TRASHFUTURE - Feel Bad Inc. feat Yasha and Fernando

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

We chatted to two riders with the German grocery delivery app Gorillas all about their unionisation drive, and their boss’s strange obsession with fire magic. Also, Maureen Dowd is a tech writer now and she’s been buffaloed by Silicon Valley’s resident “dad CEO” Dara Khosrowshahi. 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 Follow the Gorillas workers here: https://twitter.com/GorillasWorkers https://www.instagram.com/gorillasriderlife2 If you're in Germany, check out the strike fund here: Name: fairsichern community e.V IBAN: DE48430609677918887700 BIC: GENODEM1GLS Verwendungszweck: SPENDEKX6HV9  Donations will be used for: strike pay for workers, covering legal costs, supporting sister struggles and building our community. Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ *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)

Hello and welcome to this free one of trash future, I'm going to keep talking to you. It's the free one. Damn it. The free one. It's the free one. It's the free one. This is Milo Riley and Alice and we are talking about a few things today. I've got a couple of things that have come up in the news.

I love how you like open the podcast or the sort of table of contents like a staff meeting. I really appreciate that. I'm talking about a few things. We're going to talk about someone who has been not refilling the coffee after they have completed a pot. AOB and trashy trashy stands or any other bits? No. Do we have any final bits? No.

We're doing no more bits. It's a bit free podcast. I'm afraid there's been a buried jerk Van der Klurk at sea. No bits, no pulp. It's the trash teacher promise. No fat on this one at all. Just all dry analysis. Welcome to the Financial Times Alphaville podcast.

Yeah, sorry. I feel like the animating energy that keeps this thing moving forward. The Financial Times Alpha guys listen to this. We love you guys. It's my desire. It's Sigmaville now that we ran. The FT Sigmaville is what Sephiroth reads when he wants to find out what to invest in. It's always Shinra.

No, no. So we've got a few things. I've got to talk about some news up front. And then we spoke to two guys from Germany who are working with us. Two guys from Germany. Two guys from Germany. Two brothers. Who are involved in making a reference to that show.

Two guys who are involved in the unionization of gorillas. One of these 10-minute or less horror grocery delivery apps. Not the animal. Not the primate. No, they're not trying to unionize gorillas. It's the baby from five years ago. They really get the strong. More or less.

It would be fun if you were able to mobilize gorillas to help you gain working condition improvements. Cocoa the gorilla would be a fantastic aid to any strike. Well, no, it's called the AMC. It's called the AMC. You can buy it on Robinhood. Speaking of dumb financials, before we get into that, I've got a price update on the most expensive NFT ever sold. If you remember, it went for approximately 70 million.

It was by the digital artist Beeple. Great name. I immediately like him just based on the name alone. So if you all remember, we talked about this a few months ago. When it was sold, it was sold to this guy, MetaCovan, who was like had an NFT fund. It was clearly... The guy's called what?

You don't know. It's internet shit. Don't worry about it. So I have never been on lots of computers. Sorry, do I need a computer for this? So basically, right? If you remember, the guy you bought it bought it for a huge amount of money because he stands to earn a lot of money from NFTs being worth a lot, basically. So it was kind of a bit of a shell game.

It was a shell game on his behalf. Anyway, wouldn't you know it? His token connected to that fund is now worthless. Amazing. It turns out that buying a JPEG for $70 million, or sorry, buying a link to a particular JPEG for $70 million, not a good investment. So you're telling me that the invisible hand has like reasserted itself

and the laws of markets have once again acted rationally. What I love about the invisible hand is it feels like someone else is doing it. That's right. Well, I think what happened with the whole NF... I think we can look... Look, buying and selling never stops. This may go back up again and will look like rubes later, but for now, the whole...

For now, it's a goodbye. If you want to make us... No, legally, you should not buy it. Legally, we bought it. People of color, is that a thing? It is not. Investing heavily in TF Rube on the NASDAQ. That's all right.

Rubecoin. It's the Russian one. Anyway, so it feels as though essentially, yeah, with the economy tried to sit on its hand, on the invisible hand, so it would feel like it was someone else. Turns out, feeling does come back eventually. And the thing is, it's now nothing.

Wait, do you mean I am doing this? Oh, no. That's gross. I'm a guy. This has been made worthless. But I'm gay now? Oh, no. Yeah.

Anyway, I feel like... No, it's me. Okay, I'll wait. Yeah, just fine. Finish the bet. Uh-huh. That's fine. Your hand Van Knob.

Uh-huh. Your hand Van Knob. It's the NFT department. Uh-huh. A very new... I mean, because I have beanie babies lasted longer than this. Yeah, I think they did. Yeah.

I think beanie babies have retained more value long-term than this. What's the most expensive beanie baby? That's my question. Yeah. Well... What beanie baby has sold for the most amount of money? What are those ones that's full of cocaine? Well, there was one that's...

Unique etchstein themed beanie baby. Yeah. Uh, Princess the Bear sold for half a mil, which seems like quaint. There were just crypto punks. Like, it's 16-bit images of guys. It's just a 16-bit image of a person that would sold for well over the most expensive beanie baby. I feel like that means like...

If the scams are going exponentially higher in value, or at least sort of the stupid scams that fall apart right away, as opposed to the other scams that end up getting sort of just kicked down the road by all the zombie credit. Yeah, the things that are going to end up dynamising our economy. Well, someone actually mentioned to me the other day, they brought up to me, if I remembered, crypto kitties. And this is something that doesn't exist. And I was like, fuck, we talked about that years ago, prefiguring this whole thing.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We still have a couple, because some fans gave them to us. And they're now worth a fortune. No. Shit. Immediately closing all of my Zoopla windows. Well, it'll have to...

I'll live to fight another day. Hello, is that the Bentley garage? Yeah. There's been an issue. Look, I'm sorry. The JPEG of a cat just wasn't worth what I thought it would be. It's your cousin Marvin. Marvin Bentley.

Yeah. I have a great idea for a car. Marvin Bentley, plausible England footballer name. Definitely true. Like left wing. No, like mid 2000s, like kind of like sub got like four caps was playing for like Aston Villa. Yeah.

There's like, there's like a crazier in a second half one. Yeah. There's a photo of like Marvin Bentley hugging David Seaman after penalties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Came on to immediately miss a penalty. Yeah.

Well, Marvin Bentley. This is one players who've come on and immediately miss penalty. Some of them are very nice boys who we like very much. Yeah. It's just objectively quite funny to come on immediately in the, in the 90. Well, the 120th minute. I mean, it's, it was a group stage game. I believe England would have been knocked out there in Marvin, Marvin Bentley.

Don't even remember him. Not a, not a fantastic failure. Marvin Bentley. We went out to the last game played by Yugoslavia. Yeah. Plausible. Yeah. I'm going out to D reams.

Things can only get better. I'm going out to Kosovo before Kosovo even existed as a state. But there's one more thing I wanted to talk about before we talk to the two guys from gorillas or from the gorillas union. Is it Marvin Bentley? Marvin Bentley actually has been selected as a. Yeah. I'm thinking we'll be a little bit of Marvin Bentley content.

I think Marvin Bentley is here to stay folks. Anyway, we spoke to Damon all about unionizing. Welcome to nineties trash. Yeah. The by far the most cursed about like trash in the past. Groovy. Yeah. Are we, are we all wearing union jack T shirts?

Oh, very much so. I guess like, cause when we, when stuff in America and Canada rebranded for the nineties, I'll give you an example. What happens is like they, and you can hear the amount of cocaine, right? That I'm about to look that's involved in all of these decisions, right? Which is we're going to bring back the loony tunes as slick foul mouthed superheroes that are been redrawn for the nineties and they're called the lunatics. That's right.

Right. Yeah. We did that kind of thing. You guys over here did a different thing in the nineties, which was. Yeah. We did. We did a deeply cursed cultural ritual known as Brit pop or cool Britannia. Yeah.

Well, you had the mini with the union jack on. But there was a kind of like, I mean, look, as often as people in the, in the labor party, which we will talk about briefly in a moment, if only to gloat, talk about, don't worry. We're gloating. We're gloating. It's just gloating. It's only gloating as much as I'm going to talk about it in seriousness. You're becoming more like Jerry Seinfeld by the week.

That was it. That was a deliberate sign out there. So it's, why can't I gloat? You can gloat. You can gloat. Oh, oh, that's gloating. I couldn't go out with him. I couldn't go out with him.

He was a gloater. We're going a little bit trumpet. We're going to get those routers. Oh, they don't even want you. There's so many fake votes, even without the routers. But if they would just give us those routers and what they would show. Because you think the routers folks. Elaine has like, we're getting so distracted.

But it's me, Julie, a little bit great for some one of the sexiest women who's ever lived. And I'd like to see those routers. If you see, if you see Milo's router, do you know what it would be? It'd be a lot of searches for pictures of Julia Louis-Dreyfus. That's what it would be. So we're going to, we're going to look into that router very strongly. Okay, Julia Louis- I said Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

I mean me, of course, because that is who I am. That's this voice. She has a Trumpy way of talking when she wants to like make a point. Yeah. A little bit. A little bit. Now that, now that you've said that you've ruined Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The thing about George Costanzis, he's pathetic.

When I do an impression of Elaine, I'm always, I'm always thinking of her saying he took it out. Which you haven't gotten to yet in Masters of our Domain, haven't you? No. Okay. Well, I guess, I guess you will eventually. I never take it out personally. Keep it in. Yeah.

Keep it in. I'm always saying keep it in. Okay. Okay. But I feel like the 90s rebrand. Listen to Masters of our Domain. If you think we've talked about Seinfeld too much on this show, listen to Masters of our Domain where we do not talk about something. I'm just enjoying the experience of the listener who is presently going to Google, Mormon Soak.

Oh, that's, that's a cursed thing. I explained that to a girl on a dating app once and she was like, what? Under what possible context? I can't even remember. Immediately. Could you need to have been like, hey, baby, you want to try a Mormon Soak? By the way, I have a blood test. Hey, baby, you want to try a Mormon Soak?

Hey, Greek Style Love. Greek Style Love. No, thank you. I'm here for Utah Style. Yeah. Yeah. But look, what I was saying, they call it Greek Style, but it was invented in Turkey. What I was saying, look, everyone loves the Greek Air Force.

Yeah. In Turkey, in Turkey, it's called a Turkey. Jesus Christ. We're actually going to damage the guerrillas unionization effort. This is good. Look, we all have rain madness. One guy sat in the corner of the union meeting just going yogurt invented in Turkey. Okay.

You are dog people. What I was saying is that, oopsie doopsie. What were you saying? He's out of money. Oh, that's a shame. That's a shame. They shouldn't have bought us. If only they hadn't like, purged all of those members.

I actually, like a lot of people just left voluntarily. Like if you look at, because this has now been dragging on for a while. If you look at the groups that they prescribed, most of those people had already left. They're just preventing them from rejoining. But now they're basically saying, oopsie poopsie, we only have a month of money left. So we're going to have to make a bunch of you all redundant. It might have been a mistake for Keir Starmer to go on TV and say that labor unions were, you know, scum and that he despised them, that he didn't want their money under any circumstances.

That's perfect. That's perfect. That's why you get closest to Partridge scum, subhuman scum. Yeah. It's the, I mean, look, the thing is, I don't know. Look, they basically, what they've done is they've just brought in all of like, they've basically done an expendables of the, of the just most, just some of the most wretched people in Britain.

They've brought everyone back from the nineties. Oh yeah. Jim Davidson. It's fucking great, right? Because you're expected to know who these people are. And so you'll see a bunch of tweets from like labor MPs and like semi-friendly journalists being like, ah, Giles Brunt is back. Serious worries for Johnson.

No, not Giles Brunt. Competency. Competency has returned to the room as Anthony Quim has re-entered the labor part. And it's like, no, these people only remember each other from jerking each other off at parties in their mind. I think someone else was doing that. No one else. Well, exactly.

Nobody else knows who they are, but they're so concerned with their own like self-satisfaction. They're very happy that like, we've got all of these people back and now we're going to take the fight for the Tories. What are the polls? Oh, that's fantastic. I think they should only be allowed to bring back deceased labor MPs from the Blair era. Let's get Robin Cook. Let's get Moe Molem.

Let's get a shadow cabinet that's been entirely necromanced. I think Peter Mandelson, you can include in that for reasons of general volume. Are you basically suggesting that you could replace certain elements of PMQs with like a knock seance? Yeah, I'd like that. If they had like a Ouija board. Robin Cook has knocked three times to indicate that Boris Johnson is a boor without credibility. That's right. Kierstarma convening with the spirits like him in a big robe of the MQs.

Holding hands with Boris Johnson around the candle. And they get the same friendly journalists just sort of crowing approvingly like, oh, he's got him on the ropes now. He's summoned the spirit of Cure Hardy. David Kelly, is that you? You were murdered by hope. PMQs is enough of a like obscene, like incomprehensible ritual that it may as well be because every time you actually watch the damn thing, for some reason, because you have nothing better to do,

you put it on like in the Corbyn years, right? You put it on, you'd see Jeremy Corbyn putting what seems like quite reasonable and like objections to government policy. And then you'd see like a bunch of guys who like write under big caricatures of themselves and Sunday papers going, this was the worst PMQs ever. Corbyn must resign after this disgraceful performance. And then you go back now and you watch this and you see Kierstarma sort of like following sort of the same lines, but worse.

And you look in those same papers and the same people are going magisterial performance. Serious questions for Boris Johnson. And you're just like, this is not, this isn't real. This is fake. This is just a black box that like you extract the conclusion that you want to get out. Yeah. Well, the thing is for all of these like friendly journalists and all these people, and we've said this before, but it's always been about how it makes them feel, right?

And that's why the whole thing begins to take on the feel of a cargo cult. Whatever, just say where we've got like, you know, the coconut headphones and we're building like the tower and we're saying, oh, you know, I don't have any coconut headphones. Roger Gunch is back and he certainly is going to be making waves as the head of communication and strategy. And again, it's one of these guys because the thing is, right? Blairism like had an actual political project and was a response to the changes of the 1990s. Yeah.

Right? It was, yeah. Put Union flags on clothing. Yeah. And like the thing is those conditions have changed and the entire struggle. Yeah. Because it's not cool. The entire struggle of just got had a call from Keir Starman.

He's told me the nineties are back and that I have to stop being a renowned cosmologist and go back to playing the keyboard in a band called D-Ring. But we talk about it being a cargo cult because they're it's it's sort of such cart before the horse reasoning. It's like, well, if we can, there's several levels here, right? Level one is like, well, what? You're just going to try to do the same stuff now with the same band and we can just make it the nineties again. Yeah. Like the tactics aren't working.

But what if we brought the guys back? Yeah. Maybe the guys will have some ideas. And like the thing is, if you're a social democratic party in the 1990s, you probably were or vaguely, right? You probably were panicking because history has ended. The Soviet Union is gone. The Union flag is fucking everywhere and everyone's loving, grooving to the sounds of blur. And the third way, the reason like it sort of emerged everywhere all over the place at the same time

is that that was the that was kind of the way that you respond to that is you're like, well, okay, well, we accept all of this. We're just going to try to be nice about it and it works because you it only works if you have a once in a generation charismatic politician, a bill, a fucking Obama that works if it's him. And then obvious and then the whole job, right? I think there's someone you're forgetting the whole job, the whole job of the of these guys now. They succeeded in a time. They came of age in the seventies, right?

Hang on. Who came of age? But these if you come of age in the seventies in the eighties, your experience is of is of humiliation and apology constantly, right? That's what you do because because you your story that gets accepted is that the Union not not a global energy crisis, but the unions basically brought the world to its knees by being like slightly too greedy and they're being one too many libraries or whatever. Yeah, but body is being unburied, garbage piling up in the streets.

If you actually there's a few things, right? And then the the fix to that the sort of financialization of everything that turns out to just be like, yeah, like this sort of tape and tape and gum more or less to patching everything over. It works for a while. It falls apart because it's a flashy a flashy, but ultimately low quality way to run a society. But you your whole experiences of that working and your whole the whole point is to pretend that 2008 never happened and that you can just sort of you can keep responding to all of those other things. Wait, what happened in 2008?

Anyway, one second, I'm just going to check my best stock. But also like if you think we've this is something I think it's worth remembering. Actually look actually look at the crashes, the different crashes and the sizes of the crashes in 79 and 2008. One is not very big in comparison to the now part of that is because the economy keeps growing and all of this. Like it's not you can't compare apples and it's not apples and apples, but the it's not as though that disturbance Someone threw stones at those. That's right. Yeah, it would be a chart crime to be like this number bigger than that number, therefore this less bad.

But like growth got back. It got back pretty quickly just as it did after 2008. And the whole project of just trying to pretend that these things never happened and that these changes never occurred is one that I mean, I'm very excited to see how it's going to do. Especially now that we have, you know, Bertram Crump back as head of. They appointed their new house. I love Bertram Crump. Very, very buttery staircase.

One of the if you were there now actually even they're even picking people who are proven losers, right? Of course, because they're proven losers. They are the haters and losers. Can I remember them on 9-11? If you remember Harriet Harman's old chief of staff has actually rejoined. If I remember Harriet Harman's old chief of what the fuck kind of loser do you take me for that? I would remember Harriet Harman. I barely remember Harriet Harman coming back wouldn't really be much.

If you remember her old chief of chief of staff. Well, when Harriet Harman was the interim leader, she commissioned a report on the. Her main recommendation was to commission a report on labor and government by a Tory. Not an interim leader. But it was the idea was to commission a Tory to write the report on the performance of the Labour Party. So they know what to apologize for. They're such rooves. Losers.

Roob coin. It is really Roob coin. I'm very excited to see them all in there. None of these people in the Conservative Party could have an ideological axe to grind against we in the Labour Party. So we can trust them to be independent arbiters over what we shouldn't shouldn't apologize for. I mean, like just the final thing right is all of this is culminated basically in. It essentially is an organization that is seems pretty broken from the outside that is basically doing to its own staff. By the way, it's staff, many of whom may have gone to bat for this kind of outcome, let's say, is giving all of its staff basically firing and rehiring them under insecure contracts.

And essentially trying to, you know, completely downsize. Now, I think if you wanted to say, re-engineer an organization and retool it to your own ends, then create and just saying there's a financial crisis and we have to clean house is a great way to do that. So I don't take any of these people at their word, but boy is an organization I like to see flail. So proud we are all of that. Incredible stuff. Anyway, if we want to talk, though, about some of what's actually going on in actual efforts to improve actual working conditions for actual workers, then I suggest we throw to ourselves in the past to speak to the guys unionizing gorillas. Yeah.

Hey everybody, we are just here for our segment where we are talking to Yasha and Fernando from the report to the workers in Germany who are organizing the gorillas food delivery company. Yasha, Fernando, how's it going? Yeah. Pretty good. It's been a long day. All good. So, look, I mean, this is, it's part of like, I'd say, a rising trend, right? Of gig economy workers who are unionizing, working together to try to take the fight up against the, frankly, insane people who open a lot of these businesses.

So how have your experiences been so far, starting the union in gorillas? It's been a long ride. We've been since like, since early February, I joined gorillas end of January. So it's basically two weeks in and we start organizing there. It hasn't been easy. There's been lots of ups and downs. But in the last month, I'd say it's been a little bit too much ups for us. We weren't ready for all this attention that we started getting about a month ago.

It's been pretty crazy since then. Yeah. Yeah. So just a little bit of background on this, right? Gorillas is one of several companies that have all popped up kind of all at once. Other similar companies, at least in the UK, are called Getter, Deja, Weezy, Zap, Fancy. Okay. At least two of these you've made up.

Fancy is the one that only delivers to Riley. It's just the bounty of the sea. That's all they deliver. It's only oysters. Yeah. These are all basically just rejected panels from 1960s Batman comic books. Yeah. Very Audemann Appear company.

Biff, Pow and Kaplanla. Yeah. Ooh, I'm ordering some detergent from Biff. Yeah. That's actually a plausible British detergent. Yeah. And what all these companies have in common, they all were started very recently and they all promised something like delivering you a full load of groceries, food.

Delivering you a full load. Yeah. Food, detergent, so whatever you need in 10 minutes. That seems to me very far-fetched. How is that possible? I look to you guys, Yasha and Fernando. How do they manage 10-minute delivery? Yasha, you want to answer?

Yeah, thanks. Go ahead. Well, to be honest, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's because we are working there and we are working really hard because don't stop working. They are like going crazy with this sound when the new order comes and they must feel everything in less than one minute. Otherwise they might be punished, at least in my warehouse. Every week they have a meeting where they can tell you how fast you are when you are

picking and also we must work on a really, really big pressure because we only have 10 minutes to deliver and sometimes the backpacks are really, really heavy. And presumably that 10 minutes, does that include like the time it takes to pick the stock as well? I think it starts to finish. You hit the button, you have your oysters or whatever in 10 minutes. Yeah, is that correct? Honestly, it's not really clear for us how the whole thing works.

Sometimes, I think it has come to our attention that actually what happens is that before the customer even does the payment, goes through the payment that the order is already ready because I think as the customer is choosing the product, the order is being prepared. That's one theory. But now we don't really know. But the thing is also we should take into account that these dark stores or as gorillas prefer to call them warehouses, which is not, it's not really a warehouse. I mean, it's like everything's really crammed together and you use the bathroom sink as

the kitchen sink and the toilet as the bathroom sink. I don't know. They're all really like, we don't really go far away from there. It's not like takeaway or something where we deliver around the city. There's a radius that keeps on expanding, unfortunately, to which we deliver. We know the area pretty well where we are. Yeah, that makes it possible, especially where we work, it's all downhill, so it's pretty easy. It's downhill in both directions somehow.

Thank goodness. We've seen this before with food delivery where we've had dark kitchens. This is similar to that. It's a dark grocery store. Well, some are literally dark. Oh, perfect. The Burgon grocery store. Sorry, Europeans.

So basically, this company, and this is just one of gorillas, is just one of these companies that has taken basically this business model, which is to hyper exploit, as we've been talking about, just some of the ways by making conditions poor, by making the work sort of extremely pressed and difficult and so on. They've used that to drive evaluation now over a billion dollars. And again, they're sort of taking advantage of those trends where prime real estate in cities is becoming available, and there are, you sort of go ahead, Alice. It's so great that you could get like millions of dollars worth of funding off of the principle that, well, if it takes one man an hour to dig a hole, then it'll take 60 men one minute to dig that hole.

That's right. And like this, we sort of talked about this sort of coming, right? Where this kind of economy, where it makes this labor invisible by putting a glossy app on it, is basically just going to get more and more intense. And one of the things you guys have talked about, right, is one of the things that you're thinking about is like, well, how does it work? How does the logic work? And how have you guys, as a gig union, confronted the fact that the app developer doesn't want you to know really how the app works? I don't know.

We don't really seem to care about how the app works. On an actual day-to-day basis, if you were, if you would happen to stumble upon one of these warehouses and would look inside, you'd realize that the app is kind of not that important, that actually everything, I mean, if we didn't have an app and people were just calling in and saying, hey, I need this, this, this, it would all just work the same way, because apart from the ordering party, there's literally no technology involved. Right, right. It's a technology company.

Because the app is so that all the venture cap guys go like, ooh, cool. It's on the computer. Yeah, I think it's another example of taking labor and tricking people, or tricking the end consumer into thinking it and the investor, and to be like, ooh, this is a high-tech company. And it's like, no, the app is barely that important. It is literally about having this flexible, exploitable labor pool and all of these buildings that no one knows. Hey, remember that restaurant you used to like?

Sorry, it's a dark store now. Well, and in fact, that was a very Freudian slip, confusing the investor and the end consumer, because as we know with these companies, the end consumer is the investor. That's right. Because actually one of my friends works in tech, and so he's always abreast of whatever the scam going is. And he knows that at the moment, all of these delivery grocery companies are giving you like 60% off your first order. So he's been making like one order from each company and ordering like ludicrously expensive shit, and there's been like living like a king.

And I'm like, yeah, because this isn't a business about actually making money from customers. It's about a business about convincing investors to go like, ooh. Yeah, I mean, it's telling, right, that one of the... They're dumping money into subsidizing as big and frequent orders as they can, and just turning to you guys and being like, well, I hope you love cycling, basically. Yeah. Is that sort of what you see as the case actually working there? I think that is the case that, I don't know, the CEO lives in Jupiter or something like that,

and he thinks that we are doing this because we love cycling, but at the end we just got this... It's not even, well, just a minimum weight, no? So I don't know. It's crazy. Yeah. I think in the job description, it should be rather not that you just like cycling, but you like cycling with 20 kilograms on your back.

Exactly. Yeah, that's what they don't say. Yeah, because you're hard. It's about being like an army guy. You could get management consultants doing this in their spare time if you convinced them that it was like a cool guy thing to do. Oh, yeah. Like, in the blistering heat, 20 kilos on your back.

Are you tough enough? Yeah. So you're just basically... It's a tough mother. Yeah, that's right. It's an obstacle run. Yeah, that's right. They're all just running, not even bikes.

No, so, I mean, it's not difficult to see, right? Why, under these conditions, like, workers are organizing. I mean, before we sort of go into, like, how Gorillaz has responded, I just want to know, like, what are some of the things that the... Well, of the things that you're comfortable talking about publicly, what are some of the things that we're trying to get? I think it's quite easy. We just want better working conditions.

That's all. At the end, we are not asking for anything crazy. We just want better working conditions. Like, a few weeks ago, at one of the protests that we had in front of the headquarters, that's like a regular issue that we have every single month. Like, people don't get their full pay. Like, there's always money missing. And, yeah, that's the most recurring issue that we have.

But it's, like, interlaced with a lot of other issues. And, like, we came up with this demand list. We made an assembly there at the protests. Like, there was, like, 50, 60 writers, pickers, etc. And we came up with these, like, 19 demands. And when we show these demands to people who have, like, no idea about, like, who are not on the inside or on the outside, like, everyone's like, yeah, these are, like, really standard things.

So, like, we're saying that, like, Gorillaz fulfilled this demand so that we could have, like, the minimum bearable working conditions in the company. Yeah, there's nothing special. Like, rain gear. Like, it's like, we're employees. We're not freelancers or anything here. They have to provide us all equipment, shoes. We learned that a few months ago, like, work phones.

I mean, we shouldn't have to, like, have some, like, drunk customers calling us the next day. And, like, I don't know, like, molesting us on the phone or something. This happens, too. Like, people, like, sometimes there's discrepancies in the wages. Like, some of us are getting 12 years an hour who started earlier. Others who started more recently are getting 10, 50, like, sexual harassment at the workplace, discrimination. It goes on and on, actually. But all of these things are, like, really, really, really basic.

It is really, it is, you're just, it's your basically say if I understand it right. You're saying, we already have these rights. Yeah. Please act accordingly. Yeah. Something we've noticed a lot dealing with, like, these kind of, like, app-based jobs where, in this sense, where you're, like, you're doing something, was being ordered by a customer by, like, Uber or delivering food or whatever it might be.

And essentially, these companies are performing a kind of trick where they're sort of circumventing all previous, like, labour regulation. And so you get these kind of, like, surreal things, like when they were trying to force Uber to pay the minimum wage in London. They're like, we can't pay the minimum wage. That'll destroy our business. Like, yeah, but everyone else does. Like, what the fuck?

Like, hang on. No, everyone else has been doing this for years. And the thing is, right, in order to try to keep... Well, there's a few peculiarities, right? One of them is that Germany has... Germany, especially, has, like, a weird... Like, at the highest levels, the span of government and stuff, has a weird insecurity about its tech sector not being very good,

which is why, like, they allowed wire cards to get away with, but they got away with for so long. Yeah. And all this. Like, because they were like, no, it's... And so Germany is, like, is gonna be pretty... is generally without, like, actual pressure and a popular movement. I imagine we'd be pretty ready to look the other way

because they'd be like, oh, gorillas, it's our unicorn. We lost wire card. We have gorillas now. We matter on the world stage as a tech... as a tech hub. I mean, I don't know if you guys have sort of seen that end of it at all, but from looking at Germany, that's kind of how I see it. Yeah, I mean, like, there's been a lot of startups popping up here in the last 10 years,

which have just, like, built new cities within the city. Like, like, Zalando has, like, a university-sized campus right in the center. Like, the touristic area here, right across from the wall or whatever's left of the wall. But honestly, like, I'm personally kind of outside of this tech sector. I mean, I think you realized when I couldn't get the earphones working for a while. Oh, lots of them can't. Don't worry about that. Yeah.

If you're two in the tech sector, then you have a guy to get the earphones working. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the rules of working in tech is you have to be very stupid. Yeah, oh, that's one of the key things. But so let's talk a little bit about how Gorillaz has been responding, right? They've done the usual PR bullshit where the CEO, a guy called Kagan Sumer, has just said, oh, yeah, he just loves cycling.

So he wanted to share cycling with others. That's so generous of him. Oh, that's cool. He just wants to share cycling with others in a way that makes him personally a billionaire. Yeah. In a lot of ways, being a delivery rider is kind of like doing the tour de France, but in a very condensed area. And that's how you should think of it.

Yeah, a woman hops out in front of you with a sign. Yeah. Yeah, it says, please bring me my wine. And in response to the union, they've said, again, like this is kind of goes back to the theme of what you were talking about, which is we're just demanding our literal actual legal rights. Gorillaz has said, well, we support the idea of a workers council. Such as employees interests being represented on the board, basically, right?

But we know, like, that's kind of bullshit, right? That's what they need to say. Otherwise, we would get in trouble. I mean, it's pure PR. Yeah. Well, and also, isn't that a legal requirement in Germany to have worker representation on the board anyway? Yes.

Yeah. We will obey the law. Now, they have representation on the board if they go public, like if they do like an IPO or something. Yeah. But like a workers council is not exactly workers representation on the board. It's like what Germany came up with at the time and where they were like shifting towards corporatism

back like in the Weimar Republic, which is basically like, and it's like kind of similar to what a union is. But the idea was actually to make unions irrelevant back in the day. Like a workers council consists of workers in the company who are basically distancing themselves from like the workers. Like basically they get like new powers. They have the right to information within the company. They have the right to implement some changes.

And basically like if they go to court, the company has to pay for the costs of both like their own legal costs and also those of the workers council. Like the workers council doesn't really get like any budget or anything, but like anything they need the company has to like bring them, like put it like at their feet, you know? It's kind of a complicated legal thing that exists like in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands too, I think.

But it's also like it's like a watchdog over the company. It has like some like they have, for example, like the ability, like the legal right to check schedules, like make sure the schedules are according to what the workers want or to enforce equal pay for the same work. But it's there is no membership. There is no like at the same time when Germany introduced workers councils, they made a union membership and individual choice.

So it's kind of like two fronts here. Like seeing off the pit because it's seeing off the potential power of the union realistically, right? So it's like it's and I'd imagine, right? If Gorilla's this company is already kind of trying to do that trick where it says we're just a technology company. We're just an app, you know, so we're going to kind of circumvent obeying the literal law, right?

Are we saying the workers council probably isn't enough to basically bring them to heal? It sounds like having work prefects. That's what it sounds like. Do we think like the reason I'm sort of asking you this is are we going for a union instead of workers council or thinking of the workers council is not enough basically? That's a hard question.

We're actually going for both where we consider the workers council being a tool to organize people. But at the same time, like the workers council, one thing that it lacks is like the right to call for strikes or something. Right. A lot of those lines. So workers council does have some advantages. Like, like you can actually reach out to everyone working at Gorilla's.

And but yeah, there's a lot of disadvantages too. But on that regard, I actually want to mention something else. Like the day I think we saw, we watched like some sort of video. Like there's this company called different. It's like the just eat whatever takeaway. I don't know what they're called in the UK. Or I think you have them to the orange people. Just eat a meal.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Like there was like the company also like they got a workers council in a few cities back in the day, like a few years ago. But then and like they were putting, of course, like really good PR out and everything. But I think there was like some artist collective or something

that called the company pretending to be a politician or like some minister of something and they like they want to talk to the company. And they're like and the company and I think it was like some of the management people like, yeah, we need to get rid of these workers councils. Yeah. We need to get rid of the minimum wage to them and they put that out online. So like it's for everyone to see. Yeah.

Two faces to the company after all. It's one of these things, right? Where if the power of a union is the power comes from the union and the power that the worker has over the labor. If something is like enshrined in law that will this council has to be at this company and so on, that's power that's given to you from the state and it can be taken away. You can't take away the union because that's literally the people who do the thing.

Yeah. So I want to just sort of talk about one more thing, which is an email you guys would have received. An email from Kagan Sumer himself, the big man. Does it include the phrase with more of a family? Oh, it's much stranger than that. This segment comes in two pieces, right? The first piece, the reasons why guerrillas is terrible, right?

That's obvious. We've covered that. The second one is why it's also very weird. Yes, it's okay. This is clearly, it is a deeply strange man. Because it's a company run by apes sitting at typewriters. That's right. They coded that app and then circumvent it all.

They call it feel good incorporated. So saving that one for about 20 minutes. He doesn't get that joke because it's about music with lyrics in it. Yeah. I wouldn't know about it. Yeah. So this is the email that was sent to you guys from your boss, your CEO, Mr. Kagan Sumer.

I share one link. The title, guerrillas falling into the inexperience of CEO Kagan Sumer. We all need to read this. We all need to reflect on this. It's a perfect example of what I tell you. Focus on attraction and not distraction. Okay. All right.

This is quite like Alan Johnson so far. Yeah. He's all the secret. Yeah. So it's basically this much worse. It's worse as I go on. The funny thing is they are correct on one point. I am inexperienced.

I'm inexperienced to build something that has never been built before. And I love it. And I love to create the path together with you. So I feel like this, the first bit of this feels like it was written in a smoking area at like four in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like a piled up cult leader.

Yeah. Yeah. Would you like some of this Kool-Aid? It was delivered here in 10 minutes. It says, there's a Turkish saying, if a tree gives apples, people throw stones to get the apples down. And now I'm always saying this. It's making a great point about I should never listen to the Turkish.

And now me as a leader and we as a team need to be aware that we give apples. We give damn beautiful, tasty, organic apples. Oh, now it's kind of, it's getting almost Trump. Like all cave Johnson. Yeah. The lemons. I mean, so when you were received, when you guys got this email, this strange email that later on says, if I know one thing in life, there are two elements of charisma.

One is ghost and one is flame. How did you react? Excuse me. It's like pickup artists at the end. This guy has got the keys to the VIP. Yeah. He's the CEO. He's mystery from the pickup artist.

That's right. So how do you guys react to receiving this strange email? Well, I'm part of the Gorilla Rider Life crew as well. And we were laughing all the time and thinking about the memes that we were producing with that ghost and flame thing. Because I mean, it's a pickup artist thing. And we were like, we couldn't believe that it was this. I mean, he's a CEO of Gorilla's talking about apples, then flame, then a ghost, and it doesn't

make sense at all. So we were laughing very loud that evening. I love that. He basically feels like it feels like some pattern you learn on a forum that gets shut down by the government. Yeah. No, I think the worst part about all of this is that like, I think the only people that were excluded from receiving this email were writers.

So like actually the writers did not even get that email. Like people from like other parts of the company were like showing it to us. So I guess he didn't feel safe sending it to us, but somehow it got to us anyways. You know, like it shows already something, you know. It wasn't too good to not be shared, no? He knew you'd make fun of it. Yeah. Well, he knew you'd get too powerful once you knew that ghost and flame trick.

Yeah. You might start throwing rocks at his apples. Yeah. Well, he actually explains this. Ghost is the ideal state when distraction comes along. Okay. No, he knew what it is. This is the twins from the second Matrix movie.

Yeah. He's like, I am a ghost. Yeah. I'm a ghost and I'm getting distracted, but it creates something else. It lights the flame inside. Flame is attraction. I hope you're all taking notes by the way. Ghost and flame.

The flame is when I'm eating pussy. Anyway, flame is when you get into a room and you own the room. Flame is a relentless drive for attraction. Jeez. This is just pick up. It sounds like the website of a gay club. Flame is dedication. Flame is personality.

I should not take that back. It sounds like the copy of the swing is club. Yes. That's what it sounds like. Flame is personality. Ladies, 20 pounds. Yeah. 150 pounds.

Exactly. It's not revenue or whatsoever, but it's about having a meaning and a purpose. So now team, now team. So he counted it all. Join me. He typed it all. Yeah. This is line break.

So now team in all camps. Line break. This, this letter is so many things to so many people, but to me, it's also a bit like Charlie and it's always sunny in Philadelphia trying to write next six months. We need to be flowing between the two states of charisma ghost and flame. I'm always flowing between ghost and flame states. Yeah. How is, how is this real?

I like, I, I, this happens to me a lot on this podcast, but I just, we regularly, we have to read things that have been written by people who have huge amounts of money and you're reading them and being like, dude, what? Like what do you want now? Is this a bit? Is this a PSR field? Which sketch that escaped the containment field? I think one of the, one of the many reasons that I think unionization of this sector is

important is that these idiots cannot be allowed to control the economy. Yeah. They must be strong. If you write something like that, you shouldn't be able to own it. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, if you take him to court, he's just going to get off on the grounds of being the stupidest man who has ever lived.

And to be fair, you'd have to hand it to the judge on that. It's the perfect defense. Yeah. But I'm sort of noting that we're sort of coming up on, on the half hour here. Because before we end, I just want to ask, like, is there anything that people in Germany or in Europe or the world more broadly can do to support guerrillas while you guys are unionizing? Yeah.

Well, there's a lot of things can be done. I mean, people could be putting pressure on the company like, I don't know, making sure, well, first of all, the main thing, the main thing everyone needs to do to look like, I don't know how it is in London, but here, like the typical customer is someone who lives in the fifth floor without an elevator. Sometimes even the sixth floor, we had one case, it was the 18th floor without an elevator. And Jesus. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And these people, like, then you don't understand that we're carrying like a lot of weight that they should maybe like come down halfway to meet us. And also, no online tips, please, no online tips, tip and cash, because yeah, online tips, they come with a paycheck at the end of the month, or maybe not even. Sometimes we're not as lucky. Yeah, tipping in cash is key because also sometimes we've had experiences and we're

trying to figure this out, but there's no way to figure it out. There's this thing where assuming it's called tip theft, where some algorithm malfunctions or someone makes sure that the algorithm malfunctions and people don't get their full online tips even like, so people are like calculating, hey, how much did you give me two euros? Okay, good. I'm going to add it to my like Excel sheet or something because like there's no way to trust this company with anything. Yeah.

Yeah. Apart from that, something that can be done, which is what can be pretty significant is, well, first of all, we have a Twitter account. We also have Gorilla's Rider Life on Instagram, which does really good memes. Yeah. And yeah, nicer for the public at least. And apart from that, we also have, we also created a strike fund. Perfect.

Yeah. There's a, it's German E-bond and everything. It's really like German, but it's working out. So we're gathering money. Like for example, whenever we do a strike so that we can pay the workers their tips or something or if like workers have like some legal needs or stuff that needs to be solved quickly that we can, so that we can manage it. So it's pretty good to contribute to that.

And yeah, put pressure on the company in any way you want to, you know, there's 1000 ways and I would prefer not to mention any single one of them. Yeah. But bully them on Twitter about the ghost flame thing. Please email that man about the ghost and flame thing and demand to explain it to you. Ask him why he's ripping off the movie Hell Rider. Tip him over the edge. I think a Hell Rider, the Nicholas Cage one.

Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider. That's the one. Negative Ghost Rider. The pattern is full. Hell Rider. Shut up. A Riley Quinn movie.

I only know the things that I know. I don't know all the other stuff. That's why they call me Hell Rider. So we're going to include the links. 10 minutes to get to hell. Look, we're going to include all of those links. We're going to include the links to the meme pages. We're going to include the links to the strike fund.

And yeah, we'll also include the Twitter and all this. But guys, Ashley, Fernando, thank you very much for coming and talking to us about this day. It's very interesting. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pretty good laugh for us too. You know, like to get another perspective on the ghost and flame thing and mostly the

ghost and flame thing actually. We're always happy to offer that. We're always happy to talk ghost and flame. Anyway, I have to go deliver an innocent smoothie to pandemonium. Wow. Thanks us from the past. What an enlightening interview. Yeah.

Paul Stalis. Yeah. I think we all sound very handsome and beautiful. But before we end, I wanted to... I've been reading a little bit. Doing a little bit of reading. Wow. I've been reading The Grey Lady, as a matter of fact.

The paper of record. The magazine for Guilford enthusiasm. That's right. I've been reading that magazine. And wouldn't you know it? Maureen Dowd, famous for basic... Like going to Colorado, whiting and then demanding that we'd be made illegal again. Ah.

Yeah. She ate like a bunch of edibles to test out the concept of legal weed and then had to lie down in a dark hotel room for two days and then came out of it to write the art school. Yeah. We should be illegal. I took too much weed chocolate last night because I first of all wanted to sleep and also like I've watched all of the TV on all the streaming services to the extent where all that was left was season two of Amazon Prime's Jack Ryan and it's not good.

And I was like, I'm going to need to be really stoned to get through this. Out of television. And yeah, it's very bad. It's all about Venezuela. It's almost good. It's so bad. It's like it's wrapping around into like the plot makes so little sense that it is kind of yeah.

And then this morning I was like still in a like hallucinatory state where like I dreamt that I'd woken up and I was like doing shit. And then I was like, well, I don't need to worry about these alarms then. And then I actually woke up and I was like, oh, fuck. Yeah. Well, I was an illusion. Yes. Again, I've been foiled by my own brain.

Yeah. Anyway, Maureen dad, let's just say is a columnist who frequently finds herself at the mercy of her own mind. Okay. Who has decided to write a profile of Dara Kazar Shahi, who is the new Uber CEO. And yeah, the sensible one. The adult in the room after Travis Kalanik. He is going through the company and he is picking up all the red cups and he is putting

all of those goofuses in Robot House on double secret probation. So this is kind of like Kazar Shahi's own story as to why he's a good CEO for Uber. Now, purely from the perspective of is this a functional organization, you might say, well, if there was to be sort of an effective manager here who is turning the company around and all this, probably they wouldn't be experiencing record staff turnover at the moment, but they are. Yeah. It's interesting.

Listen, he's not like he's different from the last guy, even though he's acting the same, if not worse. Yeah. Because like because he's old, he went to the beach that makes you old and that means he's responsible. That's right. It's basically right. Right.

Is Dowd is interviewing Kazar Shahi and is basically, we'll see this is sort of. Like, yeah, you got me at home. I need to make double sure it should be illegal. It is essentially just what we're seeing is someone who's doing exactly what our columnists of the New York Times should do when talking to a titan of industry, which is completely by everything they say at surface value and fail to say, engage me kind of critical fact. I guess again, if they engage your critical faculty when talking to Dara Kazar Shahi, they wouldn't be writing for the New York Times.

No, of course not. No. So let's let's talk about it. I was just cutting into a juicy piece of steak that the chief executive of Uber, Dara Kazar Shahi had grilled and plopped onto my plate when one of his eight year old twin boys. This is this writing is. Plopped it. Plopped it.

Plopped it. It's an appetizing plop of a bit of steak. Plop. Yeah. I love I love to eat food that's plopped. Yeah, that's right. When one of his eight year old twin boys asked me, who was your worst interview and who was your best?

I replied. I think that the two boys said this in exact chorus. Oh, like in the shining. Yeah, exactly. That's what his children like. Who was your worst interview and who was your best? So I replied. Kevin Costner was one of my least favorite because he was at the height of his fame and

acting very sniffy. The idea of arrogant Kevin Costner is so funny to me. Kevin Costner is like, I'm the hottest man alive and this will never change. Tom Ford and Elon Musk were two of the most fun because I enjoy writing about operatic characters without of this world proclivities. So right away, she's basically, she's giving away the game here, which is I love jingling keys, jingle keys in front of me and I will write whatever you want. Yeah.

I love, I love a wet steak and I love, I love being distracted. Yeah. Mr. Say, what's that over there? Mr. Is it, is it perhaps a very wet steak? Because that's the one thing that could interest me. No, sorry.

I will not just eat anything that gets plopped onto my plate. Thank you very much. Oh, no, no, it has to be, it has to be a fully like liquid eyes. It needs, it's true. So, uh, Mr. Cause Rasha, his wife, Sydney Shapiro, looked across the kitchen table at her husband with a sultry Lauren Bacall smile. These people are all so in love with their own writing to pick on a woman who's been

dead for that long. No one's been sultry ever since then. Last sultry. And who is therefore most readily remembered as an extremely old woman? That's how I remember. And like that, that, that makes, that makes dark cause Rasha, he clock Gable. I guess. Gable of Uber.

And also by the way, like just so you know, right? Like none of these, the conditions for drivers, for example, have not improved under cause Rasha. His wife's a fucking dime piece apparently. His wife, his wife is as hot as this dead lady. Yeah. His wife is a hot skeleton. Yeah.

Hold on a second. What was his wife's name? Sydney Shapiro. Sydney Shapiro. And Shapiro's other hot sister. We're going to, we're going to investigate this. You need to up your eccentricity. She said teasingly.

His 16 year old son jumped in. My dad's a lizard person. He said, which is. Yeah. I've been watching videos by this guy called David Ike. And apparently. But also like, I think, um, the team just said he'd found a random post on the internet about a conspiracy theory contending that his father, Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush,

and Bob Hope are all lizard people. So that is actually what happened. Oh, but I really needed an Oxford comma. His father, Queen Elizabeth. They're reptilian aliens. They can shape shift and control the world. Just know that if you pour water on him, he will melt. So again, like, uh, this is like, whoa, the crazy big, this big CEO as a normal family.

This is the focus of what I'm talking about. My kids are being radicalized by anti semites too. If you pour water on him off of this steak, he's been cooking. Yeah. That's right. Basically, right? He says, uh, Mr. Cause Rasha, he is weirdly normal for Silicon Valley. He's not growing in the Andrithal beard, living off salt juice or somewhere in outer space,

but rather any time somebody has this article written about them, like, oh, he's so normal. He's not weird. They are the weirdest motherfucker in the world. And we're going to return to this in like 15 years time. Uh, when some news emerges that makes this article very funny in hindsight, that's my wager. Oh yeah. I mean, look, there's some stuff that comes up later in the article that makes it seem very weird to have this in hindsight.

When I first met this guy, I had to ask him, what is a piss dungeon? But also like, do you feel like, like we almost like, I think this happens as it happens in truth because Silicon Valley is a very sort of poisonous place to live and work. Right. You ask the people we've talked to are like left that culture now, even like, like talking to like Jason, uh, who was on last week's bonus episode about this. Uh, you know, you, you can tell it's very toxic. Even just the geographical place.

I've been there. It's insane. But if you are a, if you are a mainstream sort of person who's trying to write about this stuff, right? If you are a Maureen doubt, then what you essentially see is you see this sort of pantomime villainy of Silicon Valley's individual meanness in the forms of Uber's frat bro culture or, or, or like, or the fact, yeah, they genuinely are like repugnantly like prejudiced in awful places.

I don't have to pledge to get a job at Uber. You see, you see that. And, but then you'll see someone who'll come in and change the aesthetics. You just sort of, you're looking at the other bit of the puppet show and you sort of, you completely just, you know, relinquish your critical faculties and you say, well, the good puppet one, thank God. Uh, and then you leave the puppet show having clapped like a moronic trained seal. We have, we have a good CEO now.

Thank good. We had the, we got rid of the bad one who was, who was bro and we have the new one in who's dad. Yeah. Well, the thing with Uber is they were just a few bad daddy, you know, and, uh, and, right. And there's the, they, this is, this is a company that like while, while cause Rashadi was in charge currently right now, as recently as this year, right, has, um, not only been like,

has been sort of shown to be systematically underpaying Uber eats, like bicyclists and drivers and stuff, but pressures Google to take down apps from their app store that show drivers if they're being systematically underpaid. Like if you actually care about the actual, if the actual experience of the actual people working there, which again, if you write for the New York times, you manifestly don't. Yeah. Uh, then you do not, you'll see right past the puppet show. But what, what this article is all about is someone, is someone basically going to a punch

in Judy show and then being like, well, those people are awfully small. This is, this is someone who is like a punch in Judy show and cancelling him for being as well. This is, this is someone sitting in Plato's cave complaining that the wrong shadow is winning. Yeah. You know, um, and so this is, this is, this is, she says, taking on one of the worst cleanup jobs in the history of American capitalism at one of the most low companies and refusing

to do any of it. Yeah. Yeah. He, he kept, he clean. Yeah. That's how you do a cleanup job is you show up, open the door, announce that you're there to clean it up, have an article written about how you're cleaning it up and, um, yeah. Well, even just like the, the literally even bothering to mention like a frat bro culture

Uber or whatever, just suggests that like, well, the most important thing about the way this big company, which you know, like thousands upon thousands of people work around the world for on like a kind of almost less than minimum wage basis is like the vibes of like the most well paid people who work there. Like, what about this person being $300,000 a year, who someone was rude to them once because of frat? Well, like this is the thing that they were only able to do those things because of their vibes, right?

Not because of any sort of economic reasons. It was because they were bros that they, you know, underpaid people. What is a structure? Yeah. I don't know. It's something that like frat bros jump off of. Yeah. Right.

The thing is, right? It's, I think it's important to mention, right? That like when, when, when we talk about like like Kalanick and so on, like, like he was, he was like, um, there was, there was a great deal of like sort of sexual harassment allegations that flew around Uber and so on, but and, and like it's again, it is, is well and proper that he was ousted. Yeah. The thing is bad.

Yeah. Like we, we saw with Activision Blizzard about like what an absolutely toxic office culture can be like, uh, but like at the same time, the, um, a lot of the sort of objection to the frat bro culture was not that they were doing these terrible things, but like it was like, it was vulgar and it was demeaning because like what we should do instead is get an adult in who like allows those things to happen and allows all of the other sort of like less directly toxic, uh, exploitation to happen, but in a mature, I think there's a belief, there's an implicit belief here as well, right?

That the problem is being faced by the people on the ground who are being systematically underpaid. Those are sort of separate entirely from the, from the, from the problems of the culture there. But the, I think these things are so intertwined with one another that like making these sort of, making the shift away from, from, uh, you know, the, the bro office to the dad office is, is, is essentially, it's, yeah, it's, it is putting up, it is ignoring the very real problem at the root of both of these things.

Yeah. Well, and it also ignores what's wrong with Uber, Qua Uber. I mean, the fact that like it's, it has been a toxic work environment at times does not make it materially different from any other fucking company, which is of no newsworthiness. If you see what I mean, whereas I go in like, Oh, the only problem with Uber, this company that does all of these like incredibly evil things on a global scale is that like some guys did some sexual harassment one time, which I mean, it acts to kind of make Uber just seem just like any other company where, you know, bad things sometimes happen.

So he says, taking on one of the worst cleanup jobs in the history of American capitalism, which again, you have to know, you have to know, you have to have, you have to be a prisoner of your own brain to be like, yep, that was it, not, you know, I'd say removing the triangle shirt waste fire. Never heard of it. It was, it was Uber at one of the most loath companies, Mr. Cosworth Shaw. He was like a dad that had come to mop up after the frat party, put away all the solo cups and get the vomit off the marble floor.

Quite easy to get a lot of marble floor, actually. It's not a very porous. No, comes right off. Yeah. Just mop it pretty straightforward. But also what, what dad's coming into a frat party to be like, well, time to clean out cool dads, cool dads coming to wipe the vomit off the floor of a flat, of a frat party. So awesome.

You just like wake up off the frat party. You don't even need to clean up because your dad's just done it all. Yeah. This is this next sentence though, it was very funny. I hope you boys had fun. This next sentence is very funny. He came into a nightmare said Barry Diller, who juggling calls from his yacht, helped him nap the job after the terrible board deadlocked between Jeffrey Imelt and quippies Meg Whitman.

She's everywhere. She's back. You cannot fail enough. We've got to, we've got to bring some maturity to this. What do we get? Quibs. Yeah. We need some quibs.

Yeah. We need the golden arm. We need to involve. There's Uber, Uber black and Uber golden arm. You get pulmonary gold disease. Yeah. That would be fun. Yeah.

I want a self driving car, but the car actually turns the wheel with a big golden arm. The simple fact of Meg Whitman being present at every, is it, is it, is it for some reason, is there a law in America that like Meg Whitman has to be considered for every position? She's like, she's like the fucking grim reaper. She just like appears when shit's about to go wrong. Universal basic Meg, every company gets the possibility. Cosrishai's vision for the company is of, is of broadening the delivery being the sort of broadening the delivery of getting anything to anywhere else.

Say, right now I dream about pushing a button and getting a piano delivered to your home in an hour and a half. I think that'd be really cool. What? What? Are you a child? What? No.

He's a dad. Why? Who, who would make that sort of a purchase? Who? I need a piano immediately. Who would buy a piano on a whip, like other than like a coked up Saudi prince, like, which you're limiting your market. Like who?

What? I also like, it's the, what he, I think what he's trying to get at is like, there are a bunch of, a bunch of different places that have like logistics arms. He'd like to be the logistics arm for everything, logistics and service, blah, blah, blah, but sort of cashing that out in terms of what if you get a piano really fast? I want to see a guy on a moped delivering a piano. I love the idea that it was like, I choose to take him a 100% literally and he means only pianos.

It's like the third thing. You can get like a car somewhere. You can get some food delivered or you can get a piano. Uber Brahms. Yeah. So. Uber Brahms. So now, now he says, this is when I also, we know that the phrase post pandemic is kind

of a meaningless one, but everyone sort of seems to be seeing the world in that way. So let's do that with them. So thinking post pandemic, he says, now that parts of the world are getting back to calling for rides again and it will never, it will stay that way forever. They're suddenly way more expensive, 40% more. And thanks to Uber, there are now far fewer taxis to take them. Whoops. Oops.

Oops. We destroyed the, we destroyed the industry. We did not know how to, yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm sure the drivers are reaping the benefits of that. Well, they're reaping the benefits and flexibility, you know. Yeah. And also I assume. I mean, you, I mean, I was going to check, but there's no, there's no app to check.

There used to be an app to check that, but there's, it seems to be gone. Oh, no. We have to, we have to assume based on vibes and I assume that those vibes, it's a dad vibe. Now it's going to be, it's Dara, Dara cause Rasha, he has a dad vibe. He's going to slip every driver at 20 in their birthday card. Yeah. He's going to like tassel their hair off you go.

Ah, you know, scamp, go deliver a piano. Run along. So Dara cause Rasha, he slips a piano into the boot of your Uber. Hey, don't play it all at once. Don't tell your mother about this. It's just like full like grand piano in there. So those Priests have more spacious boots than people think. Now that like think about that, right?

Like there we need a lot of more rides. But this sort of attempt of monopolist came in, fucked up being monopolist quite badly, destroyed the rest of the industry and didn't really fill the gap. Amazing. It's not where we need to be right now. Mr. cause Rasha, he conceded and get an Uber there and right. And then this, this is the part right that really just absolutely fucking, this is the part where the Dowd as just being taken for the room that she is.

Where she basically says, look, Dara, I've read somewhere that your business is not viable long term without self-drive, unless you can get cars to self-drive. But that doesn't sit. But like we've all realized that's probably, I mean, I, Maureen Dowd, think that's still happening because I'm a great a moron, but everyone else seems to think that's not going to happen. People smarter than me, which is everyone have decided that it's not. Doesn't Uber have to charge a lot more for the rides or find some way to pay

drivers even less? Isn't this fundamentally at odds with treating workers humanely, which you seem to want to do. Mr. cause Rasha, he demurred saying proposition 20. Here's the thing, a journalist, I feel, should ask a follow up question here, right? Or maybe a couple. Mr. cause Rasha, he's like, lunge at him over the table with a knife. Said that proposition.

Not to that if you're journalist. Mr. cause Rasha, he demurred saying that proposition 22, which will, of course, I'll remember was basically the like Uber doesn't like minimum wage. We don't care about, we don't care to pay it. So we're going to basically fund a giant disinformation campaign aimed at the citizens of California to make, basically have them agree that we can keep paying less than minimum wage when the government used to do that. It's a shame, all this outsourcing.

So proposition 22, that ballot measure in California that I just talked about never could have passed in the bluest of blue states, unless a lot of drivers supported it. So they like actually this situation. Yeah, this is, this is good to them. It's like, look, come on, logically, California is a blue state, right? So like, obviously nothing saying that we, a giant kind of like influence an election, couldn't possibly be obviously like Uber drivers are a

substantial constituency in the state of California. So nothing gets by them. Yeah. And more, more, more than that, though, that, well, I guess we have to conclude that it won and elections are always the measure of what everyone wants. Why do you hate democracy? He, he then went on to say, our system doesn't work for a certain percentage of drivers who can't figure it out and who can't understand how to make it

work. I hate this guy. So fucking much. How come stop underpaying yourself, stop underpaying yourself, stop underpaying yourself. Have you tried being smarter? I do think that for that percentage, and it's probably about 10% of your drivers, but you're talking about 10% of a million drivers on the road.

That's a lot of people who want to earn and our system isn't working properly for. I do think we have to build better safeguards for people who can't make our system work the way that they want it to work, or we're willing to work with regulators to have certain safeguards like minimum earnings. These system, you're just employing them at your company, which you run for a profit. That's you're their boss. You're not providing them with a system they can use independently.

If they're smart enough, you are their employer. Well, the thing is anytime it's like, you know what this sounds like to me? This sounds like someone who's trying to sell a super food that you actually just sell to other people in a pyramid scheme. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You you're not like losing weight on these like nutritional milkshakes made primarily of cardboard because you're not like adhering to the system. Well, but also it's it's when when a business venture is described as a

system, right, and you're going to make and it's not so much a job as a lifestyle. Actually, that's always a pyramid scheme. It's always a scam. They're all someone is always treating you as a mark. If they're saying, oh, it's not employment. It's the it's the, you know, a vigor system or whatever. They're trying to treat you like a mark. And again, New York Times journalists love to be treated as a mark.

And again, to follow up questions for this. Nope. She's like, yeah. Well, look, we may have AstroTurfed a campaign to make it legal for us to pay less than minimum wage with if we didn't do this, our business would be non-viable. But because that AstroTurfing campaign works, I can only assume that it was legitimately popular. Anyway, for everyone who doesn't like it, we'll do something for them. And she was like, let me ask about your family now.

So, so on these two kids, just adorable, the way they talk in sync like that. So in 1979, when Dara was nine, his family fled Iran to escape the revolution, leaving, wait for it, the fortune they'd made from their large pharmaceutical and cosmetics company. The Ayatollah took my family's business. Wouldn't you know it? Anyway, they moved to an uncle's mansion in New York before getting a condo. Imagine if an Ayatollah came here and took our podcast.

Imagine how we would feel. Yeah, but probably we would have to move to our uncle's mansion. But then here's the crazy thing, right? He then was taken under the wing of a man named Herbert Allen, Jr. And I'm sure for some listeners, have you seen the documentary The Master? So Herbert Allen, Jr. Right, is a guy who like again, if if you're one of the listeners who knows who that is, your third eye should be open at this point.

He's the guy who's behind, who is now in charge of a family, an extremely secretive investment bank that's entirely family run. So it's private, completely private, called Allen and Company, right? And they're mainly famous for running what are called the Sun Valley conferences where like again, it's sort of like a Bilderberg group, but like a little bit south, you know, it's, it's okay, but they did or El Bilderberg Grupo Tropicana, or the like where they burn the owl. It's basically like Bohemian Grove, but like with more sort of Sundance vibes.

But the thing is, right? The other thing about Allen is that he is so intelligence connected. Uh-huh. That's just called having friends and hanging out with cool guys. No one in Dodgy's ever been connected with the intelligence community because they would find out if you were Dodgy because they know, they know stuff. They've got access to, you know, your phones. It's called the intelligence community because it's just a bunch of guys who are smart.

I'm not really good at scramble and hang out with small, for example, right? George Tenet was a director at Allen and film. Yeah, from the film. He was a direct friend of the director at Allen and Co. After he was ahead of the CIA and Mike Pompeo comes and speaks, came and spoke at a Sun Valley conference a few years ago. And also it's interesting how this like small, secretive family run investment bank that doesn't have any of like the obvious resources of like a Goldman or

whatever seems to find itself just in the earliest and most profitable funding rounds for some of the biggest tech companies in history, like Google or advising Facebook on a slam dunk, multi-billion dollar acquisitions, like WhatsApp. If there were a word, if there were a word, I wish there were a phrase, you know, some kind of like expression you could use for somewhere where you could like keep a lot of money that you would like silo off of your main money, some kind of like fund of some kind. Yeah, like a like a snow fund.

Yeah, like maybe like a liquid, a liquid, a liquid stake fund. Yeah, exactly. I think that would be, I think that would be, we should invent that. But also like interesting how it was the scion of like, you might say a the scion of a major politically connected right wing, wealthy Iranian family ends up being in charge of one of the biggest forces that are union busting, having been basically raised in part by a CIA connected investment banker. I'm sorry, are you really suggesting that the American intelligence community

would have anything to do with Iran or like Iranian expatriates? Oh, I mean, because that's a little far fetch for me. Hang on, sorry, I'm just getting an, no, it's going to be pretty embarrassing, but I actually thought he's standing right behind me. The entire CIA are also on the call. Alice, you're going to feel really stupid about this. But there's a guy in a balaclava with a silenced pistol behind you, and he's heard everything you just said.

Oh, God. Yeah. Anyway, what's the M.E.K. So anyway, with leaving all that aside, right, because it's just by is that a weird coincidence that all of those things happen together? The article concludes, it's crazy how we keep like uncovering things that like may or may not be linked to the intelligence community. Disruption.

Once the mantra of Silicon Valley has now become a dirty word. No, it hasn't. What are the ethical boundaries of disruption? I do think there's power in a name, Kazer Shah, you said. Our system is called capitalism. It's designed to optimize the long-term growth of capital. Yeah, why don't we call it nice? Yeah, why not?

When people wonder, well, aren't capital over owners advantage over labor? It's not called laborism, but he mused that sometimes the system. Fuck, dude, it's really not. It's not called laborism. To be fair, there is something called laborism. And it also sucks as well because it's related to the British Labor Party. But he used that sometimes system works too well.

I think capitalism has its cause. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's actually been too successful. I think that capitalism has its cause in our democratic societies in ways that has allowed it to overly optimize for its benefit. Said the man who is in charge of astroturfing the Prop 22 campaign to get California voters. Overly optimized.

This is incredible, too, because look, it's a hack observation by this point. We've said it so many times, but you can't optimize into a system which destroys the planet. Right? Like once that's happened and once you've locked in that happening, your making number go up is not, in fact, optimization. For nobody is that optimizing. Absolutely, nobody is being optimized there.

And again, the none of these none of these sort of musings seem at all discontinuous to New York Times because stuff like because all of these things because for the New York Times to be the New York Times, everything has to sit in its little boxes. And all of it sort of has to be separate little things. And everything is what it looks like on the surface. Yeah, that's right.

And if you ask a follow up question, then maybe you should go, I don't know, maybe you should go work for the New Republic or whatever because you don't belong here. That's the trash policy. Yeah. Anyway, everything is as it seems, listener. So that was anyway, that was Maureen. I've noticed we've been going for a while. That was Maureen Dowd writing this fantastically braindead puff piece on Dara Khazer Shahi. Thank you, Maureen.

So thank you very much for that piece of writing. I loved to read and think about it. Anyway, I think that's about it for today for us. So don't forget to check us out on the bonus episode. Five bucks a month. You get a second episode every week. Please, we need we need you to optimize our system. Can you optimize our system quickly?

Come in and optimize us. Can you quickly optimize? And you know, if you if you sit on the optimization, it feels like somebody else is optimizing this week. We talked about the Billionaire Space Race with Dwight from Eat the Rich. It was a great conversation. So do check that out. Otherwise, we'll see you next week.

Bye, everybody. Bye.