Reinventing the Rip-Off with Lindsay Owens

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you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We are coming to you 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 Steven Colbert and Steven 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 Steven was able to get up and accept”

the award because and the people that don't 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 Steven to rightfully get up and accept his well-earned Emmys for best variety. But that's

that. I'm a little jet lagged. It was lovely to see my friends, but it's going to be even more lovely segue to talk to today's guest who is going to save our economy from the exploitation of our overlords. She is one of my favorites. Let's just get to our ladies and gentlemen, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative and Author of Douaged, the end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet. We are joined on this momentous day in economic history.

By our good friend, Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative, author of gouged the end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet and Lindsay's 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

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 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 it was reading it. It is a rage read for sure. Although we end on you know, it's like happy note, but it is a positive. It's a rage read. That's right, what you can do

about. First we could 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 the rate, where she's going to announce rate heights? Usually two o'clock, I think. So we don't know if they're going to raise the rates 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 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 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 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 tariff rates. But Trump isn't doing that. And so the Fed is in a position where they have there are one tool, which is raising rates. And so I think they are expected to raise rates this afternoon. And that's going to be a problem for a lot of folks in the country.

So the idea is, if I may, and I'm just going to, you know, put this in in Laman Turb, 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. So 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. 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

your, your 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. You're, 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,

“little bit of profit. And, 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

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 fubus 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 labels. Why weren't they selling enough labels? Because

it turns out that technology that keeps light bulbs burning has been really good for a really long

time. There is a light bulb today in Livermore, California that's been burning for over 100 years. What? And you can log on. Yes. Wait, log on. It has its own webcam on it. It has a webcam. It is a light bulb cam. It's like a panda cam. Lindsey, 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 FOIA? 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. Lindsey, 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 feed is story

that you're telling. And the other way, Phoebe's with a pH just to let you know how long ago this was. This was when was this early 1900s? Yeah, it was in 1924 when the Phoebe's cartel convened in Geneva, Switzerland to short circuit the lifespan of the light bulb. They got together. They said we're not selling enough of these light bulbs. They're lasting too long. We've got a problem and they all agreed to cut back on the lifespan and wrote a

memo, signed it. There was a memorandum and they even vetted and ensured compliance. Each of the participating companies had to send their light bulbs to a lab where the lab tack 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, they would. And this ushered in, I don't know if officially ushered it in, but it's sort of the theory of, of yes, 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 parts of the battery in a toy, you know, running out, but then you can't change the batteries. You've got to buy a new toy, rather than just sticking a new battery in. Right. Yeah. And to be clear, they can make it better so that you wouldn't have to buy as many and they have gotten together

“to choose not to. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think the key here is coordination to”

execute a successful cartel, a successful price-fixing scheme, unique coordination. And coordination costs are significant. Everyone had to fly to Geneva and get in a room and and talk it through and sign a deal. This is all pre-sume. This is pre-sume 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

you can get price-fixing across industries and sectors where coordination would be impossible

but for the players using a common algorithm. Now, 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?”

It 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. Typically, that would be the federal trade committee who would typically be in charge of figuring that out. Yeah, the Department of Justice has an anti-trust 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 the book. I guess it's not collusion. Well, now you know what we'll get into like price-gallaging based on surging and things like that later. Yeah, let's keep talking about collusion. So generally the price of colluding would make people think twice about it is it 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're going to 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 bulb shidder we can spend more. These algorithms are involved everything that makes it so that when you're talking to your wife about lamps and then you open your phone and suddenly every other ad on Instagram is about lamps. The way that they drive

those ads the way that they target you for those things. They're also targeting price. They're targeting what you can pay. Is that correct? Yeah so look for a long time prices were posted. They were on stickers. They were pretty straightforward. You worked at the limited. I worked at uh uh hormones. So I worked as a stockboarder and we did we had a little gun and you'd go right. 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

um you know haggling was the norm for thousands of years um 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

because there was a business case for it right so John want to make her is usually credited with

“the first price tag in the U.S. and his want to make her's department store in Philadelphia”

in the late 1800s and he is supposedly um 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 and 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 trained in the art of wallet emptying right I mean they are really

good at it the seal team six of bankruptcies for consumers and also in the old days let's be fair to change the price was laborious you know and and it would be not something that you could do

on on a whim it would be relatively in in frequent but now it's a second to second

microsecond to microsecond to fair it's it's dizzying you know in addition to the lack of transparency in not having you know clear set 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 people you know I'm going to lens I'm I'm actually on it right now I'm just scrolling just multitasking yep 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 prices 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 tax hello that's the it's time for your favorite thing which is advertisements by the way

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I mean the best example I can give you no 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 who's sole purpose was to set up a system a platform to run pricing experiments without people's knowledge.

and stores have have always done this to some extent 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 at without closing our shopping card online but running tests at a scale that's unimaginable right you know behind the scenes doing AB 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 disruptive 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 will pay for

“milk and that's what Instacart was doing on millions of Americans shopping for their groceries last year.”

The Instacart one is 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 expedient we're used to kayak these the idea is we'll find you the best price will 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 volunteers 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 you know box of frosted flakes. Oh yeah Lindsey talked 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 it was pretty straightforward then we crunched the numbers and that's when

“I think things got pretty interesting. What we found is that for 75% of the items in that grocery”

cart different subjects in our experiment were being offered different prices from Instacart. These were at the same pick-up locations and the same cities at the exact same time everyone was logged on together. Take that clear that that's the clear saying because you might want to say to yourself well geez it's cost-a-living is more expensive in New Jersey than it might be you know 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 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 $150. That's what we found right. 75% of the items”

you've 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% different differences across the whole basket of grocery items and of course if you were on the losing end of that AB 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 $1200 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 if I inch that up there they also know who you are. So in the instacurate study we did not find personalized or surveillance pricing. Okay we couldn't pin the price differences. But that is the thing.

Yes yes so what's happening next companies are getting better at not just running these

place where it's easier to hide these experiments. They are also starting to track your data

“the breadcrum trail that you leave online what you click on what you look at what you hover over”

with your mouse. Oh dear god. Oh dear god. Oh dear god I've got some cleanup on aisle three to do. Yeah it's it is um it is really scary to think about the types of information they have they know if you're logged on from a macro PC they know if you're logged on from Manhattan or Nashville. All of these things can be used. They know if you owe money. They know if you're in debt. They know if you got a raise. Yeah and increasingly you know not to get to dystopian. Increasingly

they know what you confess. We are on the precipice of agentic commerce which means if you're talking

to your chatbot about how you're feeling a little insecure about how you look ahead of the

prom and you're a high schooler you know in a world in which we start to see agentic commerce take off and by the way McKenzie says that's gonna be a $5 trillion 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? And how could we use that in our press setting

decisions? And I can't stress this enough that we are sold the fiction that online market places exist to find you the best deals. This is the part where it gets really pernicious as well. And I know

“there are sites that say we search for you and we find you the best thing but what they never tell”

you is they're working 10 times as hard to exploit you then they are to help you. Is that correct? The the amount of information well here let me give you let me give you two answers to this. Okay let's go with the companies answer number one delta partnered with an intelligence company an artificial intelligence company out of Israel called Feature. They partnered with Feature 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 peaking at American or Southwest. But they also talked about Feature on their investor day calls as a company that could help Delta you know start to achieve personalization right figure out what each individual might be willing to pay for every seed on a delta plane. If you looked up Feature at the time which we did before they deleted everything from their website we pulled down their white papers and their blog post

what you found in Feature's white paper were their marketing materials and explaining this to companies like why would you buy Feature's product? There were two phases phase number one was the exploration phase. This is where companies started looking around like where Feature started looking around your customer base looking around your competitors just trying to understand the market

trying to sort of test what people would pay. The second phase was called the exploitation phase.

This was not subtle. Was called the exploitation phase? Yes in the white 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 RAI 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 revenue

“is 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 Feature is going how much money they're bringing in the revenue outlook you know they started with a little pilot program where they gave Feature 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 CEO 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

about what companies are actually up to from earnings calls look telling consumers that you

“are 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 CEO's of American and Southwest really seized on that and said we're not going to do that and Delta had to back down what happened when when Instagram because I thought this was interesting when you exposed Instagram 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 AP 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 supply we're not doing surveillance praising we're not setting prices based on

“individual features or characteristics of you this isn't personalized it's just a beta sting”

and there was a PR malstrom for the company their stock plummeted the Trump administration announced a probe of instacart which you know the FTC under the Trump administration had done like nothing yeah they've done nothing so this sort of woke them from their slumber briefly and two weeks later the company cried uncle and posted a blog a couple days before Christmas and said we're going to

stop these experiments we're not gonna let brochures partner with ever site the AI company who

ran the experiments anymore um but throughout history the way in which companies have sort of found out when they had gone too far and when they stepped over the line and when they touched the stove was often consumer outrage and the example that I that I using 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 and that interview probably thinking like no

inserting this Brazilian magazine that Coke was piloting and stalling thermometers in their vending machines great story in the book to charge you more yes on a hot day for a coke right and this was before you know this is like 1996 right so this is not things are not going viral on X but it was on the cover of you know major American newspapers coast to coast Wall Street Journal blasted him it was in the Honolulu newspaper right and Pepsi of course way to end you know we're

in the business of quenching thirst not exploiting it and Coke backed off and said you know it we're just kidding like you know the lab is closed we're not going to be installing thermometers on vending machines right just kidding you know I do think you know bringing sunlight to these issues and frankly what a lot of consumers are doing when they're taking these tiktoks of what's happening in Walmart is actually part of how we get this work started right it's how we

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pulling about what consumers think is fair or unfair and I do think consumers generally

accept some measure of cost passed 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 I see what this costs you I see there's a little bit of you know you've got a pat in for profit and paying your workers and all these labor costs and everything else but this is too far yeah there's like a really interesting series of studies in the 80s and 90s from behavioral

economists that started to test this you know they they did phone surveys and they called people

and they gave them a pricing 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 as you know you could”

imagine so things like okay you know tariffs are going to be applied to a new item peanut butter like the cost of peanut butter is going to go up because of tariffs is it okay for the shopkeeper to raise the price of the peanut butter that's already on the shelf so hasn't been exposed to the new tariffs right because purchased and shipped over before the new tariffs were put in place and 80 plus percent of respondents say no that's unfair right he's taking advantage of the fact

that people are starting to expect peanut butter tariffs even though he didn't actually have to pay more for that peanut butter we should get it at the original pre-tariff price another example there's one cabbage patch doll left in the store I mean again this was in the 80s

“yes I you know I had a cabbage patch doll auction I believe this is referred to as the”

Stanford cabbage patch auction experiment exactly exactly but you know there's one left in the

store yeah how do you decide who gets it is it the first person to the aisle like that's first

come for serve or a queue do you say okay there's 50 people in the store everyone draws straw it's a lottery and whoever gets lucky gets the cabbage patch doll or do you say oh this is interesting I've got a lot of people in my store I've only got one cabbage patch doll let's sell it to the highest bitter if you talk to a lot of economists they love the idea of selling it to the highest bitter sure supply and demand it 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 a hundred dollars 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 for newer viewers substitute libubu yeah exactly and I think you'll have to understand it but where this comes into play in sort of wrapping it back around to the fed and raising interest rates in these things we're generally told that inflation is a product of supply chain problems or you know wars or disruptions or all these different things but there is a level of price increase that is utterly artificial that has

much more to do with market concentration and collusion and these AI tricks and yet there is that you know raising an interest rate is going to do nothing to touch those drivers of consumer pain yeah and those two things are related right so the cover that these economic events global events provide is an additional opportunity to raise prices to 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 you know liberation day does happen all these tariffs are 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 am 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

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 or overcharged”

and so having consumers a little confused like am I paying more because of the trade war or is this company just picking my pocket right and I don't know and that's a good place for companies to be if the goal is to overcharge you for you to not be quite sure if you're being nickel and dime or if this price is just responsive to external events well the pit the pandemic was the San Francisco level fog event of 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 if you weren't taking advantage of a situation

“the idea that in a world wide catastrophe they would be able to maximize their profits”

is unconscionable unless they're manipulating you look you know the impetus for this book started in part because we started studying at my organization how companies were responding to inflation like you know how were they thinking about this were they like oh shit like we're going to be in real trouble this is going to eat into our margins or did they feel like they were going to

weather the storm and what we saw over and over again was CEOs telling their investors actually

a little bit of inflation is good for business actually my team is doing a great job taking additional pricing passing all of this pricing through additional pricing and God bless euphemisms price optimization revenue management yield all of these terms that companies are

“hiding behind when you know 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 you know companies swear up and down that they're not building the technologies to get better at overcharging us in the grocery aisle right that's not what they're focused on but they're utilizing it they're not building it they're just utilizing it yeah and when we look

at their patent applications the patents they file the patents they're granted what we see is companies who are investing a ton of money in building new technologies four things like surveillance pricing over and over the best example you know 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 you know 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 you know approximate that in the grocery store because

you and I aren't checking out next to each other because of 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 going to need buns and so buns on your way to that aisle they will charge you more for the bun because they know a boneless sloppy joe is just chipped beef in your hand exactly the example in the Walmart is tuna and mayonnaise once you got the tuna the price of mayonnaise should adjust right and because you're probably making tuna salad that's a stunt so so the larger point of all this is to try and give it a more macro view a lot of the crises that we face

that these companies see in the crisis and if I may I'll use an example that you use 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 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 Cancer 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

land collude really yeah that was the allegation right that they were colluding using this shared

common algorithm this shared software but if you read the Department of Justice's complaint against real page you know it's maybe a hundred 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 charge yeah this guy

“if I remember the saying correctly exactly and so you know by the way it wasn't just to the”

algorithm because of course you know some landlords might say look I gotta get this thing run it so I'm gonna go for a lower price they also had you know a team of pricing advisors on staff who would you know cajol and arp 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's complaint they held user groups for landlords where they could get together and you know bitch and moan

about the pandemic and what it was doing to prices but also where they could compare notes right the kind of room 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 and rental markets and have suggested that pricing creases and 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 minimal mobile plan 15 bucks a month 15 bucks a month what is it

network to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month go to mn mobile dot com slash TWS that's

“mn mobile dot com slash TWS got your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month and mn mobile dot com slash TWS”

that's it there's no catch upfront payments of 45 dollars for three months 90 dollars for six months or a hundred and eighty dollars for twelve months plan required 15 dollars per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than fifty gigabytes may slow when that work is busy includes up to twenty gigabytes hot spot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see mint mobile dot 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're 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 eighty percent of all the meat packing in the united states will then suddenly the ability of these algorithms uh and these uh collusions becomes you know 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 uh 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 you know the big innovation and algorithmic price fixing is it allows for coordination even in markets that might have competition right the court you know the multi-family landlords right right

“or i'll give you a more recent example that you know just came out after i 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 seventeen hundred retail gas stations were using calibrate potentially again you know again this is an allegation to you know help set retail gas prices in seventeen hundred gas stations right like you couldn't coordinate across all seventeen hundred of you right and the complaint alleges that

the increase in gas prices as a result of calibrate could be as much as thirty 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 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 augurimate price fixing you know alleged by this tech company calibrate in gas and retail so just um you know there i mean by the way there's one of these for

french fries called patito track there's one for hotels there's more hotels called rainmaker i mean there's a french fry cartel frozen french fries it's it's called patito track bastards yeah i mean these you know what's really sort of difficult to wrap your head around with all of this is anytime the government is going to involve itself in trying to address these affordability issues across different commodities or different services

or different things we are always told that socialism that's anti-capitalistic it can never work

price controls are uh the road 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 um

you know pricing is competitive falling from the sky um you know that really falls apart

gaming markets are obscuring pricing in ways that would make it impossible for comparison shopping

“to function by the way how how the markets um 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 gonna hold and see if i can find a better deal getting in her car going you know three miles to the next grocery store seeing the better price um and then a bunch of people do that and the grocery store on the north side says hmm nobody's in the store today I wonder what's going on oh the grocery store on the south side is offering better deals I've got

a lower my prices um that is the mechanism through which pricing is disciplined in markets and

pricing can be um you know can can be competitive um when you can't comparison shop um because you have no idea what the prices are or because the prices are changing before you're very eyes or because companies have used personalized pricing to figure out who the comparison shoppers are and offer them a good enough deal to keep them at bay and then overcharge all the rest of us you know pricing cannot be competitive in that environment so where then is is the federal government

where is the the FTC where is the SEC where any of these organizations I could help because what they

do is they leave you then to uh the harsh winds of the federal reserve what they do is they don't

address any of these inflation starts to rise suddenly you get interest rate hikes and suddenly there's a recession and people lose their jobs and it's all an artifice based on these come and I'm not saying totally I'm not saying that there aren't supply shortages 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 or uncompetitive issues that companies are using look we do not have the the funding or frankly

the bigger problem is the political will or the enforcement we need to make this economy competitive and fair and honest for the American people and that is a problem that is bigger than the one

“that we're discussing here and this is a pretty big problem that problem is I think the problem”

or a 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 rest 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 like how to charge us the absolute maximum we are willing to pay for every single item in our grocery cart is horrifying and may be only surpassed by the thought of you know agentic commerce taking a run at this exact same opportunity yes yes let's tease that out a little bit because that's 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

going through the website leads you to higher prices leads you to not get a 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 hay jet chatty BT 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 agentics 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 chatchipi tea is probably going to be better than the points guy right at figuring out some of this stuff like no offense to the points guy 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 points guy for milk and a points guy for bread and a points guy you know for everything that we that we buy um so sure agentic commerce has

“I think a lot of possibility in that and that vein but the flip side is you know these agents may not”

work for us they may not work on our behalf they may work for the highest bidder whoever they get kickbacks for Gemini partnering with retailers who you know preferentially and send us certain even AI is greedy AI I I thought well it should have human impulses it should it should be working for the the moral good where's Azemoff when we need him for God's sakes I mean look let's talk about let's go back to Walmart let's talk about Sparky Sparky is Walmart but oh God's they come Sparky

his name is Sparky I his or her by the way did 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 um we should fire up the app and ask Sparky Sparky are you eating enough do you have food insecurity Sparky 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 um 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 they're 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 gonna be more likely to buy more at Walmart anyways but I think what is more likely is um and they talk about this a little bit in the earnings call and 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

“buy the tuna you should definitely get the mayonnaise right so these the ways in which companies”

are deploying enterprise agents like Sparky Amazon has roofest there are a lot of different agents that these companies are are working with I think does present new frontiers for for gouging and new frontiers for over charging but also Sparky you will ask you an innocent question like what do you need today and when do you need it and you know 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 gonna charge the people with the most money more and that's and like maybe some people are excited by that oh yeah they're

gonna bulk the wealthy but I think you know you're desire for something doesn't always match

a sick kid or you don't have a sick kid but your kids yelling in your ear to buy something right

you 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 yes not an avenue of convenience even or of what you would consider to be supply and demand it's exploitation

“and extraction yes as a better word thank you extraction that's what it is they're going for”

all of the consumers are plus like every ounce that's right of additional money you're willing 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 to press wages it's at same argument I got into with Mr. Summers where he was discussing how why shouldn't they be able to charge whatever they could possibly get well because that seems to be sparking inflation

and then you're going to spark a recession by raising rates and people are going to be out of work yeah look I think you know there 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 the 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 door to ask 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 was doing sort of personalized pricing on it's what subscribers yes

but they're owned by Jeff Bezos I can't imagine he would deploy those types of techniques right like he only founded the most sophisticated pricing company in the history of mankind

and it is on right but you know that disclosure was sort of a helpful first for staff and and now

folks are trying to ban these practices like you can't use my data to overcharge me you can offer discounts but not in not by spying on me by like giving me a senior discount or a student discount or a memorial day sale or or a coupon right but everyone has access to so you know there there is starting to be some momentum at the state level there you know there's some interest in this at the federal level the federal trade commission you know issued a notice and 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 I'm optimistic that you know in the relatively near future we'll see some 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 researched and well presented I mean it 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 and what that means for your wallet and man oh man you should get it

because you should understand what these people are doing uh Lindsay Owens president of CEO Groundwork Collaborative and author of this great new book gouged Lindsay thank you thanks so much for having me john it was really great to chat and so I appreciate you reading the book and giving me the chance to discuss uh I didn't read it uh Gemini gave me a summary and I was just working off of that so I did uh my agent my agent took with no it was I bred it 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

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“posting a job as easy I don't see a downside do you see a downside no that's why it's not called”

downwork that's why I 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 that is UPWO archa.com upwork.com you know I said god bless the earnings call but along with that let me see 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 a month yeah that's been silver lining

right and so I felt incredibly able to be present yeah good book too good read it's shocking to me that lends it you know that she's considered like the radical she's a socially and you're like trying to protect people from exploitation she's like they're charging 35 cents more for eggs you guys like you got a face right they're all like shut up marks let me tell you something angles you don't know what's going on I have but you know when you start to think about it when you guys

shop on like I'll go on Amazon I never realized like they bury on the pages the best result for

what you want and they try to sell you crap or when it'll say like guest pick or like uh popular choice or all those ladies 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 that the discussion about dark patterns it struck me as 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 it because you know I've had that experience like in Las Vegas I look something up and I'm like oh it's a 10 minute walk and it takes me like 30 minutes just to get

“out of the building and that's what they're doing to us you know on every website now you want to cancel”

your subscription you want to find the best deal for yourself you're going to have to navigate through all of these pages well it's interesting how much of 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 a pocket full but they put in

pumped air and they keep it dryer and they keep it less pleasant so it'll drive you down to the floor of the hotel where the casinos 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 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 how did this happen but listening to this conversation and after reading the book like what is congress doing about any of this uh 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 gonna they're not doing i mean she said there's 90 pieces of legislation but but it's the tip of the iceberg really i agree because it's a symptom and it's not you know the actual

“problem and i think i mean the most disturbing part about this for me is just like these crisis 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 deer on wars and real the tear of wars and real they have the opportunity to all it but then they create that pretext to also raise prices on top of that and increase their bottom line and by the way they're also squeezing the other side the workers

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 rebalance the”

economy so that it doesn't always flow into the favor of these extraction processes it has to

somehow rebalance to the betterment for you know the consumers and the people but that's now we're up on our our platforms but guys we are getting $5,000 checks so you know it's a good point and it won't as the best and said it he doesn't see why it would affect the deficit it's only one point three trillion dollars 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 are the people want to know for god six 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 foggy and it's all nonsense and it would deny him the thing

that he craves the most which is to be the center of the universe attention to be the center of the concentric circles yeah I mean when Carolyn love it and now she was leaving um there was a reporter that I saw online that was and in your time reporter he said you know say what you will

about her and we have but she always answered the questions that I said Jesus and I was

really like that's where we're at just she doesn't know during the fact that she stood up there and lied to the American public for an hour every day say what you will say what you will about Carolyn love it but she lied consistently you know a lot of people would have just started to cry but she didn't she stood tall and lied to us with the 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 Carolyn

love it but she did insult us to our faces and also our intelligence when it came to the answers that she would paint answer yeah say what you will that's stock home syndrome yeah that's just that's capture for sure for goodnessx briny what else again uh john do you believe the Supreme

“Court is truly just calling 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 them they have single-handedly made it impossible for us to reform and save our democracy decision after decision by the Supreme Court has left us unarmed in the face of a full frontal assault on democratic principle citizens united the way that they have redefined corruption as it has to be explicit

grid broke well the way that they have made it explicit the corporations are people and money is

speech and they always say the same thing in those decisions like I'm sure it'll be fine because

transparency will be a great counterpart to all of those things but there's never any transparency there isn't any actual it's just dark money group sending it to a pack or sending it to another thing you don't know where it's coming from you don't know any of it and it's impossible to reform because now the executive branch has near total immunity and corruption doesn't actually exist

“the Supreme Court has done more damage to unfortunately do you know what I think it's going to”

force us to do I truly mean this there has to be a process of amending the Constitution

Constitution isn't a suicide pack and money is killing this country money and 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 and they sometimes they'll say things like and the legislature could pass different sorts of limits and all those sorts of things but why would they pass something that would put their own you know who will really be able to handle our elections the people that rely on them for their in competency and the people that have access to more money because they are in combat right any reasonable system would make those individuals

refuse themselves from fixing a system that only benefits them through in competency yeah the

unelected judges are supposed to be the ones deciding these things in favor of what is best for the

“American people but now that they've been captured ideologically the Roberts Court has been the”

worst thing to happen this country in a long, long time it's the way that they've made it so that agencies are no longer have the ability 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 bop bop bop bop bop

I'm fired up to that apologize I love it yeah great jet lag famously fires people up yeah okay last but not least yes John this is very important come on make it lighter please god yeah I can't take any more is it too soon to start decorating for Halloween I don't even know what it is what is it September 16 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 would maybe a little spider web to give yourself but at this point it is the production value of no lens the Odyssey the shit that I see in our neighborhood of where they're getting 28 feet tall skillet is 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's trying to jump out of you it's so good you see what you're doing you see what you're doing you're it once you get to the point where the animals have had enough of you I have a friend that has um she actually used it up all year round but a huge life size cutout of Michael Myers in her window why would you do that to people it'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 yeah any human killer and surprise you by the ice cream in the freezer section and everybody laughs like ah these 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 yeah that's a fair point my dollar store already has a Christmas decorations being sold so you are way ahead of it guys do they still do those stores that are purely Halloween stores spirit Halloween yes spirit Halloween what did they do they take over empty spaces for a certain type it's like a pop I guess when you consider a pop off season all 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 potton part in our appearance we're trying to make Halloween is pleasant is possible I'm excited do you still do you do Halloween rituals now that my kids are out of like it's a non-issue in my house yeah I think last year jillion I actually just sat on my

like we were getting police by these high schoolers I love the idea of you too sitting on a

“stoop doing basically the Joan Rivers E Red Carpet Show on people coming by to come be your house”

oh it's too accurate you call that a ghost we're gonna start charging this year

that's hilarious I love it uh well very very lovely uh had so it's by the way next week

“we're we're coming out on Wednesday again right we're back yeah that's that's the big change”

uh how can they stay in touch with us Brittany uh Twitter we are weekly Shepad Instagram threads

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“the weekly Shepad John Stewart as always thanks to you guys producer Brittany McAdvick”

producer Gillian Spear video editor and engineer Ravitolo audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce our associate producer Rebecca Rotenberg and our executive producer is Chris McShane and Katie great 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 bus boy productions.