Name: How Lina Khan EXPOSED Starbucks
Uploaded: 2025-11-14T19:30:20.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Lina Khan EXPOSED Starbucks' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Lina Khan EXPOSED Starbucks' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-14. Transcript available.

I wanted to ask you something I thought was really kind of cute, but about the
Starbucks
thing when you were in high school.
So you were in Westchester?
Yeah, I lived in Mamaroneck, went to Mamaroneck High School.
And so the kids were causing a ruckus up in Starbucks by your high school?
So Starbucks said, but that's why we needed to investigate.
And what did you do about it?
So there was basically a, you know, some stores outside of the high school,
including
a Starbucks.
And people would, you know, go there and hang out there and buy coffee.
At Starbucks?
And then they started a policy that students, even if they purchased something,
couldn't
stay in the store.
They couldn't sit down.
So I wrote a school newspaper story about it.
You're Martin Luther King.
But didn't you get in the New York Times?
Yeah, it somehow became enough of a thing where the Times then reported on it
and reported,
cited my story or something.
So were you a little bit sucking up to the popular girls?
Or at Starbucks?
I don't remember it that way.
I was genuinely just curious why.
You were being a suck up to the, or you were the popular girls.
No.
I mean, I was a newspaper editor, you know.
I don't know that that counted.
But have you ever gotten a B?
A B?
Yeah.
Probably, yeah.
That's a lie.
I got you to lie.
No, no.
I mean, I took some hard math classes in college and probably didn't do so well.
I need to swear you in.
You never got a B. You got a B in hard math?
Some hard math, yeah.
How did it feel to get a B?
It was humbling, but in a good way.
Humbling.
Did you take the LSAT June 2009?
No.
Dino game?
No.
No, no.
I took it later.
Do you know the dino game?
Is it?
The logic game with the dinosaurs?
The logic puzzles.
I know the logic puzzles, but not with the dinosaurs.
I took it right before you.
Okay.
I didn't go to law school until 2014, so I took it later.
What did you get in the LSAT?
I don't remember.
Come on.
I really don't.
You're being humble right now.
You got 180.
I don't think so.
Straight up 180.
I'd have to go back and check.
Did you finish first?
Were you like, done?
I don't think so.
You definitely did.
It's so...
Yeah, I took it three times.
It was an inflection point in my life.
Yeah, no.
It was an inflection point for me too.
I was trying to decide whether to go to law school or whether to be a
journalist.
Your thesis in college was on Hannah Arendt?
Mm-hmm.
What was your area of focus?
I think it's pretty interesting for the times we're kind of living it right now.
Yeah.
It was this close study of a bunch of her work, including a book she wrote
called The Human
Condition.
And in the book, she basically writes about how technological progress can lead
to a lot of
advances, but also require a certain degree of distance.
And she has this analogy with the plane around how airplanes allow us to do
pretty great stuff and make physical distance shorter, but it requires an
altitude that makes you see less.
So I analogize how she talked about kind of expertise and what can get lost in
it to how we got into the financial crisis.
So that's like the most boring book she wrote? That's what your thesis was?
I don't know if that was the story.
I thought your thesis would be on her romance with Heidegger.
Oh, yeah.
The Nazi and the Jew.
Right, right.
I guess that was a component of her life.
One thing I heard you say in an interview was that prior to the establishment
of the Third Reich as a centralized power structure, that industrial conglomeration
or like was a big component of it.
Is that correct?
Or am I trying to say words?
I feel like I'm copying words that I've heard on succession, maybe?
Yeah, you know, obviously there were a lot of factors that facilitated the rise
of Nazism.
But the U.S. after World War II actually commissioned various studies to be
like what just happened and what factors contributed to it, including trying to
figure out what was happening in the economy.
And they did actually find that growing consolidation across the German economy
had basically facilitated the rise of Nazism.
You know, you had like more monopolization and certain types of rubber and
steel.
And generally speaking, there's long been a recognition that concentrated
economic power can go hand in hand with concentrated political power.
And, you know, I think that's an insight that has been lost more recently, but
we're kind of being forced to reckon with again.
So you think Paramount, if they buy Warner Brothers, maybe Barry Weiss will be
maybe the kind of go bull.
She can't, she doesn't talk shit at all.
Because she knows all the rules.
She knows all the rules.
Okay, so let's explain to our audience.
You became a star even before you graduated law school.
So you published an article about Amazon when you were in law school and you
kind of made some enemies.
Yes.
What was your thesis, what was your position that you were taking?
So basically I was writing about how the contemporary way that antitrust law
gets interpreted,
which is a very short term focus on whether monopolies are raising prices,
was creating all sorts of blind spots and used Amazon as kind of a vehicle to
tell this broader story about changes in our antitrust laws.
The law review article actually came out of a whole bunch of interviews I had
done with two sets of market participants.
One was the set of businesses that were selling on Amazon.
And the other was financial analysts and investors that were looking at Amazon
more through a long term prism.
And it was really interesting because at that time, this is like 2012, 2013,
you know,
the general consensus in DC was that Amazon is this company that is, you know,
just delivering all these low prices.
And there's kind of no monopoly power dominance concern here.
But when you talk to those sets of market actors, they were like, yeah, of
course, you know,
this company is amassing structural power that one day it'll just be able to
flip the switch.
And that's the whole like investment proposition here.
And it was just one of these instances where there was a real gap between how
kind of the experts and the pundits were understanding what was going on in the
economy.
And how when you talk to like real people that were doing business with this
company, how they understood it.
And that gap was really interesting to me.
And so I decided to try to make it into a law review article.
So in essence, you're saying that they were dropping prices so low that like
mom and pop were just couldn't compete.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, they were engaging in a bunch of business practices that like 50 years
ago would have been illegal.
But because there was this kind of Reagan revolution and antitrust where we now
basically assume that monopolies were good unless they were engaging in a very
narrow set of practices that were bad.
We'd kind of become blind to being able to see, you know, corporate dominance
and monopoly power unless and until it hit this like very narrow set of
conditions.
What do you make of the argument or like like people would say like the Sears
catalog is going to drive the general soar out of business?
Is it just that like, yeah, like Bezos kind of reinvented a supply chain, but I
can get any crap I want tomorrow.
Like, do you get crap on there?
I'm not a Prime member, so I don't really buy stuff off of there.
What do you mean you're not a Prime? What are you doing? You go with your feet?
You go on your feet to a thing?
I mean, that's a good thing about living in New York City, you know, you can
buy a lot of stuff in person.
Yeah, but you could also get any crap tomorrow.
It's true. I mean, the thing is, it's really not about, it's more about, you
know, the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws were designed to basically create
more checks and balances in our economic sphere.
Because there was a recognition that like, you don't want to concentrate
economic power.
And through competition laws, there's an assumption that firms, if they're
having to compete for your business, they're going to try to make things better,
be it through lower prices or kind of better service.
And so we want to maintain competition and there are fair ways to compete and
unfair ways to compete.
And our definition of what is unfair ways of competing has like radically
changed over the last few decades such that companies like Amazon have been
able to get away with things.
And, you know, when I was at the FTC, we ended up filing a lawsuit against it.
After investigating it, we found that it was breaking the law and that now it
is actually systematically raising prices for people, both consumers.
Because they fucked everyone off.
Yeah, because they can.
Yeah.
And like the businesses that have to sell on Amazon now have to pay as much as
one out of every two dollars to this company.
Sorry for cussing also.
It's not a good situation.
Yeah.
And, you know, a lot of that is because they don't face real competition.
Do you think the game Monopoly is maybe problematic for people's understanding
of Monopoly power?
It's possible.
Because no one wins at Monopoly and everyone's like, you're a bad guy.
Right.
Everyone's like, you know, I mean, it's a disaster.
Your dad just relapsed on alcohol.
He told your mom that she's just like her mother.
Your sister's crying.
That's what happens when you win at Monopoly and you're like, I'm the best guy
in the family.
You know, there's a really interesting history of that game where it was
actually designed as an anti-Monopoly game.
And then it was like, you know, commercialized and made into a kind of a pro-Monopoly
game.
Wait, so what was the objective?
That everyone has different stuff?
In the original version?
In the original version.
You know, I haven't played the original version, though I actually have a
version of it.
So I need to try it out.
So you went back into the think tank world after law school?
Just briefly, yeah.
Were you offered like a federal clerkship or something?
I mean, it seems like from your resume, like you could have...
Yeah, I was supposed to clerk a year out of law school.
And my judge ended up passing away a few months before.
So then I kind of had to rejigger things and ended up actually working first at
the FTC for a commissioner.
Rohit Chopra, who had just joined, who was doing incredible work.
And then actually ended up joining as a staffer to a congressional committee
where we did a big investigation of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
And so was there for a year and a half or so.
And you started working with Elizabeth Warren or like in an unofficial capacity
at the time?
Is that correct?
Yeah, not officially, but you know, she in 2016 gave a big speech basically
saying, you know, across the economy we have now extreme consolidation.
And she named companies, which, you know, in D.C. is unusual for kind of
somebody to really name the company you're talking about.
And she did that across sectors.
And it basically helped give much more prominence to this issue of antitrust
and anti-monopoly.
And she became kind of an ally as somebody who agreed that we really needed to
reinvigorate this area of law.