No Priors Ep. 84 | With Chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan

(techno music) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're talking to Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. When she was appointed at 32 years old, she was the youngest chairperson in the history of the FTC, and one of the youngest leaders of a government agency today. Lina has made a significant impact during her time at the FTC, focusing on high-profile antitrust cases. Within tech, her FTC has challenged NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as taking actions within healthcare and pharma. We're gonna discuss how she thinks about AI, the structure of the markets best for consumers, non-competes, predicting whether or not M&A will happen, and her approach to increasing competition.

Well, Chair Khan, thank you so much for joining us today on No Priors.

Thanks so much for having me.

So when you were 32 years old, you were appointed the youngest chairperson in the history of the FTC. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your career and what led you to the FTC and government?

Yeah, happy to. So I got my start as a business reporter and journalist, and one of my jobs was to document how various markets across the US economy had evolved. So I had to do deep dives in areas like the airlines, uh, book publishing, uh, chicken farming, uh, the aluminum market, uh, really all sorts of nooks and crannies that gave me a deeper appreciation for the ways that over the last four decades, our markets had become much more consolidated, uh, primarily through waves of mergers and acquisitions, uh, which in part were permitted through a much more lax approach to antitrust laws and policing mergers. And through that research, I really got a direct view of how consolidation and concentration in markets affects everyday people, be it consumers who are having to drive much further to get to the nearest hospital, uh, to chicken farmers who can only sell to a single company, and that leads to all sorts of exploitation, uh, to entrepreneurs and small businesses about how, you know, when you have a handful of gatekeepers controlling access to markets, that can also, uh, lead to much worse terms for them. And so it really got me just interested in this question of market structure and the fact that how we structure markets is in fact a policy question. Uh, do we want monopolies in every market, or do we want more competition? And historically, America has chosen the path of more competition, and I believe that's what's contributed to just the phenomenal economic growth that we've seen and the birth, uh, of, of so many fantastic companies.

While you were at Yale, you published this very influential essay, um, uh, about Amazon and the antitrust paradox. Um, can you describe the theory behind the essay and, you know, how that might differ from traditional antitrust, and if it still applies in your, your thinking today?