TRASHFUTURE - Netflix De-FAANG’ed: the Economy is Real Again

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

This week, Riley, Milo, Hussein, and Alice discuss even more police-related ideas from UK politicians, a terrible startup from Australia, and the recent news that Netflix’s share price has collapsed due to–big if true–the fact that they don’t make any money. Hope you enjoy!  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* Milo has shows coming up in London and Brighton. Learn more here! https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *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, hello, hello, and welcome to what some are calling the free one. Shut the fuck up. Hi, Bestie. It's the free one. Yeah, it's totally the free one. I hate the idiots. I will quit. Riley is dead.

Riley has died, is the thing. And that's going to be crucial for you going forward, understanding and enjoying this episode, is that our fearless leader has contracted any number of diseases. It could be anything, really, but as a consequence of this, he sounds atrocious and will be speaking very little. I think I sound great, actually. It's a voice like a sepulchre. Riley sounding like he's coming from the bottom of a well, yeah.

I think I sound fine. What's going to be happening for me is you're going to hear a lot more horror puns. I'm going to start referring to our listeners as boys and ghouls and other assorted crypt keepery. But as per usual, I've prepared a number of things, but once again. Yeah, a coffin and like a brief service in your memory. Some flowers. A pre-written eulogy. How about this?

All right. Written by friend of the show, Brendan O'Neill. It says here that of all the souls I've encountered, yours was the most noble, which I'm not sure I agree with. Yeah. Well, look, I'm waiting for my soul to be weighed against a feather by Anubis. The devourer is like the unspoken cast member. Yeah. I'm awaiting my soul's measurement against that, I guess the weight of a feather.

And he says he's going to be about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes. Anubis is a guy. So why don't we talk about some of the events of the week and the day? Sure. As per usual, I've assembled a number of notes and then immediately something hoes into view that I feel your death. Well, no, not my death. Something hoes into view.

The death of Top Gear magazine. I must discuss. So this is, I saw this in my London dot news. And the quote, the poll quote at the front of the article just says, quote, this building is doomed, colon, residents speak out. How was they doxed you? We were promised a cinema and a sky garden. Instead, we get leaks, broken lifts and dirty windows life in the luxury tower block with flats costing four grand a month. Don't like it.

There's the poor. There you go. Yeah. If you don't like it. I mean, if you want to experience all of those things for a tenth of the price, all you have to do is move to Glasgow. Yeah. We have exactly as few amenities and exactly as many like doomed, sick building centre and things. There you go.

One thing I've been very confused about, but also like what I really find very funny is that if you go to like other cities where it was like very clear kind of like class divides and very clear. Like the message is very clear where it's like, if you're rich, then you have like all these like amenities available to you. And if you're poor, you don't is that in London, that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be like if you're poor, then you get shitty housing and access to nothing and like will make your life miserable. But if you're rich, will also make your life miserable, but in like less impactful, but definitely kind of a grieving way is none of that. So that's why you end up having these stories about like rich people who like rich people who live in these kind of like horribly made buildings that are kind of like collapsing as soon as you move into them. And their question is like, why the fuck did we like pay four million for this?

Well, it's like, unless you're one of about 20 extremely rich guys who can just like build your like underground Bentley garage stroke aquarium, then yeah, every every all of the housing stock in London is so shit that it's like pointless to spend any money. But there's you have to. Well, I think it's because, right? Like the whole point is that London, especially living in London like we've talked about before that the story of the UK is the in crowd getting slowly and slowly smaller. People shocked to realize they're in the out crowd. Actually, it's just going to be one guy.

Yeah. Is that eventually the United Kingdom will be buying for the benefit of one dude. Yeah, Lex Greenfield. No, the but it's like, oh yeah, you're you're still like you're paying four thousand pounds a month. Is that it? You fucking sucker. You've moved in on the basis of like a state of the art amenities, including a private cinema, magical children's play area, a formal garden lounge for adults, another lounge, a library.

And then you move in and none of the air conditioning works. But it's this enormously tall building in a country that doesn't really know how to build tall buildings. And the building managers are still taking you for a massive sucker because you have no rights. And so the thing is, if you live in London particularly, but in the UK generally, if you need somewhere to live like to sleep at night, fuck you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you should be working. What are you sleeping for? Open a bloke, might join you.

What do you need to be asleep for? Dreaming of sucking dicks. And even yeah, and even if like you do move into one of those like big build, like those very tall buildings, it's like, oh, the sites that you get are here. Here's a lovely site of some roadworks. And if you go to the other side of the flat, you can see more roadworks. You might be able to see some like youth sports fields. And Tommy Walsh is going to be very, very happy about that.

Extremely lint chocolate advert voice. Do you dream in sucking dicks? I told you last time, yes. It's very, it's just that the article goes on. It says in light of like leaks everywhere, mold everywhere, none of the chillers working in rooms getting up to like 34 degrees heat hot at night. Residents have accused the management of being quote more interested in promoting the tower than actually opening stuff or running it. Why not take pictures of residents using it? Some residents have even seen major rent hikes from landlords in the building.

There's some reportedly rising by as much as an additional 700 pounds a month. And here's the funny thing. Do you know which, who owns it? Who owns it? The Saudi royal family. Nice. Third floor of the Jeddah Hilton experience after all. What's really funny is that like you now actually have common cause to, if you wanted, even if you're paying four grand a month for your special fancy boy apartment to organize a rent strike or to join the London Renters Union or any of these other things because that's what they're for.

And I just, I envisioned those meetings with a bunch of like hedge fund guys who have been broiled all night along with normal people. And I just think that, you know, a capitalism sort of arranges for some strange bedfellows. That's right. That's right. I don't want to focus too long on that. I've got some, some stuff, some other things, some, some bad boys. Got some, got some, got some doing, got some transpiring. And because I don't know if we also saw this as well, but the Kent police in Ashford are trying to design out crime by removing anywhere, any benches or bushes that people might gather near.

They could talk about this for an hour. Yeah, same. I'm very, and I'm very happy to welcome to, welcome to the Kent, welcome to Kent future where we talk about the future. Kent police taking an aggressive anti-dogging stance. Kent, Kent, Kent is very much like the most English part of England in this sense. And like reaches its full expression in Kent police tweeting out that they, along with a sort of Barrett like Holmes company have been taking out all of the benches. Oh, Alice, Alice, Alice. It's not called Barrett Holmes.

It's called Moat Holmes. No, I mean, I think this is sort of an expression of the kind of policing that we like to do in this country. Which is also something that like we've seen Keir Starmer announces his new allegedly policing policies of police, police hubs and more like Bobby's on the beat or whatever. And so all of these, all of these policing interventions are sort of primarily designed to defend house prices more than anything. And so you end up with this focus on what used to be like safer neighborhood teams or like community safety teams or whatever. But like police officers who are like tied to a specific neighborhood of Barrett-ish homes with a focus on preventing street crime. And the form that that street crime takes is like seeing four kids in puffer jackets on BMX's and being terrified for your life. I have a policy proposal for this actually.

I think that like that labor could definitely win more votes in Kent if it suggests that the Kent police or rather as a national policy priority. Okay. We have everybody from the age of 14 until 23 approximately. Right. 14 to 23, every single person in Britain has a switchblade loitering munition hovering over them at all times. We put the suicide squad like brain bomb inside every youth and you get it taken out when you buy your first house. I mean, like, it's just, it's so, it's so interesting to me because part of the sort of Blair policy of policing was teaching the police that crime has social causes. But unfortunately, what they learned from that was they just heard crime and social together and decided that the cause of crime is people being social.

Well, or crucial for being social, not in a pret or a caster, but being social outside where it's free. That's right. Well, look, one thing also to bear in mind about Kent police is that like, so they, you know, you could talk about this for a long time. So I'll try like to kind of surmise it. They like to kind of position themselves as being the community police force, right? In comparison to like the metropolitan, you know, the London metropolitan police. So they kind of like to think that. Sneering metropolitan police.

So they kind of like to think in a lot of, you know, in a lot of places. And this is like what they use when they came to like, when they go to like Kent schools to try and recruit people. They're like, oh, you know, unlike the Met Police, unlike the Met Police where, where, you know, they, they make lots of mistakes and like, you know, we're a community police force. Like we're very much embedded into like local people's lives. They love kind of posting pictures of themselves like, like fun fairs and all that stuff. But because of that, like posturing, like they are able to kind of garner more respect than they necessarily deserve, especially considering that. Like they're not a particularly successful police force, if I remember correctly. The community policing thing is a tremendously effective PR thing for them, especially by comparison with like, if your nearest neighbor is the Met Police,

anybody's going to look community minded. But what, but what's also very funny about them is that because when you're patrolling Kent and crucially, you know, in Alice, you'll know this and like our Kent listeners will know this too. Like there is nothing to fucking do in Kent, right? Like, like, like when you're a young person living in Kent, you're, what you're doing is like trying to find small pleasures in suburban living when everything like is taken away from you to either become barret homes or parking lots. So when you're the police officer, like what you're doing is like going into fields to look for, to look for teenagers, smoking like really badly rolled joints, right? Yeah. Or you're looking at, you're like trying to find like, again, groups of young people who are outside of shops or like, you know, you know, That's why it's, that's why it's such a sort of continuity Blair, right?

That's right project is because it was like, it's not just that society doesn't exist. That society must be prevented from existing at any cost. And they're like main support based comes from like homeowners and landlords for whom like, you know, their biggest fear is like, oh, Kent's going to become like London and it's going to become really rough. And like, you know, these young people acquire a culture. Yeah. They'll be able to get food here. That's not terrible. Yeah.

These young people are going to like run down this like lovely neighborhood, like, you know, the lovely Ash neighborhood like disclaimer. It's not a lovely neighborhood. All these young people are going to start like a trendy small plates restaurant or or some kind of a place where it sells four pounds. That is where the priorities are is this sort of safer neighborhood thing. That's what every government on a bipartisan basis has been talking about when they talk about the police is essentially this kind of policing. And it's based on a fear of street crime in areas that have largely not cooperated by providing one, even with the best ability of the police to sort of create crime by showing up and either detecting it or provoking it. It's what we what we talk about right before is if your whole thing, if your whole government, if your whole program of politics is to then induce in a swage panic and cycles,

then you're going to have these hugely expanding police departments that are sort of cracking down on the thing that you basically invented for them to crack down on. That's the thing that not even expansive. Like they were they might have been expansive under Blair, but then sort of both parties managed to cut all of their budgets. So what they're left to do is nothing is to chase retweets with this kind of thing. Because even if you wanted to have a sort of fully staffed, like safer neighborhood team of police officers to wander around and like tell off teenagers for drinking in public, you can't afford that anymore. So what they can afford to do is to try and hashtag design out crime by taking all the benches out of a fucking playground. Yeah, we know that sitting is a precursor to crime.

In fact, most criminals have sat down within the prior 24 hours to committing a crime. And on that basis. Kent Minority Report thing where it's like a sort of marble rolls down from the precogs and it's like this criminal was sitting down. Look, we're not going to hire any more of them. But what we are going to do is give every police like group of three or more police officers a squad level weapon. Like some kind of a browning. Of course, all of the crime that places like this do have is like commensurately under resourced because it doesn't grab a lot of headlines. And because if you do want to like address the kind of crime that does happen in the streets in rural Kent,

it's going to be people getting in fights coming out of clubs and a lot of those people are going to own some of these nice homes. So it's like, you know, the impulse is pushed against each other. And also dogging crimes. Lots of dogging crimes. I mean, I kind of like I broadly understand this as the English person hates fears is disgusted by the prospect of being around other English people. And I get this completely. On my way back from the kill James Bond live show, I was I was getting the train and I got shunted into a sort of overcrowded diesel passenger train that was late. And I came off of that thinking, I believe that British transport police should have a mortar platoon.

They should be able to engage targets parabolically at ranges of over a kilometer. Not any of the other cops, just the transport cops. If you set foot into a station, you should get killed by Ed 209. What about this? What about this? What if the British transport police were just like they had either like a missile cruiser in the English Channel or like an artillery emplacement sort of along the east of England, or they could even like mine the East Coast mainline. So if anyone tries to use to deter people from using it, we have.

The Royal Air Force just kind of shrinks and is absorbed by British transport. This is just a whole thing is to make sure no one goes anywhere. But I think the other thing about this, right? But I'm just looking at this picture of just these two fucking like geezers just like taking a bench away and then taking a picture of a place that is now safely benchless like a before and after. And it's just like what it strikes me as is there is this huge Americanization of so many parts of Britain where we're just trying to force this country. That is generally pretty small, pretty walkable and doesn't have nearly as much like sprawl as the US does just like because that's on our history, whatever. But what we're pretty safe, what we're trying to do is force it into the shape of the US. And they're trying to do that by just using the blunt instrument of cops just fucking with anyone who's not in a car or like walking somewhere where they're going to buy something.

Well, senior police officers love this shit because it doesn't require anything from their budgets of which they have none and it makes them look proactive. Yeah, it's amazing the extent to which like people in Britain are paranoid about crime. When crime is basically just like a thing that doesn't really affect most people's lives, like the rate of particularly serious crime in Britain is like extremely low. I think it's a question of priorities. Like we actually do a pretty good job of like preventing a lot of street crime. I think you're a lot less likely to get robbed, for instance, or assaulted in this country as you might be in some others. But we also just don't bother investigating anything if it's a tool difficult. I remember reading like something like 97%.

British cops are British first and cops second. They will not do their job. In England and Wales, I remember reading this as something like 97% of frauds allegations are no further action. They just do not investigate them because it's too difficult and they don't have the reason. Also fraud is a homeowner style crime. Yeah, exactly. It's the same with a lot of like domestic violence. Same with a lot of, well, shall we say more middle class and lighter, huge drug taking?

It's enforced very selectively because... I love the lighter, huge drugs. Yeah, well, I know. And that's sort of the natural constituency of the people who make policing policy in this country is to be like, no, what the police are therefore is locking up people who like ride BMXs. It's funny you should bring up fraud though because I've heard that conversely the conviction rate for fraud cases that go to court is extremely high because juries are basically listening to someone explain some incredibly complicated financial chicanery and they're just like, yeah, sounds like a cunt.

I don't understand it. Probably guilty. He had how much money? Yeah, guilty. Before we go into the next thing, I want to say like the specifics of the labor plan as it's been set out. It has been said that we're going to quote, get tough on low level offending. Again, like the thing that the only thing that like everyone agrees that you have to be tough on this. It's just because it doesn't really exist in the way that they're talking about. New one can crack down on it because it's like trying to hit smoke with a hammer.

They say we were over 50 people in Kent in the last month of being called a clean shirt. Also, can I just say very quickly as well that like from and again, this is like anecdotal and like based on sort of growing up here. But like so many people in this area in like in Kent, like their kind of understanding of crime is so distorted and it's all kind of influenced by like what they hear about London, right? So like, they'll kind of go, they'll go on their kind of like monthly trip to London and, you know, they'll go as far as, you know, central and they'll see that, oh, you know, there's lots of police officers around or they might like see something and they'll kind of believe that, you know, they'll kind of believe that, oh, that's coming to our way pretty soon. Like, I don't know, you know, you go into like Sadiq Khan's mentions, for example, and it doesn't take that long to find someone who's like talking about how he's like ruined the city and ruined the country. And then you find out that he lives in like the guy who's talking, who's at him, like lives in Tumbridge Wells, right? The number of days until there's an acid throwing attack in Seven Oaks doesn't bear thinking about it.

Yeah, but they like thinking and I don't know whether it's just because like there are certain aspects of Kent, which like, because they don't have that sort of kentish charm to them, they're just like commuter towns where people park their SUVs, that like, there's not really bad distinction between Kent and London anymore, in certain areas to the point where they kind of believe that like London crime is going, or like, you know, what they think is London crime is going to come really soon. But like, crucially, the places that they live in are not built for that type of crime anyway, right? Like, it's really hard, I think it'd be really hard to do that type of crime in Kent, not least because of like how difficult it is to get anywhere or do anything. There was like a guy once a long time ago who threatened to like, come to my house and fight me. And he was just like, tell me where you live. And I saw, and I saw, yeah, it's Andrew Tate. And I saw, and I sort of sent him like, you know, this is the rough area and he was like, oh, too far, mate.

No, we're giving him directions to Mecca. Yeah, I live in the Carver. Yeah, Americans will go meet someone in Temecula, but the Brits can't be bothered to just drive round Kent. Well, as we said before, Britain is a very low stakes country and Kent is like a low stakes area of a low stakes country. No, I want to say though, what here's what Labour actually said it wants to do, which is create these things called community victim payback boards. Oh, fuck me. So community payback. That's the most Kearstar Marass name I've ever heard.

You've been awarded a BMX from this kid. Why don't they call it something called it? Why don't they call it like the vengeance panel or something? Yeah, why don't they call it the death squad? Yeah, Milo, that's going to come out in the neck in the bonus episode death force. Oh, yeah. We've already talked about that. People who came to the live show will know what you're talking about, but everybody else will be scratching their heads and being like,

what's this death force you keep talking about? That's a fun preview. Subscribe to the Patreon. You're about death force. No, so Starmer said after 12 years of conservative government, which has seen record case delays, police officers. This is very funny. Disappearing from our streets as though it's like back to the future and their parents did. Well, I've been raptured to cop heaven.

Where there's always a gentleman and a lady and they're reaching agreement with the aid of an intervention from PC Shufflesworth and myself. Yeah. Cops just like walking around, just like being taken to black sites, just being disappeared. Police station closures and court sell-offs. Are they selling courts and turning into luxury flats? Oh, yeah. They're selling a shitload of gold though. Communities have no faith that the criminal justice system is keeping their communities safe from crime.

Community payback can stop more serious reoffending. But judges have stopped handing it out because this soft on crime conservative government cannot be trusted to make sure offenders pay back their crimes. How it works is that the locally appointed board. So again, like I assume they just take the four or five people in the local area who are most interested in like, I don't know, triggering the explosives in every young person's neck, having them sit on this board. Absolutely sickos. Yeah, 100%. Same people who become magistrates. Because they're not paid.

It's a volunteer position. So you need to volunteer to like be like the low level crime punisher. Creating, quote, a new level of involvement for community leaders and victims of crime and deciding. And here's the funny thing. What unpaid work offenders must undertake. Great. Yeah. Podcasting.

That's right. Yeah. We're actually all here as part of our probation agreements. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just going to be, it's what we're getting to is like, I don't know, like we're sort of reverse engineering a situation where like the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is just going to be like rounding up all of them. Rounding up all of the teens and like, it's going to be national service, but through this.

Because everyone wants more cops, but more cops are expensive. And so they try and find things that aren't cops. This is like, this started with police community support officers and has just like found stranger forms every year since until eventually we are going to get to the volunteer border force. We're just, we're all, we should get an asbo team from Kent to be our new studio assistant. You know, we're going to, we're going to scare them straight. Turn their life around. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. I was, I was a real tear away kid until I learned about jerk Vandicle. Yeah. I'm actually the kid. I'm actually the person from Kent who's been taken into the trash feature studio as part of my, as part of my penance. And you ended up doing a kind of scared straight program with a South African mercenary. A police officer found me in the field and took my badly rolled joint and said, this is the greatest crime, but has ever been conducted in this village. So I will sentence you to a hard labor.

The scene was found with a bowl of mad dog 2020 drawing a penis on an underpass. Sainsbury's basic orange juice topped up with Glen's vodka. Since then, his life's really turned around in the worst thing of all sitting on a bench with two friends. All right. All right. What are you friends with two blokes for? Trying to shag them. This ain't a designated talking area. All right.

Shall we do a quick startup? Sure. Why not? I love to do a quick start. So this is an Australian startup. And it's called immediately. It's about racism. No, it's turning my head upside down to try and like, it's not about racism. I'm sure its impacts are probably racially diverged.

No, it's called before pay. Payday lending. Right. Yeah. God damn it. I mean, it kind of like gives. Yeah. That was one of the more obvious names. No. So it's, it's, it has this thing though, right? Called pay on demand.

So what is the POD in podcast stands for? Yeah. What was the CAST stand for? Legally, we cannot say. Community action security trust. So basically they say your pay at your command. So what do you, I'm sort of serving this to you up on a plate, but we understand it's kind of, it is to do with say salary advances.

What, what do they see this as? Can you get paid like every day or something? If you want to, is it like a weird, you can like drip feed your salary? That's right. The perfect way to get paid that's not completely massively stressful. I get paid by the minute. I'll be able to buy this coffee in about 30 seconds. This is so, I mean, I'm just stalling because I'm trying to wait for the minute to be out

so I can get paid for this. And then I'm going to say what I think. There's two reasons I want to talk about this. It's number one, they say, look, we before pay understands that traditional pay cycles are a form of financial stress. I just hate how traditional my pay cycle is. I wish she was non-traditional. I guess there is something there about how like if you get a pay packet like on a certain day

every month and you don't know or find it difficult to like manage your finances. Fine. Sure. I get that. But that's also the same sort of stalking horse that every payday lender has always been using forever. And it's always in such bad faith. And it's mostly stressful because the amount you're being paid isn't enough. It's not really the cycle that's stressful.

It's like, you know, people who are paid a lot of money don't tend to run out of money at the end of the month. That's the thing that only really affects people who don't make it off money. So just in general, right? I understand that like overspending and like sort of living beyond your paycheck is like a function of not being sort of very good at managing your finances. Sometimes it's a mental health thing. Fine. Whatever.

Why would I let in sort of blood dripping vampire called before pay to help me with this instead of literally anyone else? Well, they say. Yeah, like Prince Harry, for example. Yeah, exactly. You could check in on me. They say check in on your check in on your friend. I'm afraid I can't Alice because you're not a chap. My code prevents me, but I do wish you well.

Are you suggesting Prince Harry's code prevents him from ever checking in on anyone but chaps? Yeah, that's right. What are you checking in on a woman for so that she can introduce you to a bloke? That's why we created pay on demand a service that allows you to access the money you've earned at work when you choose to do so. After all, it is yours. That's the part that we take. Yeah. Is a no interest.

No interest at all. Not a single percent of interest. They will charge you, which is great. It's not charged as a percentage. It's charged as a flood amount. Well, it is charged as a percentage, but it's not interest. Not to defend traditional financial institutions, but generally speaking, if you like, if you talk to your bank and ask them to do that, the bank can ask them to put a payment limit on your thing because you don't want to gamble or whatever.

They'll probably do that for you. You don't need to talk to some simple Australian money farmer who is going to take a percentage off the top. I also love it when these kind of companies are like, oh, don't worry, you don't have to pay with money. Then it's like, you do actually have to pay with money. They say it's also a buried where it's like, no interest, just a fixed transaction fee. We also know that the world of finance can be confusing. It's so fucking condescending, this Australian money lending startup.

They say interest rates. It can be pretty confusing to Australians. Interest rates. I wrote over a million dollars in insurance for Lex Greensill. I just thought he was a nice bloke. Interest rates, annual fees, late fees, balance transfers, approval forms, all of which make your money difficult to access. It means it's near impossible to work out what you'll be charged for doing so.

We don't like this. So our fee model is straightforward. It's just 5% transaction fee. That means to access $100 of your wages, the transaction fee will be $5. You'll never be charged anymore, few. So wait, if you habitually run out of money during the month and then start using before pay, what happens the next month? Well, you have 5% less money.

You should probably run out of money a little bit sooner. You can get it 100% sooner, so it's a great deal. Yeah, and then you could invest it. There's an investment opportunity in a new cryptocurrency that I've just heard about on Discord, and I have 30 minutes to invest in it, or it's going to moon, and I'm not going to be able to afford it. I need to get all of my wages now.

You could get into fashion drops, for instance. You could spend 99% of your paycheck for the month on some Gucci ex-north face if you wanted. The cost is really time limited. You could, I don't know, gambling again, horse racing. You could do that. They say, you'll never be charged anymore, few. Yeah, few indeed.

Repayments scheduled around you, and we don't stop there to make sure we're truly in sync with you. We match our repayment schedule with your income, which is very nice of them. Repayments are automatically scheduled in the app to be made in your next payday, and you can spread them out across four installments over your next four pay cycles.

So it's, yeah, like, well, great, excellent. Just keep your teeth in me. The entire history of credit to that is, like, we're not going to, in fact, break your legs on the first visit because we want you to pay us back. So we're going to, like, adjust it so we can turn the screw just enough that you're going to, like...

We're going to pick up a box of crunchy nut, and we're like, crunchy nut, pretty expensive, as I recall, and then start pouring it out on the floor. This is... I probably shouldn't find this as insidious as I do, but then you could sort of, like, payday lender. I just sort of inherently associate with criminality and, like... Yeah.

This is, like, poorly from the sopranos, but wearing a Patagonia fleece. Exactly. By now, pay later, and payday lending in Australia is, like, it's a huge industry. Like, it's enormous. There's a huge amount... Huge industry here.

Remember when Wanga and, like, 3MPs? That's right. But, like, here, it's like... There's been some regulation that basically put that kind of lending, sort of, set it back a long time. Thank, like, much to, like, the... Much to the benefit of everyone who actually lives here. And then, like, Klarna came in

and sort of found another way to call itself a fintech and skirt lending rules in Australia. No such thing happened. And so it had this sort of exploding, you know, access your salary beforehand industry. But now they also have so much buy now, pay later. So then it's, like, Australia's... The life in Australia as someone just, like, with an,

let's say, who lives on a paycheck is just constantly being sort of advertised and congealed to and manipulated to, like, live beyond it now because there are a million products out there that are saying, you can do it. It'll cost you nothing, asterisk. And then it'll be super, super easy.

We can give you what is definitely not legally a payday loan, but it's effectively a payday loan in minutes. Or we can, like, give you a payday loan to, like, buy this hat or whatever, right? It is so fucking insidious because... It's specifically because it's all designed and marketed just to look like a different way of engaging with your own finances that you have

instead of as an incredibly exploitative financial product that's like payday lending. And the Albanese wants to ban the great Australian loan shark. The shark is as much of a symbol as Australia as anything else, like the bunning snag or the weekend. And it's just, to me, like, the real... The fact that it is totally unregulated and that the advertising of it is so...

It comes in so smooth and just says, hey, you know, don't... Just go ahead and do it. It's so easy. It's just like managing your money intelligently. You can't blame anyone for fucking falling for it because everything around them is saying, go ahead and do it.

And then the moment you're fucked, then they're like, ah, you shouldn't have done this thing that everyone around you was trying to control you into doing. It was a test. You failed the test. Yeah. It's like you are...

Not just in Australia, but in Australia especially, if you are earning below a certain amount of money, then you just have to go through a test every day where it's like, hey, you can have anything you want. You can have anything you want. All you have to... And you can have it now,

but you have to not take it. And if you take it, then your life is going to be like incredibly shitty. If you press this button, one random person somewhere in the world will be killed. But it's like... I mean, I'm just thinking about the kind of... Because I imagine that this is going to happen

in London really soon, especially when... Especially considering the UK government a few weeks ago, there were concerted support for FinTech. And if you look at most of the FinTech, or at least quite a lot of the FinTech that's emerging in London right now,

a lot of it are... Well, if it's not crypto, it's different forms of loan sharks. And the justification of... They use the same type of justification, which is we're just trying to make people's lives better and we know that in a climate where it's very difficult to get loans,

for example, to buy property, or in a lot of cases, buy essential things in the cost of living crisis, they present themselves as infrastructure. And crucially, I don't know... I can't remember what company it was, but I was reading some of their literature fairly recently, and the way in which they market themselves

and the way in which they try to employ very empathetic language to describe what they're doing, we know that things are really tough and we know that for people who have been in difficult situations, we know that they don't deserve to be in, they deserve support and we're there to do that. They present themselves as being a support of infrastructure, absent of the government,

and they do that exploitatively, but I understand why people fall for that, especially considering the rest of the infrastructure around them just shows so little care and empathy towards people who have financial struggles, but all of a sudden, when you encounter somewhere which at least pretends that it does, or pretends that it cares about you,

it's very easy to fall for that. I know it's very common in basically every type of MLM or pyramid scheme, but I imagine that the reason why it's going to amplify so much and the reason why these types of stories are going to become, I think, a signifier at the very least of the global cost of living crisis because you have everything else just show so much disdain for people who aren't super rich to begin with,

so that to show empathy in any way is this really novel thing that allows people to put their guard down and just take that risk, right? It's so, so predatory. I think then coming back to it, so much of that cutesy, the cutesy way it's presented is to make it feel like it's safe to take that risk and it's not as predatory as it really is.

And I mean, even in the UK, we have a much more regulated lending sector when it comes to personal lending. Again, someone's going to find a way around that at some point. They did with WANGA. They're going to do it again with whatever the next thing is. Sure, by now, pay later is not going anywhere. Even then, right?

The regulation of the language you can use is just that you have to put in, in size like 3 font, this is lending at the very bottom. That's the amount that they're considering thinking about the actual language. The legally this is not financial advice thing that we do is more of an effort than anything that's imposed on them. Anyway, shall we go on to another couple of things

and carry on our trundle through the episode as I slowly die? Having a little trundle, aren't we? One thing I wished for. The gentleman was engaged in a trundling style locomotion towards the vicinity. Fortunately, the bench had been removed by Sergeant Johnson and myself.

We've removed the bench with an artillery barrage from a rocket launch system. That's correct. Because British police don't have the equipment the American police have. They can only dream of having artillery. Whereas the police in rural Mississippi have a tank for some reason.

That's what we need to change. Give British transport police the tanks. Yeah, that's right. That's a form of transport. Real replacement bus service, except the bus is just like an MRAP or whatever. Yeah, it's just like an infantry fighting vehicle. You just get rattled to death well in it. I think we can do like a British transport police

mortarplatoon patch or something. That'd be very funny. Let's hope we remember it. I want to talk about something that I'm very happy to get to see in a smug way before I die. Which is, you remember how we talked about Netflix with Ed and Jaython and we're like, wow, if anyone ever charges any money

for the purposes of lending, this business is immediately going to fall apart. And then... Wait, but I heard that they could get a loan with actually no interest. Whether it's just a transaction fee. Netflix is using before pay. Yeah, that's right.

Look, they're not an Australian company. They're going to have to get around that first. Netflix is... Stock price is down by like 40% now. Yeah, Pershing Square just pulled a shit ton of investment. They recently, pretty recently invested something like a billion, lost 400 million and just taking it out a month later.

Because now it's higher risk. Nobody wants to pay as much for Spencer Confidential anymore. No one's interested in watching an episode of Stranger Things that cost $30 million to make. Yeah, and the kids are all like 90 years old. They've got the fucking Irishman de-aging thing going full blast and it's not working. Captain, I'm trying to make them look cute still.

It just won't work. I'm a doctor, not a butcher. She won't hold. Look, subscribers, right? Puberty, can't we give them something for that? But subscribers, right? They're dropping off because prices are rising and content's getting more expensive to make.

And one of the big reasons for that, right, is that it's getting more expensive to borrow money and the Netflix approach has always been to borrow free money and then just dump it into things. And here's what's very funny. You can make everything, make red notices, make a show about whether or not things are cake. If one of them's a hit, it doesn't even matter.

It's not even the one thing in a hundred that's a hit is going to pay off the others. It just won't. The bill will never come due, ever. I feel like they took an approach that was kind of like the soft bank approach, which is just like we're going to dump huge amounts of money into everything because all the money is free.

But they forgot that the money that they earn back is from subscribers. Who can just unsubscribe rather than... Well, also, they can like piss on their subscribers because also in a kind of very soft bank like move, when they make something that is popular or is successful, they'll cancel it because it's slightly cheaper

because you don't have to like raise any more money to pay the crew more. Well, you know why? It's because I was... I think I heard this from friend of the show, Noah. It's that in season three, that's when stuff gets... That's when like actors get expensive to pay

because they're an approved and hit. So, you know... So what it means... Well, it's weird. I feel like with Netflix... Here's another couple of things that are happening with Netflix that you're going to find very amusing, right? So just to finish setting the table,

it's that they need to keep making more and new content so they can keep buying subscribers. They have a really high cost of sales, basically. And so when what they need to do... And when they can't borrow much, they have to raise prices. And when they raise prices, then people drop off at the margins. Simple as that. And they lost about 600,000 paying users

across the US and Canada after doing a big price hike. And the more users they lose, the more they'll have to keep the prices up because they still need to pay the same amounts of money to license all the stuff they've licensed and to keep making the new stuff. So it's like their whole business is just falling apart at both ends

because the fake economy that it was based on, this idea that just high growth at no interest rates could be sustained forever, that you could just keep ramming adrenaline needle after adrenaline needle after adrenaline needle into this low investment, low growth, highly unequal world. That kind of ended as soon as we had to start dealing with real restrictions. As soon as inflation went up like 0.001%,

the economy became real again. Not in a way that owns us for saying that the economy was fake, but in a way that owns a lot of very financially precarious, small mom and pop businesses like Netflix. And so one of the things that's happened, right? Think about some of the things that make Netflix distinctive, right? It's a past... Well, it's that you could have a shared account with your family.

They're cracking down on that. It's that they could release shows all at once in blocks. No sharing. But now what they're doing is they're doing weekly releases because when they release in blocks, then people watch everything and then unsubscribe. Oh, no. So wait, wait, wait.

There is a parallel here, right? And I think it's... You know how we always talk about how like DeFi and crypto people always end up inventing modern financial regulation because they get burned by all of the reasons of why those regulations exist. But what's happening now is Netflix is inventing television because they found out the hard way,

all of the commercial imperatives, why you would have things like an ad break or why you would have sponsors. It's funny that you say that. Why you would make television in the way that you make television. They are putting ads back in. Of course they are.

Because that's like... Sick. It was worked out a long time ago that like decades ago that it was... That's one of the ways in which you can make a sort of this medium, like a tall, profitable. Imagine paying 15 quid a month to listen to shit with fucking ads in it. Well, it's that we're going to have a cheaper tier with ads

and then they're going to have a tier without ads. But they are just reverse engineering TV to the point that, yeah, it's going to have ads. It's going to be weekly releases. And one of the things that drove extremely expensive, like very impressive looking, almost movie like TV shows, like sort of Game of Thrones or whatever, right?

Was the fact that all of a sudden there was all this cheap credit flowing around and companies like initially HBO and then Netflix and Amazon, whatever, could access it and then just basically just pump it into this relatively low rent medium to drive subscriptions. And then what happened is as soon as that credit dried up, all that's going away.

And so now they're also trimming their content spend, which means that we're going to go back to TV being crappy. So it's going to... It's going back to the 90s, where TV becomes like relatively unprostigious, ad supported and released on a weekly basis. It's gone full fucking circle. Yeah, what it means we might get like the new Seinfeld.

And it might also mean that like there is... Once they have a show that works, we'll just like make loads of seasons of it, which I think will be good. I feel like we as a culture of like... One of the sad things about Netflix culture is that you'll kind of get about three seasons and that's it. And I want shows which have like 14 seasons

and each season has like 25 episodes. You just want to sit down with a big box of like Mad Men or Suprise or something. Yeah, and this is where I think Netflix is going to go to. And then I'll be like, oh, people love having hard copies of stuff. So we'll start selling them on these discs. I want to have a photo of that before.

Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe if you want a bit more flexibility, what we'll do is you'll mail you out a disc and then you can return it by post. We're getting back. Yeah, look, we're getting back. We are getting back to the box set

and then you'll need a store to sell those box sets and maybe both stores can sell music and records. Yeah, bring it all back. Bring back the speaking clock. Let's do it. I want it. Let's go. And the other thing, right,

is it's not as though like, ah, yes, this is how television has to be. You know, I think that's not necessarily what I would argue. No, that's what naturally occurring television formation looks like. Well, I think it's more like, if we take seriously... It's what you do when you run out of ideas. It's what you do when you have to make television

under the constraints of, I guess, what you might loosely call late capitalism. It was nationalized Netflix. Whenever I see something like Netflix or Uber as well, right, these things that promise that by the use of just some trickery and the use of sort of innovation, quote, unquote, and like a website and then enormous amounts of money that they're going to be able to totally reinvent

the entire way that people experience this thing and the way that people... And that as soon as they stop just driving the money into it, you realize that the innovation wasn't really anything, that the website was just a website and that most of what you were experiencing was just a whole bunch of money. Like what you were experiencing,

you were experiencing 10 years of the economic effect of a bunch of people putting it all on 32. That's it. Yeah, it's a good number. And so that I think that that disguises, that makes itself look like transformation, but really it's just distortion. It's distortion of the world that you live in

by just the sheer gravitational force of money, but with no ideas around it. Just money and some marketing, essentially. Yeah, but think of all the good times that we got out of it. We got Mark Wahlberg as a sort of like cynical but harsh of gold Boston private detective. We got one season of The Witcher, not sure what happened to that show after that.

Yeah. We got... We got Bright. We got Bright. We got Ryan Reynolds doing a whole bunch of stuff. We got... Spencer Copped and Shaw. Yeah, no, all of those memories, you know.

I think it's possible to get quite sentimental about Netflix now that it's gone. Diastrates. Like Tears in Rain. Like piss down the fucking dunning. Yeah, it's that. And then also CNN Plus launched in a great time for heavily sort of debt-supported streaming services.

Lost more money than Quibi and closed down quicker. You mean people didn't want to see like a sort of 16K resolution Anderson Cooper? I don't know why not. It's kind of... Yeah. I would just look at that man to be honest. Anderson Cooper 40K.

Come on, don't tell me. In the grim future of CNN. Rotating Anderson Cooper in my mind. I mean, look, I think really, right? You know, I want to go back to this idea then. The economy kind of is real again. And there are some companies where it's been real for a longer time. It's only that we had some kind of way of articulating these cycles

where it seems as if the economy goes very well and nothing like, you know, there's just infinite money and then things go badly and there's not a lot of money. And almost as though it's... And it seems that by continuing to do the same kinds of things, we just make the cycles bigger and worse. No. What?

Come on. But no, we talked about... Bigger is better. We talked about that. We mentioned this earlier, right? This idea of as soon as... You know what it is, because when interest rates go up, what that means is that you have to think a little bit

about whether or not what you're doing is going to produce an actual return because it's not free. You can't just fire the money gun anymore. And so... Arming British Transport Police with the supreme money gun. It's not like now is better, right? Because it just... Because it means that like more regular people

are paying more for things that they need that their wages are like going up a bit, but not by enough. And that even the things that you get to try and make it just a little more bearable, like the streaming service that you like or the fucking treats that you enjoy, there's reasons that you have these things

are because it's pretty shitty to live. And these are... That's the deal. In exchange for living in these precarious shitty conditions, you get treats, the fun things. You cannot self-actualize. You cannot own a house. All you can be is the birthday boy.

I stand by my thinking that the greatest sort of moment of crisis in the British post-war political settlement was that week where we weren't sure if we were going to be able to get food, grade, CO2 to make all of the fizzy drinks. I think that had as far grave a potential repercussions than anyone realized because that's part of the whole thing. It's part of the whole deal, the treats. In this case, right, from...

And before, it's not like ordinary people were suffering less. It's just like all of that economic dynamism was going to creating a dream world for someone like Reed Hastings where he can decide the law of gravity doesn't apply. And he still lives in an insane fantasy paradise. It's just... You can't do that in Australia for a long time. He's not allowed.

It's that he has to live a little bit more in the real world where your business has to have a logic to it. It doesn't mean... Yeah, the economy has told him. He needs to stop living on the couch and get a real job and maybe start chipping in a bit for rent. Yeah. Whereas for most people, what it really means is

is that you don't even get the treats anymore because the treats are the first thing to go because they were provided on the basis of the fantasy. And when the music stops, the most precarious, the least rewarded people are the ones who are going to be the first to have their shit taken away. And the services that they engage with

are the ones that, I don't know, depend on people making that marginal decision between spending $19 and $20 or 14 pounds and 15 pounds on something like Netflix. Or the difference between making the kind of... I don't know, take as an example some kind of fancy Scottish gin that's made with seaweed and kelp in it that'll make Riley's eyes light versus your sort of victory gin

that's made out of, like, sewer juices. Gross. For the record, I don't like gin. I really don't like spirits at all. I picked a luxury good around them. Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. But look, I mean... I don't like gin.

He never took part in the woofer end of Stofascan. But ultimately, you know, when I look... I'm like, on the one hand, it's like, yeah, Netflix is a shitty company. It had a terrible plan. It was built on... It was essentially freeriding on the terrible solution to the financial crisis that sort of Western governments

decided on because they were like, well, I don't know. We can't exactly do anything about this. We just have to, like, keep this... Keep these plates spinning as long as we can. They were a beneficiary of that, you know, but... Then the Greek Air Force came in. But, like, you know, it just means that those of the financial crisis, you know,

it's like standards of living went down because that's like the thing that gets crunched when things get hard. And now things are getting hard. Standards of living are going down again. And, you know, as a byproduct of that, these stupid companies that, like, you know, provided you with your luxuries,

yeah, they're getting constrained. But, you know, I mean, that's not going to be the only thing. And I mean, Nestle have announced that they're going to have to put prices up and, like, shrink portions. So, you know, you're fucking... They're coming for your KitKats. Yeah.

They're coming for your KitKats. They're coming for your stories. It's all... You want to get home from a long day at work at the getting kicked in the face and dick factory. And you want to, like, settle down, try and, like, put some ice on the bruises and have a KitKat and watch Spencer Confidential.

It's not going to be as easy. Yeah. This isn't chunky at all. Yeah, no. And there's not going to be a couch for you to... a bench for you to sit on on the way back either because it's been hit by a mortar strike. Downgrading it to a KitKat husky.

That's right. Anyway, I think that's about all we have time for today on today's free episode. I have to go have some Lemsip now because my voice is very hoarse. Never reduce the portions on that, I'm afraid. Fuck me. But it was, you know, it was, as ever,

a delight to speak with all of you on this phone call because we're not live in the studio today because I'm home unwell. I just loved getting to talk about the cops. It's one of my favorite things to do. That's right. And also, thank you to all of you out there in Podcast Land for listening.

Don't forget, we have a Patreon. Remember, one of the few treats left to you as podcasts, largely because they require very little money to set up. So we're not spending $25 million an episode unlike Netflix yet. So do sign up for the Patreon. It is five bucks a month. You can check that out.

Milo, you... Crucially, we're not raising the prices or lowering the portions. You're not getting a 45-minute TF with an ad in the middle. Milo, this is coming out on the 26th. If you're listening to this, it's probably Tuesday. That means on Sunday, as you look at it from your perspective in the afternoon at 3.30 p.m.,

I will be filming my 2019 show, Pindos. Many of you have seen it. Others of you will not. Why not come? The tickets are atana. It's going to be a good show. The room is very large. How large is the room?

It's like a 300-seater. Yeah, if this was like a 100-seater, I just wouldn't be worried at all. But like, yeah, 300... Bring two friends. Bring people off the street. Bring 299 friends. Yeah, there you go.

Anything else, Milo, or are you all plugged out? Oh, yeah. On 17th May, I'm in Brighton. How do you feel about Brighton? Love it. Greatest city in the world, baby. It's here. The small apple.

Yeah, the apples of the world die. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.