Matt Levine

speaker

4,099 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 6d ago

Matt Levine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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Money Stuff: The Podcast · Learn More Gooder · 4 Sep 2026 podcast

And the FTC is like, but that's not what you do. voice-verified

And Amazon's like, look, nobody buys ads based on like simplified descriptions of the auction mechanics. voice-verified

They buy ads based on like return on ad spend, right? voice-verified

So if you spend a dollar and you get four dollars of revenue, you're like, Yeah, great, I'll keep buying ads. voice-verified

Amazon's defense here, which I think is true and is just interesting to me because it's like not how the financial industry works. voice-verified

Amazon's defense is like basically this is a black box. voice-verified

Like we do not expect our advertisers to actually understand like the auction mechanics, because like voice-verified

What we're doing is not a second price auction, right? voice-verified

It's like, sure, it's a second price auction with a soft reserve price, but like voice-verified

We don't even know the soft reserve price until after that. voice-verified

But also they're like, you know, it's not actually uh second price auction. voice-verified

We're not actually voice-verified

auctioning ad spots to the highest bidder and making them pay the second price. voice-verified

We're actually choosing the ad spots in part based on who the highest bidder is, but in part on relevance. voice-verified

Right. voice-verified

So like when you search for like toilet paper, Emily wants to show you like sponsored products that are toilet paper. voice-verified

They don't want to show you sponsored products that are like cars, right? voice-verified

Even though that might have a higher margin and might be willing to pay more. voice-verified

you know, we started this voice-verified

I think it's like they have like a slider that's like how much should we care about price and how much should we care about relevance? voice-verified

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