Name: LINA KHAN Talks FTC, Monopolies, Biden
Uploaded: 2025-11-12T23:00:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'LINA KHAN Talks FTC, Monopolies, Biden' from The Adam Friedland Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'LINA KHAN Talks FTC, Monopolies, Biden' from The Adam Friedland Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-12. Transcript available.

LINA KHAN Talks FTC, Monopolies, Biden

You function kind of like as someone that enforced the law. You were kind of
like a cop or like a, you know.
Yeah.
Did you ever ask for a gun?
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 send guys to Burning Man to like figure out tech corruption?
We didn't have that good idea.
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.
The whole, the whole economy is going to be one company pretty soon.
I guess.
Oh, it's Adam from a show on my TV.
Yo.
Let's do it.
Just let me get over that real quick.
Is my feelings being hurt?
Hello, welcome back to the Adam Freeland Show.
I'm Adam Freeland.
Adam Freeland here.
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That is true.
That's a funny line, Caleb.
Thanks.
Leave that in.
Turn it up for Caleb Pitts, everyone.
My guest this week is former FTC Commissioner Lina Khan.
Lina's been in the news recently as she is the head of Zoran Mamdani's mayoral
transition team.
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.
Effective valve.
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 Lina Khan like Batman.
Like Batman.
And think of Amazon like the Penguin.
Meta.
Bane, I guess.
Oracle.
Hugo Strange.
Joe Biden.
Ra's al Ghul.
Apple.
Killer Croc.
And I will be Alfred Pennyworth.
The butler.
The point is, Lina is one of the good guys.
And I'm Alfred.
So please.
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.
I love my team.
Please enjoy my conversation with Lina Khan.
Great job everyone.
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When I've lived in England, I think I was Arsenal.
And maybe Man U at points, but I don't really remember very well.
You're from the Shtetl.
I lived in Boulder's Green, yeah.
That's where the Frumers lived.
Is it?
That's really the Orthodox, right?
Oh, the Orthodox, yeah, yeah.
That's true, yes.
Yeah.
Yes, it's a pretty Orthodox neighborhood.
I think now it's a bit more, there are like a lot of Polish immigrants there as
well.
Thank God.
Thank God.
No, it was a nice place to grow up.
Dude, she's a gooner.
Do you hear that?
What?
Arsenal fan.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I don't know that I could faithfully still claim that.
Stop being a lawyer.
Just lie.
Have you learned to lie?
You're allowed to lie, though.
It is like against my disposition at this point.
I know.
Watching interviews with you, you're like, they give you opportunities to talk
some shit
and you're like, "How far?
I know the rules for this."
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, you know?
I agree.
Yeah, people don't lie in front of Congress.
It's bad if you do, so.
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 do the interview.
Okay.
You've never told one lie in your entire life?
I probably have, like as a kid or something, but...
Not since you were a kid?
I don't know.
I mean, in my last job.
I lie.
My whole life is a lie.
This is a lie.
It looks pretty legit, but...
I wanted to ask you something that I thought was really kind of cute, but about
the Starbucks
thing when you were in high school.
Uh-huh.
So you were in Westchester?
Yeah.
I lived in Mamaroneck, went to Mamaroneck High School.
And so the kids were causing a ruckus up in Starbucks by your high school?
So Starbucks said, but that's why we needed to investigate it.
And what did you do about it?
So there was basically a, you know, some stores outside of the high school,
including a Starbucks.
Uh-huh.
And people would, you know, go there and hang out there and buy coffee.
At Starbucks?
And then they started a policy that students, even if they purchased something,
couldn't
stay in the store.
They couldn't sit down.
Um, so I wrote a school newspaper story about it.
You're Martin Luther King.
But didn't you get in the New York Times?
Yeah, it somehow became enough of a thing where the Times then reported on it
and reported,
cited my story or something.
So were you a little bit sucking up to the popular girls that were at Starbucks?
I don't remember it that way.
I was genuinely just curious why.
You were being a suck up to the, or you were the popular girls.
No, I mean, I was a newspaper editor, you know, I don't know that that counted,
but.
Have you ever gotten a B?
A B?
Yeah.
Probably.
Yeah.
That's a lie.
I got you to lie.
No, no.
I mean, I took some hard math classes in college and probably didn't do so well.
I need to get, I need to swear you in.
You never got a B. You got a B in the hard math?
Some hard math, yeah.
How did it feel to get a B?
It was humbling, but in a good way.
Humbling.
Did you take the LSAT June 2009?
No.
Dino game?
No, no.
I took it later.
Do you know the dino game?
The logic game with the dinosaurs?
The logic puzzles.
I know the logic puzzles, but not with the dinosaurs.
I took it right before you.
Okay.
I didn't go to law school until 2014, so I took it later.
What did you get an LSAT?
I don't remember.
Come on.
I really don't.
You're being humble right now.
You got 180.
I don't think so.
Straight up 180.
I'd have to go back and check.
Did you finish first?
Were you like done?
I don't think so.
You definitely did.
I took it three times.
It was an inflection point in my life.
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.
Your thesis in college was on Hannah Arendt?
Mm-hmm.
What was your area of focus?
I think it's pretty interesting for the times we're kind of living it right now.
Yeah, it was a close study of a bunch of her work, including a book she wrote
called The
Human Condition.
In the book, she basically writes about how technological progress can lead to
a lot of
advances, but also requires 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.
So that's like the most boring book she wrote?
That's what your thesis was?
I don't know if that was boring.
I thought your thesis would be on her romance with Heidegger.
Oh, yeah.
The Nazi and the Jew.
Right, right.
I guess that was a component of her life.
One thing I heard you say in an interview was that prior to the establishment
of the
Third Reich as a centralized power structure, that industrial conglomeration
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've heard on succession maybe?
Yeah, you know, obviously there were a lot of factors that facilitated the rise
of Nazism,
but the U.S. after World War II actually commissioned various studies to be
like what just happened
and what factors contributed to it, 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.
You know, you had like more monopolization and certain types of rubber and
steel.
And generally speaking, there's long been a recognition that concentrated
economic power can go hand in hand with concentrated political power.
And, you know, I think that's an insight that has been lost more recently, but
we're kind of being forced to reckon with again.
So you think Paramount, if they buy Warner Brothers, maybe Barry Weiss will be
maybe the kind of go-bull.
She can't, she doesn't talk shit at all.
Because she knows all the rules.
She knows all the rules.
Okay, so let's explain to our audience.
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.
Yes.
What was your thesis, what was your position that you were taking?
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.
The law review article actually came out of a whole bunch of interviews I had
done with two sets of market participants.
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.
And it was really interesting because at that time, this is like 2012, 2013,
you know, the general consensus in DC was that Amazon is this company that is,
you know, just delivering all these low prices.
And there's kind of no monopoly power dominance concern here.
But when you talk to those sets of market actors, they were like, yeah, of
course, you know, this company is amassing structural powe