Hello and welcome to the first edition of the Readback podcast from Punch Bowl News.

I'm your host, Max Cohen.

I'm a congressional reporter here at Punch Bowl News, and I'm very excited to be joined by our tech policy reporter, Ben Brody, for our very first edition.

We're going to be talking about his story this week,

which you can read on Wednesday and in the readback edition this morning about Lena Khan

hitting the road. Ben, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me.

It's so exciting that it's the inaugural podcast. I know it's great to have a new reporter on.

Of course, you just joined us, and we're very excited.

You've already hit the ground running with some great additions.

And let's start with this article on Lena Kahn, the FTC chair.

So she's been very active over the past week, traveling across the country, meeting with

House and Senate Democrats in key states that

are going to be key in November. So tell me a little bit about the story, how it came about,

and what exactly Lena Khan is doing across the country? Yeah, absolutely. So Lena Khan, as you

mentioned, is the FTC chair. She's this very popular figure, kind of on both sides of the aisle,

particularly among progressives. She's been very aggressive among what she would call corporate

misdeeds. And that's got her a lot of plaudits on the left, but even with some populist

folks on the right. And so she's going to these events with members of the House and the

Senate to talk about various policy issues, grocery prices, consolidation, healthcare. And she is,

you know, making her mark on that and sort of bringing her almost sort of celebrity status to

these districts. I got wind of some of these events and

then was able to quickly confirm other ones of them to kind of put together a whole wrap of her

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