TRASHFUTURE - Ready Worker One

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Listen up, you hogs: for those of you who missed the live show in London on May 30, please enjoy this recording. Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) are joined by special guest and TF original Charlie Palmer (@cfppalmer) for a night of apps for loan sharks, philanthropy for space villains, and a game of pong played against an electrified shelf. You’ll love it! If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* On June 15, we’ll perform at Wolfson College Bar (Wolfson College, Cambridge CB3 9BB) in Cambridge. The show starts at 8:30 pm, so be there and be ready to hear about Gundams. Tickets are £8 for students and £10 for general admission: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-in-cambridge-15062019/ *COMEDY KLAXON*: Come to Milo’s regular comedy night on June 5 at The Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA), This show also starts at 8 pm and features Alfie Brown and Mark Watson. Tickets are £5—sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-alfie-brown-tickets-61860825394 Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Hi friends, Nate here. Please enjoy this live recording of us performing at the Star of Kings on May 30th. And just bear in mind, if you like hearing live shows, we've got another one coming up on 15 June at Wolfson College at Cambridge University. Look for a link to purchase tickets in the description. Thanks and enjoy. First of all, hi and thank you for coming to the trash future live show. Give yourselves all the pat on the back for making it out on a lovely evening. Thanks everyone. Thank you for being here. However, before we get into the normal content about how we live in hell, we first have a special announcement from the trash future rationality correspondent

Brendan O'Neill. Brendan's very sorry that he can't be here tonight. He's getting some medical treatment for the fact that his head is a butternut squash. But through me, he'll be addressing you all now. Recently, the chattering classes of this once great nation have been taking to the internet to defend one of the most dangerous foes to freedom and civility in British politics. That's right, dear readers, I speak, of course, of the strawberry milkshake. It all began when a rabid Trotskyite Corbinista threw the milky fruit flavoured refreshment over the far right campaign at Tommy Robinson. Now, don't get me wrong, I completely disagree

with Robinson's views and oppose him vociferously. But this is precisely why I must constantly defend him in my columns. Because make no mistake, Tommy, big robs the axe monster, he was not milkshake. He was not milkshake for being a racist. No, this is far more insidious. He was milkshake for exercising his freedom of speech in a way which constantly happened to be racist. These are different things. And to insist that doing and saying racist things is the same as being racist is the same kind of Stalinist group thing that we fought against in World War two. The worrying thing here is not Tommy Robinson being covered in succulent other

juice. I didn't read this aloud to myself. My brain is a dark place. But rather that civility is now gone from British politics What happens having a polite adult conversation with a skinhead and exchange of views in the marketplace of ideas? And it is not only far right boogeymen like Tommy Robinson, but they have even done this to a man of the people, Nigel Farage. Such that he ended up trapped on his campaign bus for fear of a further creamy demise. What if he had been lactose intolerant? He could have had a very upset stomach. And if you ask a trendy Islington lefty, they'll tell you that it's okay. Because Nigel Farage is a Nazi. But who gets to decide who is a

Nazi? Sure, we could go by the usual warning signs of nationalism and racism. But in calling their far right opponents Nazis aren't these young people in a way the real fascists? As a classical liberal, even though I firmly disagree with Nazis on a number of key points, I am appalled by this discriminatory campaign against them and their creed. The young armed with their dairy weapons are conducting nothing less than a new crystal noct against far right politicians. Not by smashing their shop windows, but by covering them with milk, a milschnacht. It has gotten to the point where an innocent old man, former Army Sergeant Don Norton, who we know is definitely innocent because he was found innocent of war crimes by a real

judge in the 1970s, a verdict which was in no way controversial, was assaulted was assaulted with the eponymous bovine juice outside a polling station where he was on duty for the Brexit party. Ramon has flocked to claim that this looked like a hoax, refusing to believe that their feral foot soldiers could do such a thing rubbish. Though of course, after splatter analysis in a video of mcnaughton emerged where he and two men smear yogurt on him describing as advanced propaganda. That's genuinely true. It transpired that it was in fact a hoax. But although they didn't milkshake mcnaughton in a way they did because because they drove him to milkshake himself. An old man afraid that his innocence alone would not save him from the

flavoured lactate, just as it did not save those civilians in Northern Ireland. Coming to the realisation that the only safety is to be pre-milked. A saturated target of no interest. What can be done about this? Can we besaid from this pole-pot Stalinism where a diversity of views will not be tolerated? Well, to start we must raise the price of milkshakes. From now on they must come at a much higher price, a price of £19.84. Thank you. Brendan, you have outdone yourself. Anyway, welcome all of you to Trash Future, the podcast about how if we do not implement fully automated luxury gay space communists and the future isn't will be trashed. I finally got it.

I only say it at the live shows now. I think the key is I only have so many I can say a month and I have to reach my total. Also, as you can see, I'm afraid the part of Alice Caldwell Kelly is going to be played by season one superstar Charlie Palmer this evening as Alice was taken with a wasting disease in his trapped in Glasgow. We heard your demands and didn't think they were ironic. Yeah, that's one of those diseases that the Hapsbergs used to get. It's like that kind of a Alice is romantically coughing into a lot of handkerchiefs and looking out of a little window. So look, look, look, look. We have like before way too much content to

get through and never enough time. So I'm going to leap right into this week's startup. We're going to be talking at one and a half speed. I hope that's fine. It will be slightly pitched up, but we think you can handle it. Yeah, that's Trash Future Alvin. All right. So the startup is called Ernin does it sound evil like an apostrophe at the end because you're you're you're you're hiply earning or is it like earn in like a love in but worse E A R N I N. Oh, like is your mic not on? I don't think it's on. Well, that's going to go well for the first bit. Yeah, I did wonder genuinely my thought process so far was I don't think my microphone's working, but somebody would have mentioned it. This

is this is the first time anyone could have said is this thing on after doing a joke and have it actually not be on. No, it's not. It's not a song. It's a startup. Cool. You can just edit me in with a much funnier joke at a later date. The Riley Quinn Studio Approach you dare. Do not you even dare. Only at the live shows do we see the truth. Yeah. Okay, Ernin any any guesses before I move on to the blanked out sense got like kind of like a left field guess. Okay, which is it's not earning is saying you have Ramadan brain. Of course, you have a left brain. Someone tell me if it's like 905 someone tell me when it's 905 like don't ask why just just tell me it's actually called in in which is refers to which refers

to a constant loop of nine inch nail songs. Like an earpiece. So while you're while you're at the factory, you just listen to nine inch nails. It's a startup that in your left ear puts the rapper from Lincoln Park and in your right ear the rapper from Evanescence to make you more powerful than any man has ever been. There's a reason why they never did a collab because it would just be too big. Exactly like speak music and everything else kind of you would just grow a goatee by listening to. I've never seen a human wallet chain before so so we have two music related guesses one is one is it's a song it's it's and one is it's an app that plays nine inch nails. Is it going to be something that like garnishes your wages to

pay for a toaster or something oddly enough? No, but no one get any ideas. No one make that okay. I'm going to do the first blanked out sentence. You blank today. You should blank today. I know something that rhymes with blank. The answer is yes. Sorry one more time. What was that you blank today? Yeah, you should blank today. This one's a real stumper. Yeah, it's confusing because your brain wants to assume that every sentence of blank is the same word, but it presumably is. No, it's not. Yeah, no, this is not a perfect system. I came up with this while drunk years ago. So I assume it must be like

you spend today or you save today or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're on the right track like you. You work today. You should get paid today. Something like that fuck me. Is that right? Is that the right answer? It literally is what they wrote. The problem is the problem is these guys are getting way too good at this. Oh, like Riley, is it like a payday loan? It's actually worse. Oh no. You sign up for an app and it doesn't give you a payday loan. It's much like Twitter in that way. So you can join earn in to get blank the minute you blank with no fees or hidden costs. So you you figured it out. Oh, it is. It's like a bridging loan. Is that what it is? No fees or hidden costs. So it doesn't it doesn't make an income. Clearly

it's just a charity and we've now started talking about products that instead of being evil or asinine or good. No, that's not what happened. It's really bad. That was it. That was a genuinely tense moment in the room. Oh my God, what's happened? You got very avenged sevenfold there, look, I just became so numb. Yeah. All right, we tried so hard. Yeah, look, look, look, here's the thing. So here is their tagline and wrote note note what they're not saying that they do. They're not alone. A lender earn in is facilitating an advance on your paycheck. Oh, well, what are we doing? We're not lending you the money. We are facilitating an advance on the paycheck through the sanitation business.

My friend Vinny Dice told me he collects the money and then if you don't have it, he kills your wife. No, no, what he does is a real good facilitator. If you don't pay back, say Gilbert Gulf rate in the mob. Yes, you don't pay it back. You don't pay it back. They disrupt your knees. The subscription on your knees runs out and also just so you know that this isn't some like rinky dink shit that want to competition. Their customers work a total of 50 million hours a month at 50 K plus companies, mostly in the United States. That's a really busy 10 guys. A lot of people are involved in this. So bear that in mind.

So here is here is the CEO Ram Palani Appen in an interview. Four out of five people in the US live paycheck to paycheck and half the country can't come up with four hundred dollars in an emergency. An easy way to solve this is by you. I mean, we want to get exploited consumer capitalism, the simplest way. No, it's not given. No, if you were wondering, it's not pay them more or give them more, more money. No, it's a text. It's a tech problem. It's letting them into the poker game. Come on, Tony. An easy way to solve this is by giving people access to their money as the second they've earned it. And what exactly gave him this idea? So when he worked at a different company,

he would often find himself in a position of fronting the money that his employees needed to cover expenses before payday, but then heard them complain about overdraft fees. And he said it didn't make any sense because I thought I was paying everybody very well. What? You don't like the free hams? Then I'll take them. I'll give them to the children's home. I was so sure I was paying everybody well and I couldn't have been wrong. So what else could have happened? The finest gruel in all the land, but he then realized the problem was that employees need money the next day or indeed that day and couldn't wait until the following Friday. That's it. So it's just an advance on

your paycheck. Well, yes. But it must take a fee or do some shit like that, right? Oh, we will find out how it makes money. Does it sell your data to Matt Hancock? Does it involve some kind of headset? All of this would be better than what it actually does. It sells information about your body to Matt Hancock sitting in the glare of the laptop screen in his room, learning about everyone's body. What a guy. When I left that company, the people I was doing this for want to know if I would still do it for them. That's when I realized that if I didn't try to turn this into a product, I would feel bad about myself becoming a loan shark to the lips. I just I love it. I just if I didn't if I didn't become

a loan shark, I would have felt guilty because of all of those loans that went on all that chum that went on eating and and the moment he had the idea nine inch nail started playing in the background. I love the idea to that instead of it's like oh I did two weeks in Kenya and some kind of volunteerism thing. It's like no. I just became a loan shark. That's so that's giving back in the grand scheme things. People need money. It's giving back then just taking back later at a great profit to yourself. So so basically the tech industry has done its thing and instead of inventing like a bus or like like anorexia like they've done and previously they did. Jack Dorsey thought he discovered anorexia when he started fasting Twitter. So this time they've

reinvented usury they've reinvented payday lending. So he asks how do we keep things running? Oh this is this is you thought it took a turn earlier to deal with satan earning is a community that looks out for one another. We've found that it's like it's like for your paycheck is what you're saying. Oh my god. It's actually you'll find that it's quite a bit more like farmville for your paycheck. So he's like soylent green of payday loans. They don't quite lend the money to each other, but god you're close. Does this mean I could get paid for farmville. The secret of farmville is the only person that got rich off of farmville is the guy that owns it. So earning is a community that looks out for

one another. If this is a profit making tech company that says that kind of sentence in their ad copy you know that something bad is about to happen. We found most of our members appreciate not having to pay extra fees and penalties to banks and the like again to banks and support us by paying forward tips to one another when they're able to do so. So it's a payday lending system that works on tipping, but also like if you don't pay somebody back would you just owe internet to a owe money to a guy on the internet that you just don't know. I mean no no it's that okay. I'll explain. I'll briefly explain how a guy you want money to a syndicate this thing of a because of nostra yeah the associates come around and they get the money

so what what they actually do is that what is you sign up you hit a button on the app you connect them to your employer's payroll software we'll get back to that and then very cool very cool select how much you want to borrow you hit a button and it hits your bank account obviously that doesn't work very well it's full of bugs and a lot of people have been really fucked by it but you also then can add an optional tip and you can choose to pay it forward to someone else now again this sounds good if you don't think about it for very long or if you have a head injury but we'll find and this is technically a social enterprise by the way it's it's good it gets social enterprise funding so incredible giving tips for your loans

isn't required sometimes things are going your way and you can afford to tip sometimes you're the one going through a rough patch help when you can accept help when you can we've got each other's back paladapien has wrecked previously like an urn into a jedi bringing balance to the universe oh but then the urn in have built this massive space station but what they what they haven't thought of is that there's this one like weird hole on it and they've not told anyone about the hole so they're pretty sure it's going to be fine all like point of star was was that like the jedi didn't do anything they were really bad and like the decadence was the reason they got fucked right yeah sorry i only watch anime

i mean here's the thing if we want to do a whole metaphor for how a silly silicon valley model of just incredulity driven capitalism is going to collapse yes that's more or less it in the sense that he did not intend it is like a jedi in this sense wait did this guy leave the previous company because they were like we recognize you as a member of this council were you and not granted the bank of loan shark master he's like this is an outrage a lot of sand in the office murder all the younglings it was a sweatshop what can you do what can you do so basically not the younglings they make the shoes that would be a fantastic way to start a shoe making business like yes you're a paddle you were allowed on to the nike executive council

so so here's the thing hello everyone well wait a minute yeah okay so this all basically seems again if you're really stupid or just have a head injury fine however here's the big however users who don't leave a tip have incredibly restricted and actually damaging access to the service because they're regularly financially ruined oh it's like a strip club it's like technically you don't have to tip but like so is it the case like in new yorker like if you don't tip then like an angry italian person come out and start like like running down like west 34 it actually does happen i saw it i love the idea this app is actually just universal basic

income for italians every pain is one way to slaves so users who don't leave a tip have their credit restricted to a hundred dollars per pay period and the suggested tip equals seven hundred and thirty percent apr nice which if you want some context is thirty times higher than the legal limit so what we love it so what we were saying is that is james ball of pre yeah if you're going to do the thing like a lot of like like john mcternan and james ball do where you pretend to have a crucial misunderstanding of really basic facts then yes this is going to be

the definitely not a payday lending predatory solution for you so we know that it is incredibly extractive and it also has an optional overdraft avoidance feature called balance shield if you opt in i know earnin will send well basically prevent it from sending you into overdraft as it does its magic with your paycheck and your and your and your bank account by just popping a hundred dollars in there and then taking it back later after you've been paid if you tip if you do not tip then you do not get the thing that keeps you from a series of fees that result in financial ruin remember this is a social enterprise it gets social enterprise funding just the tip wait so it's got it's got d it's got dlc it's like candy crush basically but for your bank

account that's why i've i've compared it to farmville it's like payday lending but pay to win in effect the greatest trick the guy who invented farmville ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist i nearly make sense so with that in mind let's go back to what pallion appon said about why he created this company that's when i realized if i didn't make what i was doing for my employees into a product i would feel bad about myself i mean it was pretty predictive i guess but i'm these people are just so incredibly evil he noticed the cap in the market slapped the tech veneer onto essentially illegal payday lending practices put the trappings of mutual aid on it took a bunch of money and

social and impact bonds and then charged hundreds of percent interest payday lending to circumvent local interest rate caps we are in the wrong business we really need to stop podcasting and start getting into the like fake tech business which is why trash capital is launching next week yeah our social enterprise project is the patreon it's a charity with one beneficiary yeah me not sleeping on the streets nice all right so you also any regular listeners to this show will know that i never ever ever let the faq section of one of these terrible companies pass me by because there is always gold in it a hem this is this is the one of their f aid queues that i've chosen to answer for this

particular show this i'm just i'm not even to the question i was going to do the answer hello uber drivers that's how i stop all my gigs hello uber drivers are you are you tired of just getting fucked once per economic transaction thanks for choosing earn in formerly active hours to get paid formally what formerly active hours all right to get paid you know they did something you know they did something to get paid on your schedule when you connect your account to uber your ride summaries will be added to the app automatically so basically do you want a pay deduction forever then you can

sign up of course to earn in if you're an uber driver nice i love i just i do love every every every single possible angle just getting just exploited a little bit i just love how they sort of they like the people who run these companies like blunder through the landscape never seeing anything and they're sort of like oh yeah i set up a loan shark company but i'm pretty sure it's a good thing they saw they have the they have the energy of like Serbian war criminals in the hage sort of going that we had lovely time in Kosovo and the cake was served we solved some economic problems now there are lots of jobs for example i don't see i don't see why i'm here this seems like a you problem

but this wouldn't of course be a tech products trash future segment if i didn't oh no you thought that was the worst bit it's not the worst bit if i didn't end it on what i've taken to calling the prestige last wednesday earn and launched health aid aid no worse a service that gives users access to patient advocates who will help them negotiate down their medical bills set up payment plans or secure financial aid like urn it was going to be like organ sharing like urn in health aid of course operates on the same tip system told you it's an organ yeah you just like you just make sure that you like give your

blood or like sperm samples every like every couple of weeks and you know so if you ever need an organ transplant you can get it right the nice thing yeah the moment you stop giving your blood and sperm samples they just come and take your organs my my favorite thing to do is to tip somebody along they're like do you know that you can survive on 25 percent of one kidney some people some people in that see the wonders of the human body but what you should see in that is a market opportunity but the cool thing is that if you contribute that then you might get somebody else's kidney yeah for free who cares if it doesn't who cares if it doesn't match no you can eat you could eat it you could eat those maybe your body just needs new ideas just it's all

about variety when it comes to the different blood types of organs yeah you need like a you need like a diversity of blood types i'm sorry i didn't know your body was this stallion in spice legs you weren't tolerant of other blood types and there we have the trappings of a new bread and article triggering the left by putting different blood into them the immune system is a planned economy okay well kind of oh my oh so that's earning what do we think are we are we ready to invest i've taken out a payday loan and i found it i have a strategy of taking out payday loans from multiple different providers so i can

invest in this other payday loan provider yeah i just i haven't been on this for a while and i think it's cool that the show now has sponsors oh i if we could get one terrible tech company to sponsor us to roast them that would be fantastic would be really good wouldn't it yeah this show only has one sponsor and it is getting your dick suck dot com oh it's coming before we move on to the next but you gotta admit riley that the the app connected dick lock company probably thinks they're doing something really right right now because their web traffic is spiking and they're like man this is a market opportunity for us there should really be a holding page just saying

coming soon shouldn't it look right now getting your dick suck dot com still redirects to the podcast website but the web designer for getting your dick suck dot com is here this evening in the house the web designer so our our revitalizing local news project as a dick joke because capital won't do it uh is proceeding a pace it's completely funded by trash capital right it's funny that she thinks patreon is yeah the grand scheme of things patreon is legitimately owned by jared kushner's brother so in a way it kind of is all right we thought about getting a dick suck dot com and we knew that if we didn't turn it into a product we'd feel bad about ourselves oh people from my day job are here

hi all right riley day job at getting your dick suck dot com eventually look i'll explain that later oh yeah they don't listen to the show he'll explain it on casual fridays where people get to relax and wear shirts without ties and we just have to wear suspenders i'm gonna go up into the office wearing like a polo shirt tucked into khakis but like oh you read the latest on getting your dick suck dot com i love the idea that riley has cooked this up because he knows they've been monitoring his web traffic and he's like well if i can explain all the times i've google searched i'm like no it's research for a news site i'm not getting in trouble for clarity riley currently

works at a competitor live jasmine look look look look there's a sec look we thought we've had fun in this interstitial segment but there is another segment a second segment because much like last time we we came down into this basement um and talked about philanthropy we've decided it is time again to come down to this basement and talk about the gigantic global level scam that is philanthropy so mckenzie bezos the uh ex-wife of jeff bezos formerly a wife guy now a bachelor has just he is a wife guy because he still follows his wife but his wife doesn't follow him he's the opposite of pro jared also it's one of those like cursed cursed american sir name first

names oh yeah awful just the worst yeah i was gonna say mckenzie bezos sounds like some kind of riverine flippery creature that only exists in the pacific northwest but yeah she's some mining company no she's this is the mckenzie bezos amazing rituals of the mckenzie bezos named after explore now they follow your husband online named after the explorer john mckenzie who ate every living specimen of it which jeff bezos has most certainly done yeah you know that he has that man has eaten some pineal glands like he is involved in some pizza gate shit allegedly so mckenzie bezos has just received enough money through from her divorce to jeff bezos to like and all of homelessness in the uk immediately

which i i am joking that's of course unrealistic in fact she has enough to end all of homelessness in uk immediately and then fund the nhs for about a year and still have a little bit left over she has she has inherited quite a bit it was a weirdly specific demand that her divorce lawyer made and they were like man we don't even have the figures on that like um so the uk were like thanks but why she's like no you're not getting the money i just want that amount it's for a special project i'm gonna set up a deep fake of brinn she could also like fun like single-handedly fund mac hancock's like leadership campaign right like a version of fake taxi but it's the whole of britain every scenario is a porn scenario

of britain also at some point i guess gettingyourdicksite.com has to announce its endorsement for conservative leader oh well it's going to be matt hancock yeah matt hancock and the gondom he's the only person he's going to build up he's a great way to learn about your body i mean so and essentially what she has decided to do with this amount of money because look the vast majority of people in this room can agree that no human being ever has ever done anything to deserve a tenth of a billion dollars so we can just we can just move past that now we all agree on that set by mojara or a hundred million dollars by margera deserves that much money and then maybe big-time tommy

keeping it old school baby yeah so nato and i came up with a deeply cursed character earlier which was serbian bam margera bamko margeric he's constantly doing war crimes as pranks we won't go any further down that rabbit arm so you know i really thought you were gonna do it don't check out mylos twitter later yeah um so always don't check out mylos twitter so basically what she's done is she's decided to do something entirely unaccountable probably

pretty pointless and most importantly completely non-threatening to the relationships of power that keep her living like a demigod which is she's signed warren buffett's giving pledge and proud we all are of her what of course any man named after all you can eat food yes a warren so in short warren buffett's giving pledge i love that how did that how did that work on you warren buffett's giving pledge is basically a document that like people who are the richest people in the history of humanity sign to publicly say they're going to give away a bunch of their money either when they die or you know now in order to more or less avoid taxes or like experiment with a new kind of math or you know give you

kenden children ipads that take their dna uh it's it's not a great organization that's just a flashlight ipad good lord it's very popular in ugandan no no one knows why so one of the mysteries of consumer capitalism so may have you got a timestamp on that no make it the big of the video i didn't really see how that's offensive i think it's weird okay i'm gonna do what i usually do i just envision like a you're the man now dog but just the moment hussain's heart breaks on this show it's over and over again i am going to pull us back as i usually do when i'm dealing with you with you clowns um so i'm one of these fucking guys of all right so why did they go to school so

mckenzie says her inspiration to do the giving pledge came from a book she read on writing advice because she's a novelist i think that's kind of strange because i think advice on what to do with a world changing amount of money shouldn't come from a book on writing advice was it ben shaperra's how to destroy life yeah it should come it was guerrilla mindset wasn't it a classic an amazon best sell us save the guerrillas mindset it was it was jacobry smogs the victorians so the passage that she was inspired by uh she says in her letter was quote underlined and starred like all the words that have inspired me most over the years words that felt true in context and also true in life tears the years full teen little words

amazing she says do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now the bezos family famous for not hoarding they never heard never something more will arise for later something better anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you you open your safe and find ashes it's hard to believe that hitler wrote that open your safe and find ashes open your safe and find ashes so the idea here is that she's a valuable family ashes thank god they're safe so it's the lesson here that like actually this this is like an impulse spend and that and actually what she's what she's being advised to do here is uh spend the money now on

something like frivolous and short term the world rather than save it for something better like the mars colony like like the mars colony this is why she and she and jeff divorce they disagree on this bit and this piece of thing so i was going to build like a giant obelisk to the edge of space that said jeff bezos has a small dick but then i was told about this thing called poverty so i was like what kind of app was that and i decided to build the obelisk like ten feet shorter so so i'm now going to uganda to write in the dirt in a way that's only visible from space jeff bezos has a small dick so she says i have no doubt that tremendous value comes when people act quickly on the impulse to give which of course the bezos is our famous for doing no drive has

more positive ripple effects than drive to be of service and this is where the letter gets very strange something greater rises up every time we give the easy breathing of a friend we we sit with when we had other plans the relief on a child's face when we share the story of our own mistakes laughter at a well-timed joke when we tell some we told us someone who is crying like for example if they i love being a very normal social situation i'm like comforting a child crying by telling them a knock knock joke while dressed as of a joker jared lesso joker the best joker hey you've suffered compound fractures on your knees from working in amazon warehouse but check out this knock knock joke it's gonna knock you up your feet but i'm i mean this all just sounds like she's

decided to invest in a child prison she's investing in she's investing in like in a pizza restaurant in washington dc hello ladies and gentlemen of the international criminal court have you heard the one about the serve the croat and the bosnian look there's no reason why we can't enjoy ourselves come on and and so basically there's the this this is what she wants to do she wants to do the sort of world changing amount of money equivalent to that to like telling a joke to a crying child which is really regular these immediate results however are only the beginnings telling the aristocrats to a crying child their value keeps multiplying and spreading in ways we never know

we each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand oh like being married to a billionaire i think how can that money have appeared but even then it's like no it's that money appeared because you know jeff bezos is basically ground hundreds of thousands of people into dust like it's not like it didn't just magic it's way into the bank account at one point to be grounded the dust by jeff bezos and to be ashes in a safe okay it wasn't it wasn't it what it didn't just appear at you know it was accumulated over time by this art called earning it's amazing the trajectory of jeff bezos his career from like i just want to sell books on the internet to like i will crush your family to i will feast on the

blood of your young and then he'll write books about it for his website yeah clever you will mine uranium on the asteroid belt a real plan jeff bezos actually has apparently slavic jeff bezos to so the letter finishes in addition to whatever life whatever assets life has nurtured in me i have a disproportionate amount of money to share my approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful it will take time and effort and care but i won't wait and i will keep at it until the safe is empty is this the fucking laurax like what's going on mckenzie bezos is a fucking novelist why why does she get to decide how all this money is spent much like jeff bezos is a book salesman or elan musk is like a dangerous version of willy wonka

what the fuck is she gonna do buy a gigantic live laugh love billboard like in space to be fair willy wonka is a dangerous version of willy wonka oh yes the tesla factory in its waterfall of molten steel oh and she signed up to the uh to the payday loan thing and she's like she's lending everyone a hundred dollars but i expect a tip that would that would be better than what she's actually done which is almost nothing but made a huge you and cry about it again she shouldn't be able to do anything she shouldn't have any of that money in the first place nor should jeff bezos or any of these morons but she is hunting but she is hunting down like local naves to bring them to the lord's hundreds courts so that's a hue and cry joke

yeah excellent we love amazons cool right yeah they're great that we love we love to work for them i can't wait until we all work for them yeah we all get to be a community together in a warehouse the lovely thing about them is that they sell um they sell hussein kesvani's debut book uh follow me but because i need to like pay my family court fees taking my wife's boyfriend to court but you you you pay him like for a living i pay him a tip yeah i buy his app you may you may not he lends me my wife a fantastic new app for divorce dance so with that in mind i would like to focus on a few of the ways that mckenzie and jeff bezos have filled that safe not with ashes but you know with with children and pizza slices yes

because apparently because apparently mckenzie can't fully comprehend it no she doesn't i figured she says she doesn't fully understand how um she and her husband became the richest people in the history of the species so so if they're listening okay if you guys are listening here's how you did it um so number one we all know amazon paid no taxes in the us in 2017 and like one percent of what it should have been should have been paying in the uk since it started operating here twenty years ago i have the actual figure it's like about six million it's not very it's it's astonishingly low so and they claim this by saying they basically make no money because the profit margins their industry is so slim which is why it's such a mystery why jeff bezos is such so rich all the

money goes on the space obelisk guys like you know it's an expensive obelisk that's interesting because their founder is of course financing a moon base to move all of earth two's heavy industry and we also know that every time someone says the word union and an amazon fulfillment center they're quickly fired because amazon is a quote unquote family because like a normal family if you ask for an increase your in your allowance you're booted onto the street now your reference to for the word family here is the episode of the sopranos where him and his wife inherit some money and they want to move to florid and he's like no this is a family you can't just leave yeah you can't yeah a family you know like prison yeah but in prison you have access to a toilet

unlike an amazon warehouse so ambulances have been called to amazon warehouses over 600 times in three years and of course the online retailer denies that there are any unsafe working conditions i guess they just love ambulances we just love pranks they just keep employing the jackass guys the fun thing is actually that um we've we've been developing haven't we uh an app a sort of tech platform that uses ambulances in their slack time to uh to deliver books i love the idea of an ambulance showing up and it's like i says an ambulance for a see more butts and there's just jeffie's i was like giggling in the corner but his eyes are glowing red for some reason right so we but we all know all that um we also know that they've come

under um under increasing criticism in recent years for the treatment of warehouse staff which is basically how they make all this money because they keep pressing the delivery times shorter and shorter so they can crush every other business out there they're great and so we all know also that like people can't piss um and that that in january sit down no of course it makes you stronger so what we but we all know that what we're focusing on is how amazon has made work fun it's really dark so but very fun how do we think that amazon has made work fun for again producing the two richest people in the history of the planet so a company that generates more per capita ambulance calls than anyone else in the warehouse say most fake

people by playing nine inch nails so their most recent strategy is and i'm taking from i'm taking from an article here i'm not making fun of the article because it was at least skeptical of what they were doing thank you um proprietary video games are now displayed on small screens at every employee workstation in response to worker complaints that amazon's push for automation has made laborers feel quote just like cogs in a machine which is you know surprising because you know it's not as though that's what they've been doing better way of making someone feel human than to make them play farmville during their breaks yeah i'm thinking in a different way like imagine if you work in an amazon warehouse but you also do cosplay because you have to

it's like yes you have to pick things off the shelf you have to carry the buster sword while you're at it amazon just dressed as sailor moon for some reason amazon cosplay does come into this later we love to foreshadow that wasn't intentional but hey ooh fucking woo yeah so with names like mission racer picks it's just like if like uh they've made like fake chinese versions of video games mission racer picks in space dragon duel and castle crafter the games have simple graphics what this is like you live the lifestyle of a medieval so the games have simple graphics akin to early nintendo games like super mario brothers workers say because cameras are forbidden in warehouses i wonder what they're hiding probably all the fun

so here's how it works as robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to put into a pin remember when amazon created a little thing of a wristband that would shock you if you went for the wrong item i certainly remember pepperage farm remembers the games then register the completion of a task which is tracked by scanning devices and pits individuals teams or entire floors against each other oh boy that one hurts i love it when my job is the hunger games but like nintendo eight bit hunger games yeah your salary is that you don't die or entire floors in a race to pick or sto lego sets cell phone cases or dish soap for example

i can't wait for this to be in the olympics game playing employees are rewarded with points virtual badges and other goodies throughout their shifts not even real badges do they get to be called do they technically classify as gamers then they get they get skins if you if you get like the high school for the month you're allowed to say exactly two slow words to everyone at the end in the factory and there's nothing anyone could do about it amazon employees are sorted into clans my question is how we roll this out to other jobs that's that's how i think this is really i mean i really think we could revolutionize plumbing for instance

so um experts say and this is the idea that these arbitrary targets and rewards have psychologically powerful effects effectively tricking employees into working faster by making routine tasks seem meaningful and engaging and therefore shape or boy you could motivate employees by giving them good working conditions or paying them or it's not possible it's a people have tried it i love like motivating my employees by like making them play video games and saying how cool their job is rather than being like if you don't do this faster we're gonna kind of throw you and your family to the streets yeah exactly and mckenzie and while you're crying mckenzie bezos can come and be like hey i've got a joke for you i don't know how i got these scars you can do it better i refuse to

accent because they all just like come i don't know oh i'm just imagining the like the fancy consultant coming in like hey we've got a new technique for motivating your employees have you heard of this thing called the nkvd well at the battle of starling grab they found that the productivity of their employees was not great and they discovered that lots of their employees were kind of shying away from the production line so what they did was they set up machine guns at the opposite end from the production line they just shot anyone who didn't and we've discovered that people are really keen on the production life you just shoot them when they what was nice about that was actually that it reminded everyone it it felt made everyone feel like they were playing

call of duty one um so that actually what they could do was that they could kill all the Germans and and get points and uh and restock that kind of health just imagine being being a world war two being like damn sort of reminds me of world war one it's like well it's a gjc history essay up in here the reward for surviving the battle of stalling grad is dish soap or virtual badges swaggerables oh hang on no we are getting to that later because the rewards are interesting yeah one worker said that from inside her cage she had picked up yes come on let's go because by the way if you didn't know um i but before i did this podcast i didn't have to know this stuff now i know all of it it's awful and you have to too

that now what's happened is they've been able to cut staff and make them work harder and faster by putting them in cages and automating all the shelves on small robots so basically if you leave the cage you'll be killed so don't leave the cage but have fun with this dragon game i love when my job is hell in a cell one worker said she had in from her cage picked nearly 500 items off of the roaming shelves in one hour egged on by a game pitting her against her co-workers to drive a race car around a track awesome yeah the film the film the matrix was unrealistic because in the future we're not going to put people in a massive computer simulation so they don't know they're being

exploited for their energy we're just going to make them awake but still in the cages and being Amazon raises productivity by surrounding everyone in goo somehow just fucking drowning in this great factory in north korea that produces the world's best goo we got dav benson phillips in goo.com not to be confused with goop.com no very different websites so she said that pickers and stowers compete with one each other ferociously to compete the video came tasks faster a west side story the pickers and the stowers meaning for amazon they are moving more real merchandise onto trucks that bring the items to the customer's door steps cool this is from the mirror where in the days leading up to black friday misperformance targets saw scores of staff sacked so if you

don't do well on the game do well on the game don't know it is it's it's it's like a cutesy version of the opening speech and glen gary glen ross the first prize is we'll tell you what it is later because it's really paltry the virtual virtual badges are for closers peeing is for close but imagine that speech being delivered by mckenzie piezos what i found inspiring oh yeah she is so awfully live laugh love so this is from someone interviewed by the mirror once a day a supervisor would approach me to remind me how i was performing not to ask to remind often it was not well i love that idea they hire someone to walker is like you fucking suck at gaming and that man was and my mama's phase bank they hire everyone from

xbox live just come up and call you gay my my my amazon drill sergeant i didn't realize that amazon we hire you bunch of fucking sissy girls how do you expect to face the stores like that private but with workers pitted against each other one told this journalist as long as you're not on the bottom you have no need to worry for now a normal thing to say clubbing in berlin so you know if our team doesn't slay the other team's dragon then we'll get fired from this job where we stand in cages and interact with robotic shelves and at least one warehouse said one employee workers have used high achievement on the games to push managers to reward them with extra amazon swag bucks i love swag you should buy us worse and worse doesn't it a proprietary

currency that can be only used in amazon to buy amazon logo stickers apparel or other goods at least they're real badges yeah it's it's like if you were a feudal it's it is quite a bit like being a feudal surf being drafted into battle to be killed by a bunch of long bowman but you have to wear the flag of the guy who's getting you killed hey roiley the swag bucks don't have jeff bezels his face on do they well i mean he's wearing a pointed helmet and his eyes are glowing red but very close it has been reported because again cameras are not allowed that in their warehouses employees have said the swag bucks look like a monopoly pill with jeff bezels his face on them yeah and he's sitting in a little metal shoe

weirdly you can actually play monopoly virtually while collecting parcels off the moving shelves you always go to jail yeah you will remain in the cage you will never free parking thing isn't an official rule it's not an official rule you will never at any point own any of the properties on the map so using swag bucks workers can buy items like t shirts land here it's water bottles from amazon the company currency is available all year round from performing well at the games but sources have told the reporter that we're asking that there's more up for grabs during what's called peak period especially during what's known as power hours can you um can you is when the cages are electrified can you can you tip people your swag bucks

no just your vacation days oh it's it's true you actually do frequently have to do that that's how you get maternity cover in american schools as someone else has to give you their vacation days it's reported as heartwarming but actually it's hell but but can we talk about this peak time thing because i've seen this yeah and they have obviously peak time is the time just before christmas right yeah and the most wonderful time of the year unless you're an increasingly large portion of the population that's working in these kinds of jobs yeah which is horrendous or unless you're in al-qaeda the night some of whom now work for amazon surprising overlap with them yeah really look it was a takeover nine eleven was a long time ago guys what have they done six but you

got to be brutally honest they were big stars then but you know but during this peak time there's new kids on the block you can't if you're standing still you're going backwards i have to ask about the peak hour though like okay so it's it's nine eleven that was standing it's the time that only gets said it's like on this podcast and at q and on meetings i hear what you're saying about nine eleven but if we could keep this on of the lizards in the moon right i'm running i'm wondering about this so so amazon customers know that it's power hour to just happens now do just the tormented employees know but they're not tormented that's the thing isn't it they're having a very nice very lovely time there was there was cake once

because because i do not understand all the drama about the power hour it was a very productive time you really latch on to a character my friend yeah yeah and but but particularly they have an incredibly nice time while they're you know working extra hard and because amazon put on what they call peak fest which is a celebration of their busiest time of the year that all the employees are invited to however and you can go at the low low price of seven pounds for the party that they put on for you for working so hard as to again make these people the richest people that have ever existed in the history of the species i think it's a bargain but using okay so power hours additionally are when managers try to pump up

warehouse workers to work extra hard for sixty minutes sometimes motivating them by this is this is quite quite bad saying workers and other departments have been talking smack or outperforming them we hear when picking said about all of your mothers we do this on the show don't we if we think someone hasn't been funny enough on the show we all individually message them i love what's up that no good Ralph sifaretto in the stowing department said that jenny sack has an eighty pound mole on our ass are you going to take that the stowing department it's a matter of respect so at the end of the

hour staff members can be rewarded with this swag bucks or prizes and one manager is reported to list employees hourly one manager rather was reported to publicly list employees hourly rates of picking stuff and stowing it from slowest to fastest to get people quote fired up yeah up yeah yeah for sure up get them the up parentheses yeah it's insulting one employee said because around this time of year the managers if their targets are met or exceeded they get a bonus one warehouse worker reported however when confronted with this another warehouse worker said that's ridiculous i've personally won a 50 inch television keon burges said during an interview organized by amazon

it's great he continued we can win power hours in teams or we can win them individually it's a great thing for us associates we love it i love playing what's it called cut is what castle mania is it that's like that's a netflix it's one of them also cast castle crafter castle crafter my 50 inch tv i don't care to scroll up and check we'll call it that my little amazon pod yeah so that's also love we love it we absolutely love this this thing that is the cages where we stand and we can kill another team's dragon because they said that thing about our mom and wait wait wait i feel like we haven't mentioned this but this sounds a lot like of one of our favorite movies ready player one

um which is a great plane movie but a very bad movie generally but like wasn't that like part of the whole like ready player one like fucking like universe that they were in where like they actually had these factories where people were in these like game like in these games but they were actually just performing like industrial services yes the difference is um this is the real life version of that and it was organized by the most evil man in history and so it's like that but with bad games so eight bit with eight bit games you don't like you cut they don't even have like a like a cheap version of like final fantasy seven this this is why gen xers are like the worst generation ever because they were like

well let's see we have people working in basically slave like conditions and living in tents we can motivate them by oh of course we can by having them play our favorite games from when we were a kid before games got good yeah it reminded it reminded them of like when they got to do when they did chores and their parents like gave them a bit of money for the arcades yeah love to play pong against a moving shelf so of course all of these initiatives are connected to the same thing which is to perfect pair order fulfillment expenses which rose by 35 percent last year compared with a 20 percent 20 percent rise in product sales so it's a 15 percent gap that they're trying to close with games swag bucks and as close as you can get to like criminal neglect without actually crossing

the line and of course fix filling this gap it's unthinkable to cut the pay of I don't know the bezos is because then Mackenzie wouldn't be able to do or anti bullying initiative or just wouldn't be Jeff wouldn't be able to build like a farm in space no so what we're going to do is going to make a bootleg mario and we're going to make company script like from the 19th century a lot more kooky and fun and that's how we're going to fix this particular existential threat what what do we what do we think of amazon strategy folks pretty cool i think it'd be cooler if they had like final fantasy seven right or like i don't know like tecans yeah any good good street fights this is this is the the trash future promise we are going to stop just being internet shitheads

and we are going to get out to organize the workers at amazon to agitate for better games anyway i actually got to go out for a minute because i was thinking about what would have happened if they'd have had um okay well i've already started talking now so too late i don't doubt because i was thinking about how the world would be different if they'd have had ready player one on planes in 2001 it's just a thought also i can officially say that we have we i think we're slightly running out of time so i have even though this is usually the thing get that power has come to an end however i will say from our family to yours thank you very much for coming out on a thursday night to the star of kings thanks for coming incredible