Organized Money

The journalist Lindsay Owens is on Walmart's bad side. After she uncovered several deeply creepy patents designed to surveille and de-anonymize their customers, the company has firmly denied they would ever, ever implement such terrible things. No one really believes them. 

Today on the show, Lindsay explains Walmart's surveillance patents, and more stories from her book Gouged, about the future of pricing, where algorithmically determined personalized gouging could run rampant without regulatory intervention. We also discuss the impact of Lindsay's work, her congressional testimony, and the important role prices play in democracy. 

For years, gamers and the gaming industry have been a testing ground for many of the topics we regularly discuss on Organized Money: digital licenses standing in for true ownership; unending subscriptions; dark patterns; endless consolidation; and more. Now gamers are organizing to fight corporate greed. 

Today, David Dayen and Laurel Kilgore speak with Otis East, a founding member of Players Alliance HQ, and Zefrine, a Sims content creator, about the gaming industry, and their work around the $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and its partners, including a "raid" on EA...

Over the last several weeks, AI regulation fever has swept Congress, with competing ideas coming from various corners of Congress and the AI giants. On the table are solutions ranging from formal bans on superintelligence to a self-regulatory regime similar to banks.

Today, David and Laurel sit down with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) to discuss her approach. The National AI Charter Act Framework, which relies on an old but reliable method of regulating AI companies using corporate charters: "“The crux of this bill is simple: if you want to be an AI company in this country, you ha...

With Matt on paternity leave, David is joined by co-host Laurel Kilgour to talk college sports!

The Protect College Sports Act is a piece of legislation which seeks to do the opposite of what it says on the tin. Instead of “saving” college sports, it seeks to roll back the recent spate of state and federal rulings that have granted college athletes more rights over their likenesses, easier mobility between teams, and pay from the schools themselves. The bill just passed the Senate easily, but is likely to face more opposition in the House of Representatives.

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Matt is out (for happy reasons), so please enjoy this repeat from last year. It's one of our favorite episodes, and we'll be back soon!

Today on the show, Matt and David sit down with Sam Levine and Stephanie Nguyen, formerly of the FTC under Lina Khan, to discuss the dark side of customer loyalty programs like frequent flyer miles, corporate discount cards, and ordering apps from chains like Starbucks and McDonalds. Their new paper, The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices, exposes the lengths these programs...

Whether or not you buy into the argument that AI will kill all humanity, it’s inarguable that there’s suddenly a rush to find a regulatory framework for AI in DC with the support of the AI giants themselves. But until recently, Anthropic and OpenAI were full steam ahead—what gives? What if this is actually about something much more mundane? What are they really afraid of?

On today’s episode, we sit down with Organized Money alum David Seligman of Towards Justice, and Colorado State Representative Javier Mabrey to find out. David and Javi...

Have you noticed the seemingly endless, catastrophic sounding text messages from political candidates? Messages like: “Barack Needs Your Help!”; “Social Security Is Ending!”; or “Help, We’re Losing The Election!”, all ending with a plea to throw in a donation.

These spam messages are part of a sophisticated and profitable arm of political fundraising that has grown substantially over the last decade. It’s gone from grassroots fundraising to what can arguably be called elder fraud—where small numbers of frightened, sometimes mentally unwell Americans give hundreds or thousands in response to these text messages. 

Today on the show...

Michigan's Senate race between Republican Mike Rogers and populist Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is shaping up to be a proxy for the midterm elections as a whole. El-Sayed's message of Money in Your Pocket and Medicare for All has clearly resonated with the season's most energized voters, while his anti-corporate bonafides led him to victory over the more establishment Democrat, Haley Stevens in the primary. 

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 a...

One of Trump’s staunchest constituencies, cattle ranchers (and their congressional representatives) are in revolt. You might think rising beef prices might 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...

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 r...

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...

Of all New York City 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 experts who consulted with the mayor on his grocery plan: Errol Schweizer, grocery consultant, host of the Grocery Nerds podcast, and writer at the The Checkout Grocery Update newsletter. Errol argues that far from an untested policy, many A...

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 next week! 

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 under-known c...

Comedian and podcaster Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything, Factually, and so much else, 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 a board member of the WGAW, wh...

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 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 wit...

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 a...

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 o...

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 p...

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 an exciting 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...

Last month, the 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. On 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 Met...

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 start to 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 specifi...

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 s...

Union steamfitter Dan Osborne 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 Osborne 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.

Osborne's pitch is simple: mechanics should be able to beat billionaires. 

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, f...

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...

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, tech companies are seeking to exploit your therapist (and you) by using therapy data for advertising and AI training. They also discuss the business of psychology, and in our One Piece Of Good News segment for the week, the progress that has been made in states like Illinois, w...

Yet another consequence of the war in Iran is a looming supply shock in plastics. Plastics, which are derived from oil byproducts, are everywhere, but their origins remain somewhat mysterious to the average consumer. Today on the show we demystify the plastics industry with Beth Gardiner, author of the new book Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bet an expose of the industry that underlies modern consumer culture. 

Together with Matt and David, they discuss where plastics come from, how they are made, and how the situation in I...

Matt and David are live from a conference room in Chicago to break down the Live Nation Ticketmaster verdict! Live Nation was just found to be an illegal monopoly in a dramatic jury trial which saw the Trump administration drop out of the case with a surprise settlement. The states picked up the baton from there. 

Matt and David cover the decision, the history of Ticketmaster’s tangles with Pearl Jam and the Justice Department, and how the current case played out, and what the decision means for the future of Ticketmaster, and the ant...

On March 17th, the candidate Daniel Biss defeated 15 other democratic challengers in the primary election for Illinois' 9th Congressional District. It was one of the most closely watched in the country, in which Biss, and other candidates, were up against millions of dollars in ad spending from dark money super pacs like "Elect Chicago Women", and "Chicago Progressive Partnership". These vaguely-named pacs were all fronts for AIPAC, the big-spending Pro-Israel lobbying group which threw money and ads at various candidates, in hopes of electing Laura Fine, who eventually came in third. Biss won by putting AIPAC, and their influence...

Ever since the US and Israel began bombing Iran, the Strait Of Hormuz has become the most watched shipping lane in the world economy. The strait itself is just a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf Of Oman, but much of the world's oil and other crucial material, such as industrial helium, flow through it. Now, after weeks of bombing and retaliation, the strait is gummed up, with hundreds of ships stranded, little traffic, and no end in sight. We're already seeing prices at the pump begin to spike, and the stock market has cooled, but...

With the federal government largely stepping back from antitrust enforcement, who's picking up the slack? California Attorney General Rob Bonta makes the case that state attorneys general are filling the void,  and he's got the caseload to prove it. David and Matt speak with Bonta about his remarkable portfolio of active fights: the Ticketmaster/Live Nation trial (which the states pressed forward with after the DOJ settled), a price-fixing case against Amazon, social media addiction suits against Meta and TikTok, and a challenge to the Nexstar/TEGNA local TV merger that could give a single broadcaster control over news i...

As bombs started to fall on Iran, some Americans cashed in by placing bets on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. These bets paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to users who almost certainly had inside information about the exact timing of the attacks. Similar bets were made on the assassination of Iran's Ayatollah, turning an act of murder into a commodity.

As these markets have come to embrace acts of violence, often rife with insider trading, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has introduced legislation to curb betting on government actions and similar events. His bill...

In a shocking turn of events, the federal government settled their longstanding anti-trust action against Live Nation after a week of in-court proceedings. This process was described as “mind-boggling” by the judge, and surprised counsel on both sides along with many states’ attorneys generals who are also suing Live Nation. 

Today on the show we break down the case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster (which it acquired back in 2010) with two guests: Gigi Liman, who is reporting on the trail for bigtechontrial.com, and Tommy Dorfman, a live music promoter who has been in litigation with Live Nation...

This week we discuss the recently rediscovered history of midcentury lighting, the elegant modernist style of lamps and fixtures that emerged in small design firms and flourished from the 1940s through the 70s. By that point, they were being consumed by megacorporations that flattened their products’ quality and style, and they gradually drifted out of fashion, and memory. 

This style was spearheaded by a company called Modeline, but until recently dealers and scholars alike often misattributed their work and the work of similar designers. Our guest today is Nick Ferrell, a dealer, author of Modeline of California: Pio...

In a shocking move this week, Netflix declined to raise its bid against Paramount for control of Warner Bros. After months of corporate tug-of-war, Paramount and David Ellison have taken a giant step towards controlling Warner Bros’ linear television assets, including CNN, its streaming service HBO Max, and its film studio, which just had a blockbuster year. Without question, this deal will lead to mass layoffs, fewer shops to sell work to in Hollywood, and leverage massive debt against Paramount: so why is Paramount and Trump-World so desperate for it, and why did Netflix get cold feet? Today on th...

Besides data centers, climate change, and regulatory capture, there is yet another reason utility rates are far outpacing inflation: private equity! On this episode, we try to understand why investor-owned utilities, which provide electricity to the majority of Americans, continue to reap profits at the expense of their customers. These entities are supposed to be regulated by state governments, but why is enforcement often so toothless? And why does venture capital want to get involved in something as thin-margined as utilities?

To answer that, we are joined by Marissa Gillett, a former utility regulator and senior fellow...

The Epstein files lay bare the impunity the rich and powerful possess as a social class: The Epstein class. Today on the show, Matt and David dig into the Epstein files with one of the congressmen responsible for their release: Representative Ro Khanna. We discuss what the Epstein files tell us about the influence that wealth affords the people who run our economy and institutions: People like Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, and countless less-famous people who structure the world we live in, but are seemingly accountable to no rules at all. They also discuss Khanna’s...

After the government announced new regulations for Medicare Advantage, the market-based alternative to traditional Medicare, the stocks of healthcare companies that participate in the program plummeted. But why is this popular program in the crosshairs? And are these new Trump Administration rules actually...good?

Today on the show, Olivia Kosloff, senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and creator of the newsletter Acute Condition, joins Matt and David to discuss Medicare Advantage and how a program that was intended to be cheaper for the government than traditional Medicare has become far more expensive. In addition to...

As The Department and Homeland Security and ICE see their budget balloon, anything unrelated to to immigration is getting short shrift. Today on the show, Matt and David talk to Richard Powers, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at The Justice Department, and the former Acting Assistant Attorney General at the Antitrust Division, to discuss the consequences of ignoring antitrust and white collar crime. They discuss the post-DOGE state of The Justice Department, the culture of prosecution (or lack thereof) that dominated the antitrust division through the Obama and first Trump era, and how to make budgeting antitrust a...