Factually! with Adam Conover - Lina Khan: How to Fight Corporate Power Under Trump

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Until recently, Lina Khan was the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Under her leadership, the FTC went after the anti-competitive tactics of tech giants, finalized rules to ban non-compete clauses, enforced the right to repair, and even took on ever-loathsome junk fees. Despite the limit resources of her department, Chair Khan made such undeniable strides in improving the lives of everyday Americans that even notable hardlined MAGA Republicans like Steve Bannon seemed to support her. Though Trump’s second term meant the end of her time with the FTC, it feels like what she accomplished is potentially the start of something bigger. This week, Adam is rejoined by Former FTC Chair Lina Khan to discuss the groundswell of support for anti-corporate legislation and what comes next for corporate power in America.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey there. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, out of all the things that the Biden administration fucked up and they did fuck up a lot of shit, one of their best decisions though

was to orient the federal government a bit more towards taking on corporate power for the first time in literal decades. And one of the main ways they did this was by appointing Lena Kahn, a 32 year old legal scholar with very little to no experience in government to be the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Now this was a sea change in the way

American government treated monopolies and corporate power because for the three years Lena Kahn was in charge of the FTC, she changed the agency's approach to antitrust enforcement and consumer protection. She actively pursued cases to combat monopolies and ensure fair competition, which was something that the government had stopped doing for dozens of years. Under her leadership, the FTC went after the anticompetitive tactics of tech giants like Amazon and Meta. She finalized rules to ban non-compete clauses in employment, which gave workers more freedom in the workplace.

She enforced the right to repair for electronics equipment like your iPhone, and she blocked the Kroger Albertsons grocery merger, which would have massively increased consolidation in the grocery store industry. Now look, the FTC is a small agency with limited resources, and by no means did they win every case that was brought during Jercon's term.

But the force of her leadership and the new ideas that she brought to the conversation have been so strong that even some on the right wing, like Steve Bannon, have seemed supportive of her. So it's time to start asking, have we started to see a real sea change in how this country overall views corporate power and the need to fight back against it?

Now, while Lena Kahn was in office, she actually appeared on this show. But now that she is a civilian again, because the Trump administration has taken over, I wanted to have her back on the show to ask what she learned from her time in government. Is this neo-Brandeisian antitrust movement a blip, or is it a real revolution that is picking up steam?

It's a really important question, and I could not be more excited to have her back on the show to discuss how the fight on corporate power has progressed and what we can expect in the future. If you wanna support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, I hope you'll do so. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week. I hope you'll do so. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. We also have a lot of other wonderful community features. I'd love to have you join patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And just to remind you, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy on the road, I just announced a whole bunch of new fall tour dates. I'm taking my brand new hour. Coming up soon to Indianapolis, Indiana, on August 14th to 15th, St. Louis, Missouri August 16th to 17th,

Oklahoma City and then Tulsa, Oklahoma from September 11th through 14th, Brea, California on September 21st, Tacoma, Washington on October 17th and 18th, Spokane, Washington on October 24th and 25th, Des Moines, Iowa November 5th, Atlanta, Georgia on November 6th, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 13th, Washington, D.C. on December 4th, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on December 5th and 6th. Head to adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I would love to come see you and give you a hug at the meet and greet after every single one of those shows.

And now, let's get to this week's interview with former FTC chair and personal friend of the show, Lena Kahn. Lena, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Great to be here. I'm really thrilled to have you back. I'd been wanting to do a postmortem with you because we had you while you were in office,

which is very fun to speak to a true government official, like making policy at a high level about an issue that I care about and we care about on this show, but now you are out of government and I thought we could have a different kind of conversation. Like maybe things'll, maybe your tongue will be a little looser or something. I don't know.

I guess I wanna ask first of all, how have the last couple months been for you transitioning into a civilian life? I mean, at a personal level, it's all been good and fine. I mean, I think pretty troubling to see what's happening in government across the administration and the dismantling of so much of the good work

that was done over the last few years. But at a personal level, things are okay. Do you feel that the work that you were personally responsible for was dismantled? Or do you mean more in general? More in general, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been basically shut down and that was the main government entity

making sure that people are not being scammed and defrauded in day-to-day finances, right? Yeah. So great day for payday lenders and all the predators that had been really forced to be accountable the last few years are just now able to be on the loose because they sent the cops home. Yeah, I mean, why do you think that the public

was so easily turned against an organization like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is like, it's so specifically set up to protect average Americans from things that hurt them every single day, payday lending, credit cards, you know, financial predation of all kinds are rife in the economy. People are constantly affected by it. They're getting the bills.

They're like, oh my God, this is horrible. Here we have this organization specifically designed to protect them. And the new administration comes in, basically guts it, and people cheer. What's missing? Yeah, I mean, maybe some people cheer. I do think there is like a broader, you know, effort to push back and say, you know, this is not what we voted for.

Even those of us who did vote for this administration. You know, there is a deeper question here, which is why was this administration able to come in and do this in a way that didn't face more public opposition? And I think it does speak to this issue of needing to figure out how do we make government even more effective? How do we make sure that there are fewer obstacles to government materially improving people's lives. And at the FTC, I saw some of those obstacles and had to kind of work to strip back the internal bureaucracy and the internal red tape that in many ways was a legacy of the Reagan administration.

And in many ways, it's actually the biggest corporations that don't want effective government that are most vigorously advocating for that internal red tape. And so I think there is a kind of broader conversation and a broader effort that we need to make sure that government is able to act effectively and efficiently and people have a clearer sense of all of the ways

the government is directly standing up for them. Yeah, it's this problem where there are bad actors or people who the government is meant to regulate who work to make the government less effective. And then they point and say, look at how ineffective the government is. That's right. Let's just shut it down entirely. Yeah.

And so it becomes this sort of vicious cycle. Well, let's talk about your time at the FTC. I mean, you came in as a very prominent advocate for a new way of thinking about, you know, monopoly power and antitrust enforcement. You wrote a famous paper that went viral. And then just a few years later, you found yourself running the department. You say that you came in and, you know, there are all these things set up in the Reagan years. What did you find when you when you got there? And what did you feel? Okay, here's what has to change. Yeah, I mean, the FTC is a pretty small agency,

at its height when I was there, it was like close to 1300 people and we have a huge job. And it has a lot of very public interest oriented career civil servants. I do think for several decades, the agency's ambition had been dimmed and the biggest problems that people were facing in their day-to-day lives were not necessarily ones that the FTC was laser focused on.

And I think that, again, was a legacy of the Reagan years and this view that the FTC has a much narrower, smaller job to do rather than figuring out, you know, why do we see so much corporate abuse and how do we make sure that we're using all of our tools to take it on even when it means standing up against some of the most powerful companies in our economy. And there had been this tendency sometimes to bring the full force of the law

when it came to scammers and fraudsters and bad actors, but relatively small ball players. But somehow when it came to, you know, the subprime lending crisis or for-profit schools or the opioid crisis, the government had been MIA. And so it was a moment to kind of come in and say this Reagan era legacy that has so clearly failed in countless ways to really help Americans and make sure people are able to live lives of dignity in our economy, how do we make sure we're fully using the tools that this agency created against the backdrop of the robber barons? Right? I mean, this is the agency that was created in 1914 after the industrial trust had come in

and kind of rolled up markets. And Congress created the FTC to stand up for people against that type of consolidated power. And so part of the effort was to make sure we were able to harken back to that traditional role that the FTC had. And it was a tremendous honor to get to be there. It was thrilling.

And we had a very, very active few years. How did the agency's mission get dimmed? How does that happen when the agency was, again, you say created, to be very muscular and to really protect people? How does that change occur? Yeah, I mean, there were so many different components of it. There was an ideological revolution

in the late 70s and early 80s where the Reagan administration came in and said, instead of aggressively policing monopolies, why don't we see if monopolies actually make things better for people and take a real hands-off approach? It's like the EPA going like, what if smog is good though?

Have we looked into it? And for things like consumer protection, there was a much, much narrower and thinner view of the FTC's authorities where basically the FTC said, our only real role is gonna be to make sure companies are not lying to you, but if they abuse you in other ways, you know, that's for the market to fix. And so they really slimmed down just what the role of the agency was, which when we saw, you know, the rise of big tech companies

that were now abusing people's data, that outdated approach meant that really all the agency was doing was policing whether companies were adequately disclosing all the ways that they were abusing your data, as opposed to saying maybe we should stop the data abuses. So, you know, that was the legacy and partly it was a creation of huge big business corporate pushback to the FTC in eras where it was assertive and was fully using all of its authorities. There was a period where there was an effort to actively defund the agency to strip back its authority. And so there had been this this kind of baggage of real fear that if we do too much or if we act aggressively or assertively or vigorously, you know, maybe that our powers will be taken away, maybe we'll be defunded.

And I think those are all, of course, concerns you have to keep in mind as you're thinking about, you know, the longevity of the institution. But I think you also need to weigh that against what happens when you're so focused on taking up as little space as possible that there's such a vacuum and people wonder, well, why do you exist in the first instance, right? And embedded in the agency's DNA, if the FTC is doing its job right,

it is gonna be forced to go up against some of the most powerful dominant firms in our economy, and those companies are going to have the resources to fight back. And so the agency has to make sure that it is creating countervailing power to that, right? The kind of mobilizing the public that it is standing up for. And so we basically had a kind of different game plan for how we were gonna do things. And I think it really changed people's understanding

about what the FTC is. I mean, there was this interesting natural experiment of sorts where, you know, a little after I got to the FTC, there was actually a question on Jeopardy about the FTC and nobody got it. It was a triple stumper. And fast forward a few years, and I think all three contestants buzzed.

And so just- There was another question a couple years later, and they got it right. And they got it right. Wow. And you know, it's just a tiny data point, but it's like, I think in the public consciousness, awareness of the fact

that the Federal Trade Commission exists, its job is to stand up against corporate abuse and defend Americans against all of this corporate law breaking. I think that really changed and that matters, right? That matters in terms of making sure that when there are efforts to strip away the agency's power, strip away its funding,

because big businesses are so upset that there actually is a reservoir of public support to defend the agency. Yeah, because you are taking the difficult stances and people say, oh, this is a brave agency, or I've seen it do these things in the past. And you can sort of tell as certain agencies come under attack by the Trump administration,

sometimes you can tell which ones are popular, right? People love NASA, people do love PBS, it's not an agency, but it's connected to the government in smaller ways. Like building that public support's really important. How did you, I found your initial appointment really striking because it was such a sea change, right? It was like, looking at when the Biden administration

came in, it was one of the areas where it was like, oh, they are looking to make a change here. I'm curious, like how did those initial conversations happen, you know? Like, were you coming in and saying, hey, here's what I would like to do. This is what I think the FTC should, the way in which the agency should change,

or was it led by the administration, or, you know, how do you make sure you have support for making those changes? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I give the administration a ton of credit in several areas of economic policy making in particular. They had the courage to break from decades of failed orthodoxy

that was on antitrust and anti-monopoly. It was on areas like industrial policy, where there was a recognition that this trickle-down approach, this assumptions that markets were more or less fixed themselves and the best thing for the government to do is just take a very hands-off posture. There was a recognition that that had

catastrophically failed. And I think many of the lessons of the financial crisis and the aftermath of the financial crisis and the aftermath of the financial crisis were really taken into account in how the administration responded to the pandemic and how the administration announced that they were gonna break from Robert Bork. I mean, the president signed an executive order

where he said, 40 years of Robert Bork have delivered higher prices, lower wages. You know- Robert Bork is delivered higher prices, lower wages. You know. Robert Bork is for those who don't know. He was a, you know, famous antitrust scholar and then a judge, and he was kind of the godfather

of doing this radical pivot away from vigorous enforcement of our anti-monopoly laws in favor of a very hands-off approach that basically gave free reign to monopolies in all but a handful of circumstances. That maybe monopolies are a good school of thought. He's sort of the king of that. Yes, the more pro-monopoly school of thought. Yeah. So, I was appointed, there were several other key leaders

across the administration, including Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and folks in the White House that were really focused on how do we make sure that we are enforcing the law in a way that's actually responding to the day-to-day realities that people are facing rather than these outdated assumptions and models and theories about how markets work. And so that was a game changer. And it is an area where I think we are seeing

more durability, right? I mean, I think there was an open question for me personally about A, how much time are we gonna have? Because that Reagan administration see change, they had eight years of Reagan plus four years of Bush. And so they had 12 years to radically reorient what they were looking to do

and really instill it in the scaffolding of the building. So that once they left 12 years later, the new default way of doing things was what they wanted. Clinton wasn't coming in and saying, oh, we're gonna go back to the old way, probably. I assume that the Clinton administration was sort of like playing along with that new regime. Yeah, it was the new common wisdom of how to do things.

And votes at the FTC that were initially three two votes, like very partisan votes in 1981, were now five oh votes by 1991. So it just showed how there was a total state change in what people thought the right way to do things was. It's really a really clear example of how, like, an intellectual movement can have real-world consequences. That, like, you know, Robert Bork and people like him advance this new theory of how we should enforce antitrust and this new economic theory of how to analyze monopolies.

And then it takes over to such an extent that three, two votes are changed into five, oh votes and then decades of American policy changes. I mean, it's real, not that often that you can see that concrete of a connection between an intellectual movement and public policy. It was remarkably successful. And I give them a ton of credit for that in terms of-

Good job guys. Yeah, really. You guys did what you set out to do. And guess what? It lasted for decades. Yeah. That said, the last few years have seen that old consensus crumble.

And we did see really a new paradigm for how to do this. And for me, one question was, okay, if we only have four years or three and a half years, how much of this can stick? Yeah. And it has been interesting to see much more institutional durability than I think many people expected.

Obviously we have seen pretty troubling backsliding in a whole set of areas, but it hasn't been the kind of wholesale reversion to the pro-monopoly school of thought. And so it really shows that there is durability here. Folks, you know, as summer heats up, I'm always trying to cool down my spending so I can spend more money on, you know,

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And, you know, you're leading people who have been doing it the old way for a long time and that can lead to conflict. I think a lot about, for instance, you know, departments in city prosecutor's offices where the progressive prosecutor comes in and now they're leading, you know, all of these prosecutors under them who have been locking people up, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, people like that. And there's always a lot of internal strife, right, to try to turn the ship.

And so I'm curious, how did you approach that as the new leader trying to change how the agency works from the top down? It can be difficult. Yeah, it certainly has its challenges. And I think the first thing to remember is that these are career civil servants. They were not calling the shots in terms of big picture,

what was the agency going to do. That was really the role of past FTC chairs and past political leaders. And so I think it was, first of all, really important to be able to show that there was a difference there, that you're not coming in and saying, the way you've been doing things for the last 30 years

was a total disaster. And explain why it is that you're looking to do things differently and practically what that means. And a lot of that comes down to communicating, what are the priorities, what are the priorities, what are the goals, why do you want to do it differently? And so it does, you know, the institutional change management is a set of skills. And I was really fortunate to have, as part of my senior team, just people who are really skilled at that. And, you know,

some people are not going to want to do it the new way. And that's okay. And, you know, some of them ended up departing. But I think a lot of people did end up recognizing. And especially once we started racking up significant court victories, even after doing things slightly differently, it really helped create this positive feedback loop, where people recognize that, yes, we were taking some risks because we were going

to make arguments that were a little different than how they'd been made previously. We were taking on kind of formidable companies that had just millions of dollars to sink in in opposition. But we won time and time again. And that was really thrilling. I also just wanna ask personally, like you're very young to be appointed to the position.

I remember looking and going, oh, you're younger than I am, which is like partially me getting older. You know what I mean? Like you have that feeling where now when I watch like a baseball team, I'm like older than all the players and that wasn't the case five years ago. So it's partially that, right?

But also I remember I was familiar with your work and I'd seen interviews and I saw that you were appointed and I was like, I mean, I would be, I would feel so out of my depth, right? To be leading an agency like that at the age that I am, I would feel like I should be, you know, a more eminent person. And so I'm just curious, like on a personal level,

did you ever have like any vertigo about it or was there an adjustment? Or how do you carry yourself? Yeah, I know it was humbling. And I remember, you know, we would sometimes, we would be doing these meet and greets with staff at the agency and people would share how long they'd been there.

And there were people who had been there since before I was born. And that was humbling. And, you know, I think things happen so quickly and we had such an important mandate and realized we might not have a lot of time that there wasn't, you know, too much time to think about some of those issues.

It was just like, really try to hit the ground running. And again, I think this is where, how you build your team really matters in terms of any particular leader has their set of strengths and their skills, but they're gonna have blind spots. And so filling out your team so that other people can mitigate for whatever blind spots

or lack of certain strengths you may have really matters. Yeah. When you were writing that paper, the Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, or just at that period of your career, was taking power, taking the reins in government like an aspiration of yours, or was that something that you sort of were sucked into?

I mean, I loosely thought, oh, maybe it would be need to work in government at some point, but I did not write that paper to become chair of the FTC. And if anything, writing that paper at that point probably would have hurt my chances. I mean, I'm not sure that it did, but I'm always just interested in how that moment

where you realize you're becoming maybe a different sort of person than you expect. I remember the moment when I sort of had to inhabit, I'm just interested in how that moment where you realize you're becoming maybe a different sort of person than you expect. I remember the moment when I sort of had to inhabit, oh wait, I'm gonna be a television host, so I'm gonna run a television show. And I previously, I thought of myself as a comedy writer. And it was like this internal reorientation.

And so I guess I'm curious if you just ever had a moment like that where you're like, oh wait, this is what I'm doing. Oh fuck. Right, right. I mean, I think just the speed of all of it meant that I had to suspend processing it to a certain degree because there was just like

too much to do. So, but I mean, it's just thrilling to see how much we were able to get done even in a relatively small number of years. Well, yeah, so let's talk about what you were actually able to get done. I mean, you took on a lot of big fights during the, while you were there, there was a fair amount of press

saying, oh, they're not winning that many, and yet you kept taking on more, right? So yeah, like, just tell me about, how did you wade into those, and which were some of the biggest that you took on? Yeah, I mean, we were really active in figuring out what are the biggest pain points in people's day-to-day lives.

And I think, you know, in the past, the agency had been criticized for kind of becoming focused on kind of more small ball areas and ignoring kind of the bigger areas. So we were extremely focused on digital markets just because so much of people's day-to-day lives is now being mediated by these tech giants. We were very focused on healthcare markets.

People are so dependent on healthcare and the fact that it is too often totally unaffordable. We're seeing declining access in swaths of the country. We're seeing the rise of private equity in healthcare. These were all problems that we focused on and took on. Just very concretely, you know, people have been paying hundreds of dollars

for asthma inhalers in the United States, even though people in other countries pay as little as $7 and inhalers have been around for decades. And so we decided to figure out why is this? And we found that some of the big pharma companies were listing patents for pieces of plastic on the inhaler. Like the inhaler cap. Which has nothing to do with the actual drug ingredients and the like medical components of the inhaler.

And we challenged that. And within a few months, three of the four big manufacturers announced that they were gonna drop how much people pay out of pocket down from hundreds of dollars to just $35. Wow. And I've had people come up to me and say, you know, I'm a lifelong asthma inhaler user

and I've seen my costs go down. And that was because of the FTC. And it was just because you started to enforce it? Like they just announced after you started pushing at them, they were like, nevermind, we'll just drop it. Yeah, I mean, we made clear that we thought we had the law on our side, and if necessary, we would initiate lawsuits.

But yeah, it ended up just resulting in much quicker action and quicker results. So the threat of enforcement, like they just buckled as soon as you, you began to pursue it. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty egregious and, you know, I was really thrilled we were able to do it, but also pretty struck by how many years people have been overpaying for this device that helps them breathe.

Yeah. And just how many billions of dollars could have been saved for people. Yeah. And so, you know, I of dollars could have been saved for people. And so, I wish we could have had more time to keep doing more of that. But that was a big area of focus. We were very focused on these non-compete clauses, these contractual provisions that lock workers into place.

So these started off in the boardroom, but they basically proliferated so that you have janitors and security guards and fast food workers and nurses and health care workers across the board that basically have a provision in their employment contract that says, once you leave this job, you cannot go work for a competitor or go start your own competing business for x number of years

within x hundred of miles. And practically that has meant for people that they are deprived from taking on better job options. So just to give a concrete example, we brought a case against a company that was including non-competes in contracts with security guards. These are people making minimum wage,

close to minimum wage. We had stories like there was a security guard that needed to basically take on a different schedule so he could take care of his kids. He found another job that would let him do that and pay him more within his town. But the company said, no, he couldn't because of this non-compete.

Why would the company, I mean, normally a non-compete is, hey, we don't want you taking our secrets. Apple doesn't want you to take their secrets to Microsoft or whatever the hell. What possible interest would this company have in not letting a security guard leave and go be a security guard somewhere else? Yeah, I mean, companies make all sorts of arguments.

They say, well, there are certain trade secrets or proprietary information, we invested in training the security guards. So we should be able to have them keep working here for a certain number of years or not have other companies get to free ride off of our investment. Those are some of the arguments that get made. But what's been interesting is that different states over the last decade have been introducing more limits on non-competes.

California was the pioneer here. They've prohibited non-competes from being enforced for over a century. And that effort has meant that economists can now study and isolate what are the effects of non-competes. And they found that they reduce wages, they reduce people's economic mobility, and they're bad for workers, but they're also bad for competition and for our economy as a whole. Because startups and new businesses, for example, sometimes are not able to hire the workers that are the best fit because they're stuck with a non-compete.

And we would hear stories even from scientists who say, I was not able to hire the best scientists that could have jumped in and led this potentially world-changing research because the scientists were stuck with a non-compete, even though they wanted to come. We heard from businesses that were basically hit a ceiling in their ability to scale because of these non-competes.

And so there are very real economic outcomes. There are very real innovation outcomes. And so we felt very confident in both enforcing the law against existing non-competes. We also passed a rule that would ban the vast majority of non-competes. That rule is currently tied up in litigation. Big business groups do not like that rule.

So we'll see what ultimately happens there, but we've continued to see more momentum at the state level. Minnesota a couple of years ago passed a pretty sweeping ban on non-competes. New York has been considering it. So I'm hoping that the momentum will continue. So that's just a small snapshot of what we did. We also passed-

I just wanna say, in addition to the economic effects, it's also just a really clear example of corporations having too much power over individual people's lives. When you're talking about corporate power generally, the idea that I can be told by an employer that I cannot leave their employment or I cannot go work for someone else

is like, it really is just an abridgment of like your economic freedom in a really clear way. Absolutely, I mean, this goes to the heart of the question of, you know, do people really enjoy meaningful economic liberty in this country? I mean, we got, we heard just some, we got 26,000 comments from people all across the country

and, you know, I read a lot of them, just some atrocious stories. I mean, we heard from a bartender in Florida who was being harassed at her job. So she found another job at a different restaurant and then got hit with a lawsuit for tens of thousands of dollars. Wow.

And so she said, she had to choose, do I continue to subject myself to harassment at my job or risk a lawsuit? Yeah. And there was a real sense of fear. at my job or risk a lawsuit. Yeah. And there was a real sense of fear. They're being imprisoned in a way. Yeah. And just, there was a kind of just,

it allowed employers to abuse their power and to do it with impunity because they knew that workers were trapped or that they would really fear for the financial ramifications if they left. And so these non-competes do really contribute to an environment of fear. They allow employers to get away with abusing their power. And it really shifts the framework, right? I mean, employers in a healthy competitive

economy should have to compete for workers by seeing who can offer better wages, who can offer better benefits, who can offer better benefits, who can offer a kind of a better workplace. And these non-competes basically allow firms to get away with not having to compete on any of those dimensions. And so it really does go to the heart of economic freedom. We saw actually some bipartisan agreement on this issue. I mean, we got some comments even from people who said,

you know, I didn't want to take the COVID vaccine because of, you know, my religion and I believe in religious freedom, but this non-compete meant that I couldn't follow what my religion said. And so no matter what your political persuasion, I think there was a sense that these non-competes really impede people's own sense of autonomy and

freedom. Yeah. I'm always struck by how much freedom is such an important word in American culture, especially when it comes to economic issues. And yet, our government and our culture seems to overlook so often when corporations are the ones that are like ab bridging that freedom, right? Like you would think that the, you know, the, the most, you know, libertarian free market right wing person would be very in favor of anything that increases competition, right? Anything that increases the ability to move from one place to another or to start new

businesses, et cetera. But you know, the, the system that people like Reagan ended up giving us is one that allows these large corporations to abridge our freedom in these fundamental ways, right? To end competition, to have these non-compete clauses, in all these different parts of the economy. That this strange contradiction at the heart of capitalism ideologically,

where it's like the results don't match what, even the people who designed the system say that they want in this fundamental way. What do you make of that? I mean, a key question is freedom for whom, right? Is this freedom for corporations to get away with abusing their power, right? Is that the freedom we're gonna privilege?

You know, this also goes back to the kind of roots of the anti-monopoly framework, where there was a recognition that real freedom requires certain checks and balances in our economic sphere. And in the same way that we have the Constitution, we have checks and balances that curb outsized power in our government sphere, that alone is not going to be enough to secure real freedom for people. Because if you have, sure, freedom politically, but in your

economic life, your boss can get away with abusing you with impunity, with when your trading partner, the company you depend on to sell products to, they can cut your contract on a whim because you said something they didn't like. There are all these ways that we can see coercion in our economic sphere and in the commercial sphere that we also need safeguards against. And anti-monopoly and anti-trust was viewed very much in that kind of semi-constitutional spirit.

Of this is fundamentally about people's freedom. And there was a recognition that, you know, America had just overthrown a monarch. We're really gonna then settle for being ruled by these autocrats of trade. That was the kind of language people were using. Yeah, and I remember learning about, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, the trust buster, right?

It's like a part of my school education of like, this is something that America used to go after very strongly that we, it seems like we forgot about. And it feels like you're picking up a sort of a long American tradition, and yet there was a huge amount of resistance to it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the resistance came from a relatively small number of very

powerful interests that have kind of outsized, you know, they get outsized airways in terms of how much they get heard and their views get weighed. But if you go out across the country and, you know, pull people on the actions that the FTC took, they are overwhelmingly popular. Yeah. And so I think the reservoir of kind of public political support that we had for our work, I think helps bring into contrast just how small,

relatively speaking, the opposition was. What else are you proud of from your time that you spent there? I mean, a lot of what we look to do on the consumer protection space was just take on just these day to day indignities that can pile up. Right. So we took on these junk fees, where if you're looking to make a, you know, buy something online, you'll see that say a concert ticket costs $55, but by the time you go to checkout, it's suddenly $105 and you're paying $50 in convenience fees and service fees.

You know, you book a hotel, there was one cost that was advertised, but then when you show up, you're suddenly on the hook for, you know, $50 in a resort fee and it's not even a resort. So these types of fees that I think really make people feel that businesses are able to get away with a bait and switch. We were able to take on those practices and then finalized a rule that said that in live event ticketing and short-term lodging, companies can't do this.

They have to be honest about what the price is. We brought actions taking on corporate landlords that were doing this advertising one rent and then people would sign the lease and realize they had to be on the hook for all of these additional fees. We also finalized a rule that requires companies to make it as easy to cancel a subscription

as it is to sign up for one. Because we've seen that as businesses have made a kind of pivot to more and more subscription-based lines of revenue, they can have an incentive to make it supremely easy to sign up. Look, I've tried to cancel an Amazon Prime membership before and it's like, you have to find the grayed out, yes, I want to cancel button like four or five times.

You're like hunting for the button that lets you cancel. It's like, they put you through a funnel and you can tell it has been tested to make this as difficult as possible. And sometimes I still think I have an Amazon Prime membership and I don't know it. You know, like I'm like hunting around on the site. Are they charging me and I don't even realize it?

Like I'm paranoid, cause I'm not even certain that it went through. Yeah, I mean, we actually sued Amazon precisely for making it difficult for people to exit prime subscriptions. Yes. And when we looked at their documents, we found that they had actually come up with a name

for the cancellation process, Project Iliad. Wait, that's so intense. Yes. Project Iliad. It was Project Iliad was the kind of name for- Like the Iliad, like the Greek epic poem. Yes, exactly. Okay, about like a war against, yeah,

like a war with the gods on your side. Yeah. So we sued Amazon for this. We sued Adobe that had also made it really difficult to cancel subscriptions. Right. People would call, you know, be put on hold, kind of enter this doom loop of being passed

from customer service rep to customer service rep. We would hear from so many people that sometimes their only recourse for canceling their subscription was to cancel their credit card. It was the only way to make it stop. So we took on that problem.

There was a rule that was supposed to go into effect in May that would have required companies to make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up. The new FTC, the three Republicans there, decided to just give companies more time to keep screwing consumers this way, and so it's now potentially going to come into effect in July. We also took on these practices by data brokers, these kind of shadowy entities that are collecting people's data and oftentimes making it very easy for others to access or buy it. This includes things like your personal health data, if you use kind of any health apps, your geolocation data, your browsing history. And in the past, the approach of the FTC and other enforcers had been

to basically say that as long as companies are disclosing to you what they're doing, as long as they have these reams of pages of terms of services that say, we can kind of do anything under the sun with your data. As long as you scroll by it on your login screen, they can do whatever they want.

Yeah, and that basically we had this disclosure regime. We decided that that wasn't sufficient to really protect people, and so we actually created some bright lines to say, for certain categories of sensitive data, like health, like browsing, like geolocation, the default rule is that companies cannot just share that or make that accessible to third parties.

And unless people are affirmatively giving permission for that, companies can't do that. So that was actually a pretty significant change that the advertising industry in particular took a lot of note of. So, we were very active on the consumer protection side. We took on some of the bait and switch tactics for when people are buying a car,

when people would, it's very stressful to buy a car. You know, you're making one of the biggest purchases of your life for many people. You have like all of this paperwork. And similarly there, you know, we heard so many complaints of how people would be shown one price. But then by the time they were checking out, they were suddenly being charged for nitrogen filled tires, which are basically just regular air. Or, you know, regular gas, oil changes

for an electric vehicle. Just all sorts of bogus charges that suddenly the onus was on people to have to kind of ferret out and police. And I think this gets to a deeper issue, which is that I think for a lot of people, it can feel like you're just trying to get people to have to kind of ferret out and police. And I think this gets to a deeper issue, which is that I think for a lot of people,

it can feel like you always have to be on guard in today's economy and always looking around the corner to say, am I about to get ripped off? Am I about to get scammed? Is this some type of fraudulent transaction? And for so long, the approach of the government had basically been to put that burden on the individual to have to kind of figure out

who are the predators out there, as opposed to just saying, no, predation is banned. And if you try to prey on people, we're gonna come after you and prevent that. Right, because if you require the individual, oh, you have to read the terms of service, you have to read the article in Consumer Reports about how to avoid the scam or whatever,

then all that does is means that all the people who don't have time or don't have the ability to read those terms of service, maybe English isn't their first language and that's what the terms of service are written in, all those people are gonna get preyed upon. There's always gonna be people who do not have the wherewithal to protect themselves, and in, all those people are gonna get preyed upon. There's always gonna be people who do not have the wherewithal to protect themselves,

and are you leaving those people defenseless, or are you protecting them? I mean, isn't that the job of government to defend the defenseless? Yes, I think so. Yeah. That rulemaking is so much of his positive. I wanna talk about some of the merger cases

that you brought, because you won some and you lost others. Some of the losses were quite public. The Microsoft Activision case was like really closely filed. I follow video games a lot. You know, all of games media was like focused on this. And there was of course a lot of discussion all the way from the sort of consumer press to financial press about like, you know, was this a good decision of a case to take on, you know, et cetera. How do you think about your record at the end of, you know, your time there in terms of how many cases

you won versus you didn't? And, you know, I assume you might feel that even the cases that you lost like helped move the ball forward. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, obviously we only brought cases where we thought, you know, there was something illegal happening and overall had a, I think around 95% win rate

in our merger cases. There was a very intense kind of propaganda campaign to suggest, oh, this FTC is always losing, but it was totally divorced from reality in terms of the numbers. You're right, we did lose the Microsoft Activision case and the Mea Within case. You know, Microsoft Activision was really about

trying to preserve a market that is open and competitive rather than this switch that the Microsoft Activision transaction marked to more of a wild garden approach, right? And we've seen time and time again that when you have competition and when you have platform agnostic producers of content, there are a very different set of dynamics in the market that lead to more options for people, that lead to more creativity, more channels to get to market.

Right? I mean, we've seen this in media entertainment. And once you allow the kind of vertically integrated walled garden, it can be bad both for the creators as well as ultimately the consumers. And so that's what that case was ultimately about. Obviously, we did not prevail, though on the appeal, we were able to kind of, you know, get some vindication about some of the arguments we had lost at the district level. So I wish we had won that. I think it's been interesting to see already a gap between some of the commitments that Microsoft had made and what's happening on the ground. There have been kind of a series of layoffs

after them loudly touting about how great this would be for the workers. And so, of course, I wish we had won that, but overall feel pretty great about our merger enforcement. Significantly, we sued and blocked the Kroger Albertson's deal, which would have been the largest grocery merger in US history, would have affected hundreds of communities

around the country, especially on the West Coast, the Southwest. And this deal came after decades of grocery mergers, including one over close to a decade ago between Safeway and Albertsons, where those companies, the FTC did allow to merge. They basically said, yeah, we realize that there are gonna be some reduction in competition,

but why don't you sell some stores to this other third party and that will hopefully fix the problem. What ended up happening is that third party went bankrupt. Wow. And Safeway Albertsons were actually able to buy back some of those stores at a discount. Wow.

And so it was a total failure. And I went and did listening sessions around the country about the Kroger Albertsons deal to figure out how to communities on the ground view this merger. And people still had scars from that experience. There were workers who had been laid off, who had lost their pensions. There were residents who said, there is still like a closed sign on the block in my main

street because of stores that were shut down and nobody ever took their place. And we actually saw some food deserts that emerged. So, you know, this, this, uh, mistake, I think, uh, of, you know, the government to allow this past merger to go through directly worsened people's lives, both in the form of higher grocery prices, fewer options, workers that were less left worse off. And so when looking at the Kroger-Albertsons merger, we wanted to make sure we were learning from those mistakes and really taking a very close look. We found that these companies were vigorously competing.

And for communities that had options for both Kroger and Albertsons, allowing these firms to merge would reduce that competition and mean that the company would be able to hire raised prices. We heard a lot from unionized grocery workers that shared that the ability to bargain with Kroger against the backdrop of also having a contract with Albertsons really gave them significant bargaining power and significant leverage. And if you allowed the firms to merge, the workers would be worse off. So we sued to block that deal,

along with a whole bunch of state attorneys general, got a really fantastic opinion from the judge. This was the first time the FTC had tried to block a deal, not just because it would be bad for consumers, but also because it would be bad for workers. And so really marked a step forward in that way. I remember that being a part of that because I think part of the Robert Bork school of thought

is like all that matters is consumer welfare. All that matters is prices going down and availability of different goods and et cetera. But that leaves out the fact that like all of us are consumers, we are also all workers. We all have an employer. That's like half of our, or a third of our lives, right, is spent at work.

And like that should factor into government decision making, right, about how to protect people, is making sure that as workers we are protected. Absolutely. And you know, it's totally part of the antitrust laws and the tradition is to make sure we are protecting competition, not just for people when they're buying things, but also in the workplace.

Yeah. All of the enforcement that you did, win and lose, you know, really, it sort of reshaped the market in corporate America, right, for companies buying each other. Like, did you see a response, you know, not just in terms of the companies buying each other. Like, did you see a response, you know, not just in terms of the companies that you're prosecuting, but, you know, in general,

did corporate behavior start to change? Absolutely. I mean, we would hear from senior executives, senior deal makers, senior lawyers, about how previously when they were, you know, thinking about engineering mergers, they would talk about antitrust, if at all, at the very, very end.

And there was an environment where companies would choose to roll the dice, even if they knew a deal was illegal, because they thought, man, maybe the government will let it through. And under the last administration, they recognized that we were going to take a much more assertive approach. We were not gonna accept these weak settlements that were likely to fail. And it really changed the incentives of these firms. We would hear them say that the potential

for antitrust risk is now as part of the conversation on day one. And so top of mind for us as we're thinking about deals is, is this legal or illegal? You would think that would always be the first thing that we would consider. You would hope, right? And so that was real positive in terms of trying to create deterrents in the marketplace and dissuading firms

from doing blatantly illegal mergers. And so that was a real positive. Obviously it came with some kind of hysteria and some emotions about, you know, why can't we just do whatever deal we want, even if it's illegal? But I think on that, it really helped the American public. Yeah.

Well, actually, let me ask this. In terms of them thinking what was legal or illegal, you were also changing what mergers were legal and illegal, right? Like, isn't that part of the sea change that you were trying to bring about, is like changing the person, because you're making the argument

that some of these mergers are illegal and you have to make it to a court sometimes and it's a matter of interpretation. So you're also trying to change their understanding of what behaviors are legal and illegal, right? I mean, the law that primarily polices mergers has been around since 1914. So the law wasn't changing,

but what we found was that in some instances, there was still case law that was on the book, judicial opinions that were still good law that were basically being ignored by the companies. And so we put them on alert that, you know, the Supreme Court president hasn't expired. It's still good law. We put out new merger guidelines

after talking extensively to market participants, including the Riders Guild. I remember we made statements in support of the new merger guidelines. They submitted a really, really fantastic submission about kind of explaining how vertical integration in media had really led to a lot of harm for creators and workers.

So we put out these new guidelines that basically try to provide a more updated framework for how enforcers should think about deals and whether they're illegal or illegal. So yeah, there was some evolution in how kind of companies were having to think about this. You're having to re-educate them and change not just the legal environment,

not just your enforcement, but sort of everyone's conception of how the market should work. One thing that, one story I wanted to share with you was last year I was at this conference that brought together a bunch of labor people, a bunch of people from the tech world, and some venture capitalists for some conversations. It was a very cool conference. Found myself at a table with a couple of people from the tech world and some venture capitalists for like some conversations. It's a very cool conference.

Found myself at a table with a couple of people who work in venture capital, very nice folks, but we started talking about what they do for a living, blah, blah, blah. And at one point they go, oh, uh, you know, oh yeah, we, we, you know, we like the Biden administration. Oh, except for Lena con. Oh, she has to be stopped because she's destroyed the M and a market. She's destroyed the, the merger market. And, oh, she has to be stopped because she's destroyed the M&A market, she's destroyed the merger market and now no one can exit their companies. These are people who work in startups

and I realized talking to them, their whole sort of business strategy, their entire lives are based on the idea that you build this company and then you sell it to someone else, right? You sell it to a larger, there's no thought that you're gonna run it independently for a while and make money off of it.

You're just gonna sell it to Microsoft or Google or whatever. And they were lamenting the fact that, you know, you're, the fact that you're enforcing, you know, antitrust at all was making that more difficult. It was like you were, you know, taking water from the well from them, you know? And I said to them, well, I mean, mergers have like destroyed my industry, you know?

Like the mentality that you're talking about has completely destroyed where I work and everyone's out of work. And they were kind of like, oh, yeah, that's true. You know, we just sort of, conversation kind of ended there, right? But it struck me how much you were going against like the fundamental logic that was underpinning

huge parts of the American economy, specifically the tech sphere, right? That's a really difficult thing to go up against, and it really caused a backlash, didn't it? I mean, the big tech companies were pretty upset. They would file all sorts of recusal petitions to try to get me kind of taken off of cases, because I had written a law review article.

So, you know, they really threw a lot at us in terms of trying to weaken the FTC, weaken our ability to do our jobs. They were not successful. And ultimately, you know, we did see deterrence where we had seen, I think it was over 800 acquisitions by the five big tech companies over a decade, not a single one of which was stopped,

that allowed them to become these massive gatekeepers and monopolize all sorts of markets. We've now had judges rule that Google is a monopolist in online search and in digital ad tech markets. The Facebook trial is ongoing. And so we needed to make sure that we were learning from that experience and not repeating the mistakes of just allowing these tech giants to go on a buying spree

even when that would eliminate competition in the market. So, you know, it was not celebrated by the tech giants themselves, but candidly, I would go to Silicon Valley periodically and meet with actual startups and actual founders. And yes, some of them, you know, some of them were dreaming of an exit by being bought out by some of these companies, but many of them wanted to see if they could be independent and actually said that the reason they had to think about

an exit sometimes was because it had become so impossible to compete independently and actually antitrust enforcement that allowed the market to be more open and competitive and didn't result in situations where you have, say, an Apple getting to be a gatekeeper for whether a founder's app is accessible or not. And that can overnight kind of flip the switch, and suddenly they're off the app store and are seeing kind of their business dry up. and suddenly they're off the app store and they're seeing kind of their business dry up, that that type of outsize power that these companies currently enjoy over consumers,

but also over swaths of founders and entrepreneurs that that was not healthy for the longterm. And actually having a more assertive FTC and DOJ they recognize could be a real positive. Yeah, and had I had a longer conversation with those VCs, as I was thinking about it later that night, oh, what I wish I would have said, they're imagining, well, the only way I

can get investment for the startup that I'm getting the money for is if I promise the investors I'm going to sell to Google. That's sort of the premise of their entire lives, is this idea. And what I wish I could have done was shake them by the shoulders and say, what if you could be Google? Or what if there could be thousands of Googles?

What if you didn't, that wasn't the only exit, would that be a better world? I don't know if they had ever considered that or not. But the practical reality is you were going up against a huge amount of money and power and there are folks who credit, you know, your enforcement with a huge amount of, you know, the tech world, the Mark Andreessen's of the world, right?

Tilting right and supporting Trump in the last election, specifically because they got radicalized by, you know, the Biden administration starts enforcing, you know, antitrust for the first time in generations. And suddenly the tech industry, which had been free to run rampant, right, is being regulated for the first time. And they're like, oh, we don't like that.

And we are now going to pick sides in a way where we never did before. That it was sort of like this large reaction. Did you have any fear that that was gonna happen? Or do you think that narrative is overblown? Well, look, I think there are a lot of narratives, you know. Yeah, I mean, look, I think a world in which

either political party decides that they're not going to enforce the law against donors to the party is really bad. I think it's pretty corrupt. I think it undermines belief in the rule of law. And I think Americans on the whole are already pretty disillusioned with the government. They all too often think the government works great

for the wealthy and the well connected and not very well for everybody else. And so I came into the job, you know, being very focused on enforcing the law without fear of favor and not thinking it was my job to go light on any individual or company because they had certain political connections. Good fucking answer.

Like honestly, to be like, your job is not to worry about those political consequences and to worry, oh, what's gonna happen when such and such a CEO gets mad and they're gonna change their donations or whatever. It's to like enforce the law and protect people and consequences be damned to a certain extent. Yeah, I mean, it's not like we're just on a whim going after companies, right?

These are law enforcement decisions based on years of investigation, based on years of analysis. And if we find that powerful actors are abusing their power in ways that hurts Americans, it's our job to do something about it. Yeah. And that's what we did. Yeah, well, despite the pushback,

I mean, you've said that a lot of the changes you made have been durable to like to maybe a larger extent than you anticipated, how so? You know, in ways big and small, I mean, they're continuing right now with some of the big cases, including the Facebook litigation, which, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was at the White House

trying to get that to settle. He was not successful. He really thought he was gonna get out of that by wearing a chain and working out and hanging out with Rogan and Barron and all that. He was like, if I just culturally bro out a little bit, I will, they'll drop the case. That seemed to be his approach.

Yeah, the rebrand was not successful in that sense. Um, so, you know, some of the big tech cases seem to be continuing though, you know, Yeah, the rebrand was not successful in that sense. So some of the big tech cases seem to be continuing, though a worry that I continue to have is that the FTC is not going to be making decisions based on the facts and the law and are just going to be kind of one White House phone call away from pulling a case because of, say, a donation or some connections. They did recently pull a case that we had filed against Pepsi,

where we had after a two year investigation found that Pepsi was systematically discriminating against smaller grocery stores and giving them much higher prices than they were. Really unbelievable for Pepsi to discriminate. For them to think that, cause everyone's discriminating against Pepsi all the time, and for them to think they're bigger than anybody else,

I'm sorry, please go on. No, I mean, it's something that actually, when I went out and traveled across the country, I would hear time and time again from independent grocers is just how hard they would find it to compete, and they would go sometimes to a Walmart or a Costco and they would see that the price on the shelves at those stores was lower than what they were even being offered at wholesale.

Damn, like literally they can't buy it from Pepsi. They might as well just go to Costco and buy pallets of Pepsi there and then bring it to their store. It would be cheaper than buying it from Pepsi. Yeah, I mean, just the discrimination and that's illegal. And it's been illegal for close to a century, but would be cheaper than buying it from Pepsi. Yeah, I mean, just the discrimination. And that's illegal. And it's been illegal for close to a century,

but the government stopped enforcing that law. And so now this type of discrimination has just been baked into business models and how corporate America functions. And so we revived that law. This is a lawsuit that the FTC pulled back on in a way that I think really abandons those independent grocers.

So, you know, it's a mixed bag so far. Some of the lawsuits are continuing, some of the rules are continuing, the merger guidelines are still in place. But I think, you know, there's also just some weaponization of law enforcement resources. Some of the investigations they are starting seem to be very focused on, you know, potentially doing the bidding of Elon Musk against the advertisers that didn't wanna advertise on his platform.

So I do worry about how they're spending their resources. That's sort of like twisted Elon argument of like, if you don't advertise on X, that's illegal. Like this, it's sort of a fun house mirror version of an antitrust argument. Yeah, it's sort of a fun house mirror version of an antitrust argument. Yeah, it's basically, you know, trying to argue that there was some collusion. I didn't investigate it, so I can't say definitively,

but it seems pretty direct a result of, you know, wanting to do a powerful person a favor. Yeah, keeping on the transition, you know, you said earlier that, you know, you admired the Biden administration really coming in and wanting to make a change economically and focusing on what's affecting people's lives. You know, what's affecting people's material reality.

You know, I, as someone to the, you know, generally to the left of Biden was like surprised and heartened by that. I was like, oh, focusing on poor people's, you know, material stresses. That's like what I want the government to do. That's part of the political program I think would work. You're, you know, you being put in as chair

in the work that you did, I was like, this is a great improvement in the government, you know, making people's lives better. And you really saw the Biden administration focusing on that in their rhetoric and policymaking. And yet when they lost the election, the narrative that we took away as a country was, oh, everyone was economically struggling,

the Biden administration didn't do enough or care about that and people revolted, right? That like, you saw the administration really try to focus on pocketbook issues in a way that I had always wanted a government to do. And it kind of didn't work, you know, politically in the long run. I'm curious, yeah, what your view is of that overall project.

What was the disconnect between the public and what the administration was trying to do generally? Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't profess to be some type of kind of electoral strategist or expert. And there are a lot of diagnoses and analyses about what happened. Inflation was real. People were paying more than they were several years ago.

And I think there was various factors that were driving that, including some overhang from what happened during the pandemic in terms of huge supply shocks. I think what had been interesting for a lot know, a lot of observers of some of these dynamics had been that prices shot up during the pandemic, understandably, because there were serious supply chain jams. But as those supply chain jams got resolved, prices did not come down concurrently. And there was a big question about why that was. And at least in certain concentrated industries,

we certainly saw some executives boasting on earnings calls about how basically the fact that consumers had become used to these higher prices basically gave them additional latitude to keep prices high even as their costs came down again. And so, you know, I suspect that was a dynamic and, you know, that probably was an opportunity, um, for, for the administration. It's been interesting to see the Trump administration, um, you know, more directly call out, uh, companies, even in pretty

striking ways. I mean, there was an effort to say, even if tariffs raise your cost, you better not pass those costs on to consumers. And so I think there can be different levels of comfort in kind of how directly certain administrations are calling out businesses. That's interesting that Trump administration

has specifically said, like, we will harass, we will go after you if you do this. And companies as a result have like backed off putting like a tariff charge on a bill or that sort of thing. And that sort of bullying approach was not something that the Biden administration did, but maybe like a little bit more bravado

would have been good, huh? Well, you know, of course we don't want the White House to be bullying anybody. And I think that is a real danger we're seeing with this White House. You know, I do think that, and the White House did actually, did to their credit note that in certain industries, like in agriculture,

in meat packing, we were seeing some of these dynamics. But you know, I think there was a broader administration like in agriculture and meat packing, we were seeing some of these dynamics. But I think there was a broader administration in its efforts and the FTC was a small part of that. And I hope we learned the right lessons from the last few years. Yeah, I think we're still processing what they are. Like the end of, the last election I think was so wrenching

for so much of the country that it's, it's still been hard to figure, you know, pull apart what went right and what went wrong, you know? Like where was, where was the disconnect? Again, I look at it sometimes I say, oh my God, the Biden administration did a bunch of stuff that I wanted to have done. And yet here we are, everyone talks about it

as an utter failure, you know, economically, especially, that talks about it as an utter failure, economically especially, that the administration didn't listen to people's real pain, didn't respond to it. And yet there were programs where it was trying to. And so it's, I'm still piecing what was the fundamental mistake, apart from Biden being too old and all of that, and that's a whole other political issue. But the administration was reaching for a sort of populist helping the average American, and yet when the administration was not re-elected,

the narrative was they did not help the average American. I'm still trying to figure out what that meant. Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things. First is, you know, the work that the FTC and CFPB and a handful of other agencies were doing were kind of one component. I think there were kind of different approaches across government.

I think there were instances in which rules and, you know, changes to people's lives took too long to come into effect. And that goes into this issue of how much internal red tape is there, how much internal bureaucracy and handicapping is there. Um, and ultimately I think there was also a question of, um, you know, the bully pulpit. And, you know, when I would go out, uh, to places like Ames, Iowa or Kansas city, or, uh, you know,

parts of Arizona or Nevada, I would hear from people just across the board a real interest in seeing their government stand up to corporate law breaking. And parts of the government were really doing that. And sometimes people just had no idea, even people who were following politics. And so I think this goes to kind of just,

how are we communicating to people and what are people learning? Well, and I think you're to kind of just, how are we communicating to people and what are people learning? Well, and I think you're pointing out that, or at least what you're making me think is, yeah, we did not have the president out there saying, this is what we are doing in quite as strong a way as maybe we wish he had, you know, like it was, you were in there doing the work

other agency heads were as well, but it was not, didn't feel like it was being led from the top in this, in this really, uh, muscular way. And to some degree. Um, what I find interesting though, is that even though again, we, you know, had a complete change in administration, um, and your work received such blowback from, you know, uh, the wall street journal, like wrote countless editorials about, uh, attacking your work,

et cetera, you have received more praise from people allied with the current administration than like, I think probably most other agency heads. Like I think Matt Gaetz has said nice things about you. I believe you found common cause with Josh Hawley at times, et cetera. I know you, there's a famous photo of you with Steve Bannon, right?

I think you had a conversation on his show, right? That I assume was relatively friendly. So I'm curious about like, what do you make of the wing of the populist right that is, you know, like looking at these issues. Do you think that it's, you know, is it evidence that the ideas that you're trying to get into the political ecosystem are finding purchase?

Or is there, you have any suspicion about, are they in good faith, et cetera? I'm just, yeah, how do you evaluate that? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly true that antitrust and anti-monopoly has been this like island where we have seen significant bipartisan agreement over the last few years, even amid, you know, peak partisanship. I think there are several factors driving that. I do think that there is, you know, there was a lot of concern about the tech giants and whose speech were they privileging versus not. And, you know,

do we want a handful of executives getting to decide who gets seen and heard in the 21st century public squares? I think that was a driver. But more generally, there is a recognition that the libertarianism that for so long had been just the mainstream of the Republican Party has actually allowed forms of coercion and abuse that certain Republicans don't want to stand for.

And there's a growing recognition, I think, especially in younger generations, that even though they've been very attuned to the way that state power can be used in abusive ways and to undermine people's freedom, if you totally ignore the role of monopolies, you will suddenly have the ability of private entities to also coerce and abuse in ways that should be

pretty offensive to Republican values. And so there has been a growing recognition that coercion can come from private monopolies as well as the state, at a kind of more fundamental philosophical level. What that ends up meaning for this administration, I think is a big open question, because to actually see that realignment succeed,

you're gonna need to have people in these positions that actually have courage to see through cases against powerful companies, even when those powerful companies are pushing back. And that's where I have a big question about whether we're going to see that level of courage and spine that will result in the follow through. We are seeing some real factional debate and fight in this administration between the kind of more oligarchy, corporatist wing and more of the populists.

And I think we're gonna have to wait to see how that shakes out. Yeah, it's really fascinating. And it's an area that makes you think, oh, it makes the realignment that's happening in American politics visible. Like this area, you watch it like, oh, there's something happening here

that I don't quite know how to slot into my previous political categories. And that means there's evidence of like a tectonic shift. And it's like, we don't really know how it's gonna come out yet. One of the things that you said that made me think is, yeah, Democrats are often focused on corporate power and Republicans are focused on state power

is the thing that they're concerned about. Republicans are usually concerned about state economic power. We don't like the government telling us how to run our businesses, et cetera. But when they're focused on corporate power, they are more now, but they tend to be worried about social issues, about free speech

or values-based things like that. And the question is, are they going to be worried about corporate economic power? Are they gonna get to that step? Because that's when you'll actually have a little bit of alignment between your movement and theirs in a bipartisan way. Like would you see a Republican FTC ever say,

oh, hold on a second, this is anti-competitive in a way that hurts people we care about and we're going to go after them on economic grounds. That's right. I think that's the big question. That's really fascinating. Well, that's, I question. That's really fascinating. Well, that's, I don't know, maybe we'll have you back in a year

and we'll talk about it. What are your, I think we covered a lot of ground here. What are your plans for the future? That's my main question. Like you're out of government now, you're still quite young, you have a long career ahead of you. Like how do you begin to chart a way forward

for yourself doing this work? Well, we built just a tremendous amount of momentum with all of this work and we need to figure out what is this broader movement now need in these coming years. And there are lots of different components of that. There needs to be more research and policy work. I think there's a lot of interest in DC

and members of Congress about what does it look like to do politics around anti-monopoly. One thing that's of interest to me is what does the next generation look like in terms of being able to hit the ground running if there is another opportunity to govern? I get dozens of emails weekly from college students, law students, high school students, people saying, I'm doing my high school project and I had a Tarbell and I learned about the FTC and I want to be a trust buster and how do I do that?

And so I'm really interested in how do we nourish that interest and direct it. I think there could be somewhat of a standing army in waiting in terms of people who really want to be able to serve the public and use the levers of government to make sure we have a more fair economy and corporate lawmakers aren't able to get away with it. And do you see that fight as something that can continue

despite the change in administration? Because when Trump won, I really felt, oh my God, I really care about antitrust, right? And oh no, this sea change that was happening is gonna be interrupted. Is it something that you think can continue? And yeah, even while out of power? I mean, I think a lot of the momentum is shifting

to the state and local level. And we are seeing states pass bans on private equity, being able to enter medicine freely. We just had Arkansas recently pass a bill that would limit the ability of pharmacy benefit managers to have their own local pharmacies. We're seeing states and localities pass laws banning algorithmic price fixing. So, you know, we are seeing on the local and state level serious legislative wins that are checking monopoly and corporate power.

Okay. It does feel like the movement that you've led to some extent has had, it's had an effect on American political and economic culture, like in a way that surprised me a little bit. Does it surprise you? Are you coming out of this feeling optimistic?

I mean, yes and no. The day to day of what's happening in DC, it's hard to be optimistic sometimes, but I think big picture, what I've seen is that sometimes it can feel like the economic challenges that people face in their day-to-day lives are just a fact of life or just happened to us like the weather, as opposed to being the result of very specific legal and policy choices that people in positions of power are making and not making.

And you know, I think one effect, I would like to think one effect of the FTC's work these last few years is that more and more people recognize that these things are not inevitabilities and that we have government entities like the Federal Trade Commission that are charged with standing up against that corporate abuse.

And if we are still seeing that corporate abuse, it's because those actors are not doing their jobs. Yeah, I wonder if the changing, you know, Americans' cultures, you know, understanding of these issues is even ultimately more important than the work of the FTC, right? The FTC, as you say, is a small agency, can only do so much in a limited amount of time,

the amount of time that you have there, but raising people's consciousness about, hey, this is not a fact of life, it's something that's been done to you that you can be a part of changing, that you have power in, ultimately. That's how we lead to more durable change, right? Yeah, and I mean, I think especially

with the case of antitrust and anti-monopoly, it's not just that, you know, it doesn't have to be this way, but a lot of this was illegal 50 years ago and then we stopped enforcing the law. Yes. Right? So the kind of path to change is actually

in some ways should be even easier. Yeah. Well, I'm really heartened by the fact that you're still on it. You know, you could really be forgiven for saying, hey, I spent my time on this particular topic. Now I'm gonna go write a novel or whatever. You know, certainly in my own career,

I'm like, I've been doing this enough. I wanna do something new. And so the fact that you feel that you're still in the fight, that's inspiring. I mean, I think the work is too important in terms of just like, people are getting a bad shake in America oftentimes, in our economy.

And I think we really need to help fix, change that. I'm so glad that you're continuing that work. Thank you so much for being on the show again. It's really wonderful to have you back and I hope we'll get you back for a third visit sometime. Thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you once again to Lena for coming on the show and thank you to all of you

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