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625. The Biden Policy That Trump Hasn’t Touched
01:03:14
Lina Khan, the youngest F.T.C. chair in history, reset U.S. antitrust policy by thwarting mega-mergers and other monopolistic behavior. This earned her enemies in some places, and big fans in others — including the Trump administration. Stephen Dubner speaks with Khan about her tactics, her track record, and her future.
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- [00:02]
Stephen Dubner
Freeconomics Radio is sponsored by Discover. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one you can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show see terms@discover.com credit card@t mobile we'll give you four free 5G phones and four lines for only $25 per line per month with eligible trade ins. And no, it's not a contest, it's every day for a limited time. Everyone's a winner on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account $5 more per line without autopay up to $830 off each phone via 24 monthly bill credits plus taxes, fees and $10 device connection charge for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on required finance agreement to bill credits and if you pay off devices early ctmobile.com Lina Khan was just 32 years old when Joe Biden appointed her to lead the Federal Trade Commission. In 2021, she became the youngest FTC chair in history, and this agency goes back to 1914. Khan was also considered one of the most progressive chairs in FTC history. While she was still in law school, Khan published a journal article called Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which went on to become famous and which painted a picture of capitalism gone wild, where too many firms have become too big and too powerful, posing a threat not just to consumers and employees, but to the economy itself and maybe even to democracy. One of the signature achievements of her FTC term, done in collaboration with the Department of Justice, was an updated set of the government's merger guidelines. This is a 50 page blueprint for pushing back against over overconsolidation, for limiting both horizontal and vertical acquisitions, and for making the economy more resilient by reducing corporate power. These are ideas we have dug into repeatedly on Freakonomics Radio. We have done episodes about consolidation in the eyeglass industry, in the pet care and dialysis industries. We made an episode called Are Private Equity Firms Plundering the US Economy Now? With Donald Trump Back in the White House, Lina Khan is of course gone, replaced by a Republican chair, Andrew Ferguson. And the Trump administration has been moving quickly to undo or wipe out any number of Biden administration policies, but not those merger guidelines. They are being retained and embraced by the Trump administration. Here's how one former Biden administration official put it to me, it's like being in your house when a tornado comes and wipes out everybody's house except for yours. You might call this the Lina Khan paradox. And how does Khan herself feel about this paradox? Based on the conversation you are about to hear, I would put it this way. When it comes to antitrust policy, Khan doesn't care who gets it done as long as it gets done.
- [03:14]
Lina Khan
I view the stakes here as being existential for our country.
- [03:19]
Stephen Dubner
Today on Freakonomics Radio, we review Lina Khan's FTC track record.
- [03:25]
Lina Khan
If you tally up our wins and losses, we have done better than prior administrations, even while taking bigger shots and putting together more ambitious cases.
- [03:34]
Stephen Dubner
And we talk about how to do good work in a world where bad behavior is often rewarded.
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Lina Khan
You need to place more value on feedback and input that is actually tethered to reality and tethered to facts, reality.
- [03:48]
Stephen Dubner
Facts, and more with former FTC chair Lina Khan. Starting now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that.
- [04:07]
Lina Khan
Explores the hidden side of everything with.
- [04:10]
Stephen Dubner
Your host, Stephen Dubner.
- [04:24]
Lina Khan
My name is Lina Khan, and until recently I served as chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
- [04:29]
Stephen Dubner
It's fun to say that, I would imagine. Yes.
- [04:33]
Lina Khan
Yeah.
- [04:34]
Stephen Dubner
Can you just give us in a nutshell how you got here there in such a relatively short time?
- [04:42]
Lina Khan
Yeah, happy to. It is a bit of an idiosyncratic path. I spent a lot of time in undergrad, interested in journalism. I graduated right after the financial crisis. Journalism jobs were pretty hard to get. I ended up instead landing with a think tank, and I worked with a group where my job was to research and document consolidation across markets.
- [05:04]
Stephen Dubner
This was the open markets group at the New America think tank.
- [05:07]
Lina Khan
Yeah, that's right. I had to do these deep dives into all sorts of sectors, be it book publishing, airlines, or all sorts of commodity markets. And I started to get a picture of decades of consolidation in market after market where we had gone from dozens of competitors to increasingly a small number of firms in each sector. My job was to both document that that had happened and also document what the effects had been.
- [05:37]
Stephen Dubner
It's one of those things that in retrospect, seems obvious, like, yes, there's been so much consolidation in our economy, full stop. But at the time, I'm wondering if you felt like you were toiling in some forgotten corner of the economy that this was something that people weren't paying much Attention to at the moment.
- [05:53]
Lina Khan
That's right. This was around 2010, 2011. There was a national conversation around economic inequality more generally, but there was not any real conversation around industry consolidation or concentration. If you went to some type of social gathering and you said, I research market consolidation and antitrust, people's eyes would tend to glaze over. So my job was to document consolidation and the effects of it. This really gave me a tour of all sorts of sectors across the US Economy. I spent a lot of time understanding how the chicken farming industry works today and learned that you have tens of thousands of chicken farmers on one side, millions of consumers on the other, and they're all connected by a very small number of these chicken processing companies. The effects of that and the big picture have been that consumers are paying more even as farmers are earning less. That got me really interested in the antitrust laws which were passed over a century ago, designed to keep markets open and competitive. I was really struck by how we had, on the one hand, a set of laws designed to keep markets open and competitive, and yet on the other, we had seen just wholesale consolidation and a drift away from markets that were open and competitive. And I was really intrigued by how this had happened. That in turn got me interested in the history of the antitrust laws.
- [07:23]
Stephen Dubner
I think most people pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in the world that they live in right now. Not a lot of attention, but a little bit of attention. And very few people read a lot of history. So we tend to respond to what's going on in the news, let's say in anti competitive practice. Based on what we know about the last couple years. Yeah, Facebook has gotten too big, Google's gotten too big, and therefore X or Y needs to be done. But that's not, not a particularly fruitful way to look at the world. It's nice to have some historical and even philosophical underpinnings. So if you could just talk about a quick history of competition law and how people long before us saw it.
- [08:04]
Lina Khan
So at the federal level, the first antitrust laws trace back to 1890. This was when the Sherman Antitrust act was passed. And it was passed against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, which had delivered transformative advances across the country country, but it also consolidated a lot of wealth and power. Some of those most affected by this consolidation were farmers and entrepreneurs and small proprietors, especially when it came to the railroads. The railroads had transformed the country. You could suddenly transport your wares nationally. Farmers and others had access to national markets. There Were enormous benefits. But. But it also meant that farmers and others were extraordinarily dependent on a very small number of companies, sometimes just a single company, the railroad that controlled the rails going through their town. And farmers recognized that this concentration of power could be abused. You had the railroads effectively picking winners and losers. And whether a farmer did well or whether his business sank could just be up to this single railroad. We had discriminatory pricing, arbitrary pricing. So a lot of the frustrations that farmers felt ended up being channeled towards both the Interstate Commerce act, which ended up regulating the railroads, as well as the Sherman Antitrust act, which broadly prohibited certain forms of monopolization and illegal restraints of trade. Those laws were enforced, but it became clear pretty quickly that there were some major gaps. So then in 1914, Congress passed two additional antitrust laws. The Clayton Antitrust act, which prohibited mergers and acquisitions that may lessen competition, as well as the Federal Trade Commission act, which created the ftc, prohibited unfair methods of competition more generally. And then you had, over the decades, different levels of activity in terms of vigor from the antitrust agencies, but broadly, an approach to competition that was very focused on wanting to make sure that the market was competitive. From a more structural perspective, during the New Deal, you had these two different moments. @ one point, a more hands off approach. And then you had the second New Deal period where enforcers really doubled down. And then starting in the late 70s and 80s, there was this wholesale revolution where we as a country radically reoriented how we were enforcing these laws that in good part led to this consolidation.
- [10:52]
Stephen Dubner
That wholesale revolution you're referring to that includes what antitrust people call the Chicago School of Thought, named for University of Chicago legal scholars Robert Bork and Richard Posner, the economist, Aaron Director and others. One person I spoke with who used to work with you made the note, and I'm curious if you think this is true, that your youth really served you well in thinking this through, because rather than just accepting the current regulatory environment as it stood, you felt compelled to dig into that Chicago history. Can you walk me through what you saw there and how it shaped your thinking?
- [11:30]
Lina Khan
When I started looking at what happened in the 70s and 80s, I was struck by just how radical it was. There were certain economic assumptions that drove that change and certain ideological assumptions that drove it. There was a view that the best thing for the government to do was to get out of the way. The idea was, you know, monopoly power and market power in the economy is rare, but if it is ever to come about, and if firms try to abuse their monopoly power. The theory went that that monopoly power would be disciplined by this rush of new entrants that would come in and limit the ability of that monopolist to exercise its power. And so it was better for government to err on the side of under enforcement than over enforcement, which could chill innovation.
- [12:17]
Stephen Dubner
Do you feel that was a legitimate expectation or it was a little bit of a fig leaf?
- [12:22]
Lina Khan
I think it was primarily driven by theories of how markets work that ended up being pretty divorced from the reality on the ground. This hands off approach assumed that markets were more likely to self correct and that had bipartisan staying power. It was ushered in initially by the Reagan administration, but then continued by the Clinton administration and the Bush administration and then in good part by the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the last 40 years have been a natural experiment premised on those theories. And now we have more and more empirical evidence that I think rebuts those.
- [13:02]
Stephen Dubner
When you say that, it rebuts those, can you put that in the form of more and more empirical evidence that.
- [13:07]
Lina Khan
What that significant consolidation can result in market power, in monopoly power that firms can exercise without it immediately being disciplined in the market. And instead what you can have is persistent monopoly power that firms can use to charge people more, reduce innovation, reduce quality. There are papers looking at markups beyond marginal cost, finding that in the 80s, on average it was around 20% the markup and now it's as high as 60%. I think one of the theories that has been rebutted is this idea that monopoly power is rare and fleeting and if it does ever come to be exercised, it will be immediately corrected by the market. It was a kind of multi decade consensus. And that consensus started to break during the first Trump administration and then further during this last Biden administration.
- [14:05]
Stephen Dubner
Okay, so that's the context for the antitrust climate you walked into. Let's back up. You're at the open markets think tank. You're finding out everything there is to know about the history of antitrust policy and the poultry market, for instance. What happens then?
- [14:21]
Lina Khan
I decided to both apply to law school and to apply to journalism jobs and ended up choosing between going to become a beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal or going to law school. Ended up going to law school and really tried to structure my time there by taking classes focused on the areas of the law that are shaping and structuring corporate power. That includes antitrust, but it also includes things like trade law or even First Amendment law, which firms had increasingly been using to try to strike down regulations. While I was in law school. I ended up using some of the research I had done around E Commerce and Amazon to write a law review article. Using Amazon as a vehicle to tell a broader story about the shift in antitrust law. Ended up publishing that. And there was a broader conversation around all of these issues.
- [15:13]
Stephen Dubner
When you say there was a broader conversation, the conversation was mostly around your paper. To me, it seemed like you're a, let's say, beginning of career singer, songwriter and your first song becomes the world's biggest hit. This was your paper, Amazon's antitrust paradox. And it catapulted you and this idea really onto the global stage. That's at least my outside perspective. What's the inside perspective?
- [15:40]
Lina Khan
You know, I had just been in law school trying to get this paper out. I was impressed and surprised that anybody was reading it, let alone that it had caught some broader attention. But the background conversation was a growing recognition of the fact that market after market had become so much more consolidated and that antitrust was in need of a reboot.
- [16:01]
Stephen Dubner
The abstract alone is fascinating. I'll just read one sentence back to you. In addition to being a retailer, Amazon is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, major book publisher. It goes on and on and on and on. Elements of the firm's structure and conduct pose anti competitive concerns, yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny. Is that the paradox of your title, that it's acting like a monopoly but escaping the scrutiny?
- [16:29]
Lina Khan
Yes, that is one of the paradoxes. To further add to that, there's a line in the paper that talks about how Amazon has actually marched towards becoming a monopoly by singing the tune of contemporary antitrust. It wasn't just that it had escaped scrutiny, but it had actually pursued its strategy in a way that was landing squarely in the very blind spots that had emerged in antitrust.
- [16:56]
Stephen Dubner
What do you mean by those blind spots? And I'm curious how that was accomplished. Was that just Jeff Bezos and his leadership being very, very good at corporate strategy, or was it more than that?
- [17:07]
Lina Khan
I can't speak to what they were specifically thinking, but one of the reorientations of antitrust had become where enforcers would primarily look to whether a firm was charging more or reducing output as the metric for understanding whether there was harm in antitrust terms, Amazon, at least rhetorically, its strategy was very much focused around doing what's best for the consumer. When enforcers were looking at that through just a short term lens, I argued that they were missing some of the broader harms that were emerging.
- [17:43]
Stephen Dubner
Okay, so your Amazon paper clearly struck a deep chord. But how did you go from being a law student, admittedly a high profile law student, to being chair of the ftc?
- [17:55]
Lina Khan
After law school, I spent some time doing more research and writing, was set to clerk for a federal judge. And then a few months before my clerkship was supposed to start, the the judge I was supposed to clerk for ended up passing away.
- [18:06]
Stephen Dubner
Who was that?
- [18:07]
Lina Khan
Judge Reinhart in the ninth Circuit. So then I reshuffled my plans, ended up going to work for a federal trade commissioner, Rohit Chopra, and then ended up going to work for the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on antitrust, which was looking to start an investigation into the large technology companies including Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. I became part of a very small team tasked with crafting a congressional investigation. So we did an 18 month investigation, ended up publishing a report summarizing our findings and issuing a set of recommendations for how to make sure that these digital markets are competitive. After that, I was going back to academia and then had the great honor of being nominated to serve at the ftc.
- [18:57]
Stephen Dubner
Coming up after the break, Lina Khan puts her Amazon research to work. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ebay. Picture this. You're halfway through a DIY car fix, tools scattered everywhere, and you realize you're missing a part. It's okay, because whatever it is, it's on ebay. Brakes, headlights, cold air intakes. Whatever you need. Guaranteed to fit. No more crossing your fingers and hoping you ordered the right thing. All the parts you need at prices you will love. Guaranteed to fit every time. Ebay things people love.
- [19:41]
Lina Khan
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- [20:06]
Stephen Dubner
You join Metro plus tax for a limited time is subject to change. Max one offer per account. Lemonade sings a pet insurance customer review. My new puppy, swallow the bone. Still a good boy, though. And boy, was I glad that I had limited. I was paid back quickly and efficiently.
- [20:32]
Lina Khan
Everyone was so nice.
- [20:34]
Stephen Dubner
Get this pet insurance and get a've@lemonade.com Peter when she was a law student at Yale. Lina Khan wrote what would become one of the most famous law review articles of the current century. It accused Amazon of using novel forms of monopolistic practice, including deliberately underpricing its goods and services with the goal of becoming an e commerce behemoth. A goal that Amazon has achieved. Okay. While you were running the FTC, you and 18 state attorneys general in Puerto Rico sued Amazon over monopolistic practices. There is a trial scheduled to start in 2026. I'd like you to take us full circle from writing the Amazon Antitrust Paradox paper in law school to now having brought this suit and waiting for the trial to begin.
- [21:36]
Lina Khan
To state the obvious. Writing a law school paper is very different than being a law enforcer. Especially in digital markets. You can see a monopoly life cycle where the set of tactics that a platform pursuing in the early stages when it's looking to scale and achieve monopoly power will look different than the tactics that it is deploying once it has achieved that monopoly status, has locked out its rivals, and then is in extraction mode where it's now able to exploit that monopoly power. My law review article was around the first stage and the lawsuit ended up focusing on the practices of this second stage. The lawsuit basically alleges that Amazon, after itself achieving scale, ended up in a very concerted way, pursuing tactics designed to deprive other companies of similarly enjoying that scale that you need to really compete in online commerce. It did this in a few ways. One was it engaged in what we call anti discounting practices where Amazon would basically punish any business that listed its goods for a lower price on other platforms. And it was doing this even as Amazon was steadily increasing how much it charges sellers to sell on Amazon. Amazon takes as much as one out of every two dollars from some of the sellers that rely on Amazon. Even as it is increasing prices for sellers, it punishes those sellers for listing goods for a lower price, even on platforms that are taking a smaller cut. We argue that this basically inflates prices across the Internet. We also allege that Amazon illegally conditions access to certain prime badge services on sellers using its fulfillment services and that that has certain anti competitive effects. And then we also allege that Amazon used this algorithm called Project Nessie that also inflated prices.
- [23:46]
Stephen Dubner
The Internet Nessie, as in Loch Ness Monster?
- [23:49]
Lina Khan
Yes, exactly.
- [23:50]
Stephen Dubner
Why was it called that? Do you know?
- [23:52]
Lina Khan
We don't know. We can only speculate.
- [23:54]
Stephen Dubner
And would you care to predict the outcome of the Amazon trial?
- [23:58]
Lina Khan
Well, look, the trial is slated to go forward. It is going to trial because the FTC defeated Amazon's efforts to dismiss the case, we got a resounding win where the judge said all of these counts are plausible. I feel very optimistic, but we'll have to wait and see.
- [24:14]
Stephen Dubner
What do you think Amazon looks like in 20 years?
- [24:17]
Lina Khan
It's hard to say. Part of that answer will depend on what happens with this litigation.
- [24:23]
Stephen Dubner
So the Amazon case has thus far been a win for you and the ftc, but there were losses as well. One legal scholar that I spoke with noted that a lot of your lawsuits were just seen as unlikely to succeed in the courts and wondered when is it legitimate to bring a lawsuit that doesn't have a great chance of succeeding and whether that's an attempt to influence the law as opposed to carry out a successful prosecution.
- [24:50]
Lina Khan
Look, we ended up having resounding success in the courts, including with cases that had not been brought previously. If you tally up our wins and losses, we actually have done better than prior administrations, even while taking bigger shots and putting together more ambitious cases. Sometimes there can be analyses that are not actually matching the facts of what happened. We only filed cases where we thought there was a lot violation and where the facts matched it. But we also brought cases that were responding to the harms in the modern economy. One trend that we've seen in various sectors is this issue of private equity roll ups or serial acquisitions, where firms will make a whole series of acquisitions, each one of which may be small or fly beneath the radar, but in the aggregate they may have still rolled up a market and then inflated prices. That's something that's been happening in our economy for some and antitrust enforcers had not addressed it. We ended up filing a lawsuit taking on some of these roll ups in anesthesiology and ended up having a successful case there. We also defeated the company's motion to dismiss. That's going to trial. We ended up successfully blocking dozens of mergers, including getting litigated wins, including in instances where enforcers in the past candidly had failed to stop some of this consolidation. We succeeded in blocking the Kroger Albertsons merger, which would have been the largest supermarket deal in US history, despite there being a fix that the companies had proposed previously. Enforcers had allowed some of those big grocery deals to go through and the public had really lost out.
- [26:34]
Stephen Dubner
Let's talk about the work you did on non competes. These are the employment clauses that might forbid an employee from leaving one company to work for another in the same industry, for instance. And I realize it didn't have the happy ending you were looking for, but I'd love you to walk us through it so people can understand both the scope of what you identify as the problem and what you see as remedies.
- [26:56]
Lina Khan
Non compete clauses have proliferated across the economy. They started off in the boardroom, but have now expanded to cover janitors, security guards, fast food workers, gardeners, journalists, healthcare workers. A conservative estimate is that as many as one in every five Americans have been covered by a non compete clause. And these clauses can really have a devastating effect on people's lives materially. They can depress income not just for the workers that are directly covered by a non compete, but actually for workers as a whole. The idea being that if a worker is not able to change jobs, there is less opportunity and churn in labor markets as a whole in ways that can deprive even those workers that don't have a non compete from opportunities. And that overall can really have a depressive effect on wages and income. After we put out a proposal to ban non competes, we got 26 comments from people across the country, which was really striking. I mean, people live busy lives. People are not necessarily going to prioritize sitting down and submitting a comment to some obscure federal agency. But it was clear that people felt very strongly about non competes and we heard some devastating stories about just how these had affected people's lives.
- [28:26]
Stephen Dubner
So I have two very basic questions about it. Number one, once you get beyond the top tier employees, right, I don't want my chief blank officer going to a rival firm. I understand that. Or I don't want people with trade secrets leaving my firm and potentially going to a rival firm. Those I understand. But beyond that, all the other people that you just named, what is the reasoning for why a non compete would even be considered worthwhile? And then how can it be legal?
- [28:57]
Lina Khan
The motivation question is a good one. For the businesses that are imposing these non compete clauses, some of the arguments that get made at a high level is that these non competes are in theory necessary to make sure employees are not divulging trade secrets or that employers need these non competes to give them an incentive to train their employees. A lot of those arguments will lose their force entirely when you're talking about certain categories of workers. But even for higher income workers we have trade secrets laws. For the vast majority of American workers, there is no good justification for these non compete clauses.
- [29:38]
Stephen Dubner
So that gets quickly to the second part, which is how did it become legal to enact these non competes so broadly?
- [29:44]
Lina Khan
Well, I would argue, and the FTC argued That it is not legal. We brought some enforcement actions, including one case where you had security guards making close to minimum wage. The security guards were based in Michigan. Under Michigan state law, these non competes were actually illegal. But the firm still had them in place and still tried to enforce them. We had to basically sue to make sure these non competes got dropped. Even in states where these non competes in theory are not enforceable, firms take a shot. Oftentimes workers, their rights are chilled because they may not know that these non competes are not enforceable. And who's going to really want to go up against their employer and risk being thousands of dollars out of money?
- [30:32]
Stephen Dubner
In the case of the security guards, Prudential was the name of that firm.
- [30:35]
Lina Khan
That's right.
- [30:36]
Stephen Dubner
What was the ultimate outcome of that case?
- [30:38]
Lina Khan
So we ended up bringing in enforcement action. We ended up getting an order that required the company to drop its non compete clauses with the vast majority of the security guards. And so thousands of people were freed from non competes.
- [30:52]
Stephen Dubner
So that's a small victory, but the larger effort has been so far a defeat for you. Correct.
- [30:58]
Lina Khan
It's more of a mixed picture. After we finalized the rule, we got three legal challenges. One filed in Texas, one filed in Pennsylvania, and one filed in Florida. Each of those legal challenges came out a slightly different way. The judge in Pennsylvania said the FTC's rule was lawful. The judge in Texas said it was unlawful, and the judge in Florida came out somewhere in between. The ftc, when I was still at the agency, ended up appealing both the case in Texas and Florida. We're going to have to wait to see what happens though. You're right that for the time being, the rule is not in effect. Unfortunately, non competes are still in place right now.
- [31:41]
Stephen Dubner
So one big function of the FTC is plainly policing. But also when it comes to your antitrust activity, an implicit argument is that cracking down on monopolistic behavior, cracking down on non competes also is good for for competition and it's good for the markets. Good markets theoretically benefit a lot of people. Startup firms and employees, consumers. In other words. Competition is seen, at least by economists as win, win, win. So what's your best evidence that your work has actually produced these kinds of victories?
- [32:19]
Lina Khan
I can give you a couple of examples. One is a specific merger that we blocked. This was the Sanofi Maze transaction. Sanofi had a monopoly on a drug for Pompe disease, this really horrible illness that leads to muscles atrophying. Maze was this upstart that was in the process of developing another treatment for Pompe disease. Unlike Sanofique's treatment that required regular IV shots, Maize was working on something that could be taken orally. It had the potential for dramatically improving the lives of Pompe disease patients. The FTC argued that if Sanofi bought out Maize, there was a real risk that Maize's innovative treatments either wouldn't make it to market or wouldn't make it to market as quickly. Because here you have a situation where Sanofi is already enjoying monopoly profits on this drug. We worried that it wouldn't have the incentives to introduce another drug that would cannibalize its existing sales. So we filed a lawsuit seeking to block this acquisition, arguing that it would allow Sanofi to illegally monopolize this area. And the companies ended up walking away from the deal. Maize ended up then partnering with another firm that ended up having as good, if not better, terms for Maze and will actually bring that drug to market even more quickly.
- [33:55]
Stephen Dubner
So it's a Japanese firm?
- [33:56]
Lina Khan
Yeah, that's right. So I think that was proof of concept of the FTC's work getting it right. I think more generally the non competes that ended up being dropped because of the FTC's work, that means there are thousands of workers that are now free to go start their own business or freely switch employers. The mergers that we blocked, including in the context of Nvidia arm, ended up leading to a lot of independent success for both Nvidia and ARM in ways that also has boosted innovation, especially at a critical moment for a lot of these artificial intelligence technologies. We've also filed a whole set of other lawsuits, including one against John Deere for illegally restricting farmers ability to repair their own tractors and agricultural equipment, which is something we heard a lot of concern about from farmers. When they're entirely dependent on John Deere for getting their agricultural equipment fixed. It can both inflate their costs as well as lead to all sorts of devastating delays. We also filed a lawsuit against Pepsi arguing that it was engaging in illegal discrimination in ways that was squeezing independent grocers. We filed a lawsuit against the three big pharmacy benefit managers claiming that the rebating practices practices they have in place have systematically hiked the cost of insulin as well as other drugs. And then we more generally took on these illegal patenting practices where firms would illegally list patents for certain products and components of devices, including things like the plastic cap on an inhaler. Asthma inhalers out of pocket costs have been hundreds of dollars, even though asthma inhalers have been around for decades. Once we called out some of these illegal patenting practices. Three of the four big inhaler manufacturers announced that they would drop the out of pocket costs to $35.
- [35:56]
Stephen Dubner
And what happened to the share prices of those firms?
- [35:59]
Lina Khan
You know, that's a good question. I don't remember right off the bat.
- [36:02]
Stephen Dubner
They didn't go out of business though.
- [36:03]
Lina Khan
No. I think they have a lot of other lucrative lines of revenue.
- [36:07]
Stephen Dubner
Can you talk a bit more about the price of insulin?
- [36:10]
Lina Khan
The FTC's lawsuit was actually about the market as a whole where we found that basically these pharmacy benefit managers engage in what are known as these rebating practices where drug manufacturers have to pay these PBMs or rebate to get their drugs listed on what's known as the formulary. We allege that the way the PBMs have structured this whole system means that the drug companies are incentivized to ultimately raise the cost of insulin rather than compete by lowering it, and that this as a whole is inflating the cost.
- [36:46]
Stephen Dubner
We did a series on private equity consolidation in the pet care industry and we found a lot of problems there for employees and consumers. But we also learned something that seems to apply to a lot of the human healthcare industry. If you look at nursing homes, doctor's offices, dentist's offices, what we heard is that the founders of these offices and companies, when it's time to retire, they might prefer prefer to sell to one of their junior partners. That's what often happened before private equity was around. But now those junior partners have so much debt from medical school or veterinary school or whatever that they can't afford to buy the practice. So the only likely buyer is an outside investor like a private equity firm. The PE firm is satisfying a real need there, but the resulting roll ups or consolidations are often worse for existing employees and worse for consumers. Do you have any thoughts for how that might work differently?
- [37:44]
Lina Khan
It's a really good point and I think highlights how antitrust and competition policy have a really important role to play. But there are all sorts of other economic policy decisions that are going to affect, for example, whether the junior partner even has the ability to make that acquisition that we need to be paying attention to as well. The other thing I'll note is there are all sorts of different types of private equity business models. But it is true that one model has been the leverage buyout where a private equity firm is using the assets of the company they're buying as collateral, loading up that company with a lot of debt. Sometimes there's the 7030 model where the private equity firm is making 30% of the investment and then using the balance sheet of the underlying company and taking on a lot of debt. That can weaken the underlying firm, but also incentivize the private equity owner to make a lot of short term extractions and engineer a lot of short term returns in ways that can undermine the quality of the business as a whole. For example, we got some submissions from ER doctors. Emergency medicine is a place where we've seen a lot of private equity incursion. They mentioned that there are all sorts of financial metrics introduced into their work. I remember hearing from one ER doctor that he was sitting with a parent who had just lost their kid. And this ER doctor having to think that he didn't even have the time to commiserate with this parent because he felt such significant financial pressure to meet this quota.
- [39:22]
Stephen Dubner
If the government is concerned about over consolidation in those kind of spaces, right, Healthcare, whether human, animal, whatever, would it be viable to consider something like low interest loans to junior partners to help keep firms a smaller size rather than succumb to the one possible sellout outcome, which is to a bigger investment firm like private equity?
- [39:46]
Lina Khan
That's a really interesting idea and not something I've heard propose before. I could imagine it could make a difference.
- [39:51]
Stephen Dubner
Let's talk for a minute about the merger guidelines released by the FTC under your watch. Just start with the process, maybe the idea or the theory and then the drafting. What were you hoping to accomplish and why did you think it was important?
- [40:05]
Lina Khan
The merger guidelines can sound like this arcane document, but the core of it is a roadmap for how enforcers review and assess mergers that are before them. There have been guidelines going back to 1968 and periodically these have been updated. We undertook a process starting in late 20 to revise these merger guidelines with a couple of goals in mind. First was wanting to make sure that these guidelines were actually reflecting the law. We had seen that in some prior instances, enforcers had actually handicapped themselves and written guidelines with very cramped or sometimes just inaccurate expressions of what the law really was, which we thought was not being faithful to Congress or the courts. We also wanted to make sure these guidelines were up to date and reflecting the realities of the 21st century economy. We wanted to make sure they were addressing things like digital markets and platforms. We wanted to make sure they were addressing labor markets, which had been a big blind spot in the past, and issues like serial acquisitions. And then we wanted to make sure that we were hearing from a broad set of market participants. Antitrust in recent decades has been quite insular. You'll hear from very smart and accomplished experts, but the broader public as a whole has often been neglected. We wanted to change that and ended up getting thousands upon thousands of comments from the public. A lot of healthcare workers participated, including doctors, nurses, people who had seen their field and their practice change based on increasing consolidation. We heard from farmers, we heard from musicians, heard from teachers, ordinary Americans who don't spend their days practicing antitrust law, but whose life has shown them that whether markets are extremely consolidated and monopolized, or whether they are open and competitive makes a real difference.
- [42:14]
Stephen Dubner
What about from the industry side? The draft of the merger guidelines was open to them as well. It sounds like you're saying most of the public sentiment was saying, yes, we would like, like stronger guidelines. What about from industry, though?
- [42:28]
Lina Khan
Industry spans a broad set of market actors. We heard from a lot of small businesses, including independent pharmacists, independent grocers. We heard a lot from entrepreneurs and startups and founders who have seen that when you have these big gatekeepers, that can shut them out of the market, that can have real problems. So even within industry and the business community, we heard a lot of interest in favor of stronger antitrust. Of course, we did also hear from existing monopolists and incumbents and dominant firms who would prefer that antitrust enforcement be quite weak.
- [43:04]
Stephen Dubner
I assume that the goal of these merger guidelines is to act as a deterrent against some mergers that might be seen later as anti competitive. Assuming that is true, how do you measure the effect of deterrence?
- [43:18]
Lina Khan
The goal of the guidelines is really to provide clarity to the public about how it is that enforcers will look at mergers and analyze them. On the deterrence question, of course, as a law enforcer, you don't want illegal behavior to occur in the first instance. So if through that type of guidance, you are deterring illegal mergers, that is a net good. In terms of how you measure deterrence, it's a good question. I don't think it's a precise science, but over the years when I was serving at the ftc, we got some data points, like what senior dealmakers would be saying around how several years ago when they were counseling clients, they wouldn't really talk about antitrust until the very, very end of the discussion. Whereas over the last couple of years, antitrust was up front and center right at the beginning. We also heard from dealmakers, senior executives, about how certain deals that were initially being discussed ended up not being proposed because there was a recognition that the legal risk was too high. We also saw deals where once they were proposed and the FTC started investigating, the firms ended up abandoning. There was a practice in the past where firms sometimes recognized that there was significant legal risk, but would kind of roll the dice and say, well, maybe enforcers will look the other way or maybe they'll miss it. Once we started taking a closer look and a more stringent approach, some of those deals abandoned as well.
- [44:56]
Stephen Dubner
So if you read the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, these merger guidelines are an attack on the free markets. There's been a lot of criticism on that front. Marc Andreessen, the very prominent venture capitalist, he said when Trump was reelected, it was like, quote, getting a boot off the throat for people like him, for people in the tech and business sectors, I gather that you're the person wearing that boot. In the Andreessen comment, what we heard.
- [45:25]
Lina Khan
From startups and founders was that they wanted a chance to compete. When you have markets where the only option is to be bought up, that's not giving founders the opportunity to really scale organically. I think the story is a bit more textured here.
- [45:42]
Stephen Dubner
We've learned recently that the merger guidelines put out on your watch will be retained by the Trump administration. Are you surprised by that?
- [45:51]
Lina Khan
I personally am not that surprised, in part because issues around antitrust and anti monopoly have had a strong bipartisan current in recent years. Some of the initial lawsuits that were filed against large technology companies, including Facebook and Google, Google actually were initiated during the first Trump administration.
- [46:12]
Stephen Dubner
I know JD Vance is a fan of yours. He recently said, I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job. Considering how much Biden administration work has already been undone by the Trump administration. I wonder what it feels like for you to have one of your signature policies continue. Undoubtedly under Trump.
- [46:36]
Lina Khan
It's too early to say what the big picture is going to look like in terms of whether we're going to continue to see strong enforcement. Of course, seeing other law enforcers be dismantled, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is quite troubling. But of course, the fact that at this stage, it's clear there is bipartisan support for strong merger guidelines that's going to protect more Americans from consolidation and monopolization. I think we can have some cautious optimism on that small front, even as we're going to have to wait and see what happens.
- [47:11]
Stephen Dubner
More generally, you once wrote that your hobbies include, quote, trying to find the most obscure industry where I can find consolidation. Can you name Some industries that we may not think of as heavily consolidated but are.
- [47:27]
Lina Khan
That's a good question. One industry that I actually came to learn about, it was a market for basically ugly produce. I don't know how else to put it. Produce that is seen as not being attractive enough for supermarket shelves, and then it gets sent off to certain other markets. And I remember there was a merger being reviewed that was focused on that market that actually was more consolidated than I expected.
- [47:55]
Stephen Dubner
Lina Khan's example example here. A consolidated market in ugly produce points to a larger philosophical argument about how the US economy should work. Just about every economist agrees that consolidation above a certain level can be a big problem. The history of our economy includes a long line of creators and innovators, operators and aggregators who, through their grit and savvy, cornered markets or created monopolies. Some of these companies were intensely exploitative, but they were also helping create what would become perhaps the most dynamic economy in the history of the world. And this dynamic capitalism has helped produce huge gains for many people over the years. It's hardly perfect. Everybody knows that. And over consolidation is one big flaw. But how do you dampen the appetite for domination while keeping alive the incentives to create? How do you encourage people to keep risking their time and money and brainpower if they're punished for winning too big? If someone comes up with a clever idea like buying up ugly produce and building a market around it, and they come to dominate that market, is is that reason alone to break them up? That is essentially the same question Google is facing in court right now. So where is the appropriate middle ground? After the break, we will try to find it.
- [49:27]
Lina Khan
Constructive engagement is always valuable, but you also have to be able to separate that from some of the hysteria.
- [49:35]
Stephen Dubner
I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Rates will rise or fall. Inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one Cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning Learning at netsuite.com freak. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com freak netsuite.com freak. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's brown breakfast comes first. Lemonade Sings a Pet Insurance Customer Review my new puppy swallow. I was paid back quickly and efficiently. Everyone was so nice. Get this pet insurance and get a'@lemonade.com Pet Lina Khan had plenty of critics during her tenure as FTC chair from a variety of ideological camps. Some conservatives accused accused her of overreach. Some liberals said she was more bark than bite. But there is one thing about her that just about everyone agrees on. She is a serious person who eats, sleeps and breathes antitrust reform. She has been fixated on corporate power since she was at least a high school sophomore. In 2004, she wrote an article for her school newspaper about a nearby Starbucks that wouldn't allow students to congregate. The New York Times followed up her article with one of their own called A Tempest in a Coffee Shop. I asked Khan if she could identify where this crusading spirit of hers comes from.
- [52:28]
Lina Khan
I think from a young age I was really struck by journalists and the efforts that they undertake to hold power to account both powerful corporations as well as powerful actors in government. Especially growing up after September 11th and seeing the incredible important role that journalists were playing then really made a big impression on me.
- [52:48]
Stephen Dubner
You have been praised in some quarters for your work at the ftc, but also attacked, and I would argue the attacks were much more intense than is typical for the FTC chair. How do you manage the criticism? Do you try to seek out criticism that has value and try to learn from it and sort that out from the rest? That's just noise. Do you not pay attention to any of it?
- [53:11]
Lina Khan
You know, I'm a public servant. I serve the public. So it's absolutely important for me to be soliciting and getting feedback and input and understanding what the public response is. But of course you need to place more value on feedback and input that is actually tethered to reality and tethered to facts. Good faith, constructive engagement is always valuable, but you also have to be able to separate that from the hysteria.
- [53:38]
Stephen Dubner
Where does the Wall Street Journal editorial page sit on the tethered to fact spectrum?
- [53:45]
Lina Khan
I was surprised sometimes by just the factual errors. I think it does go back to this basic issue of economic reality versus theoretical assumptions that are just out of Date.
- [53:56]
Stephen Dubner
Although I will say this one critic of yours, this is an academic who doesn't like your work very much. He works in the antitrust space. He made the argument that your work is almost universally in his. Ideological and not empirical. How would you respond to that?
- [54:12]
Lina Khan
I think the fact that this work has gotten so much traction so quickly was entirely because it was on the side of reality. The antitrust enforcement model that had been followed for 40 years had failed to keep markets open and fair and competitive. And so it was really empiricism that drove this work forward.
- [54:36]
Stephen Dubner
What kind of a boss are you? I'm told you're not the let's all grab a beer after work kind of boss.
- [54:43]
Lina Khan
Any particular aspect of that that you're interested in?
- [54:46]
Stephen Dubner
Some people complained about your leadership style. People said there was low morale at the FTC during your tenure. There were a lot of resignations. I'm also aware that when you're a political appointee, coming into an agency like this and you try to do things quite differently, there's going to be friction. Looking back now, after four years, if you could start again, would you approach your management style any differently?
- [55:08]
Lina Khan
Well, let me say, first of all, the FTC is really fortunate to have extraordinarily hardworking, talented career civil servants that are being pitted up against some of the largest, most powerful companies in our country. My hat's off to them in terms of the grit and commitment that they bring every day. Stepping back, back. My arrival, understandably, I think, was received by some as some type of indictment of the agency. I had been, on the outside, a critic of the ftc, arguing that both the FTC and the DOJ had gotten things wrong, had taken decisions that ended up resulting in real harm to the American people. Those criticisms were really directed at political leadership, the people that are calling the shots. Understandably, there was some questioning about what my criticisms were really about. This was also a moment where you had the President say that the last 40 years of competition policy had gone astray. So these are people who were saying, look, I've been doing my job every day as a dedicated civil servant, and now I'm being told that I've been doing it all wrong.
- [56:17]
Stephen Dubner
It sounds as though you're coming into an agency that had operated under a sort of political ideology, a consistent political ideology, for, let's call it 40 years. Does an agency like, like that therefore attract civil servants who jibe with that ideology? In other words, did you take over an agency that was staffed quite robustly by a bunch of people who really liked the Reagan and the Bork and the Chicago school of thinking?
- [56:43]
Lina Khan
Well, there are all sorts of different factors that drive people to public service. For the most part, they want to serve their fellow Americans. It was more about the antitrust enterprise as a whole. The ways that the law had drifted, what type of analysis the law was privileging. Rather than any specific person or groups of people.
- [57:05]
Stephen Dubner
Were there particular quadrants of the FTC that you bulked up on or tried to slim down?
- [57:10]
Lina Khan
We wanted, first of all, just to make sure we had the teams that we needed to pursue some of these litigations. I mean, the agency was actually smaller than it had been in the 1970s, especially when we got a budget increase. We did hire more people, including very talented litigators. We also wanted to make sure that the way we were looking at markets was actually reflecting the reality on the ground. And that meant broadening the type of skill sets that we had. We were not just hiring Industrial Organization economists, but also labor economists, accountants, people who had slightly different skills, skill sets that would be able to give us a more 360 view. We also started a new office of technologists wanting to make sure that we had data scientists and data engineers and AI experts. Especially as more and more markets digitize. We need people who can sit alongside the economists and the lawyers and explain how are these algorithms actually working?
- [58:15]
Stephen Dubner
What share of this new wave of FTC employees would you say will still be there a month or a year from now?
- [58:22]
Lina Khan
It's hard to know. Obviously, across government there's a lot of disruptive efforts right now that are resulting in a lot of people being laid off and let go. So it's too early to say. I will say the new administration has talked a lot about the importance of making sure our technology markets and digital markets are open and fair and competitive. If you are gutting the FTC by eliminating technologists and eliminating the litigating teams that are supposed to be pursuing these cases, that's gonna really handicap your ability.
- [58:58]
Stephen Dubner
What was your favorite thing about working in government?
- [59:02]
Lina Khan
I really loved getting to hear from people who had an issue that they thought the FTC should be focusing on. I had the chance to do a lot of listening sessions across the country. I went to Ames, Iowa to hear from farmers that were worried about this particular fertilizer merger. Heard from pharmacists in Kansas City. Those types of engagements were really important in keeping me focused and underscoring the ways that seemingly arcane agencies like the FTC have a lot of opportunity to make a real difference in people's lives.
- [59:37]
Stephen Dubner
What are some of your least favorite things about working in government?
- [59:40]
Lina Khan
Sometimes it can take longer to get things done than is optimal. We certainly streamline certain processes and tried to eliminate red tape, but I think there's just more of that could be done. Of course there's a lot of baked in pushback from monopolists and dominant firms.
- [59:58]
Stephen Dubner
I'm curious to know your thoughts on the choice of Kamala Harris as the candidate with no outside competition after Biden withdrew. I mean, doesn't it feel that that was handled in a similar way to some of the anti competitive cronyism that you're fighting?
- [60:13]
Lina Khan
I have zero comparative advantage in terms of weighing in on this. I'm kind of a policy nerd, but I don't really have much to add when it comes to some of the political analysis.
- [60:24]
Stephen Dubner
I don't know if you're familiar with the work of the political scientist Yuen Yuan Ong. She's at Johns Hopkins and she studies political corruption. She makes the argument that countries like China and Russia have significant levels of corruption in forms that to an American seem patently illegal. Suitcases full of cash and no bid contracts, things like that. But she argues that political corruption in the US is also also very significant. It's just that it's essentially legal corruption in the form of corporate capture of government. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on corporate capture and how serious you think that problem is.
- [61:02]
Lina Khan
Americans certainly worry that government is not always serving their best interests because large corporations have too much influence. We see that concern expressed in all sorts of ways, including concern about the role of money in elections. But I think there are all sorts of subtle ways beyond just how much money large and wealthy entities can pour into elections. Intellectual capture can occur. We see it through a lot of the funding of research. And then what kinds of research is even made available to regulators and enforcers? There can be all sorts of ways that the information environment in which enforcers and regulators are operating is already skewed by those well heeled interests.
- [61:55]
Stephen Dubner
So Lena, your life has already had this amazing arc with a lot of accomplishment and drama. It feels like enough to write a book about maybe an opera. But you're still very young, so let's assume that your life to date is act one of that opera. What do you want the second and third acts to look like?
- [62:16]
Lina Khan
I'm still just processing the last few years. I ended my government service at the end of January, so so really just focused on the near term for now. But I care deeply about wanting to make sure that markets in America are open and fair and competitive. This is important for people materially, but these issues also go to the core values of our country. The lawmakers who initially passed the antitrust laws viewed them as being a key safeguard against the concentration of power that in the same way we needed checks and balances in our government to protect against the exercise of arbitrary power. There was a view that the antitrust and anti monopoly laws would play a similar role in our economic and commercial sphere. So I view the stakes here as being enormous, as being existential for our country. And I'm really committed to continuing to work on these issues and whatever opportunities I have.
- [63:16]
Stephen Dubner
I understand you're back teaching at Columbia now, at least for this semester, is that right?
- [63:20]
Lina Khan
Yeah, exactly. I'd been on leave and I'm back at the law school.
- [63:23]
Stephen Dubner
Do you have any concrete items on your wish list? Does policy and politics remain toward the top of that list or something quite.
- [63:31]
Lina Khan
Different, perhaps for now just continuing to build out this work. There is a lot of enthusiasm and interest among law students and young people in general. Of course, it was a great honor to serve. And if there was another opportunity, that's of course something I would be open to.
- [63:48]
Stephen Dubner
If President Trump had asked you to stay on, I realize that may sound unlikely to a lot of people hearing this, but the more they know about you and your work and how the Trump administration thinks about your work, it's actually maybe not so unlikely. But would you have stayed under Trump?
- [64:01]
Lina Khan
I mean, you know, that was a hypothetical, but my term ended up expiring in September. President Trump ended up nominating somebody new to fill my seat. So I had a great time getting to work alongside Andrew Ferguson when he was a commissioner and I was chair. And I do think it's important for people to serve. And the FTC historically has had bipartisan commissioners that have continued to serve across administrations.
- [64:28]
Stephen Dubner
I see that Bernie Sanders has embarked on what he calls a national tour to fight oligarchy. He's drawing pretty big crowds, a lot of enthusiasm. I'm curious if he has asked you to put in an appearance and if you would, if you were asked.
- [64:43]
Lina Khan
I'm a great admirer of Senator Sanders. He was a strong supporter of the FTC's work. There's a real concern that very well heeled interests in this country are wielding enormous, not just economic power, but political power. And the antitrust and anti monopoly laws were supposed to be a bulwark against that. I leave it to the elected officials to do what they do best. But of course I'm happy to support that work however I can.
- [65:08]
Stephen Dubner
When I hear you mention Ames, Iowa, I cannot help but think that perhaps you might have aspirations of being elected to office one day. Is that the case? No, that's a flat no.
- [65:20]
Lina Khan
No. I really enjoyed being a bureaucrat.
- [65:27]
Stephen Dubner
It's always good to speak with someone who enjoys being a bureaucrat. I'd like to thank Lina Khan for the good conversation today. I learned a lot. I hope you did too. Let us know what you are thinking. Our email is radioeeconomics.com Coming up next time on the show, another one on one conversation around another set of important government functions. But this person is not embraced by politicians on both sides. My nonpartisan approach is to be critical of everybody in Washington. Do you have any Florida friends? No, not really. Jessica Riedel has two main messages. Number one, the federal debt crisis is even worse than you think and few politicians have the courage to do anything about it. And number two, just about everything you know about US Tax policy is wrong. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. Also@freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs with help from Zach Lipinski. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abuaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Ripley, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarz, Morgan Levy, Neal Carruth, and Sarah Lilly. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening. I know you're married and have a young kid. Are they grateful that you're no longer at the white hot center of Anti Monopoly?
- [67:17]
Lina Khan
I would think so, yes. Less Multitasking while making Dinner Broccoli Breakfast the Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything Stitcher.
- [67:39]
Stephen Dubner
The Quarter Pounder with cheese had many great things. Maple flavored griddle cakes. Is it one of them? McDonald's breakfast comes first. Hey there, I'm Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio. If you love the podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio Network, I want to tell you about a way you can get even more from us to hear our shows without ads and get exclusive access to Freakonomics Radio bonus episodes. Please subscribe to seriously XM podcasts plus on Apple Podcasts or sign up at siriusxm.com podcasts plus start a free trial today.