Charlie Robinson (00:01.708)
Welcome to Macroaggressions. I'm your host, Charlie Robinson. If you're watching us on rumbleband.videovigilanteTV, now back on YouTube, or you're listening to wherever podcasts are served, thank you so much. We appreciate your support. Connect with us, macroaggressions.io. Find us on social media, on X, on Instagram. Our sponsors are fantastic. They'll...

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Charlie Robinson (02:21.078)
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All right, let's get down to business because the business of business has been frustrating these days and I've been Like everybody watching What's happening with the cost of goods in you know, I can only really use America because I'm here I understand that prices are going up a lot of places and it's not limited to the United States, but we have a really

a little peculiar way of doing things. So when we have price issues, tends to be, well, it tends to spread, frankly, because anything that happens with the dollar isn't contained inside of the United States. Of course, it happens everywhere. And so I wanted to do an episode a little bit about this, because I'm seeing this push towards dynamic pricing.

Charlie Robinson (04:42.838)
and we'll get into what that is and why that's going to be a catastrophe. And it starts innocuously enough with like Wendy's saying, well, we're going to maybe use it for the price of a cheeseburger. And you can see where that's going to go. So we'll talk about that because it's important. I want to list out some of the bullshit fees that are out there. It's so funny because it's just a term that I used to look up. I was looking up online and I searched bullshit fees.

And it turns out that that is the actual term for it. is a, I'm not kidding. There's a real, it's now bullshit fees. And I was like, oh, how do I describe this to the search engines? What I'm looking for? I'm looking for fees, but not good fees. I'm looking for, you know, bullshit fees. And I look and there is like an actual classification called bullshit fees. So we'll talk about them and they're going to be both funny and frustrating. I'm sure you'll be surprised for that. And,

we'll talk a little bit about what happens when you take this concept of dynamic pricing and then Lunatics who are the programmers and you add AI to it and where that's going. This is something I think we're gonna wanna be on top of, at least paying attention to it. And we'll wrap up with the role of private equity. And private equity is a huge component of why prices are so expensive. And everyone is like, these...

These awful capitalists, you know, it's all the lefties out in the streets in Portland, screaming about how capitalism is the real problem. I've got my problems with capitalism, don't get me wrong. But if you think what is going on in the United States of America is capitalism, then you have your head squarely up your ass. that, Berwick described it as crapitalism in the Controlled Demolition book. I like the term, it's true. This isn't capitalism.

It is at best crony capitalism, but it is all kinds of other things on top of that. If you don't think that America, everyone's like, we need to turn America into a socialist paradise. I got news for you. On some levels, it already is a socialist, not paradise, but socialistic thinking, the way they come at government's role in what they should and shouldn't provide. By the way, the role of the government is to do very little.

Charlie Robinson (07:05.058)
The government has made it their business to try and do everything. They're barely capable of being a government. They're certainly not good at, you know, creating, running grocery stores and the sorts of crazy ideas that these leftist retards have about re-imagining the economy and things like that. Now, mind you, most of them have never had an actual job. So they're the last people in the world I would take economic advice from.

They have no idea what they're talking about. They've never saved money. They don't spend money in a traditional way. They get given gift cards and EBT debit cards so that they can go to the grocery store and not buy actual food, but load up with cokes and Twinkies and all that stuff. So these are not serious people that are out in the streets talking, shaking their fist about how down with capitalism. But the truth of the matter is there are some huge problems with

this current version of capitalism that we're living through. And unfortunately, when you add the tech side to it, which is the direction that we're going, it's only gonna get worse. You thought it was bad when the bankers were in charge of the money. Now the tech bros are gonna be in charge of it and it's going to be a catastrophe. determining value has always kind of been a bit subjective. You barter.

If I'm growing corn and you're growing strawberries, then I need to trade, I have to find what is the exchange rate for the corn to strawberries, know, barter system. How do we do this? And so there's no hard and fast rule necessarily. Back in the days, you know, was, this is what we have agreed. Now, what if you grow corn and that other guy grows strawberries, but you don't want strawberries, you want something else? Well, then that guy, then it doesn't do you any good. Your corn,

has value to a lot of people, but it doesn't have value to this guy or maybe his strawberries have no value to you because you don't really want them. So do strawberries have no value? No, they have no value to you in the moment because you don't want any. It's the Shane Gillis joke, you know, talking about racism. Racist. Are you racist? I'm not racist now. You know, are you hungry? I'm not hungry now. So do you want these strawberries?

Charlie Robinson (09:25.256)
They have no value to me now, right? But what if I wanted those strawberries a week from now? And then I've got to go out and find the strawberry guy. Then they have value. it's a bit subjective. It's not, know, barter worked locally, but it really couldn't scale. It wasn't until coinage came about that things really changed and allowed you to say, well, look, I have corn and

And I'll sell them. I don't want your straw, I don't want your strawberries right now, I or your whatever, but I want, I'll take this, these coins for it. And then I can use these coins later to get whatever I want. And I don't have to be sort of held hostage to you in your negotiating for the fruit that you have that you think is more valuable than I believe it to be. And so you have to establish these marketplaces where everybody kind of comes together and says, corn equals this. And it's a bit of, it's obviously a

a flexible scale that changes. So when you have coins, then you can do things differently. You can scale up. You can scale up too much and next thing you know, you're the British East India company. So sometimes you have to be careful because we moved to gold coins and that was a thing. And then we had to put ridges on the coins because of you know who. And then we had to go to bank ledgers. We went to bank ledgers because it's like, got a kid.

drag all this gold everywhere I'm going, I'm gonna get robbed by the Kazarian mafia every time I go through from point A to point B, they're gonna steal all my stuff. What if we figured out a way where we could just have bank ledgers? We could have double entry accounting, where like I'm making an entry on my end, you're making an entry on your end. And instead of me traveling from point A to point B with all this gold in the back, which is heavy,

and draws a lot of attention and makes you put a big target on your back. Instead, I can travel from point A to point B with banknotes, and I can exchange it that way. And I don't even necessarily have to physically go from point A to B any longer once they invented the telegraph, right? So then you've got that now you can communicate information across long distances. So you have that. Then you say, well, this is great, but what if we had...

Charlie Robinson (11:53.487)
you know, this banking system here, what if we kind of infused human psychology in the manipulation of money, we've kind of put them together and we invented something called fractional reserve banking, which is basically like, I'm a bank, I've got money that people have deposited with me and then I lend money out. And what I'll do is I'll lend out more money than I have. And that is based on, first of all, it's kind of dangerous, but...

If you've been running a bank for 30 years and you make a calculation, you know, we keep all these people's money here, but there's never been a day when everybody comes asking for their money. So the truth of the matter is we could kind of loan out more money than we have, provided that we don't ever have one of those days where everybody asks for their money at the same time. Then we would be exposed as being over leveraged and, you know, it would be a fraud. This is called fractional reserve banking and they allow banks to do this nine to one.

on the money that comes in. So when we talk about like, Trump is expanding the money supply, the Federal Reserve is expanding the money supply. Yeah, yeah, they are. Those are both true statements. However, if you don't understand the baked in concept of fractional reserve lending, how the banks themselves are expanding the money supply, then you really are watching a game that you don't understand the rules to. So.

It's kind of moved on and on and on. We've got fractional reserve bank. Then we turn into private central banking. We know how that's gone with fiat currency, fiat meaning by decree. This money is valuable because I say so. And we have all of that. And now the eventual evolution of that will be into the universal ledger that's housed by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, which they intend to be the crypto rail system for all CBDC, stable coins and the like. That would be a catastrophe, but...

that's the direction that they want to go. So no more cultural barter to establish pricing in some alleyway in Calcutta somewhere. You know what I mean? This is now, we've gotten to the point where we have marketplaces that tell you what the prices are. Now, within those marketplaces, there's a ton of fraud, of course, know, anything having to do with precious metals, Forex, Comex, Libor, you know, any of these

Charlie Robinson (14:15.798)
inter-banking rates, all of these marketplaces have been rigged by bankers. They've been found guilty of rigging the banking in these markets. They've paid large fines. Nobody goes to prison, of course, because let's not get carried away here, but this is the direction that we're going. So it used to be that you could just go to the farmer's market of the day and...

take your green beans and set up a stand and sell them. And hopefully that lasts for a long, long time. Hopefully you're able to do that forever. But I've got news for you. The direction that we're going with dynamic pricing is alarming. And I think it pays to be aware of it because, well, let's just talk about it and then you'll see where I'm going. It's driven by AI and real-time data integration.

across diverse industries, okay? I'd looked up the industry of dynamic pricing to see what was going on with it and see if it's a real thing. It is a real thing. And it's growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10 % a year, which is pretty big. That's a nice growth rate every year. And we've currently got 1.4 million companies that are using dynamic pricing.

So what is it? Well, let's talk a little bit about it. So it's AI powered, changing prices. know how the guy, you know, you would go to the grocery store in the old days, cause I'm old, and there'd be a guy with like a price gun and he'd be putting stickers, know, just putting the price tag, little price stickers on everything. We've kind of moved away from that. We're now on QR codes where you just scan everything and the price is there. But underneath, when you're at the grocery store in the aisles,

there's a can of, I don't know, beans, and you've got a price underneath it. There's a little sticker, a physical price tag. Those tags are changing. They're turning into digital tags. The reason why they're turning into digital tags is because you can't just put 99 cents next to the can of green beans because tomorrow it might be $1.04. And then the day after that, it might be 97 cents. And so you're constantly changing all the, buying all these little stickers and just make them digital.

Charlie Robinson (16:41.408)
If you know you're going to change it all the time, that's what they're doing. So we're going to get into a very, very unusual future in which pricing is predicated on a variety of factors. some of them, new factor might be the time of day in which you purchase the product. That might be the most important factor of all. You see an Egg McMuffin might cost you

$3 at six o'clock in the morning, but an Egg McMuffin at 11 o'clock in the morning, maybe it goes for a dollar because nobody's really buying them. Maybe the pricing is determined due to the demand and it's possible that the demand is predicated on the time of day, meaning that the lunchtime rush, the Wendy's cheese, I use Wendy.

Wendy's is an example of this because Wendy's was doing it. But their idea was that, well, maybe a cheeseburger costs one price at noon during lunch and it costs maybe less at 3.30 in the afternoon, because it's not, you can go in that restaurant and they'll tell you, Wendy's will tell you from their stats when they're busy and when they're not. Maybe 3.30 in the afternoon, not a goddamn person in that restaurant.

never is, right? It's in between lunch and dinner. Nobody's really there. Maybe you want a frosting, maybe you don't, I don't know. But we got to find a way to incentivize people to come in there. I don't want the guy who comes in at noon to get frustrated and leave because there's so many people in line. So I have to change, maybe I change my staffing to, you know, match the patterns of when customers are coming. There's a lot to this. There's a lot of information that goes into determining prices.

What if you could throw all that information into an AI data set and let it tell you what the pricing is? That unfortunately is the direction that we're going with this. So it's like time of day for a milkshake or an Egg McMuffin, you know? There's going to be, they're going to be different price because there's going to be different levels of demand at different times of day. So that's where we're headed for this. Like Groupon with AI for group discounts. You you remember Groupon? Groupon was like the thing.

Charlie Robinson (19:04.718)
for a while until it wasn't. like dynamic price, well, it was group pricing. was, hey, ballroom dancing lessons are, know, this company is putting ballroom dancing lessons up. They'd love to sell 15 of these things and they're willing to sell 15 instead of about a hundred dollars to sell them at 75, but they want to sell 15 of them. get 15 sales, boom, it triggers that $75 price. Everybody gets it at that price. The company's happy. The people signing up for dance classes are happy. Everybody's happy, right? They get a better price.

So there are ways to do this in which the store can benefit. It can maybe sell something that it wouldn't normally sell. It could sell it at a time of day where they normally don't have customers. I mean, there's a lot of this that could be beneficial, that could actually work. And I have to think of this not as just like as a consumer who's going to the stores, but what if I own the store? And what if I'm a guy who's trying to figure out...

If I own a store, it's not just about how much money I can make. I also have to make my customers happy too. So if it's just going to be a catastrophe that pisses everybody off, that's not gonna work. So where's this balance? think of the implications of this. Think of the implications of dynamic pricing on healthcare. mean, you know how screwed up the pricing is.

already, mean, I put healthcare and like mechanics in the same category. It's like two services that you don't know what the price is until after the service has been performed and then they spring it on you and it's always more than what you think it's going to be. And you don't get the ability to negotiate after the fact, hey, listen, it's this much for the breaks on my car. Like, well, you know, we got in there and we found that this, this and this and it took a little longer and this is it. Well, I don't want to pay that.

take those brakes off my car, well, they're on your car. We're not taking them off your car. I mean, you know what I mean? So this is a direction where, hey, perhaps, maybe allow me to be a tiny bit optimistic here just for a little bit. What if this solved the problem that you face at the auto mechanic who doesn't have a big menu up above the cash register that says brake jobs this much, oil change this, I mean, sometimes the oil changes stuff like that. if you're getting your...

Charlie Robinson (21:29.026)
You know, you're getting your fan belt replaced. There's not a price up there for that. It is whatever they say it is because it's here's the price and then here's the labor. And labor is whatever. Well, how much is labor? Well, what do you charge for labor? That matters. And how many hours are you working? And is this labor price bullshit? And is this a way of saying, I'm not overcharging you for the fan belt. The fan belt is this much. It's a reasonable price for a fan.

but the labor is three times what it should be. so there's a lot of ways in which we've been screwed over through the pricing. Now, I'm not, again, I said I allow myself to be a tiny bit optimistic. I am not of the belief that this is going to be a beneficial situation for the consumers. I feel like this is a way to rip people off without them knowing about it. I might be wrong and maybe it will, maybe things will change, but we are introducing some new technologies.

You have blockchain here, the blockchain can lock a price in forever, right? We have the opportunity to lock prices into place with blockchain technology in a way that maybe we couldn't before. We have, I mean, the internet of things where everything is talking to each other in a smart home. You your refrigerator starts telling your grocery store app that you're low on orange juice.

but what's the price of orange juice? Maybe the price of orange juice is a constantly changing thing as well. Maybe your refrigerator has to send you a message to say, it's not the right time to buy orange juice. It's twice as expensive now. We should wait till Thursday. Thursday prices are always, I mean, there's a lot of ways this can go. Commodities trading 24 seven. If you've got dynamic pricing.

There's no reason why markets shouldn't be open 24 7 With all all of this. I know they're talking about human traders and everything but Bitcoins open 24 7 cryptos open 24 7 that's why crypto gets hit so hard when there's any sort of like a big spook in the Traditional finance market on a Friday afternoon and everybody would normally be panic-selling that they don't have the opportunity because the markets closed Saturday and Sunday and doesn't open on Monday until

Charlie Robinson (23:48.706)
till the morning at a specified time. But the crypto market, it's always open 24 seven. So if you have to freak out and panic sell to raise cash, cause you've just had a short position liquidated on a Friday and you're totally fucked, you can't sell your stocks cause the market's not open. You can sell your crypto. So I envisioned a situation where the stock market eventually will go to 24 seven trading. They're just never shut down. So I wonder about

with this dynamic pricing, sort of real-time analytics they can get out of this, it'd be insane. Price comparison with your competition in real time, you could literally set your prices so that it's a penny cheaper than your competitor at all times. It's constantly looking at your competitor's prices all around your regional area. We have the lowest prices, guaranteed. How can you guarantee it? Because we set the algorithm to guarantee it that we beat everybody by a penny.

Crazy Charlies, we're slashing prices on everything, right? Guaranteed. How do you know that I'm the craziest? Because I set the algorithm to be the craziest.

What you, and again, you probably have experienced a tiny bit of this dynamic pricing if you've ever had Uber's surge pricing before, where you get out of a concert, there's a million people mulling around, everybody's looking for an Uber all at the same time. That trip has value in that moment. About 60 minutes from now, that trip from that location is gonna have no value. So I'm not even,

I'm not even mad at it at the surge pricing from Uber because I understand it. I think that there's ways in which you can be diabolical about it and really fuck people over and make your customers hate your guts. But I think the customers can understand, well, let me rephrase this. I think some of the customers can understand the laws of supply and demand and get why this is more expensive.

Charlie Robinson (25:57.837)
now in this moment and why that value is a ticking clock, this tick tick tick tick running out of time. And then eventually it gets to a point where, boy, it was like this trip from this place right in front of this concert venue to IHOP down the street so we can get some pancakes at two o'clock in the morning. This price is three times more than it should be for like an hour. And then an hour later,

It's worthless. It's expired. It has almost no value. So, and of course the dynamic pricing of things having value for a while and then having no value is the largest component of sports tickets and concert tickets and the ticketing industry in general. That ticket has value until the game starts and then it has no value. it...

We've we watch this we understand it to an extent when the sales pitch for dynamic pricing is that it's going to improve Efficiency, it's going to reduce waste It's going to enhance the customer experience with targeted coupons and it may it may do that It has the it definitely has the potential to do those things will it that remains to be seen. Let's talk about bullshit fees They're hidden misleading excessive charges that are deceptive and unjustified

and they are officially known as bullshit fees. It always pushes the final price a bit higher than the advertised one. Cable companies are a perfect example of this. Did you know that 24 % of the typical cable bill that you get is bullshit? It's made up of bullshit fees. They actually gave a percentage. They went in and did an examination on this because

Cable companies are so despised and rightly so. They went in, they took a look at the fees and they said that $37.11 per month can be attributed to bullshit fees. And it's things like regulatory recovery fee, broadcast TV fee, they take in, the cable industry takes in 28,

Charlie Robinson (28:23.777)
billion dollars every year in bullshit fees and What they do with the bullshit fees is they name them in a way that attempts to place the blame on the government now I am all for blaming the government for a variety of things and maybe the government is to blame For the cable companies raising their prices at some level. I think it's exorbitant and I think they do it because they can but when you call it

regulatory recovery fee and broadcast TV fee. That implies that this is related to the government regulatory agencies. Obviously, if you're paying a recovery fee to a regulator, that's a government regulator and a broadcast TV fee. I mean, it kind of reminds, it's the UK's TV fee that you guys pay. But you can see what they're trying to do. Don't blame us. We're just...

We just have to pay this regulatory fee that we have to pay the government. It's actually you have to pay the government for this regulatory fee. Is there a regulatory fee? Is this a real fee? No, it's a fake fee. They made it up. It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. That's why they said it's 24 % typical cable bill is bullshit. This is what they're tying. There is no regulatory fee. It's a fake fee. They made it up. It might as well be the putting things, moving things from point A to point B fee. That's what it is. It is a magical made up fee.

Broadcast TV fee you can't broadcast unless we pay the fee well we read well, then what's the fee the fee is Bullshit, that's what it is. They can't call it that because you know you wouldn't do it brought here I'll give you an example Comcast broadcast TV fee They this is what Comcast it they charge a broadcast TV fee, which is you know

You know, not great, but in 2015, 10 years ago, the broadcast TV fee that you paid every month was $2.50, okay? That was 10 years ago. $2.50, you probably didn't even notice it was gone. In 2019, it went from $2.50 to $18.50. That is a 600 % increase in six years.

Charlie Robinson (30:46.111)
or six years ago, and it only took four years for that increase. So I'm sure it's higher than 1850 because that was pre-COVID. Let's just, I don't know what it is now. It's higher than that. It should be zero. It is a bullshit fee. The Comcast broadcast TV fee is just gravy. It's just profit. That's what they're taking. Other bullshit fees you may be familiar with,

How about this one? How about telecommunication activation fees?

If you switch cell phone carriers and they charge you like a $35 activation fee, just so you know.

It doesn't cost them $30 and they're making a $5 profit to go switch you from one to... It costs them $0.00 zero fucking cents to do it. They're stealing your money. This is bullshit fees. Application fees. Application fees are to actually a weeder mechanism, like apartment, rental fees for apartment or like an application fee for colleges and things like that.

The only reason why they really have that, mean, I understand if they're gonna pull your credit, there may be a fee for that. But what they are doing with application fees is making sure that they just don't get a bunch of dummies coming in there wasting their time. So in some cases, you have to put a fee on it because otherwise you'll just be spinning your wheels, getting nothing done, wasting time on people who shouldn't be filling out these.

Charlie Robinson (32:23.531)
these applications and probably wouldn't be filling out the application if there was some sort of financial component that made them think twice before sending it out. Documentation fees, processing fees at car dealerships, those are all nonsense. This is how they make their money. So California health mandate fee on your final bill. Health mandate. California has a health mandate fee.

because they're just mandating your health. There is a...

I read this funny s- well, wasn't funny, it was a frustrating story, but it was like-

Pop pulls over a lady.

determines during the stop, she has no insurance. She does have insurance. She's trying to explain to him that she has insurance, but the insurance gets coming back as no insurance. It's a big misunderstanding, she does have, you still have to go to court. She goes to court, she talks to the judge, she explains this misunderstanding to the judge. The judge goes, I get it, I see. Yeah, you did have your insurance all the time, all along.

Charlie Robinson (33:38.382)
I'll rule in your favor. What does she have to do? She has to a $50 case dismissal fee. They'll get you any way they can get you. Even when the judge dismisses your case because it was, you know, total bullshit, they still charge you $50 case dismissal fee.

and they wonder why people hate the government.

ATM transaction fees, especially at strip clubs. You ever walk by an ATM? I've never gotten money out of an ATM at a strip club. I'll have you know, but I do know for a fact that the transaction fee for getting that is kind of a little exorbitant. And you better hope that it says Pete's gas station ATM on the receipt and not, you know.

Bob's classy lady or whatever. Let's see, what else do we have in terms of fees that are stupid? Here's one that is just annoying and it works out in the way of you paying more for gas. But in Oregon, one great thing about Oregon, there are very few, one great thing about Oregon, there's no state sales tax. So if you like go into a department store and you

find a shirt that you like and you take it up and you ring it. The price on the tag is gonna be the price that you pay. So there's no additional sales tax. And you're like, hey, this is great. Look at Oregon. Look at Oregon, coming out strong with some common sense. And then when it comes to going to the gas station, you can't pump your own gas in Oregon. There has to be an attendant that pumps your gas for you. Did you know that? Have you ever tried to get gas in Oregon? You can't. can't pull your car up.

Charlie Robinson (35:32.12)
Get out and pump your own gas. There's a guy there who will pump it for you, like in the old timey days, like in the jerk, except that there is an Illunatic on the hill shooting at him. Although in Oregon, there may be. Moving on, back before smartphones, they had a convenience fee for printing up your own concert tickets. Do you remember when like Ticketmaster would mail you the tickets? You'd call up, gosh.

Damn, I sound like I'm a million years old. You call up and try and get tickets, right? And then you buy them and you get the tickets and they would physically mail them to you. And then we moved into an era where we had printers at home and then you could actually print the tickets. You could buy the tickets online and then instead of Ticketmaster mailing you the tickets, you could print them yourself from your home computer or your home printer because that would be a smart thing to do. Because it would be, it would, you know, it would save you.

Did you know that there's a convenience fee for printing up your own tickets? There is. They charge you for not allowing them to mail you your tickets. They charge you because you would print up your own tickets. Now it's all digital and they don't do that. They'll find a way to charge you for digitally emailing you your tickets, I'm sure. But back then, you couldn't even print up your own concert tickets without them charging you for the privilege of doing that.

kind of reminds me of the resort fees that we're seeing at hotels everywhere. There's a resort fee to use the gym or there's a resort fee to use the internet. You know, maybe up to $40 a night. Look, stop doing this. Customers hate it. I mean, bundle it into the price of the hotel room and don't tell anybody if you're gonna be, if you wanna be just sneaky about it. But when you do this and you itemize it,

everything is extra. you wanted to use the internet? you wanted to have the maid? Did you want maid service in your hotel room while you're on this trip? Yes or no. I had one place say that if I wanted it, it was an additional charge. God damn, everything is extra. Credit card fees are bullshit. you know, I look forward to Bitcoin destroying credit card companies. That'll be fantastic to see. I mean, nobody hasn't come into them more than

Charlie Robinson (37:54.37)
Visa, MasterCard and American Express. well, maybe if there's one group that has it coming to a more than that, it's Western Union. Western Union, I don't know if Western Union is a publicly traded company, but if it is, I would short it. And I would short it pretty extensively considering what crypto is going to do to it. mean, Western Union has a horrible reputation with high fees, up to 7 % for sending money.

anywhere, but it's getting replaced by Bitcoin as well. Too bad. Maybe you guys just need to go out of business then. It's like death by a thousand convenience fees. It's just frustrating to be a consumer because you get the feeling that the companies hate you. I'll tell you, there's a real opportunity for a company to recognize this and to position themselves

accordingly, where they're not going to nickel and dime you for things like that. People are so appreciative when it doesn't happen that I think that there's a real opportunity. know, like when you're paying your rent online and they charge you $8 for a convenience fee of paying your rent online, that's frustrating. I think the entire flying experience is like that. Everything's been broken down and itemized. Now it's like your bags.

How many back you know we're gonna charge you for your bags your seat choice if you don't pick a seat We're gonna put you in the middle seat You know what about food and drinks used to be that there'd be a beverage cart coming down and every you know Yeah, now some of it is you know still if you want to coke you know it's fine They'll give you that but everything else is itemized and charged drinks Your pets you want to bring your pet on we're gonna charge you for this you want it you know They just kind of make the flying experience shitty

and everything that you do, you're getting charged extra for. And the problem is that people remember a time when you weren't. If you started an industry from the beginning and everything was broken down into individual sales, and that's just the way it always was, people wouldn't know any differently. But looking at it now, and they see what the flying experience used to be and what it is now, it's pretty obvious. They don't want you flying. They don't want you to live the life that you lived before.

Charlie Robinson (40:13.646)
They don't want you to have a good time when you're on the They want it to, you know, if it's your first time flying on Frontier, you have to fight, you know?

So, I just think that it's important for us to take a look at what we're spending money on, where we're spending money, who we're supporting with this, and is there an opportunity for us to do things differently? Can we go somewhere else? I I think that people are going to...

Somebody is going to have a falling down moment in Michael Douglas moment where he flips out at the fast food place because they won't give him the breakfast when he wants the breakfast. Somebody, and I'm not trying to put this out there, but I just have a brain and I can extrapolate out where things are going. Somebody is going to be asked to tip on their credit card when they're paying for their fast food. They're going to be asked to tip.

and it's going to send them over the edge. Would you like to tip 10%, 15 % or 50 % for your fast food experience? How about you give me my fucking hamburger right now. I'm telling you, I just hope I'm on the jury. That man won't serve a day in prison, I assure you. Assuming like every coffee shop wants you to tip, every fast food place wants you to tip.

You're gonna really, this is gonna backfire. As somebody who was a bartender and understands the world of tipping and where you tip and when you tip, I'm a good tipper when I go out. But I also understand, and I understand that people get slammed in restaurants and things like that. I understand what's going on in the back of the house. But I'll tell you, a lot of people don't, and a lot of people are very frustrated that everything is an additional cost.

Charlie Robinson (42:19.678)
and everybody wants you to tip them. And it used to be that tipping was for exceptional service and now it's become expected. Now it's becoming, it's not only expected, it's getting baked into the tech side of things where it's being suggested. In some cases, it's not even a suggestion, it's being added in there. Restaurants charging extra for employee costs like taxes and healthcare, we're seeing this happen throughout.

Not just, it's not limited to California though, of course it's happening there quite a bit. Remember, while you're being taxed and extorted over and over and over again, every single item is just gonna cost a little bit more, or there's a service charge on top of this, or you got a tip on top of that. I want you to remember, when you're at the height of your frustration, when you're paying for some bullshit fee that you used to get.

for free years ago and now all of a sudden there's a charge. I want you to remember this.

millions, 40 % of Americans are getting free SNAP benefits that you're paying for. How does that make you feel? How does that make you feel? Everybody else is getting free SNAP benefits, they're getting free Section 8, while you are getting nickel and dime to death. How does that make you feel? I know how it makes me feel.

Charlie Robinson (43:46.863)
What about using paper bills, not switching to digital bills? Your power company wants to send you a bill, they used to send it to you in the mail, they always send it to you in the mail. Now, if you don't switch over to a digital bill, you get a fee for paper bill. You get a fee for doing it the way you have always done it before. The way they set it up that they wanted you to do, now there's a fee for that. For them sending you the bill,

and you paint it with a check or credit card or whatever.

That's now a problem. Used to be that was the only way you could do it. Now, if you're doing it that way, they're gonna charge you more. You're the problem. Rental car collision damage waiver fee. I'm not paying for that. Foreign transaction fees on everything. People sending money. How much money gets sent to Mexico from the United States? How much money gets sent to India?

quite a bit.

quite a bit. Foreign transaction fees? Why? Why wouldn't you just send them crypto? Why would you ever go to a Western Union? I would just send them Bitcoin. If you don't want somebody to know what you're sending, I'd send them Monero. But Western Union? Bank foreign transaction fees? Get the fuck out of here. You guys are living in the Stone Age with that. You know.

Charlie Robinson (45:15.18)
bank overdraft fees, pizza delivery fees, extra data fees, restocking fees, currency conversion fees, late payment fees. It's getting to be tough for a pimp out there these days. You know what I mean? Let's talk a little bit about what happens when AI is in control of setting prices. So many things can go wrong. Think about this. And I'm not even gonna be mad at the...

at the technology. The technology is doing what it's created to do and what it's programmed to do, right? My question is the people who are in charge of it. Artificial intelligence is going to be in charge of setting prices. So the question is, if AI is in charge of setting prices, who's in charge of AI? Don't worry guys, it's just Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp,

Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, Eric Schmidt, Israel, Unit 8200, the PayPal mafia, you know, just those guys. They're gonna be in charge of the computers that set the pricing for everything that we do going forward. It's fine. I'm sure everything will be fine. I'm sure they won't use it to rig markets or front run price moves or...

create false scarcity to drive up prices. I'm sure none of that's going to happen, right? I'm sure that the pricing will be above reproach. They're not gonna use it to crash markets, to manipulate consumer buying behavior through algorithms. They're not gonna do any of that guys. You guys, you're just paranoid. You're with your tin foil hats and all. Why can't you just listen to Sam Altman?

Sure, he might have murdered one of his employees, and of course his sister is accusing him of raping her constantly when he was a child. But why won't you let him be in charge of the algorithms for your AI? Are you a bigot? Maybe you're anti-Semitic because he's Jewish. Maybe you don't like him because he's a homosexual. How dare you? That's all your fault for not liking this guy. If only you were a better person, you would let this pedophile scumbag be in charge of

Charlie Robinson (47:33.371)
all of your technology moving forward. He and his friends, Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, just a bunch of homosexual predators setting the algorithms to destroy the planet because they have a very different version view of how they want humanity to live.

You will have zero privacy.

when AI is in charge of setting prices, okay? All purchases will be tracked, they will all be monitored, they'll all be regulated, they'll be taxed instantaneously. Why would you ever, why wait till April 15th for tax day? Tax day is every second of every day. It's just the government never knew how to do it until now. You think that taxes are going to be relegated to being collected once a year?

No, no, no, you will be taxed daily. As soon as they can figure out how to do it, they will do it. You don't have to worry about tax deductions. It will be deducted before you get it. It will be automatically deducted.

And you just think about, think about the underground, think about all the people, you're starting to see these videos in China who are outside of the social credit system. They're sleeping on bus stations and homeless and they can't, they don't have access to a bank account. They've been cut off. Their social credit is too low. They're not allowed to travel. They're not allowed to hold a job. They're not allowed to get an apartment. They're not allowed to have anything.

Charlie Robinson (49:17.167)
If you think that mentality is limited to the administration running the Chinese government and that that's somehow not being thought of by the United States, then you don't understand what's going on. The United States looks at this social credit component that China is unfurling and they don't look at it with disgust. They're trying to figure out how long until we can install it here.

Charlie Robinson (49:44.08)
I wanna talk a little bit about the role, we'll wrap up with this, the role of private equity. Everything is expensive in America in 2025, but it's gonna get much worse. And the reason why it's going to get much worse is not because everything's getting...

you know, the quality is higher and everything's getting more expensive because, you know, we have limited choices. No, no, Things are getting more expensive because the companies that make the things that you used to buy are being bought themselves by other companies. And the companies that are buying them are private equity companies. And what that means is it just means private money. It means a bunch of rich guys. You start a company and this company is a private equity company to say, we're gonna take, we're gonna...

go to all of our wealthy friends and say, invest money in our company. And we're gonna take your money and we're gonna use that, you know, the collective buying power of all this money that we got from all of our rich friends to go out there and buy things, buy companies. And then, but our only goal isn't necessarily to make this company, these companies that we go out there and buy, we don't need to make them better. We just need to make sure they're profitable, okay? Cause this is all about money. It's not about.

making the customer happy. We don't even know the customers. We didn't start the business. We're buying the business from somebody else who started the business. So there's no love for the customers baked in. And so what do they do? There's a variety of tactics that these companies use that are extremely dangerous. Watch this in Vegas. This is part of the reason why Vegas is as expensive as it is. So...

It would be one thing if, we'll use Vegas as an example, it'd be one thing if like these casinos, they own the land and they built the hotel and they built the building and let's just say it costs 30 years to pay it off and they pay it all off. When they do a deal, when they sell their company to another, they will do deals where they will take a look at their portfolio for all the hotels that they have. And what they'll say is, we're not gonna sell you the hotels, but.

Charlie Robinson (51:53.22)
We need money, we MGM, we need money, we need to raise a lot of money. What we'll do is we'll go to a private equity company and we'll sell you the land that the hotels sit on. And then we'll sell it to you, let's say we sell it to you for $10 billion, all right? You give us $10 billion, we'll give you the ownership of the land that's underneath our casinos. And then we, the casinos, since we don't own the land anymore, we've got your 10 billion that we're gonna use to do all kinds of other things.

We will pay you rent. We'll now be a renter. So we'll pay you rent for our casino to be on your land that you now own. And when we've got $10 billion, we can pay this rent and it doesn't really matter. We use it for other things, but if you have to pay an exorbitant rent, it doesn't really matter. We got all this money. Well, but you get a couple of years down the road and that money's gone, but the rent is still there and it never goes away.

because you don't own the land anymore. Some other company does and they want that rent and now they want 2 % more each year, every year, forever. And so the next thing you know, you're selling $18 bottles of water, not because you want to, but because you fucking have to. Because if you don't pay the rent, the lease on the land that's underneath your casinos, they're gonna take your fucking casinos. Do you understand how this goes? They have walked into a trap. I have no sympathy for them.

They voluntarily walked into this trap and they're all finance guys with MBAs, so they know what's going on. It's not like they need me to come in and say, you're walking into a debt trap. They don't care. They asked to walk into the debt trap. You know why? Make the stock price go up a little bit. Because the guy who made the decision has a stock options compensation package that is predicated on this fucking stock going up 10%. And it hasn't, and I need to make it go up or else I don't get my money. So what do we do?

What is a guaranteed way to make my stock go up 10 %? Sell off all the land, show that I've got all this money coming in. Boom, my stock goes up 20%. Now I hit all my bonuses, baby, we're good. The company's fucked, but I personally, the CEO, am good. That's how it works. That's how it works. So, and by the way, just so you know, it's not limited to casinos. They're out there buying air. This is asset stripping. This is...

Charlie Robinson (54:08.963)
real estate lease backs and things like that. It's a form of asset that you buy a company that has assets. Now, sometimes what you want to do with it, you look at it you go, boy, I could break this thing up, sell all these things off individually and make three times the money. Sometimes it's better to do that. Sometimes you take something that has value like Vegas casinos with land underneath it you go, what if we sold the land?

Well, we could do that. What's that worth? It's worth this. Yeah, you have to pay the lease going for, oh, well, whatever. Well, that's an expense. So what we'll do is we'll, yeah, we've got to pay that as, but we'll expense that. then the finance bros get involved and the accounting guys come in and say, well, move this to that quarter and move that to the next year. And we can do some accounting magic with this. And it's all smoke and mirrors. But the payment comes due at some point. You can't play this game and not have some price, right? This is the...

You remember the movie Wall Street with Gordon Gekko, the bad guy in there? You know what he was doing? Leveraged buyouts, private equity. Leveraged buyouts. This is how he made all his money, right? You go buy a company, saddle them with a ton of debt, extract, pull money out, pull management fees out. You make all these money on management fees. Now you've got a company like Toys...

KB toys watch what Bane capital and Mitt Romney did the KB toys. You know why there's not KB toys in your mall anymore because Mitt Romney destroyed it

bottom saddled them with billions of dollars of debt, extracted all these money and fees and then bankrupted the company. That's what they did. leverage buyouts using a ton of debt, that's kind of where you find yourself. There are 18,000 private equity companies out there with $4.4 trillion of money under management and they are actively looking for things to buy. So what are they buying? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Charlie Robinson (56:05.647)
They are buying things like veterinary clinics. are buying plumbing companies. They're buying HVAC companies. 800 purchases since 2022 of just HVAC companies. So telephone repair companies, cement trucks, RV storage, blue collar companies. Find blue collar companies that cashflow, buy them all, consolidate them, jack the prices of everything up on them.

That's why you're paying more. And that's what they do. There is almost a trillion dollars of private equity money out there that is just sloshing around looking for stuff right now. Because...

You know, that money has an expiration date on it. If you're holding Federal Reserve notes, if you're holding a trillion dollars of Federal Reserve notes, you know, it's losing its value daily. Yearly, the value of the dollar has gone down at just 10 % just in 2025. So if you're sitting on a trillion dollars, you've lost 100 billion of it just by not having the ability to, you know,

just on debt, just debt service and things like that. you're going to need to understand this. So if you don't know why everything is getting more expensive, this is part of the reason why. It may be deciding factor in like where you take your dog to the vet. Cause if the vet that you love just got bought by this bigger company, maybe the vet that you love is still there. He's still working, he has a contract.

three year deal, you're gonna have to stay here, we're gonna make it look like everything is the same as it used to be, it's just the ownership has changed. Why has the pricing gone up? Pricing go up a little bit this year and go up a little bit next year and go up a little bit the year after that and next year, then they can't do anything about it. Next thing you know, you're not taking your dog there anymore because the price is too expensive. It's not even that guy's fault, he sold the company.

Charlie Robinson (58:17.389)
So you may have to think of your life as a private equity firm that you're running, you know, for your family. You have to figure out where you're allocating money, like how much goes to the home and how much goes to debt and what's our cashflow looking like and what's our backup plan for, you know, what's our backup plan? Do we have passports and things like that, you know? So I think that if you're trying to figure out like how do you, what's the move on this? What's the play? How do we...

plan accordingly if you know this is going on out there and you see it. Well, mean, you are going to have to get your hands on some assets. Because if the price of assets are going up and the price of services are going up, that you're going to have to pay. One way to hedge it is to have something else that is also going up with alongside of that, you know.

assets that produce a yield, productive farmland, mineral rights, riparian rights, water rights, things like that. Do you have these assets? Guys go out and private equity firms will buy weird things that cashflow, patents. You know, go, what? Buy a bunch of patents. Music publishing rights, one of the reasons Michael Jackson got on the wrong side of the.

the Jews in Hollywood was because he bought his own publishing. He bought the Beatles publishing. Bought it so that Paul McCartney couldn't get it. And when you own these assets, then you are more insulated than other people. I think there's still going to be problems, of course, but it becomes, if you create more revenue streams for yourself, you are, you know, it's.

less impacted by this. think that's reasonable. But look, sound money. Start thinking about it. You have to re-examine the relationship you have with money. It's so weird. The Federal Reserve notes that are in your wallet are pledged to you by a bank that's totally insolvent. The Federal Reserve is a private bank.

Charlie Robinson (01:00:41.827)
that is set to destroy you. It didn't exist before 1913. America was so prosperous in the mid 1800s and early 1900s until the central banks came in and they just destroyed it. So look, you're gonna have to have some gold, you're gonna have to have some silver, get yourself some Bitcoin, get yourself Monero. These are two cryptos that have capped supplies that they can't infinitely print into, you know, like some of the other ones. The Ponzi of Federal Reserve Notes,

is coming to an end. know, I've been playing this game of musical chairs for over a century. I'm telling you when the music stops, they're not pulling one chair. They're gonna pull all the chairs. So fuck the rules. This is your life that we're talking about. Do not wait, cut to the front of line with this information. Don't sit around waiting. You know.

If you are trying to make moves accordingly, I would call Tony Ardeburn at Wise Wolf Gold and Silver. You can turn IRAs and 401ks into physical gold. I'm not talking about paper gold. I'm not talking about GLD or any of that stuff.

Charlie Robinson (01:01:59.898)
I mean, but this is it. Nobody's coming to save you and nobody's coming to wave their hands and scream. The market's crashing. You should do something now. You're gonna have to do this in advance. In fact, you're gonna have to do it while everybody's telling you not to do it. You're gonna have to have some conviction in this. You're just gonna have to understand a bet on gold and silver and Bitcoin and Monero and these things, these things with limited supplies.

It's just, it's a bet against the existing system. And the system is broken, was built to be broken.

Charlie Robinson (01:02:43.577)
You know, I, the.

They've written about this in the past, the invisible hands of marketplace, Adam Smith, right? They talked about this as a concept. But man, I tell you, those invisible hands feel like they're wrapped around our throat these days and ready to finish us off like some jealous husband.

Keep cash alive, stay private, fuck the banks. Hey, if you liked this episode, you can take the additional step right now. Share it with somebody that you think might like it. Rate the show if you haven't done so already. Macroaggressions.io is the best place to find me. Thanks everybody. I'll talk to you again soon.