LINA KHAN Talks FTC, Monopolies, Biden

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Speaker 2 you function kind of like as an someone that enforced the law you were kind of like a um like a cop or like a you know did you ever ask for a gun

Speaker 3 you should have got a badge I know we probably should have you know we did have investigators who like went undercover sometimes and they did have badges did you you send guys to Burning Man to like

Speaker 2 figure out technical stuff?

Speaker 3 We didn't have that good idea.

Speaker 2 See, had I gone to law school, I would have had that great idea. They would have been on Molly and they would have been like, we're going to make one company.

Speaker 2 The whole economy is going to be one company pretty soon.

Speaker 3 I guess.

Speaker 2 Just let me get over that real quick.

Speaker 2 Just my feelings being hurt.

Speaker 2 Hello, welcome back to the Adam Friedland Show.

Speaker 2 I'm Adam Friedland.

Speaker 2 Thomas just bullied me.

Speaker 2 All right. Hello, and welcome back to the Adam Friedland Show, guys.
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Speaker 2 That is true. That's a funny line, Caleb.

Speaker 2 Leave that in. You deserve it.
Give it up for Caleb Pitts, everyone.

Speaker 2 My guest this week is former FTC Commissioner Lena Kahn. Lena has been in the news recently as she is the head of Zoron Mom Donny's mayoral transition team.

Speaker 2 During her tenure at the FTC, she became a powerful enemy of major corporations like Amazon and Meta, transforming a famously toothless arm of the executive branch into an effective valve on corporate power.

Speaker 2 Effective valve.

Speaker 2 Kind of cool.

Speaker 2 A valve is something that regulates like a stream. Regulates.
Hmm. What does that remind you of? Okay.
You did good copy, bad copy? That was good copy. Think of Lena Khan like Batman.

Speaker 2 And think of Amazon like the Penguin. Meta,

Speaker 2 Bane, I guess. Oracle, Hugo Strange, Joe Biden, Razal Ghoul.
Apple, Killer Croc, and I will be Alfred Pennyworth, the butler. The point is, Lena is one of the good guys, and I'm Alfred.

Speaker 2 So please.

Speaker 2 Caleb, you crushed it this week. I was on the phone too much, and Caleb wrote perhaps the best intro we've had thus far.
Give it up for Caleb Pitts one more time.

Speaker 2 I love my team. Please enjoy my conversation with Lena Kahn.

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Speaker 3 When I've lived in England, I think I was Arsenal.

Speaker 3 And maybe Manu at points, but I don't really remember very well.

Speaker 2 You're from the shtettel.

Speaker 2 I lived in Boulders Green, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's where the Frummers lived. Is it? That's really Orthodox neighborhood.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yes, yes, it is a pretty orthodox neighborhood.
I think now it's a bit more...

Speaker 3 There are like a lot of Polish immigrants there.

Speaker 2 Thank God.

Speaker 3 No, it was a nice place to grow up.

Speaker 2 Dude, she's a gooner. Do you hear that? What? Arsenal fed.
Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't know that I could faithfully still claim that.

Speaker 2 Stop being a lawyer. Just lie.
You learned to lie.

Speaker 2 You're allowed to lie.

Speaker 3 It is like against my disposition at this point.

Speaker 2 I know. Watching interviews with you, you're like, they give you opportunities to talk some shit and you're like,

Speaker 2 I know the rules for this.

Speaker 3 Well, I feel like once you've testified before Congress where like the main goal is not to lie, it's like that becomes like really ingrained in you.

Speaker 2 I agree. Yeah,

Speaker 2 people don't lie in front of Congress.

Speaker 3 It's bad if you do.

Speaker 2 You know what, guys, can we just do the interview now and then we'll just do the walkout later? Yeah, yeah. Okay, because we're ready to doing the interview.
Okay.

Speaker 2 You've never told one lie in your entire life?

Speaker 3 I probably have, like as a kid or something, but.

Speaker 2 Not since you were a kid?

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 2 My whole life is a lie. This is a lie.

Speaker 3 It looks pretty legit, but...

Speaker 2 I wanted to ask you something that I thought was really kind of cute,

Speaker 2 about the Starbucks thing when you were in high school. Uh-huh.
So you were in Westchester?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I lived in Memarinik, went to Memarinik High School.

Speaker 2 And so the kids were causing a ruckus up in Starbucks by your high school?

Speaker 3 So Starbucks said, but that's why we needed to investigate.

Speaker 2 And what did you do about it?

Speaker 3 So there was basically

Speaker 3 some stores outside of the high school, including the Starbucks, and people would, you know, go there and hang out there and buy coffee.

Speaker 3 And then they started a policy that students, even if they purchased something, couldn't stay in the store. They couldn't sit down.

Speaker 3 So I wrote a school newspaper story about it.

Speaker 2 You're Martin Luther King.

Speaker 2 But didn't you get in the New York Times?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it somehow became enough of a thing where the Times then reported on it and reported, cited my story or something.

Speaker 2 So were you a little bit sucking up to the popular girls that were at Starbucks?

Speaker 3 I don't remember it that way. I was genuinely just curious.

Speaker 2 Or you were the popular girls?

Speaker 3 No, I mean, I was a newspaper editor, you know. I don't know that that counted.

Speaker 2 Have you ever gotten a B? A B? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Probably, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's a lie. I got you to lie.

Speaker 3 No, no. I mean, I got a lot of hard math classes in college and probably didn't do so well.

Speaker 2 I need to swear you in. You never got a B.
You got a B in hard math?

Speaker 3 Some hard math, yeah.

Speaker 2 How did it feel to get a B?

Speaker 3 It was humbling, but in a good way.

Speaker 2 Humbling?

Speaker 2 Did you take the LSAT

Speaker 2 June 2009?

Speaker 2 Dino game?

Speaker 3 No, no, I took it later.

Speaker 2 Do you know the dino game?

Speaker 2 Is that the The logic game with the dinosaurs.

Speaker 3 I know the logic puzzles, but not with the dinosaurs.

Speaker 2 I took it right before you.

Speaker 3 Okay,

Speaker 3 I didn't go to law school until 2014, so I took it later.

Speaker 2 Would you have nails?

Speaker 2 I don't remember. Come on.
I really don't. You're being humble right now.
You got 180.

Speaker 3 I don't think so. Straight up 180.
I'd have to go back and do it.

Speaker 2 Did you finish first? Were you like, done?

Speaker 3 I don't think so.

Speaker 2 You definitely did.

Speaker 2 So, I'd like,

Speaker 2 yeah, I took it three three times. It was an inflection point in my life.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, it was an inflection point for me, too. I was trying to decide whether to go to law school or whether to be a journalist.

Speaker 2 Your thesis in college was on HANRN?

Speaker 2 What was your area of focus? I think it's pretty interesting for the times we're kind of living in right now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was this close study of a bunch of her work, including a book she wrote called The Human Condition. And in the book, she basically writes about how

Speaker 3 technological progress can lead lead to a lot of advances but also require a certain degree of distance and she has this analogy with the plane around how like you know airplanes like allow us to do pretty great stuff and like make physical distance shorter but it requires an altitude that makes you see less and I analogize how she talked about kind of expertise and what can get lost in it to how we got into the financial crisis.

Speaker 2 So that's like the most boring book she wrote? That's what your thesis was?

Speaker 3 I don't know if that was.

Speaker 2 I thought your thesis would be on her romance with Heidegger. Oh, yeah.
The Nazi and the Jew. Right, right.

Speaker 3 I guess that was a component of her life.

Speaker 2 One thing I heard you say in an interview was that prior to the establishment of the Third Reich as a centralized power structure,

Speaker 2 that industrial conglomeration

Speaker 2 was a big component of it. Is that correct? Or am I trying to say words? I feel like I'm copying words that I heard on TV.
On succession, maybe?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, obviously there were a lot of factors that facilitated the rise of Nazism, but the U.S.

Speaker 3 after World War II actually commissioned various studies to be like, what just happened and what factors contributed to it,

Speaker 3 including trying to figure out what was happening in the economy. And they did actually find that growing consolidation across the German economy had basically facilitated the rise of Nazism.

Speaker 3 You know, you had like more monopolization monopolization in certain types of rubber and steel.

Speaker 3 And generally speaking, there's long been a recognition that concentrated economic power can go hand in hand with concentrated political power.

Speaker 3 And I think that's an insight that has been lost more recently, but we're kind of being forced to reckon with again.

Speaker 2 So you think Paramount, if they buy Warner Brothers, maybe Barry Weiss will be maybe the kind of gobble.

Speaker 2 She can't, she doesn't talk shit at all. She knows all the rules.

Speaker 2 You know all the rules.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's explain to our audience.

Speaker 2 You became a star even before you graduated law school. So you published an article about Amazon when you were in law school and you kind of made some enemies.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 What was your thesis? What was your position that you were taking?

Speaker 3 So basically I was writing about how the contemporary way that antitrust law gets interpreted, which is a very short-term focus on whether monopolies are raising prices, was creating all sorts of blind spots and used Amazon as kind of a vehicle to tell this broader story about changes in our antitrust laws.

Speaker 3 The Law Review article actually came out of a whole bunch of interviews I had done with two sets of market participants.

Speaker 3 One was the set of businesses that were selling on Amazon, and the other was financial analysts and investors that were looking at Amazon more through a long-term prism.

Speaker 3 And it was really interesting because at that time, this is like 2012, 2013,

Speaker 3 the general consensus in DC was that Amazon is this company that is just delivering all these low prices and there's kind of no monopoly power dominance concern here.

Speaker 3 But when you talk to those sets of market actors, they were like, yeah, of course, this company is amassing structural power that one day it'll just be able to flip the switch.

Speaker 3 And that's the whole like investment proposition here.

Speaker 3 And it was just one of these instances where there was a real gap between how kind of the experts and the pundits were understanding what was going on in the economy and how when you talk to like real people that were doing business with this company, how they understood it.

Speaker 3 And that gap was really interesting to me and so I decided to try to make it into a law review article.

Speaker 2 So in essence, you're saying that they were dropping prices so low that like mom and pop were just couldn't compete? Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 3 Yeah, they were engaging in a bunch of business practices that like 50 years ago would have been illegal.

Speaker 3 But because there was this kind of Reagan revolution in antitrust where we now basically assume that monopolies were good unless they were engaging in a very narrow set of practices that were bad, we'd kind of become blind to being able to see

Speaker 3 corporate dominance and monopoly power unless and until it hit this like very narrow set of conditions.

Speaker 2 What do you make of the argument, or like people would say like the Sears catalog is going to drive the general store out of business?

Speaker 2 Is it just that like, yeah, like Bezos kind of reinvented a supply chain, but I can get any crap I want tomorrow? Like, do you get crap on there?

Speaker 3 I'm not a Prime member, so I don't really buy stuff on there.

Speaker 2 You're not a Prime member. What are you doing? You go with your feet?

Speaker 2 You go on your feet.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's a good thing about living in New York City. You know, you can buy a lot of stuff in person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but you could also get any crap tomorrow.

Speaker 3 It's true. I mean, the thing is,

Speaker 3 it's really not about,

Speaker 3 it's more about, you know, the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws were designed to basically create more checks and balances in our economic sphere. Sure.

Speaker 3 Because there was a recognition that, like, you don't want to concentrate economic power.

Speaker 3 And through competition laws, there's an assumption that firms, if they're having to compete for your business, they're going to try to make things better, be it through lower prices or kind of better service.

Speaker 3 And so we want to maintain competition, and there are fair ways to compete and unfair ways to compete.

Speaker 3 And our definition of what is unfair ways of competing has radically changed over the last few decades, such that companies like Amazon have been able to get away with things.

Speaker 3 And when I was at the FTC, we ended up filing a lawsuit against it.

Speaker 3 After investigating it, we found that it was breaking the law and that now it is actually systematically raising prices for people, both consumers.

Speaker 2 And they fucked everyone off.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because they can.

Speaker 3 And the businesses that have to sell on Amazon now have to pay as much as one out of every $2 to this company.

Speaker 2 Sorry for cussing, also.

Speaker 3 It's not a good situation. And a lot of that is because they don't face real competition.

Speaker 2 Do you think the game Monopoly is maybe problematic for people's understanding of Monopoly power? Because no one wins that Monopoly and everyone's like, you're a bad guy.

Speaker 2 Everyone's like,

Speaker 2 you know, I mean, it's a disaster. Your dad just relapsed on alcohol.
He told your mom that she's just like her mother. Your sister's crying.
That's what happens when you win a Monopoly.

Speaker 2 And you're like, I'm the best guy in the family.

Speaker 3 You know, there's a really interesting history of that game where it was actually designed as an anti-monopoly game and then it was like, you know, commercialized and made into a kind of a pro-monopoly game.

Speaker 2 Wait, so what was the objective? That everyone has different stuff?

Speaker 3 In the original version? You know, I haven't played the original version, though I actually have a version of it.

Speaker 3 So I need to try it out.

Speaker 2 So you went back into the think tech world after law school?

Speaker 3 Just briefly, yeah.

Speaker 2 Were you offered like a federal clerkship or something? I mean, it seems like from your resume, like you could have.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I was supposed to clerk a year out of law school, and my judge ended up passing away a few months before.

Speaker 3 So then I kind of had to rejigger things and ended up actually working first

Speaker 3 at the FTC for a commissioner, Rohit Chopra, who had just joined, who was doing incredible work.

Speaker 3 And then actually ended up joining as a staffer to a congressional committee where we did a big investigation of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Speaker 3 And so I was there for a year and a half or so.

Speaker 2 And you started working with Elizabeth Warren or like in an unofficial capacity at the time?

Speaker 3 Is that correct?

Speaker 3 Yeah, not officially, but you know, she in 2016 gave a big speech basically saying, you know, across the economy we have now extreme consolidation and she named companies, which in DC is unusual for kind of somebody to really name the company you're talking about.

Speaker 3 And she did that across sectors. And it basically helped give much more prominence to this issue of antitrust and anti-monopoly.

Speaker 3 And she became kind of an allies as as somebody who agreed that we really needed to reinvigorate this area of law.

Speaker 2 And so from my understanding, well, two things. First is like, how did President Biden, how did you get drafted in the league at 32?

Speaker 3 It's a great question. I have no idea.

Speaker 2 You were the youngest by like 40 years probably in the government.

Speaker 3 Oh, in the go. I mean, there had been some prior FTC commissioners that had been in their 30s, but I think chair

Speaker 3 probably was the youngest.

Speaker 2 So how did you get scouted? Like, how did they know that you were the goat? It's really cool that President Biden was like, this is the one.

Speaker 2 And you, like, changed, we'll get into it, but you changed the way kind of a toothless part of the executive functioned, from what I understand.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, how people get picked is like a total mystery.

Speaker 2 Oh, now you're lying. Now she's lying.
We got her, guys. Let's clap it up.

Speaker 2 What happened?

Speaker 3 You know, you basically get a call being asking you if you're interested in serving.

Speaker 2 From the Monopoly man.

Speaker 3 From the federal government.

Speaker 2 You get a call from the federal government.

Speaker 3 You get a call from somebody, you know, working in the White House who does personnel.

Speaker 3 Usually somebody who works in the Office of Personnel. HR? It's basically HR for the White House, who has to figure out for all of the political appointees who are we going to pick.

Speaker 3 So they call you, they ask if you're interested. If you say yes, you have to have all of this.
kind of background checks and have a lot of conversation with security people.

Speaker 2 They looked into the Starbucks, right? Probably. They probably called someone at the Starbucks.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they call people who know you to kind of try to figure out what's going on.

Speaker 3 And then sometimes you don't hear for a while and you have no idea, am I in or am I out? In my case, I ended up being told that I had been picked as a commissioner and they were going to announce it.

Speaker 2 Had you spoken to President Biden before?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah. He wasn't like, Kato.

Speaker 2 Kiddo, the malarkey of you.

Speaker 2 You got no malarkey.

Speaker 3 No, we didn't get to have that conversation.

Speaker 2 So you came into it, from what I understand, and as you alluded to, from Reagan till the time you came, which 2020?

Speaker 3 2021, yeah.

Speaker 2 2021. Like,

Speaker 2 for, what, 30 years, it was basically a completely just, what did they, they did Herbalife, right? Was that their big hit for 30 years?

Speaker 3 They were very focused on, you know, frauds and scams. And, you know, it's staffed by very well-meaning people, but there definitely had been kind of a real narrowing in their ambition.

Speaker 2 So you walked into the office, everyone was Hawaiian shirt, beer pong. Were people doing

Speaker 2 like Xeroxes of their butts?

Speaker 3 You know, it was still COVID, so it took a while till everybody was like back in.

Speaker 3 But no, I mean, you know, the staff there was very hardworking. There had been people who'd been there since, you know, for decades.

Speaker 2 She won't talk shit. They were definitely like, look at this homework nerd coming in, trying to make us work for the first time ever.

Speaker 3 No, I mean,

Speaker 3 I was an unusual pick for a bunch of reasons. So,

Speaker 3 you know, it was a bit of an adjustment for the agency.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 How'd did you get picked?

Speaker 3 It's a great, it's a great question.

Speaker 2 Because you're not Nepo, right?

Speaker 3 No, I mean, no.

Speaker 2 You're like the smartest one. They never picked the smartest one.
Seriously. It's like a rarity.
That's why I'm so fascinated by it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's. Especially so young.

Speaker 2 They hate youth in

Speaker 2 Hollywood, in ugly Hollywood, I mean, in DC.

Speaker 2 They have a contempt for youth.

Speaker 3 It was an unusual pick, and I think it really did speak to how, in a pretty small number of years, the the kind of elite, even elite consensus about antitrust has started to change.

Speaker 3 And so there was a growing sense that the kind of Reagan approach, which had become a bipartisan approach, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, the incredible thing about Reagan was like,

Speaker 3 when they came in, the stuff they were pushing was seen as really fringe. And, you know, there were deep partisan fights.

Speaker 3 But then you fast forward 12 years after eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush, and the stuff that had been really fringe of theirs was now just the new common wisdom.

Speaker 3 And so they were pretty masterful in kind of getting their set of ideas and ideology to become the new mainstream.

Speaker 3 And it took until 2018, 2019, 2020 for there to be a greater recognition that that had been the wrong path and we needed to kind of reinvigorate this area of the law.

Speaker 2 Even from what I understand, people that were supporting the Harris campaign were kind of

Speaker 2 going at your ass a bit. Is that correct?

Speaker 2 It wasn't clear if Kamala won, if she would continue kind of your project.

Speaker 3 Yeah, look, I mean, she, you know, a president has the prerogative to kind of pick their own team. So they were

Speaker 2 not

Speaker 3 choosing

Speaker 3 who they were going to have in place before they won.

Speaker 2 But you were a first-round draft pick.

Speaker 3 You know, I think it would have been her, it was an auditor serve, and it would have been her prerogative to kind of choose the path forward.

Speaker 3 But it's true that there were people who were upset by what we were doing and that were kind of being very vocal about it.

Speaker 2 There were a a lot of people who were upset.

Speaker 3 I don't know if I'd say a lot.

Speaker 2 I mean the newspaper that I believe wait what did I find there's like 53 op-eds against you after you came into the FTC?

Speaker 3 At least, yes.

Speaker 2 They were saying they were why you drove them nuts. You were living rent-free because it's tech.
Was it big tech and hedge funds?

Speaker 3 There was some big tech trade groups. A lot of it was also the deal makers.

Speaker 3 So parts parts of Wall Street that make a lot of fees off of mergers and acquisitions.

Speaker 3 But you're just some lady.

Speaker 2 I mean, you're what? Five foot four?

Speaker 3 Yeah, five, four, five, five. And there's, look,

Speaker 2 brain death at Khan's FTC and LinaCon blocks cancer cures.

Speaker 2 At hedge fund that made a killing betting against LenaCon. Lenacon needs to see Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary.

Speaker 2 Lenacon whiffs again.

Speaker 2 Why were you such a lightning rod? I mean, how are you like this, but then in the court, you're like that?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think there were a few things.

Speaker 3 I think we had had several decades of elite impunity, where if you were breaking the law, but you were in a C-suite, the government would go light on you. And,

Speaker 3 you know, even at places like the FTC, sometimes there had been a double standard where if you kind of found that there was some like small-time scammer or fraudster, you would like bring the full force of the law against them.

Speaker 3 But then if you kind of found that a fancy CEO was breaking the law and their company was publicly traded, you might go a little lighter.

Speaker 2 They were contributing to your campaign.

Speaker 3 And I, you know, I thought that was just really problematic.

Speaker 3 And so we were very clear that we were going to enforce the law in an even-handed way, no matter kind of what your political connections were. We just had to look at, are you breaking the law or not?

Speaker 3 And I think that approach to enforcing the law upset some people.

Speaker 2 Two things. Did President Biden, when you came in, give you that mandate? Was he like, go for it?

Speaker 3 The White House was very supportive of kind of what we were doing. President Biden did sign this executive order in 2021 that was pretty significant.

Speaker 3 I mean, he basically said, the last 40 years of kind of Robert Bork-style antitrust has been a total mistake.

Speaker 3 And I'm, you know, directing my government to basically turn the page on that failed approach.

Speaker 3 And that means the FTC, the DOJ, but also all of these other agencies need to really focus on taking on monopolies. So there was definitely a mandate.

Speaker 2 And they called you a hipster?

Speaker 2 That was one of the labels that was attached to you. So you were like, listening to Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective.
What was it? What was that?

Speaker 2 Why did they go there?

Speaker 3 You'll have to ask the people who came up with the term, but I think

Speaker 3 their view was the approach to antitrust that we wanted to advance was like a throwback.

Speaker 2 What was the other thing, like neo-post-Brandeisian or something?

Speaker 3 Right, neo-Brandeisian.

Speaker 2 That's pretty cool. You functioned kind of like as an someone that enforced the law.
You were kind of like a

Speaker 2 like a cop or like a you know did you ever ask for a gun?

Speaker 2 You should have got a badge.

Speaker 3 I I know we probably should have. You know, we did have investigators who like went undercover sometimes and they did have badges.

Speaker 2 Deep undercover in Wall Street?

Speaker 3 Usually, no, usually not on Wall Street, usually kind of if there was like various types of frauds or scams or that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 Did you send guys to Burning Man to like

Speaker 2 figure out technical stuff?

Speaker 3 We didn't have that good idea.

Speaker 2 See, had I gone to law school, I would have had that great idea. Because they would have been on Molly and they would have been like, we're going to make one company.

Speaker 2 The whole economy is going to be one company pretty soon. Yeah.
And they would have been on Ketiman or whatever the hell.

Speaker 3 That is a very creative investigative technique, though.

Speaker 2 Can we go back to the FTC and try it? And can we cut that from the episode? Because I feel like we've cracked it just now. Go to Burning Man.
They're all on drugs over there talking about

Speaker 2 singularity.

Speaker 3 I guess.

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Speaker 2 I'm not alone in saying this, but we've all had our data breached. I've been breached numerous times on the PlayStation Network, Supermarket, Club Card.
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Speaker 2 So you took this toothless organization,

Speaker 2 you made it a potent organization for the first time. Did you have any structural changes that you had to enact in order to get the ball rolling there?

Speaker 3 Yeah, a few. I mean, first, we brought on more technologists because a lot of the...
the economy is now becoming digitized, but you kind of need people on your team who understand how the stuff works.

Speaker 3 So we brought in a bunch of them, we hired more lawyers,

Speaker 3 you know, we started started litigating more and so we brought on more litigators. Um the FTC is pretty small relative to the size of its job and mandate.

Speaker 2 Um so we I would imagine you just get out gunned. Like they have nine thousand lawyers, you have like twelve guys.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean sometimes the like in-house lawyers of these companies are greater than like the entire like competition bureau of the FTC.

Speaker 2 How many guys did you have?

Speaker 3 In total we had 1,300.

Speaker 2 I thought you were going to say 13. That would have been a hilarious movement.

Speaker 3 But no, I mean we are totally outmatched when it comes to resources and the amount of money they have. So you kind of have to figure out how to navigate that.

Speaker 2 What do you view as like your biggest dub?

Speaker 3 Gosh, I mean, there are a lot of cases that are still pending.

Speaker 2 You sued Call of Duty?

Speaker 3 We did sue to block the Microsoft Activision merger. That merger did go through.
We weren't successful. And now

Speaker 2 you can't get it on PlayStation?

Speaker 2 Call of Duty? I think you can, but I think you get it early on Xbox.

Speaker 2 Look at what you did, what they did to you.

Speaker 2 You were trying to stand up for Caleb.

Speaker 3 Well, there have been a whole bunch of price hikes that I know gamers have been pretty upset about.

Speaker 2 Well, there's the Game Pass thing.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 Caleb, you want to sit in for me and talk about the game pass?

Speaker 2 I don't care. I hope that.
It's $30 now. It's very expensive.
It's $30?

Speaker 3 $30.

Speaker 2 Look at what they're doing to my beautiful boy over here.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, we were very focused on healthcare markets just because people depend on healthcare.

Speaker 3 And one of the initiatives we did was really try to figure out why are drug prices so high. And one reason they're so high is because pharma companies use all sorts of patent tricks.

Speaker 2 The orange book, right?

Speaker 3 Yes. Yes.
Wow.

Speaker 2 You went deep. I'm a lawyer.

Speaker 3 So we called out those pharmatrics and

Speaker 3 three of the four big manufacturers of asthma inhalers dropped the price. from hundreds of dollars to just 35.

Speaker 3 So there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people who rely on inhalers who are paying less today.

Speaker 2 And did you get them scared? Like, were there mergers that weren't attempted? Because they're like,

Speaker 2 cons coming?

Speaker 3 According to them, yes.

Speaker 3 They would go on TV sometimes and say, you know, back in the day, we didn't have to think about antitrust risk when we were thinking about our deals, but under this administration, we have to think about it right away.

Speaker 2 And I guess, like, like on the politics side,

Speaker 2 there were some Republicans that actually were like, that rode with, that fuck that fucked with you

Speaker 3 i mean like where you got it didn't go along partisan lines i mean like that's right there was josh josh hawley was one of them or no yeah he was he was pretty supportive of a lot of the ftc's work who else on the republican side were like kind of like uh supported like you you know there were a lot there were a lot of members who were really concerned about big tech in particular uh some who were concerned about these pharmacy benefit managers these like drug supply middlemen so it was kind of issue by issue but generally speaking, like taking on corporate power when they're breaking the law is very popular.

Speaker 3 And there were Republican members that recognized that.

Speaker 2 You went after Meta

Speaker 2 while you were at the FTC.

Speaker 3 We sued them, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so, and

Speaker 2 what was the result of that?

Speaker 3 We're actually waiting to find out. The trial happened a few months ago.

Speaker 2 I would think that Trump would just stop that.

Speaker 2 So there was an AM. He had a new haircut.

Speaker 2 He's got a chain and a haircut and he does MMA. Case closed.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No, I mean, I think there was a big effort.
I mean, I know Mark made several visits to the White House leading up to the trial, and there was kind of effort to get them to settle it.

Speaker 3 But they let it go forward. I mean, you know, that doesn't mean they won't see it all the way through.
And I think the lobbying pressure is constant.

Speaker 3 And the type of access these people have to the White House is pretty unprecedented. So we'll have to wait and see.

Speaker 2 So if you went to the South Bay, would you like wear a bulletproof vest or something? Like 50 Cent?

Speaker 2 Do you know the song many men by 50 cent have you heard it no but does that

Speaker 2 as an individual do you process that like i mean it is kind of crazy that like you drive them nuts yeah it was it was pretty striking um have you got phishing emails maybe

Speaker 3 yeah you always have to be on guard with with those phishing emails you know one thing I think most folks have

Speaker 2 heard about is that you know there was a liquidation in the civil service. I think something that's useful to like talk about is like

Speaker 2 having a robust civil service is how planes don't crash into each other and like we don't get screws in our cans of tuna, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, I guess, like, what changes were made at your shop after you left, and like, what have they chosen to pursue since you've been gone, the new commissioner?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I think a lot of people have left, especially in the consumer protection part of the work.

Speaker 2 The butt Xerox guys are back?

Speaker 3 I think they're, you know, know, they apparently are now trying to hire. Maybe they let too many people go, but

Speaker 3 there's been a real backsliding. I mean, you know, we were firing on all cylinders and taking on all sorts of, you know, big companies that were breaking the law.

Speaker 3 And there's definitely been a slowdown in activity there. They've also kind of shifted gears.
So,

Speaker 3 you know, we allowed this big merger to go through between these two

Speaker 3 ad agencies and one of the conditions of that was basically that they had to buy ads from Elon Musk more or less on his platforms.

Speaker 3 Yeah, under the purview that they couldn't kind of discriminate on political grounds. So it does seem like they're more eager to use the law to kind of advance their political grievances.

Speaker 2 And they pursue

Speaker 2 sex changes?

Speaker 3 Yeah, they're doing some workshops to see if they should go after doctors.

Speaker 2 Workshops? Yeah. Like you go for a weekend to a hotel.

Speaker 3 I think it's like a bunch of bureaucrats in like a conference room for half a day, but yeah.

Speaker 2 What was it like being 40 years younger than everyone else, actually?

Speaker 3 It was pretty strange at times. I mean, there were definitely people who'd been there since before I was born.

Speaker 2 Was it a bad hang?

Speaker 3 No, I mean, people, you know, I think it had been tough for some people because I had been known before I got to the FTC as a critic. of the FTC.

Speaker 3 And so I think some people interpreted that as kind of, you know, personal criticism.

Speaker 3 And I had been critiquing, you know, the political leadership and the way they've been doing this. Yeah, there was a sense that like, wait, why is the hater now our boss? You know?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 had to navigate some of that, but people really came around. And I think people were proud to work at an agency that was on the front lines of protecting people from corporate abuse.
And so.

Speaker 2 Is it supposed to be an independent agency? Like, ostensibly the Justice Department is supposed to be, but we're seeing it's not at all right now. But like,

Speaker 2 did you is it like the president can't really mess with it, or is that like...

Speaker 3 Yeah, the president's not supposed to direct us. You know,

Speaker 2 they can issue. I'm giving them their space right now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting dynamic because previously there used to be a lot of speculation about kind of who's heading what agency.

Speaker 3 But now it doesn't really matter as much because it's all being run out of the White House. So a lot of those decisions just...
you know, it just doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 And what cases have they carried on from your tenure?

Speaker 3 So they're still continuing the case against Amazon, against Facebook. There are a bunch of cases against like Ag Monopolies, against John Deere.

Speaker 3 It was making it really hard for farmers to fix their stuff.

Speaker 3 They're continuing some cases against, we have one against Adobe that was making it really hard to cancel subscriptions.

Speaker 2 For PDFs, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Acrobat.
Yeah. So the vast majority they've actually continued.
Oh, really? The cases. But the place they pulled back are the rules.

Speaker 3 So we issued a rule that would ban non-compete clauses for Americans. These are those like contractual provisions.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they were like doing it to people at McDonald's. Yeah.
You can't work at Wendy's after you leave.

Speaker 3 That's right. Fast food, security guards, janitors, healthcare workers.

Speaker 2 Why the fuck are they... What's the point of it?

Speaker 3 I mean, they would say it's because they're trading in workers and they don't want to lose their investment, but to a lot of people, it seems like it's just to get greater control and power over the workers.

Speaker 2 I took introduction to micro and macroeconomics.

Speaker 2 So I'm kind of, I think I'm qualified. I don't want to speak from a position of authority unless I'm qualified, but I think I'm qualified here.

Speaker 2 But what, like, my understanding is the argument for consolidation is they say that it'll create more efficiencies that could be passed on in savings to the consumer.

Speaker 2 Is that kind of what you've been pushed back on?

Speaker 3 That's often the argument, yeah.

Speaker 2 But it's stupid, no? Because it's like if there's one company that could charge a zillion dollars in silk and make it for cheaper,

Speaker 2 and you say that to the judge,

Speaker 3 I could be a lawyer. I think so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Do you ever give a closing argument?

Speaker 3 No, we had very talented litigators that were in the courtroom. I was not personally making those arguments.

Speaker 2 So, you do the boring parts of a lawyer?

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 You don't do the razzle-dazzle parts?

Speaker 3 No, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 Lena, how are you doing the homework parts?

Speaker 2 You do the worksheets parts?

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Oh, you love homework. Why don't you do the, like, give a speech?

Speaker 3 You know, we had very talented people who were

Speaker 3 experienced at litigating and did that very well.

Speaker 2 You can't handle the truth. You never want to do that.
I want the truth.

Speaker 2 You would be so good at that.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Let me

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Speaker 2 Who's your favorite

Speaker 2 Supreme Court justice?

Speaker 3 I mean, Brandeis was pretty great.

Speaker 2 Nice. Jewish.

Speaker 2 Okay. What is number two?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I mean, third grade Marshall is pretty great.
Sick.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Pretty cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's go down the list.

Speaker 3 I don't know if I have them ranked beyond that, but.

Speaker 2 What did you do at law school? You didn't play with top five? We did. Top five MCs of law school school.

Speaker 3 No, but we really missed out on that.

Speaker 3 I mean, on the jury trial thing, it's interesting because, you know, we did, there was an effort to kind of bring some of these cases before juries, and the companies were really terrified of it.

Speaker 3 So the Justice Department brought one of their Google cases before a jury. They wanted to have a jury trial.

Speaker 3 And Google basically just gave a bag of money to the Justice Department so that they could avoid the jury trial.

Speaker 2 It was in a bag?

Speaker 3 More or less. I think they sent them a check, or maybe it was in a bag.

Speaker 2 It would have been cool. It would have been a trash bag.
yeah yeah

Speaker 3 and and you know there was a recent survey there was law firms are advising their clients you know to avoid jury trials because they're realizing that people's sentiments towards corporate America have turned negative people hate companies I think so I think that's good though right

Speaker 3 you're gonna follow the rules and not say that's good I mean I think it's good I think people are realizing that A lot of the thing that's bad in their lives is sometimes being driven by corporations that are breaking the law.

Speaker 2 And have bought influence, perhaps, in our politics? Perhaps. Perhaps, you could say.
Yes. Allegedly.
Allegedly.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 Counselor. Counselor.

Speaker 2 Aston answered.

Speaker 2 Hearsay. Have you ever fallen asleep in court and then objected when you wake up?

Speaker 3 I haven't had that experience.

Speaker 2 That's from a movie, right? If you ever fall asleep in court, you have to object when you wake up. Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 I think the

Speaker 2 John Grisham?

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 When you enforce a policy when you were a commissioner,

Speaker 2 you oftentimes would file a lawsuit.

Speaker 2 A lot of discussion has been made about how the judiciary is kind of

Speaker 2 it's a kind of

Speaker 2 it's is there ever a fear that something could potentially go to the Supreme Court, which is kind of

Speaker 2 It's understood to be quite partisan at this point and 6-3

Speaker 2 to the other side. Is there a fear that you could actually fuck those initial regulations that you're trying to enforce?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of strategizing that has to go into, like, does it make sense to appeal this case? Is there a risk of making things worse? Yeah.

Speaker 3 So we definitely have to think that through.

Speaker 2 But if you win and they appeal, they're like, we're going to ride this to the top and then they're going to let us make one company for the whole world.

Speaker 2 So what is the current state of the judiciary, like, in your estimation?

Speaker 3 Like, you know, I'd say a few things. Like, there are a lot of

Speaker 3 district court judges, appellate court judges that are just trying to do their jobs and be faithful to the law.

Speaker 3 I think there has been a general drift coinciding with more Republican appointees on the bench of just more hostility and skepticism of federal agencies when they're trying to use,

Speaker 3 you know, trying to make things better in the economy, more or less.

Speaker 3 So that's been a challenge. I mean, during the Biden administration, you know, there were dozens of rules that were basically blocked, sometimes by by just a single judge in Texas.

Speaker 3 Even rules that were trying to, you know, limit overdraft fees or say that airlines can't lie about the price of a ticket, the FTC non-compete rule.

Speaker 3 You know, we even passed a rule that said companies have to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up.

Speaker 3 And a lot of those rules ended up being blocked. So there's just greater skepticism of agency power.
I think this is going to be a revealing moment as to whether that's selective skepticism.

Speaker 3 Like, are you only skeptical when it's Democrats in those agencies, or is it actually a bit more consistent and principled?

Speaker 2 That's very fair and noble to say, honestly. I mean, that, I mean, seriously.
I mean, the court shouldn't be partisan, right? They should be enforcing the law.

Speaker 2 Yeah, interpreting the law.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 What is, if you had to look at the American economy, like, what industry do you think just fucks like my audience or

Speaker 2 the people the most?

Speaker 3 Like, I I mean healthcare probably. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They have the most blood on their hands. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 When we were talking about the orange book, that was me, something I heard five minutes ago and I said to impress you.

Speaker 2 But like one of the ways that they raised the price of inhalers to $500 was that they would file a patent on like a strap. That's right.

Speaker 3 On like just pieces of plastic that have nothing to do with like the actual drugs.

Speaker 3 But there are all sorts of tricks. I mean, you know, there are people who have died because they can't afford their medicines in this country.

Speaker 3 And when we were at the FTC, we would kind of do these regular open meetings where anybody could sign up and come talk to us.

Speaker 3 And we would hear from people who would say, I have a family member who's having to literally ration their insulin or their life-saving medicine because it's too expensive.

Speaker 3 And some of that was done through illegal tactics by the drug manufacturers, by these pharmacy benefit managers.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, let alone the fraud that we see in all sorts of parts of the healthcare system where they're literally defrauding the government and just like bilking money.

Speaker 2 Is it like as a member of the civil service, right? How much do the politicians fuck up? Are they the biggest obstacle to like you guys like doing your jobs?

Speaker 3 You mean like

Speaker 2 politicians?

Speaker 3 Like members of Congress? Members of Congress, yeah.

Speaker 2 Or even the president at this point.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean it very, it's hard to paint in a you know broad brush.

Speaker 3 There are a lot of members of Congress that were very supportive of the FTC's work in both parties, even on the Democratic side, kind of a broad, you know, a big tent.

Speaker 3 And there were big efforts to make sure that these agencies were actually funded and had the resources they needed.

Speaker 3 But I would say that, like, there have been trends that have just

Speaker 3 made it so expensive to bring these cases. Like a single antitrust case, if you're trying to block a merger, you can have to pay an outside economist anywhere from $1 to $5 million.

Speaker 3 If you're trying to bring a case against a monopoly, you can have to pay an outside expert anywhere from $20 to $30 million just for a single case.

Speaker 3 And, you know, the budgets of these agencies is less than half a billion dollars.

Speaker 3 And so it's just become this, it's actually become somewhat of a grift where it's like these outside experts that are just like raking in this money as all of this litigation has become so expensive.

Speaker 2 So if you need money for a lawsuit so that people don't die from a company, you have to go to Congress and be like, please,

Speaker 2 I'm a lawyer.

Speaker 2 You have to ask them and then they're like, they're like, they think they're better than you.

Speaker 3 Well, you have to, you know, as chair of the SEC, I would have to go into Congress every year and testify before the House Appropriations Committee, and they're the ones that decide how much money we get.

Speaker 2 Who was on that when you were there?

Speaker 3 There were a bunch of people.

Speaker 2 Freak show. House is freak show.

Speaker 3 It's different.

Speaker 2 I thought the house was the government.

Speaker 2 When I met Chris Murphy, he was like, yeah, it's the house.

Speaker 3 It's not a big deal. I mean, the house is the most democratic branch of government, you know.

Speaker 2 Do you think that they should start wearing nicer clothes again?

Speaker 3 I honestly don't have a very strong view on that.

Speaker 2 You're so nice.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess so the healthcare industry, and then who would you put second? I guess,

Speaker 2 who are the top five most

Speaker 2 evil you're not going to answer, but I'm going to say

Speaker 2 industries that have the most adverse effect on Americans' lives?

Speaker 3 I mean, within healthcare, there there are a lot of different actors. There are the pharmaceutical companies, you know, health insurers, after healthcare.

Speaker 3 I would say in food and agriculture, too, like the agriculture industry in this country is so consolidated.

Speaker 2 That was one of your first things, right? The chicken. That's right.

Speaker 2 The chickens. You want to tell them about the chickens?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. I mean, so when I was doing some of this, you know, market research, one of the industries I had to study very closely was chicken farming.

Speaker 3 And that's an industry that is consolidated a lot. And so you have, you know, millions of consumers, thousands of farmers, but they're just connected by basically four chicken processors.

Speaker 3 And so if you're a farmer, sometimes your entire livelihood depends on doing business with just one company.

Speaker 3 And that company has a ton of power over you, over your livelihood, and all sorts of abuses.

Speaker 2 All farmers sell their chickens to a big factory guy?

Speaker 3 To a chicken processor, yeah, like Tyson, you know, Tyson Chickens Purdue.

Speaker 3 And it led to all sorts of abusive tactics. There's also been a phenomena where...

Speaker 2 Quotas? Is that like they say you have to make your, like, and they raise the quotas each year?

Speaker 3 Yeah, they can raise the quotas. They also

Speaker 3 can basically like penalize farmers by giving them bad chickens.

Speaker 3 People have made that analogy before.

Speaker 2 It sounds like 1880 or something.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 it's really horrific. And

Speaker 3 people are actually paying, have been paying more. for meat and chicken, even as the farmers are making less.
And it's basically just the middleman taking a bigger and bigger chicken.

Speaker 2 Mr. Tyson goes, Good.

Speaker 3 That's good. Well, Mr.
Tyson is the one taking more and more of it.

Speaker 2 Of course. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Does it make you cynical? Did it make you cynical? Like as someone that was trying to enforce something that's like obviously just being nice, like to a guy that has a chicken farm? That Mr.

Speaker 2 Tyson's like, I need more chickens from you. Otherwise, I'm going to.
What are they, serfs? Are they

Speaker 2 Mr. Tyson is a feudal lord?

Speaker 3 There are certain parallels.

Speaker 2 It's feudalism.

Speaker 3 It's really wild, yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know,

Speaker 3 I think the fact that more and more people are recognizing that it's really screwed up, that so many of the parts of the economy are like this and are kind of demanding that type of change, it's going to take a while, but I think it is a positive sign.

Speaker 2 But they have way more money.

Speaker 2 And they can just keep doing it because they have more money?

Speaker 3 That has been the story so far. but I think if we have you know political leadership that is able to stand up to money, then maybe it could change.

Speaker 2 What was your like most cynical moment as some of those try to just simply enforce the law?

Speaker 2 I mean you got to be bummed some days. You're like fuck this shit.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think I had a real sense of urgency because you never know how much time you're going to have and time in government goes really quickly.

Speaker 3 And these types of windows of opportunity to like really do serious pivots in how we've been doing stuff don't come around very often.

Speaker 3 So, I didn't feel like I had time to be cynical or bummed for too long.

Speaker 2 You just had too much work. Yeah, it's kind of chill.
It's nice to be busy, right? Yeah, yeah, you gotta invest your brain in drama, yeah.

Speaker 3 And, like, you know, I was like, well, I'll think about that on the other side whenever that is. What'd you get on the L side?

Speaker 2 Come on, stop lying.

Speaker 2 I read, you're just lying to my face.

Speaker 2 Lena Khan had been around when the typewriter was invented. Lena Khan gets punched back.
Lena Khan finished yet, question mark.

Speaker 2 An unfawn farewell to Lena Khan. When you see the press, what did you think? Were you laughing?

Speaker 3 Sometimes.

Speaker 2 Sometimes you're like, what, this guy's talking shit in the newspaper? Who was the most. It was Wall Street Journal primarily?

Speaker 3 Their editorial board, yes. Their early

Speaker 3 fixated.

Speaker 2 On you.

Speaker 2 Do you think they had a crush, maybe?

Speaker 3 It's a good question.

Speaker 2 Did you ever clap back

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 3 not directly I mean I think I did some event with them once maybe the Wall Street Journal

Speaker 3 yeah did you diss that you did a you had a burden I mean we kind of let our work speak for itself you're so much a lot of it was just like unobjectionable you know

Speaker 2 do you have political ambition

Speaker 2 like to run for like Congress or something be the president no I mean I wasn't born here so it makes it easy on that one you were born in England do you want to be maybe the queen then?

Speaker 3 Not especially.

Speaker 2 I can see you as queen. You'd be great.
You're little corgis.

Speaker 2 Shake hands in a line. Would you be a senator?

Speaker 2 Would you want to be on the Supreme Court?

Speaker 2 I guess just from what I'm seeing is like you seem very honest and altruistic. And

Speaker 2 what is

Speaker 2 your project?

Speaker 2 What message do you want to get across?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think the current economy is really screwed up. And I think we need an economy that's much more fair and where people can get a fair shot.

Speaker 3 And the current economy is not just like the product of some natural forces. It's like entirely rooted in laws and policies and political choices that we have made.

Speaker 3 And so I am, you know, my project is to make a case for changes in how we do law and policy so that we have a more fair economy.

Speaker 2 We had Chris Murphy on the show. And one thing I talked with him about is like, the remarkable thing that's going on right now is Trump is like, this is the law breaking right now.

Speaker 2 You know, like he's just saying it, and it's fascinating to watch because it's like, you're supposed to lie, right? And he's like, in this way,

Speaker 2 I'm doing some sort of fraud, right? It feels like the law at this point doesn't matter because it's so rampant. Do you think that the law,

Speaker 2 you want to make the law matter again? Do you think it can matter again? Do you think that there's a point where

Speaker 2 we can't go back?

Speaker 2 Can I have four more questions? No.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I think,

Speaker 3 you know, in some ways, what we are seeing now is just like a caricature of being able to violate the law with no consequences.

Speaker 2 It's like TV or something.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but I think for a lot of Americans, they feel like there's been a version of this that's been happening for a while, right?

Speaker 2 Where they think...

Speaker 3 It was maybe a little bit more subtle, but I do think that there was a sense that if you were an elite, you could get away with certain things that non-elites couldn't.

Speaker 3 And I think this is kind of going to bring to the surface a question about what do we want the rule of law to look like in the future?

Speaker 3 And are we going to be enforcing it equally in a way that even if you're fancy and rich or connected, you actually have to follow the same set of rules and are not able to, you know, engineer a massive financial crisis that is kicking millions of people out of their homes and still kind of, you know, not really face consequences for that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're saying that Trump is doing 12-dimensional chess. He's saying the crimes to make it finally illegal to break the law.
So you're saying he's kind of actually the hero Gotham needs.

Speaker 3 You know, I don't know how much foresight is going on there, but

Speaker 3 yeah, there is.

Speaker 2 He's doing a great job, I agree.

Speaker 3 There is an opportunity, I think, here for Democrats as they think about, you know, what the future looks like.

Speaker 2 But as I said before, like, if there were people that were kind of backing the Harris campaign that were kind of opposed to the work you were doing at the FTC,

Speaker 2 to what extent can the Democratic Party coalesce around that as a project?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's going to be a real choice, right?

Speaker 3 Because what some of those people were really saying was that we actually don't like it when the government enforces the law. against us.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 We liked it with Clinton and Obama when they were

Speaker 2 with the guys xeroxing the butts and so on.

Speaker 3 And honestly, I mean, that's not too different from what we're seeing with Trump, right? We don't want the law to be enforced selectively.

Speaker 3 And so when we were at the FTC, we would say, you know, is this corporation breaking the law? If so, let's do something about it.

Speaker 3 We weren't then thinking, oh, but are there executives big donors to the Democratic Party?

Speaker 3 And, you know, I'm personally pretty disturbed by people who think that we should instead have a system where Democrats do stand for that type of selective enforcement.

Speaker 3 So I think it's going to be a big choice for the party.

Speaker 2 You got 180, didn't you?

Speaker 2 Just look at it. You got 178 because you were humble.
You're like, I'm going to drop two points to be a good guy.

Speaker 2 Just tell me the number.

Speaker 2 We'll bleep it.

Speaker 3 We'll bleep it.

Speaker 3 I truly don't remember, but I'm happy with that.

Speaker 2 You're lying to my face right now. I thought you were a noble jurist.

Speaker 2 You're lying to me to be nice to me because I'm so because I'm a stupid guy. I'll tell you mine.

Speaker 2 No, you. Okay, will you tell me? Will you?

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm happy to guess, but I guess mine then.

Speaker 2 I don't know. One.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 No, you promised me that you were going to get more.

Speaker 2 You were going to tell me.

Speaker 3 If I had to guess, it would be something in the 170s, but I don't remember.

Speaker 2 Your expression is full of shit right now.

Speaker 2 Just tell me.

Speaker 2 179.

Speaker 2 You missed one, to be nice. Yeah, because I'm jealous of you, because

Speaker 2 you're the son that my parents wanted. No, I really appreciate your time.

Speaker 2 And I think, like,

Speaker 2 I think you contextualizing it as the fraud happening right now is kind of par for the course for what was happening previously is like an important point to make.

Speaker 2 Because it's like, I think a lot of the time,

Speaker 2 people view things as exceptional and like if we get rid of Trump then then everything will be fine again.

Speaker 2 But like if you know if there was a kind of pathway here, I think it's a better way of understanding it perhaps.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean look no doubt. What Trump and the Trump administration is doing is a level of corruption and griff that is pretty unprecedented.

Speaker 2 No, you said he was a good guy earlier.

Speaker 3 No, I mean look it's

Speaker 3 what we are seeing with this administration is like truly totally anathema to the rule of law and all the values of this country. And it's a level of corruption and griff that is unprecedented.

Speaker 3 I think for a lot of Americans, they've been feeling that the rules have been rigged for some time.

Speaker 3 And so it's a question about kind of where do we go from here.

Speaker 2 I feel like we've had periods of extreme corruption. Like the FTC was started because of the robber barons and stuff like that, right? But there was an effort every time to

Speaker 2 kind of make something that fixes it. And I feel like now it's just like, it's like

Speaker 2 we're just putting tape over a leak that's coming into the the ship. It feels a little bit that way to me, at least.

Speaker 3 I mean, I do think we need you know, like a New Deal-style

Speaker 3 level of ambition.

Speaker 2 Do you think I should run for president?

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 do I have to do the thing? We're gonna close on it

Speaker 2 the FTC thing.

Speaker 2 All right, because it's because this, I,

Speaker 2 so our audio is a comedy show, so

Speaker 2 I have to just, I'm sorry about this. Okay.

Speaker 2 I just wanted to do

Speaker 2 Should I do it or not?

Speaker 2 She's so nice.

Speaker 2 Okay. FTC, does that stand for fart tits cock?

Speaker 2 Does that stand for fuck this crap? I'm sorry. Shit.
Fat titty committee.

Speaker 2 Funny titty committee friend friends that crap

Speaker 2 fart TC

Speaker 2 we just need for the audience they're not

Speaker 2 they're gonna like I'm

Speaker 2 I just needed to put in something immature for them because I've been so mature in this interview totally no you got to play to your audience

Speaker 2 once every day

Speaker 2 I really appreciate your time yeah no it was good fun should I go to law school

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, it seems like you're really...

Speaker 2 Can you write me a letter?

Speaker 3 Happy to. Happy to.

Speaker 2 For an elder student?

Speaker 2 I would be in your class. I'd be older than you.

Speaker 3 I'd be 38.

Speaker 3 I guess by the time you're in the world.

Speaker 2 I'd be like, who the hell do you think you are talking to an elder like this? She's going to get me into law school, dude.

Speaker 2 My dad's going to finally tell me he's proud of me.

Speaker 2 No, he loves the show, actually. Very educational.
What? Today was very educational. Because of the stuff I said, mostly.
Yeah. We didn't climb everyone.

Speaker 2 Did you have fun?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You've never been around such an unserious person.

Speaker 3 It was a very different interview than of mine.

Speaker 2 What are you talking about? I'm the Charlie Rose of Middle Enials.

Speaker 2 I thought that was really fun. Lena hated it, but I thought it was fun.

Speaker 2 Lena Reed.

Speaker 2 Lena, you want to watch Arsenal this weekend?

Speaker 2 Are we rolling?

Speaker 2 Ladies and gentlemen, at 32 years old, she became head of the FTC under Joe Biden. Give it up for former FTC chair, Lena Kahn.

Speaker 2 Was it commissioner?

Speaker 2 Is it commissioner or chair?

Speaker 3 You can call me Lena.

Speaker 2 No, were you the commissioner? I was the chair. I was the chair.
The chair. Yes.

Speaker 2 Would you want to change the name at any point?

Speaker 2 You could have been Grand Pooh Bah.

Speaker 3 It's actually in the text of the law.

Speaker 2 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 I think.

Speaker 2 that's a good idea.

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