Amazon's buying iRobot, which is, it's gonna give them more of your personal data to sell to the
highest bidder. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins joins me to talk about it. Farron, every time,
how many stories have we done just in the last maybe five months with Amazon going in and buying
another part of our culture? I think the last one we did, they're coming in and buying healthcare.
Yeah. Private healthcare. We're gonna
make it better for you. It's gonna be cheaper. Let us buy this healthcare system that we're gonna
use all over the country and then the world, and we're gonna solve the healthcare problem, right?
Yeah. Okay. So now this,
now this is even weirder. Go ahead. Right. And, and I'm sure most people on the
surface say, okay, well, they're, they're just buying the robot vacuums. How bad can that be?
Uh-huh. Well the Roomba or iRobot, I guess CEO said just
a couple years ago that he wanted to start selling the mapping data of your home. And, and this was,
again, this, I think it was 2017. So five years ago, he said, look, these little robots that you
think, oh great, I don't have to vacuum. It's mapping your home. It can identify sometimes
faces in your home and they wanna sell that. And Amazon of course has one of the worst histories in
the country of companies selling your facial data. They're selling your Ring camera data,
and they're oftentimes giving it to police officers without a warrant or permission.
That's right. It's so specific, Farron. This iRobot moves around your house vacuuming,
as it's doing that, it's plotting out, oh, here's where you watch TV. Oh, here's the TV program you
watch. Oh, let me move over here. Here you got your gym equipment. This, you need some new gym
equipment. Some of this furniture looks like it's run down. What happens then is you start getting
emails, gym equipment, TV shows, new furniture we're gonna give you deals on. This is what
they're really up to. It's, it's, it's the most intimate details about your life. And everybody
seems to be saying, oh, that's okay. It's a cool little robot. It, it'll vacuum my floor.
And yeah, these little robots they're determining whether or not you have
any pets. It can tell by what is on your floor whether you're a messy person, a clean person,
start sending you targeted ads for organization or maid services. And, and yeah, like you said,
most people are like, oh, well, there's, there's no harm in that. Well, what about when they start
identifying the faces in your home and they start selling your biometric data to anybody out there?
That is where the real danger comes in, because there's always that escalation and they're right
on the cusp of it even before the Amazon purchase. Okay. So here we've got Ring. We've, I mean of, of
the things that are in our home Ring, Alexa, Siri, now Roomba. It just, there is no more privacy and
corporate America has figured out how to reduce it to a big profit. Let me tell you how, how big they
think this is. They paid $1.7 billion in cash for this company. They also paid $4 billion so
they could buy One Medical, which is the medical entity. They're, they're cash, they're cash flush.
And they're, this is their statement. We wanna buy our way into dominance. That's, that's what's, we
want to buy our way into dominance. And so you've got a Prime system at this point, that's already,
it's radioactive. I mean, there's no way that I think we can stop it. They just, they simply have
gotten to the point, they have too much money. And it's every part of your life now, from now
you're cleaning. You can grocery shop on Amazon, your personal assistant, your Alexa is on there,
your security with the Ring cameras. Now your healthcare, every aspect of your life, we're,
we're Prime citizens is what we are now. How about, how about the Twitter,
how about the Twitter crowd? The Twitter crowd's out there giving up everything. Now we find out.
Yeah. That there's a whole
different side to that. People, whistleblowers are coming forward and saying, you know what
we're doing? We're scraping all that information. Yeah. Yeah. It's a truly terrifying story that
just came out earlier this week. This whistleblower from Twitter says we have
everything and y'all don't even understand how big of a national security threat.
Yeah. This is, because it's not just, oh, I
ate at McDonald's today. It's people in government sending out tweets, getting their IP addresses,
having their passwords, personal data. Scraping everything.
Yeah. Scraping everything. So your,
your Twitter folks out there that say, hey, this is fun. I'm really communicating. No,
you are part of the problem right now if this continues as it's going. I don't know how to
stop it. There's too much money involved. Inflation's outta control, but a new report
says that price gouging is even worse. God, if this doesn't just infuriate you, I don't know
what would. Go ahead and jump in on this story. Well, you know, we've heard, we've been told that
business are victims of the economy. The pandemics hurt 'em. The supply chain has caused shortages.
They've, government spending is driving inflation up. Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is driving it.
Mm-hmm. And what we're finding is
even though they have selling fewer cars, less gas, their profits are hitting record numbers.
Incredible. And, and they're buying back
their stock. They're giving out huge dividends. Well, okay. So here their, their narrative is,
I mean, Lord have mercy, the narratives all over the place that this is being caused by Russia.
That gee, this isn't our fault. And you know what, we're doing everything we can to fight it. Well,
Guardian, the Guardian took a real, they put some forensic people in there to see really
what's going on and it's anything but that. The, the mar the profit margin has been raised 50%.
Right. Since all,
since they started this narrative. And as you, as you say, what that's about is
with that profit margin, they're able to buy back stock. And that increases
the value of the company. And not only that, they're able to pay dividends to shareholders
and dividends and, and shareholders keep. And when the stock goes up, the corporate,
the CEOs, their packages get better. Yeah.
Because they get more stock. They can sell off their stock when they leave. Their parachutes
get much, much healthier. Chevron, 240%.
Right, I see that. Spike in profits, 240%. As a matter of fact,
it's the best, they had the best two quarters that they've had in the history of the company.
Right. Nike, you know, the,
the public social responsibility company, 51% increase, and it's still continuing to climb.
Steel Dynamics, this is a company that touches almost everything that's made with steel.
Right. Their profit margin jumped 809%, 809%
is their profit increase since all this started. Dr. Pepper, 83%. You know, you're looking at
Hershey's, your Reese cups. Yeah.
They have gone up 62%. They did a $200 million stock buyback.
Yeah. At Hershey's.
You know, here's the point. These are companies that have massive capital.
Right. They can operate in, they
can operate in low profit times. If they, if they were asked to do it, if they're forced to do it,
if Biden would take some action and punish a few of them, and they got the picture, it's not like
they're gonna go out of business or even have any difficulty during this downtime. They have,
they have this massive amount of money that's put into their company that's available to them
anytime. But rather than doing that, what's, what's socially responsible, they say, well,
we're just gonna, we're just gonna rape and pillage right now because we can.
Right. And, and, and you know, anybody who challenges 'em you, we're called
business bashers. If you try to question it. Bernie Sanders has caught on to this.
Elizabeth Warren has caught onto it some. But they're voices in the wilderness. It's not,
there's not a lot of momentum out there. You know, so what ends up happening is
what they're trying to do and this is really scary is to create a new norm. In other words,
once you get used to paying that higher. Right.
That higher thing for a box of cereal, you're used to it. And so you're gonna do it anyway. And when,
when you have, when you have competition that's not there because one company owns all the cereal.
Right. It's not as if
a competitor's gonna come in and say, well, we're not selling our cereal for as much money. So buy
our cereal. There's not an alternative. Right.
The alternatives are so limited. And these companies are just are using this opportunity
to rape and pillage. And unfortunately there's nothing's coming outta the White House. The white
House can do something about this. Right.
When Chevron said, we're making a 240% profit because of the suffering that people
are going through with, with in gas lines. Right. This is, it's kitchen table politics.
Yeah. Where we've
gotta go. Yeah.