Lovett or Leave It - Rich Boys and their Space Toys

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

Billionaires are doing it for themselves. Simon Rich joins to break down the week’s news: reconciliation, competition, and Olivia Rodrigo is here...to tell teens to get vaccinated. Senator Amy Klobuchar talks about corporate power and her book on monopolies. And long dead cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - tough booking - stops by to share his thoughts on Bezos and Branson's ticket to ride.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/lovettorleaveit. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Love It or Leave It, out of the clos Get run into the streets Choose for yourself Love it or leave Are you feeling nervous Back in the crowd Even fully vexed This might be too loud Don't start to panic

Love it, don't leave Don't be sad, we're just grieving You have shows we didn't see getting married like I give a shit we are similar I'm bad at ending bits he's not gonna play this

if I am too mean so never mind just praise the queen we're going to joke with everybody Joke with everybody Joke with everybody Joke We're going to joke with everybody

Joke with everybody Joke Get out of the closet Get on into the street From our chubby vocabulary Get out of the closet, get on into the streets, from our chubby, but get with me. Get out of the closet, get on into the streets, choose for yourself, love it or leave. Thrones down, stop tweeting, thrones down now stop sweeten us and get out of the closet and get into the streets

for Marsha P. for Cam and me that incredible song was by ex-fiance I also just like the idea that we're already at the stage where we're creating Bo Burnham inside parody song parodies like that

like that a lot. If you have an out of the closet into the streets song, please email to us at leave it at crooked dot com. They have been amazing. Just so everybody knows, we are back in the studio this week, which is very, very exciting. Great to be here with other human beings and not recording this out of my house slowly, but surely heading back towards a full live audience. On the show this week, Senator Amy Klobuchar drops in to talk about antitrust and the fight against corporate consolidation. And, believe it or not, the ghost of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin has some words for these billionaires and their rockets. But first, he is a screenwriter, novelist, and author of the upcoming collection New Teeth.

Please welcome Simon Rich. Simon, thank you so much for beingeth. Please welcome Simon Rich. Simon, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I have been a fan of yours. I first became aware of your existence because you wrote a series of short stories or one long story divided into four parts for The New Yorker called Sellout. I don't want to ask you to respond to this. I think it's actually pretty hard to respond to specific writing compliments. So I just want you to know that one of my favorite moments in anything I've ever, funny moments I've ever read is this moment when the main character buys a potato at the Whole Foods. And it's that moment and the specific moment when he is screaming at Whole Foods for

their prices and everyone in the store applauds. And that, to me, is one of my favorite moments in writing. And so I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for being here. You've also done many other wonderful things, but that's where I wanted to start. Thank you so much. Yeah, a lot of visceral rage in the writing of that chapter. I love it. And I felt my own connection to my old Jewish relatives in that story. So I'm a huge fan. Thank you so much. It's so nice to you.

Yeah, the premise of that is just born out of the thought that if my great-grandfather were to ever meet me, he would think I was a spoiled brat and want to beat me up. Well, it's a great story. Everybody should check it out. But let's do the news. Let's get into it. What a week. On Friday, President Biden signed a 72-point executive order designed to promote competition in tech, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, internet,

banking, and consumer finance, notably absent the fried chicken sandwich space, because we're good. There's enough competition. We have enough fried chicken sandwiches. It's actually one place where there's too much competition. No more. I can't eat another one of these fucking sandwiches. There's enough. Yeah. At a certain point. And they can just filibuster. Is that still a thing in the Senate? Yes, they can still filibuster in the Senate. I see that in my in my phone.

It's like filibuster. And it's like that is the craziest thing. I remember when I first heard about that in high school, it was like learning that the senators have like rules about calling out safety and doorknob. Yes. Or like they say, like safety and doorknob. Yes. Or like they say, like, Jinx, buy me a Coke. It's like, it's unbelievable. That's still a thing.

It is. And I do think we all learned it incorrectly because we learned the kind of like whitewashed version of it that like, you know, it's like the Mr. Smith goes to Washington version of it, not the Southern Democrats stop civil rights bill for 10 years version of it. Like that. Imagine if they made Mr. Smith goes to Washington, but everything is the same. But the bill is a civil rights act. That's the actual reality of the filibuster. It's always made more evil and way more boring. Yes. Yes. Right. History is more evil and more boring. That's right. The order also targeted pharmaceutical companies who practice pay for

delay to slow the emergence of cheaper generic drugs. I'm very sorry for what's about to happen. Paying someone not to finish. What kind of whores are these? That's not how I mean, these pharmaceutical companies, they're not even good whores. It doesn't even make sense. You know why it doesn't make sense? You paying and not finishing, but they're paying someone else not to finish. Do you see what the problem is with that joke? Simon, you're an expert.

Do you see the problem with the structure of it? I think it was perfectly conceived of, constructed, and delivered. Ah, what a guy. What a nice person. On Tuesday, Chuck Schumer told reporters that Senate Democrats had come up with a $3.5 trillion investment plan that they hope to pass via reconciliation by avoiding a filibuster. While the budget reconciliation is useful for sidestepping the filibuster, it actually started as a way to get us to stop talking about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for like five fucking seconds in our miserable lives. So although we're going to have to end up talking about them because they'll still be the decider. They may go for it because it's only 50. They don't need to do

their filibuster thing, but we still have to convince them, which is frustrating, obviously. A lot of the details are still up in the air, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the deal would definitely expand Medicare to cover vision, hearing and dental, which is great news for everybody with a head. It's such a strange reality of our health care system that like, oh, certain parts of the body we just decided don't count. They're like they're just not health care. Like your teeth. That's not health. Right.

That's something else. That's dental. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. And when did it start? Well, the teeth thing, maybe that was like a Washington, George Washington thing because he didn't have any teeth. Right.

Yeah. He was pretty pissed about it, too. He's like, if I can't have teeth. Nobody. That's probably like, yeah, that doesn't count as medicine. He's just like stood up and he was like, teeth don't count. And then you just like won this war. And everyone was like, all right.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's pretty nuts, but we nuts but we gotta you know he's pretty famous so we're gonna do what he says he's like over five foot six and he you know just told us teeth don't count and we just i gotta gotta run with that look he knows how to ride a horse um and also just like a lot of conversation about like my mouth hurts yeah, do you have any more mouth oil? Yeah, like, yeah, mouth oil. Bring in the dentist. And then it's just like a dirty handed person coming in with like a ball peen hammer and like a set of wooden implements. Whoever can handle screaming the most is elected dentist. We just don't talk about it enough. Being a person was so gross until like

2013. That was when like, oh, your tooth hurts. Well, you're dead or we're just going to hold you down and knock them all out. For many years, the requirement of being a doctor was just sheer physical strength. You know, can you, can you subdue somebody physically? Can you manhandle them to the point where you're able to inflict this horror on them? And that, that was like way more important than having like red medicine. What was there to read? What was there to read? There's nothing to read. Yeah.

There's like a couple like weird etchings from the middle ages and like nobody had seen the inside of her body for a long time. So like every time they do cut open a body, they'd be like whoa like this is this is really crazy and then you're scrambling at that point what's this goopy stuff yeah your qualifications to be a doctor were um can you get the money together to buy a satchel and are you able to to be confident do you have like can you go to a town and say, I'm a doctor? Yeah. And not lose it. Not lose it the first time somebody comes to you.

Yeah. And also, like, not break into laughter when you're describing the treatment you're going to do. Because you have to look them, like, straight in the face and be like, we are going to drain your blood with leeches. And you have to not laugh, you know? You have to, like, really commit to the bit for, like, the entire stay in the village. Yeah. Doctors were history's first improvisers, actually. Absolutely.

They they just yes anded their way through these various treatments. We're going to put leeches on you. We're going to cut that right off. These are some leaves I found. You're going to definitely put those into a tea. Everyone's just nodding. And, you know, yeah, absolutely. Makes sense.

In Star Trek. When do they is it four when they go back in time i think it is it's four when they go back in time to to get the whales kendra we have a we have a star trek expert uh on hand just for this kind of emergency and i always liked it when um um dr mccoy is just always like these 20th century butchers. It's the best. He's like, what are you doing? Just hit him with a light, a flashing light. He'll be fine. An Ipsos poll from Reuters found that 64% of adults in the U.S.

support a tax increase for top earners to pay for a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure package. You know what they call that, Simon? That's an Ipsos facto. Wow. I am so sorry. An Ipsos facto. Wow. I am so sorry. An Ipsos facto. I love it. Do you? I'm so positive. I do. I mean, when they're going into space, that's really, with all this tax stuff on the table, you'd think they'd have a little lower profile than that. Yes, I think. Right. Well, they feel not beholden to our laws or mores.

I also think Jeff Bezos is going to hide a lot of his money in space. Oh, yeah. That's his sort of plan. It's just sort of like, oh, you want to tax me at 30%? Yeah, good luck. It's up there. You can go grab it. You build a ship and get my fucking money from near-Earth orbit, you terrestrial fucking

pieces of shit. It's going to be so sad, like 500 years from now, when we colonize the moon and somebody digs a hole and it's just filled with these grimy, early 21st century bills. It's like, ah, this is where Bezos buried all his cash. Right before it all became worthless. Yeah. Because we switched to the one coin you didn't think to get.

My fear about the space thing is that they might run into aliens and then aliens are going to think Musk or Branson or whatever, like is a representative human. And then they're going to like report back to their like alien friends and be like, this species is really crazy. Like this, get ready for an insane war. So we've evaluated the humans based on the samples we've got, which were Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. Obviously, on the intergalactic narcissism scale, they are extremely high. The conscientious scale, extremely low. We think it's best, honestly,

not to engage them. It'll only bring us misery and death, which is honestly the experience that they've had. We could try to help them, but it's not going to be worth it. Let's withhold our space medicine. We can stay butchers. We'll withhold our light thingy that fixes their sicknesses.

They're just not ready, and they may never be. Right. They may never be. Yeah, I'm definitely partial to one alien theory, which is if that giant gel tab floating around the ocean is actually a spacecraft, we do not have the capacity to understand their goals any more than like our dogs can understand what we're doing when we like put on a play. Right, right, right.

They're just, they can't, we can't really make sense. They're, they're higher order. And so we're just struggling to really put together what they're up to because it's beneath our meat brains, you know? I think that's really, I think that's great. And I, and I hope they found what they were looking for. Whatever their goal is on a level that we can't comprehend, I hope they achieved it. That's my feeling.

Absolutely, yeah. Also this week, teen pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo visited the White House to meet with Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci and to record videos promoting the COVID vaccine. It's great to see this issue kind of cross the generational divide from Olivia, who just got her driver's license, all the way to Joe Biden, who is about to have a difficult conversation with Jill about giving his up.

It's just time. What is he going to do? He's going to wait till he crashes his car into a stop sign? Like, what's the what's the point of that? Picturing the three of them, the small talk, everything before, everything after. I want to listen to just like edited footage of everything they talked about that wasn't the purpose of the meeting. Having experienced it myself, the great thing about small talk with Joe Biden is it's a very low lift for you. You're a passenger on a small talk train that's going

to go where it's going to go. You're not going to really have much say as to the destination of the conversation or really much input at all. You'll do a lot of listening. And that's going to go where it's going to go. You're not going to really have much say as to the destination of the conversation or really much input at all. Uh, you'll do a lot of listening and that's great. It's very low stress. And I think that's probably the, what Olivia's experience has largely been. And, um, I'm sure it was lovely for Olivia Rodrigo. That sounds great. I think everybody wants it. Fauci is just hanging on. He's just, yeah, I think Fauci has probably learned by this point that there's no reason really to fight to get a word in edgewise. Yeah, that's the point, right? I've been doing this for 40 years. I don't need to have this conversation. Everybody loves this Olivia Rodrigo song, Driver's License. And I would like to make a counterpoint. I just got a look of

like, what are you doing? Here's my counterpoint. Here's my counterpoint to driver's license. I would like there to be more songs about high school love that basically are like, this doesn't matter at all. feelings you have right now are hormonal and short term. And honestly, even singing about it for five seconds isn't worth the energy. Just forget about it. Low stakes utility. This boy is one of the first boys you have known. He will turn out to be completely boring and all likelihood in the dead center of the standard deviation of the kind of boys you're going to meet, which means about half of the boys are going to be better than this boy, which is a great hit ratio. So don't worry about the driver's license boy. Olivia, you're going to be fine.

You're going to be fine. That's all I wanted to say about that. I think it's time for Taylor Swift, as a elder millennial to do an album about breakups, about how stupid they are to care about if you're under 30. Like if you're under 30, no breakup matters. And that's a cool part about being under 30. You don't even have to worry about who gets the dog. There's not even a dog.

There's not even a fucking dog. A federal judge dismissed a $95 million defamation case brought against Sasha Baron Cohen by You don't even have to worry about who gets the dog. There's not even a dog. There's not even a fucking dog. A federal judge dismissed a $95 million defamation case brought against Sacha Baron Cohen by Roy Moore. The shocking reveal in the case, the judge, none other than Sacha Baron Cohen. That's great. That's it. Chuck Schumer said the Democrats would be on the right side of history and that the Texas governor and Republican legislatures would be on the dark and wrong side of history after Texas Democrats fled the state to prevent the passage of a restrictive new voting law.

Democrats. So often we find ourselves on the winning side of history and the losing side of the present. It's oh, wow. Great. I guess we're on the right side of history. Terrific. That doesn't do fucking anything for anybody. Being on the right side of history is like the entry point. We should always strive to be on the right side of history. Nothing we do should ever be on the wrong side of history. We have to be on the winning side of the present and the future. Those are the two places where we can actually have some influence. We should just write, I told you so and like a really snarky handwriting and put it in like a time capsule. Yeah. 50 years from now. I mean, we live in this like post-apocalyptic like hellscape, but like opening this time capsule. They told us so. Yeah.

Yeah. I will say, yes. Right side of history is the I told you so of political expressions. And another controversial point. I've now I've now slammed Olivia Olivia Rodrigo. I will also say this. A lot of people say the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. towards justice i think they should probably stop saying it i don't think they're using it the way it was intended and a lot of times it's a little bit like sure we lost yeah right but well that sucks yeah i don't want your i don't want this is not an excuse phrase this is not meant to be used as an excuse the arc of history as well it's also like one of those lies you tell yourself yeah i'll lose the weight after the holidays. You know, it'll bend back probably. I really like reducing the arc of history as long, but it bends towards justice, too. I'll lose weight after the holidays, which I think is a completely fair, completely fair comparison.

Meanwhile, these seven states have moved to block COVID vaccine requirements for students, even when enrollment requires other vaccines, because Republicans across the country already did one playthrough on normal. And now they're trying to up the difficulty. They were like, OK, we played this game with vaccination. What about what if we take eradicated childhood diseases, bring some of them back, make getting out of childhood harder. What's it like to play the game then? Hey, what if we had to move through some of the levels and there were more guns and fewer rules against guns? What if we were more violent? What's it like to play the game then? Harder, more challenging, more exciting. We should start to think of the Republican Party as a group of disaffected, nihilistic, bored Twitch streamers who are trying to up their difficulty on reality itself, that they played it the normal way and they're fucking sick of it. Is that Bill Gates vaccine thing? Is that still a thing?

The 5G? Yeah, I want that to be true so badly. If that's real, I would never have to get into an argument again. And I really hate arguments. But if that theory was somehow proven true, I could say in any argument, I could say, you know, well, we were both wrong about Bill Gates. So who's to say whose turn it is to wake up with the baby, you know, like who's to say, who's to say, but that was like, it was so crazy. He went on the news. He did that press conference. He presented incontrovertible evidence that like we all accepted that he did this vaccine thing. So, you know, maybe it's your turn to wake up with the baby. We are in a kind of epistemological chasm. Yeah. There's no way to see out.

You're showing me the phone where I texted and said I would wake up with the baby. But maybe I maybe that's it's fake. via communist military dictatorship. Similarly, there's this idea that like there's this other secret plan to track us, know our secrets when that's the public facing plan. Like you are completely tracked right now. And the secret is the conspiracy is no one gives a fuck about you. Oh, yeah. You don't matter at all. Like nobody. Your movements are banal, boring and predictable, valuable only to companies trying to get small purchases out of you or big purchases out of you from time to time. The government has no interest in you.

You're nothing. Although here is here is, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but recently I think there was an advertisement in one of my dreams. It was I was in a dream and I distinctly saw a billboard and there were Oreos on it. And it's very possible that I just went to bed sort of hungry for Oreos and I like Oreos. So that's one explanation. But the other explanation is that Nabisco is sitting on something. That's interesting. That makes Google look like a guy with a sandwich fork. Look, I mean, it's crazy you're saying that because the other day I had a dream where

there was an advertisement for my naked high school physics teacher. Yeah, there you go. So that's weird too. Maybe that's involved. Maybe it's, yeah, absolutely. I don't know what corporation, Cooey Bono, we ask, you know, follow the money. Yeah, it's for whatever reason, Google or Microsoft really, you know, they're trying to sell me me riding a horse and just a mob is after me and I'm falling off a cliff. And it's the seventh grade. Yeah, no, that's that's a really I.

All right. Moving on. Utah, they'll get too real utah's division of wildlife resources released a video of their annual fish restocking which shows them dropping thousands of juvenile fish out of planes and into over 200 lakes well they were juvenile fish when someone throws you out of a plane you grow up pretty fucking fast and and finally users have noticed that Apple's weather app doesn't say 69 degrees, but instead says 68 or 70. It's unclear whether the app will give an accurate temperature reading when it hits 420 degrees. So we'll just have to wait until next summer to find out. Oh, man, what an interesting corporate meeting when somebody had to bring that up, you know,

so 69 and half the room like knew what it was about and half the room was down. I would guess it's because 20 degrees Celsius converts exactly to 68 degrees Fahrenheit and 21 degrees Celsius converts basically exactly to 70. Oh, okay. That would be my guess. That's my less fun theory. Got it. Got it.

But I prefer to think it as fucking Tim Cook's a little is a is a prudy prude square. He's like 69. Ew. Not on my app. No. I want people to watch wholesome things like Dickinson. None of the 69ing. Simon Rich.

Everybody. New Teeth comes out July 27th. Everybody check it out. Simon Rich, thank you so much. It was so good to talk to you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Of course. And when we come back, very special guest, my interview with Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Hey, don't go anywhere. There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up. Hey, don't go anywhere.

There's more of Love It or Leave It coming up. And we're back. On Sunday, billionaire Richard Branson successfully traveled nearly 54 miles from the Earth's surface on Virgin Galactic, my high school nickname. Next week, Jeff Bezos will take his own trip to the stars, rocketing well past the Kármán line, delineating the Earth's atmosphere and into outer space. That would be pretty impressive if someone hadn't already taken that trip way back in 1961. Joining me now is the cosmonaut himself. Tough booking. Here he is. Yuri Gagarin, the late, great, first human being in space.

Thank you for joining us from beyond the final frontier, Yuri. Hello. Yes, it is I, the heroic cosmonaut and scourge of American hubris and imperialism, Yuri Gagarin, the first man to pierce the Earth's atmosphere like a white-hot needle through a Smolensk bride's veil. Totally.

Ah, how much the world has changed since my country won the space race. Tell me, comrade, what was it like when Western capitalism collapsed under the weight of its own excesses? Well, that's not exactly what happened. We can talk about that. But I want to get your take on Richard Branson and now Jeff Bezos going to space.

Yes, of course. You know, Nazis, they destroyed the school in my village. My family had to live in a dirt hut for years. I learned to read from a military manual someone threw in the village. My family had to live in a dirt hut for years. I learned to read from a military manual someone threw in the trash. But Yuri, he persevered. He climbed until he soared. He soared until he reached the very stars. Tell me, what did these men do to become God's chosen few, to be among those who have smooched the face of heaven? Great question. Well, I guess Richard Branson is

maybe really good at branding, I guess. And Jeff Bezos made $200 billion after starting an online store that also makes some decent TV shows. Ah, but it must be the best marketplace in the world, yes? No. It's actually really hard to find anything on there.

And the ratings are a sham, and the company does not treat their employees very, very well. So help Yuri understand. The capitalist pigs have won, and now they are using their riches to copy my whole ish. I went to space before computers exist, John. I was in a barrel going over a waterfall, except the barrel was a steel tube, and the waterfall was devoid of space.

We never got the dog or the monkey back, you know that, right? Perfectly good dog and monkey. Poof! Gone! No more! Adios! Kaput! Ben!

R.I.P. Laika, historic first dog in space. I was an international superstar. Did you know that the Soviet government eventually had to ban me from space? They said I was too dear to mankind to risk his life for the sake of an ordinary space flight. Not these billionaires, though. I hear Jeff Bezos say it was always his dream to go to space. Oh, was it, Jeff? Oh, was it?

It was always your dream? Okay, yeah. Everybody wants to go to space. It's fucking space. This is real dream where you devote life to fulfill. You train and learn and fly and fight and take daring risks? You strap yourself into capsule built by hand by men and women who did math with pencils, who lived and slept and ate in service of one goal,

who shed tears and blood and flew with the memories of dead pilots in their hearts, the ones who dared and lost because they lived for this mission? Or was it a dream in the sense that as a fat and soft American child, you drew a picture of Moon for Mommy to put on General Electric refrigerator and then forgot this very important dream when you built book and toilet paper monopoly until you could buy rocket with dirty money as an old man? You are not cosmonauts, Jeff and Richard.

You are fucking tourists. Yes, we seek glory in space. We are human and we are flawed. But it is not simply a new territory for our narcissism and our greed. Humanity will live forever beyond this rock or we will die upon it. It is sacred mission. It is not your mission. It is our mission.

I am Yuri Gagarin and you are not fit to shine my helmet. By the way, just checking, I turned down Kimmel to do this. Was that good choice, or do I have shit publicist? No, no. No, that was right. I don't think you should feel bad about that. This was definitely right for you to do this show and not Kimmel. I think you were good.

Don't question that. This thing that we are doing here, this is bigger than the Jimmy Kimmel live. Nope. Somebody, some wires crossed on that, but I think you're still going to be really glad when you get look, we get a lot of engagement. This studio is small and I thought Kimmel very big.

So maybe this was wrong. Maybe I should have gone to Kimu. I think I fucked up. I think Yuri fucked up again. I remember last time Yuri fucked up. They say, the plane's ready, Yuri.

It's safe, Yuri. One last flight, Yuri. Then Yuri, no mas. Yuri go visit the monkey and the dog. Because Yuri... Because Yuri... Yuri go visit the monkey and the dog because Yuri because Yuri I died in 1968 and an accident that is long been source of rumor and conspiracy but that's for other time where were we oh yes thanks for having me it's good to have been

here and I'm gonna go back to where I was before this, which was heaven. But before I do, I will watch a brief documentary on the Vietnam War because it did end after I died. And I don't know what happened, so no spoilers. I want to watch the Ken Burns thing because I like how he makes the photos feel like they're moving. Yuri Gagarin out. No spoilers. No spoilers. I think you'll appreciate it. Honestly, I think you'll personally, based on your own history, appreciate how it ended. Yuri Gagarin, everybody.

Thank you so much for being here. When we come back, Senator Amy Klobuchar. Don't go anywhere. This is Love It or Leave It, and there's more on the way. She is the senior senator from Minnesota and the author of the new book, Antitrust. Please welcome back to the show, Senator Amy Klobuchar. Senator, thanks for being here. Well, you're welcome.

It's great to be on. I was eager to talk to you because I feel like for a long time there was this conversation about inequality in this country that focused on globalization and automation. You hear that over and over again. But there was this third aspect of what was changing in our economy, consolidation, that got short shrift, in part because there just wasn't a lot of attention on the part of Democrats on why it was so important. And so you are part of the vanguard that's redirecting focus on this issue of corporate consolidation, corporate power, antitrust, monopoly. In the book,

you spend a fair amount of time diving into the history of progressive populism and taking on corporate mergers, taking on the big trusts. What are some of the lessons you learned about what we need to do now when you started looking back at sort of the trust busting in our past? When you look back, you realize the public was with the leaders. In fact, the public pushed the leaders. They were pissed off, whether it's farmers with pitchforks who are paying way too much for rail rates or whether it's small businesses that couldn't compete. And pretty soon, as I think you're starting to see, and this is a part of the

debate that's getting left out a bit, the state legislatures and the governors started doing stuff in states, including in more Republican states. And of course, they couldn't do everything because they weren't the federal government, but they started doing things and that created momentum. You had union strikes going on at the same time against everything from the steel trust to the railroad trust to what you saw with the Chicago strikes at the time. You then had the farmers going at it in Iowa and Minnesota, Wisconsin. And pretty soon, no one could say no. And so I cannot underestimate the importance of public opinion on this.

And one of the things that then happened after that, so we start passing laws, the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act. There's some heydays of antitrust, like the breakup of AT&T. This, you know, you fast forward 100 years, presidents did stuff. They didn't do stuff. The law was pretty good. Then there was a major shift. So part of

what I'm doing here and so many others are doing in the progressive movement is to make the case again politically that this matters to you. You know, if you wonder why you can't get a better deal now that travel is coming back, two companies own 90 percent of those online travel deals that you think you're getting or you wonder why you don't have better privacy protections or that people can make false claims about the vaccine and people believe it because it's all they see when they get their news because they get their news from social well guess what there's been no privacy laws in place that are meaningful on the federal basis anymore there's no misinformation laws that matter.

And all of this has really got the signature, signature mark of monopolies. If they got power, they go for it. Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest challenges in this conversation is you're describing these big and sweeping forces that many now, I think, just take for granted, like this is just how the economy works. This is how big companies are. This is life. This is our society. You point to kind of, I think, these two shifts that took place, both of which you just mentioned. And it seems like it speaks to a lot of problems in America. There was targeted conservative enthusiasm and widespread progressive apathy. Can you talk a little bit about what happened when conservative legal minds got a hold of antitrust regulation and what the impact of that has been over the

last few decades? Sure. Well, there was this legal dispute between what was called the Harvard School, which is a more traditional view of antitrust. This is kind of hilarious about this story. This is based on what the antitrust laws meant. You're supposed to go after monopolies. It's what Adam Smith said we should go after. And then you had what was called the Chicago School. That was my alma mater for law school. That was a more conservative school that said, let's look at something new. And Robert Bork came up with this new theory called consumer welfare. It sounds good, but it's not about the consumers. It's about companies and efficiency is one of the factors. They got judges on the courts. We get to the Clarence Thomas,

Alito era, now following up with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, both of whom had incredibly conservative antitrust decisions when they were on the circuit courts. It was almost like, hey, look at us, we're adopting the Bork theory. And they were solo in many of these decisions. Those decisions now dominate. So while you wonder why this judge in the FTC Facebook case was so dismissive of the case, a lot of it is based on decisions that have been made in the past, as well as his own views, of course, but also decisions in the past. We need to be as sophisticated as these companies that are dominating our economy and giving people less choice and scaring small businesses out of the market, buying up everything in sight. As Mark Zuckerberg said himself in an email, I'd rather buy than compete. Those are his words, not mine. That is not exactly the definition

of capitalism. So this sort of legal theory takes hold. And yet, outside of the courts, through Democratic administrations, through Republican administrations, you have airline mergers, you have media mergers, you have pharmaceutical mergers. And through it all, you see these giant impacts on the economy. And yet, it doesn't become a big political issue. Now, you talk about the need to make this kind of the center of our political life. How do you do that? How do you start that conversation about like these big sweeping changes taking place in boardrooms, in the stock market, in industries that are nowhere near where you live and relate it to like the daily experience of being at a job or being a consumer?

Let's look at what if AT&T had just stayed as one company? Let's talk about that. They had what we call a horizontal monopoly. They owned all the phone companies and they owned everything under them. They had no ability to want to compete. It doesn't mean they didn't give us some great new products. So what happened is the government comes in actually under both Democratic and Republican presidents. It went on for a while. And they said, wait a minute, this isn't good for the economy that we don't have any competition. And so even in today's world, there are times when the FTC or the Justice Department under Trump, under Obama, they did step in and they said, wait a minute, this is going too far. When they did that in the case of AT&T, what that meant was

they got broken up into separate companies. Long distance rates went way down because you finally had competition. Because of this competition, we got great new products. And that's what I mean about rejuvenation and that you get companies that are able to meet the demands of consumers. Why does this matter for workers? Imagine if you're trying to

get a job and there's only one monopoly in town that's dominating. It's harder to be able to get the kind of wage that you want. So it matters. Monopolies tend to hire tons of lobbyists and say, oh, well, we don't want to have the Honest Ads Act passed. That's what happened to me at the beginning with the social media ads, because it would be so bad. All it said was news organizations for political ads, you've got to have disclaimers and disclosures. So monopolies are able to dominate the political, they dominate a court cases, and then they start dominating people's heads about, you know, what they think that they can do and they can't do. You know, during the pandemic, of course, we needed companies to do online ordering and all of that. That doesn't mean that we rest on our laurels. And we have laws on the books. And with

people like Lena Kahn in charge of the FTC now, who is an out of the box thinker and Tim Wu at the White House, we are a small but mighty group that thoroughly believes that we need to do more as people have done in the past in America to make sure that we preserve competition. This is about allowing for capitalism. And I hope I made the case because it is not exactly intuitive when you think about, well, I did get some new stuff and I got some pretty cheap stuff on Amazon the other day. But one of the things monopolies do is they give you good rates. And then once they're the only one in town, they don't have any reason to keep giving you good rates. So that's why you want to make sure there's new companies coming in. One of the challenges when it comes to tech, and I do think

a lot of the attention has been directed at the tech giants, even though this is a much kind of larger and more pervasive problem, is when it comes to social networks specifically, the size of it is kind of part of the appeal, right? Like everybody being on Facebook is what makes Facebook a good social media platform. Enough people being on Twitter makes it a good platform. How do you think about the role of kind of reducing the influence and corporate power of some of those social media platforms while at the same time recognizing that some part of this is kind of intrinsic. You want a big social network that everybody's on. Sure you do, but you could have had Instagram got bought by Facebook, right?

And even people involved at the time in the Obama administration now say, well, we should have looked at this in a different way. And we should look back now. Instagram, WhatsApp, all of those platforms could have been competitors. And really, while Twitter gets a lot of attention, that is not in the same market position as Facebook is in terms of dominance. an entire industrialized nation, oh, if you make us pay more for news content, we're just going to leave. And you might say, okay, great, go leave. Well, Google had over 90% of the search market there. There are things that monopolies do even outside of the consumer prices that are really upending to our democracy. One great example is App Store. So Americans spend four hours at an app and they're kind of like the new web. Right. So Google has and there's just been a lawsuit filed against Google on this. And we had a great hearing, bipartisan hearing on this. Spotify or Match.com, they have to pay 30% of their revenues when you buy stuff in the app stores to them. And there's no one else to buy for, for the Apple phone. You cannot say, oh, you can get

cheaper deals on the website. You can't say that on their dominant app stores. If they're self-preferencing, I think you're going to hear a lot about that. That means putting their own products on top or making them easier for the consumers to access than other people's products. So it is to get to the point where you see that it costs you money. It's not that hard, but you know it's not fair. If you're the one trying to compete and we want capitalism to be an even playing field to get in, this isn't fair because the big guys are going to keep getting bigger. And they have a natural impulse and they're doing it to keep the smaller ones out. How do you see this fight playing out in Congress with respect to kind of partisan alignments?

Like on the one hand, there's this expectation that it's going to be harder to get some Republicans to go along. Yet we just had a number of bills introduced in the House, several Democrats from California who represent districts that have a lot of people that work at these companies have been some of the people objecting to it. You have Josh Hawley in the Senate, who is a valueless creep, but sees some political interest here for his own betterment in making this a centerpiece of his kind of political argument. What are the politics like for you in the Senate of trying to build a coalition to pass some serious changes here? They're wild politics. You've acknowledged

that with what you've pointed out here. But I've always believed, and you know, you heard me say this in the presidential campaign, you just keep trying to find support where you can. So we just passed a major change to the merger fees that no one ever thought possible that I led with Chuck Grassley. Chuck Grassley can be a bit of a maverick when it comes to wanting to do something to preserve small businesses, honestly. And so we change it so that the big mergers, when people apply for these and they're coming at an unprecedented rate right now, that they have to pay more. That money goes to Lena Kahn can hire more lawyers at the FTC and so that they can get more lawyers in the Justice Department. We cannot take on the biggest companies the world has ever known with duct tape and Band-Aid.

So that's one of my major goals right now is to get this bill passed. It passed the U.S. Senate, went through unanimously. And yes, do I hear some of the more Republicans who are closer to business sometimes? Yeah. Do they not like this? No, some of them don't, but they will support this bill. They did support this bill.

It went through. And so you just have to try to find support where you can find it. And I think the Biden administration will play a major role in this because a lot of it has to do with pursuing these suits. They were started during Trump, some of them, but the work's going to be done during the Biden administration. I don't think of you as like a rabble rouser, scorched earth populist. I think of you as a consensus builder. That's the kind of campaign you ran. That was, I think, part of your message

when you were on the campaign trail. But when I think of like taking on some of the biggest corporations in this country, I think about that as like a left wing fight, a populist pitchfork battle in which you're going to have to make a ton of enemies that people don't give up power willingly. You're going to have to take it. And so this is going to be a massive, massive fight. What made you want to kind of focus on antitrust? I would not underestimate my ability to fight. You don't run for president without being willing to fight. I'm from the Midwest. This is where a lot of the fomenting of taking on big interests,

you go back in history to, you know, William Jennings Bryant, you go to the more current people like Tom Harkin. It was a lot about the Midwest and not just allowing powers that be to run the nation and to run the economy. So I think I'm in a way the perfect person. The other thing about it is, yeah, I came out of business. So I was at a law firm. I understand how some of this works. And someone else that's

been doing this is Mark Warner. I don't think you'd think of him as a prairie populist, but he's someone that's been willing to stand up to the tech companies over and over again. I think some of it is once you start getting into it and know it, and I'm chair of the antitrust subcommittee, you know someone's got to step in. And Elizabeth's done incredible work in this area. Dick Blumenthal has. Corey's done some work in this area. There's been a number of us. I'm not alone, right? So I've got people from the middle of the party and the left of the party that have been working together. But I'm a lawyer. I figured out a lot of this. And I may as well put it to good use because people are really screwing around with people right now. And it's so easy to do because it's so complicated. One kind of pushback you hear from some of the tech companies is you're focused on the wrong things that Google, Apple, Facebook, these are big companies, but the United States needs to win a larger fight for the internet against China. They point to China and they say,

if you start breaking us up, if you start hurting our ability to do what we want to do, you are going to bite your nose to spite your face, and you're going to make it so that China wins the internet. That's the kind of fear mongering that you will sometimes hear. What's your response to that? I don't think the answer is that we be like China, and that we have basically one company that's a gatekeeper of every single industry out there, which is exactly what's happening right now. And I think we're better off when we're stronger when we allow for now. And I think we're better off when we're stronger, when we allow for competition. And it is the same kind of thing that AT&T said

at the time, this is bad for security. It's going to hurt us with the rest of the world. And after it all ended, their chairman said they were stronger company because they had to compete. So that's the first answer. The second one is, this is one part of what you just argued rhetorically, I want to embrace, and that is that it isn't just about tech, though. It is pharma. You wonder why the price of insulin went way up. You wonder what happened with EpiPens. Well, a few dominant companies were able to say, well, we're putting the price up now. It's not because we changed anything. It's because the competition went away. And so all of that to me is an argument for making

more sweeping changes. I want to do tech specific stuff. I've worked with the house on this, but I think if we really want to see change, we have to change for the biggest mega mergers, make the companies prove why this doesn't hurt competition instead of making the government prove that it doesn't hurt competition. make it easier to look back at these industries that we've just allowed to grow bigger and bigger and bigger. It would have been unheard of, you know, 150 years ago or so when they were looking more carefully and had more resources per merger to allow these companies to dominate with 60, 70, 80 percent market share. We don't even have data anymore, the government on industry by industry consolidation. When I wrote this book, in addition to finding 100 cool cartoons, that was just a little pitch for the book, I realized that the FTC stopped collecting

industry by industry data, because there was pushback by the companies many, many years ago, this is, you know, you got to go back to like the Reagan time. And so we don't even have that. But all of this has to change. And Merrick Garland actually taught antitrust. He understands it. You have got someone in Lena Kahn that's a true leader. You've got people that are willing to take this on and have the passion to do it. The House hearings last year, there are Republicans. you've mentioned a few, but Representative Buck did those bills with Cicilline. Grassley's done tons of things with me. Mike Lee agreed to do a bill to give the state AGs more power to do things. There is a lot of action out there. Kennedy and I took on the power of the tech companies and said we should allow news organizations to coordinate when they negotiate for the price of their content. How do you think some little newspaper in Lanesboro, Minnesota, is going to be able to negotiate with Google and Facebook for the price of their content?

And so that's what we're dealing with right now. And why, you know, I'd rather not do it that way. But we don't have a choice because of what's happened with the market in the hopes of making it more central to our political debates would you like to see president biden talking about this more well he has laid out and they are i know working on a competitive agenda i think he really showed his cards when he put tim wu in place and lena khan in place um and i think we'll see more to come. And there are things he can do. In my book, I lay out like eight things in administration, major things I'd like to see a new administration do. And one of them is put people in place

and judges in place that understand what the antitrust laws and how they were originally meant to be enforced. Don't you like this, that the Democrats have to go back to the original antitrust laws? And then Congress has to pass bills. And then finally, think outside of the box to encourage competition that I bet you've talked about before, non-compete agreements that make it harder for employees to move around. Something President Biden has just said he's going to do an order around. Exactly. And immigration reform would actually be a good thing because you would be able to just have more people that can work at places and things like that. What this is all about to me is encouraging competition. And I think people forget that a lot of this antitrust came up at the same time

as labor unions were on the rise. And that's because it's about the power of the people. And so it is no surprise that we're fighting on these fronts, antitrust, voting rights, you know, efforts to squelch organized labor. It's really all about the same thing. One final question. Senator Klobuchar, I was surprised to learn that your prom date was gay. Is that right? Yes, he was. Yes. Now, at the time, I didn't know that.

Right. Now, here's my question. Do you think that there might have been some deep-seated pain in the heart of a teenage girl that came out when you were picking on then-Mayor Pete in some of those debates? Oh, get out. on then Mayor Pete in some of those debates? You know that Pete and I are actually very good friends. And I actually did an interview, I think it was with Rachel Maddow when his book came out, Trust. Let's be amused for a moment that his book was called Trust. And then mine was called Antitrust because the rivalry continues. But I had it right behind me. So it was displayed a few months back. He had me over

for lunch with his dogs, went on a walk. So I really, I think he's doing a great job and I strongly supported him. So no, there's no deep seated anger, only seated friendship. Just the pain of a hurt young girl looking back on a time in her life when she was vulnerable and she took it out. No. No, there you go. No, because that really wasn't the story of the prom. My high school prom was more about maybe a bunch of the dates of not just my own getting drunk at the Ridgedale Mall where we had our prom because no one had raised enough money to have it anywhere else.

So we danced around, you know, the Woolworths and various places. And then my date actually asked another person's date in her lime green dress if she would dance in the fountain because I didn't want to get my pink polyester dress ruined. And then the vice principal, who is a chaperone of the school, asked me if I needed a ride home. Man. But I came up with that, John, to become a U.S. senator. So I often tell the story to students sometimes to say, no matter how bad your high school experiences can be, you can emerge from that.

That's brutal. Senator Amy Klobuchar, thank you so much. The book is Antitrust, and it is an incredibly compelling case for what not only we need to do to take on monopolies in this country, but also why it is so important to our politics that we talk about this more. So thank you so much for your time. And when we come back, we'll end on a high note. And we're back because we all need it this week. Here it is, the high note. Please love it. This is Jennifer calling from the Burbs of Washington, D.C. And my high note this week and every week is hearing the songs that people send in to you and being reminded of the amazing number of talented people there are out there. What a great feeling to know that people are creating and that we get to hear some of it. So thanks for everything.

Bye. I love it. This is Rachel from Portland, Oregon. I started listening to the show in 2017 as a new intern at a political communications firm. I just finished my first legislative session as a new lobbyist and I passed a bill that replaces police as crisis workers when responding to behavioral health emergencies based off the Kemp's model in

Eugene. So I'm feeling excited and grateful and, you know, hopeful for the future. Thanks for the show. Bye. Hi, Lovett. This is Matt from Georgia. I'm sending this high note a little late, but two weeks ago I passed the first of my exams to be licensed as a psychologist. And then that evening and the day after I got to go out with my partner and friends and celebrate pride.

It was a wonderful feeling to get over not just a professional hurdle, but to have a personal celebration and to do so because things are getting better. And I appreciate everything you and everyone has done. You got me to make calls through the 2020 election for the Senate runoff in Georgia, and it's wonderful to see all the success that's come from it. Keep doing what you're doing. Thanks. I love it. It's Toby from Arkansas, my High Note of the Week. I love it. It's Toby from Arkansas. My high note of the week. I've been in Arkansas for the last three years as one of, what I jokingly say, three Jews in Arkansas, let alone being openly bisexual. being really, really good friends with a woman down here, a fellow queer Jew. We have finally realized that we are actually dating. So there's some joy, some queer Jewish joy.

Thanks, Lovett, for all you do. And thanks to the Cricket family that we now get to listen to together. Thanks to everybody who submitted those high notes. If you want to leave us a message about something that gave you hope, please call us at 213-262-4427. Thank you so much to Simon Rich, Amy Klobuchar, our own Yuri Gagarin, Brian Semel, and everybody who called in. There are 479 days until the 2022 midterm elections. Have a great weekend. Love It or Leave It is a Crooked Media production. collections. Have a great weekend. our editor and Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Our theme song is written and performed by Sure Sure. Thanks to our designers, Jesse McClain and Marissa Meyer for creating and running all of our visuals, which you can't see because this is a podcast. And to our digital producers, Nara Melkonian and Milo Kim, Mia Kelman and Matt DeGroot for filming and editing video each week

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