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Alright, I'm so glad to have Matt Stoller,

Research Director for the American Economic Liberties Project back on the podcast.

Of course, you also know him from his amazing substack, Big, to which I am a subscriber.

Welcome back, Matt.

Thanks, thanks. I am amazing.

It's really, you're really lucky to have me on to talk about so many important things.

Look, real talk. I reached out to you first off to talk about this perspective, airline merger.

But then there are all these other news events that keep bubbling up that you're kind of uniquely suited to talk about.

Oh, stop.

Look, I'm no flatter, Matt. This is just the truth of the situation.

You did a really interesting, I think, nuanced thread giving your take on the hearing on the Twitter files with Matt Taiyibi and Michael Schellenberger last week.

And additionally, there is this bank collapse out west that is all over the news, and which I would love for you to help us understand.

So do you have a preference about which one we start with?

No, I mean, so there's the airline consolidation in general, right?

Which is like fascinating. And then you've got the Twitter files and like the FTC and then you've got Silicon Valley bank that collapse of that.

And that whatever you want.

I left off obviously the very first thing I reached out to you to talk about was whether or not there were any kind of antitrust implications with the derailment in East Palestine, whether or not there was kind of a top level.

Explanation for how some of this stuff happened.

So how about we start just superficially with that one, you know, I kind of went out in a limb, but I was just curious.

How few railroad companies there are, it seemed to me that consolidation had to be some part of the story of how we get to a place where there's very few companies that are as a consequence, perhaps more susceptible to the kind of corporate capture that we've seen in the case of Norfolk railroad by going too far out on a limb there.

No, that's right. I mean, so there's different kinds of industries and some of them, you know, when you're like selling ice cream, you can have lots of competitive firms.

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