Organized Money

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.