Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Monopoly Power is Killing Hollywood with Matt Stoller

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

This week on Factually!, author Matt Stoller joins Adam to discuss corporate monopolies in entertainment, why we should be breaking up Disney and how concentrated power is so problematic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, I'm Adam Conover. Welcome to Factually. And we all have this vague sense that monopolies are bad, right? Politicians complain about them. I think Teddy Roosevelt hated them. I think I heard that in history class. And come on, we all know there's something devious hiding under that board game guy's top hat, right? He looks way too smug. But what exactly is it that's so bad about them, right? We don't often unpack what the issue actually is. Well, the truth is when one company dominates an entire industry, it makes our lives

worse in countless ways. Now, the obvious one is prices, right? When companies compete on price, that brings lower costs to you. But if only one company dominates, they can jack up the prices. Since you don't have anywhere else to turn, you're screwed, right? But much more important than prices is power. When a company dominates an industry, they gain a massive amount of power that they can use to harm others for their benefit. And this happens in countless ways. Just for one example, they can use their dominance to push out potential competitors.

Take Amazon. Amazon controls close to 40% of the entire online retail market on that platform. And since they don't just run the store, but they sell their own products on that store, they can use that power over the market to push their own products, whether diapers or body wash, to directly undercut their competition. And since they're so massive, they're able to sell their products at a loss almost indefinitely in order to gain even more power. How can any business owner compete with a company that is so huge they can actually operate at a loss just to win? But it's not just competition and prices. Companies with too much power can also mess with how much workers like you make.

Think about it. When you choose which company to work for, you're selling your labor in exchange for a paycheck, right? Well, if there's only one buyer for that labor, then your wages are going to take a hit because that company doesn't have to compete with anyone else for your services. So whether you're a nurse working in an area with just one hospital, or a farmer with only one mill to sell your grain to, or hey, a TV writer like me and there's only one or two streaming services left in town, a monopoly means you lose money. And hey, so maybe the fact that monopolies have been forming all over America in multiple industries in recent decades, that might explain our decades of stagnant wage growth, huh?

What do you think? But most importantly, the economic power that these monopolies have also give them unfair power in our society. For instance, they can use all their cash to influence the government, especially when they feel like they're under threat. Money is speech in America, and monopolistic companies have the money to shout at the top of their lungs, drowning out the rest of us small business owners and employees who can only whimper or, I guess, tweet with our tiny voices. Secondly, their unfettered power over entire industries can actually change the way our society functions. For instance, a Pew survey found that 43% of adults get their news from Facebook. So that means that Mark Zuckerberg's unilateral decisions

about what kind of information to spread or encourage affects what ideas get heard in our society and which don't. The rest of us don't get a say in that. Zuckerberg gets to decide all by himself. of us don't get a say in that. Zuckerberg gets to decide all by himself. This massive amount of power concentrated into the hands of just a few executives is not just bad, it's also inherently undemocratic. Think about it. Our society is founded on the notion that we all collectively decide how it operates, right? So when power rivaling that of our own government is wielded by the CEO of just one company in ways that the rest of us can't control,

well, that's the opposite of democracy. That is autocracy. And you know what? Americans throughout history have actually known this. That's why from Teddy Roosevelt's day through the New Deal and after, American policymakers have taken steps to break up monopolies or to stop new ones from forming so that no one company holds too much power over our society. Fighting against monopoly power is actually part of America's political DNA. But, you know, somehow it seems that we forgot how to do that. We now live in an age of massive consolidation.

In just about any industry you can imagine, industries that affect our lives deeply. Four companies now control 98% of the cell phone provider market. Three companies control 75% of the beer market. Airlines, cable companies, even dry cat food is now a monopolized industry. And things are only getting worse. If we had at one time such a strong anti-monopoly movement, how did we end up here? Well, to answer this question, our guest today is Matt Stoller. He's a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, and he's the author of the book Goliath, The Hundred-Year War Between Monopoly, Power, and Democracy. Please welcome Matt Stoller. Matt Stoller, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me.

So I first found your work through your wonderful newsletter called Big, where you, and I hope folks listening, please go sign up to it because it's really fantastic, really fun, readable look at monopoly power in America today. You did a great piece a couple months ago, first one I read, called The Slow Death of Hollywood, I believe, about Netflix's monopoly power or near monopoly power and what that's doing to the entertainment industry. really articulated so much of what folks in my industry are thinking right now. And people were sending it around to each other in LA and, you know, uh, in the entertainment industry, um, saying, yeah, this really explains what's going on right now. Uh, it was a real talk in, you know, uh, writers guild union circles, for example. And you just came out with a new piece, uh, as we're recording, this just came out yesterday about, it's called It's Time to Break Up Disney, which is a really wonderful, wonderful thesis. Yeah. Could you talk

about that a little bit? Why should we break up Disney and why should we be worried about the power of Netflix? Yeah. So just to kind of give a, like a predicate for all of this. So I started thinking about monopoly power during the financial crisis, and which, you know, just screwed up our economy, these banks that were just basically too big to manage. And out of that, I developed a kind of appreciation for how problematic concentrated power can be and how destructive it is. And you see concentrated power everywhere in our economy. So it's not just like Hollywood, it's, like Hollywood. It's search engines and airplanes and cable networks, but also like peanut butter markets, like coffins.

It's just, it's kind of everywhere. And it has this particularly toxic impact on Hollywood because what monopolization does when you concentrate power over creative fields, it tends to bottleneck creativity itself in the hands of sort of nervous executives. And so what you're seeing is the weirder stuff, the more interesting stuff kind of doesn't get made. And I kind of noticed this over the course of several years, and then it turned into those

two pieces. And those pieces are basically about how there was a roll-up, a gradual roll-up of power in the industry, starting really in the 80s and 90s, when you saw theater chains kind of roll up into these megaplexes, which has to do with financing and private equity. But basically, that's when the theater chains exploded and started taking over all the independent theaters. And then- That's the world I grew up with. I don't even remember. You read about the independent theaters that used to exist. I barely remember going to theaters like that. When I see one, it's like old timey. I grew up with Megaplexus. that, you know, it's a great movie in 1985.

And it's like a weird movie, right? And I didn't realize this. You know, John Mulaney has this amazing kind of stand-up about how fucked up that movie is. Yeah, yeah, he goes back in time and he's hit on by his mom. It's a really, really weird... It's hard to imagine the pitch for it, right? In the room.

Yeah, no, he does the whole... This is amazing. And also he has... This is the thing that Mulaney doesn't do, which I thought was just amazing where he was like, and his friend inexplicably is a disgraced nuclear physicist. And he's a high school kid. And they never explained why.

Look, look, I know Mulaney is very funny. Okay. I know he's the funniest comic in America and everyone can stop telling me that every single day. Cause I would love to be as funny as him and I do my best. So you don't need to rub it in how great he is I agree let's move on well I'm just hoping that I can use this

podcast as a stepping stone to get on his podcast okay you know what you know what man we're off to a rough start let's the point is it's a weird movie it's a hard movie to pitch right if you were just gonna be like hey let's launch a brand. You know, you wouldn't that would be a really weird brand to launch. But the reason that it got made is because the filmmaker had made Romancing the Stone, which which did well. And so the people in Hollywood were like, well, it seems weird, but like, let's give him a shot. And then they didn't it wasn't a huge risk to make the movie and distribute it because you just put it in a few theaters. And if it worked, kind of word of mouth would like carry it. And that's what happened. So it's first weekend, it made $10 million. And then it basically made $10 million throughout every weekend over the summer

and ended up making $385 million, which is just this, like, it's just an incredible achievement for a film like that. But also it was a market, right? Like you didn't have to just, you know, do a marketing campaign. And then week one was basically how, you know, if you didn't do well week one, sorry, it's over. Yeah, it was, you could have the movie in theaters for a while. And if people liked it, they would tell their, it could stay on the shelf for a while and sell consistently over time. But now it's like, if the movie doesn't do well in the first week, you have to do so much marketing leading up. And if it doesn't do well in the first week, you're sunk, and you might as well have not made a movie at all.

That's right. And that particular segment, I particularly love comedies, right? In particular, John Mulaney style comedies. Not your kind of comedies, but comedies. You're in that sort of similar industry. Sorry. Keep digging, man.

No, I love comedies. I I grew up on Mel Brooks, like with my family, we bonded over that stuff. And like, it's just, I just love comedies. And, and that's the particular segment that's getting hurt the most because it's, it's, I guess it's probably the hardest stuff to pitch because comedians are weird. Right. And they're the weirdest people. And they're also, I think the smartest smartest people in Hollywood because they basically observe like, you know, tricks of language. And like it's kind of hard to explain sometimes like why it's something is funny, but it just is. It could just just be funny. Yeah. And we can't have the sort of comedies that are made now. I agree. It's it's a terrible time for comedy movies because comedy movies are basically not made now unless they are action movies in disguise. Like every comedy now has to have for some reason, like an actual drug dealer

who's who like the people are trying to stop and then they get tied up and then they're in a dangerous situation. It's like so many movies are that over and over again. Like if there's these very few sort of formulas that the movies have to fit into. And yeah, that would make sense because it is, uh, it has to be pitched to people without them actually seeing what the jokes are. Right. Right. Without them like getting a sense of the sensibility, you can't, you can't just make like, Hey, how about the jerk where it's like a movie about a weird, funny guy and you know, the end, right? It's not right. And that can't make that. And that's because the risk of, of introducing a new product is so much more extreme today

because you can't just put it in a few theaters and nor could you even sell it into a few theaters. You have to cut your deal with like, you know, I guess the AMC chain or whatever. Just like, it's just harder to introduce products in America in general because now it used to be that there were locally owned stores all over the country. Now you have to go to Amazon or you have to go to Walmart and introduce your product in like, you know, a thousand stores or, you know, massive volume. You can't, you can't just like try out a few things here or there. And that's why, and like then get it right and then roll it out to more and more. And that's because you've seen

this concentrated roll up of power. You also have much worse bargaining terms. So when you roll up the theater chains, then all of a sudden the studios have less bargaining power. So they have to combine so they can get more bargaining power. It's a kind of concentration creep. And that's what you saw happen. And basically the laws were changed to enable this, laws against merger prohibitions and then the 96 Telecommunications act. And then in on TV, it was, it was, there were some rules called the financial syndication rules that prevented networks from owning the content that they also syndicated. So there were a bunch of rules. And like, so when Bill Cosby, I mean, he's like a bad guy,

obviously, but in the, he was like one of the first prominent shows with like a black middle class family, the Cosby show. And it's like, originally I think they wanted ABC or somebody wanted him to like do, he was famous when he pitched it, but they wanted him to be like a lounge singer. And he said, no, I want to. Would have been a little bit closer to his actual personality if he was a lounge singer. Point is, so Bill Cosby was able to say, so it used to be that the networks just sort of put on what they put on and they controlled it. on and they controlled it. And then when they were no longer allowed to just put, you know, own the content that they were producing for primetime, all of a sudden they had to buy from studios or from independent producers. And then Bill Cosby could say, look, I want to do the show

the way I want to do it. And hey, ABC, if you won't do it, I'll sell it to NBC. And so it created a market and that allowed for, you know, some of the most kind of creative television was in the 1970s and 80s and early 90s with, you know, All in the Family kind of creative television was in the 1970s and 80s and early 90s with, you know, All in the Family and Sanford and Sons and Seinfeld and kind of it created this model because markets work, right? If they're competitive and fair, they actually work. And when you consolidate, there's a couple of ways to undermine markets, but the main one is to consolidate.

And we got rid of the FinCEN rules. And so now you see like, you see this vertical integration, which is what it's called when like the TV network produces all their – syndicates all their own shows. Or like the movies, you know. And the movie – you know, the studio system, which was the pre-1948 system, you know, the studios controlled the distribution and they controlled the theater chains. controlled the distribution and they controlled the theater chains. And so you had, you know, five guys that were controlling all of Hollywood and they controlled all the directors and they controlled the actors and they, you know, it was like massive control over Hollywood. And we're back to that now. Yeah, we're back to that.

Yeah. It's really stunning how if you, you know, people used to describe, you know, the golden age of TV as being, mid-2000s, early 2010s. And it felt like there was a market, right? That there were all these different networks who were suddenly making good TV and weird TV and interesting TV and trying new things. And now, just working in the industry, that market has dried up. like those mark that market has like dried up and so we're headed back to you know the old days of abc cbs nbc maybe fox right except now that's netflix disney hbo amazon and yeah like you said those places are owning the content they're not you're not working for a studio in the you know to get a little bit of the industry, you know, nuts and

bolts here, rather than making the content for a studio, which then sells it to a network. And then the studio can say, well, if the network cancels it, we'll take it somewhere else. We'll take that show that Fox canceled and we'll bring it to ABC or bring to Netflix or whatever. That's not even possible anymore because now Netflix is producing the show themselves. So once they cancel it, well, you can't, you can't do shit with it. Yes. And, and the, the, it's so, so, and they also have combined TV and movies, right? So, you know, ABC, you know, NBC, CBS, they were, you know, they were actually, they were not necessarily just, you know, theater, were actually, they were not necessarily just, you know, movies and TV were separate. And now Disney is a huge television and movie studio.

And so the aftermarket for movies is also getting, you know, undermined, you know, the residuals and all of that. So it's like what's effectively happening is that, you know, what this, the strategy of these, of streaming services, right, is to just cram down and destroy the power of labor, of producers. And it's not just about wages. It's also about destroying their creative power, too. So, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's all about power. And what we're seeing is the resurrection of a studio system that is in many ways even more extreme than the studio system that existed before 1948,

which, by the way, was broken up because of an antitrust suit that resulted in something called the Paramount Consent Decrees. So it was about a vertical integration problem. We now have a vertical integration problem on steroids. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, yeah, that studio system that you're talking about,

that was an era where this one company would own the, they would have, you know, ironclad contracts with the talent. They paid them peanuts and they made them work on, you know, the movies, television shows. And then they owned the theaters that they would be distributed and they vertically owned the whole thing. And so they were able to control the entire pipeline and had immense power over what got seen, what got made. And we are really, really moving back to that. I mean, talk about, look, this pattern holds in so many other people's industries. But, you know, just because we're talking about mine, I feel it happening right now, right? Like, um, it used to be that the most valuable thing you could do as a creator in Hollywood was to create IP, right? Was to create a new, uh, series, a new

movie, uh, something new that people would, uh, you know, that, that the, uh, uh, studio could, uh, bring to the world and, uh, you know, profit off of, and then you would receive a piece of that profit because you created the IP, right? Like you created the thing that was being sold on lunchboxes, so you got a portion of the fucking lunchbox sales. And now these companies have moved to this strategy of purchasing the IP, hoarding the IP, which turns all of the people who are working on the shows into hired hands.

Hey, why don't you come work on Batman for a little bit? You don't own Batman. You didn't create Batman. You don't really get much say over Batman. You're just here for the summer, like helping out on Batman. And for that reason, we're going to pay you peanuts for it. And simultaneously, so it's like they own an asset, a creative asset that you're just helping out on. So it like fundamentally, not just financially, but also creatively disempowers the creatives. And then simultaneously they have so much power. They're also working to end the system of basically anyone having any backend participation in their, in the show or movie, if you do happen to create it where, you know, it used to be, uh, you know, again, if you created a piece of intellectual

property, you got paid every time it was shown or, you know, et cetera, you had, you participate in the profits and now they don't, they just don't do that anymore. They're like, no, we'll buy you out. Here's like, you know, a couple of grand and, uh, you know, we'll never pay you again, which is like, Oh, maybe sounds good on the day it happens. But then if it's a huge hit, well, you don't participate in that anymore. Right. And also, you know, if you do romancing the stone today, you don't get to do the follow on, which is, you know, back to the future. Right. So the weird, fun, creepy, interesting stuff, the stuff that teaches us about who we are, the stuff that takes risks, the stuff that challenges power doesn't get made, right? Because nobody who can challenge power has any power anymore, right?

So like, as just an example, you know, in the 1930s, the Hollywood studios would not make movies that offended Nazi Germany because they were selling into the German market. And this is funny because like, they were all like Jewish studio heads, right? But they were just like, we're going to not, we're going to not, you know, we don't want, we want to keep selling to Nazi Germany, which is pretty fucked up. But like Charlie Chaplin had an independent production company and actually FDR, Franklin Roosevelt called him up and said, Hey, you know, I really want to encourage you to make the great dictator, which was a satire of, of, of Hitler. And. And he did. And it was, you know, but the way that we learn as a culture in many ways comes from

movies. So I started out my piece on Disney by saying, you know, I used to work in Congress and one of the, you know, I learned about, I like learned about the U.S. Marshals, which are this branch of government. And then they basically go out and they serve arrest warrants. And it was like sort of depressing, but they had all this fancy equipment that helped them serve arrest warrants better. And I was like, when did you get funding for all of this? And they said, oh, in the nineties. And I was like, well, when, why is that? And they were

like, oh, cause the movie, The Fugitive came out. And that's when Congress finally understood what we do. You know, it's like, it's like, it's true. You, you, you know, movies help contextualize our world. So when you have, um, today, you know, you will never see a Chinese, um, villain in movies, right? Because there's so much control that the Chinese censors now have over Hollywood. And I want to contrast this to a very different market, a market that's actually functional. And that is the podcast market. I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, no. So, so, so podcasting, it's this fascinating kind of almost accidental market where you see a separation of production and advertising and distribution basically because Apple hasn't done anything with their podcast app. And that's what a lot of people use.

Right. So they're not tracking and they're not automating things. And so what you see is a diversity of voices and a diversity of business models. Mm-hmm. Right. Because it's so easy. It is that market where it's so easy to access. Anyone can open up their podcast app,

hit add, do a little search. It immediately, the podcast immediately pops up because they're using Apple's database, most likely, which is Apple sort of has an open API for that, I imagine. And, you know, very little of it is paywalled or anything like that. And so, yeah, it's a very open, you know, that word of mouth process that brought people in the theater to see Back to the Future is also why, you know, you can have these sort of like very middle class podcast hits that do well for their creators and have a really specific point of view. Like our show, our show being one of those. It's not vertically integrated either.

So if you can make a podcast, you can distribute it through lots of different apps, and there are multiple advertising networks that you can use. So there's not, like you can, not only can you just like open up the app and get a podcast, but if you start a podcast, you can pretty easily distribute it. And if you get an audience, you can pretty easily get an advertising network to start selling advertising on your podcast. Now, it's hard to build a good podcast. As you know, it's a lot of work. But if you do it, there's a market there. There's a series of, and because nobody's rolled it up, they're trying. Private equity is trying to destroy the podcast market right now. But they haven't been able to do it. And as a result, we have this immense and kind of vibrant and really cool kind of podcasting world for the moment. and they bought Maximum Fun, and they bought Joe Rogan, and they bought all these podcasts, put them behind a paywall,

or even just figured out some way to make sure that their podcasts— Or cut a deal with Apple. Cut a deal with Apple, exactly. They make an app that's the best app. They come up with all these various reasons that you have to use that app. Oh, you could subscribe the other way, but no, you're probably going to use that app. Then eventually they start paywalling them, et cetera, et cetera. Then you only have a couple of executives deciding what kind of podcasts to play. Then they say, Hey, we're going to move into the

Chinese market. So now the podcast that we're going to approve have to be, uh, not insulting to China, but also they have to really work internationally. Like they can't be too specific or, um, you know, they can't be like, they can't be like set in New York. Like they can't be too specific or, um, you know, they can't be like, they can't be like set in New York. Like they have to be about stuff that everybody likes, like, uh, sex jokes or, uh, makeovers, right? You're basically describing what's happened to TV in the last couple of years, right? Like you're starting to see those ways that like that massive amount of power really distorts what gets made. Right. And the other analogy would be to what's happened in newspapers.

So the way that they're going to try to do it to podcasting is they're going to try to put a lot of tracking into the apps so that the advertisers will no longer want to just buy on your podcast because they trust you and they know you have a relationship with your audience. They're going to say, oh, we know what the audience does

and we're going to hit them where it's cheapest. And then you lose a bunch of your advertising revenue, and you kind of get starved out. And that's what's happened to newspapers all over the world, frankly, is that like the local, if you want to hit local audiences, you know, in Pittsburgh, you don't have to go to the Pittsburgh, you know, Courier or whatever the newspaper was, which doesn't really exist anymore. You can go to Facebook, right? Because they know everyone in Pittsburgh or Google, they know everyone in Pittsburgh. And so the advertising money that used to finance news gathering and creative output no longer does that because you have these kind of central intermediaries that have accumulated large amounts of data and can put advertising, can match that with advertising

inventory. So that's kind of how you'll see it. My guess is that's how private equity is going to try to ruin. I guarantee you there are a bunch of annoying tech bros right now in Silicon Valley thinking about how to ruin podcasting. Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, they've tried. I mean, Luminary was an attempt to do that.

And luckily, it seems to have failed. I don't ever hear anybody talking about using Luminary. I'm not, you know, but that's not to say it won't fail in the future. And so just for the folks listening out there, when these apps start coming, don't use them. Stick with your crappy old independent podcast app. Well, no, there's a good one.

I use Overcast, very nice independently developed app. And do it the old fashioned way as best you can. Stay on the boat as long as you can before you escape as it sinks. Well, let me go optimistic here because I don't want people to think that this is all going to just collapse, right? Because it doesn't have to. And that's like – so I have a book out called Goliath, The Hundred-Year War with Monopoly, Power, and Democracy. I have a book out called Goliath, The Hundred-Year War with Monopoly, Power, and Democracy. And one of the things that we, you know, I want to tell a historical, like the story here is about whether we have a democracy or not.

Because we're talking about a political question, right? And so it's like, yeah, sure, use Overcast, you know, use podcast apps that are going to kind of enable liberty. But fundamentally, we need the Federal Trade Commission to step in and prevent, you know, the mergers in the podcasting industry. You need the Department of Justice or we need the state attorney generals or you need Javier Becerra from California to step in and say, hey, Disney, you can't do what you're doing. Or Google, you can't do what you're doing. And that's starting to happen. But like fundamentally, these are political problems. Like this is what politics is about. And so it's like people in Hollywood really should start getting – you guys are members of the WGA or you're members of the Director's Guild or the Actor's Guild or IATSE or any of these other – like those are political institutions who should be fighting for the industries that you're working in, fighting for your political rights to express yourselves, your creative rights to express yourselves.

And your audiences, the audiences of movies and of this creative content of video games, people are so passionate about this stuff. And you should not have an intermediary, whether it's Disney, whether it's the Chinese censors, whether it's Google, whoever it is, they should be facilitating the interaction between the creator and the audience. They shouldn't be intermediating it in a way that's harmful. And that's what these monopolies are doing. And fundamentally, what we're seeing now is a total shift in our politics, right? It's a little bit disguised because people are super confused because of Trump and it all seems so crazy. But like you're seeing this immense turnover after the financial crisis where political economy and monopoly power is being re-centered at the core of how we think about what politics is for. Well, let's keep talking about that,

but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Matt Stoller. Okay, we're back with Matt Stoller. So Matt, you were giving us the optimistic view that we don't have to accept that every part of the economy is going to slide into monopoly. And I have to say, I would like to share that optimism. Your book is all about how we used to have a period in American history where politically we fought back against these monopolies where, you know, and again, you raise a good point that individual people can't stop monopoly by themselves, right? You know, just subscribing to people on Patreon and, you know, little magazines and independent podcasts or whatever is not going to create the economy that we want to have that's going to cause those things to flourish. We have to do it as a group political exercise. It's what I always talk about on this show. Individual action is often not enough. We need to come together as a society and make societal changes if we want society to be better. And so we did that in the

past in America. We actually fought back against monopolies successfully for decades, and now we're not. We're backsliding. So tell me about that a little bit. Like what were the steps that were taken in the past to actually break up monopolies? Right. So let me just observe one – I think one thing that's important just for the optimistic frame because we really shouldn't be disempowered. We actually are starting to fight against monopolies again. Like this – the movement to do that has really been going for three or four years and it is beginning to work. It doesn't seem that way yet, but it is really exciting. So I just want you to know that like we stopped fighting monopolies, but we're picking up that kind

of politics. It's not obvious. And I can go into why I think that that's the case, but I just wanted to frame that. So my book starts with Teddy Roosevelt in 1910 giving this incredible – giving this speech in Ossawatomie, Kansas, in the mud to farmers talking about the great crisis of special interests in America. And it's the third crisis of America, the first one being the Revolutionary War, the second one being the great contest with the slave power in the Civil War. And now we have this giant problem with this third crisis, the corporation, right? What do we do with this thing called the corporation, the crunching of bones under the railroads, the steel mills, you know, the standard oil, the octopus strangling our liberties? Like, what do we do about that? And Teddy Roosevelt gives this speech and comes out with this theory called the new

nationalism, which says, just concentrate power under the government, which looks a lot like fascism actually, which emerges when, you know, a few years later. That almost sounds like the system that China has today, where it's a state sponsored monopoly. Yeah. Everyone thinks of Teddy Roosevelt as a great trust buster. And what I show in Goliath is that he actually was kind of a proto Mussolini in a lot of ways. Oh, wow. Okay. Although it was very – I mean it wasn't – because fascism hadn't happened yet or it hadn't been coined.

But fascism is basically a variant of aristocracy. And Teddy Roosevelt was – he's known as a great trust buster because he used the Sherman Act. But that was really because he was trying to establish with J.P. Morgan who was kind of of the great boss of corporate America, that Teddy Roosevelt was in charge, not J.P. Morgan. But in 1912, when he ran for president again, he wanted to actually get rid of the antitrust laws because he actually liked monopolies. The point is the 1912 election was the election in which we – that was all about how are we going to structure corporate America, right? That was sort of the big bang of American corporate politics. And it reached back to the founding of the country, questions of monopoly and banking power, which Americans had always understood as a political threat. And that, in that election, Woodrow Wilson won,

and Woodrow Wilson essentially laid the template down for what we would do. He did 18 months that was just amazing. And, you know, banned child labor, just all these incredible things. And then World War I started. And World War I was such a big deal that the US stock market shut down for six months. Wow. Right? Because it was, it's like, they just didn't know how to run things without, with Europe at war. Right? It was crazy how, what a big deal, a hundred thousand Americans were stuck in Europe. It was just like the, the world war one changed everything. And what Woodrow Wilson did, he eventually took the U S into world war one.

And he said, we know this, the new freedom, which was his frame for how he was going to bring industrial democracy. We're not just going to bring democracy, industrial democracy in America anymore. We're going to bring it bring democracy, industrial democracy in America anymore. We're going to bring it into the heart of the old, the heart of the aristocracies and monarchies of Europe. Because if you don't, it leads to world war, which is catastrophic. And so he tried to do that. He said, we're going to bring the new freedom worldwide. And that was the treaty attempt to pass the Treaty of Versailles. And it was a catastrophe. There was a massive boom and then a massive bust. And finally, the people just hadn't had enough. And they elected this plotting mediocrity named Warren Harding. I mean, he used to talk about, he's like, I'm a mediocrity. I don't know what

I'm doing. I don't want to play cards. But he died. He died pretty quickly. But the thing is, is the roaring 20s was this period when people didn't believe in democracy anymore. So Walter Lippman wrote a couple of books basically saying democracy doesn't work. The U.S. Army Training Manual listed democracy as a kind of a national security threat, said it was like demagogue. Like, there was, it was this decade that, you know, the KKK was just ascendant, right? Because there was a rural depression. And the KKK was the big issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. And the KKK forces won. Actually, the mayor of Portland, Oregon and the mayor of Portland, Maine in 1922 were both KKK.

Which, by the way, in the 1920s, the KKK was also a for-profit Ponzi scheme type of thing. Not Ponzi scheme, but it was a for-profit sort of Amway-style multi-level marketing company. Because what, they were selling the hoods for profit? They were literally selling the robes for profit. And then it collapsed in a sex scandal. Like, it was amazing. Like, it's super fucking weird, right? Anyway, so I go over this really scary decade in the 1920s,

and I talk about one of these all-time great American villains, which nobody knows anymore, it's this guy named Andrew Mellon, who was the Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932 and also the third richest man in the world or in the country. He owned three Fortune 500 companies. He was engaged in self-dealing. He basically ran the IRS as his own political machine and gave himself massive tax cuts. He threatened his enemy.

He was this fascinating guy. And then he was running his companies while at the Treasury Department. And he, yeah, no, it's like, there are all so many parallels to the way that politics operates today. Yeah. And there were three presidents in the 20s.

And the joke at the time was, you know, three presidents served under Mellon, right? And then, thank you for like the chortle. It doesn't really deserve. It's like, if this were 1927, you'd be like, oh man, that's a great, you know, but like it's, anyway. So it's just like fascinating kind of really dark period where we almost, we pretty much almost went fascist. It was a corporatist decade around the world. That's when Italy went fascist.

That's the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany. Things were not going particularly well in terms of team democracy, right? And then in the 30s, there was the economic collapse, and that's when the second major character of my book, the first one is Mellon. He kind of casts the shadow over the 20th century. And the second one is this guy named Wright Patman who is a student of Brandeis, kind

of an ally of FDR, but a populist from rural Texas. And he gets into Congress in 1929, and he basically organizes veterans from World War I, and there's like 10 million veterans or something. There's a large number of veterans. And he says in 1929, he introduces a bill to get them an accelerated pension for their service in World War I, which isn't that popular then. But by 1932, when everybody is poor, all of a sudden there's a giant march and protest in D.C. where people are literally – it's like Occupy Wall Street. It's called the Bonus Army. And they just camped out in D.C. saying, give us our money from the First World War.

We're in a depression. And Andrew Mellon is saying no. And then Patman is leading the charge. And then Herbert Hoover tear gases them all. When that footage from that is shown in theaters around the country, because that's how a lot of people got news. Newsreels. Everyone started booing.

And that's when FDR was like, oh, I guess I don't really have to campaign against Hoover. I'm going to win this one. Man, people really, really hated Hoover. He was incredibly hated. He was such a piece of shit. He used to sit down for a seven-course meal every night during the Depression in like tails, like not just tuxedo, but like tails. And the reason – it's like a seven-course meal every night. like tails. And the reason it's like a seven course meal every night. And the reason he did that is because he was like, if people don't have confidence that things are normal and going well,

then the depression will continue. Oh, wow. Yeah. He was withdrawing money. Like he was telling people, oh, don't worry. The banking system is safe. And then having his assistant withdraw all his money. Like, so he would have it in cash. Like he was bad guy. The musical Antony has this song, Thank You, Mr. Hoover. That's about Herbert Hoover. He was this figure. The Democrats ran against him for 20 years. So what I show is that basically the first thing that FDR,

FDR actually puts Andrew Mellon on trial for tax fraud. Is this the same Mellon whose like name is on Carnegie Mellon? Is it the same guy? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. That shows you the power of wealth that even after being such a piece of shit, you can still have your name on universities today is something. But I'm sorry, I cut you off.

Please finish the story. No, like, and his like grandson or great grandson-grandson or whatever is like a Bitcoin billionaire. Or was. God damn it. And then, like, it's just like, it's just like it's... Of course he is. You know, it's so stupid. Like, extreme wealth is so dumb. Yeah. That's the other thing, is these people are like, that's what's so cool about, like, FDR

and Patman and Pecora and these guys, is they like, today, you know, I think, like, my problem with, like, some of the Obama guys is they, like, looked at super wealthy people and they were like, oh, you must know what you're doing. You're like really smart. And like these guys looked at super wealthy people and were like, you're mediocre. Yeah. Like you're just good at grabbing things.

Yeah. And you just have a lot so you can do a lot with the stuff you have. Like it's not because you're a genius. It's just because you have it. It's just because you're a genius. It's just because you have it. It's just because the rich get richer. It's like the reason rich people are rich is because the rich get richer. The end. I am so annoyed I have to pay attention to Mark Zuckerberg

because whenever he says anything, he's such a mediocrity. He's a good businessman, but it's like a plain omelet talking. He gives a speech about free speech speech and it's just like, it's so boring and annoying. Like this guy is like, it's like a sophomore in college who read some books about free speech and like, I don't care.

Like, why do I have to pay attention to you? Nobody elected you. You just monopolized a social media because we weren't enforcing the laws. And now I have to pay attention to you. This is really fucking annoying. Yeah. He just bought,

he just bought his competitors and now he's one of the most powerful people in the world. I'm sorry. I just want to go on an aside. This is not about monopoly power at all, but I have experienced in my working life so many, and I won't name names, but so many like dudes who happen to be in the right place at the right time. So they made a bunch of money, you know, they, they started a website, got lucky, et cetera. And then as a result of that one bit of luck, everybody, they and everybody else thought that they're geniuses and that everything else they're going to do is going to be great. And then you watch them, everything they do fails after that over and over again, because they're not actually that smart and they're not actually that talented.

They just got lucky the one time. It's like I had a friend who went to Vegas with a friend, and he was like, you know what I'm going to do? As soon as we get there, I'm going to put $100 on red on the roulette wheel. And we're like, okay, man, go ahead, fine. He was like, that's his fun game he's going to do. He put $100 on red. He won, and then for the rest of the night,

he thought he was the smartest gambler in the world. He was like, oh, you know what you should do in blackjack. He was telling everybody. He's a genius like no you got lucky that's a bad bet that's a bad bet no matter what you got lucky on a bad bet doesn't make you smart doesn't mean you know vegas inside out or anything like that right and there's so many like that's what that's what zuckerberg is like he happened to create you know he he was the guy who created the one site that happened to go he bought everybody else and now now he acts like he's a genius who should get to decide what our political discourse is. Like, give me a fucking break. political hurdle that we have, right?

It's actually, it's in our own minds. It's this sense that people who are successful are successful for a reason, as opposed to people who are successful are successful because they took advantage of a public policy framework that encouraged a certain kind of concentration. They're just like us. They're no better or worse.

And there's this guy, Bernard Baruch, who was an advisor to Woodrow Wilson, and he ran a lot of the operations during World War I. And a general, or actually the head of U.S. Steel came to him and said, you know, you can't tell us what to do. This is an intricate operation and you can't just order us around. And he said, well, you know what I can do? I can just fire you and appoint a second lieutenant to run U.S. Steel, right? I mean, he had some respect, obviously, for some operational competence, but he knew it's, this is not, this is not rocket science, right? You can do this stuff. Like what they did during the crisis was not rocket science.

And we need to have the confidence that we can govern, right? Because if we don't have the confidence that we can govern, then we're going to let Bob Iger at Disney or we're going to let Mark Zuckerberg or we're going to let Warren Buffett or anyone else. We're going to say we defer to you. And it is that deference. It is that culture of deference that is the reason that we are increasingly operating in servitude. We don't have to do that, right? We can just be like we can recognize what we all know, which is that people are just people.

We are all basically equal, for better or worse. That's an incredible insight. And because we have this culture of deference towards these billionaires, towards the Elon Musks, towards the Tim Cooks, towards the whoever's in charge of Google, of like oh these these people must really know what they're doing and we should listen to them um but uh it's yeah why so so here's why okay so i go into this in the 1950s we built a new

ideology and this this came from a couple of scholars on the left and the right so john kenneth galbraith richard hofstetter and then milton fried and robert bork a couple of scholars on the left and the right, so John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Hofstadter, and then Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, a couple of others, they built a sort of a fake history. And they said, you know, political economy, corporations, banks, that stuff is not part of politics. That is science. Let the economists, the scientists handle that. Politics is about social questions like, you know, conformity or flag burning or whatever. The economists, they know what they're doing. The plutocrats, like if somebody, you know, gets to the top of a bank, it's because he knows what he's doing. And politics is not about that.

Politics is about, you know, abortion or politics is about sort of these social questions, which are important. But we shrink politics to these questions that don't involve our commercial selves. And that's not true, right? Because politics is about power. It's about who exercises power, who controls our lives, who sets the terms of our lives. And de facto, anybody who's running a company that's as large as Facebook or U.S. Steel or whatever is determining the, has power over our lives, right? Like Mark Zuckerberg. They're a private government. I mean, that's what it is. When you have a monopoly. So in Goliath,

I show this and I show that the new dealers, they, this is how they talked about the world. They said, you know, U.S. Steel is more powerful in some cases than many governments. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg said this too. He said, Facebook in many ways, this is a quote, in many ways is more like a government than a business. We're really setting policies, right? When you talk about Amazon, like they, you hire people, they hire people, they say, you know, you're going to be an Amazon marketplace policy enforcer. That's not somebody on their public policy team who talks to people in DC. That's somebody who enforces policies on the Amazon marketplace. That's a governing position, right? So a monopoly, right? Disney is the governor increasingly of our creative commons.

They're not just a movie studio. They govern, right? And I mean, there's, it's a little bit more complicated, but they set the terms and conditions for a lot of the people in the industry and a lot of the ways that audiences can relate to movies and you either take it or you leave it. So what, what I show in Goliath, and this is, I think, something that was kind of part of American politics from the 1790s until the 1970s, is that how we do business is how we do justice. It's not about whether we're for business or against business. It's about how we do business. And justice is part of business. So power is part of business. Business is part of politics.

And we have to recenter political economy as the core point of politics. And that means saying to economists, saying to experts, saying to plutocrats, you know, you guys are, these are political questions and we all get a say in this. Even if I'm just a guy who is just like doesn't have a particularly nice suit and tie. I get a say because I'm a citizen.

And that's the other piece is that in the 1970s, this philosophy that I talked about was being developed in the 40s and 50s coalesced into the consumer rights movement. And so a lot of the well-meaning people on the left decided, oh, well, I don't care about whether businesses are small or big. Business is just bad. What we really care about is consumerism. And they transformed our conception of what our political selves is from citizen to consumer. And when that happens, all of a sudden, we lost our ability to see power. And our antitrust laws and our regulatory tools, all of a sudden we stopped caring about whether that concentrated power and started saying, well, is the stuff that we're getting cheaper, right? Do people like, you know, Star Wars? Is AMC, are their theaters fine? Okay,

if they're fine, then whatever. We don't care if they're independent theaters because there's no difference between an independent theater and big chain, right? Who cares, right? So that's what happened to us. And we're reclaiming citizenship now. Yeah, and that is why it's so satisfying to now see, you know, politicians yelling at Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing, right? And refusing to take his bullshit lying down, right? And saying, no, we deserve,

like, you have to take us seriously. This is not a sideshow. This is like the actual, you know, where the actual business of figuring out what our society is going to be, where it happens. Absolutely. And you're seeing – that is a symptom of the fact that we are returning political economy to the center of our politics, right? That Mark Zuckerberg is testifying and he's sitting there and he's acting actually like the global privacy commissioner and Congress is mad that they can't do anything about it. That's not something we would have seen five years ago. It's not something that we would have seen 10 years ago.

There's major investigations going on into Facebook and into Google. This is something we haven't seen really since the 50s or 60s. And this is a hallmark of the 1930s kind of politics is investigating corporate power. So that's why I'm excited about this moment because we really are learning and our policymakers are learning and all of us are learning. And fundamentally, that really is what drives politics. Like our democracy does,

like our politicians do actually respond to what we care about. We just didn't care about this stuff before because we had lost our ability to see power. And now we're learning to see power again. Yeah, I love that message that it's about power and not about price. I actually read Tim Wu's book, The Curse of Bigness earlier this year. And he talks about how it was almost like Robert Bork, like advanced this philosophy that, you know, we used to have antitrust that actually went after centers of power like this and saw the problem with monopoly as being power,

but that was very difficult for judges to enforce because it required them to think in a complex way. And Robert Bork advanced this idea of like, oh, you can just, it's only if prices go up. That's the only problem. Like if prices go up, that's the problem with monopoly. So are prices going to go up or did they go up? Then you can, you know, that's a really easy litmus test. And all the judges were like, oh, okay, if I use this, then I don't have to think so hard. This guy gave me an easy formula to plug it into.

economists. So the judges were like, because judges like fancy people. So judges are like, oh, well, I'll just listen to the scientist and he'll tell me if prices go up. And if you want to understand the physical manifestation of that. So Robert Bork in the 1970s transformed antitrust by saying, it's not about the competitive process. It's not whether, you know, you and I would say, what are the competitors in the market that shows if there's competition? Robert Bork said, no, no competition just means whether their consumer prices are low or what's called consumer welfare. And then what's the physical manifestation of that? That would be Walmart, everyday low prices, right? And Walmart, you had all these independent stores. And then in the 1970s and 80s, Walmart exploded. And people are like, well, there's no difference if you have thousands of

independent stores versus Walmart, because Walmart, they're just delivering lower prices. And it has, obviously, it has massive effects on a society. But when you airbrush power out of the equation, right, all of a sudden, you know, you enable the growth of these giant corporations like Walmart, and then eventually Amazon. So it shapes our culture. But also, price is only one part of the occasion. How about wages? Right? Like Walmart has so much power that it is able to drive wages down for everyone who works there because those people have nowhere else to work in the town because none of those other stores exist. That's right. And then also, yeah, the amount of power they have to just shape the lives of the people who live there by virtue of what Walmart chooses to stock.

Like if Walmart cuts a deal with such and such a vendor, then that's the only type of beach chair that you have in your town for sale anymore. And that's a frivolous example. And then also, if you want to make a new product, right, you used to be able to go to a bunch of independent stores and be like, hey, I have some pomegranate juice. Would you sell this? And the guy would be like, hey, I have some pomegranate juice. Would you sell this? And the guy would be like, yeah, sure. We'll see if it sells. And now you have to go to Bentonville or Seattle where Amazon is located and negotiate with their rooms of lawyers who will make sure you get no margin. So what we're seeing is that it's much harder to start a business these days because the distribution channels are clogged up with companies like Walmart and Amazon.

And that's true. That's what movie chains – that's what the change. That's what movie change. That's what happened to Hollywood right now. Yeah. That's the other thing. It's like, so it's all part of the same philosophy. And this is why, and this is why, by the way, this is a, should be a nonpartisan issue or a non big business versus or a non business versus left wing issue.

Because like when smaller companies are choked out, then that's bad for everybody, right? That's bad for like, I mean, everyone in American politics loves small business entrepreneurs, right? And the fact that it is harder to start a business than it used to be in America, that's something that everybody

should be able to get behind. Yeah, and I think what you're seeing is a radical restructuring of politics. So a lot of people don't believe me. I have a bunch of Republican friends now, and they really are concerned about this. Tom Cotton, who's an Arkansas Republican, he tweeted, you know, when Adam Newman at WeWork got a $1.7 billion severance or whatever for his – for destroying – for just being a con artist. You know, Tom Cotton was like, you know, he shouldn't get a $1.7 billion. He should be investigated. And this is why so many young people are going to Bernie Sanders, right? And it's like capitalism, when you monopolize, when you have this crisis of monopoly,

you undermine the legitimacy of capitalism itself. And that's what's happening. And people on the right understand this. So you're seeing a rebellion on the right. And these are not, I'm a left-wing Democrat, right? So I'm like, their vision is not my vision. And it's a scary vision in many ways. But they see what's happening.

They see the control that China has through our commercial institutions. They see the control that Mark Zuckerberg has, and they're afraid of it. And on the left, you see candidates like Elizabeth Warren, like Bernie Sanders, and a whole, you know, AOC, and just like a whole bunch of others who are actually starting to talk, who are recentering monopoly power and political economy in our politics. And I think that this is, this is, you also see it in the business world too, to your point, right? Like you're a bitter fights in DC now between not just,

not just small businesses, but like Oracle is a bitter foe of, of Google and, and Amazon. And you're seeing Walmart and Amazon fighting and you're seeing like all of these, these kind of, you see venture capitalists, you're seeing like the business world is breaking out into a kind of civil war because the monopolists,

it's like a bunch of these guys that basically, I show this basically in the 70s, the business community essentially cut a deal where they would cartelize and monopolize the whole economy in these large and in some cases, very large companies. Well, now these large and very large companies are looking around and all of a sudden they look up and there's Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page from Google and Jeff Bezos from Amazon. And they don't actually feel like predators anymore.

They feel like prey. And so that's scrambling the economy in this and our politics in this very weird way. And it's like the left doesn't see it because they don't necessarily understand business and they don't really care about business. But this is really a fascinating moment. And we're about to have a war, like a really fun opportunity to really restructure our economy in these really healthy ways. That's why I'm an optimist. But it's like, we have to learn, we have to know, like you guys, you know, when I say you, I mean like comedians, but just basically creative professionals, figure out where the leverage points are in your industry, figure out the

market structure that you want to see in your industry to help you compete and help you tell stories. That's what you want to do. And then policymakers can act on that information, right? That's kind of the great nexus that we can put together if we do. I mean, we really can put that together. And, you know, the place that that's happening in the entertainment industry right now is in the unions, right? The Writers Guild is taking on the entrenched monopoly power of the agencies and is one of the only forces in the entertainment industry that is even thinking about consolidation as a threat to the industry. As everyone else watches it happen and is like,

oh boy, Disney Plus sure is scary. You know, the other place that it's happening is the, this is the entertainment world, the ultimate fighting championships. There is an antitrust suit from the fighters against the UFC. Yeah. Because UFC bought up a bunch of its rivals. And so they're suing on wages, right? They're saying our wages went down.

And both the agents, the fight over the agents and the UFC fight, from what I hear, the rumor is that the Trump antitrust division is going to file friend of the court briefs against the fighters in one case and then on behalf of the agents in the other case because the guy who runs the DOJ antitrust division is a guy named Macon Delrahim, and he's like – he's terrible. And both of those things are run by WME, which – the head of which, Ari Emanuel, is like a good friend of Trump's. So he's like, there we go. There we go. Right. No. And the thing is, is that these industries, when you concentrate them the way that we have, what you get is, you know, we concentrated, for example, our civilian aerospace industry into Boeing, right? Boeing is a result of a series of roll-ups. The last one was that bought McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s. And Boeing is the only civilian, major civilian aircraft manufacturer. And now because it's, it's, it was mismanaged.

Now we effectively don't have a competent civilian aircraft manufacturer anywhere. So we're going to have to either buy from Airbus, which has its own problems, or the Chinese are coming with it with an aircraft maker. And so what you actually see with companies like Facebook and Google, they seem like they're good at what they do, but they're actually getting worse and worse and worse. They look a lot like Ford and General Motors in the 1960s, which were on top of the world. But then the next decade, like Toyota came in and showed that they were actually really shitty. And that's what's going to happen to Disney. It's what's going to happen to Google and Facebook.

It's already happening to Boeing so when you pool when you concentrate wealth and power you also pool risk in a way that's dangerous Monopoly really protects incompetence like if you don't need to compete then you can suck at your job and we all suffer because now you're the only place where we can watch TV or buy cars

or get plans or take a flight or etc and that makes you ripe to be toppled when our political establishment finally wises up and people start voting around this issue, which it seems like they finally are. Well, Matt, I got to thank you so much for coming on the show. I really hope people check out your newsletter, which is called big and the book, which is Goliath.

It's really a great book. And there's really not anybody telling these stories except for you. There's very few books on this, and it really helps recenter the way that you think about the economy. I really thank you for writing it. Thanks a lot. So the full name is Goliath, The Hundred-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. And you can subscribe to Big at my website, which is M-A-T-T-S-T-O-L-L-E-R.com or mattstoller.com. Now, you know, you should really be working in Hollywood because that was a masterful plug. Thanks so much for your time, Matt.

Thanks a lot. Well, thank you once again to Matt Stoller for coming on the show. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our superstar researcher Sam Roudman and our WK for our theme song.

You can follow me at Twitter at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list to find out about tour dates and interesting factoids

at adamconover.net and until then we'll see you next week on Factually. Thanks so much for listening. That was a HeadGum Podcast.