Reinventing the Rip-Off with Lindsay Owens

0:00When you get older, you got to have yourself a little bit of the comfort. And that's where the avocado green mattress comes in, man. And unlike most mattress brands, they'll only sell you online. They do have stores too. You can go into a store. You can try them out. Unbelievably comfortable. Avocado mattress is designed for comfort, support, helping your body stay aligned. You know the last time my body was aligned. It's been, I think it might have been the last time the Mets won the World Series. That's how long it's been, it's been aligned. But these mattresses, avocado green mattress, responsibly sourced organic materials that are built to last. So get an avocado green mattress. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or premier retailer near you or shop online at avocadogreen mattress.com slash TWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale.

1:00Avocado green mattress.com slash TWS. Avocado green mattress. dot com slash TWS. Period. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We are coming to Wednesday, September 16th. Normally we tape on a Tuesday. We had to tape on a Wednesday because of the Emmys. I flew out to the Emmys. It was delightful. I got to sit at a table with my friends,

2:02John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and Stephen Colbert won. And God bless. I would have liked to see Jimmy Kimmel win as well because I know that many people could do it because I think he deserves it as well. But thank God Stephen was able to get up and accept the award because and the people at home didn't see this. But just minutes, minutes! Before the award was announced, there was a terrible accident where all four of our beards got interlocked. And thank God for a resourceful seat, filler, who was able to somehow unlock the Rubik's cube that was the four nascent beards of Oliver Colbert, Kimmel and Stewart, locked together and allowed Stephen to rightfully get up and accept his well-earned Emmy for best variety. But that's that. I'm a little jet lagged. It was lovely to see my friends, but it's going to be even more lovely, segue, to talk to today's guest who is going to save

3:09our economy from the exploitation of our overlords. She is one of my favorites. Let's just get to her. Ladies and gentlemen, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative and Author of Gouged, the end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet. We are joined on this momentous day in economic history by our good friend, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative, Author of Gouged, the end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet and Lindsay so nice to see who she is joining us on the day that she found out that the printer that the publisher has ran out of toner. Now she's they're shipping a bunch of books where maybe the words are on there, maybe the words are not on there. Lindsay, what have you heard now? Yeah, I don't really know. I'm going to run this down after you and I

4:11log out of the podcast, but all the more reason to listen to the pod because it might be the only way to get the material. Lindsay, thank you for saying so and we are going to get into the book and if for those of you who enjoy the economic musings put into print form, it will in no way make you throw the book four or five times against the wall in utter rage, which is what I did. That's how I was reading it. It is a rage read for sure, although we we end on a slightly happy note, but it is a positive. It's a rage read. That's right. What you can do about first, you know, first we can do it is 10 a.m. it is Wednesday. The Fed, do you know what time the Fed is meeting today by any chance or what time they're announcing their rate, Worsh is going to announce rate hikes. Usually to a clock, I think. So we don't know if they're going to raise the rates or or not raise the rates. Do you think they're going to raise the rates? I think they are. I think they're likely to move forward

5:11with an increase. I think that's what the markets are counting on and I think, you know, look, inflation is still pretty hot right now and that's what the Fed does raise the rates. Lindsay, I do, you know, we've had this discussion previously that the Fed is a blunt, a blunt tool and it seems like whenever the economy finds itself in a in a difficult place, whether it be because there's a war in Iran or a war in Ukraine or, you know, there's a pandemic. They decide to raise the rates to blunt inflation, but it doesn't necessarily deal with why inflation is higher. It just slows the economy and hurts workers bargaining power. Would that would that be a fair assessment? Yeah, look, we've had a lot of policy induced inflation. The president has started a trade war. He has imposed a huge number of tariffs on the American economy. Supreme court struck them down.

6:15He reimposed them. He also started a war in Iran that has had pretty significant impacts on oil and gas prices that has filtered through prices throughout the economy. And as a result, inflation is up, prices are up. And so one of the best ways to bring inflation down and start getting it cooling again would be to get out of the war in Iran and would be to recalibrate the terror rates, but Trump isn't doing that. And so the Fed is in a position where they have, there are one tool, which is raising rates. And so I think they are expected to raise rates this afternoon. And that's going to be a problem for a lot of folks in the country. So the idea is, if I may, and I'm just going to put this in layman term, the president of the United States gets to fuck up everything in the world and drive prices up. And instead of the president of the United States paying a kind of political or personal price for any of that sort of

7:16thing, we're going to take it out on workers. Yeah. Well, if you put it that way, it makes total sense. Look, we've got, you know, we do have a political price that will likely be paid, to the incumbent party, right? There's a Republican trifecta. Oh, that is. In Congress. That is so optimistic. From your mouth to that's an exciting prospect. You've just laid out there. You know, your book, and we're talking about gouged, the end of a fair price, and what that means for your wallet. It's written by Lindsay Owens, who is our favorite, if I may say, I don't want to say pure favorite, one of our top five favorite economists. Not only because I think I agree with so much of what you say, but because you never sound, you're very pleasant. It's a, it's a tough field. There's a lot of arrogance. There's a lot of ego. I love how we're dancing around all these various things. Your book though, it goes into

8:20we always think about supply and demand as being. There are sort of these immutable laws of economics that drive what you pay for things. And there's almost nothing you can do about it. It's just merely companies. There's a demand for their product. There's a certain cost of making that product. They then give themselves a little, a little bump on their product, a little, a little bit of profit. And that's how capitalism works. Lindsay, from reading your book, it seems like that may not be exactly how things work. Yeah, there is a lot of economic theory that depends upon a whole host of factors that make a lot of sense in textbooks, but that don't actually appear in the real world. And one of those factors is competition, for example, you know, getting prices to a nice level depends on competition. And when there is not a lot of competition, we see the opportunity for

9:22companies to raise prices well beyond what would be expected in our models. We also see frankly, companies getting together and ensuring that prices aren't competitive. In the book, I tell a number of stories about cartels and price fixing. I talk about a kind of old-school cartel, the Phoebus cartel. These were the CEOs of the major electric companies across the world from Japan to Europe to the US. And they met in December in Geneva, Switzerland, and they said, hey, we're not selling enough light bulbs. Why weren't they selling enough light bulbs? Because it turns out that technology that keeps light bulbs burning has been really good for a really long time. There is a light bulb today in Livermore, California that's been burning for over 100 years. What? And you can log on. Yes. Wait, log on. It has its own webcam on it. It has a webcam. It is a

10:27light bulb cam. It's like a panda cam. Lindsay, where is this light bulb? It's in Livermore, California. Livermore, California. I haven't had a chance to check it out. Is it in the foyer? What are we talking about here? It's in like a fire hall in Livermore, California. I'm going to try to make it out later this fall to take a peek at it in person. Lindsay, your life is better than that. I'm going to tell you this right now. You don't have to do that to yourself. We can all log on to it if we want to see it. I don't want you to have to do that. Now, the Phoebus story that you're telling. By the way, Phoebus with a pH just to let you know how long ago this was. When was this early 1900s? Yeah, it was 1924 when the Phoebus cartel convened in Geneva, Switzerland to short circuit the lifespan of the light bulb. They got together. They said, we're not selling enough of these light bulbs. They're lasting too long. We've got a problem. And they all agreed to cut back on the lifespan and wrote a memo signed it. There was a memorandum.

11:32And they even vetted and insured compliance. Each of the participating companies had to send their light bulbs to a lab where the lab tech plugged them in, screwed them in and kept them burning and then logged and monitored how many hours they burned to make sure there were no cheaters because, of course, someone who's offering a longer burning light bulb would have a competitive advantage outside of the cartel. Yes, yes, they would. And this ushered in, I don't know if officially ushered it in, but it's sort of the theory of what they call planned obsolescence. Sure, exactly. Where you would build things that you could build better. But if you built them better, you wouldn't be able to sell as many because you'd have no return customers. Yeah, you're degrading the quality of the product purposefully to sell more of the product. It breaks early. Another form of planned obsolescence would be if one of the parts deteriorated earlier than the full part. So the battery in a toy, you know, running out, but then you can't

12:34change the battery. So you've got to buy a new toy rather than just sticking a new battery in. Right. Yeah. And to be clear, they can make it better so that you wouldn't have to buy as many. And they have gotten together to choose not to. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think the key here is coordination to execute a successful cartel, a successful price fixing scheme, unique coordination. And coordination costs are significant. Everyone had to fly to Geneva and get in a room and and talk it through and sign a deal. There's a pre-zoom. This is pre-zoom where people could have just done it from their computers. Yeah. And look, those types of cartels are still alive and well. I mean, we saw examples recently of the big tech CEOs sending each other emails and making sure they weren't hiring each other's employees and engineers because they wanted to keep wages down. We had an example in California recently where the attorney general exposed a kind of old-fashioned price fixing scheme between Amazon and Walmart and retailers like Levi's,

13:39where they were emailing each other and saying, Hey, it looks like the price on the Levi's website is a little better than the price on the Amazon website. Like, let's take care of that. Right. Like, let's get the prices back up. But in the book, I'm really focused on the ways in which new technologies have allowed tech companies to sort of supercharge these age old impulses and reinvent the rip-off. And these days, you can get price fixing across industries and sectors where coordination would be impossible, but for the players using a common algorithm. Now, we're a roll list. Let me roll this back. So in the old days, they would fly to Geneva and they would sit in a room and they would say, our product is lasting too long. Let's all make the product shittier so we can sell more of them. Was that at that time illegal? Is collusion amongst competitors? Has it been typically illegal? Yeah. Collusion and price fixing is illegal.

14:46And the case I just mentioned against Amazon is being brought by the attorney general of California. It is illegal to price fix. It is illegal to collude. Okay. So and the way that they would track that down is I'm assuming it would be different government agencies would regulate this kind of collusion. And typically, that would be the federal trade. Who would who would typically be in charge of figuring that out? Yeah. The Department of Justice has an antitrust division and they can prosecute companies at the federal level. They can prosecute companies for price fixing and collusion. And the tax on companies to comply with that because I assume it's you kind of think of it as just another cost compliance that there's a tax if they were to get caught is enough of a deterrent that generally that has not that people have not colluded other than there's the famous case you use in in the book. I guess it's not collusion. Well, now you know what we'll get into like price gouging

15:49based on surging and things like that later. Yeah. Let's keep talking about collusion. So generally the price of colluding would make people think twice about it. Is that would that be fair to say? I mean, ideally, yes. Like litigation risk would be something that would keep companies from flouting the law. But clearly, you know, many companies in the US and elsewhere have made a decision that flouting the law is more profitable than complying with the law and they don't view the compliance costs and the potential for getting caught as as fatal. I think they probably feel like they'll get a slap on the wrist. I think they feel like they can tie up those legal proceedings for a long time. Maybe they feel they can fight them effectively. In the case of the algorithmic price fixing I talk about in the book, a lot of these companies argue that they're just suggesting the prices and therefore they aren't technically involved in price fixing, right? They're just the

16:51algorithm offering prices. It's the retailers that are taking the prices and setting the prices. Well, this is where it gets really interesting. So in the old days, you would think of guys in a smoke-filled room talking about, let's make our light bulb shittier. We can spend more. These algorithms are involved, everything that makes it so that when you're talking to your wife about lamps and then you open your phone and suddenly every other ad on Instagram is about lamps. The way that they drive those ads, the way that they target you for those things, they're also targeting price. They're targeting what you can pay. Is that correct? Yeah, so look, for a long time, prices were posted. They were on stickers. They were pretty straightforward. You worked at the limited. I worked at a hormones. So I worked as a stockboy there and we did,

17:52we had a little gun and you would go right. A sticker gun. Yeah. And you would just hit the prices on the thing and that's how it was determined. Yeah, there was some stability. In America, we've had price tags for 150 years. We didn't always have price tags. Huggling was the norm for thousands of years. The retailer... I was shocked to find that out from the book that Huggling was the norm in America up until 1800s. Yeah, late 1800s. It was the Quakers who said, look, it's pretty unfair to charge different people, different prices for the same item. All men are created equal under God. We should have a fixed price. It shouldn't depend on... I can't believe they're using the all men are created equal under God to be like, this should only be 59 cents. Everyone should pay that. I love that. Look, price discrimination. Discrimination is inherently unequal and I think it didn't sit

18:55right with them. This idea that you might charge someone who you didn't like a little more. If I had some dirt on you, I could probably get a better deal. It felt unfair. But also, eventually, we got the price tag because there was a business case for it. John Wanamaker is usually credited with the first price tag in the US in his Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia in the late 1800s. He supposedly was supposedly inspired by the Quakers. He was a devout, press-paterian, and religious man. But also, he wanted you to buy a lot of stuff in his department store and haggling for each item took a long time. So posting the price got you in and out of the store more quickly. There was a business reason to use a price tag. But look, 150 years, we had price tags. You got the Sunday weekly and the newspaper and you could see the price of all the groceries that week. What is the price of a pound of meat going to be? What is the price of a gallon of milk going to be? And you could compare prices across grocery

19:58stores. And when you went to the grocery store with your weekly, you knew that the price in the grocery store would match the price in the weekly. And if it didn't for some reason and error, they would match it for you. It was pretty straightforward. And today, pricing isn't like that. It is a highly engineered science. There are teams of pricing consultants and pricing advisors. In the book, I talk about them as a sort of cross between the geek squad, physics nerds, and seal team six, right? They are assassins. Let me fair, price assassins. Price assassins? They're not literal assassins. They're trained in the art of wallet emptying, right? I mean, they are really good at it. A seal team six of bankruptcies for consumers. And also in the old days, let's be fair. To change the price was laborious. And it would be not something that you could do on a whim. It would be relatively in frequent. But now it's a second to second to micro second to

21:06micro second to fair. It's dizzying. In addition to the lack of transparency in not having clear, sat-posted prices, it also makes pricing way more volatile and unpredictable. If you go on TikTok right now, John, there will be dozens of people. You know, I'm going to Lindsay. I'm actually on it right now. I'm just scrolling. Just multitasking. You'll find dozens of videos of women and some men taking pictures and snapshots of prices changing right before their eyes or in Walmart being like, hey, the price was supposed to be this. And now I'm at the checkout line and the price is three times what I expected. Or look, I'm in Walmart and I'm in the clothing section. And they haven't even bothered to put price tags on the clothes anymore. They're just, you know, brand labels, right? Everything has has shifted under our feet as pricing has gone high-tech.

22:12Hello, it's time for your favorite thing, which is advertisements. By the way, I'm at the Emmys and I'll say one thing about myself at the Emmys. I think I might have been the prettiest boy at the Emmys. The whole night, Colbert kept trying to get, I must have gotten schmutz on my right shoulder. And the whole night he was trying to teach me how to get it off by using the fabric of my own jacket to clean my own jacket. Apparently works. But I'll tell you the one thing, I don't like to think about it. And Quince is how I don't have to think about. Quince, they bring in the wardrobe staples that you reach for every day. You don't have to worry about a tux or a cumbered bun. Do you want a cumbered bun? No, you want a standard bun. Quince probably has those. Quince has cashmere sweaters, fall wardrobe pants, teas, active wear, high quality stuff. Find your next fall favorites of Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers

23:15or go to quince.com slash TWS. Get free shipping on your order. And 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-i-n-c-e.com slash TWS. I mean, the best example I can give you is the fact that it has become commonplace for companies to run experiments, pricing experiments on millions of Americans while they shop. Their AI companies, Eversite is a good example. This is an AI company whose sole purpose was to set up a system, a platform to run pricing experiments without people's knowledge. Now a pricing experiment, just to give people a sense of a pricing experiment is that's them and stores have always done this to some extent. But obviously in a more analog way is pushing to see how much you can get

24:20somebody to pay for a certain item and testing those upper limits. Exactly. And generally the floor as well. Absolutely. Testing our willingness to pay our price sensitivity, what the sort of peak price we might be able to still take an item at without closing our shopping cart online. But running tests at a scale that's unimaginable, behind the scenes doing A, B testing, offering U and I different prices for the same item to start to get a better sense of exactly how much they can charge. And to be clear, the thing that's different about this is they now have your data. So these are not blind experiments. These are experiments where they understand you may have just lost your job or you may have just gotten a raise or you may have two kids or three kids that and it's near Christmas and they know you need this more and they're using your life against you. Yeah. So we have a few different types of technologies here. We have

25:24just simple experimentation, which is I think pretty deceptive if you and I don't realize we are subjects in this grand experiment to determine which of us will pay more for bread and how much will pay for milk. And that's what Instacart was doing on millions of Americans shopping for their groceries last year. The Instacart one is fascinating. Talk about that because our understanding of these online sort of marketplaces is that they exist to save us money, that they are crunching the numbers to the point where they're getting us that we're used to expedia. We're used to kayak these. The idea is we'll find you the best price. We'll use our technology to help you as a shopper. This is the opposite. Yeah. So my organization teamed up with Consumer Reports and more perfect union late last year to run an experiment that exposed Instacart's

26:25experiment. We got volunteer secret shoppers together and we said, look, log on to Instacart, select a pickup location in Seattle or Washington DC by the same 23 items by the same groceries, like by a party sized bag of tostitos by a box of frosted flakes. Oh yeah. Lindsay, talk to me. That's what I like to hear. It was a good basket of groceries for sure. And then we said, look, take screenshots of your cart. That was the whole experiment. It was pretty straightforward. Then we crunched the numbers and that's when I think things got pretty interesting. What we found is that for 75% of the items in that grocery cart, different subjects in our experiment were being offered different prices from Instacart. These were at the same pickup locations and the same cities at the exact same time. Everyone was logged on to make that clear. That's the clear thing because you might want to say to yourself, well, geez, it's cost

27:26to living is more expensive in New Jersey than it might be. This is not, oh, across platforms, across cities, across various things. This is the same item in the same store at the same time. Different price. Exactly. The equivalent would be if you and I, John, were standing in the exact same grocery line. We just happened to have the exact same basket of groceries. I check out and I'm charged $123. While I'm still bagging my groceries, you get wrong up and your price is $155. That's what we found. 75% of the items offered at different prices at the same time. The price differences were pretty extreme in some cases. Up to 23% more for some shoppers than other shoppers. On average of 7% differences across the whole basket of grocery items. Of course, if you were on the losing end of that AB test, you were getting

28:28offered the higher prices. We estimated for a household of four because, of course, you don't buy one grocery item or one basket of groceries. You go grocery shopping every week all damn year. You've got to eat. It's $1200 is what we estimated it could cost a household of four under some conditions. They're not just pushing this randomly. They're not just trying to see if I inch that up there. They also know who you are. In the InstaCert study, we did not find personalized or surveillance pricing. We couldn't pin the price differences. But that is a thing. Yes. What's happening next? Companies are getting better at not just running these randomized AB tests at scale thanks to larger computing power and e-commerce, which is a place where it's easier to hide these experiments. They are also starting to track your data. The breadcrumb trail that you leave online. What you click on, what you look at,

29:29what you hover over with your mouse, but don't click on it. Oh dear god. Oh dear god, I've got some cleanup on aisle three to do. Yeah. It is really scary to think about the types of information they have. They know if you're logged on from a Mac or a PC. They know if you're logged on from Manhattan or Nashville. All of these things can be used. They know if you owe money. They know if you're in debt. They know if you got a raise. Yeah. And increasingly, not to get too dystopian, increasingly, they know what you confess. We are on the precipice of agentic commerce, which means if you're talking to your chatbot about how you're feeling a little insecure, about how you look ahead of the prom and you're a high schooler, you know, in a world in which we start to see agentic commerce take off. And by the way, Mackenzie says that's going to be a five trillion dollar book of business by 2030, which is only a few years from now, you can easily picture a world in

30:35which what you said to the chatbot could be very useful in deciding how much you'll pay for something. How desperate are you? How urgently do you need something? What kind of person are you? And how could we use that in our price setting decisions? And I can't stress this enough that we are sold the fiction that online marketplaces exist to find you the best deals. This is the part where it gets really pernicious as well. And I know there are sites that say we search for you and we find you the best thing, but what they never tell you is they're working 10 times as hard to exploit you. Then they are to help you. Is that correct? The the amount of information. Well, here, let me give you let me give you two answers to this. Okay. Let's go with the companies answer number one Delta partnered with an intelligence company an artificial intelligence company out of Israel called Fetcher. They partnered with Fetcher to get better at pricing to get better at dynamic

31:38pricing to get better at charging you the maximum price for every seed on a Delta plane before you started peeking at American or Southwest. But they also talked about Fetcher on their investor day calls as a company that could help Delta start to achieve personalization, figure out what each individual might be willing to pay for every seed on a Delta flight. If you looked up Fetcher at the time, which we did before they deleted everything from their website, we pulled down their white papers and their blog posts. What you found in Fetcher's white paper were their marketing materials and explaining this to companies like why why would you buy Fetcher's product? There were two phases. Phase number one was the exploration phase. This is where companies started looking around like where Fetcher started looking around your customer base looking around your competitors just trying to understand the market, trying to sort of test what people would pay. The second phase was called the exploitation phase. This was not subtle. Was called the exploitation phase. Yes, in the white

32:43paper, they didn't even come up with a pseudonym. They didn't come up with something that could have presented it in a more gent. They were just literally, this is where you would exploit these people. Yeah. Like R.A.I. has rooted around your marketplace, learned everything it can learn, like gotten a good sense of who your customers are. And now we're going for broke, right? Now we're going to exploit what we learned to drive revenues up. That's how these companies talk about what they're up to. And then of course, Delta CEO, crowing in his earnings calls about how great the partnership with Fetcher is going, how much money they're bringing in, the revenue outlook. They started with a little pilot program where they gave Fetcher one percent of their routes. They said, by the end of the year, we're going to give them 20%. We love what we see. We love the exploitation phase, right? By the way, Lindsay, God bless the earnings call. If it weren't for earnings call, you would think that the bullshit these CEOs say on CNBC or any of these other places

33:46is actually real. Like during the pandemic, you would think that during the pandemic, when they said, we're really struggling to get the types of products to consumers, even though we have real supply chain issues. And that's what's driving the price up. And then they go to the earnings call and go, we're killing it folks. This pandemic has been unbelievable for us in terms of profit. This is about maximizing profit. Yeah. That has nothing to do with really supply and demand. It's exploitation. Yeah. I mean, God bless the earnings call is right. We learn a lot about what companies are actually up to from earnings calls. Look, telling consumers that you were doing this is a terrible business strategy. Hey guys, you're in the exploitation phase of our app. Yeah. Like when we exposed what Delta was up to, which I mean, it didn't take a lot of work like they set it in broad daylight on their earnings call. You know, there was a huge PR crisis for Delta. And of course, the CEOs of

34:51American and Southwest really seized on that and said, we're not going to do that. And Delta had to back down. What happened when when Instacart? Because I thought this was interesting. When you exposed Instacart, I thought their reaction to that was very telling. Yeah. So initially, they denied almost everything in our study. They did say that they run a select set of pricing experiments in AB tests and tried to sort of, you know, brush it under the rug. But they said, you know, we're not doing traditional dynamic pricing. Like we're not changing the price based on the weather or like the supply. We're not doing surveillance praising. We're not setting prices based on individual features or characteristics of you. This isn't personalized. It's just a B testing. And there was a PR mouse trim for the company. Their stock plummeted the Trump administration announced a probe of Instacart, which, you know, the FTC under the Trump administration had done like nothing. Yeah, they've done nothing. So this sort of woke them from their slumber briefly. And two weeks later, the company cried uncle and posted a blog a couple days before Christmas and said, we're going to

35:53we're going to stop these experiments. We're not going to let Grocers partner with ever site, the AI company who ran the experiments anymore. But throughout history, the way in which companies have sort of found out when they had gone too far and when they stepped over the line and when they touched the stove was often consumer outrage. And the example that I that I use in the book that I love is in the 90s, the CEO of Coke was down in Brazil, giving an interview to a magazine. I don't really know what he was doing down there. But he let slip in that interview, probably thinking like no one's reading this Brazilian magazine that Coke was piloting and stalling thermometers Yes. In their vending machines. It's a great story in the book to charge you more. Yes. On a hot day for a Coke, right? And this was before, you know, this is like 1996, right? So this is not things are not going viral on X. But it was on the cover of, you know, major American newspapers coast to coast, Wall Street Journal blasted them. It was in the Honolulu newspaper,

36:55right? And Pepsi, of course, weighed in, you know, we're in the business of quenching thirst, not exploiting it. And Coke backed off and said, you know what? We're just kidding. Like, you know, the lab is closed. We're not going to be installing thermometers on vending machines. Right. Just kidding. You know, I do think, you know, bringing sunlight to these issues. And frankly, what a lot of consumers are doing when they're taking these tiktoks of what's happening in Walmart is actually part of how we get this work started. Right? It's how we let companies know that these practices are approaching a point at which they're no longer okay. They're no longer fair. They violate our values and our norms as a society. And in this economy, we don't want to see them anymore. You've heard me talk about fast growing trees, right? And I'm, you know, how, how I feel about trees. I'm a, I'm a fan. And again, I don't want to go all Maclamore on this and get controversial and get kicked off my tour. But I am a fan of trees.

38:03So fast growing trees, you can imagine is one of my favorite companies of all time. Well, I've got some news for you people fast growing trees has changed their name. I'm going to give you a chance to sit and think about what the new name might be. They're just trees now trees.com. They're America's largest most trusted online nursery plants that your yard or home needs fruit trees. Fruit trees. That's why they couldn't call fast growing trees because you got fruit trees. You got slow to, you got privacy trees. There's all kinds of trees. This is, they are the Beneton of trees. There is not a tree alive. The trees.com wouldn't be proud proud to offer to its customers. Right now they have great deals on planting essentials up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% off their purchase when using the code TWS to check out. That's an additional 20% off better plants and better growing at trees.com using the code TWS to check out trees.com code

39:10TWS. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together use TWS to save today. Offer as valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. And you do, you do some really interesting, I think, kind of public opinion polling about what consumers think is fair or unfair. And I do think consumers generally accept some measure of cost pass through as being the price of doing business and being fair. And they're very clear about when that crosses the line. When is it that consumers feel like, all right, I see what this costs you. I see there's a little bit of, you know, you've got to pat in for profit and paying your workers and all these labor costs and everything else. But this is too far. Yeah, there's like a really interesting series of studies in the 80s and 90s from behavioral economists that started to test this. You know, they they did phone surveys and they called people and they gave them a pricing

40:14scenario and they said, do you think this is fair? Do you think this is unfair? And they tested some things that I think are just as resonant today as, as, you know, you could have imagined. So things like, okay, you know, tariffs are going to be applied to a new item, peanut butter, like the cost of peanut butter is going to go up because of tariffs. Is it okay for the shopkeeper to raise the price of the peanut butter that's already on the shelf? So hasn't been exposed to the new tariffs, right? Because purchased and shipped over before the new tariffs were put in place. And 80 plus percent of respondents say, no, that's unfair, right? He's taking advantage of the fact that people are starting to expect peanut butter tariffs, even though he didn't actually have to pay more for that peanut butter, we should get it at the original pre-tariff price. Another example, there's one cabbage patch doll left in the store. I mean, again, this was in the 80s. Yes. You know, I had a cabbage patch doll auction, I believe this is referred to as the Stanford cabbage patch auction experiment. Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, there's one left in the

41:20store. Yeah. How do you decide who gets it? Is it the first person to the aisle? Like, that's first come first serve or a queue? Do you say, okay, there's 50 people in the store. Everyone draws straw. It's a lottery and whoever gets lucky gets the cabbage patch doll. Or do you say, oh, this is interesting. I've got a lot of people in my store. I've only got one cabbage patch doll. Let's sell it to the highest bidder. If you talk to a lot of economists, they love the idea of selling it to the highest bidder. Sure. Supply and demand. What could be fairer? What could be a better way to evaluate who needs the cabbage patch doll the most than figuring out who's willing to pay the most? Right? Yes. I want it so bad, John, I'm willing to pay $100 for it. That's a perfect outcome. But economists love an auction. Americans trust a line. And I think we saw that this summer with FIFA. And the auction is unfair. And for millennials or for newer viewers, substitute LaBoubou.

42:23Yeah, exactly. And I think you'll have to understand it. But where this comes into play in sort of wrapping it back around to the Fed and raising interest rates in these things. We're generally told that inflation is a product of supply chain problems or wars or disruptions or all these different things. But there is a level of price increase that is utterly artificial. That has much more to do with market concentration and collusion and these AI tricks. And yet there is not you know, raising an interest rate is going to do nothing to touch those drivers of consumer pain. Yeah. And those two things are related. Right. So the cover that these economic events, global events provide is an additional opportunity to raise prices. Explain that. Explain

43:30that. Yeah. So, okay. The best example is Tom Barkin. He is the chair of the Richmond Federal Reserve. Right after Liberation Day when Trump imposed his sweeping set of tariffs, he holds a little round table with local CEOs and business people in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And he asks them, hey guys, you know, Liberation Day does happen. All these tariffs are here. Are you raising your prices because of the tariffs? Or are you raising the prices? His words because of the tariff noise. The opportunity the tariffs provide you to raise your prices. And one of the business owners in the round table says, actually, it's both. And I'm, I feel guilty admitting that. Of course, not, you know, not guilty enough to stop, right. But these externally economic events put upward pressure on prices. They do, right? Tariffs are going to pass through to consumers. Companies pass those through. But they additionally provide

44:32opportunity to go further and the fog that companies need to go further. Because again, consumers don't like it when they find out they're being built or nickel and dime or overcharged. And so having consumers a little confused, like, am I paying more because of the trade war? Or is this company just picking my pocket, right? And I don't know. And that's a good place for companies to be if the goal is to overcharge you for you to not be quite sure if you're being nickel and dimeed or if this price is just responsive to external events. Well, the pandemic was the San Francisco level fog event of the century for these companies because the world is sort of shut down and in a standstill and nobody's getting anything. And in that emergency, God bless the earnings calls because corporations were talking about,

45:35we've never done better. And that seems an impossibility unless you are manipulating. Because if you weren't taking advantage of a situation, the idea that in a worldwide catastrophe, they would be able to maximize their profits is unconscionable unless they're manipulating. Yeah, look, the impetus for this book started in part because we started studying at my organization how companies were responding to inflation. How were they thinking about this? Were they like, oh shit, we're going to be in real trouble. This is going to eat into our margins. Or did they feel like they were going to weather the storm? And what we saw over and over again was CEOs telling their investors actually a little bit of inflation is good for business. Actually, my team is doing a great job taking additional pricing, passing all of this pricing through.

46:37Additional pricing. And God bless you, Femizms. Price optimization, revenue management, yield, all of these turns that companies are hiding behind when really what's happening here with price optimization is they're calibrating exactly how much they can get away with charging you. I will say the other data source that we have been using lately in addition to the earnings call that we've become obsessed with is the patent. Companies swear up and down that they're not building the technologies to get better at overcharging us in the grocery aisle. Right. That's not what they're focused on. But they're utilizing it. They're not building it. They're just utilizing it. Yeah. And when we look at their patent applications, the patents, they file the patents they're granted. What we see is companies who are investing a ton of money in building new technologies for things like surveillance pricing over and over. The best example,

47:39Walmart's patents are a really scary place to look. The types of things they're exploring. So one of the patents that they were granted is for smart cards. Smart cards are starting to become more common in grocery stores. You put your items in the cart and you can go ahead and scan them right there in the cart so you don't have to deal with checkout. But of course, that allows companies to start doing some personalization. Because now that thing where you and I were online and not standing next to each other in the grocery store. So we didn't realize we were being charged different amounts for the milk. They can approximate that in the grocery store because you and I aren't checking out next to each other in real time because we're checking out in our carts. And one of the patents, and this is the example that they give is as the technology gets better at understanding what you're interested in buying. In part, based on what you are buying in that moment, it can change the price of other items that it thinks you will need to complement those items. Holy shit.

48:45So if you buy something that generally like I've got sloppy Joe that I've just put in my cart, they know you're going to need buns. And so buns on your way to that aisle, they will charge you more for the bun because they know a bunless sloppy Joe is just chipped beef in your hand. Yeah, exactly. The example in the Walmart pot is tuna and mayonnaise. Once you've got the tuna, the price of mayonnaise should adjust, right? Because you're probably making tuna salad. That's the stuff. So the larger point about this is to try and give it a more macro view. A lot of the crises that we face are in part, I'm not saying in total, but in part caused not by the crisis, but by the opportunity that these companies see in the crisis. And if I may, I'll use

49:46an example that you used in the book. So we have a housing affordability crisis in this country. People have a very difficult time finding rents, buying houses, those kinds of things. You talk about in the book, there is a company that surveys, I guess it's called real page. And it artificially increases people's rents, not based on what the market is suggesting, but by these algorithms that you're talking about, is that still in use? Is that true? Yeah, so at the end of the Biden administration, Jonathan Cantor, who was the head of the antitrust division, brought an algorithmic price fixing case against real page. And say what real page is and what it does. Yeah, so real page is a real estate tech company. It is Texas based. Used to be publicly treated. Now it's privately owned, but it is a software platform that landlords use to do a whole host of

50:46things. But one of the things that it can be used for is pricing, recommending different prices for landlords. It's primarily used in the commercial market. So your kind of mom and pop landlord is probably not using it, but the guy who owns a building with 30 units probably is. And what it has allowed landlords to do is coordinate on pricing in ways that would have been impossible without the software, because there are too many units and too many landlords. Or collude really. Yeah, that was the allegation, right, that they were colluding using this shared common algorithm, the shared software. But if you read the Department of Justice's complaint against real page, it's maybe 100 pages, which I did. One of the really interesting things you learn is all of the ways in which the algorithm was designed to kind of obliterate how supply and demand should work in the rental market. Right. So when there was a glut of apartments, there was

51:50a lot of availability. Prices should come down. But real page didn't recommend dropping the price. They said, look, it would be better to have a couple of vacant units and charge more to keep prices high and to keep prices moving in our preferred direction, which is up. There was a whole host of asymmetry baked into the real page algorithm. So there were hard floors. Didn't want you to go below certain prices, but there were soft ceilings. Right. The ceiling is a mere suggestion. Please, by all means, if you think you could charge more, we would hate to be in the limit. If I remember the saying correctly, and so, by the way, it wasn't just the algorithm, because of course, some landlords might say, look, I got to get this thing runnard. So I'm going to go for a lower price. They also had a team of pricing advisors on staff who would cajole and arptwist and make sure landlords were sticking with the recommended prices, charging top dollar. So this is all what is

52:53alleged in the Department of Justice's complaint. They held user groups for landlords where they could get together and, you know, bitch and moan about the pandemic and what it was doing to prices, but also where they could compare notes, right? The kind of room and Geneva Switzerland approach. Right. And agree to not undercut, not go below that hard floor. Yeah, absolutely. And some analysts have tried to estimate the impact of real page in rental markets and have suggested that price increases in markets where there was a high penetration of, you know, landlords using this software could have been 25% more than they should have been stunning. Pretty huge increase. Yeah. Mint mobile. I don't know what you want out of a phone company. What I want out of a phone company is delivering me a good product for less and don't bother me. Don't bother me with the like,

53:57oh, have you heard about our new program? You can upgrade to it. It'll just cost you a lot more. And then they're like, call you a bunch on their own phone. Think about that. Think about the diabolical mind games that phone companies are playing by like locking you into an expensive phone program and then using the very item that they sold you to contact you about paying more for some ridiculous upgrade that's not even really an upgrade. Oh, they're diapol. But not Mint mobile. Mint mobile plan. 15 bucks a month. 15 bucks a month. What is it? 1992? 15 bucks a month. High speed data on limited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to minmoble.com slash TWS. That's minmoble.com slash TWS. Got your wireless build of 15 bucks a month and minmoble.com slash

54:57TWS. That's it. There's no catch up front payments of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow in network is busy includes up to 20 gigabyte hot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see minmoble.com. I really hope they speed that up. I mean, that's the thing about this book is what you're uncovering is absolutely stunning because what it suggests is the story that we are all being told about affordability is not the whole story. So the remedies that we are also being sold about the affordability issues are not adequate because we're all being gamed. And by the way, combine that with here's

55:58another area that I think we haven't really talked about when you talk about consolidation of industries when you talk about four or five companies owning 80% of all the meat packing in the United States will then suddenly the ability of these algorithms and these collusions becomes supercharged and makes it that much more difficult for us to address it. Look, it is really hard for me to overcharge you if you can walk across the street and get a better deal. So concentration and winnowing competition in the American economy is part of the precondition for a lot of what we're seeing right now. But I do think the big innovation and algorithmic price fixing is it allows for coordination even in markets that might have competition. The court, the multi-family landlords, right? Or I'll give you a more recent example that

56:58just came out after I finished the book. There is a law firm that brought a class action lawsuit against a tech company called Calibrate in California, which is basically the real page of gas stations. Oh, wow. And what is alleged is that 1700 retail gas stations were using Calibrate potentially again, this is an allegation to help set retail gas prices in 1700 gas stations. You couldn't coordinate across all 1700 of you, right? And the complaint alleges that the increase in gas prices as a result of Calibrate could be as much as 30 cents a gallon. That is an extraordinary complaint. There's always been this question of why gas prices are so high in California. There are reasons related to differential regulation and environmental standards, but it's always been even higher than that still. And you start to wonder if maybe we're

58:01honing in on the answer. And the answer is anti-competitive practices like algorithmic price fixing alleged by this tech company Calibrate in gas and retail. So just, you know, I mean, by the way, there's one of these for French fries called potato track. There's one for hotels. Oh, my. Hotels called rainmaker. I mean, there's a French fry cartel. Frozen French fries. It's it's called potato trash. Bastards. Yeah. I mean, these. This is, you know, what's really sort of difficult to wrap your head around with all of this is anytime the government is going to involve itself in trying to address these affordability issues across different commodities or different services or different things. We are always told that socialism that's anti-capitalistic. It can never work. Price controls are the road to hell. We can't possibly stop this because what you're seeing in prices is merely the natural effects

59:03of supply and demand. And what you learn is that story is bullshit. It's utter nonsense. And yet, what seems to be a very fixed point in that is that government trying to intervene is somehow socialism. Yet corporate collusion is considered, oh, that's the price of free market. How do we address that narrative? Yeah, look, the idea that, you know, pricing is competitive, falling from the sky. You know, that really falls apart when faced with the data in my book, but also more broadly, the ways in which we know companies are gaming markets are obscuring pricing in ways that would make it impossible for comparison shopping to function. By the way, how how the markets achieve competitive pricing? It is through the mechanism of the bargain shopper doing her comparison shopping, right? Going to one store and saying, hmm, that price seems a little

1:00:07high to me. I'm going to hold and see if I can find a better deal. Getting in her car, going, you know, three miles to the next grocery store, seeing the better price. And then a bunch of people do that. And the grocery store on the north side says, hmm, nobody's in the store today. I wonder what's going on. Oh, the grocery store on the south side is offering better deals. I've got a lower my prices. That is the mechanism through which pricing is disciplined in markets and pricing can be you know, can be competitive when you can't comparison shop because you have no idea what the prices are or because the prices are changing before your very eyes or because companies have used personalized pricing to figure out who the comparison shoppers are and offer them a good enough deal to keep them at bay. And then overcharge all the rest of us. You know, pricing cannot be competitive in that environment. So where then is the federal government? Where is the FTC?

1:01:09Where is the SEC? Where any of these organizations that could help because what they do is they leave you then to the harsh winds of the federal reserve. What they do is they don't address any of these inflation starts to rise suddenly you get interest rate hikes and suddenly there's a recession and people lose their jobs and it's all an artifice based on these come and I'm not saying totally. I'm not saying that there aren't supply shortages and housing and there aren't real issues in eggs and beef and all these other industries, but it is clearly exacerbated by these non-uncompetitive issues that companies are using. Look, we do not have the the funding or frankly the bigger problem is the political will or the enforcement we need to make this economy competitive and fair and honest for the American people. And that is a problem that is bigger than the one that we're discussing

1:02:14here and this is a pretty big problem. That problem is I think the problem of our democracy, corporate capture of this government which makes it easy for companies to say you know what, this is a risk I'm willing to take. I don't think I'll be I don't think this will be enforced and if it is I think it'll be a slap on the wrist or a fine that I can absorb as the cost of doing business. And until we have a functioning democracy it is going to be hard to ensure that our economy is working for consumers and workers as well. But Lindsay, I don't even really hear economic populists talking about this as a huge issue. You know, I definitely there are a lot of people talking about the affordability crisis which by the way is a phrase a fucking hate, affordability crisis. It's not a crisis. It's the natural occurrence of a system designed to squeeze you by raising prices to the point where it will break you. This isn't a crisis because the system

1:03:20isn't functioning properly. It's a problem because the system is functioning as it was designed. Yeah, companies being on the precipice of figuring out how to charge us the absolute maximum we're willing to pay for every single item in our grocery cart is horrifying. And maybe only surpassed by the thought of, you know, agentic commerce taking a run at this exact same opportunity. Yes, yes. Tease that out a little bit because it's just what I was thinking a little bit earlier when we were talking about if AI can, you know, fuck your bottom line, it can unfuck it. And so how is it that consumers can get, how can we develop AI tools that can alert the consumer of when this manipulation is occurring because there's no question that that is within the realm of possibility. Yeah, I mean, here, I think we actually do have a kind of interesting

1:04:24opportunity because most people are not doing their shopping using bots, right? Most people are not doing all of their shop, you know, sending Gemini out to take care of their weeks worth of shopping, right? And so, no, but even those websites are designed. Amazon designs its website. And you actually talk about this in the book, the sort of casinoization of these websites where, you know, going through the website leads you to higher prices, leads you to not get good deals. Absolutely, you know, dark patterns. These are the design techniques that, you know, engineers have built into e-commerce to make it hard for us to get out of there without spending more than we plan to putting us into a subscription when we just wanted one item instead of one item every month for the rest of our lives, giving us a personalized storefront. So we don't realize we're not on the main website. And now we're having prices catered to us. But I think there is a question, which is, who will these agents work for in the commerce setting? You know,

1:05:26you're right. These agents could be deployed to help us accomplish something that has become more difficult, which is comparison shopping. Like, hey, chat, chat, TBT, like, go get me a summary of every price for this particular sweater that I want, you know, it returns that information and then I go the lowest price item. That is possible, right? That is one pathway. And can help you uncover dark patterns and can help you uncover. There's no question that you could create agents that would allow people to see how they're being manipulated. Absolutely. Absolutely. Can uncover some of these tricks and traps. They can do hard work for us, give us some shortcuts. You know, like, chat, TBT is probably going to be better than the point sky, right? At figuring out some of this stuff. Like no offense to the point sky, who is really great at helping everyone with their airfare. But, you know, we are getting to this place where we sort of, you know, start to wonder,

1:06:28you know, amidst all of these just incredibly opaque and manipulative pricing practices, if we're going to need a point sky for milk and a point sky for bread and a point sky, you know, for everything that we buy. So sure, Agent DeCommerce has, I think, a lot of possibility in that vein. But the flip side is, you know, these agents may not work for us. They may not work on our behalfs. They may work for the highest bidder, whoever they get kickbacks for. Gemini partnering with retailers who, you know, preferentially send us certain. Even AI is greedy. I thought, well, it shouldn't have human impulses. It should be working for the moral good. Where's Asimov when we need him? For God's sakes. I mean, look, let's talk about, let's go back to Walmart. Let's talk about Sparky. Sparky is Walmart's bot. Oh, for God's, they come Sparky. His name is Sparky. I, his or her. By the way, do they pay Sparky enough? Or is he also on public assistance,

1:07:31even though he's working at Walmart 24 hours a day, seven days a week? We should fire up the app and ask Sparky. Sparky, are you eating enough? Do you have food and security? Is everything okay? Yeah. You know, if you again go back to the earnings calls, you look at how Walmart talks about Sparky. Here's what you find. Basket totals for customers using Sparky are 35% higher than for customers who aren't using Sparky. No. Look, they're Sparky. You sort of what? I mean, look, like, there could be innocent reasons for this, right? Maybe the types of people who are using, okay, the types of people who use Sparky relative to the types of people who don't use Sparky are wealthier and we're going to be more likely to buy more at Walmart anyways. But I think what is more likely is, and they talk about this a little bit in the earnings call. If they're wealthier, they're a target. They're not at Walmart anyway. Yeah. Sparky is good at

1:08:34upselling. Sparky is good at closing, making sure you don't forget to check out and you buy everything in your cart. Sparky is good at bundling. Hey, you buy the tuna. You should definitely get the mayonnaise. Oh, my God. So these, the ways in which companies are deploying enterprise agents, like Sparky, Amazon has roof-s. There are a lot of different agents that these companies are working with. I think does present new frontiers for for gouging and new frontiers for overcharging. But also, Sparky, you will ask you an innocent question, like, what do you need today and when do you need it? And it knows you need something urgently. It knows you need it. It knows you're in a rush. I think, you know, when we talk about personalized pricing, we often think it lines up with income. Like, these companies are just going to charge the people with the most money more. And that's, and like, maybe some people are excited by that. Oh, yeah, they're going to build the wealthy. But

1:09:36I think, you know, your desire for something doesn't always match income. Sometimes you're desperate for something because it's the middle of the night and you have a sick kid or you don't have a sick kid, but your kid's yelling in your ear to buy something, right? You need it now. You're going to a funeral, so you're buying a plane ticket. But the point is that almost entirely every one of these tools is an avenue of exploitation, not an avenue of convenience even or of what you would consider to be supply and demand. It's exploitation and extraction. Yes, that's a better word. Thank you. Extraction. That's what it is. They're going for all of the consumers or plus like every ounce of additional money your will to today and fix the damage of extraction. The only tool we have is to create collateral damage for people that are already suffering,

1:10:36which is to slow the economy, slow hiring, depress wages. It's at same argument I got into with Mr. Summers, where he was discussing how, why shouldn't they be able to charge whatever they could possibly get? Well, because that seems to be sparking inflation and then you're going to spark a recession by raising rates and people are going to be out of work. Look, I think, there is another avenue here in addition to the enforcement avenue. It's a legislative one. We are seeing some green shoots. I don't want to get too optimistic, but we're seeing some green shoots. This year alone, there have been 90 pieces of legislation to tackle algorithmic pricing. Several states have actually passed legislation to tackle algorithmic pricing and things like surveillance pricing. Can states effectively do that given that the algorithm is not a resident?

1:11:42The algorithm unfortunately does not live in Fresno. The first piece of legislation that was passed in the country was actually disclosure law in New York. That requires companies operating in New York to tell you if a company is setting prices using algorithms. While mere disclosure is not enough, it has been useful in shining a light on which companies are using this. If you go to DoorDash, you're going to get the warning. If you go to Uber, you're going to get the warning. This is how we found out that Washington Post was doing personalized pricing on its subscribers. But they're owned by Jeff Bezos. I can't imagine he would deploy those types of techniques. He only founded the most sophisticated pricing company in the history of mankind. That disclosure was a helpful first step. Now folks are trying to ban these practices. You can't use my data to overcharge me. You can offer discounts, but not by spying on me

1:12:51by giving me a senior discount or a student discount or a memorial day sale or a coupon. Everyone has access to. There is starting to be some momentum at the state level. There's some interest in this at the federal level, the federal trade commission issued a notice and comment. For the next nine days, you can let the federal trade commission know what you think about this and what you think they should do about it. I'm optimistic that in the relatively near future, we'll see some real meaningful action on this. But right now, it's a Wild West. That's what I like to hear. It's a Wild West, but Lindsey, your book, if I may, exposes this in such a clear and well-researched and well-presented. I mean, it paints a really complete picture of all the headwinds that people are facing in terms of affordability and why it's not a crisis, but it is the end result of very

1:13:54obviously exploitative and extractive policies. So I really appreciate it. The book is called Gouged, the end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet and man-o-man. You should get it because you should understand what these people are doing. Lindsay Owens, president of CEO, Groundwork Collaborative and author of this great new book, Gouged. Lindsay, thank you. Thanks so much for having me, John. It was really great to chat and so appreciate you reading the book and giving me the chance to discuss. I didn't read it. Gemini gave me a summary and I was just working off of that. So I didn't my agent, my agentic was, no, it was, I breaded, it was great. Thank you though, Lindsay. Thanks for having me. Work sucks. That's why they call it work and I got to tell you something about work.

1:14:58The biggest pain in the ass would work. So when you got to stop trying to do everything yourself, you know what I'm talking about? Delegate. You don't have to do it all yourself. Well, you little control freaks are in for a treat. A little thing called upwork. That's where businesses find highly skilled freelance professionals for specialized work. With business plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on upwork. Upwork is like a great resource. For those of you who are busy working but don't have time to handle things like contracts and payments in one place, you can spend more time running your business and free to sign up and posting a job is easy. I don't see a downside. Do you see a downside? No, that's why it's not called downwork. That's why it's called upwork because there's only an upside. You see what I did there verbally? Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to connect

1:16:02with top talent ready to help your business grow. That is UPWORK.com upwork.com. You know, I said God bless the earnings call. But along with that, let me say this. God bless the cross-country one day trip to the Emmys because I got to sit in quiet and read her book twice, once. Yeah, that's some silver lining. Right. So I felt incredibly able to be present. Yeah, good book too. Good read. It's shocking to me that Lindsay, you know, that she's considered the radical. She's a social, and you're like trying to protect people from exploitation. She's like, they're charging you 35 cents more for eggs, you guys. You got to pay attention. Right. They're all like, shut up, Marx. Let me tell you something, Engels. You don't know what's going on. I, but when you start to think about it, when you guys shop on, like, I'll go on Amazon.

1:17:08I never realized like they bury on the pages the best result for what you want. And they try to sell you crap. Or when it'll say like, guest pick or like, popular choice or all those latest Amazon choice. Amazon choice, right? And you're like, yeah, but who the, like, who Jeff Bezos? Yeah, he has my best interests in mind. He's literally going through like, you need this snorkel. This is the snorkel you need. But that, that, the discussion about dark patterns, it struck me as a former big fan of casinos. Yeah. I mean, I love that when she's talking about like the sort of maze to get out of a casino. I've had that experience like in Las Vegas. I look something up and I'm like, oh, it's a 10 minute walk. And it takes me like 30 minutes just to get out of the building. And that's what they're doing to us, you know, on every website. Now you want to cancel your subscription. You want to find the best deal for yourself. You're going to have to navigate through all of these pages. Well, it's interesting how much of

1:18:10their economic theory seems to come from casinos because casinos are designed at every turn to get you out of your room. Your room is uncomfortable. Spare, you know, there's always the kind of, and I don't know if this is apocryphal, but they put in pumped air and they keep it drier and they keep it less pleasant. So it'll drive you down to the floor of the hotel where the casino is. And once you walk into the casino, you're in Jumanji. Like you're not getting out of there until you defeat the final boss. Yeah. Do you drink? You can still smoke. Yeah, learn Amazon. I'm having that experience on Amazon.com. How many times have you been in the casino and you can't find your way out when you finally do, you're like, is it daytime? You're like, is it 95 degrees? What the hell? How did this happen? But listening to this conversation and after reading the book, like, what is Congress doing about

1:19:10any of this? So Mitch McConnell has. He's got a plan for that. He's got a bill. He's just got to work on obviously regaining the use of his hands and feet. And then he's going to, they're not doing, I mean, she said there's 90 pieces of legislation, but it's the tip of the iceberg. Really. I agree. Because it's a symptom and it's not, you know, the actual problem. And I think, I mean, the most disturbing part about this for me is just like, these crises, they're always like, they're twofold. They raise the prices twofold because now they have a crisis and you're going to get hit for that. We're not saying that the Iran war isn't real. The terror of war isn't real. They have the opportunity to, but then they create that pretext to also raise prices on top of that and increase their bottom line. And by the way, they're also squeezing the other side, the workers at the same time using the same practices to hurt them. That's right. That's the larger problem and you don't see anybody really trying to address that. No, but that's what we need to start.

1:20:12I think the economic incentives have to be readdressed and adjusted. And that doesn't mean, you know, the workers must own the means of production. But what it means is that you have to rebalance the economy so that it doesn't always flow into the favor of these extraction processes. It has to somehow rebalance to the betterment for, you know, the consumers and the people. But that's now we're up on our platforms. But guys, we are getting $5,000 checks. So, you know, it's a good point. And it won't, as the best said, he doesn't see why it would affect the deficit. It's only $1.3 trillion. There are ways to do it. Of course. Tell me about these ways. Okay, here's a way. What if we just don't count it? Okay. How about that? Throw that in there. Brittany, what do the people want to know for God's sakes? Okay. John. Yeah, hit me. Hit me. Trump lies. What? Period. Brittany, prepare me for these shocks. Do you think the White House press corps should just ignore him instead of running after him

1:21:16like Natalie Harp? I do. I actually think that he own, he needs them more than they need him. That the access to Trump is nothing because the system has been designed to his advantage. You can't ask follow-ups. You can't do anything. It's just designed for his own personal performance. So it really serves no purpose in terms of public value. It's just another platform for him to spew. And the reason why they like it is it's a content factory. It continues to generate content for all the other shows that exist and all the other aggregators. But as far as transparency, it's not transparency. It's as my friend, Mr. Bill O'Reilly would say, a petty fog machine. It's petty fogory. He would say. And it's all nonsense. And it would deny him the thing that he craves the most, which is to be the center of the universe. Attention. To be the center

1:22:17of the concentric circles. Yeah, I mean, when Carolyn Love it announced she was leaving, there was a reporter that I saw online that was a, and in your Times reporter, he said, you know, say what you will about her. And we have. But she always answered the questions that I sent. Jesus. And I was really like, that's where we're at. She just answering the facts that she stood up there and lied to the American public for an hour every day. Say what you will. Say what you will about Carolyn Love it, but she lied consistently. You know, a lot of people would have just started to cry, but she didn't. She stood tall and lied to us with a straight face for hours. A lot of people would have said, fuck you, but she didn't say that. She just implied that. Say what you will about Caroline Love it, but she did insult us to our faces. And also our intelligence when it came to the answers that she would daint to answer. Yeah, say what you will.

1:23:20That's Stockholm syndrome. Yeah. That's just that's capture for sure. Oh, for goodness, it's Brittany. What else? John, do you believe the Supreme Court is truly just killing balls and strikes? I think they would be so much better for this country if they were actually baseball umpires. Now fuck the umps. If the Supreme Court actually just dealt with baseball and balls and strikes, I'm talking about not getting involved in any of the they have single handedly made it impossible for us to reform and save our democracy decision after decision after decision by the Supreme Court has left us unarmed in the face of a full frontal assault on democratic principle citizens united. The way that they have redefined corruption as it has to be explicit grid broke well the way that

1:24:21they have made it explicit the corporations are people and money is speech and they always say the same thing in those decisions like I'm sure it'll be fine because transparency will be a great counterpart to all of those things, but there's never any transparency. There isn't any actual. It's just dark money group sending it to a pack or sending it to another thing you don't know where it's coming from you don't know any of it and it's impossible to reform because now the executive branch has near total immunity and corruption doesn't actually exist. The Supreme Court has done more damage to unfortunately do you know what I think it's going to force us to do? I truly mean this there has to be a process of amending the Constitution. This idea that citizens united stands as the law of the land is the biggest bunch of shit the Constitution is in a suicide pack and money is killing this country money in elections is killing this country and most

1:25:22people agree both sides like I think it's one thing that everybody agrees on except for you know the Supreme Court, but also and they sometimes they'll say things like and the legislature could pass different sorts of limits and all those sorts of things, but why would they pass something that would put their own you know who will really be able to handle our elections the people that rely on them for their income. And the people that have access to more money because they are in combat. Right. Any reasonable system would make those individuals recuse themselves from fixing a system that only benefits them through in competency. Yeah the unelected judges are supposed to be the ones deciding these things in favor of what is best for the American people. But now that they've been captured ideologically the Roberts Court has been the worst thing to happen this country in a long, long time. It's the way that they've made it so that agencies are no longer have the ability

1:26:24to regulate anything. They've made everything in this country subject to ideological capture and financial corruption. Everything. It's a joke. So they lied in your confirmation hearings. It's a joke. No, but John, but John they're impartial because they struck down the tariffs. Don't forget about that. Here's what I say to them. Bop, beep, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. All right. I'm fired up to apologize. I love it. No. It's great. It's jet lag. Famously fires people up. Yeah. Okay. Last but not least. Yes. John, this is very important. Come on. Make it lighter. Please God. Yeah. I can't take anymore. Is it too soon to start decorating for Halloween? I don't even know what to do. It's what day is it September 16th. Now you generally have a one month rule on on holidays and Halloween fits in perfectly because it always occurs at the end of the month.

1:27:25So I believe October 1st is the starting line. I do think jumping in on September and especially given the fact that Halloween decorations have become like, look, you want to throw a black cat decal on the window and a little plastic orange pumpkin with maybe a little spider web to give yourself. But at this point, it is the production value of Nolan's the Odyssey. That's great. The shit that I see in our neighborhood of where they're getting 28-beat tall skeletons. I do not know. Costco, there are blocks my dog won't walk on during October because of all of these sort of scare tactics. That's right. I jump out at you. It's so good. You see what you're doing? You see what you do? Once you get to the point where the animals have had enough of you. I have a friend that has, she actually leaves it up all year round but a huge life size cut out of Michael Myers in her window. Why would you do that to people? That's great. It's so good.

1:28:31That's by the way, my least favorite YouTube videos are the Michael Myers shows up at AckMe. Like people that dress up like a serial ruthless being human killer and surprise you by the ice cream. In the freezer section and everybody laughs like, these people think they're about to die. Yeah. We don't need that in September, you guys. Thank you. October 1st is plenty of time. Although I do understand, at a certain point, when you're spending $30,000 on Halloween decorations, you probably want to get them up as early as possible. That's a fair point. That's a fair point. My dollar store already has a Christmas decorations being sold. So we are way ahead of it guys. Do they still do those stores that are purely Halloween stores? Spirit Halloween. Yes. Spirit Halloween. What do they do? They take over empty spaces

1:29:36for a certain time. It's like a pop, I guess, when you consider a pop up seasonal. Yeah. And are they in play already? Are they? I saw one going up. I watched as the sign rose. I love, I love the idea that's like, pardon, pardon our appearance. We're trying to make Halloween as pleasant as possible. I'm excited. Do you still, do you do Halloween rituals? Now that my kids are at the house, it's a non-issue in my house. Halloween. I think last year, Jillian and I actually just sat on my stoop in drink and sat in D. Some of these kids were too old. Yes. They were all too old. We were getting sp leased by these high schoolers. I love the idea of you two sitting on a stoop, doing basically the Joan Rivers e-read carpet show on people coming by to come to your house. Oh, it's too accurate. You call that a ghost? We're going to start charging this year. That's hilarious. I love it. Well, very, very lovely as always. By the way, next week we're

1:30:42coming out on Wednesday again, right? We're back. We're coming. Yeah. That's the big change. How can they stay in touch with us, Brittany? Twitter. We are Wethyshupod, Instagram Threads TikTok Blue Sky. We are Wethyshupodcast and you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel that we could show at John Stewart. As always, thanks to you guys, producer Brittany Memevick, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer, Rob Vittolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, our associate producer, Rebecca Rotenberg, and our executive producer, Chris McShayne, Katie Gray. Thank you guys so much for doing it and we'll see you all next week. Boy. The weekly show with John Stewart is a comedy central podcast is produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise

1:31:43to a state surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking. Yeah. o Paramount podcasts.