Wi still be a holiday. But instead of columbus day, it will be for ripping on each other and tearing each other down, and we will call it Indigenous Peoples day. For, perhaps, if we all do it at the same time, we wont be so indigenous the rest of the year. And since this is the second monday of october, letall embrace the new meaning of the holiday starting right now. Do you even know what indigenous means, you frickin idiot . Thats the spirit, dave come on everybody, lets just all be totally indigenous come on who the hell let this guy talk to the School Counsel . Good one, kurt. Your wifea whore. Come on, eveone Indigenous Peoples day let woman shut up, and get off the podium okay. I will in a second, fatso. All right. Who else . Come on get it out oyour system happy Indigenous Peoples day, everyone. Suck my asshole. Nnouncer from th most trted jonalistat comedy central. Itsmerica only urce f thiss heai swith your host, jon stewart [cheers and applause] [cheers and alause] on he [cheers and plause] jon y, eveone welcome to the daily show weve got one for you tonight. Unbelievable. The head of the ftc, lina khan. Khan its going to be unbeevable. But first, as many of you are aware, the news has been pretty bleak recently. The past two, three. Hundred years. Listen, but this weeke, there was one story that was so disturbing, so dark, even the news couldnt handl. In r editial discussio is morning, weere asd not videbecause of itsiolentnds sturbing nature. Ideo, ich we are intentionally choosing not to show you. Were not going to show because of how dturbing it is. I was extrely disturbedo see this. Horrible, horrible, violent imagery. Imagery. And dehumanizing were only going to show you a clip of this briefly. A right thas enough, lets take it down. Jon i didnt get to see it at all this has got to be devastating. News channels show images from ukraine, from gaza, from natural disasters. They get through them dispassionately. I cant imagine how devastating this footage must be. Fmer prident donald tmp shared video, this one, on h uth soal accnt fturing imagef presint joeiden hogtied on t back a picp truck. [audience reacts] [laughter] jon that thats what was so disturbing and dehumanizing that you wouldnt show it on television . An airbrushed biden decal on the ba of a truck . Arent you the same networks that show reruns of 11 every year . I mean, i dont think its great that tmp is posting things like this, but its not like people really think joe biden was tied uin the back of that truck. Its a doctored image but its plastered on the tailga of the pickup truck, so if youre driving behind it, it would appear as if j biden were actuallrestrained on the vehicles flatd. [laughter] jon ifou think thats really joe biden tied up o the ck of the pickup truck, i dont know that you have the mental acuity to beperating a but ifou do think that, i should probably also explain to you that trucks also dont actually have testicles. Its just a novelty item. [applause] its nots though when an f150 and a silverado love each other very much, they [bleep]nd get one of these. [laughter] what is going on . Now there is technologout in the world that really does blur the line between reality a tailgatert. But those are mostl aigenerated. Your fake joe den robocall that tls New Hampshire voters not to vote. Your chicago mayoral candida your donald trump dropping by the neighborhood for a sop hang. Look how comfortable he seems. And as agets better and better, its only going to make it more fficult to separate fact from fiction, which could be terrifying. Luckily, the people in charge of ai have told us that just like with the internet and social med, its actually going to make everythinguch better this has the potential to make life much better. I think its hontly a layup. I hate to sound like a utopic tech bro here, but the increase inualityf life that ai can deliver is extraordinary. Ai is the most profound Technology Humanity is working on, more profound than fire or electricity. Jon yeah su a [bleep], fire thats right,ou heard me you heard me, fire [applause] oh, im sorry, do i need to turn that up . Suck a [bleep] [bleep]fire ohwhat are you giggling at, electricit on the other side, im sure ai is good, but fire good . How so . Hey cahelp us solve very hard scientific problems that humans are not capable of solving themselves. Addressing Climate Change will not be particularly difficult for a system like that. The potential for ai to help scientists cure, prevent, and manage all diseases in this century. Jon i completely trust you and your enormously wide eyes and very human cadence. But benefit of the doubt, ts can cure diseases and solve Climate Change . What are we using it for now . Jarvis knows when to make me breakfast. Your toast is ready. All right. Jon are you out of your [bleep] mind . See, heres the thing, toast, i can make. I can make toast. It mig be the only technology we have that works prettmuch every time. Ill tell you at, why dont you get to work on curing the diseases and the Climate Change, and well hold down the fort on toast. [cheers and applause] of course, we have, as a society, we have beethrough technological advances befor and they all promise a utopian life without ddgery, and the reality is, they com for our jobs. So want your assurance that ai isnt remong the human from the loop. This is not about rlacing the human in the loop. In fact, its about empowering the human. Its an assistant . Its an assistant. Jon what are all getting assistants . Its an assistant ai works for you night and day, tirelessly, and all you have to do is remember their birthday thats all you had to do but i get it, its an assistant. Its about productivity, and ths good for all of us, yes . Although, they do let the al truth slip out every now and again. There will be overall displacement in the lar market. You can get the same work done with fewer people. Thats just the nature of productivity. Sound good. T that doesnt same work done with fewer people. Not a math guy, but i think fewer means less, yes . So ai can cureiseases and solve Climate Change, but thats not exactly wh companies are going to be using it for, are they . So this is like productivity without the tax of more people. Jon without e tax of more people . Ah, the peopleax. Formerly referred to as employees. But you know, the promise of ai versus the reality of ai, its not quite crystal ear in my mind yet how that will work out for workers. Do youave anyone who wants to lay this out more bluntly . Perhapwhile auditioning to be a bond villain from hi mountaintop lair . Left completely to their own devices and the market, these are fundamtally laborreplacing tools. Us tools . Id that guy just call but hes actually warning us is there anyone who might say the same thing as this fella but lks at losing employees as a featuref ai and not a bug . The ceo of a company that laid off 90 of their Customer Support staff after arguing that ai is kinda the reason. Why did you do this . Iteemed a little brutal. Its not. I think, like, its brutal if you think, le, as a human. Jon ai its brutal if you think, like,s a human. Its not the catchie ad slogan ive ever heard. So while we wait for this thing toure our diseases and solve clime change, its replacing us in the rkforce. Not in the future, butight now. So what exactly are we suppod to be doing for work . I think well need new types of jobs to help us embed ai and maintain ai in the workplace. Prompt engineers. Theyre basically people who learn how to use ai systems and, in effect, how to program them. Who wouldve thought that there will be a prompt engineer . Jon right. Prompt engineer i think you me types question guy. And by the way, if theres any job that can be easily replaced by ai, its types queion guy. This is some shit. You got going here. Ai modelhave hoovered up the entire sum of the human accomplished over thousands of years and now we just hand it f to be their prompt engiers . And by the way, youre not fooling anyone by adding the word gineer. Ure not the types question guy,oure the vice presidt of question input its true. It is like a janitor is in doctor of moing. This whole ai thing is aait and switch youre acting like youre helping us. Assistant s supposed to be my now im making ai [bleep] toast im jarvis but guess what [cheers and applause no, you listen to me [cheers and applause] i got news for you, ai. Im not siri, youre siri siri, while i have your atteion, let me ask you a sure, jon, but first, could yorun and fetch me some lithium cadmium . Jon ah, sure [bleep] i didnt want toave to do this, aibut its pretty clear with a technology this powerful, like nuclear pow and atomic weapons, im going to have to ple a little call to my good pals in the united stas government. Perhaps even the house of representatives the senate and they are about to open up a n of whas ai n . Do you understand what ai do . Understanding. An elementary i got a lot to learn about whats going on. Very frkly, is new terrain and unchartered territory. Do we have the knowledge set here to do it . No he short answer iso. The long answe is hell no. [laughter and applause] jon and the longest answer is ho the e to the ll to the no hell, i dont know how to use an answering machine [giggles]oo. Look, inot against progress. But lets look to our history to see how wve dealt with previous economic disruptions. We can retrain workers from one generation and create jobs for the next. Retrain workers who do lose their jobs or even better jobs in the future. Retrained in order to be productive workers. Upskill america to help workers of all ages. Train and retrain workers for new jobs. Ive me a break. Anybodyho could throw coal into aurnacean learn how to progm, for god sakes. [laughter] jon and i will fight every one of you jackholes who says differt but ths the game whether its globalization or instrialization or now artificial intelligence, the way of life that you are acctomed to is no match for the promise of more prits and new markets. Which soundsrutal, if youre a human. But at least those other disruptions took place over a century or decades. Ai is going toe ready to take over by thursday. And once that happens, wh the [bleep] is there left for the rest of us to do . Time is not a terrible thing. Ai freeing us up to think about things at a higher level is going to help. Its going to, you know, give us our time back. Well be able to express ourselves in new creative ways. Jon you know, hes right. Ive been thinking about this all right. Its not joblessness, it self actualizg me. Itll give me more time toe. Explore my passion im an aging suburbadad, ill learn to play the drums you know, mic ta, ta, tee tee, ta. Music is what makes us human when we come back, lina khan will be joining me on the ow, dont go away. [cheers and applause] with so many choices on booking. Com there are so many tina feys i could be. So i hired body doubles to help me out. Splurgy tina loves a hotel near rodeo drive. Oh tina wild tina booked a farm stay to ride this horse. 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The lexus take on luxury. Take it wherever you go. Live up to it. The allnew gx. [cheers and applause] jon welcome back to the daily show. My guest tonight runs one of the main Government Agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust in america and protecting consumers. Please welcome the Program Federal trade commission chair, lina khan [cheers and applause] hello hi jon lovely to see you. You run the federal trade commission. Thats right. Jon the whole shebang. And you are in charge of it is protecting americans from monopolistic company practices, but also dealing with pricing and things like that, protecting consumers. Thats right. The short of it is, we want to make sure that the American Public is not getting bullied or coerced in the marketplace or tricked. So we enforce the nations antitrust and Consumer Protection laws. [applause] jon please [cheers and applause] i just want to make that clear right away. You are not buoyed or tricked into applauding, no . Dont want to be accused of monopolistic. How much pressure do these companies exert on the federal trade commission . In other words, how much do they fight whatever regulation you are trying to put into place to keep them from becoming monopolies or from these types of Business Practices . Well, look, monopolies are not fans of enforcing the antimonopoly laws. And so that type of pushback is baked in. But we have a fantastic team. We are a small agency. But we are mighty and we played our strengths, being entrepreneurial, being strategic, and getting real wins for the american people. Jon what are the companies so these are separate things. Monopolies, the way i viewed it, oh, that is only one company. Dont we have all of appellees in the country . Arent there companies, the Entertainment Industry is controlled by six companies. Is that considered not a monopoly but a problem . Look, we have really focused on how our Companies Behaving . Are they behaving in ways that suggest they can harm their customers, harm their suppliers, harm their workers come and get away with it . And that type of too big to care type of approach really what signals that a company has monopoly power, because they can start mistreating you, but they know you are stuck. Jon and what will be the metrics of that . How would you judge that . I know that you have sued amazon. Thats right. Jon and that is for those practices. [cheers and applause] so our lawsuit does allege that amazon is a monopoly, that they hate maintain that monopoly through illegal practices. There are a variety of ways that you can show a company as a monopoly and has monopoly power. One is, you can try to figure out what is the exact boundary of the market, what is the market share. But again, the most direct way is to look at how is the company behaving . And as we lay out in our complaint, amazon is now able to get away with harming its customers. So just to give you a few examples come over the last few years, they have litter their search results page with junk ads. Ads that internally executives realize are irrelevant and unhelpful to consumers, but they can just do it and it nets them billions of dollars in money. Or they have also been steadily hiking the fees that Small Businesses have to pay to sell through amazon, and so now some Small Businesses have to pay one out of every 2 to amazon. Its basically a 50 monopoly tax. Jon wow. Those are just some of the behaviors that we. 2 to note that this company has monopoly power. Jon is there anything in the companys leader that also suggests that . For instance, if you were to go from being sort of a nerdy dude who sold books out of a garage, into, lets say, a jacked lex luthor type, does that also suggest either monopolistic practices or some type of injections . You know, we have and try to make those arguments in court. But it would be interesting to see how a judge would respond. Jon i think quite favorably. [laughs] jon how many lawyers for instance, what are you up against . Youve got government lawyers, i am assuming youve got a pretty good cadre. Lets say you are going against amazon. How many lawyers today have . If they have monopoly money, they can buy as many lawyers as they want. The ftc is around 1200 employees. But when we are going up against some of these monopolistic companies, they can out match has come out on us, sometimes 110, just if you are looking at lawyers, if you are adding paralegals and support jon you are looking at lawyers, they outnumber you 10 1 . Sometimes they do. We have lawsuits against how much of the companies and just in terms of sheer resources that they can pour into the litigation, we are pretty outgunned. But not outmatched, right . This is where it comes to playing to your strengths, being entrepreneurial jon this is not about getting a fine. This is not about going after amazon and saying because this is what the sec does. The sec, i think, is overmatched as a government agency. You dont have to comment on that but just nod your head. Utterly overmatched. So they go after groups and then they cant really prove it in court so they are like, how about this . You give us a cut of your profit and we will all be done here. How do you handle that with amazon . Its not just about a fine. Thats right. I think weve seen over the last couple of decades, we have seen how businesses can treat fines just as a cost of doing business. Jon right. We need to make sure that we are actually deterring illegal behavior, and so that can mean naming individual executives. We in our jon oh, snap you just did not go there [cheers and applause] i like that so have you had success with this . We have had success with this. I mean, we had a lawsuit against Martin Shkreli a couple of years ago. Jon all of a sudden turned into a Pro Wrestling match here. And he went to jail . Do you have to refer things to the doj or do you have an enforcement arm . You are right. We dont have criminal authority. But the remedy we were able to get against him was to effectively ban him from doing business in the pharmaceutical industry. [cheers and applause] jon now i imagine the practice that he did in the pharmaceutical industry, which was taking a lifesaving drug and jacking the price up i dont know how many thousands of percent he did something crazy, right . How do you keep that as a normal practice of the pharmaceutical industry . I mean, are they colluding as a group to keep prices high . Why are we having so much trouble with them and Prescription Drug prices . Look, there are a whole set of reasons why, for too many americans, drugs are unaffordable. I mean, i hear weekly, monthly about American Families who are having to ration lifesaving drugs. Jon absolutely. And shortages of those drugs. Shortages of those drugs. There can be all sorts of tricks and tricks and the law monopolistic behavior that is leading to that. Just to give you one example, inhalers, theyve been around for decades, but they still cost hundreds of dollars. So our staff took a close look and we realized that some of the patents that had been listed for these inhalers were improper. They were bogus. And so we sent hundreds of warning letters around these patents and in the last few weeks, we have seen companies delist these patents and three out of the four major manufacturers have now said, within a couple of months, they are going to cap how much americans pay to just 35. [cheers and applause] jon so is their game, like see you being entrepreneurial, is their game, we are going to see how far we can push this and get away with this and do these Different Things in the hopes that we dont run up against an entrepreneurial or crafty ftc . Are they waiting you out . Look, it is possible. But that is why you need to think about tactics that are going to be around deterrence, so one big area of focus for us is, understanding, what is the root cause of these problems . Lets understand, who is the mafia boss here . Rather than just going after the foot soldiers. Jon right. I think there is probably a biblical sin in there that is probably the root cause of the whole thing. But i want to talk about the tech companies. Because they are the new oligarchs, it would seem. They are the companies that and you see this especially in europe, where they are find considerable amounts of money for monopolistic practices or apple just had to pay an enormous vine, microsoft has always been found guilty of certain monopolistic practices when it comes along. How do you handle enforcement for these new, incredibly consolidated, and enormous oligarchies . So we have a lawsuit against amazon. We have another one against facebook. Jon what is the one against facebook . So that one was filed before i arrived at the agency but basically it alleges that facebook, what i was watching the transition from desktop to mobile, it realized it really couldnt survive in mobile. And so it ended up buying out instagram and whatsapp in the lawsuit alleges that those acquisitions were anticompetitive. That they violated the antitrust laws. Instead of competing organically, facebook instead bought its way to maintaining its monopoly. Jon why is that considered monopolistic . Wouldnt they say, that is a sign of our success . We are so successful, we have extra money and with that extra money can we make bets on Certain Companies and we turn those into successes . One key tenant of the antimonopoly laws is that you cant go out and buy one of your biggest competitors. Jon you are not allowed to do that . You are not allowed to do that, in fact. Jon can i tell you something crazy . I had put in an offer for last last week tonight. I had come out [applause] i will tell you something, and because it is john oliver, i offered to him in doubloons, is that is what british people use . Obviously didnt take it. You have to make the decision of whether or not they are cornering the market. They used to call it cornering the market. But couldnt you say, like, apple, microsoft, they are kind of working together to corner markets . No . So look, we are investigating to understand why there are some of the investments and partnerships that they are entering into right now in the ai space may, in fact, but not be giving them undue influence or giving them special privileges, if we get any hints that there is actual collusion happening in the marketplace, we take that extraordinarily seriously and wont hesitate to take action. One trend that we are especially concerned about is the way that algorithms may be facilitating pricefixing. And so if you have a whole bunch of competitors in a market, be it hotels, be at casinos, and they all decide they are going to outsource their pricing decision to the same algorithm, they may in effect to be fixing their prices even if they are not, you know, getting in the back room and making secret deals. Jon that would be like if the hotel says, you can get us on expedia or you can get us on kayak or but all of those companies are using the same algorithm . Would that mean that it flattens those prices and you are not getting the competitive advantage that you might get from those 1015 apps that are searching for the Cheapest Hotel rooms . Is that the idea . Thats right. You may collectively see inflated prices because all of these companies are using the same algorithm, they are inputting the same data, and that algorithm is, and effect, allowing them to collectively raise their prices, so americans are having to pay more. Jon its not just paying more. If you look at a company le walmart, where you say, they came into areas and they dominated all the competition. They didnt buy up the momandpop shots because they had access to cheap labor and overseas goods and those types of things, they could undersell them and put them all out of business. And even at that moment, they might not raise their prices but boy, could they. And boy, could they exert their influence on supply chains and boy, could they depress wages and make sure that people, even if they are working long hours, still have to have social assistance. It is not something that you could go after . Look, monopolies harm americans and a whole bunch of ways. You are absolutely right, that its not just higher prices. Jon yes. It can be lower wages, it can be suppliers getting muscled out of the market or seeing their own payments dropped. It can also be shortages. I mean, weve seen over the last few years jon sure, baby formula baby formula, iv bags jon adderall. Adderall. Basic forms [laughter and applause] jon i see the audience has no use for baby formula. [laughter] but has an interesting predilection. What do you do in that instance . So look, we want to understand, are there dominant players here that are using their muscle to coerce in ways that is contributing to shortages . We have also seen historically, when you concentrate production, that concentrates risk. And so a single