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Welcome to the third episode of the Monopoly Report.The Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy.
If you are new to the Monopoly Report, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at monopoly.markitecture.tv.I'm Alan Chappell, and I'm taking over the reins of the Monopoly Report.
I'm joined by ad tech influencer, Harry Paparo, who is, of course, our team leader here at Markitecture.Hey, Harry.
Hey thanks for taking over doing this intro i'm really bad at intros and outros i'm really excited to have you be doing this we have a great guest today so we have terry koja probably everyone knows we don't really need a big intro terry's been a guest on the market extra podcast and he's very outspoken about all things m&a running luma partners the investment bank that specializes in this area
You may not know this, but we got a tip that Terry's also big into curling.So it's not just Andrew Kraft that's the curler, probably part of the Canadian heritage.They learned that in school.So we want to hear a little bit about that.
But today we're talking about antitrust, and Terry's going to give us more of the business perspective on the FTC, the Department of Justice, what they're doing in M&A, how it's affecting his job as someone who wants consolidation and acquisitions to happen.
And then we want to talk specifically about a potential double click spin out and what that might mean from a financial perspective.So Terry, thank you so much for being here.
Hey, great to be here, Ari.Not only with a podcast host, but a client.So there you go.
Am I still a client or am I a former client?
I mean, once you're a client of Loma, you're always a client.
Is it true about the curling?
It is.I mean, you know, how bizarre.It's an esoteric sport, obviously.But I was born and raised in Canada, where curling is actually a much more substantial sport on the global stage. Canada is the strongest country in the world in that sport.
I'm pretty sure that's the only sport where Canada can claim hegemony in.But yeah, I had the good fortune of being part of a bit of a dynasty, our family.My brother is the real curler.He is a two-time world champion, which is pretty impressive.
He's on the Olympic coin in Canada.So he's the real star.I just won the provincial championships for universities.And the funny thing is, I I came to New York and pretty much hung up my slider.It's not skates, it's a slider.
I hung up my slider, and I hadn't played in so long, in about eight or 10 years, and someone finally convinced me to enter a tournament.We called them bonds bills.And I said, okay, fine, but I haven't curled in like eight or 10 years, and we won it.
And then I didn't curl again for another 10 years. entered a bond field, we won it.And then finally, Andrew had me come down to Plainfield to enter a tournament when my dad was here, which was so much fun, my 80-year-old dad, we won it.
So the funny thing is, I have curled three times in 35 years, and I'm undefeated.
And Andrew Kraft just won't stop talking about curling, but you're just the quiet, the quiet champion.Don't bring it up, but just put the points on the board.Anyway, let's talk about what we're here to talk about.
Sure.So first, some background for the audience. The FTC is a regulatory agency whose mandate is to protect consumers and they do that in a number of ways.First, they act as sort of the privacy and consumer protection police.
Second, the FTC along with the Department of Justice are in charge of supporting and enforcing competitive landscape.Most of what we're going to be talking about today is the FTC and the DOJ role in antitrust enforcement.
and more specifically, the impact of, we'll say, a more active FTC on the health of the digital media landscape, essentially by creating friction around M&A activity.
I've heard from both of you guys that the FTC's focus on disrupting mergers is – I'm going to do an air quote here – is bad.Help me unpack that.Why is it bad?
antitrust enforcement is not bad per se.And I would go ahead and argue that there are certain aspects of this more active, perhaps even virulent antitrust enforcement by both the DOJ and the FTC that are quite good.
You know, this is a country we've been lacking in terms of active enforcement.And You know, it's one thing for the legacy industries of, you know, transportation and energy, and those are pretty mature industries.
And so there's really not a lot of dynamics around companies both becoming controlling in those aspects, nor the importance of control of those.You tend to get, see the most ink in the press around media. and in particular tech.
And there's a reason for that.Tech is growing as a percentage of the economy, point number one.And point number two is
You know, anything around media and communications has an implication around, you know, information and disinformation and truth and elections and democracy.So it almost has like a bare and social media influence on children.
So it feels like it has a higher import.So I think it warrants scrutiny. And by the way, I could clearly make a case.I mean, right now, the DOJ and FTC have actions against almost all of the big tech companies.
There are actions of some sort against Apple, Amazon, Meta, and many against Google.And I think the intent of that is not wrong.It is notes, the growing control, the import that I mentioned earlier, why these companies
in these sectors have far more control and influence over our lives in America and the relative, you know, sort of concentration of power of these big tech companies.So I think that scrutiny is right and just and good.
The issue that I and others have noted about it is that sadly the effect of this more virulent intervention into some of these moves has had the opposite effect of the intention.
The intention was to limit big tech and try to create a more competitive, more equal playing field of a landscape.And it has had the opposite effect whereby it's created a pall on M&A activity
across the board with large and the problem is when you have half a dozen companies that have enormous power in the marketplace essentially you need to have freedom to do m&a for players
number 7 through 50, so that they can garner the scale and capabilities sufficiently necessary to compete against the big six, say.
And the problem is when you limit their actions, that is to say, the players in 7 through 50, all it does is strengthen 1 through 6.
And that gap, that unfair advantage that the big guys have gets exacerbated in a timeframe like we're in now, where AI, the latest sort of innovation of technology development requires like never before seen levels of capital expenditures, which only benefits the biggest guys.
So I'm afraid the bad of antitrust enforcement is a function of the net effect of what they've done, not the intent.
No, I think that makes sense.Specifically, what is it that the FTC is doing?How are they limiting M&A activity?Are they creating an EU style, there's too much paperwork?Are they just shooting down particular mergers?How is this manifesting itself?
So it's the latter.It's deal blockages.So the antitrust challenges and blockages of deals have grown substantially.In the last, in 2022, there were 50 enforcements.
That's up from usually, you know, it's about triple the sort of run rate for the prior five years. In 2023, it's even higher.So they're just stopping all kinds of deals.And it's great.
If you want to say, you know, Google and Amazon and Meta and Apple can't do M&A, that's one thing.But Adobe Figma, they're blocking small deals that arguably don't add to the acquirers hegemony or monopoly power.
They're also blocking basically yesterday's antitrust challenges.They're stopping traditional media deals.My head spun when I read in late 2022, two years ago, that the DOJ blocked the Penguin Random House $2 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster.
I'm like, oh, yeah, let's by all means prevent book sellers, book publishers, that so important channel of media.I mean, give me a break.It's like they're applying, you know, monopoly situations from the 1950s.It just seems to not make sense.
There was that one case, I forget the name, but where Meadow was going to buy a pretty small fitness app for VR fitness app and it was blocked.Is it the case that these big guys just can't acquire anything?
That has been the effect. It seems crazy that, like, Amazon can't buy iRobot, or Meta's attempted to buy Giphy, and actually that one went through.Did Giphy go through by the way?
No, Giphy went through and then got spun out.Like, they had a redo, which was not great for anybody.
So i think you need to stop the ones that are problematic but that's not everyone but the net effect has been not just for big tech, big tech can't buy anything like when we talk to clients we're like and you know it kills me when you get a founder going well google can buy us i'm like jesus really
I mean, do you not read the news?But it's worse than that.When I say it puts a pall on all activity, here's the problem.Let's take a tech company that's not in that sort of top six that wants to do an M&A deal.
Well, today, their consideration will be, well, Hmm, if we pursue this, there's a decent chance the DOJ or the FTC moves to block it.If that happens, that puts us in limbo for two years.
It takes a long time for these things to wind their way through the court.And that puts them in the penalty box.It's really difficult to announce other M&A while you've got a major deal pending.And so it's not good for the target.
It's not good for the acquirer.And it has had the effect of them saying, eh, nah, let's just stay focused on our own for now because it's too risky an environment to even pursue an M&A deal.
And also the IPO window's closed.
Yes, the IPO window is closed, so that's something bad for the entrepreneurs of the growth companies, but let's take a wider lens.
People listening to this may be saying, oh, boo-hoo, M&A lawyers and bankers can't make as much money because the deals are not going through.Let's all shed an enormous tear for that cohort. No we're not talking about the intermediaries.
The reason why you need to have a vibrant M&A marketplace is because it is the lifeblood of innovation, the way tech works, things move fast, they're very complex, they move fast, there's always new technology innovations and
Even the largest companies with the largest R&D budgets and the biggest group of engineers can't figure out every new, better mousetrap.And so the beauty of our system as it stands is they don't have to. They don't have to.
All of these independently venture-backed startups are like Petri dishes of innovation that occur in thousands of companies.
And then the big guys can just sit there and wait and see something that's getting length, that's got product market fit, that innovates or anticipated a move in the market.And they go, great, we'll buy it.
look that's great for the entrepreneurs to change their lives financially but forget that it instills a necessary part of innovation and then by the way after two years.
Turn around there the founders leave let me know when this story start sounding familiar and they found another company and the innovation cycle starts again so yes there's a component here where founders get financial paydays that's great.
There's a component here where intermediaries get well-paid, fine, but who cares?The broader implication for our capitalist world is that it is this incredible flywheel of innovation.
It's one of the reasons why America does so much better than other countries.Yes, we attract smart people, Yes, we have venture capital funding that provides the necessary dollars to innovate.
But also, let's not forget, it's the M&A that creates this flywheel and keeps this thing humming.So we do better when we have that flywheel working.And right now, the flywheel for the last 18 of the last 24 months, the flywheel stopped.
So this increase that I mentioned in blockages and virulent antitrust action also happens to coincide with the lowest M&A deal activity in over a decade.Those two are not coincidences.
It makes sense.When I tend to think about how our government operates, it's a series of pendulum swings.
Arguably, we – I think this is a good thing, but we operate in a very laissez-faire environment, certainly in privacy and competition in the States for a for a pretty long time.
One of the things that we've covered here on the Monopoly Report is the Google ad tech case.Looking back, would you still have recommended some of the acquisitions that led us to the place we are right now?
Let's be honest.The one that would have warrant, would have warranted the most scrutiny with the DoubleClick acquisition, because the subsequent acquisition of invite media that was 81 million, AdMob was 400 million, and AdMob was 750 million.
Each of those capabilities, so a DSP, an SSP, and a mobile ad network, one could argue There was no concentration.If you think about a lumescape, mobile ad networks, there were hundreds of them.
So the Google's acquisition of one of them would not necessarily have drawn scrutiny.I think it was the DoubleClick acquisition that probably
would or should or could have, the holy trinity of regret, cause for antitrust actions to say, wait a second, you're buying these capabilities that are essentially the middleman plumbing, but you Google operate one of the largest sources of inventory and a huge network.
So already, maybe some bells should have been going off saying, wait, isn't that a vertical integration in a way that would give you an unfair advantage because you're the marketplace and the seller.
I mean, you know, the analogies have been made to the finance industry and you just sort of, you just can't have those kinds of conflicts in other industries.So that one is the one that seems the most glaring.
So in some of the documents that were not presented at the trial but were in evidence was an expert witness account from 2008 that literally ended with the paragraph saying, we cannot imagine any scenario in which Google would dominate display advertising based on this acquisition.
So that tells you how much expert witnesses can be counted on.But I want to follow up on one thing.You mentioned AdMeld.You just breezed right over.
And that actually is a really big part of the DOJ's case, that they say that the AdMeld acquisition was specifically designed to thwart competition and to not let publishers have the ability to yield manage and things like that.
What's your thought on that?
So I have an informed view on that, since I advise on Invite and AdMob.Invite, I pitched Google in November of 2009.They had just launched AdEx for the very first time.And my pitch to Google was, look, you just announced a marketplace.
You have all the supply in the world to create liquidity, but for a marketplace to work, it's a two-sided, you need demand, and you need to make it easy for people to buy on this, remember, nascent notion of programmatic buy, right?
So those were the early days.It seems like a duh, obvious now, but back in the day, this was new.And I said, so I would argue you should buy what I described generically as an on-ramp. to your exchange?"
And they said, okay, and what would that look like?I said, like a DSP.And then we went through, retrieved a number of names, and because of its size and recency of technology platform, Invite was the target.
By the way, it was so funny, a week later, Invite, having received an inbound from Adobe, contacted
me and said we're gonna interview half a dozen bankers to who will advise us on this, how can you, and I showed up at that meeting and I said look guys, I have a blue book just like all the other investment banks that say the same thing, we're great, we've done a bunch of deals in this space, we know what we're talking about, but let's forget about the book, throw the book away, let me tell you about my conversation with Google.
And when I finished that, Matt Turner turned to Zach and said, cancel the other meetings, let's just get to work.
I was on the deal team at Google, and we had no idea what we were buying or why we were buying it.That acquisition was really out of confusion and fear that we didn't really know what we were doing, which was true.
And Neil Mohan specifically told me, our biggest customer on the buy side is eBay.They're starting to use this thing, and we don't know why, and those dollars are not going to come to us anymore.We have to do something.
That was basically the rationale for Invite.
And when those talks started, Invite had a net revenue of 1.5 million.It was approaching 10 by the time we closed the deal.So it was growing fast.So then we do the deal, get the deal closed in June of 2010.
In September of 2010, I have breakfast with Neil Monahan. the author of that strategy.And he says to me, wow, we said, you know, 81 million seemed like a lot of money at the time.
I think it's worth about 250 now, three months later, because the thing was just growing like a, like a bad weed.And he said, so that was a great idea.What else you got for me?And I said, well, I'll be honest, this is exactly what I said.
I said, well, you got the unwrap now to demand.And I said, you got your own supply.But in terms of third-party supply, you could consider an SSP on the other end.
And honestly, it's very different from the rationale of buying invite on the demand side.I said, on the SSP, you could buy it and just shut it down.And he said, yeah, that's a good idea.So then we did that.
Why weren't you testifying?That's a pretty damning testimony we've got here.We've got an exclusive on the Monopoly Report.
I mean, that's what I told him.I'm not saying whether he hadn't honored or disagreed, but I pitched it.Again, that was my pitch to him was you could just shut it down. By the way, they largely shut it down.
Well, the email he said, we will park it.That was an email he sent internally that was in evidence.And he suggested parking it didn't mean parking it.Parking it meant just like keep it OK and while we build other stuff.
And the prosecution or the DOJ did not buy that.Anyway, we're getting totally off topic.
Amen.Amen.The trial closed.I did not get subpoenaed.Thank God.
So Terry, jumping in with a little bit different direction, I saw the write-up on your keynote at New Digital Age and you were kind of talking that the industry as part of the ongoing road to maturity really needed further consolidation.
I'm wondering if you'd just help me unpack that.Is there a specific – like what parts of the industry need to be consolidating or how should we be thinking about that?
First of all, I'm conscious of the fact that An M&A banker calling for more consolidation is like, you know, under a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I get that sort of conflict, but I think I can very credibly make the case that objectively that is the case.Most industries go through a phase of new company formation, maturity, and then rationalization and consolidation.
And usually, the apex of any particular industry sector, the number of companies will be enumerated in dozens, maybe a hundred.In this industry, it's completely, there are thousands, right?
There's 5,000 companies across the landscape, or more than 5,000.We'll just call it 5,000 to keep it specifically on ad tech.And so we've never, ever in any industry in the history of capitalism have seen a level of fragmentation like we have.
And it is unique.It was one of the reasons why I made that chart, was to sort of get a handle on this crazy fragmentation and how it all worked.There's nothing wrong with fragmentation per se, but there's several issues associated with it.
One is the fragmentation creates dark corners. And Dark Corners allows for what I describe as shenanigans.And there's so many shenanigans.
And there's a spectrum of shenanigans that range from absolute nefarious fraud to just sort of mischaracterization, you know, calling out stream video.There's a whole range of shenanigans, ID bridging, the list goes on and on and on.And
I believe that those shenanigans are ultimately a function of the fragmentation.There's just places to hide in the ecosystem.
And now if you think about the proliferation of all these different channels, there's search, there's display, there's social, there's commerce, there's CTD, there's video.
These poor bastards at the brands, I mean, how do you keep up with all that stuff? I have been predicting that we're going to see vendor culling by the brands and by the agencies.
If you look at any of the JavaScript on websites, it's ridiculous how many different people have JavaScript on there, or how many vendors are on a particular ad call, right?There can be 50 vendors in any particular category.Why 50?
You don't need that.I gotta believe that anything past number 10 doesn't get you any more marginal yield or better ROI.So it seems like, and I think this is part and parcel of this sort of recent, fairly recent, attention to just how complex
overnumbered, overpopulated, and perhaps murky the supply chain is.People have said, well, for sustainability reasons or for these other shenanigan reasons, we should probably rationalize the supply chain.And I think that I agree with that.
I've been calling for that for years now.And so when I say consolidation, Look, yeah, there's just too many players, there's too many places to hide, and we have a very, very wasteful supply chain.
And by the way, almost every other industry starts this way, starts fragmented, complex, and wasteful, where there's a lot of take rate coming out of the flow of dollars.But then it rationalizes to a situation where you tend to have fewer players,
doing higher volumes at lower take rates with better quality.Those four attributes tend to be, so by the way, apply them to any industry.Railroads, well, you know, turns out railroad tickets are
pretty cheap airline tickets are pretty cheap why is that there's half a dozen airlines and you see what i mean you can apply it to almost every other industry this one twenty years or fifteen years into really the rise of programmatic.
And we still have crazy take rates.There's four or five, three or four vendors all looking for their 20% out of the media spend, whether it's on the supply or demand.And one would have thought we'd have rationalized it better and sooner by now.
Television, which is 80 years old, you know, takes two to 3% out of the flow of dollars.We are still taking, you know,
50%.So we've seen most of the consolidation happen on the sell side, like Kinetics JW just happened and EMX dropped out, et cetera.The buy side seems like it's somewhat resisting, I mean, medium math aside.Do you agree with that kind of general?
Yeah, I think I think there's been well, I mean, because we have because they can't hold that because because the the demand side has been a stronger business model. The supply side has had any number of challenges.
I mean, if you think about the supply side, it's like the rules change every couple of years.I mean, header bidding fundamentally changed the supply side.SPO is now changing the supply side.
And I think we're just getting started on this notion of horizontality as a concept that I borrowed from Martin Sorrell to describe companies basically
their approach to rationalizing this complex and overpopulated supply chain is to build capabilities and pipes that run from demand to supply.You're seeing that manifest with the trade desk and now the supply side has responded.
And I think that's ultimately where we go in order to rationalize this ecosystem.
Makes sense.So I want to talk dollars.So you did a video, and I've speculated about this in my newsletters and things like that, about what would the economics of a double-click spinout
So as a background, the antitrust trial about ad tech is under deliberation.We expect a judgment by maybe the end of the year, and then remedies will take a while.
But the main remedy the DOJ is asking for is a spin out of the sell side of DoubleClick, meaning GAM and AdEx, but there could be other spin outs.So give us your hot take.How much money are the bankers going to make?
Oh, so you cut right to the heart of the matter.So I was sitting around watching the trial and reading your excellent reporting.I was very impressed.Before the trial began, I was like, Why is not more people talking about this?
I mean, it's probably the most consequential piece of litigation that has ever occurred in our industry.And there wasn't a lot of ink spilled on it.But of course, once the trial got going, it seemed it was like you couldn't look away.
It was like fascinating.And especially, I think, because the trial was closed, I actually think that was better. that the trial was closed, because then people had to summarize and report on it.There was more mystique.
We knew what was going on, but you couldn't actually see it.I mean, no one would want to watch that testimony, but it was wonderful to see the excerpt.And you all, again, did a fantastic job.
So I thought, and all this talk about, oh, well, they're going to have to sell it.Who's going to buy it?I'm like, what are you talking about?So I produced that video to, A, dispel the sort of
inappropriate sort of notions of what the remedy might look like.And I said, all right, well, let's do some analysis.And I had been working on that analysis sort of privately.And I said, yeah, I'll just share it.I'll just share it.
So I made the video where I walked through the importance of the trial, maybe some of the rationale given it, putting it in context of the government's activity. And then I went, said, okay, so what are we talking about here?
And the answer is, we don't know exactly how the government might seek to enforce some kind of action.But we do know the component parts that make up constituency of the totality of what they could probably go after.
And there are, you know, six divisions.And so again, I don't know if all of those would be forced to be spun.And by the way, I say spun because You can't sell this.It's too large to sell to any one company.
All of private equity, even the biggest private equity firms couldn't afford it.And no strategist is going to buy it.So the form it would take would be a spinoff to Alphabet shareholders.And that would create an independent company
And it would trade on its own, and it would have obviously a high dependency on Google, which would have to be manifested in in third party contracts.
And then over time, one would expect that dependency to wane as they started doing business with other firms.So I took a look at the component parts and did evaluation based on available data, right, we only have
2020 data, so I had to grow it to 2024.
And then I applied a series of multiples, the conclusion of which was this thing is worth, I don't know, 75 to 100 billion, depending upon what components are put in it, which would make it the single most valuable independent ad tech company, about double the size of the trade desk.
So is that everything?Or is that just the sell side?
That's what Google calls the network business.You're taking spin the whole thing.
Yeah, CM360, DV360, Google Ads, AdMob, AdSense, and Google Ad Manager.So it ranges from demand tools to supply tools.
And what's the most valuable parts?
The most valuable parts are going to be Google Ads and GAM by far.
Well, GIM has about $10 billion of ad spend.It had about $1.6 billion of net revenue in 2020.So grow that by 40%.You're talking about $3 billion in net revenue.So you can sort of give it a 10x multiple, that's a $30 billion business.
When you say net revenue, GAM is comprised of SAS fees plus the take rate on AdEx.That's one thing, right?So one question I had, and maybe this is beyond the scope here, is let's say they just spin GAM and AdEx.They don't spin Google Ads, right?
So the supply side gets spun, but the buy side doesn't. The asset would actually, I think, be worth a lot less than it would be as part of Google because the demand from Google, Google Ads, would no longer be tied to it.
And you'd effectively have an immediate revenue and margin hit by being decoupled.
Well, so it would, would be tied to it because you wouldn't get a divestiture without transfer price, without a contract. Remember, they don't need a contract right now because it's the same company.But as a separate company, they would contract.
And by the way, Google has no choice but to use, we'll call it DoubleClick, at least out of the gate, right?So for the first couple of years, and then competition will either inform pricing, or they could switch vendors over time.
One of the big accusations is that Google ads supports addicts, basically.So the demand for Google ads almost exclusively goes to addicts.You spin it out and suddenly it goes from, you know, 80% addicts to 50 to 40 to 20, et cetera.
And they also take a higher margin because it subsidizes addicts.
a hundred percent.So then I said, okay, so it's worth about 75 to 100 billion, depending on your assumptions.It's going to be a spinout.And then, you know, who are the winners and losers?
And I went through a list of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight constituencies, well, seven plus a joke, and analyzed whether it was good for them.And it turns out it's a clean sweep.
It's great for Google shareholders because they always win when some of the parts is greater than the whole.It's good for Google ad tech management, getting the options and shares in an independent $100 billion company is never a bad thing.
It's great for the ad tech ecosystem because it oxygenates the market.Great for advertisers and publishers and consumers because increased competition means either higher yield or better ROI or more choice.
And then as a joke, I said, it's of course better for ed tech folks and business makers.But going back to Google, they're fighting this.So people said, well, isn't this bad for Google?I'm like, well, I don't know.
This unit, business unit is their lowest growth, lowest margin business. That's the highest source of biggest source of their government headache.
So I would argue if this would enable them to focus on their own businesses of, you know, search and cloud and, and YouTube, I mean, I think Google would be better off.So they're fighting it because it's almost like a knee jerk reaction.
But the reality is, I think I think you have a stronger Google in the back end.And by the way,
They're going to need that focus because they're facing some existential challenges for the very first time coming from a and its implications in terms of how consumers will navigate the web.
My theory is that they do want to spin it, but they want to keep it as a chip.They're waiting.They want the other antitrust trials to get a little bit further along so that they could use this as a bargaining chip.
Yeah, this is all a negotiation.I would not disagree with that.We talked a bit about the spinoff.What's the likelihood of this happening and what's the timing?I mean, I'm not sure Lena Kahn and Cantor are even going to be here in a year.
They definitely won't be there.Lena Kahn won't be there on November the 6th. I mean, I'm joking, but her fate will be sealed, I think, on November.
Hold up, Terry.You got to explain that.Do you think Kamala, is that a Trump reference or an either way reference?
No, no.I think it's either way.I'm of the view that regardless of who wins on the 5th, and on the 5th or the weeks or months thereafter. Yeah, Lord knows it's not a day certain anymore.
It's like, well, election starts on the Feds, we'll see when it ends.I think whoever wins, we are likely to see a more pro-Bezos environment.So I think you'll see some changes take place with Cantor and Khan at the DOJ and the FTC.
And Lena Khan in particular, I think because of her, I'm going to describe it as sort of not a pragmatic approach, a dogmatic approach towards her day job.And, you know, listen, this is not a personal attack on her.She's a person of high integrity.
Oddly going on a Save My Job media tour right now, which is kind of funny, but I think Lena Kahn's dates are numbered.
Yeah.I don't see the Harris administration being willing to carry the political water that would be required to keep her on.
I don't think there's a chance in hell that she makes it through a Senate confirmation because she would need to ultimately be reappointed.Correct.
Look, my read on Kamala Harris is she's a pragmatist, a self-interested pragmatist. Joe Biden's a little bit more of an idealist.So the game theory here, the true politician would say, win the election and pivot to the center.
And then you'll box out Trump or any other Republican that comes after Trump because the majority of the countries in the center, Biden has appeased the far left in an annoying way.
And when I say annoying, annoying to a lot of common sense people in the center that, you know, it sadly is going to raise a real chance that Donald Trump is our next president.
Well, that's fair enough.I think that the reason we have Lena Kahn is there is sort of a backroom deal.
If everybody remembers when just about all of the democratic opponents to Biden magically left the race except for Bernie, there was a bunch of deals struck and one of the deals was struck with Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Warren pushed for Lena Kahn and a couple of other things.
I think that that deal has expired.
By the way, here's a crazy point.I love the fact that the FTC invokes legislation and regulations to protect consumers.The consumer protection side of the FTC, I love it.And by the way, she's been great on that front.
There's all these scams and bullshit.In fact, she's done everything except stop political fundraising texts.There's no way to stop those apparently. So I applaud that, and I think the M&A aspect should be removed from the FTC.
In other words, because right now we have either the DOJ or the FTC, it's ridiculous that we have two government agencies pursuing the same thing.
Just leave that with the DOJ and let the FTC do what it was initially intended to do, which is to protect consumers.
All right.I think we're going to cut it off there.This was an amazing conversation.We covered politics, we covered finances, Lena Kahn, just a lot to think about.So, Terry, thank you so much for coming on here.
Great to chat with you both.Keep it up.Thanks, Derek.We need more attention on these issues.
I agree.And one of the reasons I came on to this is I think that we're lacking in literacy on these types of topics throughout our industry.And I think that's to our detriment.
We have a bunch of more episodes coming up of Monopoly Report Podcast.If you're interested in being a guest or have a suggestion for a guest, just hit us up online.We're very easy to reach.Both Alan and I could be reached by DM.
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So once again, Terry and Alan, thank you for being here.
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