Factually! with Adam Conover - How Corporations Jack Up Prices with Lindsay Owens

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Life in America is becoming less and less affordable. Politicians tend to blame it on inflation and supply chain issues, but what if corporations are just...price gouging because they can? Today I'm joined by economic sociologist Lindsay Owens to discuss why price gouging is easier and more prevalent than ever, and what we can do about it.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Kahnover. Thank you so much for joining me again as I talk to an incredible thinker and get all of the delicious ideas out of their heads and into ours. Life in America is becoming less affordable all the time. The rich consume more and more, and the rest of us are left to scrape whatever meat we can

from the economy's desiccated carcass. Now, the political class calls this the affordability crisis, and they often pin it on things like inflation or supply chain issues or lack of supply, like in housing. And that is true to an extent. But here's a thought, what if the people who make and sell all the goods we buy are simply jacking up the price just because they can?

What if, instead of an affordability crisis, we're living in an era of endemic and perpetual price gouging? Now, why would these companies do this? Well, of course, they'd like to make more money, and they don't give a shit about you. And it's easier to do that than ever, because not only is the federal government to sleep at the wheel on consumer issues or reigning in corporate America, we also live in an era

of pervasive mass surveillance. And that means companies are empowered to find new and exciting ways to fuck you over by tracking your movements and figuring out exactly how much they can screw you. It's not just your rent. It's not just your health care. It's your car insurance. Your Instacart order, your everything. Price gouging is that one weird trick ruining our economy and draining your bank account. So how pervasive is it? How can we? We recognize it when we see it, and most importantly, what we can do about it. Well, today on the show, we have an absolutely incredible guest here to talk about it. I want to remind you if you want to support the show and every single one of the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.

com. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free, and you can also join our online community. We've got a bonus podcast episodes you can only get by subscribing on Patreon. And what I'm most excited about is we are doing a mind-blowing world expansion. non-fiction book club where every couple months we read a new work of incredible nonfiction and me and my wonderfully smart producer sam rodman get together to discuss it with all of you live over the internet and then we release it as a podcast episode our first book we are reading is end times fascism and the fight for a living world by naomi klein and astra taylor if you want

to read that with us and discuss the book and learn some new things learn how to fight back against, you know, the fascists who are destroying America. And, you know, join us to read some other amazing books in the future. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And quick reminder, my new stand-up special, big divorce energy drops right on my YouTube channel on October 23rd. I'm so proud of this special. It's unlike anything I've done before, incredibly personal, means a lot to me.

Hope you'll check it out, October 23rd. Here today to discuss price gouging and the scourge that it is on the economy, we have one of the foremost experts on the subject. Her name is Lindsay Owens. She's a PhD. She's the president of the Groundwork Collaborative and the author of Gouge, the end of a fair price

and what that means for your wallet. Please welcome Lindsay Owens. Lindsay, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Let's get into it. How are companies screwing us over? This is one of my favorite topics to get angry about. How are they doing it and how bad is this?

Yeah, so I wrote a book about big text reinvention of the rip-off. Companies have been ripping us off forever. They've been nickel and diming us. They've been overcharging us. They've been pulling the wool over our eyes. But they're getting better and better at it.

And that's because technology is really supercharging their ability to extract more of our hard-earned money. So in the book, I cover, you know, dozens of different techniques. The way technology has reduced the coordination costs for price fixing and collusion. In the old days, if you wanted to collude, you needed to find all of your competitors. You needed to call a meeting, right?

Get in a room and hatch a plan to price fix, right? What are we going to charge? Are we all on board, lock arms, you know, no defectors, right? Go. That's pretty difficult to do. It requires coordination. you probably can only do it in industries where there are a few major players. Today, there's an algorithm for that. And across really diffuse industries like real estate, landlords can log on to an app by a company called Real Page and start potentially coordinating on rent prices and rent increases. There is a recent class action in California where a company called

calibrate, a tech company, has helped gas stations, more than 1,300 gas stations, coalesce around higher prices. The class action lawsuit alleges that it could be as much as 30 cents a gallon, that gas prices are up as a result of this price-fixing algorithm. So I really cover the kind of new frontier, the kind of vanguard of... price gouging, price fixing. Also, just the ways that pricing is getting more opaque, more manipulative, more volatile, and unpredictable. I talk a lot about new forms of dynamic pricing, right? Like, you've experienced dynamic pricing, right?

Like airfares have been priced dynamically for decades. Sure. But now, like, there's dynamic pricing in the grocery store because you have electronic shelf labels. And, you know, the company can set up an algorithm in HQ. that says, hey, it's hot outside. Let's push higher prices for ice cream to the following seven retailers, right? So we're starting to see dynamic pricing in a whole host of arenas where we're not really managing scarce resources, right? We're not auctioning off the last ticket to a concert or the last seat on a plane. We're just kind of using the technology to overcharge you because we can, right? That's

what's happening here. So lots of different examples in the book of companies supercharging with technology, age-old impulses to charge you as much as they possibly can get away with for every item you purchase. So how do we draw the line between, you know, a legitimate price increase in price gouging? Because certainly these companies would say, hey, you know, our costs are going up the market, blah, blah, blah, scarce resources. And, you know, there's plenty of examples of arenas where, you know, the company says it's fine and the public hates it like surge pricing for Uber. The public hates, and, you know, plenty of people have complained about, plenty of organizations

have complained about, but Uber would say, well, this is, we're doing supply and demand very, very quickly, right? And we're trying to get more people to pick you up in that area. And, you know, there's some intuitive logic to that. I think we all hate high airline prices, but we do understand that, like, there's some need to manage, you know, the demand versus the capacity versus whatever else. So, yeah, is there some clear-cut definition you have of what is a gouge versus a legitimate increase?

Yeah, it's a great question. So, like, there's a legal definition of price gouging. And typically the legal definition involves overcharging you during an emergency. So the first price gouging law in the United States. was after the, you know, Gulf oil crisis in New York when, you know, companies were overcharging for oil and gas. And, you know, the legislators in New York said, look, you know, we really shouldn't have companies exploiting New Yorkers during a crisis. We're going to ban what they termed unconscionably excessive price increases. And most states in the country now have

laws like that. Many of them actually got on the books after 9-11, others after Katrina and major national disasters, natural disasters, and actually a huge number were updated during the pandemic to prevent, you know, pandemic price gouging on things like PPE and masks and, you know, toilet paper and things like that. But I think, you know, these days companies don't really need an extreme weather event or a pandemic to put you in a position where they can overcharge you. And I think most Americans

have a sense of when they're being gouged. It's sort of the duck test, right? You know it when you see it. If it quacks like a dog, if it looks like a duck, right? It's a duck. Like you sort of know when someone's got you over a barrel and you're being ripped off.

And I think, you know, there are a lot of examples in the book of things that I would argue, you know, are gouging. I think overcharging you for, you know, soup during a snowstorm is gouging. I think, you know, setting up a price-fixing cartel to overcharge you for rent is gouging. I think, you know, using tools of surveillance to learn a little bit more about what you're likely to buy and then peek into your wallet and then say, oh, there's a 20 there. Okay, the price is $20, right?

That's the tools of surveillance. I think that's gouging too. So, yeah, I mean, there are definitely a lot of economists who think a lot of this stuff is kosher. But the truth is, it's really hard for us all as consumers to know when price increases that we see are kind of justifiable. right? Like, you know, Trump started a trade war. Prices went up. Am I paying more for this because it costs the retailer more to import it now because they had to pay the tariff? Or there's a supply chain

crisis during the pandemic. Inflation is up. Am I paying more for this item because, you know, the cost of the inputs and labor and all of those things are up and so they need to charge me more to cover their costs? Or are companies using the... those events as cover to go further than they might otherwise. And the story I love to tell is, you know, the chair of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, a guy named Tom Barkin, after Liberation Day and the trade war started, he convened a small group of business leaders and CEOs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And he says, you know, come on, guys, like, are you raising the price because of tariffs?

Or are you raising the price because of his words, tariff noise, right? The kind of fog of the trade war, if you will. Yeah, because you can raise the price and just say, oh, geez, tariff supply chain. Wow, it's got to be five bucks where really your cost pushed you to four bucks. But I can add a little more on because everyone's going to have to swallow it. And they'll blame someone other than you, right? They'll blame Trump or the war. Yeah.

Yeah. You blame the economy rather than the company who's reaching further into your wallet. And that's a great place for a company to be. You know, I always say you need like means, motive, an opportunity to commit the perfect crime. And those types of events, trade wars, pandemics, you know, the Iran war and its impacts on oil, which filters through to all sorts of prices. All of that, I think, gives companies additional coverage. to both raise prices because they need to, but also to go further than they need to as well. The first example I remember hearing of this was during the 2024 election and there was so much focus on the price of eggs. I believe that there was something specifically weird happening in the egg market at the time now, but do you remember what it was? Yeah. So there has been a, there have been a couple of different price fixing allegations. Yeah.

For the big egg manufacturers, calamine eggs being one of the largest. And what these different cases have alleged is that calamine has artificially throttled the supply of eggs to keep prices high at particular times, including just like the most gruesome way you would throttle the egg supply, culling the flock, right? Wow. Yeah. And I think the manufacturing of artificial scarcity is one way companies keep prices high. And it's hard for us to know when a product is truly scarce, in part because advertising, you know, often makes things feel scarce, right? So this idea that you log on to shop online and you're about to pick a hotel room and it's like

48 people like you are looking at this room right now, like you better get it, right? Because if you don't buy it now at this high price, like it might be. gone or there's only two of these left. You know, the New York Attorney General's office uncovered a case where a company had built into their algorithm in plus one. So let's say you were looking for two hotel rooms, it would always say there's only three left. If you were looking for three hotel rooms, it would say there were four left. Right. So that was just like, that's what the data shipped you, right? So I think, you know, whether you're, whether you're. killing chickens or, you know, creating an algorithm that makes it seem like something is in scarce supply when it's not.

These are always that companies, I think, artificially manufacture scarcity to push up prices. And what's striking to me about that was in the case of eggs, this was used like specifically against Joe Biden, right, or against the United States government, that like the price of eggs is, and by the way, I'm not trying to like back up Joe Biden here. Because currently, you know, the Democrats are leveling the same charge against Trump, right? Prices are going up. This is the fault of the politicians, the federal government, you know. And there were some small voices at the time saying, hey, actually, it's the egg makers, it's the egg manufacturer, whatever, you know, the egg companies. Yeah, big ag.

Why aren't we going to them first? And where do you think that urge comes from? because as you say, like, the companies will justify this. There are economists who say it's justified. I'm sure there's plenty of, you know, free market capitalists saying, hey, it's just what the market will bear. Like, if people can pay it, then that's the fair price. But we also have some, we know we have some broad cultural urge against prices going up

because now we're all saying, hey, everything's too expensive in a general way. Everybody feels everything is too expensive. Something must be done. And yet we are, we tend to look towards the government and say, it's their fault rather than looking at corporate America and saying, hey, we're being systemically cheated. Do you have a sense of why that is? I mean, that is exactly why I wrote this book. I was really frustrated with the conversation around inflation in this country when it took off.

The textbook economics conversation, you know, prices are falling from the sky, right? Like, this is just supply and demand. This is too much money chasing too few goods. Americans have way too much pandemic savings. They're running around with money burning a hole in their pocket. And that's what's causing inflation. We've got to dial up the interest rates at the Federal Reserve, tamped down on people's well-being, and that'll cure all that ails us. And look, there is some truth to that.

And also, at the same time, when most Americans, you know, started shocked. during a period of high inflation and they picked up a box of Cheerios that was $7 and it used to be $5. You know, they weren't thinking, oh, like the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan and all of the money that was spent is why these Cheerios are expensive. They were thinking maybe General Mills had something to do with that, right, with setting the price. And I think once I started digging in to the earnings calls, these are the calls that companies have with their investors, I learned a lot about how companies were weathering and feeling about inflation. And mostly what they were saying is they are passing along all of their rising costs because

of inflation. Their costs are going up to the cost of the things that they have to buy to make their widgets. That's more expensive. The cost of transporting their widgets, that's more expensive. All of that was true. But they were saying, look, we're passing those rising costs along and we're going for more. And also, we feel like we have... a lot of pricing power in this moment. Our pricing team is doing a really good job, calibrating exactly how much we can get away with charging. And all of that really set the stage for my interest in digging into this further and really understanding whether something has changed about how pricing works in the American economy. And what I found is that, you know, how pricing works

has really changed. It used to be pretty rudimentary. Like, figure out what the price is, put a sticker on it, move on to the next item. And now it's a highly engineered science. Companies hire teams of pricing advisors, pricing consultants. They acquire AI pricing companies that give them new tools for overcharging us. And so that sort of backdrop that you just painted is exactly where I started. You know, there's what the textbooks say, and then there's what we all can observe with our own eyes and listen to with our own ears, right? And we were getting a lot of information about how companies viewed inflation and the opportunity that inflation provided for them. You know, for me, summer completely upends my meal routines and my eating habits.

It ends up being my busiest season, and I find myself running out of time for basic tasks like shopping and meal planning. But, you know, recently, I've been trying to eat a high protein diet, and I've actually been able to keep up with it. thanks to Hungry Root. See, think of Hungry Root as a personal shopper and a meal planner rolled into one with over 50,000 chef-crafted recipes and over 1,000 grocery items, the variety never gets old.

Many recipes are ready in just 15 minutes and there's always something new to try. And you don't have to go seek out the new stuff. Hunger Root keeps getting more personalized by learning your tastes and dietary needs over time. It knows what you actually want and it keeps refining what you get. At this point, I genuinely don't think about grocery shop

or mute planning anymore. It just happens. And that is huge for me as I'm running around all summer. Whether I'm out all day for work or on a run, I can come home and know that there is something to whip up that will be quick, delicious, and personalized for me and my diet. Plus, in my last box, HungryRoot sent me some black bean brownie batter,

say that five times fast, and I am absolutely hooked. And you are gonna love Hungry Rood as much as I do. For a limited time, you can get 40% off your first order, plus get a free item in every box for life, life, go to hunger root.com slash factually and use promo code factually. That's hunger root.com slash factually, code factually to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. You know, I was lucky enough to never need braces as a kid, but as I've gotten older, I started noticing my teeth getting totally out of alignment. And, you know, adult braces are super

expensive, but I really can't afford any more mean comments about my teeth in the YouTube comments. You know what I mean? That's why I was super expensive. when Smile Set reached out to sponsor the show. Their clear nighttime-only aligners literally straighten my teeth in my sleep so I can show up here with a more confident smile and the haters can stick to their usual material, like talking about my hair or how unfunny I am.

All of it's valid, but they can't hit my teeth anymore, okay? And it all starts with an at-home impression kit. Then a licensed doctor reviews your case and builds your custom treatment plan with your aligners shipped straight to you. Progress is monitored remotely via the SmileSet app, and you can check in with a real dental professional whenever you want. SmileSet even offers nighttime-only aligners

so you can straighten your teeth while you sleep. And, you know, I've been wanting to get straightened teeth for years, and I'm finally doing something about it. I took my at-home impressions. I sent off my kit, and I've been monitoring my progress on the app, and I'm amazed at the results I'm already getting. Over 2 million smiles have been fixed with this technology. They have a 30-day money-back guarantee,

and monthly payments started just $89. Listeners of our show get an additional 35% discount when they go to smileset.com slash factually. With this discount, you can get the smile of your dreams for under $1,200 bucks. Go to smileset.com slash factually to get started, smileset.com slash factually. Well, and you make the point well that, you know,

what these companies are is they are organizations that are engineered to get the most that they can get away with. Like what else is a corporation under capitalism than an organization whose entire job is to get away with extracting as much money as possible. You know, it's a virus that's trying to reproduce itself. This is, it's sort of Elan Vital, right? This is why it lives. This is what it is optimized for. So of course, it does that. So why should we expect anything different? It doesn't even have to be evil. It's just like, hey, they're using the tools that are available to try to extract as much money from the customer as

possible. I do think the textbooks would say, though, to give you another counterpoint, and I don't know that I agree with this, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about it, that, you know, in a capitalist system, competition should take care of this, right? That like, even though these companies are going to extract as much as possible, well, if another company can sell more by pricing a penny less, then, you know, that'll create a race to the floor price that is the lease that people can pay and, you know, that there's simultaneously going to be a downward pull that'll produce some sort of equilibrium. What would you have to say to that argument? Well, look, you're exactly right. And markets with more competition, consumers are going to do better on prices. And the fact that this is

happening, in some ways, predicate to this is less competition in the American economy. And the last generation, three quarters of industries have gotten more concentrated, more consolidated. Obviously, it is very hard to overcharge you. Like, if I'm a retailer and you come into my store, Adam, and I'm overcharging you and you can walk across the street and get a better deal, I'm in trouble, right? You know, competitive markets, the mechanism underlying pricing competition is the budget shopper, right? I mean, the budget shopper is really important in the American economy, right? They're the people who go to one store, say, hmm, like, I think I can get a better deal, go to the next store, find a better deal. Enough people go to store number two.

Store number one starts to wonder, huh, like, nobody's in the store today. That seems odd. Maybe my prices are too high, lowers their prices, right? But there are a whole host of ways in which this is breaking down. You know, as I mentioned, obviously, like price fixing and coordination being easier undermines competitive markets. It's a way of circumventing that competition. Manufacturing scarcity by culling the flock is a way of circumventing competitive markets. Personalized pricing. Learning more about every single individual consumer and then identifying which ones are the budget shoppers, picking them off and offering them a discount and overcharging the rest of us is a way that companies can use pricing techniques to circumvent that competition.

So I think there are a whole host of ways in which competitive markets are breaking down. Prices are also less transparent and more volatile, which makes it much harder to comparison shop. I mean, if you go on TikTok right now, there are tons of women filming videos in Walmart of the clothing section in which Walmart isn't even displaying prices anymore in that section. that completely eradicates the ability to use comparison shopping to find a better deal. You know, it's hard to comparison shop if you're walking up and on the aisle and the price changes between the time you are at the north side of the aisle and the time you get to the south side of the aisle. You know, Walmart, you know, builds all sorts of new pricing technologies and we have done a very thorough study of their patents. And we recently came across a patent of theirs that they applied for and were granted.

for smart carts, right? This is the shopping cart that is kind of a self-checkout, right? So you don't have to go to the checkout line. You can scan the items as you're shopping. And, you know, we have no idea if they're using this in the store, but they built the technology and bothered to file a patent with the USPTO for a technology that allows them, if you say, and this is their example in the patent,

buy some tuna. to increase the price of mayonnaise because that's where you're going next, right? You're probably making a tuna salad or you buy peanut butter. You can increase the price of jelly, things like that. So, you know, it's hard to argue that these are the function of a really healthy, competitive economy, right? Where consumers are getting a good deal. Like, you're in the store already. You're probably going to get the jelly there rather than go across the street for the jelly. You've already got the peanut butter, you're halfway to the promise land, right? So they know they can charge you more. And as companies build these new technologies, pricing is just getting much murkier, more

manipulative, more opaque for consumers. It's very frustrating and obviously hard, you know, when you're on a budget to, you know, to deal with unpredictability, right? Like you, how do you know if you're going to make ends meet if the price of everything keeps changing? But it also does undermine, I think, healthy, transparent competition in markets, which is important for capitalism to function. Just to say on competition for a second, because I want to get into surveillance and dynamic pricing, but just talking about the monopolization of industries, you know, there's so many, like, places for a monopoly to sort of hide in the supply chain, right? Like, sure, there's multiple grocery stores and there's multiple brands of chicken or eggs,

and there might be, you know, even multiple farmers that are, you know, around the country that are growing those things. But if there's only one processing company, right, that like acquires the chicken and then sells it to all the grocery stores, then that one company or maybe small number of companies has the ability to set prices, right? Or to take another example, an online retailer like Amazon is, you know, has a whole marketplace where they're, forcing all of these companies to compete with each other and sort of a raise to the bottom. But then Amazon is in control of the point of sale and can do what they want there. If they feel like jacking up the price at some point, they can't. They can. That is one of the ways that monopolization really affects prices, right?

Absolutely. I mean, you can find monopolies all up and down the supply chain. And you're right. you know, middlemen and processors having monopolies is a big part of what puts upward pressure on prices. This was another thing that Biden administration tried to take on was, you know, monopolies in meat processing, which was, in their view, artificially increasing the price of beef and pork and a whole host of meat products because of that sort of middleman that was able to really exert a squeeze on, you know, on everyone down. stream in that supply chain.

Yeah. And the person who was leaving the charge on this, I believe, was Lena Khan. Am I right about that? Yeah, absolutely. And she's now, I find you really fascinating. She's been on this show a couple times. And, you know, she's now in, like, Zoranamadani's administration. And I have seen her become more popular among the public over the past couple years.

Like, when, if you look at comments on a video of her speaking now, people are like, ah, queen, you know, like, blah, blah. And part of it's because she's such a walk. right? She's like an antitrust, like, lawyer. But because what she is always talking about is, like, is the prices people pay, is like junk fees and this sort of thing. Like, it's a really great example of, like, the public actually realizing there's a problem and feeling positively about, like, you know, one of the few people who's, like, leading the charge for the solution. I find that to be fascinating and encouraging. I don't know if you do. I absolutely do. I mean,

her work has been pioneering and really impactful and effective. You know, her Federal Trade Commission investigated a whole host of the practices that I discussed in the book. She also was able to move forward, you know, the first regulation requiring what's called all-in pricing. So if you've ever, you know, picked an Airbnb or a VRBO and, you know, you thought the price looked good and then you got to the point at which you were going to pay for it and you're like, whoa, there's like $500 on top of my week's day. Where did that come from? Well, those were the

cleaning fees and the service fees and the convenience fees and the junk fees and all of that. And that new rulemaking that her administration pushed through requires them to show you the full price up front. So you can compare apples to apples, oranges to oranges. That is also, it's in, you know, but also in events. So now you have to see the full price of a ticket master ticket, inclusive of all of the various fees like the, you know, printing fee for the QR code, right? But I think what, you know, people are resonating with in part is Lina's diagnosis of

what ails the economy is the American diagnosis of what ails the economy. If you ask Americans, you know, how to solve. the cost of living crisis, they think that you have to go after the companies that are price gouging and overcharging. And so they look upstream and so does she. And that's what's funny about, you know, even the Democrats now are running more on affordability. And yet you don't see them going quite so hard against the companies themselves. I was saying like, hey, I'm going to take on these bad actors in the economy that are hurting you. Like it's like they're getting a little bit closer talking about, hey, the rent is too damn high type language, great.

But we haven't quite taken the step of saying, and it's their fault. And I'm going to pass a law to stop them from doing that to you. I mean, why do you think that is? Yeah, I mean, I worked in the Senate in the House for a long time. And, you know, I run a think tank in D.C. We spend a lot of time talking to those guys. And, you know, it is really hard for some of them to do. I mean, they do a lot of like, sort of circling around the issue without really pinpointing it.

I mean, my sort of favorite example of this is there are a lot of senators who always use the phrase special interests. The special interests. It's like, you know, so allergic to naming any specific company in any context that is harming the American people, right? They're not greedy pharmacy eos. They're special interests, right? Or the crooks. Like, well, who are the crooks, right? you know, who's overcharging you, right?

You don't say to the grocery store going like, oh, those special interests are ripping me off. That's not language that anybody but a politician uses, right? No, absolutely not. But look, I think, you know, politicians who have the right diagnosis of what ails the economy will have a competitive advantage because the American people aren't confused. The other thing I'll say is there's an interesting body of

research that shows that left-leaning parties have hemorrhaged working-class voters, not just in the U.S., but, you know, across a whole host of countries. And one of the things that you can pinpoint is left-leaning parties' interest in things like tax credits to solve problems. Like, we're going to let the health care companies in this country, like, treat this country like it is their playground. They are going to do whatever the hell they want. And then, like, once a year at the end of the year, we'll pass a tax bill that gives you a little tax credit to kind of make it a little easier for you to pay for your ridiculous premiums and your ridiculous drug prices, right?

That shift away from like muscularly intervening in the market on the front end and saying, no, the American economy is not your fucking playground. And instead, like, we'll let them do what they want and then we'll hand you a subsidy on the back end. is one of the reasons researchers identify that left-leaning parties have hemorrhaged the working class. The working class is more interested in an economy with fair rules on the front end and taming the top, taming corporations who are gouging you, right? You know, taming AI companies who are, you know, partnering with the major retailers so that if you use Sparky, Walmart's chatbot to shop, your basket total is 35% higher than people. who don't use Sparky, right?

Like, going after that is, I think, what the American people want, it is their diagnosis of what ails us, and they're sick of the kind of, you know, little, like, too little too late, you know, pencil shavings on the back end. Yeah, this is the stuff that Trump is good at, right? That just on the campaign trail, you know, being president low prices, I'm going to, you know, your groceries are too expensive. Oh, the groceries, right? Oh, remember the best word groceries. Guys never bought groceries in his life. And when he became president, he didn't do a single fucking thing to address any issue. But he knew to talk about like people's daily experiences of the prices.

And then when he wants to give people money, he sends up a check with their name on it, right? But, sorry, sends them a check with his name on it. Excuse me. And, you know, that makes a little. a lot more sense than a tax refund. Because a tax refund is like, okay, if someone is mad about a high price, they're going to be mad when the price is high. When you give them a tax refund later or give them a discount on their taxes, then they're just a little less mad at the government. Like that's not a moment where they're thinking about prices. That's a moment where they're like mad at the government that they have to pay taxes at all, right? Yep. And so you give a little

discount, they're like, no, I'm a little less mad at you, I guess. But they're not, you're not solving their other problem. You know, like, if you're like, oh, I'm paying too much at the pump. That's when if you're the politician, you want to swoop in and say it, I'm going to lower your price and I did it. And now the price is lower. And you're like, oh, I'm happy. Great. And you're the reason I'm

happy. And then, you know, the tax, like these are, emotionally, it makes no sense to do it that way because they're, they're not going to connect the thing you're doing to the problem that they have. They're going to connect it to the problem they have with you. Yes.

neither party, and this is another thing political scientists have studied extensively, you know, neither party gets real credit for tax cuts and tax subsidies. You know, people may not notice them at all. If they do notice them, they absorb them and move on, right? So it's not a salient way of, you know, if you're just doing it for pandering, it would be a bad idea. But it's also just not a salient way of intervening in people's lives in ways that they're going to feel and appreciate and understand. And, you know, I think what Americans are looking for instead is, you know, governments who, A, will enforce the laws on the book, a lot of what I outline in my book is already illegal. Like, price fixing is illegal, whether you're, you know, in a smoke-filled

room, which I talk about, you know, this great example in the book of the Phoebus Cartel, which is when all of the major international light bulb manufacturers got together and, in 1924 in Geneva, Switzerland in December, and said, hey, guys, the light bulb is too good. It is burning too long. We cannot sell very many of them. We need to degrade the quality of this product. And they did. They all locked arms and agreed upon a shorter burn time for light bulbs. They enforced it. Is this real? This really happened? Yeah, the Phoebus cartel. You hear stories about planned obsolescence and they're often, the simple version is often like, not that true, right? It's like, the example I use is, like, Apple doesn't purposely slow down

your iPhone. They have just built a cadence that has naturally made you want to get an iPhone every couple years, right? Like, it's sort of done, usually in a more subtle way. And I've heard this light bulb story before. And I've always been a little bit skeptical as a result, as a story sounds a little bit too good to be true. Yeah. But it is literally true that they, that they agreed to re-engineer the light bulb to last, last long. They did. There, there is a memorandum that was signed by all of the major electric company CEOs who attended the Geneva, Switzerland, confab. There are emails in an archive in Germany that even detail, you know, one of the CEOs sort of penned a letter to his fellow CEOs about a concern he had around, you know, somebody who was circumventing the cartel agreement. You know, this you will understand.

It's quite concerning. They even had a lab to verify that everyone had indeed degraded the light bulb quality. It is literally lab. You can see pictures of it. It's a guy screwing in all of these light bulbs. And they're just sort of like all of these light bulbs in a, you know, on a, I don't even know how to describe it. Just shelves, basically. Shelves was screwed in light bulbs.

And then they, you know, noted when they screwing. it in and then they noted when it burned out to make sure that nobody was cheating the system. In Livermore, California today, there's a light bulb that's been burning for over 100 years. Wow. There's a camera. You can even go online and look at the light bulb can and see what it's doing. But, you know, there are those forms and there are modern forms of algorithmic price fixing, and that's already illegal. And there, the issue is enforcement. And there again, corporate power in this country makes enforcement difficult, right? There are a lot of enforcement officials in

this country who turn a blind eye to corporate malfeasance, who are maybe even in bed with some of the, you know, companies, they're their donors, right? So they aren't going to go after them. But also companies know that they can skirt regulation, that they're only going to get a slap on the wrist, or a fine. They view those fines as the cost of doing business. They think that they can, can, you know, lawyer they were out of these things or at least delay them. You know, in California, this year, the Attorney General uncovered a price fixing scandal, an old-fashioned price-fixing scandal where Amazon and Walmart and some major retailers like Levi's were sending each other emails being like, hey, I noticed that your price is getting a little

low. Like, let's fix that. Wow. Right. Wow. Okay. That's how, that's why. that would break down the competition for low prices if the largest retailers that control the vast majority of the retail market are just literally emailing each other going, hey, your prices are a little too high.

By the way, these people need Stringer Bell to come around and say, like, are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? Like, they're making it a little too easy. But as you say, you know, the Attorney General of California has been doing good work in that area. but, you know, it's not as directly related to prices, but, you know, the Paramount Warner Brothers merger is flatly illegal, and the companies are trying to use every tool in the book to get away with it anyway, exerting legal pressure, exerting political pressure, making threats that they're going to leave.

And so now you've got all these people say, let's just let them commit the crime. Let's just let them do the thing that's not legal. And the Attorney General's going like, no, I think I should fucking enforce the law. It's like weirdly hard for us to enforce the law against corporations, whereas it's pretty easy to enforce it against, you know, people drinking alcohol in public, right? Just trying to just trying to relax at the end of the day on a steep. Those people don't seem to have as much trouble getting thrown in jail. The emails are great because they're smoking

guns, right? And, you know, there have been other examples like the tech CEOs, you know, Apple was emailing the other tech CEOs, you know, years ago. This was uncovered, you know, basically. doing little non-compete deals, making sure they weren't hiring each other's engineers, because if their engineers could, you know, vote with their feed, they could command a larger salary. Like, oh, I'm going to leave Google and go to Apple and try to get a pay raise. And they were like, look, we can keep all of the salaries lower if we just agree not to poach each other's staff, right? And, you know, and there was an email chain that said as much, and that's how this was uncovered. But so much of, you know, what I cover in the book, these pricing

tricks are really hard to uncover. Even for teams of researchers and chief economists like I have at my organization, but also for trained staff at federal agencies or attorneys general offices. I mean, we had a huge investigation that we broke last year where we ran an experiment with some partner organizations to uncover the experiment that Instacart was running on millions of Americans while they shopped for groceries, right? Charging us different prices for the exact same item. But uncovering that kind of thing is really hard to do, right? It requires running experiments, comparing prices at, you know, at different times on different devices across different geographies, controlling for a whole host of factors that could be contributing to price increases. So,

you know, the sophistication with which these companies are executing, you know, modern forms of pricing, you know, it's a highly engineered science. Like, it is, it is physicists and engineers and AI companies who are behind a lot of this, and they're pretty good at making sure you don't see it, because when consumers see this kind of thing, they get pretty pissed off, and it can cause problems for the company, PR problems, and then they have to back off these technologies. And so obfuscation is really key to the plan, and it's hard for policy. and regulators to C2 sometimes. Well, and to your point, just the fact that you have to do that amount of research to

figure out what the prices are, I mean, the fact that there's no law anywhere, you know, we have laws that say you have to put the ingredients in your food on the back of the package, right? But there's no law anywhere that says, like, you need to disclose in some readable form what your prices are so that they can be analyzed. The only way for you to figure out the prices is to like what travel around the country, create accounts, like try to order stuff, start making lists of the prices. I've also seen groups trying to do the same thing with Uber, for example,

where they'll like run randomized trials. We'll order this many Uber rides and then we'll try to get the drivers on board in order to figure out what the relationship is between the price of the ride and what the driver is paid. And like the fact that just that basic relationship, right, what is the margin that Uber takes versus what they pay the driver, you cannot, you have to like literally conduct a controlled study to find that out. And then they might change tomorrow and you have no way of knowing.

Like that is, that seems bad for the economy generally. It seems like there should be some level of transparency about these basic. basic facts, right? Absolutely. I mean, look, Uber, you know, the airlines, I think, are, you know, the best example of an early adopter of dynamic pricing, right? Carter deregulates the airlines. All of a sudden, you know, the government doesn't set airfares.

The CEOs have to figure out how to price airfares. That's like a new part of their job, right? And they build revenue management systems and the early dynamic pricing systems that we see today. But I think Uber really mainstreamed and popularized dynamic pricing when they introduced surge pricing in 2011. And by the way, about a couple of months after Uber announced search pricing, which was in Halloween weekend is when they rolled it out in 2011, that it was the same year that Ticketmaster began experimenting with dynamic pricing on event tickets. I mean, I remember a day where event tickets were sold first come first serve. I stood in line to get concert tickets or, you know, dialed repeatedly on my phone, hitting, you know, redial, redial, redial to get concert tickets. And if I got the last ticket, I was really lucky, but they didn't auction off the last ticket, right?

They weren't, okay, who's willing to pay the most for the last seat in the house, right? But Uber, I think, really mainstreamed and popularized it. And, you know, you mentioned this, but they made it seem really scientific and really important to the economy, you know, taxi fare. are so old and lame, we have a better system, we're disrupting it, we're going to make sure that on a rainy day, we get more drivers out by charging more, right? That's how they're managing supply and demand, right? If there are more people who want a ride, we're going to pay more to the drivers, that's going to bring more drivers online, that's going to get people home, right? But we never got under the hood of the algorithm. We never knew exactly how it worked. And we didn't know

you know, how much we were paying in each scenario more than we might have paid in another scenario. And similarly, the drivers increasingly have very little sense of, you know, why their take rate, Uber's take rate, the piece of the ride that goes to Uber instead of the driver is varying from person to person. And I think you have to assume, and it is fair to assume that the same technologies that companies are building to figure out how much we're willing to pay for every item in our cart and peek into our wallet and get better at figuring out how much they can charge us can be flipped in reverse and used to figure out how little they can pay us, right?

Yeah. And it also strikes me how much this can become normalized, right? Like, again, I sort of put earlier, and maybe a little bit naively, because I'd like to ask you about airlines, the idea that I understand dynamic pricing for airlines. Like, it makes some amount of sense to me. But maybe I've just come to accept it. You mentioned Uber, and I just took an Uber the other day, and I remember thinking, oh, this is kind of a lot, but it didn't say surge pricing. It just kind of said prices are higher than normal, right? And now that I think of it, I no longer, like, you know, whatever, seven or eight years ago, you'd open Uber, and it would say surge price,

you'd be like, oh, fuck, there's a surge on. Right. More expensive. Now I've just sort of accepted, I open Uber, and it just kind of gives me a price, and sometimes it's a lot, and sometimes it's a little, and who knows, and that's just what it does. And it's like, they just have some kind of, in the same way, I don't know why YouTube recommends the videos it recommends me. There's some loose relationship between what I watch or what I've recommended.

So there's some loose relationship. between, oh, it's Halloween and people are going to parties, and so I guess it's more whatever, but we've just sort of accepted, there's like a slippery slope, right? And I can imagine, like right now I don't, I would feel very violated if the grocery store works that way, but I could imagine them slippery sloping down the hill. It is coming for us. I mean, I, you know, in the course of doing research for my book, I learned that, Children's museums are now pricing admissions dynamically. You know, the basic idea is like a toddler mom like me who's desperate for a place for a kid to run around on a cold day or a rainy day is a soft mark for a premium admissions ticket, right?

Zoos are pricing dynamically. One of my favorite stories is a couple years ago, the Las Vegas Review Journal sent their interns around to all of the casino sundry stores like Caesar's Palace and the Belagio and all these places and just said like, you know, mark how much stuff costs. And then go back again later in the day, mark how much stuff costs, go back on Tuesday, go back on Wednesday. They published all these graphs. And what you learned is that the casinos are now using dynamic pricing in the sundry stores. So, you know, prices are spinning on the slots. Prices are spinning in the sundry stores. And the idea was charging more for sunscreen on a hot day, charging more for monster energy drinks on a Friday night, right? And of course, dynamic pricing into casino is, you know, particularly beneficial for

casino operators because it's impossible to get out of a casino. Like you're not, you're captive, right? You're not like winding your way through how many ever acres, Caesar's palaces, like getting across the strip to a CVS and a hundred degree heat to go save a dollar on sunscreen, right? They've got you where they want you. They've always been able to charge more because you're effectively in captivity. But now they're going even further. They're charging even more are using dynamic pricing. So really creeping into a whole host of areas of the economy it didn't used to be in.

And I think you're right. People are getting used to it. That being said, I do think, you know, we're starting to learn where the lines are in part because of public backlash. So, you know, when we see something that goes too far and we tweet about it or take to TikTok and do a video, like, you know, we've had a number of examples.

examples over recent years where companies have been in pretty hot water. The Instacart experiment, my organization was involved in was one example. Two weeks later, the company folded and said they would stop running those experiments on grocery shoppers. Delta was partnering with an Israeli artificial intelligence company called Fetcher. And they started talking to their investors about how great this partnership was going. They originally gave Fetcher 1% of their routes just to kind of mess around with as a pilot program. The AI was doing pretty good at charging more and driving up revenues, three to five percent. They were planning to give the company 20 percent of their roots. They talked about it in the Investor Day. My organization monitors, earnings calls very closely,

you know, worked with journalists to expose this. And what we found is if you looked at fetchers, you know, materials online, they described the sort of early period, where they're learning about the company, learning about your customers, learning about your competitors as the exploration phase. But then once they rooted around in the data and got a good handle on everything

and the agents sort of knew what they were working with, the next phase, according to their own white paper on their website, was the exploitation phase, right? This is when the company started extracting and overcharging. And there was a huge brouhaha about this. And the CEOs of American, and Southwest weighed in, said, we're not going to do this.

And Delta ultimately backed off and said, you know what, we're not going to go, we're not going to go this far. So I do think, you know, we're not completely inured to it. I think we're still, you know, shining sunlight on these practices, I think is an important way that we can, you know, discipline the market in the absence of new laws and better regulators and things like that. And tell me, again, just what the difference between, what was the practice that they backed off of? Because they're currently dynamically priced, right, to some extent. And so what was the step too far specifically? Yeah, in some of Fetcher's materials on their website and in some of the comments that Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta made to investors, they discussed using Fetcher potentially for personalized pricing.

They didn't use the word personalized pricing, but, you know, this would be the idea of like, you know, charging you more if you're getting to a funeral or charging you more if they realize that you're, you know, buying your tickets on a business card and don't care how much they cost because it's on the company die more, things like that. And personalized pricing or surveillance pricing was the bridge too far that they backed off of. I mean, they already, by the way, charge businesses more because a lot of businesses have corporate accounts at American or whatever. And then they just like, you know, And business travelers will, like, be like, I only fly this airline because I use the miles.

And the miles, of course, are funny money that they are able to price, like, really randomly. So, like, some of that already existed. But I think you're right that when you said personalized pricing, that is something that we sort of have a real revulsion against. Like you said, getting to a funeral, it's not even that. It's like the idea that I would pay a different price than a different person, that really seems to, be a violation to us. And you raised, so the worst version of this that you raised is that, but also the idea that they notice I'm buying peanut butter and then on my way to the jelly, they check the price up, right? Now, I understand that, you know, currently every grocery

store asks for your phone number so they can track everything that you buy. I used to try to obfuscate this by like putting in friends' phone numbers. Lately, I've given up and I just like, Whatever. Here's my fucking phone number. You know my credit card number two. Like I, whatever, right? Like, take the data. It's fine. Gelson's. I'm already shopping at Gelson's. I'm agreeing to be ripped off. It's closest to my house and they have the good cheese. So I, you know, whatever. I'm not, I'm lucky to not be broke buying groceries. I'm pretty price insensitive when it comes to my groceries. But, but I shrug and I say whatever. But you raise the idea of electronic. price, like, you know, price labels. And I know that, you know, you go to McDonald's and the prices are electronic. They're on a board now. They don't have printed prices. But I still see, I still have printed prices at the grocery store.

What you're sort of positing here is the idea that they're going to track everything that I buy. They're going to see that I picked up the peanut butter. And then I'm going to walk over. And the price that it says on the shelf is going to like flicker as I get close and like go up a little bit. this does, when I hear this, I am like, that sounds insane. Like, they can't. This can't happen, can it? I mean, how close is this to being a real type of pricing that they would like to do?

I mean, look, the smart cart makes this possible, right? Because you scan the item in your cart rather than having a, so each person logs into their smart card and pricing is, you know, bespoke to you. I think just quickly on the loyalty card thing, because you mentioned like putting in your phone number at the grocery store, you know, loyalty programs are data harvesting bananasas, right? Because you are handing over a huge amount of information about your purchase history and companies can learn a lot about your habits. There was a really interesting expose by a Washington Post reporter who used a California data privacy law to get his loyalty. dossier from Starbucks. Like, give me all the data you have on me, you know, as an individual. Jeffrey Fowler was his name, is his name.

He got his dossier. It's like 60 or 70 pages. Everything he's ever purchased at Starbucks, like even like how often he went to the app, like how many things he tapped on, right? Like very detailed information. But one of the other things he learned is that over time as Starbucks, you know, correctly surmised that he was a caffeine-addled reporter who was always going to buy the coffee,

the discounts disappeared, right? The loyalty perks atrophied and then evaporated, because why would you offer him a good deal, even for being a loyal customer if he's hooked, right? If he's a sure thing. And then also he learned that Starbucks was bundling his data selling it to a whole host of third parties, right? So I think loyalty programs are a place where you see a lot of this as well.

But imagine you log in with your loyalty program to your personalized cart, you go shopping, then you get your cart total. You could easily imagine personalized pricing in a brick and mortar store with that set up. Obviously, easier in e-commerce, but possible in brick and mortar. That is such a great point, especially because they can do the price, not by changing the price on the shelf, because of course we would object to that, but by changing the discount when you ring up.

So especially because a lot of grocery stores, to say on that example, the reason you punch in your number is because you have the membership, the membership gets you the discount. So you're used to, okay, there's the price on the shelf, but then when I get to the register, it's going to say you saved $30 or whatever. And that is a place where,

they could selectively go, oh, you got a discount for being a loyal customer. Now we're going to take it away. A good example of like a place I exploit this, you know, constantly is like a lot of utilities or not quasi-utilities. Like, you know, your cable company, right? A lot of people do this where I got in the habit of doing it where you call them once a year and you say, I'm canceling my cable. And they say, okay, well, we'll give you a discount if you stay, right? Like that kind of thing. if that sort of, you know, and I'm like, okay, I got the discount because I'm special. That is a place where I'm getting a special price, right? And you can imagine them ramping up that type of program and that being something that, you know, doesn't trigger people's negative emotion quite as much. Oh, well, everyone pays the same price, but I got a discount because I'm special and you don't notice when they take the discount away.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if companies are smart, you know, differential discounting is going to be stealthier than differential price hiking. Even if the end result is the same, right? One person pays more, which is what they hoped. But, you know, earlier you mentioned the kind of revulsion that many Americans have to hearing about this. And I think it is deeply held and virtually ubiquitous because I think ultimately price discrimination, which is the technical term for charging you and I different prices for the same item, you know, is a form of discrimination and it feels unfair.

And that's what we're reacting to. We're not reacting to the economics or the technology. We're reacting to something that doesn't feel right. And if you look at the history of pricing, you know, for thousands of years, price discrimination ruled the land. We haggled, right? You went up and got what you wanted and then a negotiation began. And the retailer thought you looked like someone who could pay more.

more, you paid more. If you had some dirt on the retailer, you paid less, right? But it was the Quakers in the U.S. setting who said, you know, this doesn't sit right with me, the Puritans and they're greedy haggling. We're going to do things a little differently. And they decided to institute fixed prices and said, you know, every man is equal under God. Everyone's going to get charged the same amount for a bushel of apples, right? And John Wanamaker, Philadelphia, you know, retailer with Wanamaker's Department store, one of the earliest American department stores, you know, was a religious man himself, was interested in what the Quakers were doing,

but also thought it would be a good idea to have fixed prices and price tags in his department store for business reasons. Like, it's faster than haggling to, like, check out with a fixed price, right? And we got the price tag in the late 1800s, and we've had it for, you know, 150 years. And right now it is under attack.

And the price tag is an important part of transparency and predictability and ensuring competitive markets and honest markets in our economy. But it also is fair that you and I pay the same amount for the same item at the same time, right? That we're not discriminated against or charged different amounts. Disconnects to an idea I've been thinking about a lot, which is that, you know, we all love the handmade or the one-on-one interaction, right? I love talking to, you know, I've got a lot of people I work with who, you know, my handyman comes by and, you know, you can say, hey, can you do this for 50 bucks or whatever, right?

You can have a conversation. That's great. But also, the era of mass production, there are a lot of good things about it, right? Because everybody gets the same thing. And when you're trying to optimize for everybody, you tend to make a pretty good product, right? Trying to make a TV show everyone likes. You're trying to make a soda, everybody likes. You're trying to make a price everybody can afford.

And by the way, that also cuts out a lot of, you know, opportunities for racism and discrimination, right? If you're always haggling, you get charged more based on who you are, well, then you get charged more because your group has a reputation for being suckers or whatever it is, right? But we have now moved away from this era of mass, you know, mass optimization towards personalization where an algorithm, it's not one-on-one, you can't, you're not talking to a person, but an algorithm is trying to custom fit something for you. And that is, that sucks. Like, instead of, they're not trying to make TV shows for everybody.

They're trying to make TV shows that please, you know, 19-year-old soccer fans from New Jersey. And maybe that works for them, but it's less good overall, right? And a price that is personalized to you is also less fair than one that is sort of designed to work for everybody. I don't know if that makes sense to you. It makes a lot of sense. I think, look, I think there are.

are, you know, arguments you can make about upsides to this technology, right? Often people say to me, well, couldn't this be a good thing if, you know, rich people are soaked and the extra money goes to offer subsidies to those of us who are more price-sensitive and cash-strapped? And, you know, the short answer is willingness to pay and income are not perfectly correlated. sometimes you have a high willingness to pay because you're desperate, right? You're at the airport. Yeah.

And you got to get to a funeral or you're a toddler mom like me and, you know, your kid is sick and you need to overnight some Amazon Prime, some Tylenol or a thermometer or, you know, you have specific needs. Like you can only use one type of baby formula because your kid's allergic to the other types, right? All of those features of a consumer. you know, make them someone who is willing to pay a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean, you know, it's because their wallet is fat, right? You know, so I do think, generally speaking, the most likely

outcome of a future in which personalized pricing is at scale and ubiquitous is, you know, the companies will be able to extract all of our consumer surplus. They will be able to charge us as much as possible for every item we buy. And I think. overall, that will mean that most of us pay more much of the time, right? And that is the concern here. Maybe the rich will pay even more, but they will try to nickel and dime and overcharge all of us in every scenario they can pull it off in. So what can we do about it as a, you know, in our final moments together, like, you know, obviously regulations can be passed, more of this stuff can be illegal and we can

do be a little bit stronger about enforcing the laws. But, you know, what could we be doing policy-wise and what can we be doing individually to resist this trend? Yeah, three things. The first is if you see something, say something. I do think consumer backlash is a really important way of helping to discipline some of the worst practices. Make that TikTok in the big box store. Do it. Do it. Right? Yeah. That is political action. I rarely say that posting is anything, is activism. But actually, yeah, for shaming a large corporation, it might work. Yeah, there's a class action based on a guy who tweeted about JetBlue bilking him on an airline ticket when he was trying to get to a funeral. It's a crazy story. Jet, like JetBlue responded

to his tweet and said the following thing, next time try clearing your cash and cookies. That came from JetBlue's own Twitter account. Wow. And now there's a class action. in New York on behalf of JetBlue Flyers. So if you see something, say something. Second, take JetBlue's advice and clear your cash and cookies. You can, you know, try to do some things to limit your exposure to some of these practices, you know, insofar as they depend on collecting your data and monitoring your breadcrumb trail. You know, the other thing I say is update how you think about comparison shopping.

You can't just shop across brands. You have to shop within brands now. look at the price in the brick and mortar store, look at the price online, look at the price in the app, look at the price when you're logged in versus logged out. The third thing I say is they learn how much we're willing to pay by running experiments on us, run experiments on them. Call your best friend and say like, what price are you seeing for that concert ticket? What price are you seeing for the Roll Neck sweater? And whoever's getting the better price by two, you know, Venmo, right? But these are not real solutions. Like it should not be,

every American shopper's job to duck and dodge and bob and weave and beat the machine. That is very dystopian, right? We don't need to all become like the points guy for everything we buy. It's just a horrifying thought that time, like you lose time when you have to do this, right? And time is valuable too, right? And there are tradeoffs between time and money. We do need to update laws in this country to better protect shoppers and consumers. We've done it before.

JFK had his consumer bill of rates, said, look, there's a lot about products in the post-industrial era that are really unsafe. He built the Consumer Product Safety Commission that issued recalls, so toasters didn't burn down houses. I think it is time to update protections for e-commerce. And my organization has put forward a shopper's bill of rates, which is something I detail in the book, you know, to guarantee some basic things. all in price that Lena Con brought to us for lodging and concerts.

It would be great to have that everywhere. Banning surveillance pricing altogether. Companies shouldn't be able to spy on us and overcharge us. There are 90 pieces of legislation introduced this year alone in states and cities around the countries and some are moving. And some have even, you know, there's a bill on Kathy Hochel's desk in New York. She hasn't signed it yet, but it would ban surveillance pricing in New York State. So, you know, lots of ideas, but I think it is really time to make sure, you know, shoppers in a world of e-commerce, but now increasingly a world of agentic commerce, right, where bots are shopping for us and companies are using bots to, you know, in theory, help us shop, but actually help them overcharge us. You know, all of this needs, you know, a tighter set of fair rules so that, you know, the economy is,

and healthy again, right? This isn't just about our wallets. This is about the type of economy and the type of society we want to have. Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about this, Lindsay. And for the work that you're doing

to protect our wallets and keep prices low for us, or get them low again, as they should be. The book is called Gouged, the end of a fair price, and what that means for your wallet. We're talking about your wallet. You can, of course, pick up a copy

in our special bookshop, factuallypod.com. slash books, which is, we'll take you to the website, bookshop.org, which I don't think is gouging anybody. I think they're selling along with the MSRP, but, you know, go, send me an email if you feel gouged. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Let's edit that out. I don't want to. There are still prices on books. Like, you can see the price tag on a book, right?

Okay, okay. We can leave it in then. Yes. prices they do, they have the price on the back. Yes. Differential discounting, but fixed price from the outset. For some reason, the price is on the back of the books. Who knows why?

That's a different episode. You can pick up a copy there. Lindsay, where else can people pick up the book? And more importantly, where can they find your organization and the great work that you do? Yeah, groundwork collaborative.org is the thing tank that I run. gouge can be picked up anywhere books are sold. Go to bookshop, go to a local bookstore. The book will be at Barnes & Noble.

You can obviously buy it on the Barnes & Noble website. You can get it at Amazon. Anywhere books are sold. Thank you so much for being here, Lindsay. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you once again to Lindsay for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of her book, once again,

factuallypod.com slash books. That's where you can get the books from all of our guests and support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you'd like to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover for our bonus podcast episodes, online community, and our online book club. We'd love to see you there, patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you chip in 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of the show. We got some new folks.

I'm so excited to thank them for their contributions. This is we going to thank Henry Crawford, Melissa, Aaron Stark, Shell Bidrill, Agent F, EF, MF, Dakota Tevis, Virginia, Beckenbauer, Rebecca Choppah, Christina Coranta, Sarar, Troy Stifler, Frachridden Abragamov, Yuri Lowenthal, Adam P. Aras Harman, K. Ervara Eggberger, Tracy, Greg 0692, Marcella Johnson, Matthew Bartleson, A.K.A. Bunkieh, Anjanette Barclay, Chiarraison, Griffin Myers, Grant King, Aaron Matthew, Thorntron, Davis, Snowpack, Robert Fuss, Powell McCollum, H. H. C. V.M.E. Howard and Kevin. Darren K. S.S.R. A screaming Batman. Andreas Gogger, Patrick Flanagan, Cratoon, Andrew M. Purifoy, Su, Su, Solar Yeti, Tara Wilson, Brennan, Petermen, Chris Rezek-Cotophile, John McAvey, Quinn M. Enochs, Patrick Ryan, Shannon J. Lane. Page 2, Matt Closson, Joseph Ginsburg, Nicholas Redderman, Miskbits, Sirius, Dinosauri, Dinosaurs. Christina Mendez, Kevin Sosa, Ragev, Kowshik, Glenn, Jason, Nelson, Hayden, Matthews, Eric Ziger, Robert Irish, Chris Parker, Philip, Hannawold, John McPeek, excuse me, Harmonic, Noa, Daud, Manuel, Garcia, Vincente, Lopez, Rosamundsenegh, Benjamin Rice, Conan Kudow, Jim Myers, Beth Breiv, David Conover. That's my dad, thank you, dad.

Andrew Corlis, Paul Mauch, Spencer Campbell, Antonio L.B, and Alan Liska. I just had the urge to read everybody's name. Thank you so much for listening to those wonderful names. And thank you to those wonderful people for supporting the show. Once again, if you want to join them, patreon.com slash Adam Conover. I want to thank my producers, Tony Wilson, Sam Roudman, and Maddie Schmidt, my engineer Sam Rogench, everybody at HeadGum for making this show possible. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time on Factually.

That was a hate gum podcast. That was a hate gum podcast.