Organized Money

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 Americans already love government-run grocery stores; they just don't realize it. Errol also dismantles much of the criticism the pilot program has received as we discuss the logistics of scale and how the private sector will actually run the stores. Among many things, we get into how the subsidies will work, grocery policy at large, and get a very frank assessment of what to make of the criticism coming from think tanks like The Manhattan Institute. 

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 corner of the business world, which is often shrouded in arbitration, NDAs, and non-disparagement clauses. Finally, we discuss the regulatory steps we need to make franchising more equitable. 

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

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, where he ran on an anti-consolidation platform. They discuss how the merger will result in fewer buyers, fewer platforms, and fewer opportunities in general. In this surprisingly optimistic Organized Money episode, we also get into the groundswell of anti-monopoly energy that is appearing in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and how to channel that energy through organization. 

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 with a brilliant price hack, and even a Medicare coach: someone whose job is to help save seniors millions on their medication. 

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

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


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

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

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

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

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.