Organized Money

College sports is a multibillion dollar business, but until a few years ago the athletes didn't see a penny of it. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA, the organization that governs college sports, had violated antitrust laws, and athletes gained the right to monetize their appearances and endorsements. This year, for the first time, athletes will receive revenue sharing from NCAA, the result of another lawsuit.

Afte...

With its promise to displace jobs and disrupt daily life, AI and large language models have formed a unique market and social bubble: one that nearly everyone hates. Despite little revenue, billions of dollars are promised by hyperscalers like Google and Meta to help build out AI data centers in increasingly arcane financing schemes that are propping up the otherwise meager economy. 

Today on the show Matt and David invite two ...

On today's show, David and Matt sit down with Tim Wu, the man who coined the term “net neutrality”, about his new book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. 

They discuss how tech platforms went from scrappy innovators, enabled by a robust regulatory state, to the massive, extractive platforms we know today. Wu walks through the early idealism of the internet, the m...

It’s one of the most surprising and least understood stories in American agriculture: the monopoly over the seeds that grow our food. Farmers are facing a “seed squeeze,” where two companies, Bayer and Corteva, control 90% of the seed corn market, driving up prices even as crop profits fall. Matt and David speak with Independent seed producer John Latham and industry veteran Todd Martin about how intellectual property, patents, and...

From Zohran Mamdani in New York City, to Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Democratic candidates are putting populist economic messages at the center of their campaigns. On today’s show, Matt and David break down the dynamics of this week’s elections and share their predictions. Then, they’re joined by Organized Money alum Lori Wallach, director of Rethink Trade at the American Economic Liberties Project, to preview Wednesday’s Supreme...

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 g...

This week on Organized Money, David and Matt sit down with Sahaj Sharda and David Barclay, co-founders of The Anti-Fraud Company,  a scrappy new startup aiming to turn corporate whistleblowing into a business model. Sharda, a 27-year-old anti-monopolist and author of The College Cartel, and Barkley, a former FTC attorney known for busting healthcare fraud, explain how they’re using data tools, lawsuits, and a solid dose of nerve to...

Investment in AI infrastructure has exploded over the last few years, with big players like Google, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Oracle, striking deals involving hundreds of billions of dollars to build out AI data centers. These deals are single-handedly buoying the otherwise-flailing US economy, but where are these billions actually coming from? And why do all these deals seem to involve the same players in increasingly circular arr...

What happens when Wall Street sinks its teeth into your smile? David and Matt talk with Dr. Jill Tanzi, dentist and founder of the Alliance of Independent Dentists, about the corporate takeover of dentistry. She pulls back the curtain on how corporate consolidation and giant insurers like Delta Dental are reshaping what happens in the chair, from pricing to patient care, and why it should matter to anyone with teeth.  Jill shares w...

As American farmers struggle under Trump’s tariffs, the Trump Administration is preparing to bail out…Argentinian farmers? Today on the show, a sprawling, international story that you might have missed: how an electoral blow to the market-friendly government in Argentina is causing panic across the financial sector, bringing together forces like The International Monetary Fund, the US Treasury, and hedge funds to save the flailing ...

We are at the Antimonopoly Summit  - where David and Matt sit down for some candid conversations with some of the leaders in the field -  Sen. Chris Murphy (D–CT) on the political stakes, Lina Khan on enforcement and where hope still lives. Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) on hearings and state-level power, David Seligman (workers’ rights attorney and candidate for Colorado Attorney General) on how consolidation squeezes workers, and Alex ...

What happens when two gamers-turned-lawyers decide to take on one of the biggest monopolies in the video game world? On this episode of Organized Money, David and Matt dig into a David-versus-Goliath story from the world of PC gaming. Their guests, attorneys Will Bucher and Judson Crump — both gamers themselves — are taking on Valve, the company behind Steam, which  which controls nearly all PC game sales and takes a 30% cut from e...

Senator Elizabeth Warren is here! The Massachusetts democrat she sits down with David and Matt to talk about the fights that keep her fired up—from Wall Street and Big Tech to pushing Democrats to get serious about the cost of living. 

In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss how democrats should respond to Trump's second-term victory, the Google antitrust trial, spar on Fed independence, and much more. According to Warren, h...

Google just lost a huge antitrust case—but somehow seems to have walked away the winner. In this emergency episode David and Matt explain how a federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopolist, then turned around and let the company keep the very deals that entrench its dominance. From billion-dollar payments to Apple to the future of AI, they dig into what the ruling means, why critics on both the left and right are callin...

The biggest story in football this season isn’t on the field, but in the boardrooms and backrooms of the NFL. 

In this episode David and Matt dig into the collusion scandal rocking the league—where billionaire owners conspired to block star quarterbacks from getting guaranteed contracts, in cahoots with the NFL Players Association, the union meant to represent player interests.

We're joined by the journalist who cracked the stor...

The business of skateboarding has grown from an independent, DIY culture into one almost completely dominated by private equity groups. How did it get gobbled up? In this episode David teams up with former “skate rat” and researcher Daniel Stone of the Center for Economic and Policy Research to expose how private equity has quietly, and sometimes catastrophically, taken over the world of skateboarding. What started as a subversive,...

Organized Money is on vacation this week, but we still have a fantastic monopoly story for you. Around the globe, tuberculosis kills more people than any other infectious disease, despite the fact that it's treatable. This episode is about a drug that would otherwise save lives, but is so expensive that many of the people who desperately need it, can't afford it. The reason is because of the ways healthcare companies keep...

It's hard to keep track of the number of trade deals, threats, carve-outs and deadlines and random stops and starts in the Trump administration's wild approach to tariffs. To untangle the chaos, Matt and David sit down with trade expert Lori Wallach, Director of Rethink Trade at the American Economic Liberties Project and a senior advisor to the Citizens Trade Campaign.  Lori breaks down how Trump’s "rando" poli...

Last week, the journalist Sohrab Ahmari broke a story titled The Antitrust War Inside MAGA: Powerful Lobbyists Are Battling Populist Reformers. In it, he reported that the recent $14 billion deal in which Hewlett-Packard acquired its competitor, Juniper Networks, was quietly shepherded along with help from the Justice Department, complete with martini-sipping backroom deals. Two attorneys within the department who objected to the s...