Former Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Lena Khan says she has no desire to run for elected office, but she sure knows how to stay on message like a politician. During his appearance on “The Adam Friedland Show”, hosted by comedian and “Joe Rogan” top candidate for the left, Adam Friedland, he was repeatedly put to the test by putting his anti-monopoly, anti-corruption ideology in a silly manner and a series of dick jokes. She emerged motionless.
Early in the interview, Friedland observed that Khan, who is in the news again for his role on the transition team of incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, finds it difficult to lie. Shortly thereafter, he gave a very good example of his honesty. When Friedland asked if she was a popular girl in high school, Khan said, “No, I was a newspaper editor.” Addable.
Throughout the entire conversation, Khan maintained an incredibly calm stance. While she laughed at Friedland’s jokes, she would almost immediately get back on topic. However, that doesn’t mean he pulled punches. For example, he eloquently described how we live in an era where history may not be repeating itself outright, but it certainly seems to rhyme.
“There were many factors that fueled the rise of Nazism. After World War II, America really asked ‘What happened and what factors contributed to it?’ Like started various studies, including trying to find out what was happening in the economy. “They actually found that increasing integration in the German economy had fundamentally fueled the rise of Nazism,” he said. “You had more of a monopoly in certain types of rubber and steel, and generally speaking, there’s been a recognition for a long time that concentrated economic power can go hand in hand with concentrated political power. I think that’s an insight that’s been lost recently, but we’re kind of being forced to rethink that.”
Friedland followed that exchange by asking whether, when Paramount completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Bari Weiss would become Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister, a modern-day Joseph Goebbels. Khan laughed but did not reply, because he is a professional.
Friedland managed to obtain some information from the mine that might not have surfaced elsewhere. For example, Khan revealed that she does not have an Amazon Prime account and prefers to pick up her items in person. They also asked him to name a favorite Supreme Court justice, choosing Lewis Brandeis, known for establishing the concept of the “right to privacy” and being the architect of what would become the Federal Trade Commission.
Friedland also prepared Khan to give some detailed answers on the work she was doing at the FTC and hopes she will continue to do outside the agency. Asked what his biggest “dub” was while serving as FTC chair, Khan responded, “We were very focused on health care markets because people depend on health care, and one of the initiatives we took was really trying to figure out why drug prices are so high. One of the reasons they’re so high is that pharma companies use all kinds of patent tricks. So we called out those pharma tricks and went after the big four manufacturers of asthma inhalers. 3 reduced the price from hundreds of dollars to just $35. So people who rely on inhalers are paying hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars less today.”
While Khan has a reputation as the cop on the block for Big Tech, he actually attacked the healthcare industry during the interview. Asked which industry “makes people nervous the most”, Khan replied, “Health care.” When Friendland asked, “Who has the most blood on his hands?” She said, “Yes.” Later, he said candidly, “There are people who have died because they can’t buy their medicines in this country.”
He also drew a stark difference between his approach to addressing corruption and the Trump administration’s approach to it. “If you were breaking the law, but you were in the C-suite, the government would take you lightly. … I thought that was really problematic,” she said. “We were very clear that we were going to enforce the law the same way, no matter what kind of political affiliation you have. We just had to look at ‘Are you breaking the law or not?’ “And I think that approach to law enforcement bothers some people.”
Meanwhile, he said the Trump administration has seen “a real pushback” when it comes to enforcement. “They’ve also shifted gears. They allowed this big merger between these two ad agencies, and one of the conditions of it was basically that they had to more or less buy advertising from Elon Musk on their platforms, within the scope that they couldn’t discriminate on political grounds,” she said. “It seems as if they are more eager to use the law to pursue their political grievances.”
Friedland brought some ideas to Khan for future ways to identify corruption and collusion, should he ever return to the agency. For example, he gave her a plan to show up to Burning Man and ask questions of the officers while they were out on the molly. “We didn’t have this good idea,” she said.
Although Khan maintained a professional attitude throughout the interview, he also spoke candidly about what is happening in America today. “I think people are realizing that a lot of the bad things in their lives are driven by corporations that are breaking the law.” Asked whether he was buying influence in corporate politics, he replied with a smile, “Maybe”. She also said, “It’s very popular to seize corporate power when they’re breaking the law,” which definitely makes it seem like she’s commenting on what the public might like when it comes to these issues.
Despite this, when Khan was asked whether he had any ambitions for political office he showed no real interest. She rejected the idea of running for the Senate and said she was left out of the presidency because she was not born in America, leading Friedland to inspire her to become Queen of England and oversee a herd of Corgis. Nevertheless, he has ideas about how government should work, saying, “We need New Deal-style ambition to address our current era of corruption”.