TRASHFUTURE - Now Is The Time Of Monsters. On Quibi

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

This week, Riley, Milo, Alice, and Hussein do a deep-dive on Quibi. Why is this mini-content platform supposedly worth $2 billion? Who actually stars in 8 to 15 minute videos on Quibi? And why is it all so terrible? Learn all about it by listening! Here is the article Riley references about interest rates: https://themargins.substack.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world  If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We also want to pass along a link from ActBlue that lets you donate to a bunch of bail funds, Black Lives Matter local organizations, LGBTQ+ care organisations, trans rights organisations, and many more. These are all based in the US and are helping to relieve the financial burden place by America's terrible legal system on protesters and vulnerable people. Get it here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd Also, please help us save Nour Cash and Carry from the band Housekeeping. Yes, literally the horrible pricks we mentioned in this episode are trying to gentrify Brixton Market. There's a petition here: https://www.change.org/p/lambeth-council-save-nour-cash-carry-brixton If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

What if we abandoned the podcasting thing and just started like a percussion? Yeah, what if we just did stomp like stomp of the podcast? You know, my dad was in like a small town version of stomp called the drumming pools. What we unlocked some deep Riley law, 16 seconds into the episode. They're just all playing on Niagara wine barrels. There's more to Niagara than just fucking hell. There's more to Niagara than just wine. Is there, though?

I mean, there's there's a waterfall. I guess you have the cool half of the waterfall. Uh-huh. That's right. We have the we have the still definitely racist half of the waterfall. Don't let it tell you otherwise. Yeah. And you have you have you have the the microclimate. You have the like horse shoe falls. Yeah. We have many fine breweries and restaurants.

You have the the local news that you showed me about people protesting because they would like Antifa were trying to take away the horse drawn carriages. Yeah, we we have that. We have some beautiful old hotels. We have the oldest golf course in North America as well. The Niagara Lake Golf and Country Club. We have many other fine golf courses as well. We have yes, we have the Queens Landing Hotel saying that you can get a horse

and buggy out front of I don't we have like like two really nice parks, Victoria Park and Mississauga Beach. We have like all these beautiful old bed and breakfast. Like it's really nice. I would like by way of contrast to ask you to Google image the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, which is God's. Oh, my God, no. That's just between between between between between the Churchill Theatre

and the Glades, which is also in its own way. I see my man laughing because, you know, oh, yeah. Bromley has so many fucking amenities, man. You know, it's got those. It's got it's the Churchill Theatre. I thought you said the Churchill Theatre. No, no, no, no, no, nothing that interesting. No, it's like the nodding dog Churchill Theatre.

Any of these places I know is places where I I smoked very bad joints. Yes. Yeah, these are places where I feel like both are saying and I have observed men in very, very shiny shoes. Fist-ficing. Yes. Or size and all bar one. Yes. And they all wear like the same type of like cut T.M. Is it Tim Burton show? Is it Tim? It's Tim Lewin. It's Tim Lewin.

It's Tim Burton. It's Tim Burton. They're all fanciful lads. It's just a scale. It's not Tim Burton. It's just Burton. But they have like a very specific kind of shirt. Yeah, where it's like it's like it's nice, quote, unquote,

but it's very shiny, too. It's like the shirt and the shoes. I spent this entire time just in like wearing more than one polo shirt at once. Oh, yeah. The warmth. It's layering. Yeah, just like wearing a couple. I mean, it's weird how I was.

It's weird how that fashion trend went from being about from Kanye West to just Steve Bannon. Yeah, I also love how like the dynamic of this podcast without Nate here to like rep Indiana is one part like the oldest golf course in North America and then three parts, various shitholes of the Southeast of England. That's right. That's right. That's right.

Hey, speaking of which, shall we talk about the stuff? Hmm, the stuff, the things. Oh, no. Bring in the theme song. Bring in the theme song and let it flow forth. Hello, welcome back again to Trash Future, the podcast where we apparently talk about the towns we're from. Yeah, absolutely. This is Lisa Nandy Labour progressivism.

Yeah, we're talking about towns. But hey, bus service podcast. I'm going to actually by way of introducing this episode, I'm going to take the tone and I'm going to cause a jarring shift in it because the time monsters seems to be at hand. We don't know anything about. We don't know anything. We don't know anything about the cool zone.

Yeah, we don't know anything about the cool zone. We seem to know. We seem to notice, right, that it's developing. We are also recording this episode like 10 days in advance. Yeah, everything will be completely different one way or the other. Like Donald Trump will like try to shoot someone with a gun, like just with a pistol that he found. Just be cool.

We cannot stress enough how weird and how unpredictable the terms this last week or two have taken have been. I'll leave some gaps to fill in. Wow, I can't believe that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, soda stream tank. Yeah, so like clearly this stuff is very serious and very bad, which means that the people least equipped in the world to like tell you anything about it are us idiots. No, so here's basically here's the thing.

We are recording this episode way ahead of schedule, specifically because I'm like moving house this weekend. And we didn't want to talk about current events that are no longer current. We also think that what's going on right now in the States and increasingly around the world deserves like actual deep thought and reflection and time. Yeah, we're not going to do like a brand tweet that's like,

oh, we support like a black co-creators and stuff. And then just nothing else. Here's the deal. We are going this week. We are going to be talking about one subject. We are going to cover the protests, the ongoing protests. We are going to give it enough time for us to think about it. We're going to also give us the right amount of time.

So we have the right amount of lead time before you hear what we have to say because this is serious and shouldn't just be tossed off. Yeah, also, we're going to post. We're going to spam a bunch of bail links. There's an act blue link that has been putting out. We encourage you very much to donate to bail funds, solidarity funds, community funds, anything of that nature.

We highly recommend and we will be doing that also. And of course, the trash you should break like clinic. Yeah, that's right. That's what we are now. So here's the thing. All what we sometimes we have to ask. What is when we when when fascists say they're fighting to preserve Western culture, they're they mean a lot of things.

But one of the things they mean is the consumer economy as it has developed. So they are imagining themselves as the phalanx from 300. And behind that phalanx of riot police is the company Quibi. Yeah, it's it's another one of these dumb things that we do. But like the only way that we can relate this to current events is that this is this is what all of this like all of this terror and this violence is in service of doing is you create this white

privilege and the privilege to do what? Well, to enjoy Quibi, to enjoy quips. Yeah, yeah, we need we must preserve rampant brutal structural inequality so that there can be a dynamic startup economy and that creators are rewarded, which means what we get is Quibi. Yeah, this is this is the culture that you're willing to kill and kill and kill for and it's terrible.

Yeah, I mean, as Martin Luther King said, I have a dream that, you know, the children will be able to watch, you know, eight to ten minute videos of premium content on their phone and only their phone. So here's the thing, right? Here's what's going to happen today. We are talking about Quibi, the company, how it arose, the strange circumstances of its creation and why bizarre companies like Quibi and WeWork and all the other ones we talk about

are so inexorably linked to inequality. And then on the bonus episode this week, we've gotten our friends, Brynn and Chris from Beep Beep Lettuce, and we've actually watched a bunch of Quibi shows and we actually recorded that already. So they're infecting our brains. Oh, yeah, if you hear any jokes about golden arms, they will make sense to you when you listen to that, the fun episode. Yes, exactly.

The fun zone. So what we're going to do is this, we're going to do a deep dive on this weird company as I kind of stand in for the phenomenon of large, strange, but bizarrely well-funded, but poorly thought out companies generally, talk about why these keep happening more and more and more and why they're inexorably bound up with awful and worsening inequality. So that in mind, let us begin. Let us quib.

Let us go. Are we ready to quib? We are ready to quib. We will bow our heads and quib. So, Quibi, what is it? Oh, Quibi. The watch I watched an hour of it for the for the bonus episode. And I still don't know that I can give you a satisfactory answer.

So Quibi, as you would hear, it's founder and CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman explain it to you is a mission to, quote, rebrand idle time as quick bites or quibbies of media consumption. It's quick bites. Wouldn't that be quib? I'll give you a billion dollars to not ask that question again. We've seen here a number of Quibi, a selection. Do you think of their meetings?

They have to wait for quib or them. I was waiting for that. It's kind of like, you know, so let me show you a collection of our finest quibs. They were grown in the most unique of microclimates. Yeah, it's like the Rolex guy comes out with a bunch of quibs on like a pillow. And they're like a vitrine. And you were just like, they were cultivated on the side of the Niagara of the side of the Agra for the top.

I love the quibi Somalia. Yeah, that's right. So the Quibi Somalia is who have been bringing us this content. Are there two of them? Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former CEO of DreamWorks, which he co-founded with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. And just posting the eye emoji size massive. And so that's him.

So he's like a big Hollywood studio guy and then former CEO of eBay, HP and the former Republican candidate for candidate for governor in California in 2010 who failed Meg Whitman. So like a state level Carly Fiorina, who is about to say I recognize that career track they put Carly Fiorina in the in the Xerox machines at Xerox and this is what came out. So that basically Jeffrey Katzenberg had this idea. He went to go to Meg Whitman and they said, what if we rebranded idle time by

creating small bits of media that they could they people could consume? Well, queuing up for coffee, I love to rebrand time. Yeah, wait, do they say queuing up for coffee? They said in line for coffee. But who has an eight minute line for coffee? Quibbing on millennials. I know the problem here is that they cannot say things to use a watch while you shit, but it seems like the only niche, right?

Like, well, no, this is what happened. What happened? Really, listen to shit as a quip. Listen to Dennis Leary being like, it takes eight minutes to make a freaking coffee nowadays. And they were like, that is eight minutes we could feel. Yeah, especially if the, especially if like, you know, the working class builder who doesn't drink coffee, according to like the British pundits decides one day that they really want like a strawberry cream whipped

frappuccino with extra sprinkles and, you know, all the other bits, which does take eight minutes. So, but that's right, but this is for Owen Smith. It's Owen Smith who has inadvertently ordered a frothy coffee that he doesn't understand. So, so in effect, Quibi is both the studio and the distributor. Oh, it's Netflix. Yeah, it's basically a Netflix, but exclusively for your phone. And it does and it's a walled garden of content, again, like Netflix.

But instead of what Netflix does is they'll buy a lot of shows, like, you know, your friends fucking, yeah, they'll buy Hannah Gads, be talking about bodies and spaces for an hour and then for the sake of balance, they'll buy a guy in a leather jacket doing to trigger AIDS holocaust. Yeah, so whereas Quibi, which titles have a weird amount of X's in them, Quibi exclusively commissions things that are to be made for Quibi and we'll go into why that is later. So they don't buy, they don't buy, like they don't option anything.

They just like take pictures for quibbs themselves. Yes. And these are both series and reality TV and also like movies that are serialized. And so in reality, it's actually a version of Netflix where you can only watch the shows that they make, which are basically the kinds of shows that will be advertised on 30 Rock as jokes just come true. So what this reminds me of off the off the bat is Peloton. It's very expensive. It's very prestigious in the sense of like they're a real studio.

They're they're they're a walled garden. You have to apply to get in and so on, even if it sucks. And it's highly, highly restricted. Yeah, it's highly, highly restricted. It's a month too, right? Like it's more than a Netflix subscription and I think more than Amazon Prime, even, but also like Peloton, you can't bring in any content from the outside, right? So all of this happened.

It was given a two billion dollar valuation before it launched. And then now around a month after launch, Quibi on the App Store is less popular than Super Slime Simulator and Bald Booth, an app that shows you pictures of what you would look like if you were bald. Yeah, so the front facing camera for me. Yeah, what if that? Yeah. So it's yeah, it's like I could fill my time either by watching this this show about building celebrity dog houses, or I could see what I would look

like as a character from the Star Trek Mirror universe. Getting really addicted to Super Slime Simulator sounds like something I would do. Building a building a celebrity dog house that they have to go to whenever they get cancelled. Unfortunately, facing back in the house. Yeah, so I that's a by way of introduction. That's what it is. I think everyone kind of is familiar with it, but I've actually, again,

done the thing where I've done the research going back into the articles from when it was still in the hype phase. So mostly people talk to Katzenberg. They said they talked to Whitman as well, but Katzenberg is the big name. He says no one is doing what we're doing today. He says he believes that Quibi will usher in what he calls the, quote, third generation of film narrative. These guys, I love these guys so much.

They always convince themselves that they're going to invent like the end of TV. Yeah. So he says the first generation was the rise of film as a medium in the 20s. The second, the rise of serialized TV content in the mid century. And the third generation is a hybrid of the two, whereby stories that are between two and four hours total are broken up into chapters between seven and 10 minutes that consumers can watch on the go. Or shitting while shitting while you shits. Also like the same logic that was applied to the fun size chocolate bar

where they would just say, I don't know, what if we make it smaller and then it's fun? Like they didn't consult anyone as whoever thought having less chocolate was fun. Well, also like what do you think that like, I don't know, YouTube or Netflix doesn't have a pause button like that. I'm like, ah, I'm a queueing up for this coffee. I'm going to watch this YouTube video. I hope it's exactly the amount of time it takes to queue up for this coffee because I won't be able to watch it later.

This is the third phase of media, right? Like this dude is, he is liquid snake, right? He is talking like a Metal Gear Solid villain. We're going to like, we're going to activate the quibby project here. Liquid snake. It's just an episode title. That has to be an episode. It's also like just off the bat, like it completely,

if this is really a type of platform designed for people while they take a shit, which like, I, you know, I'm all for that as someone who shits regularly and also spend a lot of time on their phone. But it completely misinterprets like what people actually want from their content when they shit, which is something that's like not, it's something like that's fairly passive and like fairly like, you don't really have to think too much about it because you're already investing a lot of time into like pooping, right?

Especially like pooping in public, in like a public toilet or something like that. As a toilet user, I agree. I don't want to watch prestige TV while I'm making a shit, right? You don't want to be thinking about like the mise-en-scène while you're shitting. You want to be, basically you want to be on Twitter. Which trust me, trust me, with Quibi, you will not be thinking about the mise-en-scène. But also, like this has been on send. Do not worry. It's just the lies, such a colossal misunderstanding of how media has changed

to the last 10 to 15 years, where like he thinks that somehow the format is that like all the stuff you see on TV has to change in terms of its length, as opposed to this, but actual tangible transformation of media, that actually has occurred where it's become much more like people making stuff for one another, as opposed to a studio commissioning, a sitcom, but then cutting it up different. Well, we'll get to this when we talk about some of the shows specifically, but it is such an analytical, like they've looked at YouTube clearly and been like,

ah, the average person watches five minutes of a YouTube video, so they must want five minutes of content because after that five minutes, they don't move on to something else. They just dust off their hands theatrically and go, ah, yes, good content. And they do YouTube videos are horrifying. Yeah. And they've like they've got that part and they're not any of the part about what the content of those videos is. So like if this was based off of YouTube patterns, I mean, OK,

two thirds of it would be fascism. But the other third of it would be like a guy who like painstakingly restores old Tonka trucks in total silence or like forgotten weapons or that guy who like eats old army rations. What they what they haven't realized, right, is that is that the thing that changed TV, the thing that changed media is that it's possible to hyper target everything because everyone is choose. Everyone is able to choose in a very fine way what they what they consume,

which means that the whole concept of like a network that makes that makes like high production values shows trying to respond to that. It's ludicrous. But I have more about Katzenberg. Katzenberg says, I've been a startup guy my whole life, who on the day he was being interviewed was very much dressed the part in black jeans, a black shirt and spotless white shell tow sneakers. So that's all I need to know. Two billion dollars, dude.

Love this guy. Wow. Back when he was Disney's number two and then co-founded with Spielberg and Geffen, I emoji, giant I emoji. Katzenberg was known to reply to emails by fax, but now he's sounding like a silicon. Yeah, I'm pretty chad, to be honest. If I could get that is true. And that's the kind of shit that you do when you're in a position

where like they can't fire you for your like obstinacy. It's like it's like novelists when they get successful. Who like Cormac McCarthy writes everything with a typewriter because he's too successful for his agent or his publisher to be like, you fucking dumbass, don't do that shit. It's incredibly irritating. Yeah, I totally get that. I'm only going to send in my quib notes on like a pneumatic tube

that I have specially installed for the purpose. But he said it's like you pay by the length of the thing, right? So it encourages you to be shorter. So it is, in a way, the quib of the email. Right. So now he began sounding like a Silicon Valley founder. His pattern pitted with talk of, quote, scale, product and learnings. They love learnings without irony. He suggested that one of Quibi's goals was to change the world.

We don't save people's lives, he said. But if we succeed, we'll make people's lives better. Cultural learnings of America for make benefit. Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. That's what it's for. There you go. We don't save people's lives. But if we succeed, we make people's lives better. And that's the best way I can think of to use the billions of dollars

that went into making the app that has been downloaded by like 10 people that allows you to watch the show about celebrity dog houses because that was popular on YouTube. I have to be honest, having watched an hour of it, it did not make my life appreciably better. What it did was give me, it gave me a series of jokes that I could make on a podcast with my friends. Alice, I disagree.

It's made my life a lot better. The fucking thing with the golden arm. I like, we have not stopped quoting that. Listen to the premium episode to hear about why we keep talking about the golden arm. But yeah, also, again, like this just goes to show the extent to which being a tech company, which means having an insane valuation is just aesthetics. And again, to sort of bring this back around into like into perspective here, this isn't going to stop.

This is going to keep happening and get it and getting worse, where the productive resources of everybody is going to be directed towards this sort of insane, fanciful ramblings of some like boomer executives who've decided that, oh, what if we made the TV short? Yeah, that's why it's a trash future. That is our wheelhouse, is that you're like the extent to which you have a privilege. It's going to be directed into something ridiculous. You can go to a bar, but it will have a ball pit in it.

You can watch TV, but it will be in eight minute segments. You can like, you can check when your parcels are there with a remote doorbell. But also it's going to call the cops on people at random. Yeah, listen, I only feel safe in a ball pit if it's protected by at least four police snipers, and that's just how it'd be. That's right. So Quibi, the company, Antifa could put bricks in the ball pit. What then?

So this is about Quibi, the company. So a lot of this from different articles in the Verge, Vox and other other outlets. Well, Quibi may have one foot firmly planted in Old Hollywood. It's 225 strong staff. What? How? Explain how it has one foot planted firmly in Old Hollywood. Oh, Alice, I'll tell you, it's studio is there. Oh, OK, cool.

Also, that just makes it sound like it's doing some shady shit. Like, I don't think Hollywood has like any. What are the associations like racism and pedophilia? Like, is that what you're going for? Yeah, it's it's forcing its stars back into the closet and into like unhappy marriages with each other and like having people murdered and stuff. And how things have changed? Anyway, staff of 225 is made up overwhelmingly of the sort of bright

young people iterating the future at startups in Silicon Valley. Katzenberg made sure to note that his team's diversity numbers are high and the ages are low while taking pains to emphasize that more than 50 percent of the staff are women and what strikes me again is like he's hired a lot of younger people and like non-white people and stuff to mean junior roles in the company, but all the strategic decision makers early in their 60s still like my my my edgy my edgy joke for this is that like if the writer's room is more than 50 percent women, then like the chuds are right.

Women really aren't funny because we watch this shit and it's all terrible. So we need to be the audience Katzenberg explains to capture a young, ethnically diverse audience. Quibi is presenting itself as a young, ethnically diverse company. It's a lot of young people love young people love Golden Arms. Yeah, every one is an ethnically diverse company. Like not diverse in its employees, but in and of itself, Quibi, the app is ethnically diverse.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's the same thing about like, you know, black, white. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And also it's the same thing as as again, it's just it's a matter of branding. It's this assumption and again, we'll see this when we go through some of this show summaries, which we will this episode. It's a matter of the and I feel like what they've done is they have assumed that if they just put all the right parts together, then what will happen is out of it will flow something create something that is creatively

fulfilling and successful. You know what it is? It's it's like a corporate persona. Like it's just making me think of the fan art of Thomas Jefferson as a black trans man that somebody drew on Tumblr for Hamilton. Oh, no. I know. I brought that. I bring this up on every podcast I'm on.

I brought up on there's your problem, too. And like Justin was like, no, I will not put a slide of that up because it is psychic violence. So if Hamilton had been a Quibi show, it would have been no better than most of the other stuff on Quibi. Literally true. Yeah. So during a visit to the Quibi office, a visitor might see a broad city co-creator deciding to forgo samples from the colossal wall of free candy in the waiting area.

But did they buy not just old candy wall or basic cable veterans dressed down in jeans and sneakers holding standup meetings with painfully hip younger colleagues around a ping pong table for the crazy cool. Yeah, I love to look. This is not a sign of a bubble at all. It's like I absolutely do not believe that Warren Buffett predicts boom and bust cycles based on ping pong sales. I just need to say something for a second because I know that like we're speaking

about OK, all these things are basically like these are all kind of like the monocles of a startup that's going to fail before it starts. But it's like if you're going to do this in the year of like 2019 or to like 2020 or whatever, like did you forget what year it is? Yes, time doesn't exist anymore. That is true. But I'm also aware that Quibi like probably like the development stage is probably like 2019 or something along those lines.

Yeah, we'll go through that. Right. So if you're going to like run a startup at this like at this particular time, like why don't you just update the tropes, right? Why does it have to be, you know, why a ping pong table? Why can't it be, I don't know, like at least like, I guess, like foosballs also out there? Yeah, I mean, none of them are creative enough to know how to update them just like us because we're struggling to complete this riff.

And because of the whole notion that like this is kind of this is a this is a video streaming platform that works on a principle that I thought that we disproved in 2015, which is that short content really doesn't kind of bring up the dividends that like boomers seem to think it does. But they've basically just like gone back to 2013 and been like, yeah, well, startups were good then, so they must be good now. I'll tell you why it's because that this a lot of how these companies attract these ludicrous valuations is actually through shit like the ping pong tables.

Yeah, it's fine. That's why Jeffrey Kasenberg is wearing sneakers. Well, it's it's that and also it's a it's a cargo call because all of this is just a confidence trick by some like by some rich people against a bunch of other rich people to take the first group of rich people's money. Like he's purely a confidence trick. It's just in this case, Quibi is a very stupid one. So it's like trying to do the like ball under the cup thing, but you like immediately fumble all three cups.

To me, it makes sense. They're making eight minute long pieces of content because that is the memory span of everyone who works there and everyone that it's aimed at. I mean, like, how are you going to, you know, enjoy a program if you can't remember what happened at the start, you won't. You can't enjoy like TV unless you do the thing where like you annoy everyone you're watching prestige TV with by being like, who's that? What happened last time?

Who's what's that guy? But yeah, yeah. So, so here's the thing, right? Let's talk about how it's funded. It's funded by a consortium of investment banks, media companies and ultra high net worth individuals like Steven Spielberg. My third eye is opening. Spielberg is directing a show called After Dark, which is a horror series that

will only be available to watch after sundown in whatever time zone you're in. What a fucking conceit that is. I love it when I go on horror Ramadan. Yeah. Well, it's again, if you cannot continue to make to make something that is let's say interesting because of what it is or its content, then you're just going to have to put in more gimmicks. It's nothing but gimmicks.

It's great. Yeah, I mean, why if you live in the polar ice cap? I mean, what then you fucking cannot watch Steven Spielberg for like six months of the year? Yeah, well, but that's that's the thing, right? It's all they know how to do is restrict. So it's oh, what if we tell them what they can't do? We'll tell them we can't do this other thing, which is watching a terrible

Steven Spielberg movie that was made for ten dollars. Hang on a second while I'm unraveling this red string. Can you just tell me what time sundown is in the American Virgin Islands? It raised as we know it raised a billion dollars against a two billion valuation. And so its investors included Disney, NBC, Sony, Warner, Liberty, Global, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and also Alibaba, which was itself funded by SoftBank. Oh, damn, I thought you meant the 40 Thieves guy for a second. What a jackpot kind of comes close.

A couple of SoftBank dollars may have ended up in this, but it wasn't directly funded by SoftBank and crucially, they've also reached a lot of bundling agreements with different mobile phone providers. So in many cases, you have Quibi, whether you want it or not. You pay for it like Windows. I mean, if this was a good move for Bill Gates in 1995, where you just buy your personal computer and you get Windows on, then this is a good move for Quibi because an operating system that everything on your computer runs through

is exactly like an app that you can forget exists. Well, I mean, if you want to take that a little bit further, right? Like Windows, like the business practices of Microsoft, as we've talked about in the past, have been horrible. They've been incredibly monopolistic. It's been a very extractive. It's been an awful company. But like at least the thing that they forced everyone to have was like functional.

Oh, I know some people who would argue with you about that one. It's not a great operating system, but at least you can do something on it. Like at least it works with Quibi. The thing you're forced to have is just nothing. Yeah, it's incoherent. Yes, exactly. When when Excel doesn't work, right? You still get what they're trying to do.

You can attempt to spreadsheet. You like you can't attempt to watch a show on Quibi because it just feels like your brain is melting out of your ears. Quibi is like pure Yoko Ono shit. Like every single show is like this beatnik outside of a pint of perfume with garnished with a single olive served in a man's hat. So we could also ask why was it so heavily funded by these people? Because they're idiots.

And also they need a lot of money to just throw around on dumb shit like this. Yeah, well, there's two levels of reasoning there, right? And boom, the second one, the one I think is actually operational. We're going to get to towards the end, which is that this year is in a world of low interest rates, things like this happen. However, the ostensible reason is that a few months after Quibi was founded, but before it got all of its funding, one of the most popular industry analysts in the TV industry called Thinkbox reported that short watching

sessions averaging two to 15 minutes dominate and platforms are selected based on viewing context and time available. Short videos generally under five minutes in duration are actively selected based on taste and interests of the user rather than the passive serving of content. And they're doing analytics again. But that doesn't account for like that's just spider's gale reasoning. It's so specious.

And they say humor, short TV, film or sports highlights, games and music dominate this need state. So I mean, what what? Yeah, that this is just industry analysts talk. But effectively one one analyst report, my hypothesis goes, which has created a lot of enthusiasm because there was a realization that it was a possibility of monopolizing this time

because they saw that like YouTube and Netflix don't over determine YouTube and Netflix are not really competing for the same amount of time. And so they said, what if we were the Netflix of that amount of time? So they thought there was this massive opening in the market because they just had a first draft of an idea because people are going to want to like they don't understand that like the currency of that is very low. If you watch a YouTube video for three to five minutes while you're shitting, you're not going to pay to do that.

It's just something that you you do to have on while you're shitting, right? What if Steven Spielberg said when you could watch it? What if you had prestige shits? Yes, what if you have to shit after sunset? Otherwise it's really boring. Let's let's talk about the business model. Hang on, I already come up with a better idea than this. It's a it's a system that's built into your microwave.

OK, and whatever time you set it to microwave for, it finds you a show of exactly that length that you then watch while your food is microwave. Some dragon's den shit. I'm in on this one 100 percent. We're all in. So it can be you never know it. You get no choice over the genre. Well, I don't want to take the risk of it being a quibi.

Just keep my craving things for exactly the length of two girls one cup. It's a diet program. Let's talk about the business model. The quibi makes money in two ways or it proposes to make money in two ways. OK. It sells subscriptions to as this is aside from bundling, which we've already addressed, because then you just get lump sums for bundling because then the phone contract providers will say, OK, well, yeah, we're going to put that in our contract.

And maybe it'll be attractive to some people. So the other parts of the revenue model are we sell subscriptions to individuals. So you're in a month, eight a month. Yeah, quit a minute saying is you could subscribe to trash future for less than half of that. Yeah, but like if you want to, you can get this same experience by listening to our bonus episodes for eight minutes at a time, pausing and then getting up and walking around and then listening to another eight minutes.

So it sells subscriptions to individuals for four pounds, ninety so for four pounds, ninety nine with ads and eight pounds without ads. And then it sells ad space. So it's projections were for seven million subscribers in year one, sixteen million in year three and then revenue projected at a total of four hundred million with two hundred fifty million from subscriptions and one hundred and fifty million from ads. Where did they get these numbers from?

A dream, maybe some kind of actually kind of some kind of fugue state. I sort of have something more to say about this because again, it's sort of like, oh, this is such a stupid concept. It's just like we sort of defeat themselves. They're like shadowboxing themselves because the whole point of these fucking shows is that there's supposed to be shows that you watch between advertisements, right? So it's kind of like, you know, if I'm taking my shitting, like my kind of like if I'm going to take a dump and I want to watch a show

about a golden wanking arm while I take a dump, I don't want to watch an ad before then, right? Like I'm trying to get away from those ads. You're giving one of the one of the one of the use cases, I think, was that you could watch a quib during the commercial break of like a big TV show, like, which is insane. But like also you then have to like watch an ad while you are watching an ad in order to watch the quib. Oh, Alice, Alice, Alice, you poor fool.

We could simply monopolize that space of watching the quib with another even smaller bit of content, just like it's just smaller screens all the way down. It's what they say. It's like it's like a babushka, right? While the ad while the ad on the quib is playing, you just watch something even shorter, like a TikTok or a Vine on your watch. What you're doing well, while that while the ad for that is playing, I don't want to speculate.

So here's let's talk a little more about sales. Quibi actually did sell all one hundred and fifty million dollars worth of its ad space to Google, PNG, Pepsi, Walmart, Progressive Insurance and A, B and Bev. Yeah, but that's not how that's not how an ad by works, though. Like they'll pay you something up front, which like makes Quibi very successful by the standards of this show because they have actually taken in some money. The rest of it depends on how many people actually see it and fewer people are seeing it than are currently making themselves bald.

So here's the thing, Alice, I really hope that all the ads are just going to be like, you know, hot singles in your area, local mom shit, you know, like a brain force plus local singles in your area have golden arms and want to meet you. That's the thing, right? Because Google, Proctor and Gamble, Pepsi and so on, because all of those contracts that they've signed with Quibi will have will have break clauses in them based on viewership numbers, we may very well or we won't, but the ten people who watch Quibi will see ads for hot singles in their area when inevitably these companies

pull sever their relationships. Now, Quibi has been downloaded a total of three point five million times as reported by the company, but an independent analyst said it was closer, probably 2.3 million and even then numbers don't numbers don't mean anything. Like two, two thirds of that is just like bot factories in Kazakhstan, where a guy just has paid nothing to swipe a bunch of phones at once. We just go and watch Inglis's court.

Act of use, the woman has golden arm and she's buried with golden arm. Knows about the golden arm, yeah. Chris's court is actually the legal system in Kazakhstan. Chrissy Teigen is assisted by Nusultan Nassar Bayer. Now, all of that will make sense if you listen to the Patriot episode. Yeah, this is a good business. It won't make sense. It's like it's a better business model than Quibi.

And it's one that I like to think that I invented with the Pennsylvania Secret Service joke that you can only get on TrashFuture if you listen to the Patriot episode, but we keep referencing it so you have to, so you don't feel like a rub. So here's the thing. The 3.5 to 2.3 million users is actually being estimated at about 1.3 million actual active users to do a little bit of maths here. That is one hundred and fifteen dollars of committed but not dispensed advertising spend by each sponsor per active user.

To be fair, if you are paying for Quibi, you're clearly a fucking rubes. So you're probably like a terribly rich pickings or advertisers like I do. Well, maybe I need a kettle that can send emails. I don't know. And furthermore, it has a Wall Street value, a company valuation of one thousand three hundred forty six dollars per active user. Oh, OK, cool. Yeah, great.

You just your time is worth one thousand three hundred dollars to them. It's like a thousand. That is approximately, I don't know what, like, what, like it's like two X boxes. No, it's like nine hundred times is valuable as Facebook users. Yeah, that's right. Now, I have a simple country quib maker. I don't know this company. Ever since my great, great grandfather's

original quibis, we have a quib farmer like just in overalls watching the quibs come up. Now, he always believed he always believed that the devil worked in eight minute intervals. And so we had to take up the minds of the common people for those period. Oh, I just just tending a little plant that as it grows is just some like a list star from ten years ago, completely voting in a performance story. You like you unearth this beautiful little shooting at the top.

You're just like, oh, it's a Lana Glazer. Wonder what she's up to this, I guess. How so here's the other thing where we talk about fake tech companies. The question I always like to ask is how is it ostensibly a tech company? Because it be on your phone. Again, that is no, that's the real answer. The real the real answer is purely that they're on their phone and they have a ping-pong table and they've called themselves a tech company.

Their case for how they're a tech company is they have a proprietary technology that's been described as their secret weapon called turnstile. Because if you remember turnstile, quibi is on your phone and only your phone. And your phone can turn in one of two directions. It can. Yeah, a whole new world has opened up for me. So how is quibi going to deal with not with enabling you to watch in both orientations without black bars on the side?

Again, this idea is worth two billion dollars. So turnstile, they say, enables new forms of storytelling. Oh, do you want to know how I'm going to tell you how you turn the phone? Well, in a Steven Soderbergh produced quibi series called Wireless, the viewer has to switch between showing the action in landscape mode and then looking at the character's phone screen in portrait mode. Oh, so it's annoying. Oh, good.

Do you remember that one interactive episode of Black Mirror that got a bunch of awards and no one fucking likes because you're just playing a game when you want to watch TV? Yeah, what if that, but without the award? So let me get this straight. They're whole like, they're whole kind of their belief that they're in tech comes from the idea that the kind of tech IP that they have is the most fucking annoying thing that they, that the app has to offer, which is either the portrait or landscape mode.

They're also being sued for that. Of course. Cool. Great. This is worth two billion dollars. Yeah, two billion dollars. Two billion dollars. I hate watching shit in portrait mode.

It's such a bad orientation. There's a reason why TV is a landscape. They could have put it in phone aspect ratio, but made everything landscape. They could have done this. They chose not to. I think we spoke about this in the bonus episode, but by the way, you should sign up to the Patreon for like in both portrait and landscape mode, like you don't actually get the full picture of anything.

No, it cuts off every bit in both. Yeah, you have to watch each quib twice to see 80 percent of the screen. All I'm going to say is that I watched, I chose Chrissy's court to watch because I wanted to see those feet and I didn't get to see them. I mean, I didn't get to see any feet. It was definitely not. I could see to be fair. You could see Nisltan Nazarbayev's feet, though, to be fair.

So six out of ten overall. And to be fair, in the British legal system, the judges do go barefoot and they are going to have a plexiglass dais. No, but so here's the other thing about turnstile, right? Is that it means that you have to shoot everything twice like at once, so you shoot twice at once and then they they have to complete a version in both for portrait and landscape format, so why even though you use well because of the technology Alice

because then people will use it and the value. It'll generate value for the shareholders. Double is good. Yeah, but you can turn your phone around when you're watching YouTube and it will just like give you black bars or whatever. And it's you get to see all of the image without them having to film everything twice. Well, it's not that they have to film it in two different takes. It's that they need to have nothing on Quibi required to takes.

Absolutely, it has to happen. It's definitely not the script writing sessions. Instead, what has to happen is that two cameras shoot everything simultaneously. Oh, my God, that's beautiful. I love it. We have to use the fucking like Calico vision as camera to film everything. It's great.

And so what that means is that it can be cost up to one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars per minute prescripted shows, which is just over. That's just it for context. That's just over a third of the Game of Thrones is per minute cost, which is the most expensive show in history. Yeah, all of the shows that we saw looked incredibly cheap. You like see the money when you watch Game of Thrones. But with this, if it's a more than a third is expensive, but you just see like,

yeah, I don't know, fucking a lot of glaciers. Sleepwalks through a scene that because it's the studio system, all of that cost is absorbed by Quibi. They're paying themselves to do that. Oh, it's awesome. I mean, basically, you're paying eight quid a month to watch TikToks that have been made by the people who write Amy Schumer movies. So basically how fair that is.

So what happens is, yeah, you get a tremendous piece of capitalist efficiency where the cost of making each show to all of the creative people working on it is very low. We'll explain how that works later. And yet it's somehow ridiculously expensive because again, like a couple of just ancient decrepit people had this ludicrous idea of how of how to try to rebrand idle time. And I haven't I know we talk a lot of times about the first drafts of an idea. It feels to me like fucking Katzenberg and Whitman were talking to one

another over lunch about how they could make people watch video on their phones and like, you know, try to make that into a business and then kind of spent the amount of time it took to walk back from lunch to the office to solve all the problems that would come up with that. This feels like just they never step back and looked at the whole thing. And it's like, well, of course, we're going to need to film with two separate cameras catapulting the cost into the stratosphere of making all this stuff because obviously like that problem couldn't possibly be solved another way.

And it's also not a problem that could just be avoided. It is as someone who looks a lot at all of these like private sector, big, big scale private sector fuck ups and how they're enabled by just the sheer impunity and just the pure just weaponized idiocy of the of like bosses. It is just it hurts looking at the lunacy that is tied up in this awful. Yeah. I mean, we loved it film. I mean, the thing is, though, the shows on Quibi are so good, they deserve to be filmed twice.

Like you will need to you will need to watch them twice to fully understand what has happened to watch them twice to believe that this is genuinely the premise of the show. Every single premise of every show sounds like a riff. I mean, we will do. We're going to talk about some premises more. I think about Quibi. The more I just think about these are just like these are people who have far too

much money, obviously, we just have no idea how people watch stuff on their phones. Generally, like it kind of, you know, that thing that happened last year about like a bit about like guys who were trying to watch the Irishman, like the three hour long Irishman movie. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how it was like it kind of became a bit because people were so sort of invested in wanting to finish a Scorsese movie that they were like going into the toilets during like family Christmas or Thanksgiving to watch it.

And that was a funny story, but it also kind of like picked up on this very important thing, which is that length of stuff doesn't matter, but also really like the cinematic quality doesn't really necessarily matter either. So the idea of it like Quibi kind of looked at all the sort of trends in visual and broadcast media and we're like, OK, the things that people want. Are things like really high definition on your phone that you can watch in portrait or landscape mode, but because that's the most important thing to you. But it's really, really short because you have a short attention span

so that you can kind of continue watching two shows at once. And ultimately, you can watch these things on your phone and basically do nothing else. Hmm, that's right. And also, you pointed out the ways in which that it's quite limited. They've had very little understanding of how people actually consume media. They also have very little understanding of how people, how media becomes popular because the other technical innovations in addition to turnstile, this ludicrous and unnecessary piece of technology is that they have completely disabled any

kind of sharing of this content. You can't screenshot it. You can't record it and you can't cast it to anything other than the phone subscribed on because they're so paranoid about someone just like making the golden arm story free on YouTube yet. No fan cams, no screenshots. Absolutely do not attempt to build a community around this app. In fact, someone once did.

They made a podcast that was just about everybody's doing that these days. All over Quibi. It was specifically about Quibi. And they threatened legal action against them. Just very normal stuff. Wait, what? They threatened to sue somebody for making a podcast about the holy shit. We are to cancel this episode.

Reminds me of that thing that happened on Twitter not that long ago when everyone was getting mad at Owen Jones because he screenshots is like a really important article about I can't remember if he was like about NHS cuts or something like that, but it was like a really important one at times. And this conversation that was supposed to be like about bringing people together to kind of comment about government injustice became one about newspapers and how, you know, screenshots seeing is actually stealing. And you should subscribe to the whole newspaper.

And you should steal Owen Jones's book was the thing that's there. Quibi's kind of thing is that like, and I kind of always wanted to build up on my last point, which was it's all well and good if you're creating high quality content, that's really high quality in every aspect. So that like you're demanding people's full attention, right? So like if someone watches the Irishman on their phone, like, OK, it's this long movie, but they're paying attention to it because there's a premium element to that. That's not the case with any Quibi show assault, right?

No, it's just weird. It's weird because they have names attached to them like Steven Spielberg or Soderbergh or like fucking Elana Glazer and yet that there is nothing that when you're watching them leads you to think, oh, this is some fucking Primo content. I just tell you why it's that. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I just think that this could have been a really good like this could have been like it will not go.

It's really good, but it would have been better if Quibi just sort of accepted that this is sort of like lowbrow entertainment and this would work really well if it was just like something passive that people could do. But the fact that like demanding full attention for Chrissie's court is just like you're totally right. You're totally right. This is the point that I was I was tentatively making earlier is that like when when you're shitting, when you're watching YouTube for like five minutes

or whatever, that's such low value in terms of your like your attention and the priority you give it like if Quibi had been an app where you like pressed the play button and it sends it serves you a random video of a guy getting hit in the nuts with something, it would be worth those two billion dollars. Yes, 100 percent. Put the Milo. It just plays you a single beautiful jackass segment from back in the day. Well, that's the thing.

Right. Yeah. This is this is a company that has made every correct marketing decision. It's made many correct staffing decisions. It's just that it's as as I think, especially like media and storytelling is absorbed more into, say, the this mode, the sort of the capital mode as the culture industry, if you like, it precedes a pace, then the the actual thing that's being made is far less important. A second. Are you suggesting that there is a tendency of the rate of cultural

value to fall? I am. But speaking of which, I would like to talk now about some example shows because Quibi has tried to create shows in a bunch of ways. They firstly, they feel like everything they make has to be a competitor to network television. So they've like done a lot of news or whatever. And a lot of its prestige TV or take some prestige TV. But also it's telling that a lot of what Quibi did was just option a bunch of movie scripts and then make them into Quibi shows.

So one dummy, which is about Dan Harman's sex doll that I'll be talking about in the bonus episode was made over the course of 18 days. They just optioned the script and made it in 18 days. Donald Loog plays Dan Harman, the Wizzow School of Filmmaking, and I'm waiting for the biopic about those 18 days. So I will hear up for actual to gear up for actual commissioning. What they did was they just basically conducted surveys of people who watched more than an hour of video a week on their phones than commission shows based on that.

You just surveyed people with Irrisable Bowel Syndrome. Well, there's nothing creative going on here. It's purely trying to turn viral videos back into shows. It's just the same McDonald's order being passed back and forth between two smart bins. But Quibi has given the fent in the dog his own show. There are going to be a lot more shows under analysis in the bonus and none of the shows that we talk about here we talk about in the bonus. They're all their own shows.

These are other shows. Yeah, this is how bad it is. You have this whole trench of shows enough to outfit two whole episodes. So thanks in thanks a million produced by Jennifer Lopez. Celebrities kickstart a chain of kindness, each gifting $100,000 to an unsuspecting individual who has had a positive impact on their lives with the catch that they pay it forward half each time and a chain of giving unfolds.

So that's just the God's plan video. Yeah, but like it's a show now. Eight minutes long. Eight minutes and produced by J.Lo, who? Yeah, what does she know about producing TV show? Why is she? What? Yeah, I don't know. She's just probably again, she had an idea from trying to like like monopolize

the concept of Christmas to like be like, yeah, I'm just going to do the video for God's plan. Yeah, I should look. She had a she had an idea once over a lunch and then she was like, oh yeah, I could get Kevin Hart, Aaron Rodgers, Carly Kloss and Nick Jonas and Gabriel Iglesias to like give away a $100,000. I used this joke already, but I'm going to reiterate it because it's so apt every person that you see on Quibi, including the guests, like genuinely, I was I was seeing guests on stuff who are ringers,

who are like professional comedians, who I recognized. Everybody on there, you just look at them. You think, huh, I wonder what they're up to right now as you're watching them. I wonder what black male material Quibi's got on them. Architecture, which I've referenced before, heartthrob contractor Tyler Cameron and interior designer, Delia Kenza, build custom luxury dog houses for the furry friends of celebrity Clientel.

Heartthrob contractor. What focus group produced that? Yeah, dog. Yeah, MTV quibs. Yeah, in this nature series presented by Reese Witherspoon for some reason. Wonder what she's up to right now. We explore the remarkable females of the animal kingdom from ants to cheetahs. These ladies call the shots in their world and sit at the top of the social

hierarchy, earning them the title. OK, I've taken psychic damage. I'm sorry. We have now we have now expanded meaningless girl boss, white feminism to the fucking animal kingdom. Are you kidding me? Clapbacks. Yeah, you could see what this was, right?

You were like, everyone likes Nancy Pelosi doing the clapback to Donald Trump. Everyone likes David Attenborough's Planet Earth. Yeah, and everybody likes that video about the honey badger from 2008, where it's like the honey badger don't give a fuck. And then they just they took that video and they turned it into something that involves celebrities costing millions of dollars to just watch my fewer people. You can identify the YouTube video that like each of these is like an ayahuasca variation of here's another one.

So I see the shape. OK, can I do my bit before you go on? Yeah, yeah, do the bit. Go off. OK. OK. Um, fuck, I'm so good to start. I'm I'm going to I'm actually going to be rescinding my Quibi subscription today until Quibi decide that, you know, I don't want them profiting off

the work of girlbusters in the animal kingdom. So I'll cheat on their boards. I will not be watching any of their shows. I mean, the thing is, they only get seventy seven percent of the antelope mate to the to the male's hundred. Here's another one. The shape of pasta. We're a professional chef.

Sorry, this is Alan Partridge's dint of our own. The M.O. Detour collaborating with Alan Partridge on that. The shape of pasta through the ages. Different different kinds of pasta. Also, we're all canceled for confusing Benicio del Toro with Guillermo del Toro. Oh, yeah. No, I was thinking I've been I've Guillermo del Toro because, like, he's like, you know, he's a big guy.

He'd be really excited about the pasta. Yeah, he's a big guy. The shape of pasta is like a euphemism for a fat guy. It's like, yeah, he's got a bit of the shape of pasta. Yeah, it's a movie about wanting to fuck a creature that lives in a vat of marinara sauce. Yes, it's a woman who takes home and rescues the avatar of NYC Guido voice. So the other night, Matt and I were watching Goodfellas and I was really tired and I accidentally called it Bigfellas.

That's like the English version of Goodfellas. That's the North F.C. version of Biglads. So Shavenpasta, this celebrity chef from L.A. Goes to Italy and it's about the pursuit of pasta perfection. He's uncovering the craft and culture behind some rare and forgotten pasta shapes. Like a rare pasta. Like we can see, again, this is people watching like three minute clips of chef's table or like Test Kitchen or whatever.

And the shape of pasta. It's such a fucking low rent idea. Pyramid. Yeah, the eldritch pasta that you like. Here's the thing, Milo, I think what you said earlier about Alan Partridge is exactly right. I could see Alan Partridge pitching every single one of these ideas. You could see Alan Partridge pitching fierce Queens.

Yeah, because you know why? Because it would be like 2019 and the conceit of the episode would be that it's all about feminism now, Lynn. And then he he could he'd come up with an idea where he would have to like he could do a feminist show, but I wouldn't have to work with any women. And then he pitched fierce Queens. Huh? Well, I like it.

I want my co-presenter to be an absolute scorcher of about 14. Do use those words. I love that when Riley does Partridge, it sounds like Richard Iowardi. I have a unified theory that Riley can actually do an impression of anyone on Earth, but only by doing someone else. That's literally true. Yeah. Oh, no. It's like the enigma machine, but for voices.

Riley, do a stathem real quick. I will not. I'm not your dancing fool. And it's stathem. It's just right up to an episode of depression adjacent stathem in 15 minutes. That's right Winston. It's true. He literally does the enigma machine, but in play there.

Okay, here's the last one we're going to do before we move on. Murder unboxed. What does a bottle of brandy, a toaster, a pile of a pile of ash and a born supremacy DVD have to do with murder? Quibi's new crime series, true crime series, murder unboxed will reveal the connections by dusting off boxes of evidence from real life murder cases. No, mimicking the style of popular online unboxing video. No, this is so insulting.

This is this is literally like what what do women be doing? Women be listening to my favorite murder and women be watching unboxing videos, apparently, so what if we just had literally a murder unboxed? That's so insulting. It's a really essentially a random time now. Yeah, the thing is, right? If I seriously, I think that if every all of your output is purely a reflection of market research, if it purely is just reflecting back to people,

what they've already consumed. Yeah, Quibi is a fun house mirror. Yeah, it's going to get weirder and weirder and weirder as random new combinations of things just bash together. Well, they just throw all the fucking pasta at the wall and see what sticks. We've accidentally done this to YouTube's algorithm on, well, that's your problem because all three of us independently forget to log out of the show's YouTube account and we just keep watching stuff while stuff is

uploading. So the recommendations for it are fucked in three different directions at once, and it's like muscle confusion. It has no idea what to recommend this next. It'll be like, oh, do you want to learn how to use a bandsaw and listen to a bunch of hard bass? But that's the thing, right? Yes, obviously, the Slavic dream. Yeah, yeah, I'm creating while creating culture.

All capital is able to do is try to make a return in an investment by looking at what else has made returns on investments. That's why it makes this like all of the all of the things produced by Quibi so hyper real and eldritch is so deeply weird. There's nothing creative about it. That's purely derivative and extractive. OK, wait, we don't mind I have a pitch for a show on Quibi. We open on a rain-swept hillside.

Hello, I'm Sarban Warcrime, Sprankster, Banco, Margerich and this we're here in Westchester, Bosnia. And this is a mortaring civilians with my frozen shits. Oh, wow. We could actually bring Banco or Maric to life. Don Ratko. It's fucking. Yeah, we're they honestly like how long

it is long enough, how long before they have like the jackass guys do a kind of. I mean, like here's the thing, right? I genuinely I'm genuinely approaching a thesis here. Also, I'm sorry that Banco Margerich gets me every time, but it does. You know what this is, right? Like if Netflix is a thing that like has the exploitative aspect with the creative aspect and from that you get like some stuff, some shows that might be good or not. And Quibi only has the extractive stuff and no creative thing.

You know what it's missing? You know the creative half is with no extraction is an fucking cameo. That's where Ban Margera literally is right now. You can listen to him like slur his words. Try to like wish somebody a happy birthday and get their name, age and gender wrong. Like this is that something has come badly uncoupled. And the result is that like cameo is truly inventively weird. It's why it's so fun to like observe is because you have no idea what's coming next.

Whereas Quibi feels so disconnected because there is no creativity to it whatsoever. So what you're saying is we fucking Ban Margera to do Banco Margerich. With only like two hundred dollars. OK, number one. Yes, let's do that at some at some point when the money maybe can't be used for some something else more important. Number two. Yeah, anyone considering doing that for us?

Give the money to bail funds instead, please. Number two. I think that what this means is we need to start a third company that's going to act as the mediator between cameo and Quibi and we're going to solve this thing with another star. Quibio. Yeah, Quibio. So here's a doing fucking dialectics to this shit with startups.

But here's the thing. We have I think that Alice number one. I think that's exactly right is that we have that market research has become uncoupled from the thing it's trying to market. It's purely marketing now. But we also look at some other people because we've talked a lot about this company and what it's producing. But we have to talk about its relationship with its creators and its workers.

Because as per usual, what Quibi actually is is a business model is a union bashing effort. That's why it's a tech busing busing. Yeah, it literally is. It is a it is a massive. It is a massive exercise in union busting. And I have with the help of some is when you have a really well coordinated game of soggy biscuit with the help of the actual industry insiders.

I've spoken with gone into the WGA Writers Guild of America contract. For example, of how this works, the basic logic of the contract is that the longer your thing is and the higher budget it is, your pay needs to scale up accordingly. And also it depends on what type of studio you are. So if you're Warner Brothers or if you're Netflix, which is a new media company, you pay different amounts. So for example, the Writers Guild of America contract for 2019, 2020 stipulates that for writing a 60 minute episode of television for a network is at least

39,463 dollars. And then that show will have maybe 10 to 20 episodes in its right. I get it, but you're not writing a 60 minute episode. You're writing an eight minute episode. Precisely. Quib, if you will. Yeah. And there's no pay scale for Quib yet.

Well, the thing is if we're writing Quib on the club here. The same contract says that if it's being distributed, but if it's 50 minutes or less, the minimum is 8,554. But that's for networks and networks and studios and stuff. It's not for new media. New media is defined differently. And so what happens is that if we go to the new media,

the minimums only kick in at 20 minutes. And fuck me. And and and here's the thing. If you have written a show that maybe has three. It's a 30 minute sitcom, maybe like a 22 minute sitcom with three, seven minute acts. All you have to do is put credits between those acts and they're now standalone episodes, so none of the minimums from the Writers Guild of America contract apply to the writers of Quibi.

Fucking hell, I should have guessed that the reason why it was so strange was just nakedly evil, but like also like I have a question here, which is like this union busting, what is it in aid of? Because it can't like the other studios can't use this, right? It's not wedging open the door for anything. And the company's still going to lose money. So what difference does it make? Like it only works if people genuinely thought it was going to be successful.

Or if like they're just purely driven by material conditions and like it doesn't matter, we've just like invented a way to like it like use this one loophole. It's like, well, the Writers Guild of America doesn't actually extend to space. So we're filming everything on Elon Musk's rocket. It drives the thing up to like obscene amounts of cost and also nobody's going to watch it, but we have successfully defeated the union contract. It's a bit like when they fake the moon landing on the moon. Yeah, I honestly think you kind of capture it here, right?

Like, yeah, the union contract has been defeated. And even if Quibi dies, then some other company can like look at how that was done, tweak it a little bit and then boom, so long as you put credits in and it doesn't matter if it streams directly one to the other, it's you still don't have to pay the union minimum. Now, there's a couple of schools of ways you can understand this. You could understand this as Quibi realized that in order to afford, it's ludicrous, pointless, and frankly, somehow this technology makes things worse to watch than it already was, which is hard for a Quibi.

So before the light, the turnstile technology, they'd have to like, you know, pay not pay its actors and writers very well. Or no, I think they started with that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's why the turnstile thing is so funny is that, like, you you do all of this, like legal contrivance to avoid having to pay your writers or your performers, and then you just erase all of it with a Google about turning your phone. That's such a perfect metaphor for the whole thing.

Yeah. God damn. So, like, you gotta ask, right? Like, why is this thing valued at nearly two billion dollars? And I think the union workaround that we've described, like it goes some of the way there, because the difference between a successful or at least a successful certain kind of tech company, again, I'm not including the sort of B2B firms that are, you know, they're still companies that are still not good, but, like, they're just quietly automating business processes in the background.

They're doing something different. But these these companies that are aiming to, like, like Airbnb or Green Sail or the ones that aim to undermine regulations, they're valuable because they find a way around paying people a good wage, a way around. This isn't even a valuable way of evading the contract, because it's just it's so forced that it just dynamites anything that, like, might make people want to watch it. Yeah, the people who came up with this company were cursed by a witch. Like, they literally was like, you have to found, like, a massively expensive union

busting company that will culminate in someone screaming, give me back my golden arm. Literally literally a line literally a line from a show. Yeah, God. So, right, like, but you have to ask, like, how how do we get here? And because I don't think the union workaround is enough. No, because especially because of the so many crazy limitations placed in how the concept of content could be consumed facing off against YouTube, Twitch, podcasting.

It's because money doesn't mean anything anymore. And as such, you have these VCs who are just able to and in fact have to to keep this whole show on the road, invest purely based on vibes, what kind of sneakers the CEO is wearing, things of that nature. And so this is why I think it's best to understand Quibi is to normal companies as Quibis are to normal shows. It's just weird and hyper real and reflected through the assumed desires of the audience, which just makes no sense once you start to think about it for a moment.

But I promise to tie this into inequality generally. And I'm going to do a bit of an explainer here on something called the zero interest rate problem. And this explains why companies like Quibi are hangover of the financial crisis and especially the response to the financial crisis from the Fed. So let's we have one of what do is look at Quibi not just as a company, but as a historical phenomenon, even though it was started in 2019, we have to locate its inciting incident in 2007, 2008.

And that's because Obama's fault. Yeah, thanks, Obama. So what happened basically is that we is the United States road out of recession, as it was in the UK as well, was largely based on, OK, we need to channel this through the market means we have to encourage economic activity. And so interest rates were kept very low. An investment was made to replace labor with capital. Monopolism grew.

Regulations were skirted or weakened. The idea was that growth is growth, whether that growth is tied to the flourishing of actual people's living standards or speculative monopoly chasing. It's the same thing as Greensill, right? Where like the point, the product is that the line goes up, right? You get growth and so different mixes of monetary and fiscal policy. So interest rate policy or tax and spend policy will encourage one or the other kind of economy. And we all know this podcast exists because we definitely all

went down one path. So interest rates, we talk a lot about interest rates, but I think it would be good to go into a little bit of what they are and what they mean. Interest rates are essentially the... No one knows really where they come from. Or God, it's God, or it's debated. It's debated where interest rates come from. But interest rates can essentially be understood as the assumption by people undertaking projects and finding funding for projects that those projects will be successful.

So the fewer people... So the idea is if you have a higher rate of interest, so let's say three to five percent, that if you're borrowing money to undertake a project, you better be pretty confident it's going to be successful. It's literally... I have a better explanation for this and it is actually a form of interest rate. It's just the big in mob movies. Exactly. Yeah.

So if the interest rates are very low, it means that companies are not borrowing because they don't think they're going to be able to make any money. And so interest rates, on the other hand, by adding cost to speculation and investment actually restrain capital from taking the kinds of like crazy and expensive risks needed to become monopolistic because becoming a monopoly takes an enormous amount of investment. But companies like Quibi are only successful if they're monopolies. So effectively, when you have a lot of free money just flowing from the Fed,

because we think we have to encourage economic activity as an end in itself, then you realize that there's... And you realize as a market, they're monopolized, you go around monopolizing it. Kassenberg and Whitman made this most clear to me with their rebrand idle time message. They saw an opportunity for monopoly. It's free to try to monopolize something by just borrowing money for nothing. And so, of course, they do it. Much like Quibi's shows, which are just based on pure market research and purely

and pure derivation, Quibi itself is just, well, we are going to reflect all of these other things in the economy. And we are going to make a zero cost bid to monopolize something. So it doesn't even have to be good. It just has to be big. Now, I understand why their directors drive around in a big tin shoe and a big tin boat, respectively. Well, it's also so weird that a zero cost investment here means two billion dollars. That's such...

That would ordinarily be called inflation, but because we've structured everything to avoid inflation ever, this is normal. Yeah, exactly. And so, the source of economic growth is these insane valuations for companies that never end up trading because they exist as enormous bets made on quite shitty hands. It's another priest of the temple of the line having to go up. And so, there's a really good article about the zero interest rate problem, which I'll link here, which I mean, I see personally the zero interest rate

problem as kind of like the issue of the modern economy. And you can think of it as decreasing the blind in the game of poker, which is the money you have to put into play each hand. By making it basically free to play, the player with the biggest chip pile is able to make huge bets on like a pair of twos and just buy every hand by making the risk too big for everyone else to play. He tips the dealer handsomely and everyone else continues making their own small aunties for capital to take just by buying the pot, just by winning less and less and less.

And so, this is how these attempts being made at Monopoly play into inequality. You can't think of companies like Quibi wouldn't exist in a world that wasn't already heavily monopolized and ridiculously unequal. These things coexist for a reason. Quibi is a large bet on like a two and an eight. Yeah, that's right. And so, the NHS brought to you by Quibi. I lost one of them.

I only I've only ever been to a casino once when I was 18. And I had no idea how casinos work. So someone was just like, OK, take the money that you have in your wallet. They think was like 50 pounds or something like this, because I was like that was all the money that my mother gave me. And I was like, so I just want it on black. And I thought that was like a really safe bet. And then I lost I lost everything.

I mean, this is I think I'm the only trash future host to have been ejected from the Bellagio by security. So I think you might be. That's a pretty safe bet, I think I have been to the Bellagio, but I was I was not ejected by I ejected myself. So basically, if you want to tie this into other elements of the economy, you can think of a large retailer like Target or something that is able to make heavy investments, borrowing money for free to do so, to automate checkout,

to make half of its staff redundant. Right. It's able to do that because the economy is encouraging it to do so. And it's able to and it's able to then become increasingly like a monopsony buyer of labor in its area. A monopsony is like a monopoly, but it's for one one buyer rather than one seller. And I guess I and I guess because these companies have like such unlimited access to capital and a risk to like fairly minimal. And you've also got like, you know, weakened unions.

So there's basically no pushback. They can take all these like bizarre risks or like in this case, invent these companies, which are any normal person knows is doomed to fail. And they go with it. And I guess I guess like my my extended question or my extended thought is, is it because of this access to these like pools of capital and the fact that all of it is just really just reinforcing itself, which then kind of gives this psychological manipulate some psychologically into thinking, yeah, this company could work

because if it wouldn't, why am I getting money from so many places? I think so. I mean, all of these guys are true believers when there's no reason for them to be like just on a purely analytical level, the worst thing that can happen to you if you invest like two billion dollars into quippy is you lose your two billion dollars, which if you had it to invest is nothing to you. And like a podcast makes fun of you. You're not really losing anything of consequence.

Just imagine an ordinary guy who's like maxed out four million credit cards in order to invest two billion dollars in credit because he like really like, yeah, I don't understand, Sandra, this is going to make our family. No, his wife, his wife wanted him to go into debt to buy a golden quibi. Golden quibi. But like what you what you get then, right, is you can't look at quibi in isolation because these beads to form monopolies, they are made knowing that many of them will fail. You say beads, bids.

That's why the beads. Well, these bids to form monopolies. I said, I said beads. That means capital at the auction means capital could afford to make incredibly weird decisions like this because ultimately it's not really a risk. I mean, it may be failed in this attempt to create a monopoly or we'll see if it has. It may have stepped on a rake this time, but it stepped on a rake as part of a much larger boot that's stepping on you.

Yeah. It can make a bunch of if it bets all in every hand, then it's it's fine. It doesn't matter if this one loses. It's the way I have to step on every rake twice, once upright and once sideways. So it's the way I think of money in this case, right, especially in a zero interest world, if you think of interest rates as holding back this kind of thing. A zero interest rate world where we've realized that no project is going to be successful, nothing's going to make money because no one has any money to spend.

And the rate of profit has gone down again, right? Is that you have to think of money as almost something like a, I mean, you have to think of money as a commodity, first of all, as we all read in capital. But I think it's a good metaphor to think about it in terms of physical matter where when size is what matters, when you can purchase the pot, when you can afford to fail for five years, so you can become a monopoly and jack the prices. When you can try to do an Amazon or whatever and lose money for a million years before you make money, you then all that has to happen is the more money

gloms on to you, the more likely you are to be successful. And then the more money is going to glom on to you. And because interest rates are free, that's the only that's the only way you can really make a lot of money is to try and form a monopoly. And so this is if you want, if you want a proximate, not the ultimate cause, but approximate cause or approximate relationship between companies like this and incredible inequality, it's quite simply that the money is all where it doesn't need to be, because there was already some money there.

And you cannot fund your schools because we have to spend that money on quips. Not even quips specifically, but like we have to we have to retain the option to do quips, we have to have this this power of capital stored that we can make these bets constantly instead of building anything that people might actually use. I think children should be taught in quips, you know, like DT, you're building a golden arm. The lesson length is eight minutes. You are renovating a house and cleaning blood off the walls.

The lesson length is four and a half minutes. So look, these downright bizarre companies like Quibi or WeWork or whatever, I see them as like a parody of what Mark Fisher was talking about when he talked about inventing the future when that invention is sort of geared towards sort of strange otherworldly at Funhouse mirror forms of of actual creativity and focus on new modes of extraction than anything else. So I suppose I could say that now is the time of monsters on Quibi. Yeah, the time of monsters is about eight minutes.

That's right. But look, hey, we've been going for like a million years. So I think I'm going to be in a long for a quip. Yeah. What if we broke this up into like 10 or 12 different segments? You stop paying all these people with credits in between. Hey, look, should we get a trashy credit sequence where all our faces come up and it plays like Jingle Jangle 90s music with captions?

Yeah, I'm introducing Alice. Yeah. Hey, number one, thank you very much for listening to us. Thank you also very much to everyone who like we donated some money and then everyone else outmatched us like immediately. Please keep donating to the blue link that's going to be. It's going to put a bunch of links up. You'll be kept with the virgins.

Yes, you made us look like merchants and we're so proud of you. This is a time that is, look, it is serious. This is worth serious. It's worth being serious about. It is worth doing something. It is worth doing something to try and, I don't know, make this world not as awful a place as it needs to be. And a big part of that is going to be throwing some money to that act blue

link down in the description. Yeah, this is where we cash in the the mutual aid after all of this like consciousness raising, right, is you got you got to do the thing. You got to spend the money. It's mutual aid time, folks. But hey, once you've done that, importantly, once you've done that, also, there's a Patreon for five bucks a month. You got the second episode

in which we talk about all of the shows that we watched. So that's fun. I won't lie, the other episode was way more fun. Like if you enjoyed this episode, oh, boy. Yeah, this this was the business episode. Yes, this is the other episode is to fucking see in the back. Yeah, exactly. So you know about all that.

You also know all the rest of the of the stuff you know about the t-shirts. You know about our about all the all these normal things. I don't need to bore you with those details. You know, the song is Jin sang. Here we go. Find on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often.

Hell, maybe find it on Quibi. Who can say maybe the pit. But hey, I want to thank you all so much for listening. And thank you all so much for being sort of the greatest listeners up. Freakin podcast at home country podcast and ask for if you are involved in activities, if you're in situations, if there are like events of a situation style nature have occurring in your vicinity, be safe. We're all tremendously proud of you.

Our antifa super soldiers. And if there is if there is a value to us lacing up our clown shoes and making a podcast, then it is hopefully that we can a coordinate some mutual aid. So people who need money get money. But B, you know, maybe crack a smile in the world of trash future. Yes, exactly. So with all that in mind, I want to say thank you. And from our family to your family, have a good one.

Go watch the whippies. Yeah, watch some clips. Exactly. Yeah, bury me with my golden arm.