Slate Money - Money Talks: Don't Be Evil-ish
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Money Talks: Elizabeth Spiers is joined by Tim Wu to discuss his new book, The Age of Extraction, which breaks down how we ended up with an economy dominated by Big Tech and its purely profit-seeking mindset. They’ll get into the slow erosion of optimism around the internet as a democratizing force, the state of antitrust enforcement in America, and what it might look like if we stop allowing big companies to nickel and dime the public unchecked.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires. Today we're here with Tim |
| 0:09.7 | Lou, who has a new book out. It's called The Age of Extraction, How Tech Platforms |
| 0:14.2 | conquered the economy and threatened our future prosperity. Hi, Tim. Hey, great to see you again. |
| 0:19.8 | Why don't you just introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. |
| 0:22.0 | Well, I guess you got my name. I am a professor at Columbia University Law School, where I |
| 0:27.7 | basically teach anti-monopoly classes and about private power. Previously, I worked in the |
| 0:34.7 | Biden administration and the tech policy. I worked in the Obama White House, and I guess I've done other things. I was just, I was just, I worked in the Biden administration and tech policy. I worked in the Obama White House and I guess I've done other things. I was just with Zephyr Teachout, I ran once against Andrew Cuomo to try to knock him off and was satisfied when we finally once. So anyway, I've done a number of things. I don't know what made me get into politics. Probably because you're talking to me. Yeah, maybe that's true. I think I did participate in a fundraiser for you during your political run. Yeah. |
| 0:58.0 | Tell us about your new book. I wrote this book. A little bit of a personal project because |
| 1:03.2 | I was one of the people who was just incredibly optimistic about the internet in the 90s and early |
| 1:09.3 | thousands. So was I. |
| 1:11.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:12.9 | What happened? |
| 1:14.1 | That's the book. |
| 1:16.8 | I thought it was going to make everybody rich. |
| 1:21.4 | I thought that anyone who had creative talent would, you know, have their audience. |
| 1:26.3 | I don't know if I really believed it would make every country a democracy, but I kind of thought it could. |
| 1:29.7 | And so the question is, basically, |
| 1:35.1 | especially the money side, what happened? Why did it end up just being a couple big winners? |
| 1:40.5 | And a lot of other industries getting hollowed out or reduced to kind of facile status. |
| 1:46.5 | That is the book. It's called The Age of Extraction. And it's basically the story of that era and the sort of misunderstandings of platform power that made it all happen. |
| 1:52.3 | We'll be getting into this conversation coming up on Money Talks. |
| 1:59.0 | Why are businesses like HelloVet choosing Apple products and services? |
... |
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