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- [00:01]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:47]
Mike Pesca
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- [00:54]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:57]
Lina Khan
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- [01:03]
Piers Morgan
Hey, it's Saturday. It's Mike. I don't know, is that the right order of things? It's Mike and it's Saturday. And on Saturday we do one from the vaults and one from the week. And this week I wanted to talk about the Pope. So you know what I did since I have a podcast and it's called the Gist. And what was interesting to me was the Pope's maga brother I had read about the things he wrote seemed maga. And then I heard him on Piers Morgan, not usually the salon for reasoned intellectual debate. And he came across, okay, he didn't come across as non maga. He didn't disavow those views. But I contrasted it with an essay I read by Tina Brown, which was like many things written by Tina Brown, worth reading, but something I disagreed with. It wasn't a spiel. It was top of the show. But I hadn't heard many other people expressing these sentiments. And so I did. And so I do again. And from the vault we go back. I was thinking about the trials, the ongoing trials, these tech trials where the big tech firms are before deep DC Magistrates being called to account for their bigness. And I was thinking about how this all started. And it was because of a then very clever Yale law student named Lina Khan who went on to be the antitrust czar czarina of the Biden administration. And I don't know how this happened, but I was looking through the archives and I found that Lina Khan was on the show and I said to myself, I, I have no recollection of having interviewed Lina Khan. This sometimes happened. So I listened to the interview, eager to hear what great questions I would have asked back in 2017 of Lina Khan. The answer is there were great questions asked, but none were by me. Robert Smith, who is of Planet Money and many other fantastic radio ventures. He was guest hosting that day and he had Lina Khan on and he did a much better interview than I ever could have done. So the Pope from this week, that's me. Lina Khan, 2017. Robert Smith does the duty.
- [03:16]
Ryan Reynolds
This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Three couples, four vacations, a lot to unpack. Watch the Four Seasons, a new series starring comedy favorites Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Will Forte, Colman Domingo and more in a hilarious and heartfelt love letter to long term relationships based on the original Alan Alda film. Watch the four seasons streaming now only on Netflix.
- [03:45]
Piers Morgan
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the Now It Pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com Credit Card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, it's Wednesday, May 14, 2025. From PE Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Headline New York Times World Catholics don't see New Pope as a typical American. Well, I can understand that he has certain qualities that most other Americans don't have, like the papacy. He's the Pope. Demographically speaking, most other Americans aren't. Very few, statistically insignificant assortment of Americans are actually the Pope. So yeah, he's his own man now. One thing that is more typical, more earthbound, less holy and exalted than you'd like is that the Pope, the former Robert Prevost, has a brother Lou. I'm doing. I'm doing New York, but it should be has a brother Lou. And Lou has opinions. Lou doesn't talk exactly like that, but Lou has put his opinions online. He says that anyone with a transgender child is a shitty parent. He says that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a drunken. Can I say the C word? I don't know if I can. I can. I choose not to. Lou didn't make such a choice. And he says that anti Trump Democrats should be arrested and tried for subversion and even treason against the usa. Okay. You know, that's in one context. The liturgy, that's in another context. I was already to be worried about Lou, the Pope's brother, Lou, how he might be the Billy Carter of the Papacy, bringing it all down, selling it all a little bit. And then I listened to an interview by Piers Morgan, because if you really want to go and get the straight dope, you listen to Piers Morgan. And there was Lou. And first of all, Lou spoke of when he first had the knowledge that his brother would become Pope. And it was very touching and it was very human.
- [06:17]
Lou Prevost
That was me. I fell back. Oh, my God. That's my brother. My little brother just became Pope. What? What's going on? I can't believe this. And that's when all my mind just went white blank. Explosions inside, outside, emotionally up and down.
- [06:32]
Piers Morgan
That was nice. And then. And then they got to the issue at hand. Will. Well, you could hear Pierce Morgan putting it to Louis, the Pope's brother, Lou. What about the wokeness?
- [06:43]
Lou Prevost
He's a communist sympathizer, whatever. I don't see. Well, the suggestion is that your brother. It may be a touch on the woke side. I know you're pretty anti woke yourself. Can you confirm or deny that your little brother is woke? I don't know that I'd even go that far to say he's woke. He's probably much more liberal than I am, but that's us. And again, that's his position as a priest in the church, as part of the clergy.
- [07:13]
Piers Morgan
That's a nice answer. That's an answer that made me feel much better about the Pope, the Prevost family. I don't know America, the world discourse, even Piers Morgan, than all that. I have been reading about Lou. One other thing I've been reading about Lou that I'm not even sure of. Lou knew is that his family is black or would be considered black under many laws in the United States for the history of the United States. So his maternal, the Pope and Lou Prevost's maternal grandparents were from New Orleans. And a census taker noted that the family, the Martinez's, were black because the grandfather was from Haiti, spelled with a Y. Whatever. Then future census takers counted them as white. So I figured. And then because they are actually of Creole ancestry, they move to Chicago. It all becomes forgotten until they research it because of the Pope. I was wondering if the Prevosts even knew all of this, if Lou was the kind of guy I'D be going on about they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, only to find out he's Haitian. But I think maybe I shouldn't have had to worry so much. Many of those sentiments I do find loathsome, but I was first alerted to them by the press, and then I was influenced by an essay in Tina Brown substack. And what Tina Brown, the former editor of the New Yorker, wrote was I don't want the Papacy demystified in the way America demystifies everything with pedestrian anecdotes about how Rob, that's the Pope, used to cosplay as a priest. Geez, it was just like yesterday I was throwing him down the stairs. If holy awe is to be preserved, we don't need any undermining of papal mystique. Plus, America has good enough global power as it is. Its cultural hegemony flattens the enigma of the sacred. That's good. Those are good words. I'm glad to have considered them. I think I totally disagree. What makes the Pope and the Papacy mystical are the trappings thereof. The power is that all that grandeur, all that history, all that association with the mystical is embodied in a man, a common man, a flesh and blood man. A man who grew up rooting for the White Sox and having a rich family history typical of many Americans. And even, yes, having a brother with whom he disagrees when it comes to politics and yet still finds a connection. And I find this is not a lamentable thing. I, in fact, find this to be overall a salutary thing. And I also think it's a little more typical of Americans than the rest of the world might know.
- [10:07]
Mike Pesca
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- [10:35]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [11:08]
Mike Pesca
You know who had a good week this week? Amazon.com they took control of their first brick and mortar business, Whole Foods and and all. The big news cover was about how amazing their prices were. Amazon's first act as an owner of a new grocery store was to slash fair trade banana prices by 30%. Responsibly farmed Atlantic salmon down 33%. Orphaned baby kale 13% off. Even locally sourced echo speakers were on sale and forgotten. This week seemed to be the concern that the world had just a few months ago. Is Amazon getting too big? You may remember when the purchase of Whole Foods was announced, stock in every other grocery store retailer plunged. People feared that the grocery business was this new world that Amazon was going to conquer. But the federal government looked at the purchase and said, eh, seems fine. And Amazon cutting prices was the exact opposite of the thing an evil monopolistic corporation would do, right? So this week it seemed that the free market triumphed. Or did it? A number of consumer groups and liberal think tanks are starting to argue that there needs to be a different way of thinking about monopolies in the Amazon and the Google era. Maybe a new set of antitrust laws to handle these new kinds of companies. Lina Khan laid out what these new laws might look like. She's a legal fellow at the Open Markets Project, which until this week was part of the New America Foundation. We'll get to that. Lena wrote this really smart and detailed dissection on antitrust law in the Yale Law Review. Thanks for coming out to the gist, Lena.
- [12:46]
Lina Khan
Thanks for having me.
- [12:48]
Mike Pesca
So why do you hate cheap avocados? Like seriously, like, what is your problem with plenty of arugula with eating healthy with prices going down? I mean, businesses are there to serve the consumer and if they're serving the consumer with quality products at a quality price, I just don't see what the problem is.
- [13:11]
Lina Khan
I think there are a couple of potential problems. One is that short term consumer prices are not an effective gauge for long term competition. So if Amazon is able to price goods below costs in a way that drives out other businesses, it will then be in a position where it can in fact raise prices.
- [13:29]
Mike Pesca
It can, but we don't know if it will.
- [13:31]
Lina Khan
Sure, but there's a basic question about whether we want to turn total blind eye to enabling a market structure that will then allow a company to raise prices.
- [13:40]
Mike Pesca
$10 avocados, eventually.
- [13:42]
Lina Khan
Exactly. I think the other point here is that antitrust law is also supposed to look at producers and suppliers. And if Amazon is selling cheap avocados in part because it's squeezing farmers and requiring farmers to undertake losses and making their business unsustainable, then that isn't a great way to ensure competitive and healthy marketplace going forward either.
- [14:06]
Mike Pesca
We know that Amazon, they're a store, they're a delivery network, they're a TV producer, they're a book publisher, they just got into podcasts through Audible, hired many of my co workers. But that's many different markets. If you take any one of those individual markets, Amazon does not control a huge share. You know, if you look at clothing, most of the clothing we buy is not from Amazon. Most of the electronics we buy does not come from Amazon. Even in this grocery store acquisition, it's just 2, 3% of the market. So antitrust law, when you think about it, it's really these gian companies that control a majority of a market. And yet Amazon doesn't in any market?
- [14:44]
Lina Khan
Well, I'd say in the book market it actually does. In the e book market, it controls over 50% of that market. I think in other sectors it's important to think about the ways in which Amazon is able to leverage its advantage in one line of business in order to advantage another line of business. It is a platform, but it also competes with the companies that depend on its platform to favor its own goods and services.
- [15:07]
Mike Pesca
Well, when we play the game of monopoly, right, It's a pretty simple thing, the board game, right? You buy up a bunch of properties and if you own all of one color, you can raise the rent when an opponent lands on it. Like that's a very cut and dried version of Monopoly. But for the entire history of antitrust in this country, it's always been one of those weird things to like, how do you define it? And one of the interesting things about the paper you wrote was to walk through that historically this country has looked at monopolies in a different way. I mean, a hundred years ago it was big as bad. If you're huge, if you own huge shares of the market, if you own the suppliers and the outlets, sort of vertical monopoly, then you are bad. But then the view changed, the view changed to sort of a consumer based thing. Do we actually have to pay more? That was the definition of monopoly. Like why did this change?
- [16:02]
Lina Khan
The foundational concerns were political, right? There was an understanding that in the same ways that concentrations of political power threatened democracy, the Concentrations of economic power similarly threatened democracy. And so antitrust enforcers looked at how open a marketplace was, whether a monopolist would be able to use its size and power to disadvantage competitors in anti competitive ways. When we switched to the consumer welfare model, which is what you're referring to, there was a intellectual movement behind that. It was the Chicago Chicago School and the law and economics movement that effectively overthrew a generation of anti monopoly thinking. And they said what matters when we're thinking about competition is not power, is not opportunity, is not competition as measured by how many rivals there are in a market. It's instead going to focus entirely on whether this is good for consumers, which is largely measured through the prism of prices.
- [16:56]
Mike Pesca
Well, explain this to me. The fear of a monopoly is that one person is going to take over one company is going to take over an entire market. And then once there's only one outlet for shoes or cell phones or whatever it is, they can jack the price up and they're going to hurt us all. They're going to hurt us as consumers. And as I look at Amazon, they've been notable for, to be frank, like making our lives better. I mean prices are affordable, prices have gone down, the shipping is convenient. It has been a benefit to the consumer. So if it's not creating bad things for the consumer, how can you say that Amazon is a monopoly or engaged in monopolistic practices?
- [17:40]
Lina Khan
Consumer welfare is not the only thing to care about. Traditionally we also cared about whether other entrepreneurs and other independent producers had access to a marketplace. So if you are a small retailer or a small producer and you're a trying to reach consumers, nowadays you engage with a massive company that has enormous bargaining power and is able to squeeze you, is able to dictate terms.
- [18:05]
Mike Pesca
Well, give me an example of a competitor that was hurt by Amazon and Amazon's policy of low prices, say.
- [18:13]
Lina Khan
Sure. So we had a few years ago there was a company called Quidsi that sold diapers. Diapers.com was the main way and it was doing really well. You know, it had pioneered a particular way of selling a lot of diapers very well. Amazon actually reached out to Diapers.com seeking to acquire it. The founders at that time were not interested in selling it. And so Amazon engaged in a aggressive price war, undercutting these producers on their diapers, losing millions of dollars by pricing diapers below cost. So the founders ended up selling to Amazon.com it's also worth noting that Amazon in fact did go on to raise prices on diapers after acquiring diapers.com so there were a lot of people who had been Amazon precisely because of its discounts that were then eliminated after it acquired diapers.com part of what makes me.
- [19:04]
Mike Pesca
So skeptical about putting antitrust laws against Amazon is because I feel like I've been burned before on this. When I was a reporter starting out in Seattle in the 1990s covered Microsoft, there was a antitrust action against Microsoft. Everyone was worried that Microsoft was going to control the world because they control the operating system of most computers and everyone had to go through them in order to make their program work on computers. But of course, 20, 25 years later, nobody worries about Microsoft taking over the world. I have no, I don't think I own a single Microsoft product anywhere in my house. I don't use Microsoft. And I feel like I shouldn't have worried about it, that someday some other company is going to make Amazon look out of date, like they were too slow, like they didn't see the next big thing coming. And we'll laugh about the days when we thought Amazon was going to control everything.
- [19:58]
Lina Khan
I think Amazon controls the infrastructure of 21st century commerce in a much more expansive way than Microsoft did. Amazon owns online platforms and is the dominant platform. 50% of all online shopping searches now begin on Amazon. Amazon took 40% of all online revenue generated in the US last year and its share is growing faster than the market as a whole. We can expect those numbers to increase. Aside from having a dominant online platform, it's also massive. It also has a massive logistics network. So it's investing not only in warehouses and trucks, but also in jetliners and shipping fleets. It's very difficult to foresee how a competitor would be able to enter these lines of business and compete with Amazon.
- [20:39]
Mike Pesca
So under antitrust law right now, no one is clearly going to touch Amazon. How do you think the law should change? How does it change, in your opinion, to deal with something that we've never seen before, like Amazon?
- [20:56]
Lina Khan
I think there are a couple approaches we could take. One is to restore traditional antitrust principles, some of which would include ensuring that an infrastructure company, that a platform company, is not allowed to compete with the very companies depending on its platform. So we would set strict limits, strict prophylactic limits on forms of vertical integration and cross ownership.
- [21:19]
Mike Pesca
So what's an example of that?
- [21:21]
Lina Khan
So, for example, Amazon directly retails, but then it also has a third party marketplace where other businesses are retailing goods. So there's no reason why Amazon should necessarily have those two businesses joined under one company.
- [21:36]
Mike Pesca
So in other words, they shouldn't both own the platform and have businesses as their customers and compete with those same businesses by selling the exact same things that the other businesses sell.
- [21:48]
Lina Khan
Exactly. So, you know, in media markets there was a traditional principle that said if you own the pipes, you shouldn't also be producing the content that would ride those pipes because similarly there would be, you know, an analogous conflict of interest there.
- [22:00]
Mike Pesca
And so what's the other way to do this? Rather than sort of smash up Amazon, you could simply regulate them.
- [22:07]
Lina Khan
Exactly. The approach we took with railroads and industrial age network monopolies was to regulate them, was to impose certain non discrimination principles that said the you're not allowed to use this power to kind of pick winners and losers among the companies that are dependent on you. You have to allow equal access and charge fair terms and make your network available to all on equal terms.
- [22:32]
Mike Pesca
After you published this article in the Yale Law Review where you talked about the problems with Amazon and ways to hobble the company, its drive to domination, did you hear from anyone at Amazon? Did anyone on Amazon call you? Did Jeff Bezos call you and say, hey, come on?
- [22:51]
Lina Khan
Jeff Bezos did not call me. I had heard that representatives from Amazon contacted some professors of mine and then the general counsel for Amazon also reached out to New America, which is where the Open Markets program had been.
- [23:05]
Mike Pesca
And we should say here, you, when you published this article, were a third year law student. So when they contacted your professors, they were contacting your current professors.
- [23:15]
Lina Khan
Exactly. They were contacting some of the professors that had overseen my work. And so when they reached out to New America, a team of lawyers came in to meet up with us. And so we had a meeting to discuss some of the issues that I raised in my piece.
- [23:28]
Mike Pesca
Now normally both academic freedom and sort of journalistic freedom protects people who write things like this. But we should say that this week something else happened at the New America foundation where your project, the Open Markets project, used to be. Tell us what happened there.
- [23:45]
Lina Khan
My project was asked to leave New America after some of our work, complimented the European Union for instituting a fine against Google and implementing a certain non.
- [23:59]
Mike Pesca
Discrimination principle, which you essentially criticized Google.
- [24:04]
Lina Khan
We essentially encourage US authorities to follow the EU addressing some of Google's anti competitive conduct. Google ends up funding a lot of New America's activities. Google, I think, put New America in a position where it felt that it had to choose between allowing open markets to say or endangering the funding of other programs.
- [24:27]
Mike Pesca
You've been writing about Amazon and your colleagues have been writing about Google as a sort of theoretical legal matter. And then all of a sudden, literally one of these companies, Google, is threatening your job and your future and the future of your project. How does that feel to be confronted by the actual company that you were dealing with? Sort of theoretically.
- [24:54]
Lina Khan
I think in many ways it's proof of concept of our work and of the effectiveness of our work. One of the principles animating our work is that monopolies are bad not simply because they threaten to lead to higher consumer prices or even necessarily undermine productivity and growth, but monopolies are bad because they're bad for democracy. The companies that acquire a lot of power are able to use that power to shift debate, to squelch research, to steer ideas and information. And I think we saw that take place here in a very vivid and concrete way.
- [25:28]
Mike Pesca
What are you going to do now?
- [25:29]
Lina Khan
I'll be staying with the Open Markets Project. We're forming a independent organization that will be standing up. So I plan to continue my legal research with them for this upcoming year.
- [25:39]
Mike Pesca
I guess I can guess who is not going to be underwriting this project.
- [25:43]
Lina Khan
That's right.
- [25:45]
Mike Pesca
Thanks so much, Lena.
- [25:46]
Lina Khan
Thanks.
- [26:04]
Piers Morgan
And that's it for the show. Cory War is the producer and Michelle's the cbso. And Leo and Astrid and Kathleen, the whole gang. We'll talk to you Monday.