Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home.

I'm Brian McCullough.

For a while now, I've been trying to get someone to come on here to talk to me about big tech and

regulation big tech and antitrust. Well Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute

he's writing a book on the history of Monopoly Power, and he has direct experience with this stuff.

He was a senior policy advisor and budget analyst to the Senate Budget Committee.

He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on Financial Services Policy, including Dodd-Frank,

including the Federal Reserve and the foreclosure crisis.

So today we're going to talk to Matt about Monopoly Power and Big Tech, how it's different because it's Big Tech, and regulating

Big Tech. Is it different this time? Is some meaningful Monopoly Hammer about to come down

on Silicon Valley? Quick note, I argue both sides of several arguments in this conversation,

but I want to stress I don't have actually any solid conclusions about any of this myself.

That's why I wanted to talk to someone like

Matt to help me get my mind around this stuff. Please enjoy.

You have experience in the government with things like oversight and regulation.

I think, you know, with the Senate, with the House of Representatives, on financial services policy, all sorts of stuff like that but I guess my first

question is from you reading your tea leaves is it really different this time

for tech do you feel like there's going to be some meaningful action coming down the pike for big tech or is this just a lot of hot air that will never amount to anything?

Oh, I think there's going to be meaningful action.

Yeah.

So, and I think it's going to be soon.

I think there's going to be a lot of it,

...