Welcome to The Lost of Beta Show for Politically Collectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And in a second, we're going to hear from somebody I've been meeting to talk to for a long time. Tim Wu, who is the author of many books, including most recently, just two weeks ago, a book called The Age of Extraction, How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. It's kind of a mix of antitrust history, but also it's in an

argument about the role of tech companies and why, in part, the failure to enforce our antitrust

laws and among other things have led us to a world in which those companies have unprecedented

power and that they're using those powers to

make our economy less competitive, our lives less fulfilled, and our potentially our information

ecosystem more polluted. And we talk about everything from newspapers to digital platforms

and free speech. And we had a good conversation about the limits of

the government's role and free speech policing, talking about the future of artificial intelligence,

the breakup of companies like AT&T and IBM, et cetera. So it is a far-reaching conversation. You'll

really enjoy it. Tim is a professor at Columbia University. He, at the law school, he also served

a special assistant for technology and competition policy from 2021 to 23 in the White House

and has been, you know, somebody who, you know, constantly commenting on antitrust policy and

technology policy. So you're going to love that conversation. But before we get there,

a couple quick things. One is, if you haven't yet, I have a substack, real Robbie Gupta.com,

where I talk about mostly non-political things. This week I talk about a book called Against the

Machine. And it's a critique of where we are in our age of digital distraction and the sort of flattening

of culture and just the texture of life.

And so I kind of riff on that book and the sort of name against the machine and, you know,

the corollaries to rage against the machine, a band that I used to love as a kid.

So I get personal there. So you could read that. It's free. So you can go to real Robbie Gupta at SubSac.com. Also, second is I have this writing group that's going to be starting up in January. It's going to last the entire year. It's called the analog writing group, and it's all about finishing. So the people who we've already accepted into the cohort, people are either writing books or screenplays and things like that. And it's all about how to finish those things. And so if you go to Ravi M. Gupta.com slash analog, you could check out more details there. We'll also link to it in the show notes in the description. And you could apply. We're accepting people on a rolling basis now through

the beginning of December. And so you could check that out. So without further ado, let's jump

to this interview with Tim Will. Tim, welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to be here. Thanks.

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