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I'm Akshatrati and this summer on my podcast zero, I'm doing a series about climate storytelling, how we talk about climate change and what it means for how we confront it.

This week, I'm interviewing journalist Amy Vestavelt about reporting on the history of climate denialism.

I'm a big believer in the idea that you can't effectively solve a problem if you don't really know where it came from.

Listen to zero on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Wyzenthal.

Joe, you remember last month we spoke with Jared Bernstein, who's the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors and we were talking about Bidenomics.

Yeah, great chat. Always appreciate sort of getting a sense of how policy makers are thinking about things and obviously we've talked a lot about this sort of like industrial policy, domestic investment side, but there is still more.

Yeah, so he outlined these kind of three basic planks of Bidenomics and you already mentioned the big one, which is public investment slash industrial policy, whatever you want to call it.

The second one is sort of empowering workers and then there's this third one about promoting competition.

And we touched on it with Jared. We spoke a little bit about how the Biden administration is approaching antitrust, but I think it's one of those topics we really need to get into because it keeps coming up in various ways.

Can I just say, I don't know anything about this topic. That's true for most episodes that we do, but I feel very comfortable saying that like when it comes to, you know, the law is not an area in which, you know, I'm like use like reading like sell side research about like, okay, the Fed is going to do this. So inflation is going to do this.

And when it comes to things like sort of like the legal philosophies related to mergers, et cetera, like I really genuinely know very little.

There's a market opportunity out there to become the antitrust guy on Twitter. So maybe that should be our goal. But you have to admit, it does keep coming up.

So we recorded an episode with Scott Hildenbrand recently about bank consolidation and whether or not we're going to be seeing a lot more bank mergers in the wake of the deposit drama in March.

And then it came up again, I think on our episode with Josh Wolfe, right, where he was talking about how big tech companies are investing in artificial intelligence, but they're doing it in a very specific way to possibly

a vague regulatory scrutiny.

Yeah, that was one of the things I hadn't appreciated before and he pointed out that you have all these big companies making these huge investments, VC looking investment in AI startups.

And he positive that one reason they may be making these investments, Microsoft making investments, Google making investments is because well, maybe antitrust authorities aren't going to be very happy if they buy some of these companies, but they can maybe perhaps like make something that resembles a VC style investment.

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