Latest / Macroaggressions / #644: Just Tell Me What the Price Is

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#644: Just Tell Me What the Price Is · Macroaggressions

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It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
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How dare you?
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Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!
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Sorting through the lies.
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And uncovering to centuries-long plan
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Please pop back, honey, please.
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I have, for a visa!
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Swing open for life.
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Charlie Robinson.
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Hey, Whitey, where's your hat?
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Welcome to Macro Aggressions.
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I'm your host, Charlie Robinson.
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do all those things.
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Check out our sponsors.
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I promise you, look,
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The least I can do is grab great ones for you.
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Products and services that you'll actually use
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by companies that aren't scamming you.
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Chemical Free Body's been with me from the very beginning
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and they'll be with me as long as I do this show
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because they make products that actually work.
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If you have, look, if you take a green drink
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in the morning, good for you.
2:27
If you don't or you want to,
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but you just have been prevented
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because I don't like the taste of them.
2:33
They taste really bad.
2:33
I understand that fully.
2:35
Guess what?
2:37
Chemical Free Body has an apple flavor
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of their green 85 that came out a couple months ago.
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If you closed your eyes and drank it,
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you would think you were drinking apple juice.
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So if you have some sort of aversion to green drinks
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because of the taste component
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and that's held you back, it's reasonable.
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Problem solved.
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Go to ChemicalFreeBody.com forward slash macro.
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Check out the green 85 apple flavor.
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Grab a six pack of that, get yourself sorted out.
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Maybe try the detox bundle or the parasite cleanse.
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I've done them all.
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They all work.
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I'm currently obsessed with my water hero
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structured water device.
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Everything in my house is getting structured water
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whether they want it or not.
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So if you're interested or just curious,
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go to ChemicalFreeBody.com forward slash macro.
3:21
You do that and the discount is already built into it.
3:24
It'll factor it in by the time you get to the cashier.
3:28
And also, look, if you own a home
3:30
and you have equity in your home
3:32
and you have good credit score
3:33
and you're positive with your cash flow
3:35
and you're smart about your bills
3:37
and you run, you know what you're doing,
3:39
but you have a 30 year mortgage, you can change that.
3:43
There is a system.
3:45
There is a way to get that down to between five and seven years.
3:48
I promise you, it's not a scam.
3:51
I'm not lying to you.
3:52
It's not a refi.
3:53
It's not a recast.
3:54
It's none of that.
3:55
It's actually something completely different.
3:57
And if you're curious about it,
3:59
best thing to do is go watch the video
4:01
or go back a couple episodes
4:03
and catch my interview with Michael Lush,
4:04
the founder of Replacer Mortgage.
4:06
I'll tell you, they have an A-plus rating
4:08
with a better business bureau.
4:09
They've helped 10,000 people do this.
4:12
It's a bank killer.
4:13
It absolutely is.
4:15
And God knows I have no love for the bank.
4:16
So if you're curious, interested,
4:19
or you want to know more about it,
4:20
go to wipeoutyourmortgagenow.com.
4:23
It's the website built specifically for this show,
4:29
wipeoutyourmortgagenow.com.
4:30
It's like a 20 minute video.
4:31
Check it out, see what you think.
4:33
There's no need to be paying your mortgage for 30 years.
4:37
Why don't you flip the math into your favor?
4:39
Go check it out for yourself.
4:40
All right, kind of relevant to what we're talking about.
4:44
I mean, this is gonna be the second episode this year
4:46
that I've done on pricing.
4:48
We should make a lot of pricing.
4:50
That's conspiracy related.
4:52
Oh my God, it is one of the greatest conspiracies
4:54
out there that frankly nobody's talking about.
4:57
Maybe I am, but we're gonna get into it
5:00
because there's so much more to know.
5:02
I mean, we talked a little bit before about Wendy's
5:04
and Wendy's took it real bad after they decided,
5:09
hey, you know what, we'll maybe reimagine
5:11
the way we price hamburgers.
5:13
People were not happy about that.
5:15
We'll get into that.
5:16
I wanna talk a little bit about crypto.
5:19
I wanna talk about dynamic pricing,
5:21
which is that Wendy's situation.
5:24
It's much worse.
5:26
It is spread.
5:27
Wendy's might have taken some bad PR from it,
5:30
but Walmart has made a corporate decision based on it.
5:35
You'll wanna find out more about that.
5:36
That's gonna impact everybody.
5:38
We'll get into how the dynamic pricing works
5:41
in a low-trust society.
5:44
Spoiler alert, it ain't great.
5:46
But, and then we'll wrap up with solutions
5:49
for how you can get around it.
5:51
I mean, listen, it's one thing if we're just complaining,
5:53
but I got some thoughts on how to get around this.
5:57
You know, you go through school,
5:59
if you go through school,
6:01
and you hear about things like
6:05
the Adam Smith invisible hand of marketplaces, right?
6:08
And you go, oh, what is it?
6:09
Well, you don't need an actual person there to say,
6:12
you know, is this priced, you know,
6:16
the apples are this priced
6:17
and bananas are this priced.
6:18
If you have an invisible hand,
6:21
meaning not visible and forcing things to happen,
6:26
then the prices take care of themselves.
6:30
You go to a marketplace,
6:31
you wanna charge $3 for your apples,
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the market says that's too much.
6:36
You decide you've repriced it at one,
6:38
now all of a sudden your apples start selling.
6:39
All right, now you've found price discovery.
6:43
And when you have that,
6:45
given a big enough marketplace,
6:47
you can kind of determine
6:49
what the going rate is for something.
6:51
And but, you know, like the invisible,
6:54
these days with dynamic pricing,
6:57
it's like the invisible hand of marketplace
7:01
has been chopped off by the Muslims for stealing, you know?
7:04
Like everything is rigged, everything is fake.
7:07
All the marketplaces are set up by the banks
7:11
and then they have their thumb on the scales.
7:14
I mean, you know, I've talked about that.
7:18
Oh, they rigged marketplaces and everything.
7:20
I'm not just saying that as like a throwaway line.
7:24
They rigged LIBOR and Forex.
7:27
The settlement for rigging those marketplaces
7:29
was $5.8 billion.
7:32
There was a settlement in 2015,
7:34
JP Morgan and Citigroup paid the fine,
7:38
$5,000 million, fine for this, okay, $5.8 billion.
7:44
Like this is not an insignificant amount of money.
7:49
RBS, they paid a $90 million fine in the UK.
7:54
They paid a $495 million fine in the US.
7:59
Barclays Bank, they paid a $450 million fine.
8:03
All of these fines are for rigging
8:06
the LIBOR and the Forex marketplaces.
8:09
So when I say I have problems about pricing,
8:12
I have problems about how we determine the pricing.
8:15
What is the price of gold?
8:16
What is the price of silver?
8:19
Because when silver went parabolic earlier in the year,
8:24
the price for physical silver in the United States
8:27
and the price for physical silver in China
8:29
were off by a factor of $30, which should never happen.
8:35
For the last like five years,
8:38
I have been buying silver at $30.
8:41
The spread was $30, like the marketplace is broken.
8:46
And you know why.
8:50
It's not that you built a marketplace
8:54
and for whatever reason, it just keeps breaking.
8:58
No, you have criminals that have designed it.
9:00
They're running the marketplace.
9:02
The market is fraud.
9:06
It is designed to be fraud.
9:08
So as long as you are running your marketplaces
9:13
through banks, fraud is baked into the equation.
9:18
There's no way to get around it.
9:20
And if you think I'm lying, ask yourself,
9:22
why are these companies paying these large fines?
9:25
If they're not committing fraud, you don't pay,
9:28
if you're RBS, you don't pay $500 million of a fine
9:32
to the United States government
9:33
if you're not engaged in fraud, which they are.
9:36
It is their business model is fraud, all of them.
9:42
If fraud were removed from the equation,
9:44
all of the banks would go out of business.
9:49
This is the part of the reason why Jeff and I were
9:51
on such a heater about Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank
9:54
in our book, because they are insolvent.
9:57
They were insolvent when we wrote the book in 2020.
9:59
They're insolvent in 2026.
10:01
They should be out of business, but they're not.
10:03
The reason why they're not
10:04
is because the entire marketplace is rigged.
10:10
And speaking of Deutsche Bank,
10:12
they paid $250 million in the UK for their fine,
10:18
but the global penalty that Deutsche Bank paid
10:22
for their criminality was $2.5 billion.
10:26
So not only are they an insolvent zombie bank,
10:30
they're also a criminal enterprise that's measurable.
10:34
They've paid, well, just from these two fines alone,
10:37
$2.75 billion in fines.
10:40
That's just Deutsche Bank.
10:42
You have to ask the question,
10:43
how much money were they making?
10:46
Well, not enough to stay solvent,
10:48
because they're always upside down for some reason,
10:51
almost like it's designed that way.
10:54
So these markets are being manipulated by algo traders.
10:58
They're being manipulated by traditional Wall Street,
11:02
Silicon Valley, the banks, governments.
11:06
I mean, everybody is involved in this.
11:08
So my question, you know, the name of this episode
11:13
is tell me what the price is.
11:15
It's like, you just wanna know,
11:16
like where are you getting your information?
11:19
Oh, this brand new car costs $75,000.
11:23
How do I even know that?
11:25
Because that's the going rate.
11:27
Is anybody buying it at that price?
11:29
Sticker prices, $75,000?
11:31
What is the real price?
11:32
Why do we have to play this game?
11:35
That's why CarMax has been so successful.
11:37
People are tired of like going into a car dealership
11:41
and feeling like they're in a war.
11:44
They wanna go in there and spend their money.
11:46
They feel like they're in some sort of battle
11:48
against the salesperson and the manager
11:50
that there's some sort of trick.
11:52
It's like, oh, shit, I gotta come in here.
11:54
I gotta bring my friend who knows something about cars
11:56
so I don't feel like I'm getting misled
12:00
by the sales team.
12:01
Like that's a bad place to start.
12:03
That's the car industry.
12:05
The car industry is a very wonky sales segment.
12:09
You know, you come in there to battle the prices,
12:13
whatever they say it is.
12:15
If you're good at negotiating
12:17
or you know how it really works,
12:18
you get a better deal.
12:19
I sat in a car dealer, I had to do this game.
12:22
I sat in a Mercedes dealership in the last day of 1998.
12:27
And there was a car in there I really wanted
12:30
and I told the guy, this is the price I'll pay for it.
12:33
I went in at like five o'clock
12:34
and it was the last day of their year
12:36
and I knew it was the last day of their year.
12:38
And I said, this is the price I'm going to pay
12:40
for that car and the manager said no.
12:43
And I said, that's cool.
12:45
I understand you guys gotta do what you gotta do.
12:47
I said, see that?
12:47
I'm gonna be in that chair over there.
12:50
And I had a book and I had some paperwork with me
12:52
and I was just working.
12:53
I'll be at that chair over there today.
12:55
I'm gonna be here till you guys close.
12:58
And you let me know when that price works for you.
13:01
I just sat there.
13:04
I bought the car that night.
13:05
I got it for the price I wanted.
13:06
So, you know, but I shouldn't have to do that.
13:09
I shouldn't have to go in there and just be abrasive
13:13
and treat them like garbage to try
13:16
and like treat them like the enemy.
13:17
And that's why CarMax has been successful.
13:19
They say, oh, we got one price.
13:21
It's no haggle, it's all that.
13:22
And so people go in there and they go,
13:24
at least I don't feel like the sales team
13:26
is gonna be laughing at me as I pull out of the driveway
13:29
with this brand new car.
13:31
So, I mentioned silver and gold.
13:35
Just an idea, just to give you an idea of these prices.
13:37
I said they were out of control.
13:41
In January of 2026, this year,
13:47
mind you, silver does nothing.
13:50
For better or for worse.
13:51
I mean, if you want something
13:52
with relatively low volatility,
13:54
silver will bore you to death, right?
13:56
It was like 15 dollars for a while
14:00
and then it kind of moved up.
14:01
Then it was in like the 20s to 25.
14:03
It was sat there for years.
14:05
If you wanted to get silver in the 25 range,
14:08
you had years to do it, right?
14:10
In January, the price went from 70 to 117 in one month.
14:19
Okay, 66% increase.
14:21
I remember I did it on like a Friday.
14:23
It went parabolic that Friday.
14:27
So I messaged Tony Ardeburn like,
14:30
are you having a cocktail tonight
14:33
after the week you've had?
14:35
He was like, yeah, no kidding.
14:37
I mean, the prices, in the first,
14:40
so that's the spike, right?
14:42
70 to 117 in January.
14:46
And you go, I don't know, man.
14:48
This is pretty, it seems a bit frothy.
14:51
Maybe the price will come down.
14:52
Well, it did.
14:53
It then turned around and went from 70 to 117.
14:58
It then went from 117 back to 70.
15:01
And that happened just in the first eight days of February.
15:06
So the first five weeks of the year,
15:12
owning silver was like owning meme coin.
15:17
I mean, it was just all over the place.
15:21
And this should not be happening.
15:24
It just should not be happening.
15:26
What was going on in the background
15:28
was that there was a failure to deliver physical silver
15:32
and the banks were scrambling
15:33
and they shut down marketplaces.
15:35
They did every dirty trick you can do.
15:37
They're still rigging marketplaces.
15:39
By the way, all the fines I talked to you about,
15:41
if they weren't rigging the marketplaces,
15:43
why did the marketplaces go down on Thanksgiving?
15:46
The Friday after Thanksgiving.
15:47
They're like, oh, we blew a fuse.
15:49
I'll get the fuck out of here with that.
15:50
You blew a fuse.
15:52
If you blew a fuse, if your marketplace shut down
15:56
because you blew a fuse,
15:57
everybody involved in that place should be fired.
16:00
Every single person working on the technical side,
16:02
all of the top management, everyone should be out.
16:05
Were they?
16:06
No.
16:06
You know why?
16:07
Because they didn't have a technical issue.
16:09
They were lying.
16:11
They shut down the marketplaces
16:12
because they couldn't deliver.
16:13
They're still rigging markets.
16:15
What's the price of silver?
16:17
I have no fucking idea.
16:18
I honestly don't know.
16:21
Because in China, it was 110 while it was 70 in the US.
16:28
I mean, traders spend hours, years looking
16:35
for the perfect arbitrage opportunity.
16:38
Holy shit.
16:39
If you could find one that was a $40 swing
16:45
from $70 to 110, you could buy it for 70 in the US
16:50
and sell it for 110 in China and make a $40 swing on it.
16:56
That's not even an arbitrage opportunity anymore.
16:58
Arbitrage is when you find these fractional,
17:01
tiny little minute differences
17:03
and you make a ton of money on the churn on that, right?
17:06
That's not what this is.
17:07
This is a broken pricing model.
17:15
The truth is you can't get silver for $70.
17:19
That's what they were trying to tell you.
17:21
It was that the marketplace is broken
17:24
because we're not gonna even deliver it at that price.
17:27
Like we don't even have it.
17:29
So this goes back to problems that we had before.
17:33
This is like talking about derivatives.
17:37
And people say, well, there's two quadrillion dollars
17:39
of derivatives bets out there and you go, holy shit.
17:42
What happens if, what does that mean?
17:46
It's been described to me as like derivatives trading
17:50
is the equivalent of you and your buddies
17:52
are standing behind a blackjack table
17:55
and you're watching people play blackjack
17:59
and against the casino, against the house
18:01
and you're watching these guys
18:04
and then you're saying to your buddy who's standing next,
18:06
I bet you $100 that this dude in front of me
18:08
wins this hand and they go, oh, I bet you doesn't.
18:11
And so you're placing bets on their bets.
18:13
That's derivatives, essentially.
18:16
There are two quadrillion dollars
18:18
of derivative bets out there.
18:20
These banks are betting with each other
18:22
on a variety of things.
18:24
It's all fine and dandy
18:26
if they cancel each other out, right?
18:28
If they did.
18:30
The problem is when one party is unable to perform
18:34
like Deutsche Bank or Credit Suisse,
18:35
if they become insult, they're already zombies,
18:38
but if they officially go out of business
18:40
and there is no bank left to pay,
18:44
the derivative trades that they had with other banks
18:47
that were winners are, they can't collect on.
18:51
The derivative trades that they had with other banks
18:53
were the other banks were the winners.
18:56
They can't collect on that either.
18:58
So if you're Bank of America
19:02
and you had a hundred billion dollars of bets
19:05
with Credit Suisse and credits that you were gonna win
19:08
because you're on the right side of these derivative trades
19:10
but Credit Suisse goes out of business,
19:12
you didn't win jack shit.
19:14
You have a debt that you cannot collect on.
19:18
Congratulations, you air quotes one,
19:21
but there's no way to collect on it.
19:24
That's the problem that we face with this
19:27
is that if the banks are all insolvent
19:30
or if all it takes is one of the banks to be insolvent.
19:33
It's like if you go to a dinner
19:35
and you play and there's 10 of you
19:37
and it's a big expensive meal
19:39
and you play credit card roulette,
19:40
everybody throws their credit cards in the pile
19:42
and everybody pulls out.
19:44
You pull out a credit card
19:45
and it's your buddy Bob down at the end
19:47
and they go, oh, Bob, you're gonna pay the whole bill
19:50
and Bob goes, jokes on you, I don't have any money.
19:54
Now what?
19:56
You technically won, right?
19:58
Because Bob has to pay the bill
20:00
but you're not getting out of that restaurant
20:02
unless you guys pay.
20:03
So it's not your problem necessary.
20:06
It's not your fault
20:08
because you're not the one insolvent
20:09
but it becomes your problem.
20:11
And that's kind of where we are.
20:12
Gold, same thing, gold went from, in January,
20:15
gold went from $4,334 to $5,434.
20:24
A $1100 increase in the price of gold
20:27
in one month.
20:29
Again, just like it did with silver,
20:32
once you got into February,
20:33
it only took five days for the price to go right back down.
20:37
So there's manipulation happening here.
20:40
You don't get an $1100 price increase in gold for nothing.
20:45
Gold, for gold to go up $1100, it takes a decade.
20:50
It happened here in January.
20:54
So whatever banking regulators collected from these banks
20:59
for manipulating LIBOR and Forex,
21:03
they need to open a secondary investigation
21:07
because I'm pretty sure they're back up to their old tricks.
21:10
Let's talk about crypto.
21:11
It got rugged in October of 2025
21:13
when millions of trading accounts were vaporized
21:19
in a matter of minutes.
21:24
And my feeling on this,
21:28
and I had to put on my little conspiracy hat
21:31
for this a little bit.
21:34
You know that the government hates crypto people.
21:38
I'm not talking about the stable coin people.
21:40
I'm talking about OG crypto people,
21:44
the people that have that mindset,
21:47
the type of mindset that would get you into Bitcoin,
21:49
sound money, things like that.
21:51
Those people have done very well over the years
21:55
who were early in Bitcoin and in other cryptos as well.
22:00
And it is my belief that the government
22:02
would love for those people to go broke.
22:04
And here's why, because if anybody is in a position
22:09
to get around the stable coins, it would be them.
22:12
Building parallel systems, seeing it coming in advance
22:16
and being able to have the voice
22:19
to tell people to get out of the way,
22:21
using your extensive crypto wealth to build a parallel system.
22:30
All of the things that are going on at Anarcapulco,
22:34
you find the people that have a lot of crypto wealth
22:37
aren't sitting around buying Ferraris, though they could.
22:41
They're really more interested in building businesses
22:43
outside of the system that are doing things
22:45
with this new crypto technology that they find so fascinating.
22:50
So if you've got a bunch of those people
22:53
with basically like endless money,
22:56
it would probably not be the worst idea
22:58
if you were a diabolical government to rug pull them,
23:01
break them to the extent that you can.
23:05
And so that they're not going up against you
23:10
when you're trying to introduce and roll out stable coins
23:14
in the aftermath of that.
23:15
I mean, that's just my assumption on that.
23:24
I mean, maybe the rug pull was for something else,
23:28
but it most definitely is made to happen.
23:31
So if you're somebody who's interested in crypto
23:33
and you go, oh God, everything's a scam,
23:36
everybody loses all their money,
23:38
they're losing their money in these senses
23:40
because they're leveraged, they're over leveraged.
23:42
If you just have Bitcoin in a wallet,
23:45
in a cold wallet somewhere,
23:47
you're not gonna lose it in one of these rug pull situations.
23:53
You're just sitting.
23:54
I mean, the value may go down of your Bitcoin,
23:57
but you're not giving it to Coinbase
24:00
and trying to earn a return on it
24:02
and then falling behind and Coinbase taking your stuff.
24:06
Like you don't wanna get into that.
24:08
I think that when you're trying to earn returns
24:11
on your money, you're in the banking system.
24:13
You're thinking with a banking mindset.
24:16
You're in a fiat mindset with that.
24:18
And I think that that will ultimately get you in trouble.
24:22
I think that maybe the cash is trash.
24:26
Messaging is designed to get people into the crypto world.
24:29
Catherine Austin Fitz has really been vocal
24:32
about her cash Fridays and getting people to spend cash
24:37
so that they don't take it away from us.
24:39
And most importantly so that they don't get us
24:42
into a situation where they turn it off.
24:44
So you have to be mindful of that possibility.
24:49
So if you hear the narrative that cash is dirty,
24:53
only drug dealers use it, only scammers use cash,
24:57
COVID lives on cash, remember that, whopper.
25:01
These are lies told to get you to think differently
25:06
to perceive this.
25:08
Catherine Austin Fitz, we were talking about this
25:10
a couple weeks ago.
25:12
She was saying that there's this trick.
25:16
One of the crypto tricks that you can see
25:19
is that Coinbase will offer an exorbitant interest rate.
25:24
Like, hey, park your money with us.
25:26
We'll put it in our coins and we'll pay you 14% interest.
25:30
And you're like, oh my God, like 14% interest.
25:32
That is, what am I getting in my bank?
25:34
A quarter of a percent interest?
25:36
Like this is a mathematical no-brainer, right?
25:40
You've gotta move your money from the bank
25:41
into Coinbase to get the 14% interest.
25:45
And she was saying that's the trap, right?
25:47
Because of course, mathematically,
25:50
you would want to move from something that was paying you
25:53
almost no interest to something that was paying you a ton,
25:56
almost way above market price.
25:58
And it's that way above market price interest
26:00
that should be the indicator, right?
26:02
Like ding, ding, ding, ding.
26:02
Why do they want my money?
26:05
So what she was saying is it's a two for one, right?
26:07
Yes, they want your money.
26:08
But it also accomplishes the task of getting your money
26:11
out of where it was currently,
26:13
which is in a bank somewhere.
26:16
So if they can get your money out of that bank
26:19
and get it into their account, their Coinbase,
26:22
as an example, then you've now moved yourself
26:26
into the digital system.
26:27
Now, to be fair, if you were in your banking account,
26:30
it's kind of a digital system anyway,
26:33
because you log online and maybe you've got an app
26:36
on your phone and it's all kind of digital.
26:37
But you can go in there and get cash and treat it,
26:41
and use your bank like a real bank.
26:43
You can't do that with Coinbase.
26:45
And she was of the belief that that is more than,
26:48
it's that when you see a 14% interest rate like that,
26:52
you should treat it as like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon,
26:57
you'd see the pile of carrots.
26:58
And there's a giant rock hanging right above it, right?
27:02
As soon as you go and grab those carrots,
27:04
that rock's gonna fall on you.
27:05
So you need to be mindful of the traps
27:09
that they're setting up to get people into their system
27:13
so that they can turn you off.
27:14
I would also remind people, and this is an important one
27:17
to remember, I did this as my,
27:21
for those of you who are interested
27:23
in the non-conformist series as something
27:24
that the folks over at the Dollar Vigilante do as well,
27:27
I did it recorded a presentation
27:30
for the non-conformist series that's coming up,
27:33
talking about bank bail ins and bank runs.
27:39
And what's happening, what is going to happen,
27:42
and this is something that's extremely important for us
27:44
to, I've been going on and on about this.
27:46
You might have heard this before.
27:47
I don't care.
27:48
It's worth mentioning 10 times
27:50
because for anyone who hasn't heard it,
27:52
you need to hear this and you need to hear this good.
27:55
The G20 legalized bank bail ins in 2014, okay?
28:02
They assured that the bank accounts will be seized.
28:07
I want to say that again.
28:09
This bank legislation in 2014 for the G20 countries,
28:15
they assured you that the bank accounts
28:19
in these countries will be seized.
28:25
So did you hear me?
28:27
They're going to take your bank accounts.
28:29
The only question is when?
28:32
I can't tell you when.
28:33
I don't know when.
28:35
I do know that they will.
28:36
The reason why I know that they will
28:38
is because they legalized it
28:40
and they legalized it in 2014.
28:42
It's not my opinion.
28:45
They did it.
28:46
You can go find it.
28:47
And they didn't legalize the,
28:49
now again, let me differentiate between a bailout
28:54
and a bail in.
28:55
A bail out is what we had in 2008
28:58
when the banks got into trouble
29:01
and they said, help me, daddy government,
29:03
we need a bail out from you.
29:05
And that's when the 700 billion came
29:07
and if you didn't get it,
29:08
there'd be blood on the streets, right?
29:10
That's a bail out from the government.
29:14
A bail in is when the banks say,
29:17
help me, we're in solvent,
29:18
we're in trouble again like we were in 2008.
29:20
And the government says,
29:22
why don't you just get the money from the people?
29:24
And they say, oh yeah, well we could do that
29:27
because technically we could do that anyway
29:30
because when you signed your contract,
29:32
your third position behind that,
29:35
shareholders and the bond holders.
29:37
So you don't really own your account anyway.
29:40
We could have stolen your money in 2002
29:43
if we wanted to.
29:44
We don't necessarily need to legalize it
29:46
but just to be on safe side, we legalized it.
29:48
So again, ask yourself this question
29:51
and I will say this as I just went over a long list
29:55
of all the fines that the banks paid for rigging marketplaces.
29:58
They paid billions of dollars in fines
29:59
and they're doing it again.
30:00
So they clearly hadn't learned their lesson.
30:03
So if you know that the legislation has been passed
30:08
for the banks to take control of your bank account
30:11
when times are tough
30:13
and the banks have already been charged
30:15
and convicted as felons
30:17
for stealing and rigging marketplaces.
30:19
They paid billions of dollars in fines.
30:20
They're doing it again.
30:21
I ask you one question.
30:22
Do you think that the banks will take your money yes or no?
30:26
The answer is yes.
30:29
The answer is yes because it's not your money.
30:33
It's their money.
30:34
They're not taking your money.
30:36
They're taking their money.
30:39
If you have a problem with it, that's your problem.
30:42
You can't do anything about it.
30:43
What are you gonna do?
30:45
Throw eggs at the branch down the street from you?
30:48
Okay, and then what?
30:49
You're still not gonna get your money.
30:51
So this is how it could play out.
30:56
Again, nobody will go to jail for this.
30:58
Even if it were illegal, nobody would go to jail for it.
31:00
But specifically in this case, you will not see.
31:03
People will be out in the street.
31:04
I demand that you lock up all these bankers.
31:07
Why?
31:07
Show me the law they broke.
31:10
Well, they stole all our money.
31:11
No, they didn't.
31:12
It's not your money.
31:12
It's not your bank accounts.
31:14
Just because you think it is doesn't mean it is.
31:17
So it's something to consider.
31:19
All right, let's move on to dynamic pricing.
31:20
We talked about the Wendy's cheeseburger story.
31:22
It was February 2024.
31:27
Wendy's backtracked and claimed it was to offer discounts
31:30
during the day, which is bullshit.
31:31
They're like, oh yeah, we were gonna change
31:35
the price of our hamburgers so that, you know,
31:37
at like, I don't know, at like nine o'clock
31:41
in the morning, you'd be cheaper
31:43
for you to buy a hamburger.
31:44
It's like, no, you weren't.
31:47
No, you weren't.
31:48
You weren't gonna do that.
31:50
You weren't going to change the price downward
31:53
to give us a discount.
31:55
You were gonna move the price up
31:57
because I wanted a hamburger at 1230 in the afternoon,
32:00
not at nine o'clock in the morning.
32:02
And so therefore my hamburger was going to be priced
32:05
accordingly to match the time of day.
32:09
It's why the Frosties would probably be remarkably cheap
32:13
at seven o'clock in the morning, right?
32:16
So this was a problem.
32:19
The general public flipped out.
32:22
But this is the direction that we're going.
32:25
Digital price tags.
32:27
Every shelf in every Walmart will have a digital price tag
32:31
by the end of 2026.
32:34
Did you know?
32:35
So you have a couple months left before it happens.
32:41
And you'll see it.
32:42
They'll be in every single Walmart.
32:44
Kroger is next, Kroger grocery stores
32:47
or the anything Kroger that's owned by them, King Super.
32:54
They own a lot of grocery stores
32:56
around chains around the country.
32:58
They will all have the dynamic pricing.
33:00
They're going to change the pricing on you
33:02
during the course of the day in grocery stores.
33:05
Depressed, 1130 at night, slowly shuffling through
33:11
the snack food aisle of your local grocery store
33:14
ready to put a gun in your mouth, blow your brains out.
33:16
Hey, look, the Twinkies are on sale.
33:19
I mean, I'm trying to not, you know,
33:23
freak out about this or anything
33:24
and see like the funny side of it.
33:28
But this is unfortunately the direction
33:32
that things are going to be going.
33:33
They claim it frees up the staff to do other things
33:36
like file for food stamps and welfare and unemployment
33:40
and stuff like that, but which is a staple
33:42
of working at Walmart.
33:44
So yes, you'll have plenty of time now
33:46
to fill out all your food stamp paperwork
33:49
and not worry about changing the prices
33:51
of cat food in aisle six,
33:53
because the prices of cat food
33:55
will be changing automatically.
33:58
Let me ask you a question.
34:00
And we're going to have to,
34:01
this is a couple of years out in the future,
34:04
but you've got everything about you on your cell phone,
34:06
right?
34:07
Let's say you're walking down that,
34:08
let's run this scenario about the guy who's depressed,
34:12
walking down the aisle,
34:14
but he's got a lot of money, right?
34:15
Guy has a good job.
34:17
They know that his phone,
34:17
what if the price of everything that you saw
34:21
when you were looking at it was different
34:23
because you were rich and the guy
34:25
who comes in the store five minutes after you,
34:27
the price of everything he saw
34:29
based on his cell phone in his pocket that knows
34:31
he's probably not going to buy anything
34:32
because he can't afford it.
34:33
What if his pricing was different?
34:36
What if?
34:37
Now you go, well, that would be crazy.
34:39
That would never happen.
34:40
It can happen.
34:42
They can geo-fence it to pull,
34:44
when your phone gets near the item with the price tag,
34:50
maybe that price is reflective of who you are,
34:53
not even so much what the product is.
34:56
You've got no money.
34:58
Hey, guess what?
34:59
You get a two for one special, right?
35:01
It pops up for you, you know,
35:02
because the computer's making a calculation
35:04
either this guy buys the two for one
35:07
or he's just going to walk on past, right?
35:09
We'd rather get the two for one end of the month.
35:11
Got to get rid of this inventory.
35:13
It makes a calculation automatically
35:15
to know we could two for one this thing right now
35:20
for this guy because it's better off for us,
35:22
but we're not going to two for one it for the next guy
35:24
because that guy's got money.
35:25
He's coming in, he'll pay full price.
35:27
This is most definitely on the drawing board.
35:31
I want to talk to you a little bit about pricing.
35:33
I have to tell this as a personal story
35:35
because it's just, it's so great.
35:37
It's one of these lessons I learned early on
35:40
and it's fresh in my mind because my girl roommate, McFall,
35:45
who I just had dinner with her,
35:46
she was on our Hong Kong trip with us.
35:49
When we were living together in Manhattan Beach in 97,
35:53
this guy moved in across the street from us
35:56
and he was like a computer hacker guy,
35:58
like long hair and I remember he was a bit of a mystery.
36:02
He had one of those hummers,
36:03
you know, like the big hummers, like the HD,
36:05
like the big ones, this,
36:06
and he had an EV1, like one of the first electric cars
36:10
and he had them both in his garage.
36:12
And I remember we went down there, we were talking to him,
36:14
we're like, are you trying to like offset each other?
36:16
He's like, yes, sort of, you know, okay.
36:18
He's got the hummer that takes like four gallons
36:21
to the gas and he's got this electric car.
36:22
Like one of the first ones
36:23
when you couldn't actually own them,
36:25
you could only lease them.
36:26
So he bought this mansion across from us
36:29
and we went over to his house one day
36:33
and he gave us a tour and we were interested like,
36:35
who are you?
36:36
Like, who are you?
36:37
What do you do?
36:38
And he's like, well, I'm a computer programmer
36:40
and we sat down and we got kind of his life story
36:42
and we're like, okay.
36:44
Cause one of the rooms was like glass enclosed
36:48
and there was just filled with servers.
36:50
And I was like, what the fuck is going on in here?
36:53
You know, like, what are you doing?
36:54
He said, well, I manage the back end for Strouds.
37:00
And Strouds was a company,
37:01
I think they're out of business now.
37:02
It's like a Michaels or linens and things, you know,
37:05
they sell like bath and body works types.
37:09
I don't know, you can get sheets
37:10
and pillows and things like that, whatever.
37:12
It's a big store.
37:13
And he said, I manage the back end
37:15
for this company called Strouds.
37:18
And I was brought, and it's interesting
37:21
when you work for them.
37:22
He goes, not really.
37:23
I'm sort of like kind of like a consultant.
37:26
He said, they brought me in early on
37:27
to help them solve their credit card problem.
37:30
I go, what was their credit card problem?
37:32
And he said, well, the thing is
37:34
when you swiped a credit card when you're checking out,
37:38
it took 12 seconds between the time
37:42
that their system would ping out
37:44
and get a response that said it was approved.
37:47
And they found that their customers didn't like that.
37:50
And they desperately wanted to make sure
37:52
that that relay time was shortened.
37:54
So they brought me in and they said,
37:56
can you help us take this,
37:58
make it shorter for the credit card thing?
38:00
And he said, I can help you.
38:02
And they said, great, what do you charge?
38:03
And he says, I charge a million dollars a second.
38:07
And they went, okay.
38:11
And he said, I'll get to work on it.
38:13
And I said, well, what did you do?
38:15
Did you know how to fix it?
38:15
He said, I had no idea how to fix it.
38:18
What the fuck did you do then?
38:19
He goes, I hired an engineer.
38:21
I paid him $100,000.
38:23
He figured it out.
38:24
I took it from 12 seconds down to six seconds
38:26
and walked out of there with six million bucks.
38:29
We all just went, oh my God, how did you know to price it?
38:32
How did you know to charge a million dollars a second?
38:36
He said, here's how I knew to do that.
38:38
And he said, when I was teaching computer programming,
38:42
when I was a little bit younger,
38:44
I was charging $60 an hour.
38:47
And the reason was 60 minutes, 60, whatever,
38:50
still charging way more than most people.
38:52
And he said, then I started dating this girl
38:54
who had an MBA, she had an MBA program
38:59
and she had a real business mind.
39:01
She said, why do you charge $60 an hour?
39:03
He said, I don't know, 60 minutes, 60.
39:05
She said, that's stupid.
39:06
She said, from now on,
39:08
what you should do is you charge $360 an hour.
39:12
He goes, that's crazy.
39:14
Nobody will pay that.
39:15
And he said, she said, yeah, yeah they will.
39:17
Because they wanna know that they're $360 an hour
39:20
or a computer guy is on the job.
39:23
And I thought, holy shit.
39:24
So he said, that's how I knew
39:26
to charge them a million dollars a second.
39:28
I threw out a crazy number and they said yes.
39:32
I never forgot that.
39:34
All right, so when it comes to pricing,
39:36
when it comes to this,
39:37
sometimes you just have to,
39:39
the price is whatever you say it is.
39:42
Does it cost a million dollars a second to do that?
39:45
No, but it is a calculation
39:48
that they were willing to make
39:50
that in their minds, maybe it does.
39:53
So you have to remove yourself
39:54
from the equation sometimes.
39:56
You have to remove your limiting views on money,
39:59
on what is a lot.
40:02
Because your idea of what a lot is
40:05
and their idea might not be in the same ballpark,
40:09
I would have never thought
40:10
to charge a million dollars a second.
40:13
He did and he got it, right?
40:15
And there's something to be said for that, right?
40:20
So anyway, so back to the efficiency of pricing.
40:25
See Walmart will call this price efficiency, right?
40:27
Well, you know, other people would call it price gouging.
40:31
So knowing what the real price of something is,
40:34
I think is vastly important.
40:36
I mean, if you don't know what the price is,
40:39
when you're traveling internationally,
40:41
you will get gouged, right?
40:43
We all know that.
40:44
And you know, we have, there's nothing,
40:48
so there's nothing really inherently nefarious
40:52
about changing the prices of things.
40:56
I'd say as long as people are aware
40:58
that the pricing is changing,
41:00
because we've been doing this on a,
41:02
you know, in a similar way with technology like Groupon.
41:11
You remember Groupon?
41:11
Groupon was like,
41:12
you know, you guys all wanna go sign up
41:15
at this aerobic studio,
41:16
like if we get 70 people together,
41:19
it'll give us all a good deal.
41:20
And it's like, oh, we all got together online
41:22
and this thing,
41:23
and then we will, you know,
41:24
presented ourselves as a group of 70 buying this thing
41:27
and we got the price down.
41:29
There's power in group purchasing, for sure.
41:33
And there's nothing wrong with that.
41:35
In fact, it's a great model.
41:36
Groupon did very well for that, Airbnb.
41:39
You know, Airbnb has this model, Uber.
41:42
Uber has their pricing
41:43
or Uber has surge pricing, right?
41:49
And people will say, oh, surge pricing, man.
41:52
That's so criminal.
41:53
It takes advantage of like these times where, you know,
41:57
like a high time, we're a concert,
42:00
a concert's letting out.
42:01
Now you charge surge pricing.
42:03
Yes, if you viewed it only from that angle,
42:08
that would be a negative.
42:09
But here's the other side of that.
42:11
The surge pricing that makes it higher,
42:14
you know, charges more for the consumer
42:17
also pays the drivers more.
42:19
So what it does is it incentivizes drivers
42:22
that may be sitting on their couch.
42:23
Hey, get up at 10 o'clock at night
42:25
and go over near this concert venue
42:27
because we're paying well right now.
42:30
There's more demand there.
42:32
So it works on both ends, right?
42:34
It's not just on the purchasing side.
42:37
If you're somebody who is offering the service,
42:41
the surge pricing works in the manner of,
42:47
it works for the person offering the service as well.
42:51
There was an interesting thing that happened with DoorDash
42:55
that was, I don't know if it was leaked
42:58
from somebody who was disgruntled, who left,
43:01
or it was just something that became known.
43:04
But there, if you are a driver delivering for DoorDash,
43:10
I'm obviously not a driver delivering for DoorDash,
43:13
so I don't know exactly how it works.
43:15
But apparently upon my examination of this,
43:19
the lowest they'll pay you to deliver a bag of fast food
43:24
to someone is $3, right?
43:26
That's the low end.
43:28
On the high end, let's just say,
43:30
I don't know how high it gets,
43:31
but let's just say the high end is $10, right?
43:34
If you are somebody who delivers for DoorDash
43:37
and you ever accept one of those $3 runs,
43:41
you have just fucked yourself.
43:43
So badly you'll never get out of it.
43:45
You might as well become a different person at DoorDash
43:48
and get yourself a new cell phone and a new identity.
43:50
Because what happens is,
43:53
you're never gonna get offered the $10 runs anymore
43:56
because you have outed yourself
43:58
as somebody who is dependent.
44:02
This is the problem that they've created for themselves.
44:11
Any driver who would accept $3
44:14
will continue to get $3 offers
44:17
because they know that that person would take it.
44:20
The guy who only accepts the $10 orders
44:23
will never get the $3 offers.
44:25
He will only get $10 offers.
44:27
And they know this because they came up
44:29
with something called a desperation score.
44:33
I mean, if you think you hate these people now,
44:36
wait until you find out about their desperation score.
44:39
Oh, please tell me, what is a desperation score?
44:42
Well, the desperation score is when they know
44:44
that you're desperate enough to do this run
44:47
that they'll only pay you $3.
44:49
Then they're only gonna give you $3 from that point forward.
44:52
That is the direction things are going.
44:58
That is very real.
45:03
Let's talk about dynamic pricing
45:05
in a low trust society, right?
45:08
Look, nobody trusts Walmart, Target, Home Depot.
45:14
These big, big companies,
45:16
they don't trust them after they were given
45:19
preferential treatment during the COVID era.
45:22
Everybody else was forced to stay shut.
45:24
They were allowed to stay open,
45:27
because the COVID virus in a Home Depot warehouse store,
45:33
you see it floats, yeah, just kidding.
45:36
I mean, it just nothing made sense, right?
45:38
So you would see that, how is that not price manipulation?
45:43
No, it's industry manipulation.
45:45
For a pricing, when you do things like that,
45:56
pricing becomes a trust issue.
45:59
And we don't trust you.
46:02
I don't trust Home Depot.
46:03
I don't trust Target.
46:04
I don't trust Walmart.
46:07
They are able to, I mean, a company like Target
46:11
is allowed to stay open during the summer of love
46:15
while everybody else was closed,
46:17
because they made arrangements to sell tuck bathing suits
46:20
to transition all the kids.
46:22
So if you're gonna be a narrative manager like Target
46:24
and say, oh, we're gonna have the stunning and brave section
46:27
so we can teach kids to pretend to be different genders,
46:29
they'll let you stay open all day long.
46:31
They'll let you stay open 24 hours a day,
46:33
even if there's a fucking comet coming in, right?
46:35
They don't care.
46:36
If you're selling that narrative and that agenda,
46:38
you'll be open for business.
46:40
So I don't trust you.
46:42
I don't trust your dynamic pricing.
46:44
I don't trust anything.
46:48
The fight, this is kind of my feeling on this.
46:54
The pricing has always felt arbitrary to me and,
47:02
or worse, you know, targeted to me
47:04
because it knows I can afford to pay for it, you know?
47:08
Like I said, like what if the phone in your purse
47:12
or your pocket is ratting on you?
47:16
It's telling the store,
47:19
maybe even telling the store from its own history
47:22
of shopping in the store that you got money.
47:25
You never use coupons.
47:26
You don't give a shit about coming in
47:28
on two-for-one deals, sales, things like that.
47:32
You know the frequent buyer cards that you have
47:35
in your scan when you go through like a grocery store
47:38
to get deals, they'll give you the deals on it, right?
47:41
The discounts, but because that information
47:43
is worth so much to see what you're buying,
47:46
when you're buying it, how you're buying it,
47:48
what method of payment you're using,
47:50
all that information matters.
47:54
Yeah, so like what happens when two people
47:56
from two different socioeconomic backgrounds show up
47:59
at the same store at the same time to buy the same product?
48:02
You know, the store has to make a calculation.
48:05
Store cannot get caught either, changing that,
48:09
manipulating the pricing to reflect
48:11
who they think is the one purchasing it.
48:14
Obviously, if you're at the dollar store,
48:16
they know what you're all about.
48:18
But when you walk in Target, you could be anybody.
48:22
You know, it used to be that like maximizing profits
48:25
was enough.
48:26
Like if we could just get a great return on investment,
48:32
then everything will be fine this quarter.
48:35
It doesn't feel like that anymore.
48:37
It feels like the goal is to financially rape you
48:40
just because the algorithm allows them to, you know?
48:45
Like maximizing profits because the computer tells you
48:51
you can pull another one or two percent
48:55
by charging a little bit more for these people.
48:59
What is trust worth?
49:02
How do you rectify that with people once you,
49:07
once the word is out that you're essentially living
49:10
in the prices, whatever we say it is, society?
49:13
I mean, it's already kind of that.
49:15
But at least there's competition from other vendors, right?
49:19
What if the competition from other vendors
49:21
are also rigging their prices at the same time?
49:24
You know, this has been going on with gas stations
49:27
that are on the corners watching each other's pricing forever.
49:31
One drops theirs by a penny,
49:33
the other one drops theirs by a penny to match
49:35
or raises it or whatever.
49:37
They don't even need to get the binoculars out
49:40
and spy on your competition anymore.
49:42
You have algorithms that'll do that.
49:43
The second my competitor drops his prices by anything,
49:48
I'll drop mine by a penny more.
49:51
So that I'm always ahead of it.
49:53
You know what I mean?
49:53
Like this is how this can go.
49:55
By the way, I mentioned the Uber situation
49:59
of the peak, you know, surge pricing
50:02
and getting people out into their cars and driving.
50:05
This is something I learned recently
50:10
that if you've been in an Uber
50:14
and you've got some guy driving it who is,
50:18
let's just say new to this country, put it nicely.
50:22
Oh, you appear to be new to this country.
50:26
Sir, I can smell that you're new to this country.
50:29
They may not be legal
50:32
and they may be driving a nice Tesla
50:35
and you may be going, oh, this fucking car is nicer than mine.
50:37
Like how this guy get this car and driving it.
50:40
They are working for somebody.
50:42
There's somebody else who actually owns the car.
50:45
This is not how, these are,
50:49
they're driving other people's Ubers
50:51
like a taxi medallion system.
50:54
If you're familiar with that back in the days,
50:55
if you wanted to, I mean,
50:57
if you people know this about the taxi industry,
50:59
I learned this in the 90s, it blew my mind.
51:02
You owning a taxi cab,
51:06
you own something called a medallion.
51:07
I always thought of it like a coin, you know?
51:10
It's a license, essentially.
51:12
And that license is valuable
51:13
and you have to have one if you wanna run it,
51:16
own a taxi.
51:17
And so like taxi cab companies own a bunch of medallions
51:20
and then based on that,
51:22
that's the number of cars that you can have.
51:25
And so you'll buy, I would, let's say in my case,
51:28
I would buy a medallion.
51:30
Like, oh, you're gonna drive a cab?
51:31
Fuck no, I'm not gonna drive a cab.
51:32
I'm just buying the medallion.
51:33
I have somebody else drive the cab for me, but I own it.
51:36
That's what's going on with Uber, essentially.
51:38
It's moving into this kind of medallion marketplace
51:42
where the Ubers are owned by other people
51:45
and they're just hot boxing them around.
51:47
Just running it eight hours with one guy
51:49
and then, you know, Sandeep gets out
51:53
and then Haji gets in
51:54
and you gotta run him for eight hours through
51:56
and they're just doing it.
51:58
That's what's happening.
51:59
So, that's become a thing.
52:10
Speaking of the Jeets and the cars,
52:12
I mean, the trucking industry
52:13
in the United States and Canada
52:15
has become a catastrophe
52:17
from all of the imported drivers
52:19
and then you've got a guy who's driving a big rig
52:21
and flip-flops watching Bollywood movies on his phone
52:25
and he's not paying attention.
52:26
He didn't realize he needs to put on the brakes
52:28
because everybody else has stopped.
52:31
So, this is where we are.
52:32
We're in a low-trust society with low IQ workers
52:36
that are, and it's one thing
52:39
if you're just in your job being stupid
52:41
but when your job being stupid
52:43
gets other people killed,
52:44
it becomes everybody else's problems.
52:46
Let's talk about expiring prices.
52:49
How much is the open seat
52:51
on yesterday's flight selling for today?
52:54
How much?
52:55
It's always been an interesting component of price dynamics
52:59
is the expiring asset, the concert ticket,
53:02
the hotel room, the airplane flight, all of that.
53:06
It has value until it doesn't, until it expires.
53:10
So, why don't we sell airplane tickets
53:14
for a dollar a flight one minute before people,
53:18
before the flight is scheduled to leave?
53:20
Well, because you have to maintain price integrity.
53:24
Sometimes you let the hotel room expire
53:27
without anybody in it because in order to fill it
53:33
you would have to crater your own pricing system.
53:37
So, if you've got a hundred dollar room
53:39
and your rooms sell out, sell for a hundred dollars
53:42
every single night, it's tempting to wanna grab 40 bucks
53:46
if somebody comes in at 10.45 for that room.
53:48
But in doing that you run the risk
53:51
of messing up your entire pricing, right?
53:54
So, this is, I'd call it price game theory.
54:01
And it's been something that people have been studying
54:04
for a long, long time.
54:05
I mean, the psychology of pricing is fascinating.
54:08
We studied this in business school.
54:10
You have to price some things.
54:13
I mean, this is why anybody who's ever looked at
54:16
like a Gucci jacket or something goes,
54:18
it's a jacket, right?
54:20
Keeps you warm in the winter, $7,000, really?
54:24
It's not about the jacket cost, it's about something else.
54:27
It's about perception, it's about feelings.
54:31
It's about anything other than what the unit cost is
54:35
and what the markup is.
54:36
The markup is you're moving into a psychological realm,
54:44
where pricing isn't reflective of what it costs
54:48
to make something, pricing is reflective
54:50
of how you feel about the item that you own.
54:52
So, you get into these weird experiments
54:54
where people are brand names, they love the brand names
54:59
and they want someone to know that the purse
55:03
that they have is a $6,000 purse.
55:07
That's why whenever I go to Hong Kong,
55:09
you go in those black market, gray market stores
55:12
where you got to sweet talk the lady down at the booth
55:16
and say, I don't want the booth stuff.
55:18
Let me go upstairs where you guys get the good stuff
55:20
and then they walk you talk you to a guy
55:22
and you go in and you walk in and they open up the safe
55:25
and you open up the door,
55:27
make sure you're not the feds or whatever.
55:29
And you go in and you go, holy shit,
55:31
you found the mother load of all the gray market stuff
55:34
and you go, okay, so now we've got the $6,000 purse.
55:38
I can get it for what, 200 bucks?
55:40
Okay, we'll get a couple of these for home, whatever.
55:42
So, pricing is subjective and you can have some fun
55:51
messing around with it, but you always have to be careful
55:54
because there is a step where you've now
55:57
disrespected your customers.
55:58
You've priced them out of the market
56:00
or you've done something that feels dirty to them
56:02
and it's tough to get them back.
56:05
If you're somebody that is moving the pricing around
56:07
on people, like they do at car dealerships,
56:10
you're going to have a hard time getting repeat business.
56:13
This is just kind of the way things are.
56:17
So, opportunity costs, sunk costs, operational costs,
56:21
interest payments, labor inputs,
56:23
all these things are changing
56:27
and they're changing in the world.
56:29
So, you have to sort of be, you have to be mindful.
56:33
The pricing will change.
56:34
I mean, what is the pricing going to look like
56:36
in the aftermath of when the energy is factored in
56:40
that's not coming out of the Persian Gulf?
56:44
You know, what's that going to look like?
56:46
You're going to be thankful if you're a brand
56:48
that you have the ability for dynamic pricing,
56:50
that you can adjust your pricing to reflect it
56:53
because if you don't, things are going up all the time.
56:59
I'm sure the IRS will find a way
57:01
to incorporate dynamic taxes into the equation, right?
57:06
Or taxes that are automatically taken.
57:08
They all kind of are.
57:09
Anyway, let's talk about some solutions
57:11
and wrap this thing up.
57:14
I'll tell you what I would do.
57:15
If you wanted to solve a lot of the problems here,
57:18
I would just end the H1B visa program,
57:20
remove all the people who are in the country
57:23
on that program and start over.
57:25
You say, you guys all have to leave
57:28
because the pricing right now is out of control.
57:33
We have too many people who are being artificially propped up
57:36
here, they're being given welfare,
57:38
they're being given things
57:39
that the average person isn't given
57:41
and that is impacting the price.
57:43
We saw what happened with 7-Eleven
57:45
when EBT stopped being able to be used for candy
57:50
and soda, they closed 600 and plus 7-Elevens around the US.
57:55
They're being subsidized by EBT.
57:58
What else is?
57:59
So you're creating an artificial marketplace
58:03
with dollars, EBT dollars,
58:06
that were being traded in for goods
58:10
and now they've made differentiation on that.
58:15
Now you can't use them for candy and soda
58:19
and things like that.
58:20
And now, what do we have?
58:23
Well, we didn't have quite as much,
58:24
we don't have organic demand for that stuff.
58:28
We have demand for candy when it's essentially free,
58:30
when the government will buy it for you,
58:32
but when the government no longer buys it for you,
58:35
the demand falls to almost zero
58:37
to the point where the 7-Elevens
58:38
have to go out of business.
58:42
So they have been artificially propped up for a while.
58:48
What else has been?
58:49
We're watching all of the fraud
58:50
that's happening in Minneapolis get busted,
58:52
we're watching the oncology component segment
58:57
of the healthcare industry in Southern California
59:00
be exposed, all of the treatment facilities
59:03
that weren't treating people for cancer.
59:06
This is the first thing towards trying to get a hold
59:10
on what the real pricing is in this country
59:13
would be getting rid of everybody who is here illegally
59:16
and all of the subsidization that's happening with that.
59:19
I would end the subsidies for the farmers as well.
59:23
Corn is massively subsidized.
59:25
Why?
59:26
Stop doing that.
59:26
We don't even know what the price of corn is.
59:29
We don't, Mel.
59:30
The government subsidizes it to the point
59:32
where it's tough to tell.
59:36
So you should have the ability
59:39
to turn off the EBT cards.
59:40
You should have the technology to see everything.
59:45
I would think.
59:47
So turn the EBT cards off or set them
59:51
so that they only work on natural food
59:54
and things like that, things would change.
59:59
Pricing can be reduced if we lower labor costs.
1:00:04
We know that, labor and energy are the two biggest inputs.
1:00:08
So we could lower labor costs.
1:00:11
So how do we do that?
1:00:13
We could, we have big problems with the unions.
1:00:16
People talk about, oh, the unions come in here
1:00:18
that help fight big business.
1:00:19
The unions are just as corrupt.
1:00:22
I mean, who is the head of the Teamsters Union?
1:00:25
Jimmy Hoffa, right?
1:00:27
Oh, Jimmy, he's like the butt of everybody's joke.
1:00:29
Oh, he's a guy who got whacked
1:00:30
and nobody could find his buddy.
1:00:32
Yeah, he's the head of the Teamsters Union.
1:00:35
They're a mafia in and of themselves, right?
1:00:37
So the unions are a huge problem.
1:00:39
They sell themselves as like,
1:00:42
oh, we're standing up for the every man.
1:00:43
No, you're not.
1:00:46
The new minimum wage should be zero.
1:00:49
The minimum wage should always be zero.
1:00:52
The idea that there's an inflated minimum wage,
1:00:55
that there's a $20 minimum wage in fast food in California.
1:00:58
What is the price of a Big Mac in California?
1:01:01
It's whatever they say it is.
1:01:02
It's not the same as what it is in Las Vegas
1:01:05
where they don't have a $20 minimum wage
1:01:08
and they don't have state income taxes
1:01:09
and they don't have those things
1:01:11
so they can price things differently.
1:01:13
You'd probably be happy that there's dynamic pricing
1:01:16
or else everybody's gonna have to pay California prices.
1:01:22
You can get replaced by robots, so act accordingly.
1:01:27
You better be mindful of this
1:01:29
and get to know a rancher, right?
1:01:32
For food, find some food from farmer's markets
1:01:35
and people that, you know, like,
1:01:37
this is not the time to be screwing around.
1:01:40
Things are changing, pricing's changing,
1:01:43
pricing of everything, food is changing.
1:01:45
It's only gonna get more expensive.
1:01:46
The fertilizer is not getting where it needs to go.
1:01:52
The ships are not getting where they need to go.
1:01:55
Everything takes more time.
1:01:57
Oil is more expensive.
1:01:58
Gas is more expensive.
1:01:59
It's all gonna go up, right?
1:02:01
So we need to be mindful of that.
1:02:04
Now, I think understanding that prices
1:02:07
will fluctuate is one thing,
1:02:09
but then that, you know, being aware
1:02:12
of what these corporations are doing behind the scenes
1:02:14
in making them fluctuate, that is something else.
1:02:16
That's where the fraud gets in, man.
1:02:19
So, you know, get yourself, get yourself situated,
1:02:22
get yourself some food, get yourself some storable food,
1:02:24
get yourself, get your cash out of the banks,
1:02:27
get yourself sorted out, man.
1:02:29
Some parts of the world, you know,
1:02:31
haggling the price isn't just normal.
1:02:33
It's expected, right?
1:02:35
Everything's written in pencil.
1:02:36
So when the gringo tax needs to be added,
1:02:40
you know, I just say I'm just browsing.
1:02:43
If you like this episode,
1:02:45
you take the additional step right this second
1:02:48
of sharing it with your friends.
1:02:49
You wanna connect with me, macroaggressions.io
1:02:51
is the way to do that.
1:02:52
Thanks, everybody.
1:02:53
Talk to you again soon.