TRASHFUTURE - 3 Easy Payments on a Car Battery to Throw in the Ocean

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

This week, Riley, Milo, Hussein, and Alice discuss the end of the Tory leadership campaign, its recent news item on the topic of abolishing the UK’s speed limit, Tesla owners in Norway threatening a hunger strike, the collapse of Klarna’s shaky fundamentals, an examination of why there are a hundred failing electric scooter companies, and much more. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hi, everyone, and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is myself Riley, and I'm here with Milo. It's the free one. I'm doing the thing. I'm usually determined sounding there. I'm also the free one. Hussain, as well as Alice, who recently has been under the weightless knife. Yes.

Who has described her recent eye surgery to it. A fascinating way of describing it. Yeah, I got my eyes lasered up. I had terrible eyesight. I was like a minus six or a minus seven diopsy prescription. I was really, really fucking short-sighted. And so Monday, I just got my entire eyeballs just like reconfigured with a big laser. And it was fucking terrifying.

Now I'm just in like this sort of like week-long, fussy aftercare thing where it's like, you have to do all of these eye drops and you have to do them very precisely. Otherwise, you know, don't worry about it. Well, the good thing is, is that at the end of all this, you'll have the glowing eyes for all the Bitcoin guys have, right? Did you see that I literally changed my Twitter avatar to my old one, but with glowing eyes? I think what I think is most fun, though, is that if you don't do the eye drops at the beginning and end of every day, then you do transform actually into Event Horizon.

Yeah, for sure. That's the really funny thing about like antibiotics as a class of drug, as a concept is they make you feel much better. And in fact, they make you feel better so well that once you feel better, you want to stop taking them. But if you stop taking them, it gets way worse than if you just hadn't taken any. I want to look, you may think it's odd that we're starting an eye surgery corner. But the one thing I found very personal interest, it's parasocial, you know, you feel closer

to me as a person for learning about my experiences of having of having a guy just point two lasers at my eyes. It was terrifying. What I thought was very funny about it, though, was you described how rushed it was, which is exactly not the kind of feeling I would expect from a late like you get in the doctor's like, hey, quickly get in. Come on, sit down. That is basically that is basically how it works.

There was a guy ahead of me who like, literally, I saw him come out with his eyes visibly hurting. They're like next. Okay, cool. But like, I don't know, maybe maybe I'm just like needy, right? Maybe I'm not that type of girl. But when I want someone with like expertise to be working on my body, I want them to be the kind of like, ah, interesting, sort of deliberative expert.

Whereas what I got instead was the I'm just going to stick this in your eye now. And you can you're about to say, hey, don't stick that am I, but it's already in. That's the kind of expert that I got. Yeah. You know what it is? You got you got the kind of you got the kind of expert that is sort of in quite a few action movies kind of since Marvel, which is is sort of so good at what they're doing that they just seem bored and distracted while doing it, which is yeah, perfect.

I love I got shot up with the James Bond smart bloods, all of it. My eye surgeon, Dr. Strange. Yeah. So I thought it was weird how after I stumbled out clutching both of my eyes and just heard from behind me. So that just happened. Don't be don't be perturbed by the name Dr. Strange. It's actually a moniker.

I got this name because I love pussy. Yes, this is my orgy name, not my doctoring name. Don't know. I introduce myself. I used to be a gender reassignment surgeon, not that you'd be interested in that, of course. Oh, hello, hello, hello, everyone. Getting the laser gender surgery. It's really fast as well.

It's real fast. It's really quick. Like the dick just comes off. You're like, uh, and it's just gone. Yeah, yeah, the girl in front of you comes out like physically in pain. You're like, wait, are you supposed to do something about it? Oh, no, no, no, get in here. Come on.

We don't have all day. Good one. Putting your ankles on my shoulders. We'll get started. But the thing about the rushing you through it thing is that it is like obvious psychology, but it does kind of work like getting kicked out of there 10 minutes later. I had two thoughts. Thought number one.

Ow. Thought number two. I can't be that bad because they're just kicking me out 10 minutes later. So I was easily manipulated. That's right. Well, I didn't even realize I was dead till I got home. Yeah, it was like, it was like the final killing blow in like a samurai movie. Like you get all the way home before you start to fall apart.

Patrick's putting my hand through the front door. That's weird. No, no, no, none of you recognize me. Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome to TF, the episodes where we're talking about some stuff. Look, before we carry on, though, I have some company stuff to talk about. I got some British politics because Britain's lost the the governing party of Britain or the the whole governing consensus of Britain is fully

lost the mandate of heaven, but it's imploding. It's fully imploding. It's going to be terrible. But I also, you know how we talk about like where the real politics is now is in movements, specifically mass movements, organizing. Yeah, to get to organizing to get what you want out of Man of Edinburgh and so on. And so that's that's where the politics is now. It's not high up in the sort of upper echelons of politics.

That's entertainment in Westminster. Radio call in people asked, do you remember when the bin men were hard and the bin men arose like sleeping giants from their stomach? So yeah, they're like the king in the mountain. So anyway, we so we sort of agreed on that. And I think one of the most exciting things with the last few weeks has been another sort of grassroots movement based sort of mass actual political movement for change and what I'm of course talking.

I'm sure many of you know what I'm going to be talking about right now. What I'm talking about is it's the Norwegian Tesla Owners Association going on hunger strike. So Elon Musk will fix their terrible cars. What a sentence, a sentence that if you'd have said it to me 10 years ago, I'd have been like, what? Of course, Norwegian Tesla. Yeah, it's just such a mismatch of tactic and issue, right?

Like you say hunger strike to me. I'm expecting some heavy shit in general. Like if you're willing to starve yourself, I'm expecting a sort of a life or death issue and the life or death issue here appears to be Mr. Mr. Epic meme poster, please make the cars work good. The Iranian Tesla Owners Association, which is named after Bobby Sands. No, so, yes, this is mostly reported on blogs and so on. So do take this with a grain of salt.

It is mostly here for comedy purposes. Oh, sure. But if you are Norwegian and is not legally actionable. If you are a Norwegian and a Tesla owner, maybe just try it and see how you feel. You know, I do. I want to say I have developed a pretty good nose for these things over the last few years. It does feel real. I was just going to say that is it like, are you sure it's not just like an intermittent fasting bit that like they're doing for like

hardly enough is Norwegian Ramadan. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Norwegian Ramadan's got us. Oh, my God, like I know rotted fish from dawn and dusk. And of course it is day 24 hours a day because it is summer in Norway. Yeah, Norwegian Ramadan is you just die. I do find it very cute, though. I do find it kind of cute, though, that like they've sort of gone to these lengths

to get Senpai to notice them and Senpai isn't going to notice them. He's too busy. He's too busy like talking about his breeding kink on on Twitter. And yeah, if you want Elon Musk to notice you, you have to post a like to be kind of OK meme on like nine. Yeah, he thinks is funny and even that will be a very young and like obviously fertile like woman. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

You're not a Canadian songstress of no. So here are the details from Clean Technica, a blog I never thought I would cite, except to mock. Details are scarce, but it seems that a number of Tesla owners in Norway fed up with ongoing customer support and vehicle quality issues are now on hunger strike in a bid to get Tesla to fix their cars. This news comes to me in the format of like a paradox game sort of news event from a country across the map, you know, like the falls fight among

themselves kind of thing. Elon Musk getting a letter that's like, if I do not get my Tesla fixed, I will murder suicide. My entire family is going, Mr Musk, he's Norwegian. He means business, but I didn't understand this at first. When you first told me about this, Riley, I thought that what you meant was that they were like hunger striking against the Norwegian government in order to get more like Elon Musk stuff that he wants.

But no, no, they're actually protesting the like God Emperor of memes. Yeah, well, it's the it's because the thing is right. Like if you remember, it's always important, I think, to remember what these things were supposed to do, right, as opposed to whatever goalposts they've set for themselves that day. In addition to having like autopilot or whatever, the whole point of Tesla was to change the world by replacing the internal combustion engine on a mass basis with electric cars.

Now, as imperfect as they are, and as much as we talk to Paris Marx about this and so on and so on, we can say like at least sort of electric cars if like the lithium is God, ethically, and all that huge, gigantic, unsolvable ifs are kind of better than internal combustion engines. Fine. But sure, in order to do this, the strategy was instead of, say, providing people with providing like a low cost electric car was the reverse Ford. You build a luxury car. A few people buy it that pays for the slightly less luxury car

that is like a few more people buy and you keep going down that path until you can build the like electric car that everybody can buy. We're trying to build an electric Rover Metro. That's what we want to get to. Yeah, exactly. But they didn't do it. They just stuck with like luxury toys for, you know, software developers. It is so funny that like the pinnacle of what you're looking to achieve is the shittiest electric car imaginable.

That's what we're trying to get to. We have a list of their grapes. But before I do that, I'll say that we want an electric Ford K.A. And we will not stop until we get there. They have. I kind of do, to be honest. I would love a shitty little electric car. They have they have also arranged their Teslas by driving them into. So there's approximately, I don't know, maybe 17 Teslas or so

arranged into the word help and then photographed from a drone. The Beatles are going to be pissed off about that. Of course they've got a drone. Yeah. Well, you know, it's the Norwegian Tesla owners associated. You know what, when Gayatri Speevac wrote that essay, can the subaltern speak? They're whatever is the opposite of the subaltern. I normally use the drone to film me and my wife having sex in the woods. But on this occasion, I've put it in an important political process.

I mean, I think about this occasionally. And I guess maybe it just it hits different if you have everything you want to not be able to have one thing you want, you know, like maybe that's the way that to explain all of these like people who are insanely privileged, like genuinely staffing themselves, maybe. Yeah. Well, I mean, we don't look. We don't know the details of how it might be a tall tale. It might be a fable, but let's let's let's just assume for the sake of it.

It contains it contains a spiritual metaphorical truth. So would you all like to hear the list of their complaints? I would love that. This is from their website, the Tesla owner association Norway website, which is now kind of like, I don't know, like the electronic intifada of like 30 or 20 guys. So they they've said they've said also we are the canary in the coal mine because Norway is by far the number one thing Tesla country in the world.

The list of complaints is as well. That's not it. That's the most things to be proud of. Number one, the car won't start in cold weather. That is a new issue in Norway. However, issue number two, the car won't start in warm weather. I'm sensing quite a narrow operational ban for Tesla. Because of climate change, they have that now there, too, as well. There's the perfect car for Britain, where it's never warm or cold.

Are you suggesting that Tesla is the perfect? It'll only start when it's like sweater weather. Yeah, exactly. That's that's exactly the like what you'll do. Right. You know that you can stay. You have three cars, right? You have like your car, your backup car, and then you have your Tesla, which you know you can drive. If you go out and you're like pumpkin spice, Lotte season car,

and you're like, it's Mr. Awesome car. I could, you know, I should wear a light jacket. Yeah, you know, it's it's the car for when you have when you can see your breath just a little bit. The leaves are what a lovely time. The sort of October, April, these kind of months. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a good month, such as these. Yeah. The next one is you could push that to March.

I'm sure it depends on the market early May. I don't know. I might get a bit warm mid November. Perhaps I get based on the year. You could drive your Tesla for up to 70 days. Yeah, depending. I mean, what you get real is that Tesla. But Tesla was built in a very specific microclimate and that needs to be respected.

So then here's the next one. Intense squeaking noise. Oh, no, I bought the Tesla dog toy by mistake. I drove this Tesla to a Norwegian dogging site. But I was followed by all these dogs, which despite the name, dogging is not actually good for the process of doing bubbles in seats, which just means I think they're improperly sealed seats are loose.

Trunk lid fills with rainwater. The next one appears to be sort of like Treband build quality, which I can understand would piss you off. You a few how much is the cheapest Tesla cost? Like 30,000 dollars, I think for the model three, something like that. You could you could get a car that was put together by someone who was paying attention for that kind of money. Yeah, 35,000 dollars for the cheapest one

with like fully limited by software, not a single extra feature. It doesn't even have like the little like bacon games or whatever. Next, autopilot does not work. I mean, come on, that's we talked about that a billion times. Norwegian Tesla owners, you don't have to go on like I think that they do. I appreciate this new turn. And I hope that it gets out of hand. I hope that someone like I hope that they sees a province of Norway,

more or less by accident. I hope that they end up sort of I hope someone ends up on the phone to Elon Musk and a police negotiator going, no, you have to deliver us this impossible technology. Otherwise, one hostage every hour, like we secede from Norway. And essentially, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, because that's the thing, right? If they're going to go on hunger strike

until autopilot works properly, then they are going to Paris. A number of people are going to inherit some Teslas. Yeah, they're going to be a footnote in the annals of history. I remember when those Norwegian guys died about Tesla autopilot. Your your your father left you this Tesla filled with rainwater. Oh, were they hit by the car on autopilot? No, no, no, they died as a protest. What one person we don't know how many people have been killed by autopilot.

But this is like on the graph. This is people killed by autopilot being autopilot versus people killed by autopilot not being on a pilot. It's it's just it's such a weird I know I said this, but it's such a mismatch of like tactic and cause that you just you want it to like go beyond that logical conclusion. I just I just pictured the like I think it's Stokely Carmichael who said like, you know, non-violence only works if your opponent has a conscience.

Just that, but with a picture of Elon Musk above it and a bunch of Norwegian guys. It's just I want them to go full paramilitary. They're being trained by like former IRA guys. It's like maybe they should become like shining path. But for now, Elon Musk is not a seat to our demands. We would drop a paving slab on his head. People don't know this, but Shining Path actually started out in a sort of similar thing and a beef about the customer service quality of Alfa Romeo.

Oh, boy. So here's more. Here's more. Internet is slow and does not work as it ought to. The wipers do not work well enough. Here's a really funny one. The car creaks in moans when you pass speed bumps and other bumps in the road. It goes bonus. No, but like just a terrible fucking car. Yeah, it just it just sounds like the car version of like getting old.

Like it just it just makes a bunch of weird noises. It doesn't quite work as well as it should do. And weirdly, this has a real audio focus to it. Like someone is seriously paying attention to like how their cars sound in Norway. My car constantly sounds like it's coming. We also have decorative moldings are loose. Lights do not work properly. Doors don't work properly and also don't work properly in the cold.

Doors also because the little handle won't come out when it's cold. I've seen videos of this guy's having to like pour a kettle on the door handle of their test. That's going to be pricey to open your Tesla. You got to boil a kettle. Oh, you want a tenner? Cheap, but just buy a new one. The lights don't work properly. Here's a dangerous one.

The door opens by itself. Oh, well, I mean, listen, we heard your complaints about being being trapped inside the car as it caught fire and now we decided to go the other way. Now the doors just open randomly. You don't want to be there when it catches fire. Yeah, you've got to sort of Tesla Poltergeist the computer. Also, why would you need the Kessel? You just wait, wait for the door to open.

System resets on its own, which seems dangerous for mostly computer controlled car. Problems charging and reduced power. Rust problems on brand new cars. This is just a Trabant. It's just a Trabant, but the game is made out cardboard. Well, exactly. And a Trabant like and a Trabant's cool. This is not cool.

Also, a Trabant, you could only drive very slowly, which made the kind of poor build construction not not much of a problem. Whereas Tesla has built like a piece of shit and you can drive it at like 160 miles an hour. Yeah, I think that's another example of something that seems to me to be orc technology, but it doesn't believe it doesn't work based on you believing in it. It's just like normal orc technology. Tesla is quite a lot like commuting to work by being fired out of a trebuchet.

Like you'll get that quickly, but you know, it's not a guarantee. You got to hit the mattress and yeah, there's a lot of potential issues. The Norwegian Tesla, the Norwegian trebuchet commuting association has complained that the mattress sometimes is moved out of the way. Doesn't doesn't interact with any of the existing infrastructure because that's all from manganelles. My employer took down the big net, which I usually land in. Interesting, you should say that, Alice.

We were promised free charging to the car's lifetime, but all the new charging stations in Norway don't fit the car. Whoops. Yeah, because Tesla uses a proprietary charging plug that no one else uses or is allowed to use. Yeah, amazing. You have to either get an adapter or hook it up to a Tesla charging point. How on earth that could possibly have come through in that promise?

No one knows. No, because it was intended to go the other way around. It was intended to like lock every other electric car brand into Tesla's charging infrastructure, but in a typical Elon brain move, what this did was lock Teslas out of everybody else's. He's so cool. Finally, this is the last one. The last few are all kind of the same one,

which is that customer service is difficult to deal with and never gets back to you. Therefore, a riot is the language of the unheard by customer service. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. So funny. I love I love a long train of like abuses and usurpations. Yeah, no, I wish them every success. You know, I will not press three for customer services. I will press the trigger of my FN file until my demands are met.

Because because Nordic politics is weird enough that plausibly a couple of things could go wrong and these guys could end up being the governing party of Norway. Oh, what? Yeah, perfect. I look forward to that. I look forward to these guys having to elect a prime minister in like 200 years being like, why does Norwegian politics have the Tesla party in the Nissan party? It's more of a sort of, yeah, it's a sort of a traditionalist thing.

It's more of a big tent than it has anything to do with Tesla's now. But I mean, actually, what if you look into it? What happened was that the Tesla party was largely funded by the CIA in the 1940s and 50s in order to forestall communism. There's a lot. There's a lot of crime in their history. You know, don't look into it. If only they'd got more paperclip Nazis into the Tesla development program.

Maybe those cars are a bit better. Say what you like about the learn of on Brown. Probably build a good fucking car. What you do is the Volkswagen. That's the paperclip Nazi car. Yeah, there you go. The Volkswagen is a good car. So anyway, that's so funny to me that the Volkswagen Beetle is like the Hitler car.

And then it went on to be like, oh, the adorable hippie vehicle that Hitler so loved. No, it was only but look, Hitler said hello. You still say hello, right? He drove Volkswagen Beetle. No, I want to talk about some stuff, because basically you know what happened, right, is yeah, they reinvented the beetle and then to take the heat off of it. And it's hippie is they in gave the world some cars with Hitler.

No. So basically, right? You know how we like ever since, you know, how interest rates were at zero when they were going to have to stay at zero forever or the economy would break. And then, you know, yeah, because we made the economy not real. Oh, yeah. How's that going? Is that going well? I hope it is because I've got I've got some stuff going on. So yeah, well, have you I really just tell me this going well?

Have you invested in Clara, Compass, Helbis and Bird? Yes. But fortunately, I did diversify my my portfolio into the stock of the Tesla Norwegian Dealerships Association. So I'm hoping that. And you've also got a lot of investments in the British pound I hear. Yeah, British pound. Yeah, a whole bunch of stuff in a bulb. Yeah, I think things are.

I mean, all of you would have tried it out about by now. Oh, would I? Oh, no. You see, I've not been open in my emails for exactly this reason. Yeah, look, just so long as it. Look, well, I always have my Enron stock. You haven't also been opening your normal mail. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, nothing like this. No, no. So I'm off the grid, baby.

We're we're yeah. Well, you're off the grid. You're fighting with those guys in Norway. Your last act was to, like, buy a bunch of Bear Stearn stock and then rip all of the copper wiring out of your walls. Yeah, well, I've also got a bunch of big coin and board apes. Anyway, like, oh, boy, well, I've got some crypto stuff for next time. No, no, we're going to revisit like several old friends in pretty quick succession

because my goodness, that's the problem, though, with when you make our prediction, right, which is that all of this economy is fake. All of these things that are being heralded is the next big thing, right? The future, they're all kind of just nothing and everyone who buys it is either in on it or an idiot. Sure. That when we're proven right, the problem is, is that it's surrounded in a much larger catastrophe because, unfortunately, the problem is you can't even laugh about it and be like, I told you so because everything's on fire.

So because that's the thing, like, oh, no, Clarna and Bird and fucking like compass, all of these moronic companies were, unfortunately, the kind of membrane separating like separating sort of things sort of ticking over and getting worse at a constant rate from things getting worse at a very rapid rate. So that's all carries in the economy mind. A change in the intercept rather than the slope coefficient, if you get my meaning. It's sort of a two-way street, right?

Like for a while, the economy had to be fake in order to prop up these companies. And then it sort of became such that these economies had to be propped up in order to keep the economy fake because if the economy became real, then we'd be in some real trouble and that better not ever happen. Of course. So I wanted to start by revisiting our old friend, Clarna. If you recall, Clarna is, I believe, the largest techno or was the largest technology company in Europe after Wirecard blew up. Yeah, the gist of it was if you wanted to buy like, I don't know,

it's like a pair of shoes or something next to the buy button. You would have a little Clarna button that was like, do you want to pay for this in X number of low interest instalments? Right? I love how basically the biggest FinTech company in Europe is exactly like the worst nightclub in Europe title where everyone who has the title is like, we used to be the second worst nightclub in Europe, but then it burned down. We used to be the second worst FinTech in Europe, and then that one burned down. So basically, if you remember, SoftBank invested in them at a 46 billion dollar

valuation. Yeah. For a small button on every like web page that no one's ever clicked on. Correct. Yes. Oh, no, people were clicking on that button, baby. Really? Well, I don't know anyone who ever Clarna. So my one of my exes, who was an independently wealthy woman. His name was Clarna. That's right. Her name was Clarna.

Yeah. Her name was Clarna Norwegian Tesla, you might know. She she would regularly Clarna stuff. I think just for the fun of it, just because like she'd be like, why do I want to pay for that now? And I'd be like, but you're rich. Well, what do you always always puts me in mind of like the sort of like black cards, like the prestige credit cards, like you don't need a credit card. Well, why you're just doing that to get the fucking concierge service.

Yeah, exactly. Here's here's the thing. Surely the person who is like bringing the biggest returns to a credit card company is someone who is just scraping by and therefore they should have the black card and the concierge service and the number you call to get sucked up. Hello, sir, would you like to make another purchase, which you cannot afford? Well, exactly. Exactly. It's like Clarna's valuation. You should get like a call from a concierge at like 3 a.m.

when you've just made an unwise purchase to be like, oh, thank you very much. Would you like some you just go and see a West End show? Would you like some like reservations for dinner? And like, oh, whatever. Burger cunt. Very good choice, sir. Very good. So, no, Clarna's valuation is now 85% lower than at its peak because its losses have quadrupled.

Milo's X started paying for stuff outright. Yeah, absolutely. And again, were those losses lessens? Yeah, 100% right. But yeah, it was it. Yeah, it is its losses have quadrupled as they've realized that, oh, shit, we forgot to make money. Oh, no.

And we can't just keep getting higher and higher valuations with like cheap fake credit to keep this whole thing sort of shambling forward. Wasn't there a thing that they were taking the payment from the retailer? So they were like charging like you still paid 30 quid or whatever for your shoes and you didn't pay any interest, but like they charged like the top shop or whatever. I don't know who's the reason. Problem is three quid. As long as people, if there is any sort of their business model

didn't seem to have much of a stretch built in it. For example, if times are tough and suddenly it's very easy to acquire, it's not very easy to acquire new customers will very dependably pay you back. So they seem to be in major trouble because also they can't just keep. They can't just keep getting people to like value them higher and higher and higher. Just absorb those losses. Oopsie, Daisy, I want to move on the investor capital to absorb your losses. I'm also a very trash future.

Another another another one. Now, this is one we talked about a while ago. It was called Compass and their main thing was that they were the we work of real estate brokerages in the US. Oh, yeah, I remember this one. Yeah, I don't want to be the we work of anything. Well, do you have you read about we work? This guy who was the we work of everything is now doing a big deal

about how much of a not we work of stuff he is. Oh, no, if you remember, well, I remember this because I'm, you know, because of course I do. But if you remember, if you remember, the compass had a big blog post that was just entitled Why We Are Not Like We Work. There's no we in work. No, there isn't or and you could call us we work or you could listen to this rap we've composed.

No, absolutely. So right, they actually say it's a real estate agent. How they grew, right, was they were just paying huge amounts of money to buy other to buy real estate brokerages and then just have their client books. They said they were a tech company, mostly because they had a website. We're very familiar with this, right? It was valued at six point four billion. And after selling thirty four billion dollars in homes a couple of years ago,

they made zero profit from doing that. No, no, no, look, I don't know. The economy hates to see a girl boss winning. Yeah, exactly. They had a zero percent profit margin on a thirty four billion turnover. Yeah, exactly. And also because OK, what's shocking about these is these are business models that should work.

I mean, like Uber obviously had a business model that was never going to work like much like Netflix or loads of these companies. But like, you know, Clana, that's just money lending, right? That they had a business model. They were charging someone for that. There was a service being given and someone was paying for it. It wasn't like a crazy this one. Similarly, selling houses and taking a commission.

Again, that's a business model that famously was electric cars. Yeah, selling electric. I like people buy them for money. Yeah, you sell them this. You should make money from this. Well, this is what CEO Robert Refkin said. Short term profit. This is in twenty nineteen.

He said this short term profitability is something that many of the more modern companies are not focused on. OK, cool. What about long term profitability? I and so they were they were they focused on that long term. Profitability is famously the thing that the wizard does. Yeah, short term profitability is what you decide whether to do that or not. Because like it's the most of the business model.

I mean, this is so we sort of talked about this while it was all happening, right? When we were sort of talking about it from like twenty eighteen onwards, right? The business model of that period and we could see it while it was happening was just to convince someone to take a bet on you. You didn't really have to deliver a service to anyone. It was like Machio, Susan, David Cameron, Mark Andreessen. Like, yeah, now it's just all of those sort of bad bets are coming due. Well, what if short term profitability scared off the wizard

and then he didn't give you your long term profitability? And the thing is skittish with us. And this is another thing they said in twenty nineteen. We're not yet at a stage where I have a clear monetization strategy because no one's ever really talked about it. Right. You were an estate agent. The strategy, as Milo said, surely suggests itself. You sell the house.

You get a badly fitting suit and then you go around and you go like, yeah, it's got a nice aspect. You spend 90 percent of your budget on a sort of vinyl decals. You apply to a mini Cooper and then you drive around in between houses that are falling apart and you sell them to people who want a house and you charge them too much and you take a commission. And crucially, you tie you tie your tie in an arcane knot of such a large size that you have to get it handed down from estate agent to estate agent.

No normal person knows how to tie that. Have you considered that maybe they haven't spoken about how their business works or whether it's even viable because they are spending their time talking about mental health and checking in with their blokes, which I personally find very amiable. Well, that is the status of trash teacher as a business. So does it make money? Don't know.

Do we have Patreon subscribers? Haven't checked. Is that mental health? Checking in the fuck on that? Absolutely. So interview. So this one real estate academic who is an interview by Vice about this subject said, Compass is the world's most unprofitable brokerage ever, which is quite dubious on her, I think.

Yeah, yeah, you should get a little trophy for that. I feel well, the trophy is that they're making a little gold place at very wide not time. The trash teacher award for accidental socialism. Well, I mean, I feel like when you make no corporate profits, what so? They are sort of living in a kind of post material utopian world almost, where, you know, you don't have to be of concern. It's not of concern to you whether or not you are.

Your activities are doing capital expansion, right? Because the capital expansion is coming from somewhere else. Like the capital expansion is just coming from all of the cheap credit. That's where it's coming off, Matt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what you're doing is you're just living your dream. You are working for eight hours, fishing for eight hours. You're farming for you're just doing whatever it is.

Oh, no, we accidentally made full communism, but just for these guys. And it's very temporary. You've got the cheat codes on in the Sims. You're just going to the blue gnome that hands you out more money every time. It's like Mark Andreessen or whoever. And so you sort of just stumble into a business. Do kind of the same thing that everyone's ever done. But most of your actual economic function is to make power points for investors

so that they can continue to pump up the value of your business. And here we're just just seeing these people realize in real time. Oh, shit, we forgot about the other thing, the actual use value of the thing. Zero use value was produced, except accidentally or incidentally. And, you know, I think it's going to have also some real knock on effects for political consensus, right? Because no, because like the main thing, right, that these are just like these are just the biggest fish in a world where we basically our policy just said, OK, well, in the absence of any product.

It's a world full of fish and I'm dumping car batteries into the ocean. It's going to kill some of the big fish, sure. But it's also going to kill a huge number of the smaller fish. It's also going to kill my need to get rid of these car batteries, which I've built up over the pandemic. Where else am I going to put them? The compost, don't be ridiculous. Yeah. In this case, where I keep my used Moser oil, ridiculous.

But like so much of the political consensus in the US and UK is based on one of the most politically engaged classes of people, always getting a kind of double subsidy from the working from working people. Yeah, well, it's two things, right? Pensions can't go down and neither can the value of your house. Correct. Because in order because your pension has to stay up and that's more of a UK thing than US thing, but the value of your house

is basically another massive, mostly generational subsidy, right? Where in order to get stable housing, someone has to set. You have to essentially be like a fucking soft bank, just chasing the value of whatever it is that you're buying by just dumping money into it with, again, cheap, easily available credit that, hey, whoops, you've got a gigantic mortgage. And, you know, a lot of normal jobs aren't directly dependent on like this zero right environment that's now gone, right?

And a lot of the people who are leaving it are just going to have, you know, again, these are God's perfect morons, right? They've been in adult daycare essentially since they graduated. And now they're like head of product at, you know, kazoo or whatever. You know, and mostly their day is like email and donuts, right? Kazoo, the company that makes harmonicas. Yeah, but it has a website, so it's worth 40 billion dollars. Yeah, it's felt like we're redefining the harmonica.

So like, so those jobs aren't really what you're worried about, but I think the they'll be fine. The political consensus that will sort of fall apart, like there's something that's probably going to change, right? When all of a sudden, you know, this very politically engaged class realizes, hey, wait a minute, I'm no longer OK. Well, I mean, generally what happens when a sort of otherwise totally privileged class starts to feel threatened for the first time is

that they start supporting fascists. So, you know, just just note that. About this time around, we have Prince Harry, who can come in and go, it's OK not to be OK, matey. Oh, that's true. As a bloke, from a bloke to a chap, I can tell you that when I was out in Afghan, it's a lot of estate agents just like you. And a lot of them were, you know, their mini Koopas have been blown up.

They were they were just short. They didn't know where to go. But then I took them to one side and I said, listen, mate, you'll find a house to sell again. And yeah, that's straighten up that tie, pal. They'll take you upwards of ten minutes. Yeah. And we know that Compass is now cutting jobs. I've heard from an individual who listens to the show that the cut

call him Mr. X. Yeah, I've I've know that. That's we call him Prince H. You know, sorry, that's too obvious. P. Harry. Yeah. Everyone's favorite Clapton wine bar, P. Harry. That's a joke for all you Clapton heads out there. No, so that the layoffs are going to be much more extensive than are currently announced in our largely based on the technical team,

which oops, forgot to have a technology. Common mistake. Anyway, this is from Newsweek. And I think we can expect to see a lot more of this, which was just quite strange. Recruiter and actor, because mostly they hired recruiters, because mostly what they were doing was just trying to buy existing real estate agents of sort of less of less of a business plan, more of a cult.

Recruiter and actor Isaac Moran recorded his theatrical exit for real estate brokerage compass in a video that has delighted the Internet, amassing nearly eight hundred thousand views. Number one, that's rookie numbers. Come on. That's not delighting. Delighted the Internet. That's delighting a mid-sized British. And ooh, and so I had to be fair,

that would be one of the biggest cities in Britain. Yeah, what big? So that would be second only to Birmingham. Moran showed up showed up in the Google Hangouts with his department head and HR representative. He told Newsweek entering the call with a long pink wig on his head and a glass of wine in his hand. So what's essentially going to happen is a lot of the most childish

people in the workforce are probably going to make epic videos of them getting fired because their entire industry has been proven to be fake. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. So last one, last one before I want to talk a little bit about politics after this, but last one. Do you all remember the concept of micro mobility or hey, why are all these scooters everywhere all of a sudden?

And it just happened overnight. Oh, yeah. Because it was going to be a key part of getting like cars off the streets, right? And greening our cities was you could get a little scooster or an e-bike. And councils loved that because it wasn't very expensive and you could just put them everywhere. And you could put your name on them. You could be like you'd tie your reputation to them.

You could have a Boris bike even like that's. On 4k, so bird, you're cringing, you're not cringing. And you keep making noises like, yeah, yeah, I'm guessing that maybe all is not well on the house. Right. Tummy hurts. No, no, I'm afraid not. Most of them went public by SPACs because around the same time that the SPAC craze was happening was when the micro mobility craze happened.

So they sort of crossed over and SPACs or stuff that goes public via SPAC is always like the best companies where lots of due diligence has been done on them, right? You know, it's really funny because that was my understanding when I invested in a lot of them. Is that one of these SPACs? Basically, if you remember, go back to our episode on SPACs if you need to remember what this was, but why this was.

But it's to do with the structure of how it's issued. Is that a SPAC is basically more it's successful for the people that did it if it stays over ten dollars, right? If it goes below because that's the base value of whatever of your share in your SPAC, and so even if it goes down from its peak, if it stays above that and you're sort of you're sort of doing OK, is one of the few that's actually still above ten is a true social, which is very amusing.

Donald Trump is carrying it solely on his shoulders. So you have to the website where where Donald Trump responds to search warrants by federal agents. Yes, basically Donald Trump's business. That's a viable business. It might be the first one he's ever owned. I mean, I'd subscribe to that. Yeah, so it's still like way down from its from its issuing price,

obviously, but it's at twenty three bucks. So, you know, very amusing to me that. Yeah, that legitimately may be the most successful Trump business. Donald Trump finally found his calling. Not as a real estate developer or as an entrepreneur, but as an entertainer, you know, what they want to hear from him. Yeah, they want to hear who's got handwriting like a psycho. Yeah, so my chrome ability bird announced in May twenty twenty one

that it was going to go public by emerging with a SPAC at a valuation of two point three billion dollars. That's a lot of dollars. And in terms of not just valuations, but actual funding that went into huge valuations is about five billion dollars of venture funding that went into scooters, not even just not common age scooters by mostly scooters, right? And so bird shares are now under fifty cents each

or a valuation of only a couple hundred million. Whoops. Whoopsie, Daisy. Oh, it's taking like a ninety percent haircut. Yeah, not great. Oh, that's not that's not ideal. And it says the company founded by former Lyft and Uber executive Travis Vander Zanden. Tell the name, name, name, name a lot.

Yeah, sorry. Yeah, touted itself as a solution for last mile transportation. But the thing is, again, as soon as the economy became real, it had to increase its prices. And so now a ride on a bird scooter is like more comparable to a short Uber ride than like getting on, for example, public transport or a bus. If it's not in the privatized, you know, like a public transport system, certainly in like a big city where like buses are reasonably cheap.

Yeah, so it costs six dollars to ride on a bird for an average average distance, which is much more than taking the subway. How much does it cost to steal one? Oh, that's free. Oh, wow, good. So a little life hack here, a quick tip. If you think it's a bit expensive riding, riding a bird scooter, you can just like why why have they put the price up that high? It doesn't make any sense because it's surely right.

OK, an Uber, you've got to pay for the petrol. You've got to pay for the maintenance of the car. You've got to pay for the driver. This is just it's a fucking scooter. Like if I bought one, it wouldn't cost me six quid to ride it for 20 minutes. Like the electricity in the wear and tear on the scooter, given the cost of these scooters, which is like a couple of hours, it just can't possibly be that much.

Travis Vanders-Anden, are you listening? You've got to price yourself out of the market, Travis. Well, the thing is, it's got to pay for both the guy who keeps the website running. Ah, yes. It's got to pay for the the lobbying various councils. And yeah, and most of all, it's got to pay for Travis Vanden Zanden. So the other thing is, though, like it's this is actually something Dan, Dan Beckner of Bottleman fame.

And I think that's mostly what he's known for. So I was talking to me about about his tour in the Pacific Northwest. And he said that the housing situation has gotten so bad there that there are sort of quite large, sort of almost like Hoovervilles, essentially, that are springing up sort of not just like like enormous sort of populations of unhoused people completely ignored by the state and everything except to brutalize them. But the one common feature of a lot of these places

is enormous piles of just broken and abandoned scooters from a plethora of almost defunct brands. So they're going to be like a sort of a stratum when when all of us get like buried under, you know, layers of our own trash and stuff, there's going to be a distinct sort of line that future future geologists can track and be like, that's, you know, that's like compacted fossilized scooters. This is this thin layer of lithium is what we call the scutacious period.

Yes, the stupid era. There's all this turf shit like, oh, people are going to look at your bones and like think that you're a man. Bullshit, my bones are going to be in the fucking scutacious layer. They're going to think Alice was a scooter. Yeah, exactly. They'll find some guy like underneath the rubble of broken scooters, wearing a BuzzFeed hoodie, like jacking off.

Yeah. And they'll be like, oh, this dude rock. And the thing is, right? Thus, misgendering. They're going to get so good at Q angles in the future. It's going to be a real science. Like that's like, you can get this BuzzFeed hoodie. I do think that about because you know how, like, for example, barely anyone in Ireland gets cremated because they're mostly Catholics.

So they don't believe in it. Whereas like almost everyone on the island of Britain does. Are they like, I killed just one day. I guess everyone on Britain just disappeared. The island sell loads of people. Yeah. So here we go. Right. The other thing, right? Is that is that these these scooters were sort of shitty and terrible.

They were much like Uber for sort of foisted itself on on on Europe, especially these like bird would just foist itself on cities. And again, I looked back at some of the headlines from when bird was, you know, here, right now. Can you say foist a bunch more times? I sure can. Thanks. This is one of the headlines foisted by his own for time from the foist era.

It's his number one, which, of course, is is old timey Brooklyn for first. You can you can ride birds, e-scooters in London starting today. But unfortunately, only in the Olympic Park. You'd basically like trying to induce you to be like, we demand the scooters. Give us Gabbo. Yeah, they want you. They wanted you to go on hunger strike for the scooters. I mean, whilst they didn't have the kind of like animus behind them that attest.

They needed some Norwegians. I mean, I I mean, whilst I think the scooters are kind of stupid and I find it very funny that there's like there's a certain brand of like teen who's like who loves who loves scooters and they're like they're kind of you can tell they're trying to look hard on the scooter, but it's like you're on a scooter. Come on. I don't care how electric that scooter is. You still on a scooter at the end of the day.

But they say it seems it's a shame because it seems like it's the sort of thing that like could be a reasonable idea. You know, like if it were not run by the most insane people, for example, if there weren't seven different competing companies, all it's what it is. It's the scooter industry is the farce of the sort of late 19th century railroad industry, right? Where you had all of these again, like competing. So what you're saying is that we need to nationalize and consolidate

all of these scooters into British scooters. I actually think that would be quite fun because I mean, and then we run that for, you know, of some period of decades. And then eventually the Tories get the idea to privatize it. And we just do all of the old startups again. Yeah, I'll accept that this time, like for what bird is now completely indispensable for our like infrastructure. And yeah, yeah, and also it's like owned by the French nationalized

scooter industry. And it's just called bird to like recall us. Yeah, SDF. Yeah, yeah. Scooter difference. Yeah, Scooter difference. No, so this there was the first one. S-C-O-U with a little hat on it, T-E-R.

The next one. UK laws prevent scooters from being used on roads and pavement. But personally, I would have thought about that before I changed that law. I didn't, because you can never have them on the road. But bird is in the process of changing that. Excuse me. But bird is pushing for legislative change. Again, there is this. I think there is this attitude in in press, once again, of, you know,

your parents don't want you to have sugar smacks or in this case, you know, that society doesn't want you to have a bird scooter that you can ride around in the pavement. They don't want you to scoot. They say no scoot, but we say fuck you. We want to scoot. Yeah. But and, you know, we're not going to. We're not going to. We're not going to have this.

Look, when they say or suggested that all of these sort of shitty, poorly built, like lithium, like every lithium battery per scooter also, for sure. Right. That they're not just just going to pile up as giant heaps of trash and sort of, you know, neglected areas of town. No, no, that's not going to happen. They're going to be a part of the infrastructure. Oopsy-Daisy, we didn't get a monopoly soon enough.

And now we had to jack up our prices before everyone needs us. And now we're basically completely worthless. That's why I say it's the farce to the late 19th century railroad thing. Right. We had all of these different competing organizations that were trying to make themselves basically essential for the new way in which the country moved around. It's just the argument in this case was that we can make ourselves essential for the environmentally friendly way in which the country moves around.

And then just what happened was that nobody doing it really had the guts of like Charles Yerks, like nobody had the soul of a robber baron because they came up during a very sort of, you might say, easy time. And so, you know, they were just sort of assumed that they would be buoyed on to sort of a sort of a sorry Daniel Plain view. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, they the fact is that they that we never got to the point where they actually became essential because it was a stupid idea

that was promulgated by an idiot and then that was propagandized by a bunch of easily led fucking morons that they call themselves the press. That's essentially what has happened. And that's why there are piles of these just lithium batteries that, you know, God knows what people went through to get them out of the ground. Just sitting in the fucking street of use to nobody because someone somewhere realized that they could basically just live their little dream of being a tycoon and that, you know,

that Masayoshi-san would redirect fucking like a giant hose pipe of Saudi oil money to them. I know that Softbank didn't invest in Bird, I don't think it did, at least. Also, someone got mad at you for mispronouncing his name. Apparently, it's sewn like rhymes with bone. So, OK, you're also racist. They didn't invest in Bird, but they invested in one called Tier, which is completely identical, you know. So that's some proportion of the scooters in that in that geologic layer

will be attributed to Mr. Masayoshi and Mr. Masayoshi. And also, if you I don't know if you remember this one, I barely remembered this one, but then I sort of dropped my memory. There was one called Hellbiz that was pretty similar. Hellbiz, yeah, I remember the names. I remember being like, what a stupid name. Yeah, it's publicly listed on the Nasdaq. It's run by an Italian.

And if you remember, they were trying. Yeah, so his name is Lutsa for safe and they were trying. They were trying to combine a scooter company, a media company, because they had the broadcast rights to they like they the broadcast rights to like the Italian series B football. And also, they had. Oh, yes. Cryptocurrency called Hellbiz coin. Hellbiz coin, they weren't prepared to just go Hellcoin.

No, no, that would have been. Hellcoin might have been taken already. It might have confused the Norse. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You don't want to confuse them. You don't, because they get mad when they're confused or they go and hunger strike. The Vikings have gone on hunger strike until their longboats start working again. It's fun.

It's being called upon. So look, we don't we don't have long left, but we there's one crucial point from last night's Tory leadership debate, hustings that I want to point out. I want to talk about we're husting, which is maybe I'm husting. Jerry, I'm husting, which is look, I thought that the the British governing consensus had sort of lost the mandate of heaven. It is proven itself unable or unwilling to not even govern in the interests of capital, just like to govern in a way

that connects with reality to ensure stability and so on. Yeah. Now, the joke that I made is that like it's the fall of the Soviet Union with no Soviet Union. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because in America, they have two parties, one of which is unable and one of which is unwilling. And in Britain, we have two parties that are both unwilling, which is the difference between us and America.

Now, the United Kingdom is a one party state with typical British extravagance. They have no party. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we were going to look when I was going to talk about a few things, some reports from some British like Tory think tanks that I think were very amusing. Yes, but I want to talk about the one policy that matters,

which makes me believe that maybe Liz Truss can re-secure the mandate of heaven for this country where she is finally taking the first step to abolishing police in prisons, which is abolishing the speed limit. That's too fucking right. Brilliant. So like getting getting some fucking like good daffy vote margins from the BMW owners, foreign people.

I think yeah, the M3 Club of Great Britain is coming out for Liz Truss and Bath Party numbers. It is really like the only demographic parties really have left at this point, which is like Range Rover owners who do genuinely believe that they should be allowed to drive 70 miles an hour on country roads, right? Through an insulate Britain like line of protestors. Well, you know, yeah, like the Range Rover mum's demographic,

which I don't know. I mean, like it feels like a bit of a risky option, especially considering that like in a few months time, a lot of those people won't actually be able to use those Range Rovers on account of not being able to afford to pay like for petrol. But I don't know. Like maybe, yeah, the fantasy seems like appealing, I guess, for now. I think it's entertaining that Liz Truss has enough sort of like

ASI psychoinheritism really genuinely do something or propose to do something libertarian, where the Tories have typically not been very libertarian conservatives for the most part. It's not it's not on the level of like American conservatives, self-destructiveness, where they're like, OK, we're going to make everybody pregnant off their meds, and then we're going to make absolutely certain they can buy as many guns as they want, but it's getting there, you know? Yeah, maybe she maybe she maybe she could maybe she could fucking

liberalize the gun laws here, fuck around, see what happens. Propose a maturity based age of consent, you know, like an 11 plus type exam. It's like pedophiles coaching 12 year olds through like a calculus test, like, come on, come on, I'm so horny. You've got to nail this. Yeah, and so, you know, I think it's Liz Truss maybe could save Britain from at least being a dull place in which to experience a very sudden social collapse, because if you've got a car, open up the taps, go for it.

Why not? Yeah, yeah, she used the last of your petrol. That's the only good thing Liz Truss could do. Yeah, well, just looking at like the last rule that is to be fair, pretty reasonable in sort of saving. The numbers are pretty good that the low speed limits in cities save a lot of lives. Yeah, absolutely. Making people drive slower is like a perfect technocratic policy,

because it's something that people hate that you can just impose. And if anyone gets mad, you have the data and you can very smugly point to it and say, this is literally saving children's lives. And it rare is the politician who is psychotic. Children, if I'm permitted to roam this country, you could walk. Yeah, so congratulations to Liz Truss for having the first actual idea of the entire not only leadership conference, but I think last several years.

Last decade, I would say. Beyond the bit, of course, that we've all agreed to forget. And it's going to stimulate the economy, because if she does that, I will be legally forced to go and buy an M4, because what is the point of anything? And of course, I kissed Kirsten and will be left like, you know, he'll have to say, and I'm really inviting Milo just to do this now, that he wishes for it to go further, are welcome.

Liz Truss's attempts to amend the speed limit. I would encourage her to go further by encouraging a voluntary speed for the responsible driver, a suggestion of a good lick on which to drive a vehicle. Oh, oh, oh, sorry. I perfect Prospero idea has sprung into my head fully formed, which is there's no speed limit in Prospero, but there's RFID readers everywhere,

and it always measures how fast you're going that's connected to a cryptocurrency wallet. And then if you draw, the slower you drive, the more cryptocurrency you get. That's basically just black box insurance. You know, you familiar with this? Oh, very much. So we've talked about it on the show before. Yeah, that's basically what it does,

just charges you more for your insurance, like the faster you drive and the faster you take bends and stuff. But what we're basically suggesting is that instead of any regulatory state at all, there's just that insurance. Yeah, yeah, perfect. Sure. Right. Liz Truss, are you listening?

Travis Vanderzanden, are you listening? This is a wellspring of good ideas. It's also about that time for us here at TF Acres. So from our family to yours, thank you very much for listening. Don't forget we have a Patreon. It is $5 a month and you get a second episode every week. Yes, cost of living is going up, but our prices are not. And that's the trash future price lock promise,

because Patreon won't let us change it. We're putting a triple lock on our price. Yeah, we really need more people to sign up in order to keep up with inflation, because we cannot change the price. But of course, there's always, of course, more content. There's Britnology. There's something that Alice and I are cooking up, but we're both easily distractible.

Something that Nate and I are cooking up, but we're also easily distractible. Yeah, it can't seem. There's a lot of new content coming, because the only solution to an economic crisis, as good conservatives, as good libertarians, as we can tell you, is to work harder. And that's what we're doing for you,

is thinking about starting at least two more mini-podcasts. And day by day, at almost Weimar Republic levels, trash future becomes better and better value for your money. So don't come complaining to me about the Patreon, OK? You're basically paying half what you were four years ago for this show. That's right. All right, all right. Well, we'll see you all pretty soon.

And yeah, bye, everyone. Bye.