#644: Just Tell Me What the Price Is

What is a goddamn wine-based honey?

Please do not use gendered language. Then why? I'll be arrested! Put in your poor jail! Well, you're gonna commit sideways.

It's a big club. And you ain't in it. How bad is you?

“Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States.”

Hi, I'm Mr. Speaker. Jack Mary's Tech, there are tricks. I am sparkly Jackson, Sacramento, E.M. Stephen Sagaal, sex offender guard, I'm Keith Morris. He's low-mind, good job he.

I'm Rick James, bitch. Sorting through the lies. The high-jackers passport was found blocks from the world traits that are crash-sighted, they can believe ab. We cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions.

And uncovering the century's long plan for world domination. We're not Cuban, have it some food. Hey, pop back honey, Peter.

You've never been an animal in a Turkish prison.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Hurt it up! It's way too far away. I have said six of my living missiles to blow up. This is hardware, he's blind to me. I think it'd be more fun than jumping on a cliff.

Too driven by sexual pho, you English are so superior aren't you? Thank you, Thomas. And now, macro aggressions. I thought I was all calling. With your hopes, hey, I don't know who you are.

You're about to get familiar. Charlie Robinson. Hey, whity, where's your hat? When dropped a blame on Charlie and said it's all Charlie's fault. He was a retard.

I get some goddamn guy already.

Well, come to macro aggressions. I'm your host Charlie Robinson. If you are watching us on rumbleband.video, YouTube, or your listening rubber podcast or surf, thanks a million. We appreciate your support.

We couldn't do it without you.

“Macroagressions.io is the website, activeisposed.com is where you should go to get all your”

news. We appreciate you guys coming to check us out. If you like the show, share it with your friends, rate the show. If you haven't done that already, do all those things. Check out our sponsors.

I promise you, look, I have to have sponsors for this show. The least I can do is grab great ones for you. Products and services that you will actually use by companies that aren't scamming you. Chemical free body has been with me from the very beginning and they'll be with me as long as I do this show because they make products that actually work.

If you have, look, if you take a green drink in the morning, good for you. If you don't, or you want to, but you just have been prevented because I don't like the taste of them. They taste really bad. I understand that.

Fully. Guess what? Chemical free body has an apple flavor of their green 85. It came out a couple months ago.

“If you closed your eyes and drank it, you would think you were drinking apple juice.”

So if you have some sort of aversion to green drinks because of the taste component, and those held you back, it's reasonable. I'm solved, go to chemicalfreebody.com/macro, check out the green 85 apple flavor. Grab a six pack of that, get yourself sorted out. Maybe try the detox bundle or the parasite cleanse.

I've done them all. They all work. I'm currently obsessed with my water hero, structured water device, everything in my house is getting structured water, whether they want it or not. So if you're interested or just curious, go to chemicalfreebody.com/macro.

You do that in the discount is already built into it, it'll factor it in by the time you get to the cashier. Also, look, if you own a home and you have equity in your home and you have good credit score and your positive or your cash flow and your smart about your bills and you run, you know what you're doing, but you have a 30 year mortgage, you can change that.

There is a system. There is a way to get that down to between five and seven years. I promise you, it's not a scam. I'm not lying to you, it's not a re-fi, it's not a recast, it's none of that. It's actually something completely different and if you're curious about it, best thing

to do is go watch the video or go back a couple episodes and catch my interview with Michael Lush, the founder of Replace Your Mortgage. I'll tell you, they have an A+ rating with better business bureau. They've helped 10,000 people do this, it's a bank killer. It absolutely is and God knows I have no love for the bank.

So if you're curious, interested or you want to know more about it, go to wipe out your mortgage now.com, it's the website built specifically for this show, wipe out your mortgage now.com, it's like a 20-minute video, check it out, see what to think. There's no need to be paying your mortgage for 30 years. Once you flip the math into your favor, go check it out for yourself.

this year that I've done on pricing.

“We should make a lot of pricing, that's conspiracy related.”

Oh my God, it is one of the greatest conspiracies out there that frankly nobody's talking about. Maybe I am, but we're going to get into it because there's so much more to know. We talked a little bit before about Wendy's and Wendy's took it in the real bad after they decided, "Hey, you know what, well maybe reimagine the way we price hamburgers.

People were not happy about that. We'll get into that. Talk a little bit about crypto. I want to talk about dynamic prices, pricing, which is when these situation, it's much worse. It is spread.

Wendy's might have taken some bad PR from it, but Walmart has made a corporate decision based on it. You'll want to find out more about that. That's going to impact everybody. We'll get into how the dynamic pricing works in a low-trust society.

It's boiler alert, it ain't great, but we'll wrap up with solutions for how you can get around it. I mean, listen, it's one thing if we're just complaining, but I got some thoughts on how to get around this, you know, you go through school, if you go through school, and you

“hear about things like the Adam Smith invisible hand of marketplaces, right?”

And you go, that's, well, you don't need an actual person there to say, you know, this price, you know, the apples are this priced and bananas are this priced. If you have an invisible hand, meaning not visible and forcing things to happen, then the prices take care of themselves. You go to a marketplace, you want to charge $3 for your apples, the market says that's too

much. If you say you've repriced it at one, now I'll have to sudden your apples start selling. All right. Now you've found price discovery, and when you have that given a big enough marketplace, you can kind of determine what the going rate is for something, but, you know, like the

invisible, these days with dynamic pricing, it's like the invisible hand of marketplace has been chopped off by the Muslims for stealing, you know, like everything is rigged, everything

“is fake, all the marketplaces are set up by the banks, and then they have their thumb”

on the scales. I mean, you know, I've talked about that, oh, they rigged marketplaces and everything. I'm not just saying that, it's like a throwaway line.

They rigged Labore and Forex, the settlement for rigging those marketplaces was $5.8 billion.

There's a settlement in 2015, JP Morgan and Citigroup paid the fine, well, $5,000,000,000,000,000, fine. This, okay, $5.8 billion, like this is not an insignificant amount of money. RBS, they paid a $90 million fine in the UK. They paid a $495 million fine in the US, Barclays Bank.

They paid a $450 million fine. All of these fines are for rigging the Labore and the Forex Marketplaces. So when I say I have problems about pricing, I have problems about how we determine the pricing. What is the price of gold?

What is the price of silver? Because when silver went parabolic earlier in the year, the price for physical silver in the United States in the price for physical silver in China were off by a factor of $30,

which should never happen.

For the last like five years, I have been buying silver at $30. The spread was $30, like the marketplace is broken and you know why. It's not that you built a marketplace and for whatever reason it just keeps breaking. No, you have criminals that have designed it, and they're running the marketplace. The market is fraud, it is designed to be fraud.

So as long as you are running your marketplace is through banks, your fraud is banked into the equation, if there's no way to get around it and if you think online, ask yourself, why are these companies paying these large fines? If they're not committing fraud, you don't pay, if you're RBS, you don't pay $500 million of a fine to the United States government, if you're not engaged in fraud, which they are,

it is their business model is fraud, all of them.

This is the part of the reason why Jeff and I were on such a heater about credit, Swiss,

and Deutsche Bank in our book because they are in solvent. They were in solvent when we wrote the book in 2020. They're in solvent in 2026, they should be out of business, but they're not. The reason why they're not is because the entire marketplace is rigged. So and speaking of Deutsche Bank, they paid $250 million in the UK for their fine, but

the global penalty that Deutsche Bank paid for their criminality was $2.5 billion. Not only are they an insolvent zombie bank, they're also a criminal enterprise that's measurable. They've paid, well, just from these two fines alone, $2.75 billion in fines, that's just Deutsche Bank.

“You have to ask the question, how much money were they making?”

Well, not enough to stay solvent because they're always upside down for some reason,

almost like it's designed that way. So these markets are being manipulated by algo traders, they're being manipulated by traditional Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the banks, governments, I mean, everybody is involved in this. So the name of this episode, it's just telling me what the price is. It's like you just want to know, like, where are you getting your information?

Oh, this brand new car costs $75,000, how do I even know that because that's the going rate? And buying it at that price, sticker prices, $75,000, what is the real price? Why do we have to play this game? It's why car max has been so successful.

“People are tired of like going into a car dealership and feeling like they're in a war,”

you know, they want to go in there and spend their money. They feel like they're in some sort of battle against the salesperson and the manager, that there's some sort of trick, it's like, oh shit, I got to come in here, I got to bring my friend who knows something about cars, so I don't feel like I'm getting, you know, this led by the sales team, like that's a bad place to start, that's the car industry.

The car industry is a very wonky sales segment, you know, you come in there, battle, the prices, whatever they say it is. If you're good at negotiating or you know how it really works, you get a better deal. I sat in a car dealer, I had to do this game, I sat in a Mercedes dealership in the last day of 1998 and there was a car and there I really wanted and I told the guy, this is the

price I'll pay for it. I went in like five o'clock and it was the last day of their year and I knew it was the last day of their year and I said, I'm going to, this is the price I'm moving to pay for that car and manager said no and I said, that's cool, I understand you guys got to do what you got to do.

See that, I'm going to be in that chair over there and I had a book and I had some paper work with me and I was just working, I'll be on that, I'll be at that chair over there today. I'm going to be here until you guys close and you let me know when that price works for you.

I've just sat there, I bought the car that night, I got it for the price I wanted, but I shouldn't have to do that, I shouldn't have to go in there and just be abrasive and treat them like garbage, treat them like the enemy and that's where car max has been successful. They say, we got one price, it's no haggle, it's all that and so people go in there and they go at least, I don't feel like the sales team is going to be laughing at me as I pull

out of the driveway with this brand new car. I mentioned silver and gold, just an idea, just to give you an idea of these prices. I said they were out of control in January of 2026, this year, but might you silver does nothing, for better or for worse, I mean, if you want something with relatively low volatility, silver will bore you to death, right, it was like $15 for a while and then

it kind of moved up, then it was in like the 20s to 25, that sat there for years. If you wanted to get silver in the 25 range, you had years to do it, right, in January, the price went from 70 to 117 in one month, okay, 66% increase.

“I remember I did it on like a Friday, it went parabolic that Friday, so I messaged Tony”

hard to burn like, are you having a cocktail tonight after the week you had, it was like, yeah, no kidding.

I mean, the price is in the first, so that's the spike, right, 70 to 117 in January.

will come down.

“Well it did, it then turned around and went from one, my 70 to 117, it then went from 117”

back to 70 and that would happen just in the first eight days of February.

So the first five weeks of the year, owning silver was like owning a meme coin, I mean, it was just all over the place and it this should not be happening. It just should not be happening. What was going on in the background was that there was a failure to deliver physical silver and the banks were scrambling and they shut down marketplaces, they did every dirty trick

you can do, they're still rigging marketplaces. By the way, all the fines I talked to you about, if they weren't rigging the marketplaces, why did the marketplaces go down on Thanksgiving? The Friday after Thanksgiving they're like, oh, we blew a fuse, I'll get the fuck out of here with that, you blew a fuse.

If you blew a fuse, if your marketplace shut down because you blew a fuse, everybody involved

in that place should be fired.

Every single person working on the technical side, all of the top management, everyone should be out. Were they? No, you know why? Because they didn't have a technical issue, they were lying.

They shut down the marketplaces because they couldn't deliver. They're still rigging markets. That's the price of silver. I have no fucking idea. I honestly don't know because in China it was 110 while it was 70 in the U.S.

I mean, traders spend hours, years looking for the perfect arbitrage opportunity, holy shit. You could find one that was a $40 swing from $70 to 110, you could buy it for 70 in the U.S. and sell it for 110 in China and make a $40 swing on--that's not even an arbitrage opportunity anymore.

The arbitrage is when you find these fractional, tiny little menu differences and you make a ton of money on the churn on that, right? That's not what this is. This is a broken pricing model.

“This is the--you can't get--the truth is you can't get silver for $70.”

That's what they were trying to tell you, is that the marketplace is broken because we're not going to even deliver it at that price. We don't even have it. So this goes back to problems that we had before. This is like talking about derivatives, you know, and people say, "Well, there's two

quadrillion dollars of derivative bets out there," and you go, "Holy shit, what happens if--what does that mean?" It's like, "It's been described to me as like derivatives trading is the equivalent of you and your buddies are standing behind a blackjack table and you're watching people play blackjack and against the casino, against the house and you're watching some--you're

watching these guys." And then you're saying to your buddy, who's standing next, I bet you $100 that this student front of me wins this hand. And they go, "Oh, I bet you doesn't, and so you're placing bets on their bets. That's derivatives."

Right? Essentially, there are two quadrillion dollars of derivative bets out there. These banks are betting with each other on a variety of things.

“It's all fine and dandy if they cancel each other out, right?”

If they did, the problem is when one party is unable to perform, like Deutsche Bank

or Credit Suisse, if they become--they're already zombies, but if they officially go out of business and there is no bank left to pay, the derivative trades that they had with other banks that were winners are--they can't collect on. The derivative trades that they had with other banks were the other banks were the winners. They can't collect on that either.

So if you're bank of America and you had $100 billion of bets with Credit Suisse, and that you were going to win, because you're on the right side of these derivative trades, but Credit Suisse goes out of business, you didn't win Jack shit. You have a debt that you cannot collect on. Congratulations.

You air quotes one, but there's no way to collect on it. That's the problem that we face with this is that if the banks are all in solvent or if all it takes is one of the banks to be in solvent. It's like if you go to a dinner and you play--and there's 10 of you, and it's a big expensive meal and you play Credit Card, everybody throws their credit cards in the pile

and you piss it out of the day, everybody pulls out of--you pull out a credit card and it's your buddy bobbed down at the end, and then you go, oh, oh, oh, you're going to pay

Now what?

“You technically won, right, because Bob has to pay the bill, but you're not getting”

out of that restaurant unless you guys pay.

So it's not your problem, that's the--it's not your fault, because you're not the one in solvent, but it becomes your problem. And that's kind of where we are, gold, same thing, gold went from--in January, gold went from $4,334 to $5,434, a $1100 increase in the price of gold in one month. Again, just like it did with silver, once you got into February, it only took five days

for the price to go right back down. So there's manipulation happening here. You don't get an $1100 price increase in gold for nothing. For gold to go up $1,100, it takes a decade. It happened here in January.

So whatever banking regulators collected from these banks for manipulating Libore and Forex,

“they need to open a secondary investigation, because I'm pretty sure they're back up to”

their old tricks. Let's talk about crypto. It got rubbed in October of 2025 when--well, when really, when millions of trading accounts were vaporized in a matter of minutes. And I--my feeling on this, and I had to put on my little conspiracy hat for this a little

bit, you know that the government hates crypto people. I'm not talking about the stable coin, people. I'm talking about OG crypto people, the people that have that mindset, the type of mindset that would get you into Bitcoin, sound money, things like that. Those people have done very well over the years who were early in Bitcoin and in other

crypto as well. And it is my belief that the government would love for those people to go broke. And here's why. because if anybody is in a position to get around the stable coins, it would be them. Building parallel systems, seeing it coming in advance and being able to have the voice

to tell people to get out of the way, using your extensive crypto wealth to build a parallel system. All of the things that--you know, the things that are going on at a Narcopoko, you find the people that have a lot of crypto wealth, aren't sitting around buying Ferraris, though they could.

They're really more interested in building businesses outside of the system that are doing things with this new technology that they find so fascinating.

So if you've got a bunch of those people with basically endless money, it would probably

not be the worst idea if you were a diabolical government to rug pull them, break them to the extent that you can. And so that they're not going up against you when you're trying to introduce and roll out stable coins in the aftermath of that. I mean, that's just my assumption on that.

I mean, maybe the rug pull was for something else, but it most definitely is made to happen. So if you're somebody who's interested in crypto and you go, "Oh, God, everything's a scam." Everybody loses all their money. They're losing their money in these senses because they're leverage, they're over-leverage.

You know, if you just have Bitcoin in a wallet and a cold wallet somewhere, you're not going to lose it like in one of these rug pull situations. You're just sitting. I mean, the value may go down of your Bitcoin, but it's not giving it to Coinbase and trying to earn a return on it, and then falling behind and Coinbase taking your stuff.

Like you don't want to get into that, I think that when you're trying to earn returns on your money, you're in the banking system, you're thinking with a banking mindset, you're in a fiat mindset with that.

And I think that that will ultimately get you in trouble.

I think that maybe the cash is trash, messaging is designed to get people into the crypto world. You know, Katherine Austin Fitz has really been vocal about her cash Fridays, and getting people to spend cash so that they don't take it away from us, and most importantly so that they don't get us into a situation where they turn it off.

“So you have to be mindful of that possibility.”

So if you hear the narrative that cash is dirty, only drug dealers use it, only scammers,

you to think differently, and to perceive this.

Katherine Austin Fitz, we were talking about this a couple weeks ago. She was saying that this trick, one of the crypto tricks that you can see is that Coinbase will offer an exorbitant interest rate, like, hey, park your money with us, we'll put it in our coins, and we'll pay 14% interest, and you're like, oh my god, like 14% interest. That is, you know, what am I getting into my bank?

“A quarter of a percent interest, like this is a mathematical, no brainer, right?”

You've got to move your money from the bank into Coinbase to get the 14% interest, and she was saying, that's the trap, right?

Because, of course, mathematically, you would want to move from something that was paying

you almost no interest to something that was paying you a ton, almost way above market price, and that way above market price interest, that should be the indicator, right? Like, ding ding ding ding, why do they want my money? So what she was saying is it's a two-for-one, right? Yes, they want your money, but it also accomplishes the task of getting your money out

of where it was currently, which is in a bank somewhere. So if they can get your money out of that bank and get it into their account, their Coinbase is an example, then you've now moved yourself into the digital system. Now, to be fair, if you were in your banking account, it's kind of a digital system anyway, because you've log online, and you're maybe got an app on your phone, and it's all kind

of digital. But you can go in there and get cash and treat it, you know, and use your bank like a real bank. You can't do that with Coinbase. But she was of the belief that that is more than--it's a--that when you see a 14% interest

“rate like that, you should treat it as like the way, you know, like in a bug's bunny cartoon,”

you'd see the pile of carrots, and there's like, you know, there's a giant rock hanging right above it, right? As soon as you go and grab those carrots, that rock's going to fall on you. So you need to be mindful of the traps that they're setting up to get people into their system, so that they can turn you off. I would also remind people, this is an important

one to remember. I did this as my--for those of you who are interested in non-conformist series is something that the folks over at the dollar vigilante do, is well, I did it recorded a presentation for the non-conformist series that's coming up talking about bank bailins and bank runs. And what's happening? What is going to happen? And this is something that's extremely important for us to--I've been going on and on about this. You might

have heard this before. I don't care. It's worth mentioning 10 times, because for anyone

“who hasn't heard it, you need to hear this, and you need to hear this good. The G20 legalized”

bank bailins in 2014, okay? They assured that the bank accounts will be seized. I want to say that again. This bank legislation in 2014 for the G20 countries, they assured you that the bank accounts in these countries will be seized. So did you hear me? They're going to take your bank accounts. The only question is when. I can't tell you when. I don't know when. I do know that they will. The reason why I know that they will is because they

legalized it. And they legalized it in 2014. It's not my opinion. They did it. You can go find it. And they didn't legalize the--no, again, let me differentiate between a bailout and a bail in. A bailout is what we had in 2008 when the banks got into trouble. And they said, "Help me, daddy, government. We need a bail out from you." And that's when

the 700 billion came, and if you didn't get it, there'd be blood on the streets. That's

they bail out from the government. A bail in is when the banks say, "Help me, we're in solvent. We're in trouble again, like we were in 2008." And the government says, "Why don't you just get the money from the people?" And they say, "Oh, yeah, well, we could do that because we were technically we could do that anyway, because when you sign your contract, your third position behind the shareholders and the bondholders." So you don't really own

your account anyway. We could have stolen your money in 2002 if we wanted to. We don't necessarily need to legalize it. But just to be on safe side, we legalize it. So, again, ask yourself this question. And I will say this as I just went over a long list of all the fines that the banks paid for rigging marketplaces, they paid billions of dollars in fines, and they're

legislation has been passed for the banks to take control of your bank account when times

“are tough. And the banks have already been charged and convicted as felons for stealing and”

rigging marketplaces. They paid billions of dollars in fines. They're doing it again. I ask you one question. Do you think that the banks will take your money, yes or no? The answer

is yes. The answer is yes, because it's not your money. It's their money. They're not

taking your money. They're taking their money. If you have a problem with it, that's your problem. You can't do anything about it. What are you going to do? Throw eggs at the branch down the street from you? Okay. And then what? You're still not going to get your money. So this is how it could play out. Again, nobody will go to jail for this. Even if a world legal, nobody would go to jail for it. But specifically in this case, you will not. People

“will be out in the street. I demand that you lock up all these bankers. Why? Show me the law they”

broke. Well, they stole all our money. None of it. It didn't sound your money. It's not your bank

accounts. Just because you think it is, doesn't mean it is. So it's something to consider.

All right. Let's move on to dynamic pricing. We talked about the Wendy's cheeseburger story. February 2024, Wendy's backtracked and claimed it was to offer discounts during the day, which is bullshit. They're like, oh, yeah, we were going to change the price of our hamburger so that, you know, it like, I don't know. It like, nine o'clock in the morning, we'll get you beat, be cheaper for you to buy a hamburger. It's like, no, you weren't. No, you weren't, we were, we weren't going to do that.

You weren't going to change the price downward to give us a discount. You were going to move the price up because I wanted a hamburger at 12 30 in the afternoon, not at nine o'clock in the morning. And so therefore, my hamburger was going to be priced, accordingly, to match the time of day.

“That's why the frosty's would probably be remarkably cheap at seven o'clock in the morning, right?”

So this was a problem. The general public flipped out. But this is the direction that we're going. Digital price tags. Every shelf and every Walmart will have a digital price tag by the end of 2026. Did you know? So you have a couple of months left before it happens. And you'll see it. They'll be in every single Walmart. Croggers next. Croggers, grocery stores, or the anything that's owned by them, King Super. They own a lot of grocery stores around chains around

the country. They all have the dynamic pricing. They're going to change the pricing on you during the course of the day and grocery stores. Depressed 11 30 at night, slowly shuffling through the snack food aisle of your local grocery store, ready to put a gun in your mouth, blow your brains out. Hey, look, the twinkies are on sale. I mean, I'm trying to not freak out about this or anything. And see like the funny side of it. But this is unfortunately the direction that things are

going to be going. They claim it frees up the staff to do other things, like, file for food stamps and welfare and unemployment, stuff like that. But which is a staple of working at Walmart. So, yes, you'll have plenty of time now to file out all your food stamp, paperwork, and not worry about changing the prices of cat food in aisle six. Because the prices of cat food will be changing automatically. Let me ask you a question. And then we're going to have to

this is a couple years out in the future. But you've got everything about you on your cell phone. Let's say you're walking down that. Let's run this scenario about the guys, you know, depressed walking down the aisle. But he's got a lot of money, right? Guy is a good job. They know that it's found out what if the price of everything that you saw when you were looking at it was different because you were rich in the guy who comes in the store five minutes after you the price of everything

he saw based on his cell phone and his pocket that knows he's probably not going to buy anything because he can't afford it. What if his pricing was different? What if now you go up that would be crazy

that would never happen. It can happen. They can geofence it to pull when your phone gets near

the item with the price tag. Maybe that price is reflective of who you are. Not even so much what the product is. You've got no money. Hey, guess what? You get a two for one special, right?

this guy buys the two for one or he's just going to walk on past, right? We'd rather get the

“two for one. And the month got to get rid of this inventory. It makes a calculation automatically”

to know we could we could two for one this thing right now for this guy because it's better off for us. But we're not going to two for one it for the next guy because that guy's got money. He's coming in. He'll pay full price. This this is most definitely on the drawing board. I want to talk to you a little bit about pricing. I have to tell that it is a personal story because it's just it's so great. It's one of these lessons I learned early on. And it's fresh in my mind because my my girl

roommate McFall who I just had dinner with her. She was on our Hong Kong trip with us. When we were living together in Manhattan Beach in 97, this guy moved in across the street from us. And he was like a computer hacker guy, like long hair. And I remember he was a bit of a mystery. He had one of those hummers. The big hummers, like the HD, like the big ones, this and he had

an EV one. Like one of the first electric cars. And he had them both in his garage.

And remember we went down there and we were talking to him. We were like, we're trying to like offset each of these like, yes, sort of. You know, okay, he's got the hummer that takes like four gallons to the gas. He's got this electric car. Like one of the first ones when you couldn't actually own them, you could only at least least them. So he bought this mansion across from us. And we went

“over his house one day and he gave us a tour. And we were anxious, like, who are you? Like who are you?”

What do you do? And he's like, I'm a computer programmer and we sat down and we got kind of his life story. And he were like, okay, because one of the rooms was like glass enclosed and there was just filled with servers. And I was like, what the fuck is going on in here? And I'm like, what are you doing? He said, well, um, I managed the back end for strouds. And strouds was a company. I think they're out of business sounds. Like a micoles or linens and things. You know, they sell like bath and body

works types. I don't know. You can get sheets and pillows and things like that. Whatever. It's a big store. And he said, I managed the back end for this company called strouds. And I was brilliant. Oh, that's interesting. When you work for them, he goes, not really. I'm sort of like kind of like a consultant. He said, they brought me an early on to help them solve their credit card problem. I go, what was their credit card problem? And he said, well, the thing is when when you swipe

the credit card at the, when you're checking out, it took 12 seconds between the time that their system would ping out and get a response that said it was approved. And they found that their customers didn't like that. And they desperately wanted to make sure that that relay time was short. So they brought me in and they said, can you help us take this, make it shorter for the credit card thing? And he said, I can help you. And they said, great, what do you charge? And he said,

I charge a million dollars a second. And they went, okay. And he said, I'll get to work on it.

And I said, well, what did you do? Did you know how to fix it? He said, I had no idea how to fix it. What the fuck did you do then? He has, I hired an engineer, I paid him $100,000. He figured it out. I took it from 12 seconds down to six seconds and walked out of there was six million bucks. We all just went, oh my god, how did you know to price it? How did you know to charge a million dollars a second? He said, here's how I knew to do that. And he said, when I was teaching computer

programming, when I was a little bit younger, I was charging $60 an hour. And the reason was, you know, 60 minutes, 60, whatever. Still charging way more than most people. And he said, that I started dating this girl who was a P, had an MBA. She had an MBA program and she, real business mind, she said, why are you charge $60 an hour? He's not a 60 minutes. She said, that's stupid. She said, from now on,

“what you should do is you charge $360 an hour. He goes, that's crazy. Nobody will pay that. He said,”

she said, yeah, yeah, they will. Because they want to know that they're $360 an hour computer guy is on the job. And I thought, holy shit. So he said, that's how I knew to charge them a

million dollars a second. I threw out a crazy number and they said, yes, I never forgot that.

All right. So when it comes to pricing, when it comes to this, sometimes you just have to the prices, whatever you say it is, does it cost a million dollars a second to do that? No, but it is a calculation that they were willing to make that in their minds, maybe it does. So you have to remove yourself from the equation sometimes. You have to remove your limiting views on money on what is a lot because your idea of what a lot is and their idea might not be in the same ballpark.

there's, there's something to be said for that. So anyway, it's a fact that the efficiency

of pricing, see Walmart will call this price efficiency, right? Well, you know, other people would

“call it price gouging. So knowing what the real price of something is, I think is vastly important.”

I mean, if you don't know what the price is when you're traveling internationally, you will get gouged. All right. We all know that. And, you know, we have, there's nothing, so there's nothing really inherently nefarious about changing the prices of things. I'd say as long as people are aware that the pricing is changing, because we've been doing this on a, you know, in a similar,

you know, a similar way with technology like group on. You remember group on group on was like,

let's, you know, you guys all want to go sign up at this aerobic studio. Like, if we get 70 people together, we'll get us all a good deal. And it's like, oh, we all got together online in this thing. And then we will present it ourselves as a group of 70 buying this thing. And we got the price down. There's power in, in, in, um, group purchasing for sure. There's not, and there's nothing wrong with that. So in fact, it's a great model. Group on did very well for that Airbnb, you know,

“Airbnb has that, this small Uber, Uber has their pricing, Uber has, um, has surge pricing, right?”

And people will say, oh, surge pricing, man, it's, it's, that's so criminal. It takes advantage of like these, these times were, you know, uh, like a high time, we're, we're, we're a concert, a concert's letting out. Now you, you charge surge pricing. Yes, that could, if you viewed it only from that angle, that would be a very, that would be a negative. But here's the other side of that. The surge pricing that makes it higher, you know, charges more for the consumer also pays the driver's

more. So what it does is it incentivizes drivers that may be sitting on their couch, he get out, get up at 10 o'clock at night, and go over near this concert venue because we're paying well. Right now, there's more demand there. So it's, it works on both ends, right? It's not just on the, on the purchasing side. If you're somebody who is offering the service, the surge pricing works in the manner of, you know, it works for the, for the person offering the service as well.

There was an interesting thing that that happened with DoorDash. That was, I don't know if it was leaked from somebody who is disgruntled, who left, or it was just something that became known. But there, if you are a driver delivering for DoorDash, obviously not a driver delivering for DoorDash, so I don't know exactly how it works. But apparently, upon my examination of this, the lowest they'll pay you to deliver bag fast food someone's $3. That's the low end. On the high end,

“let's just say, I don't know how high it gets, but let's just say the high end is $10, right?”

If you are somebody who delivers for DoorDash, and you ever accept one of those $3 runs,

you have just fucked yourself. So badly, you'll never get out of it. As well, become a different

person in DoorDash and get yourself a new cell phone and a new identity. Because what happens is you're never going to get offered the $10 runs anymore, because you have outage yourself as somebody who is dependent. This is the problem that they've created for themselves. Any a driver who would accept $3 will continue to get $3 offers because they know that that person would take it. The guy who only accepts the $10 orders will never get the $3 offers. He will only get $10

or offers, and they know this because they came up with something called a desperation score. I mean, if you think you hate these people now, wait until you find out about their desperation score. Oh, please tell me, what is a desperation score? Well, the desperation score is when they know that you're desperate enough to do this run that they'll only pay you $3. The they're only going to give you $3 from that point forward. That is the direction things are going. That is

very real. So let's talk about dynamic pricing in a low trust society. Look, nobody trusts Walmart, Target, Home Depot. These big big companies. They don't trust them after they were given

They were allowed to stay open, you know, because the COVID virus in a home Depot warehouse store,

“you see it floats, you know, just kidding. I mean, it just nothing made sense, right? So you would”

see that. How is that not price manipulation? No, I was industry manipulation, you know, when you do things like that, pricing becomes a trust, trust issue. And we don't trust you. I don't trust Home Depot. I don't trust Target. I don't trust Walmart. They are able to, I mean, a company like Target is allowed to stay open during the summer of love while everybody else was closed because they made arrangements to sell

tuck bathing suits to transition all the kids. So if you're going to be a narrative manager, like Target and say, oh, we're going to have the stunning and brave section. So we can teach

“kids to pretend to be different genders. They'll let you stay open all day long. They'll let you”

stay open 24 hours a day. Even if there's a fucking comet coming in, right? They don't care. If you're selling that narrative in that agenda, you'll be open for business. So I don't trust you. I don't trust your dynamic pricing. I don't trust anything. The fight, this is kind of my feeling

on on this. The pricing has always felt arbitrary to me and or worse, you know, targeted to me

because it knows I can afford to pay for it. You know, like I said, like what if the phone in your purse or your pocket is ratting on you? It's telling the store, maybe even telling the store from its own history of shopping in the store that you got money. You never use coupons. You don't give a shit about coming in on two for one day sales, things like that. You know, the frequent buyer cards that you have in your scan, when you go through like a grocery store to get deals,

they'll give you the deals on it, right? The discount. But because that information is worth so much to see what you're buying, when you're buying it, how you're buying it, what method of payment you're using, all that information matters. Yeah. So like what happened to in two people from two different socioeconomic background, show up at the same store at the same time to buy the same product. You know, the store has to make a calculation. The store cannot get caught either changing

that, manipulating the pricing to reflect who they think is the one purchasing it. Obviously, if you're at the dollar store, they know what you're all about. But when you walk in target, you could be anybody. You know, it used to be that like maximizing profits was enough. Like if we could just get a great return on investment, then everything will be fine this quarter, it doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels like the goal is to financially rape you just because

the algorithm allows them to, you know, like maximizing profits because the computer tells you you can, you can, you can pull another one or two percent by charging a little bit more for these people. What is trust worth? How do you, how do you rectify that with people once you once the word is out that you are essentially living in a, the prices, whatever we say it is,

“society. I mean, it's already kind of that. But at least there's competition from other vendors, right?”

What if the competition from other vendors are also rigging their prices at the same time? You know, this has been going on with gas stations that are on the corners, watching each other's pricing forever. One drops there's by appending the other one drops there's by appending to match or raises it or whatever. You don't even need to get the binoculars out and spy on your competition anymore. You have algorithms that will do that. The second, my competitor drops his prices by anything.

I'll drop mine by a penny more so that I'm always ahead of it. This is how this can go.

By the way, I mentioned the Uber situation of the peak surge pricing and getting people out into their cars and driving. This is something I learned recently that if you've been in an Uber and you've got some guy driving it. Let's just say, new to this country. Put it nicely.

They may not be legal and they may be driving a nice Tesla. You may go, oh, this fucking car is nice on the mine. How does this guy get this car and driving it? They are working for somebody. There's somebody else who actually owns the car. This is not. These are, they're driving other people's Uber's like a taxi medallion system. If you're familiar with that back in the days, if you wanted to, if you people know this about the taxi industry,

I learned this in the 90s, blew my mind. You own an taxi cab. You owned something called a medallion.

I always thought of it like a coin. It's a license, essentially. That license is valuable.

“You have to have one if you want to run it on a taxi. Taxi cab companies own a bunch of”

medallions and then based on that, that's the number of cars that you can have. And so you'll buy, let's say, in my case, I would buy on the medallion. Oh, you're going to drive a cab? Fuck no, I'm not going to drive a cab. I'm just buying the medallion. If somebody else drive the cab for it, but I own it. That's what's going on with Uber, essentially. It's moving into this kind of medallion marketplace where

the Uber's are owned by other people. And they're just hot boxing them, right? Just run in

it eight hours with one guy and then, you know, sand deep gets out and then hijie gets in and

you're going to run him for eight hours through and just doing it. That's what's happening. So that's, that's become a thing. The, you know, the, the speaking of the, the jeets and the cars. I mean, that the trucking industry in the United States in Canada has become a catastrophe from all of the imported drivers that they get, you know, they've got a guy who's driving a big rig and flip flops watching Bollywood movies on his phone. He's not paying attention.

He didn't realize he needs to put on the brakes because everybody else has stopped. You know, so this is where we are. We were in a low trust society with low IQ workers that are, you know, it's one thing if you're just in your job being stupid, but when your job being stupid gets other people killed, it becomes everybody else's problems. Let's talk about expiring prices. How much is the open seat on yesterday's flight selling for today? How much?

It's always been an interesting component of price dynamics is the expiring asset.

The concert ticket, the hotel room, the airplane flight, all of that. It has value until it doesn't until it expires. So why don't we sell airplane tickets for a dollar of flight one minute before

“people before the flight is scheduled belief? Well, you, because you have to maintain price integrity.”

Sometimes you let the hotel room expire without anybody in it because in order to fill it, you would have to crater your own pricing system. So if you've got a hundred dollar room and your rooms sell out sell for a hundred dollars every single night, it's tempting to want to grab 40 bucks if somebody comes in at 1045 for that room. But in doing that, you run the risk of messing up your entire pricing. So this is, I'd call it price game theory. It's been something that people

have been studying for a long, long time. The psychology of pricing is fascinating. We studied this in business school. You have to price some things. I mean, this is why anybody who's ever looked at like a Gucci jacket or something goes, it's a jacket, right? Keep your warm in the winter. Seven thousand dollars, really? It's not about the jacket cost. It's about something else. It's about perception. It's about feelings. It's about anything other than what the unit cost is and what the

markup is. The markup is, is you're moving into a psychological realm, right? We're pricing isn't reflective of what it costs to make something. Pricing is reflective of how you feel about the item that you own. So you get into these weird experiments where people are, you know, brand names, they love the brand names and they like, you know, they want someone to know that the

“that the purse that they have is, you know, a six thousand dollar purse. That's why when”

every time, wherever I go to Hong Kong, you go in this black market, gray market stores, you know, where you got to sweet talk the lady down at the, at the booth and say, I, I don't want the booth stuff. Let me go upstairs where you guys get the good stuff and then they walk you talk you to a guy

make sure you're not the fed to whatever and you go in and you go, holy shit, you found like the

“mother load of all the all the gray market stuff and you go, okay, so now we've got the six thousand”

dollar purse. I can get it for what 200 bucks, okay, we'll get a couple of these for home, you know, whatever. So, so pricing is subjective and, you know, and you, you can have some, you can have some fun messing around with it, but you all have to be careful because there is a step where you've now disrespected your customers, you've priced them out of the market or you've done something that feels dirty to them and it's tough to get them back. If you're, if you're somebody that is

moving the pricing around on people like they do at card dealerships, you're going to have a hard

time getting repeat business, right? This is just kind of the way things are. So, opportunity costs, sunk costs, operational costs, interest payments, labor inputs, all these

“things are changing and they're changing in the world. So, you have to sort of be,”

you have to be mindful. The pricing will change. I mean, what is the pricing going to look like in the aftermath of when the energy is factored in that's not coming out of the Persian Gulf? What's that going to look like? You're going to be thankful if you're a brand that you have the ability for dynamic pricing that you can adjust your pricing to reflect it because if you don't, things are going up all the time. I'm sure the IRS will find a way to incorporate dynamic

taxes into the equation, right? Or taxes that are automatically taken, they all kind of are anyway. Let's talk about some solutions and wrap this thing up. I'll tell you what I would do if you wanted to solve a lot of the problems here. I would just end the H1B visa program. We remove all the people who are in the country on that program and start over. You guys all have to leave because the pricing right now is out of control. We have too many people who are being

artificially propped up here. They're being given welfare. They're being given things that the average person isn't given and that is impacting the price. We saw what happened with 7/11 when EBT stopped being able to be used for candy and soda. They closed 600 and plus 7/11 around the US. They're being subsidized by EBT. What else is? So you're creating an artificial marketplace with dollars, EBT dollars that are being traded in for goods. Now they've made

differentiation on that. Now you can't use them for candy and soda and things like that. And now what do we have? Well we didn't have quite as much of, we don't have organic demand for that stuff. We have demand for candy when it's essentially free when the government will buy it for you. But when the government no longer buys it for you, the demand falls to almost zero. To the point where the 7/11's have to go out of business. So they have been artificially propped up

for a while. What else has been? We're watching all of the fraud that's happening in Minneapolis. Get busted. We're watching the oncology component segment of the healthcare industry and Southern California be exposed to all of the treatment facilities that weren't treating people

for cancer. This is the first thing towards trying to get a hold on what the real pricing is in

this country would be getting rid of everybody who is here illegally. And all of the subsidization that's happening with that. I would end the subsidies for the farmers as well. Corn is massively subsidized. Why? Stop doing that. We don't even know what the price of corn is. We don't know. The government subsidizes it to the point where it's tough to tell. So you should have the ability

“to turn off the EBT cards. You should have the technology to see everything. I think.”

So turn the EBT cards off or set them so that they only work on natural food and things like that. Things are changed. Pricing can be reduced if we lower labor costs. We know that. Labor, labor and energy are the two biggest inputs. So we could lower labor costs. So how do we do that? We could, we have big problems with the unions. People, people talk about all the unions coming here to help fight big. The unions are just as corrupt. I mean, who is the head of the

I use a guy who got whacked and nobody could find his body. Yeah, he's the head of the teamsters union.

“They're a mafia in and of themselves, right? So the unions are a huge problem. They sell themselves.”

I was like, oh, we're standing up for the every man. They're not. The new minimum wage should be zero.

The minimum wage should always be zero. The idea that there is an inflated minimum wage

that there's a $20 minimum wage in fast food in California. What is the price of a big Mac in California? So whatever they say it is. It's not the same as what it is in Las Vegas,

“where they don't have a $20 minimum wage and they don't have state income taxes and they don't”

have those things. So they can price things differently. It probably be happy that there's dynamic

pricing. We're also everybody's going to have to pay California prices, right? So look, you're going to get replaced by robots. So act accordingly. You know, you better be mindful of this and get to know a rancher, right? For food, find some food from farmers, markets, people, you know? This is not the time to be screwing around. Things are changing, pricing is changing, pricing of everything. Food is changing. It's only going to get more expensive. The fertilizer is not

getting where it needs to go. The ships are not getting where they need to go. Everything takes more time. Oil is more expensive. Gas is more expensive. It's all going to go up, right? So

“we need to be mindful of that. Now I think understanding that prices will fluctuate as one thing.”

But being aware of what these corporations are doing behind the scenes and making them fluctuate, that is something else. That's where the fraud gets in, man. So get yourself, get yourself some food, get yourself some storeable food, get your cash out of the banks, get yourself sorted out, man. Some parts of the world, you know, haggling in the price isn't just normal. It's expected, right? Everything's written in pencil. So when the greengo tax needs to be added, you know, I just say,

I'm just browsing. And if you like this episode, you take the additional step right this second

of sharing it with your friends. You want to connect with the macroaggressions.io is the way to do that. Thanks everybody. Talk to you again. [Music]