Fair Fight with Alvaro And Max.

Together Matt, David and Alvaro break down the cases, what effects they’ll have on executive policy, and question the elephant in the room: does regulatory independence even matter in an era of hyper-partisanship? It’s a sobering conversation, but we still find room for a little hope, as states start expanding their justice departments in order to pick up the federal government’s slack.

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We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Today on Organized Money, a dispatch from Minnesota, one of the most exciting states in terms of regulating corporate power.

Recently Minnesota passed a bipartisan bill banning prediction markets in the state, within a day they were being sued to block the legislation. On the show today we have Minnesota State Representative Emma Greenman, who introduced the house bill, to discuss it, her work, and what state bodies can do in the face of a negligent federal government.

They also discuss her work on money in politics, junk fees, and the effect the ICE raids of last winter had on business in Minneapolis, and why small businesses are essential to the spirit of a city in the grip of illegal police action.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

One of our favorite guests is back! The writer, thinker, and general polymath, Cory Doctorow is here with a new book and a new episode of Organized Money!

After a brief detour into mid-century chili recipes, Matt, David, and Cory discuss The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a “short, provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and stupid about AI.” Cory argues that in order to co-exist with AI, we must harness it as a tool for labor, rather than as a tool to discipline labor—which is exactly how Silicon Valley has positioned the technology.

Among many topics, they dissect the rhetoric of the AI boosters, discuss AI as a political project, the potential (or lack thereof) in AI art, the data center pushback, and how AI is a fundamentally solipsistic technology, distancing us from other people. Finally, they speculate on how this might all end—and the inevitable bust that follows any bubble.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

This week, we’re continuing a recent Organized Money conversation in order to answer the question: Why is California’s gasoline so damn expensive? Famously, California has higher fuel standards than the rest of the nation, as well as higher gas taxes, but that’s only one part of a much more complex pricing picture.

Today on the show, we welcome Tai Milder, the inaugural director of a new division within the California Energy Commission that regulates oil and gas. He is also an antitrust veteran at the U.S. Department of Justice and the California Department of Justice. Tai helps us complete the picture, explaining how taxes and regulation contribute to prices, but also the outsized effects that pipelines, consolidation, refining, and franchising have on the prices consumers pay at the pump.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Last month, veteran journalist Julia Angwin wrote an op-ed, “Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time,” which details the ways in which Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp have become a kind of zombie business: think Yahoo, Myspace, and AOL after their dot-com peaks. In this episode, we invite Julia on the show to discuss her op-ed and dance on Meta's grave—just a little, because it turns out a dying company can still be a dangerous one. From Meta's money-burning forays into the metaverse, failed acquisition sprees, and gross exploitation of fraudulent ads on their marketplace, we discuss the ways Meta is losing reach and influence, while still maintaining vast power over politics and the gatekeeping of information.

Then, we pivot to talking about Julia's new book, now available for pre-order: “On Courage: How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” a reported account of how dissidents from around the world fight against authoritarianism and how we can learn from them in our own struggles. Fighting autocrats doesn't just mean holding up signs and storming the capital; it can also mean small acts of resistance we can all practice in our own way to make big change in our communities.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

California is known as a bastion of blue state values, but when you start to look at how the state’s legislative sausage gets made, you notice how completely borked America’s most populous regulatory state has become. Today on the show, we have Jamie Court, a consumer advocate and president and chairman of Consumer Watchdog, to break down California’s weirdness and some of his organization’s recent work.

First, we discuss how industries like insurance and ridesharing have captured so much of the state legislature, before honing in on how Uber specifically is running laps around its own regulators, with a fresh, bonus slush fund to boot. Then we discuss robotaxis and the role of the California insurance commissioner, currently held by the embattled Ricardo Lara, and how future commissioners might help untangle this morass. Finally, they get into why gas prices are so much higher in California than elsewhere in the United States. And no, gas taxes aren’t the whole story.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

While David is out on vacation, Matt is joined by Organized Money alum Alvaro Bedoya as co-host this week. He’s a former FTC commissioner and host of the new podcast The Fair Fight with Alvaro & Max.The idea for today’s show came to us when Lance Lillibridge, an Iowa farmer and past president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, wrote on Facebook:

“As a farmer, watching the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger debate sounds awfully familiar. A handful of dominant firms get bigger, independent businesses lose leverage, and the people actually creating the product get squeezed harder and harder. Farmers have lived this story for decades through consolidation in inputs and retail. Now more industries are starting to see the same thing happen to them.”

Today on the show, we discuss the surprising commonalities between two different antitrust stories we’ve been following: the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger, and the decades-long squeeze of farmers in middle America. Representing farmers, we have Lance to expand on his thoughts, and representing filmmakers, we’re joined by Kirby Dick, a Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker, to discuss how a concentrated economy affects their economic lives, and how to forge solidarity across industries and outlooks.

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We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Union steamfitter Dan Osborn nearly pulled off a Senate upset in Nebraska two years ago. Now he’s back, facing billionaire heir and former governor Pete Ricketts in one of the quietly critical races for Senate control.

David sat down with Osborn in Omaha to talk about what’s changed and what hasn’t. They cover the real squeeze on family farmers, why anti-monopoly messaging is starting to resonate with everyday voters, Citizens United, and what it actually costs a working person to run for office.

Osborn’s pitch is simple: mechanics should be able to beat billionaires.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Spirit Airlines is dead, and everyone is pointing fingers: Was it the war in Iran that killed Spirit? Joe Biden’s Justice Department? Antitrust regulation? Jet fuel? Lina Khan!?? Today on the show we demystify Spirit’s demise with William J. McGee, Senior Fellow for Aviation and Travel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

William is a long-time consumer advocate in the air travel space and has watched as the deregulation project which began in the 1970s has slowly whittled down competition, forming our current aviation oligopoly. William walks us through all the factors that lead to Spirit’s liquidation, from jet fuel, to pricing squeeze from the big 4 airlines, to Trump’s proposed bailout and creditors seeking a payout. Despite the popular narratives you might hear on CNBC, Spirit’s undoing was multifaceted with history of blame going back 50 years, and many killers working in concert.

Check out the white paper How to Fix Flying: A New Approach to Regulating the Airline Industry, by William McGee and Ganesh Sitaraman

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Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Ashley Keller is a pioneer in getting corporations to pay up. As an attorney and founding partner of the firm Keller Postman, only recently he pioneered an influential mass arbitration strategy, argued a case against Monsanto at the Supreme Court, and is fighting Google on behalf of several states in a major ad tech antitrust case. Keller is also an avowed conservative and originalist. For him, there’s no contradiction between fighting for conservative principles and antitrust enforcement.

Today on the show, Matt and David talk to Keller about the conservative case for antitrust, the dangers of corporate power, and his legal worldview. They go into detail on his current work against Google and the programmatic ad market, and his recent appearance at The Supreme Court, his take on the Live Nation Ticketmaster case, the role of plaintiff’s lawyers in the legal exosystem, and get into some big picture legal questions about antitrust enforcement from an originalist perspective.

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Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.

Today on the show Matt and David are joined by Linda Michaels, a psychologist and co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network, to discuss all the creepy ways technology companies are weaseling themselves into your therapist's office. From matching services like BetterHelp, to PMC middlemen, and potentially dangerous therapy chatbots, big tech wants to both exploit your therapist (and you) by using your private data for advertising and AI training. They also discuss the business of psychology, and the progress that has been made in states like Illinois, which could serve as a model for the nation.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.