The podcast reveals a hidden economy of corporate exploitation where price manipulation is widespread and systemic. Traditional economic models based on supply and demand are undermined by collusion, algorithmic pricing, and coordinated cartels—such as the historic Phoebus cartel and modern tech-driven price fixing among retailers, gas stations, and landlords. These practices allow companies to charge higher prices through artificial inflation, often hiding behind terms like "price optimization" or "dynamic pricing." Real-world examples, including Instacart’s randomized price experiments and realPage’s rental price algorithms, show that consumers are routinely charged different prices for the same goods, even at identical locations and times. These actions are often shielded by corporate narratives of market efficiency, while government oversight remains weak. The Federal Reserve’s response—raising interest rates to combat inflation—fails to address root causes like market concentration and collusion, instead shifting economic pain to workers and consumers. Consumers, meanwhile, are increasingly subject to surveillance-based pricing, where personal data is used to predict willingness to pay. The podcast argues that the narrative of free markets and fair pricing is a fiction, and that government intervention is not only necessary but overdue to restore fairness, transparency, and competition. The rise of "agentic commerce"—where AI chatbots influence pricing based on user emotions—signals a future where personal vulnerabilities are weaponized for profit. This systemic exploitation demands urgent policy reform, public awareness, and stronger enforcement of antitrust laws to protect consumer trust and economic equity.
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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 a premier retailer near you or shop online at avocadogreen mattress.com/tWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We are comedy 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 John 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 that only 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. Segway to talk to today's guest who is going to save our 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, 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 she's 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 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 log 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 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, you know, a slightly happy note, but it is a rage read. That's right. What you can do about for 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. Worse is going to announce rate hikes usually two o'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 to move forward with 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. Lindsey, I do, you know, we we've had this discussion previously that 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. He 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 their 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 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 thing, 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, 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. And 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, we 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 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 companies to raise prices well beyond what would be expected in our models. We also see frankly companies, you know, 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 the 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 a hundred years. And you can log on. Yes. Wait, log on. It has its own webcam on it. It has, it has a webcam. It is a light bulb cam. It's like a panda cam. Lindy, 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, 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. Lindy, 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. And by the way, Phoebus with a pH just to let you know how long ago this was. When, 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, wrote a memo, signed it. There was a memorandum and 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, you know, 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, and I don't know if officially ushered it in, but it's sort of the theory of, I guess, 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 change 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 talk it through and sign a deal. It's all 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 where 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. Let's take care of that. 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 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'll roll this. 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 this 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. And 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 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 based on surging and things like that later. 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. You know in the case of the algorithmic price fixing I talk about in the book. You know a lot of these companies argue that they're just suggesting the prices and therefore you know they aren't technically involved in price fixing right. They're just the algorithm offering prices. It's the retailers that are taking the prices and setting the prices. Well this this is where it gets really interesting. So in the old days it was you know you would think of guys in a smoke filled room talking about let's make our light bold shitter. We can spend more. Yeah. 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 uh uh hormones. So I worked as a stock boy there and we did. We had a little gun and you would go. Yeah. And you would just hit the prices on the thing and that's how it was determined. Yeah. There was some stability. Like in you know in America we've had price tags for 150 years. You know we didn't always have price tags. You know haggling was the norm for thousands of years. You know the retailer. I was shocked to find that out from the book that haggling was the norm in America up until you know 1800s. Yeah. Late 1800s. It was 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 it. Look price discrimination discrimination is inherently unequal and I think it didn't sit right
with them, you know, 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, right? It felt unfair. But also eventually we got the price tag because there was a business case for it, right? So 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. And he supposedly was supposedly inspired by the Quakers. He was a devout, presbyterian, 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. And so posting the price got you in and out of the store more quickly. So there was, you know, 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 stores. 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, right? And if it didn't for some reason and error, they would, you know, they would match it for you, right? 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, sort of physics nerds and seal team six, right? They are assassins. Let me fair price assassins. Price assassins. They're not, they're not literal assassins. They're, 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, microsecond to microsecond to fair. It's dizzying, you know, in addition to the lack of transparency in not having, you know, clear, sat-posted, posted prices, it also makes pricing way more volatile and unpredictable. You know, if you go on TikTok right now, John, there will be dozens of videos. You know, I'm going to lenses. I'm actually on it right now. I'm just scrolling. Just multitasking. Yeah. You'll find dozens of videos of women. And some men taking pictures and snapshots of prices changing right before their eyes or, you know, in Walmart being like, hey, the price, you know, 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. Hello. That's the, it's time for your favorite thing, which is advertisements. By the way, I was 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 it works. But I'll tell you the one thing. I don't like to think about it. And quince is, is how I don't have to think about, quince, they bring 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 pry 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 or go to quince.com/tws. Get free shipping on your order. And 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's quince.com/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. There are AI companies. Ever site 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, that's them. And stores have always done this to some extent. Yeah. But obviously in a more analog way, is pushing to see how much you can get somebody 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, you know, still take an item out without closing our shopping cart online. But running tests at a scale that's unimaginable, right? You know, behind the scenes doing A, B testing, offering you 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 this isn't, 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 just simple experimentation, you know, 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, you know, for bread and how much we'll pay for milk. And that's what Instacart was doing on on millions of Americans shopping for their groceries last year. The Instacart, the Instacart one is 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 experiment. We got volunteer secret shoppers together and we said, look, log on to Instacart, select a pick up 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. Lindsey, talk to me. It was a good basket of groceries for sure. And then we said, look, take screenshots of your cart. That was the whole experiment. 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 pick up locations and the same cities at the exact same time, Rome was logged on. Make that clear. That's the clear thing because you might want to say to yourself, well, geez, it's cost of 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. Yep. Different price. Exactly. The equivalent would be if you and I, John, were standing in the exact same grocery line. Yeah. And we just happened to have the exact same basket of groceries. I check out and I'm charged $123. And while I'm still bagging my groceries, you get wrong up and your price is $155. That's what we found. Right. 75% of the items offered at different prices at the same time. And 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. And of course, if you were on the losing end of that A/B test, you were getting offered the higher prices. You know, 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. Right. You've got to eat. It's $1,200 is what we estimated. It could cost a household of four under some conditions. And they're not just pushing this randomly. They're not just trying to see you if I inch that up there. They also know who you are. So in the Instacred Study, we did.
did not find personalized or surveillance pricing. >>Okay. >>We couldn't pin the price differences. >>But that is a thing. >>Yes. Yes. So 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, what you hover over with your mouse, but don't click on it. >>Odeer God. >>Yes. >>Odeer God, I've got some cleanup on IL-3 to do. >>Yes, 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've got a raise. >>Yes, 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 in a world in which we start to see agentic commerce take off. 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 which 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? 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 amount of information, let me give you two answers to this. Let's go with the companies. Answer number one, Delta partnered with an intelligence company and artificial intelligence company out of Israel called Fetcher. They partnered with Fetcher to get better at pricing, to get better at dynamic pricing, 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 plane. 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 there marketing materials and explaining this to companies? 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, where Fetcher started looking around your customer base, looking around your competitors, just trying to understand the market, trying to 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 paper. - 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. So 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 1% of their routes. And they said by the end of the year, we're going to give them 20%. We love what we see. Like we love the exploitation phase, right? - By the way, Lindsey, 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 is actually real. Like during the pandemic, you would think that during the pandemic, when they said we're really struggling to get, you know, 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 American and Southwest really seized on that and said, we're not gonna do that. And Delta had to back down. - What happened when Instacart? 'Cause 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 AB testing. And there was a PR mouse drum 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 gonna stop these experiments. We're not gonna 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 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 installing thermometers in their vending machines. - Great story in the book. - To charge you more on a hot day for a Coke, right? And this was before, you know, this was 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, right? And Pepsi, of course, wait in, you know, we're in the business of quenching thirst, not exploiting it. And Coke backed off and said, you know what? Just kidding, like, you know, the lab is closed. We're not going to be installing thermometers on vending machines. - Right, just kidding. (laughing) - 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. (upbeat music) - You've heard me talk about fast growing trees, right? And I'm, you know how, how I feel about trees. 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. So fast growing trees, you can imagine. It's 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 at home to sit and think about what the new name might be. They're just trees now, trees.com. 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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 TWS. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use TWS to save today. Offer his valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. (upbeat music) And 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've got a pad 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 did phone surveys and they called people and they gave them a pricing scenario 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, you know, you could have imagined. So things like, okay, you know, tariffs are gonna be applied to a new item, peanut butter. Like the cost of peanut butter is gonna 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 it 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 there's one left in the store. How do you decide who gets it? Is it the first person to the aisle? Like that's first come first serve or a cue? 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 fair? - 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 live in 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 LeBoubou. - Yeah, exactly. - And I think you'll have your understanding of 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, raising an interest rate is going to do nothing to touch those drivers of consumer pain. - Yeah, and those two things are related. So the cover that these economic events, global events provide is an additional opportunity to raise prices. - Explain that, explain that. - 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, 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 external economic events put upward pressure on prices, they do, right? Tariffs are gonna pass through to consumers, companies pass those through. But they additionally provide opportunity 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 are 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 dime 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, we'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. Like, how were they thinking about this? Were they like, oh shit, like we're gonna be in real trouble. This is gonna eat into our margins. Or did they feel like they were gonna 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. - Additional pricing. And God bless euphemisms. - Price optimization, revenue management, yield, all of these terms 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. 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, Walmart'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, right? Smart cards are starting to become more common in grocery stores, right? 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, right? 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 sort of 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. So if you buy something that generally, like, I've got sloppy Joe that I've just put in my cart, they know you're gonna 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 pattern 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, 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 an 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, 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 things. 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 you're 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 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, you know, 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 a lot of availability, you know, 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 your way. Yeah, this guy. If I remember the saying correctly. Exactly. And so, you know, by the way, it wasn't just the algorithm, because of course, you know, some landlords might say, look, I got to get this thing running. So I'm going to go for a lower price. They also had, you know, a team of pricing advisors on staff who would, you know, cajole and arm twist and make sure landlords were sticking with the recommended prices, charging top dollar. So this is all what is alleged in the Department of Justice is 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 in 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 deliver me a good product for less and don't bother me. Don't bother me with the like, oh, 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 diabolical. 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 unlimited 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 mintmobile.com/tws. That's mintmobile.com/tws. Got your wireless build of 15 bucks a month and mintmobile.com/tws. 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 a network is busy includes up to 20 gigabyte hot spot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see mintmobile.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 gained. And by the way, combine that with here's another 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, well 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 multi-family landlords or I'll give you a more recent example that just 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. I mean, that is an extraordinary complaint. And you know, there's always been this question of like why gas prices are so high in California. And there, you know, there are reasons related to like differential regulation and and environmental standards, but it's always been even higher than that still. And you start to wonder if maybe we're honing in on the answer. And the answer is anti-competitive practices like algorithmic price fixing, you know, alleged by this tech company Calibrate in gas and retail. So just, you know, there, I mean, there, 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 you know, what's really sort of difficult to wrap your head around with all of this is any time 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
go to hell, we can't possibly stop this because what you're seeing in prices is merely the natural effects of 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 pricing is competitive, falling from the sky, 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 do 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 high to me. I'm going to hold and see if I can find a better deal. Getting in her car, going 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 to lower my prices. That is the mechanism through which pricing is disciplined in markets and pricing can be competitive when you can't come airsen 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, pricing cannot be competitive in that environment. So where then is the federal government? Where is the FTC? Where is the SEC? Where any of these organizations I could help because what they do is they leave you then to the harsh wins 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 in 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 funding, or frankly, the bigger problem is the political will for 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 here, 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 isn'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 are 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 opportunity 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, you're right. These agents could be deployed to help us accomplish something that has become more difficult, which is comparison shopping. Like, hey, 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 by 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 T. T. 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, he was 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, you 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, that we buy. So sure, agenda commerce has I think a lot of possibility in that, 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 bitter, whoever they get kickbacks for. Gemini partnering with retailers who, you know, preferentially and send us certain, even AI is greedy. I thought, well, it shouldn't have human impulses. It should, 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, well, let's go back to Walmart. Let's talk about Sparky. Sparky is Walmart's bot. Oh, my God. They come Sparky. His name is Sparky. His or her. By the way, do they pay Sparky enough? Or is he also on public assistance, even 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 insecurity? It's 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 at target. They're not at Walmart anyway. Yeah. Sparky is good at upselling. 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 bought the tuna. You should definitely get the mayonnaise, right? So these, the ways in which companies are deploying enterprise agents like Sparky.
Amazon has Rufus, there are a lot of different agents that these companies are working with. I think does present new frontiers 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'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 I 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. An extraction. Yes. That's a better word. An extraction. That's what it is. They're going for all of the consumers or plus, like every ounce of additional money you're willing to give today. And to fix the damage of extraction, the only tool we have is to create collateral damage for people that are already suffering, which is to slow the economy, slow hiring, depress wages. It's that 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. Yeah. Look, I think, you know, there is another avenue here in addition to the enforcement avenue, and it's a legislative one. And we are seeing some green shoots. You know, I don't want to get too optimistic, but we're seeing some green shoots. So 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. And states effectively do that, given that the algorithm is not a resident. The algorithm, unfortunately, does not live in Fresno. Yeah. You know, 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, and, you know, while mere disclosure is not enough, it has been useful in shining a light on which companies are using this, right? 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 sort of personalized pricing on its subscribers. Yes. But they're owned by Jeff Bezos. I can't imagine he would deploy those types of techniques. Right. He only founded the most sophisticated pricing company in the history of mankind Amazon. But that disclosure was sort of a helpful first step, and 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, by giving me a senior discount or a student discount, or a memorial day sale, or a coupon, right, that everyone has access to. So, you know, 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 in comment. So, you know, for the next nine days, you can, you know, let the Federal Trade Commission know what you think about this and what you think they should do about it. So, I'm optimistic that, you know, 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. Yeah. It's a Wild West. But Lindsay, your book, if I may, exposes this in such a clear and well research 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 obviously 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, Caljolensie. 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 did my agent, my agentic with, 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. The biggest pain in the ass would work, so when you got it seized, 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 with top talent ready to help your business grow. And it's u-p-w-o-r-k-dot-com-upwork-dot-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 and for the whole time. Yeah. That's my silver lining. That's right. And so I felt incredibly able to be present. Yeah, good book, too. Good read. It's shocking to me that Lindsey, you know, that she's considered like radical. She's a social, and you're like trying to protect people from exploitation. She's like, "They're charging $0.35 more for eggs, you guys." Like, you got to pay attention. Right. And they're all like, "Shut up, Marks." Let me tell you something, Angles. You don't know what's going on. I have, but when you start to think about it, when you guys shop on, like, I'll go on Amazon, I never realize, like, they bury on the pages the best result for what you want. Mm-hmm. And they try to sell you crap. Or when it'll say, like, guest pick or, like, popular choice or all those latest-- Yeah. 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-- 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, 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." Mm-hmm. And that's what they're doing to us, you know. And 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 their 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. So you drink, you can still smoke. Yeah, learn Amazon. I'm not 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 any 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 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. And 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. I think the economic incentives have to be re-addressed 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 re-balance 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. Oh yeah. 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 like Natalie Harp? I do. I actually think that he only, 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 it. 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. The tension to be the center of the concentric circles. Yeah. I mean, when Carolyn love it announced she was leaving. There was a reporter that I saw online that was in your time's 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. Just 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 Caroline Levitt, 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 Levitt, but she did insult us to our faces and also our intelligence when it came to the answers that she would dain't answer. Yeah. Say what you will. That's Stockholm syndrome. Yeah. That's just that's capture for sure. Oh, for goodness, it's Britney. What else it got? 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 quote, the way that they have made it explicit that 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 people 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 will 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 incumbency? Mm-hmm. And the people that have access to more money because they are incumbenced? Right. Many reasonable system would make those individuals recuse themselves from fixing a system that only benefits them through incumbency. 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 Robert's Court has been the worst thing to happen in 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 to 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, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm fired up to that. I apologize. I love it. It's great. It's jet lag. Famously, it fires people up. Yeah. Okay. Last but not least, John, this is very important. Come on. Make it lighter. Please, God. I can't take anymore. Is it too soon to start decorating for Halloween? I don't even know what to do. What to do? Or 16th? Now, you generally have a one-month rule on holidays and Halloween fits in perfectly because it always occurs at the end of the month. So 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, the shit that I see in our neighborhood of where they're getting 28-beat tall skeletons. Yeah. I do not know. Costco. There are blocks. My dog won't walk on during October because of all of the sort of scare tactics that try to jump out at you. It's so good. You see what you're doing? 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. That's, by the way, my least favorite YouTube videos are the Michael Myers shows up at Acme, 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, ah!
people think they're about to die. Yeah, 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. Spirit Halloween. What do they do? They take over empty spaces for 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 out of the house, it's a non-issue in my house. Yeah, Halloween. I think last year, Jillian and I actually just sat on my stoop in drink and stuck in the some of these kids were too old. Yes, they were all too old. It was like, we were getting spliced by these high schoolers. I love the idea of you two sitting on a stoop, doing basically the Joan Rivers e-red 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 coming 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 Ruth Lee Showpod, Instagram Threads, TikTok Blue Sky. We are Ruth Lee Showpodcast, and you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show of John Stewart. As always, thanks to you guys, producer Brittany Mamedvik, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vittolo, audio editor, and engineer Nicole Boyce, our associate producer Rebecca Rotenberg, and our executive producer is Chris McShane and 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. Paramount Podcasts.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Companies are engaging in widespread price fixing and collusion, including through algorithms, to exploit consumers and manipulate prices in real time.
Technologies like AI and data analytics now allow for hyper-personalized and dynamic pricing, often without consumer awareness, turning everyday shopping into a covert experiment.
Historical and modern examples—such as the Phoebus cartel, Walmart and Amazon price coordination, and realPage’s algorithmic rental pricing—show that collusion and artificial inflation are systemic, not isolated incidents.
Summary:
The podcast reveals a hidden economy of corporate exploitation where price manipulation is widespread and systemic. Traditional economic models based on supply and demand are undermined by collusion, algorithmic pricing, and coordinated cartels—such as the historic Phoebus cartel and modern tech-driven price fixing among retailers, gas stations, and landlords. " Real-world examples, including Instacart’s randomized price experiments and realPage’s rental price algorithms, show that consumers are routinely charged different prices for the same goods, even at identical locations and times.
These actions are often shielded by corporate narratives of market efficiency, while government oversight remains weak. The Federal Reserve’s response—raising interest rates to combat inflation—fails to address root causes like market concentration and collusion, instead shifting economic pain to workers and consumers. Consumers, meanwhile, are increasingly subject to surveillance-based pricing, where personal data is used to predict willingness to pay.
The podcast argues that the narrative of free markets and fair pricing is a fiction, and that government intervention is not only necessary but overdue to restore fairness, transparency, and competition. The rise of "agentic commerce"—where AI chatbots influence pricing based on user emotions—signals a future where personal vulnerabilities are weaponized for profit. This systemic exploitation demands urgent policy reform, public awareness, and stronger enforcement of antitrust laws to protect consumer trust and economic equity.
FAQs
Lindsay Owens argues that modern pricing practices—like collusion, planned obsolescence, and algorithmic price fixing—are undermining fair prices in the economy. She shows how companies manipulate prices through cartels, artificial inflation, and personalized pricing, often without consumer awareness or transparency.
Companies use AI and algorithms to run large-scale price experiments, adjusting prices in real time based on individual consumer data such as location, device type, browsing behavior, and financial status. These systems enable personalized pricing, where some shoppers are charged more than others for the same product.
The Phoebus cartel in 1924, where major electric companies from around the world agreed to shorten the lifespan of light bulbs to increase sales—a classic case of planned obsolescence and price fixing that was illegal but historically common.
The podcast argues that the Fed raises interest rates to combat inflation, but this doesn't address root causes like corporate collusion, supply chain issues, or price-fixing. Instead, it harms workers and fails to solve the structural problems driving price increases.
The podcast cites a study on Instacart showing that 75% of grocery items were offered at different prices at the same time and location, with price differences up to 23%. This reveals widespread, unannounced pricing experiments targeting consumers without their knowledge.
These cases highlight how software platforms allow landlords and gas stations to coordinate prices algorithmically, leading to artificially inflated rates. In one case, gas prices in California were allegedly increased by as much as 30 cents per gallon due to collusion among 1,700 stations.
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