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Samuel A.A. Levine

Samuel A.A. Levine

Sep 22, 2026

KhurramHOST
40:45
How do you think about allocating resources across groups that have maybe materially different circumstances and resources?
40:54
I want to help the most vulnerable people because I think that's where we can do the most good.
40:59
If a millionaire gets their $10 back, that's sort of a moral victory for them.
41:06
Perhaps if someone's struggling to get $10 back, that means they can fill their cart.
41:13
I think, well, with grocery prices, what they are these days, I'm not sure how much you can do with $10, but it's a lot more meaningful to them.
41:21
And I think if you look at our work, there's a big focus on who are the most vulnerable workers, who are the most vulnerable consumers.
41:31
So to take a few examples, there's been a big focus historically at this agency and certainly under my leadership on immigrants, making clear that immigrants who face exploitation, retaliation, we've had, I've had, Folks tell me and organizations tell me that immigrants who want to report violations to us, but their bosses will threaten to take them to ICE.

10 MINS LATER

KhurramHOST
51:56
Can you talk some more about a comparison of FTC and the role that you had there in working with lawmakers or rulemakers and how you're approaching that today in your practice at the city?
10:37
But I'm curious, how were you able to move past talking about ethereal harms to actually enforcing against those types of harms?
10:46
Here again, and we could talk about whether the harms are really ethereal, but the way I would put it is non-financial harms, harms that are not consumers directly losing money.
10:56
And here again, I want to do a little bit of history here because in that same policy statement where the FTC said that markets were self-correcting, it said that even though Congress simply said, go after unfair practices, the FTC on its own without any statutory basis said, we're really only going to focus on financial harms.
11:18
Non-financial harms, they gave an example of emotional distress, are not going to be actionable.
11:24
I can't emphasize enough, this was a agency veto of congressional directive, right? This was not in the FTC Act.
11:32
And that really continued to shape the FTC's privacy work.
11:36
In the early 2000s, the chairman of the FTC, Tim Uris, he was the chairman of the FTC, He would take the position that unfairness simply can't reach information sharing, data sharing practices because of the limits self-imposed in the 1980 policy statement.
15:17
Why do you think that's the case?

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