TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Nut Flix Part 2 (feat. This Machine Kills)

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

We're off this week, but we've unlocked our Netflix Part 2 episode for you to enjoy. We brought on Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) and Ed Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin) from This Machine Kills Podcast to discuss the famously sane and healthy workplace culture of Netflix with Riley, Milo, and Alice. Guess what? It's bad. And it's probably coming to your workplace sooner rather than later. If you want to listen to Part 1, you can find it here: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/nut-flix-part-1-feat-this-machine-kills/ If you want to listen to Part 3, in which we review Netflix's own SPENCER CONFIDENTIAL, you can access it on the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/44591496 We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *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/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello Trash Future fans, please enjoy this unlocked bonus episode, the second part of our Netflix discussion with the hosts of This Machine Kills podcast. There's a link to part one in the show notes, and also bear in mind there is a part three on Patreon in which we watch the films Spencer Confidential and React. Hope you enjoy. Thank you for listening. Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of TF. It is part two of a two-parter, a very exciting two-parter.

We are back. It's Riley Milo and Alice, and once again, we are joined by Jathan and Edward from This Machine Kills podcast, and we are going to talk about Netflix again. Coming up on your watch it again queue, it is BTF. Starting in five seconds, whether you like it or not. Counting as a view that will be used to campaign for more funding. That's right. Yes, that's right.

This is part two of the Netflix episode, where we are going to be talking about their psychocorporate culture and maybe speculating about not just what that's done to art, but what that means for the workplace going forward. Oh, nobody who has a flagship series helmed by Kevin Spacey could be an evil. Oh, boy. This book that I read, which is called No Rules Rules, it's by Reid Hoffman. I'm sitting backwards on the chair. It's by...

I'm picturing Reid Hoffman as the leader from The Simpsons cult episode, and nothing you can tell me will disabuse me of that notion. The thing is, if he was the leader from The Simpsons cult episode, he would be trying to take over existing schools, and instead of sitting backwards on a chair, he would make a chair that shocks you if you try to sit backwards on it. But before we carry on too much further, I want to say, Jathan and Ed, welcome back to the show. How are you guys doing? Happy to hit that three P.

I mean, well, two parts of it are talking about Netflix, which is really a form of torture, but you know. That's right. That's the whole thing about T.F. We like to torture our friends. Yeah, it's good. We get to talk about the God Emperor of Capital today. It's going to be very, very exciting.

By the way, Alice, you mentioned that they talk about House of Cards, Kevin Spacey, etc., etc. Boy, in this book written and published in 2020, do they bring up House of Cards as a kind of unvarnished success story? And boy, do they not talk about any of the other elements of it. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Just zero self-awareness.

Everyone remembers House of Cards was the show that was good, and nothing else about House of Cards. Are anyone involved with House of Cards? I mean, again, statistically. They produced those weird videos that Kevin Spacey did. Oh, the fucking boy. Re-paced things was behind the camera on those. That's like original.

I mean, again, statistically, you just have to say that House of Cards had much less paedophiles in it than the average Hollywood production. Yeah, it just had one big one. Yeah, a big get. So we're going to talk a little bit about the corporate culture that made all this possible, because Netflix, if you don't know, has a very sort of singular, unique, well, probably not unique for long. We'll get into that.

But a very famous corporate culture among like business writers and business thinkers. Oh, is it because it's good? Well, they certainly think so. The most ominous kind of all. So before we go into this, I want to read a passage from this book that indicates why Netflix organizes itself as a company as it does. We can think about what that means moving forward. And this matters because like a few thousand Silicon Valley sociopaths doing like struggle

sessions, but it doesn't. Who really cares? Who cares about that? No one cares about that. What matters is that Reid Hoffman has a coherent theory of management that could replace Taylorism in a very dark and dangerous way. And if you want to understand how the professional class is going to become precarized, it will be because these kinds of practices are adopted at the highest levels

and then filter down to the rest of the economy. Like we said, because with Netflix, it says, no, it gives you freedom. It makes you more flexible. It makes you a higher performer, all this stuff. Yeah, like driving an Uber. But precisely, it's that lifestyle is always the thin end of the wedge. And what is lifestyle for people who are not precarious because they're getting paid a Netflix salary may not be lifestyle for someone who's like, I don't know,

working in a call center or stacking shelves in a grocery store. Well, what we're saying is all of this stuff is coming for you. And it's very easy to be like, oh, it's funny that executives are getting tortured. And that's true. It is funny. It's very funny. The problem is that's the only kind of trickle down economics that actually happens is the torture.

And so the shit always rolls downhill. I mean, that's an immutable fact of life. Ironically, Netflix's corporate culture is a lot like the film it follows in that it is coming for you. So basically, right? I think this is just Taylorism just to let for those of you who don't know was the adoption of scientific management like time in motion studies by factory owners at the turn of the 20th century. It turned into like McKinsey style fire everybody management consulting where you

would like monitor workers on their paths to and from different piles of stuff. And then you would like make sure they follow most efficient paths or work in the most efficient way. Taylorism is the reason why every third startup we talk about now is a brain implant that activates when it hears the word. Yeah. It's old school Six Sigma. It's three brace Sigma. So yeah, like remember when Amazon patent that wristband that would send that.

Yes. It would strap its warehouse on its warehouse workers and would send like electric shocks to kind of force you into the most efficient movement. That is literally Taylorism, but with computers. That's all. And they turn that into a wearable. They turn that into a wearable. Well, now you pay $79 a month or some shit for them to do that.

But listen, I feel like I'm getting my money. I think and the thing is right. And this is going to become clear as we read through this book is that the corporate culture at Netflix is about putting the Amazon shock collar inside your brain. It's like a mask. It's psychologically it's nearly it is psychologically implanting the Amazon shock collar into your psyche. It's like the reverse of killing the cop in your head.

That's recruiting the cop in your head. You have love's executives. And from. Yeah. And so Jathan and Ed, I want to sort of ask you about this, right? Is I've said like, I think this is the Taylorism of what people are calling the great reset. Can you like just quickly like go into sort of what this is as like a generational transformation? Yeah.

So the great reset then is this idea proffered by Klaus Schwab, who's the founder of Davos and the World Economic Forum. And it like really it like links into his ideas around the fourth industrial revolution. But really for him, it's like he talks about as this great reset for capitalism, right? And they're quite explicit in that, in that like, I think he even co-authored a book that just came out called COVID-19, The Great Reset, which it's like the awful title for a book, but it kind of actually gets at the idea here, which is that like the way that capitalism is being done needs to be completely rethought and needs to be rethought with like AI and ubiquitous

data and Internet of Things. Like it needs to be done in this like much smarter way. Right. And I think another key thing there is that their great reset also comes with a lot of attempts at reforms where they don't really change the power dynamics between individuals and the workers, right? What they're just saying is like, it would be nice if shareholders cared more about the environment, especially if they were shareholders at like a toxic sludge company.

It would be really nice if they thought about it and voted on like a non-biting resolution. But it's not like let's stop torturing people or dumping waste into the water. It's just like, let's think about it before we do it and then do it. As a shareholder in toxic sludge corp, I've been very upset to discover what they've been doing with all the toxic sludge. What am I gonna do? And the way they want to do it is by creating this like, like total index of all the resources and materials and capital in the world

and like putting like sensors on all of it and having real-time data about all of it. So now everything becomes like a hyper-datified, hyper-monitored, hyper-micromanaged asset class. Oh, it's gonna be the Northern Ireland border. I was saying, what if we do the Domestay book, but like... The Domestay book is a book of all the times I got sucked off. That's right. That's what actually was in it.

William the Conqueror just loved getting top. Yeah, William the Conqueror was a pooha. Anyway, so when I say this is the Taylorism of the Great Reset, what I actually, I don't mean to sort of give that idea sort of any more credit than it deserves, which is basically none, as that's sort of a PR exercise, but it also does entail some substantive changes, which is that as more things are automatically tracked and more transactions are automatically performed, fewer and fewer clerical workers, fewer and fewer knowledge workers,

are going to be needed. And as such, the same process of precarization is gonna happen to them as happened to taxi drivers and people in zero hours contracts and teachers and nurses and so on and so on. And it is, I believe, I think, I'm not willing to say this is going to happen, but I see, and especially as we talk about in the book, this gets more and more popular. It's getting adopted at more and more companies. It's the document that this was based on 127 slide PowerPoint presentation called like Netflix's culture document, whatever it's called,

was considered one of the most influential in Silicon Valley. Like this isn't going anywhere and we're gonna go through why it's pernicious. But first, I want to read these two paragraphs and they're a little bit long, but I'm gonna read them because this is, I think, why he, this is the logic behind what we're gonna talk about from a corporate level. And this is towards the end of the book, this comes in says, even during the industrial era, so what he means is anything before the digital era, i.e. now, there were pockets of the economy such as advertising agencies

where creative thinking drove success and they managed on the edge of chaos. Such organizations accounted for such just a small percent of the economy. But now with the growth and importance of intellectual property and creative services, so by that he means not just stuff like a copywriting or whatever, but like JavaScript programming and user design, user interface design, so on. A very strange thing happened. We all turned into Don Drake. He gets with it to work on Netflix. You have to be constantly drinking whiskey and smoking.

So says the percentage of the economy that is dependent on nurturing, inventiveness and innovation is much higher and actually increasing. Yet most companies are still following the paradigms of the industrial revolution that have dominated wealth creation for the last 300 years. Being Taylorism and wealth appropriation, but never mind. In today's information age, in many companies and many teams, the objective is no longer error prevention and replicability. On the contrary, it is creativity, speed and agility.

In the industrial era, the goal was to minimize variation, but in creative companies today, maximizing variation is more essential. In these situations, the biggest risk isn't making a mistake or losing consistency. It's failing to attract and retain top talent, invent new products, or to change direction quickly when the environment shifts. Consistently- I mean, this is just like, it's on Saraj's brain at a more advanced level. And it's like, damn, my life like madman.

So it says, consistency and repeatability are more likely to squash fresh thinking than to bring your company profits. A lot of little mistakes help the organization learn quickly and are a critical part of the innovation cycle. So again, wait, is TF anti-innovation? I'm getting kind of broad-sided here. That's why Trash Each has never come up with anything as good as Spencer Confidential. That's right.

I briefly looked that up. It's nothing like you think it would be. I'm not going to tell you what it is. I don't think it's like anything. I have no idea. Other than I assume it has lots of big Bollywood dance sequences. And the thing is, right, I think what he's actually talking about here isn't the creative industry.

It's not any kind of expressive process. But when you're talking about innovation in this context, when you're talking about basically doing everything and seeing what works, you're talking about applying the logic of capital under a zero-rate interest world where you're looking for monopoly inside the enterprise, where you're talking about gambling. It's just bullshit, right? Like when your middle management imperatives under Taylorism were

like more efficiency and crush unions, right? Your management imperatives at a middle level in this are more efficiency and crush unions. But you think you're Don Draper while you're doing it. Yeah, you're doing this all up being back. So you want to like... Yeah, yes, literally, yes. You're just trying to squeeze more JavaScript out of people.

But the way in which you're doing it is like nurturing their creativity, but in the kind of like facile corporate way that we all know and love. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, it ultimately comes down to a remarketing of work will set you free. Yeah, that's right. Oh, well, that was that. I mean, at least like, I'm not going to say there's no benefits in any of this. I'm not anti-creativity for the same reason.

I'm not like anti-Taylorist managers providing workers with things like houses or gyms or things like that. It's that there's always a hook and it's always part of a worldview in which the point of this is to stop you unionizing and to generate more JavaScript. No one's ever unionized on a beanbag. There's something... That's true, actually. There's something else here to look at as well, which is if you're trying to find new

things to monopolize, no one thought really about monopolizing like Facebook likes or whatever until Facebook invented the Facebook like to monopolize, et cetera. And now Greg Stubbe is furious about it. Yeah, it's stuff that you've talked about before with like displacements of value and capitalism where you have to like find new ways of generating capital. And you just end up like, we're running out of natural resources to do it, running out of geography to do it. And so we venture into the mind.

And so that is the real creative dimension is your ability to make up some more bullshit. Join me in the mind dimension. We are all in the mind dimension. We are all in Sebastian Gorka's brain dojo about this. So the thing is, if you can invent a new way, if you can invent a new resource to collect, you can then have a monopoly on it from the outset. And so I think if you want to look at the one thing that's changed here, it's yes, more efficiency in terms of JavaScript.

Yes, we're still making sure no one unionizes ever. But we're also doing it in a way where instead of trying to make the same thing over and over again, we're just trying to keep making stuff until we invent something that we can dominate. And I think that's the difference. So funny. This kind of reminds me of just like the weird lines in God Emperor of Dune where it's like, you're reading the book at the top. He's like, he's like, do you know why I treat all my people like shit?

It's because I love them. And I'm trying to squeeze out the most out of them and like, you know, help them transcend the limits of their humanity so that we never, ever, ever have to go to war. That's why I'm a dictator for 10,000 years. That's why I will never let you shit in the corner unless I know where it is, you know? And Reed Hastings in his interviews with FT talks about how he's horrible with people. You know, he breaks down in front of crowds.

He doesn't really know how to interact with people. He thinks you're supposed to scream at them. But he's doing it because he wants to set everybody free. Or he thinks that he's going to come around and set everybody free through this. And I, for one, don't think that sounds ominous at all. To Reed Hastings riding the sand one. That's literally dead. That is somewhere, that is somewhere between like Lito the second and like, and like what?

A bit like a classic comic book, Bill. It's Ozzy Mandeus in Watchmen. Yes, there we go. Yes. It's literally just like every single quote they've ever said, you know, just like ominously in the background. This man is unable. He's addicted to being ominous.

Yo, I just, I just read this quote. It's really cool. I think I'm going to put it on my statue. Just start saying stuff that like would not be ominous. But he's like doing it in an ominous tone of voice. Join me in the conference room. Oh, well, here's the thing. They don't have conference rooms with doors because they don't believe in secrets in Netflix.

Of course. Okay. Of course. So here's if Edward, this is actually this quote from Reed Hoffman builds on what you said here. He said, we model ourselves in being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love despite your sibling's unusual behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to drill into that. This is not a family.

A family is where bad things happen. Fuck you. Wait. Okay. There's literally a quote in God ever, dude. I think that matches up almost exactly with it where he's like, let there be no doubt. All right. Not wrong.

Why he's he remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity, despotism and slavery always hover at the edges as if like the family is going to enslave you and tie you down to the to the room or to the bed and not let you get out or do anything. So here's here's Hoffman's quote that it basically is that but in like LinkedIn speak, just that a dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be caring intensely about your teammates and knowing you won't be on the team forever. Being on a dream team is not right for everyone.

Many people might value things like job security very highly and would prefer to work at companies where the orientation is more around stability and working around inconsistent employee effectiveness. Our model works best for people who value consistent excellence in their colleagues. Yeah. We're basically like the Green Berets, but you shouldn't be ashamed that you didn't pass the selection course for Netflix. It requires a really special set of skills. Yeah. A lot of people die on the Netflix fan dance every year.

Has anyone gone through like all production credits to really like make sure Jeffrey Epstein is not on one of them because it's just wow. No, that wouldn't be a pursuit of excellence. That would be concentrating on failure. So we talk about the model, right? Because this could just be like any CEO could say this about their company. Any single one could do that. Netflix actually has some differences in their policies and the way the company is structured that means that while this is still a bullshit, there are some different things about them. Whilst it is bullshit, it can also be materially bad.

That's right. Don't worry. This isn't just empty bullshit. This is actually very, very evil bullshit. So what it means is that at Netflix, there are basically no rules governing things like vacation, expenses, or even like strategic decision making within teams. If you have thought of like, I want to commission a show and you've done all the research for the show, you don't have to then kick that up the chain. If you're sort of sufficiently high, you can just do it. You can just make Spencer confidential.

You can just like do a great big line of Adderall and then make Spencer confidential and then just say it has however many views. It has 85 million. Who cares? Ever heard of it? No. Caroline Callaway works for Netflix. And so the other thing is though, in addition to that like lack of control, which again, that's a Taylorist thing saying if you're sick, you have to get approval from these people and this needs to be cross-checked. This film needs to be formed in. It's this control and consistency. Netflix says no, we're not trying to do that. What we're trying to do is quote set the context so that people have freedom and responsibility.

In order to in order to overturn the norms of the production line that made the Ford Model T, we have brought back the court politics of the Borges. That is literally yes. It's a combination of the court politics of the Borges and like a Maoist struggle session because negative feedback is constant and public. Awesome. Awesome. And then we went to Twitter. And they even like most like and that's why I say it's also a bit like Synanon because they have their secret cult language for describing what's going on. So when you're like,

have to do with struggle session because you know, you commissioned a show by a pedophile. Oopsie doopsie. No, no, by too many pedophiles. By too many pedophiles, then you have to go through a process called sun shining. Well, that sounds good. That doesn't sound ominous at all. First, we just hook these electrodes. Stare into my eyes. Do not blame it. It's basically like the way I imagine it is it's like the ludovico technique,

but like for a TED talk, you must now go through something completely non ominous, which we like to call the workplace eclipse. So what happens when you sunshine is either, but is either individually or through mass emails to as many people as you can as quickly as you can. You have to detail all the mistakes you have made, why you made them and how you're not going to make them again in the future. While adopting the jet. Never has the word mass email sounded so. Like it's the other thing I keep thinking of is like it's basically like you're taking like

some, you know, product manager with a degree from Stanford in a gila and making him adopt a stress position because he let too many bugs through the final product release. Working at Netflix is just taking a lot of iPhone note screenshots. That's like the Abu Ghraib has come to Silicon Valley. And I won't be satisfied until we get a live stream of Reed Hastings having his head shaved. Yeah, I mean, management secrets of the seventh floor of the Riyadh Ritz Carlton. There's some interesting things in here. So basically because the book,

um, hang on, uh, the book is like by it's an interview between him and it's like Alan Johnson police. It's a written as a conversation between Reed Hastings and Aaron Meyers, like an eminent professor of business culture and so on and so on at INSEAD and it's divided into three parts where around the three steps of like, um, reduce, reduce, increase talent density, increase freedom and reduce controls. Everybody's Don Draper. Everybody is Don Draper. What I think is really funny is because every, the book, Netflix comes off very well in the book. Like there are a couple of small criticisms. Well, here's the thing, Aaron Meyers says of the

book, quote, Reed and I got to know each other and eventually he suggested I interview Netflix employees to get a firsthand glimpse of what the Netflix culture is really like. And they all said it was great. One of them slipped me a note, but like, I just threw that in the one of them kept blinking in a very strange way. It was really hard to read what was written on the note because it was in blood and quite smudged, but I presume it was something banal. Yeah, I assume they were slush. Yeah. Um, so she says this is a chance to find out how a company with a culture in direct opposition to everything we know about psychology, business and human behavior can have such remarkable results.

Also, like, it's not really a direct opposition to everything you know. I mean, every, it's not like everyone's not working for like the profit of the company. Yeah. No one's ever come up with the idea of a struggle session before. Aaron Meyers needs to read theory. Very interesting book by Mr. C. Mal. Nah, in a few weeks, he's going to be like liberalism is the fucking enemy. Yeah. Everyone on Netflix has a big guy in furnace next to their desk.

Personally, I'm very excited for them to make a mini series, doggie drama starring like, I don't know, um, a guy from Joanie loves Chaachi called combat liberalism. Um, Netflix's management policy is combat liberalism, but combat isn't adjective instead of referb. Um, so that's what it's for. This is basically like a Potemkin book. So I want to read some, uh, uh, some stuff from the Wall Street Journal, which was a, an article that like first Sean, a light, they sunshine, they sunshine Netflix, they sunshine their, their weirdness out there. Would you, would you say that they operated some kind of a spotlight inquiry? Do they play like a weird pitch down like minor key version of you are my sunshine while they do

this? Uh, that's right. Uh, Nick, can you put that in please behind this? Yeah. Like the burial plays sunshine, a former, a former marketing vice president described the journal how she was working over the weekend to promote the second season of orange is the new black in New York city. So again, having people like work on weekends and stuff like that's like nothing we know such a mediocre thing to be doing Maoism to your employees and received word that her boss wanted to have an early meeting on Monday. When she arrived to the meeting, she was told that she was fired because she wasn't a cultural fit. The chief talent, the chief talent officer, a woman came, uh, Tony Nazario Kranz, uh, later told the former

executive that she should have fired one of the people she supervised faster. And that's why she herself was being fired. She failed what Netflix calls the keeper test. Uh, which means the question is if you heard this person was leaving, would you fight hard to keep them? If you would say, yeah, they're doing fine. I wouldn't fight hard to keep them and you're supposed to fire them right away. Cool. That sounds very hard. I love how like again, like all this comes back to our grand theory about just like everything in the modern era in the West being like the Soviet Union, but stupid and expensive. Like they've basically invented the NKVD. Like that's all this is. Just like, Oh, well, actually you knew a guy who was bad at

his job. So now you're fired too. Yeah. Why, why failed to denounce this person? Here's the thing. Nazario Kranz was then subsequently fired because she didn't fire her faster. Brushed out of the photo with three Hastings. This is the Netflix adaptation of the death style. That's right. Um, a lot of people at Netflix showing up with the ice picks in the back of their head. Fire rings. What do you think the Netflix equivalent of being exiled to Siberia is? What show do they put you on? If you're like not actively fired, but you're on thin fucking eyes, do you think you're doing like bloodline or something? You're told that you're on, you're on the Spencer Confidential account. Yeah, that's right. You're doing the KIG as

subtitles for SAS Ultimate Force. The end of like the lives of others, the third act of it, where he's like steaming mail open because they won't fire him and he can't quit, is just like the people working on Spencer Confidential. Spencer Confidential too, Bollywood excitement. I love to point my big comical Elmer Fudd firing gun at a middle manager and then it backfire all over me. Also everyone's fired. It's like a Netflix is kind of like the cells in your body, but it completely replaces everyone there every 10 days or so. How often have you been fired? So several managers have said, uh, talked to by the journalist here, said they have to keep firing people or they'll look soft and be fired themselves.

This is like Obama. Thank you to Netflix for providing a better insight to the purges than Steven Kotkin's new biography of Stalin. Yes. We've just redone it in miniature. It's beautiful. In his memoirs, he was talking about how he needed to keep firing drone missiles at people or else he would look soft on terror. This is combat liberalism. Is Trump, is Trump going to deploy his golden parachute into Netflix? I would watch every episode of the Trump show on Netflix. You're fired. You're fired. You're fired. I'm the strongest one here. You're fired. Trump is the only person. Trump is the only person who could out bully these people. He's coming to be like, no, I'm not fired. You're fired, actually.

Are him just like, shitting on Obama is not supposed to go away. Coming in, just like someone tries to fire him. He just said, you have terrible skin. He's got a Netflix deal. Okay. Couldn't get any pussy though. Couldn't get any pussy. Okay. I've never read a book. I've got more pussy than he's ever had. We're going to be looking into Obama. He's not our friend. Very very strongly looking into him. Well, there are a bunch of times here also where like someone goes out and spends too much money at a restaurant and then they have to spend an email to everyone being like,

I got too much of an expensive bottle of wine. This has hurt the company. That's why I think that the Trump comparison here is excellent because he would be like, yeah, like someone like, you know, spills like fresco on their shirt and it's like, go to the front of Air Force One and tell everyone what a snob you are. You have like just like taking out billions of loans from the ECB, but it's just for Trump. I would love to watch a show made by Trump on Netflix. That would be so good. That's okay. Here's an amazing free idea for Netflix.

I can lay it up. Every single ex US president gets a show on Netflix. After a Biden's done, he can have like- It's like the presidential library. The presidential video library. He gets to like, you know, walk around to people he hates and like, you know, pretend to drink water from this sink or whatever. Well, like say- Yeah, he gets to make like dreams of hope, the audacity of change, which like only nerds will watch. Trump gets to make season 57 of The Apprentice.

Yeah. I really want actually Clinton and Trump to have a show together where it's like comedians in cars getting coffee, but it's just- No, no, that's too many pedophiles. You've done the thing again. I don't think Trump is a pedophile, you know. I think he probably is. He's too simple. No, there are a lot of pictures of him with Epstein. No, they are that.

Absolutely. I'm afraid they're- He just loves to be at a cool party. It's the- A lot of women here, very, very small. That's my kind of thing, very, very small. What I want to see. He basically said that verbatim about Jeffery.

Yeah. He likes him young, much younger than him. He was like, Jeffery, he's a lady's man. He likes him young, real young, very strange. What was he- He did say that. He said he loves his social life. He loves his women too, some even younger than me. That's-

Yeah, there's just one quote. He was like, you should ask Chris Andrew what they- what goes on at that island. It's disgusting. I'm so- Disgusting folks. I'm so young. I'm so young, better fellas want to fuck me. So basically, I want to see-

I want to see the Biden Netflix special that he gets as well. Which is just- A remake of Happy Days, but he is the Fonz. No, I kind of think it would- I like to think of it as, again, just like a deeply murderous and sadistic Mr. Rogers. No, I think it's more like the sort of coma season of the surprise. No, I figured out what it is. I figured out what it is.

It is- It's Garrison Keeler. It's sadistic Garrison Keeler talking about Lake Wobagon and so on. It's not just Al Franken. Oh yeah, that's right. Hey, you know what? Netflix, we're coming up with a lot of ideas for you right now. We've already got it.

That's right. We're all being Dondraper right now. We're all lighting our cigarettes and we're drinking our old fashions and we're in creatives. So, like getting back to Netflix, it says that when someone is fired, an email is sent to employees explaining in detail all of the reasons why they were fired. And that they must never contact them, cut all ties with them, their family. 3.1, he's a loser. So, a vice president-

Sissy Graydon Kess is Bad Food Restaurant. Oh, that could be the name of Trump's show where he goes to- It's like Gordon Ramsay. Diners, Drivers and Dives are like our rescues. Bad Food Restaurant. There we go. We are just printing money here, Netflix. Has Guy Fieri ever met Trump?

I need to know that. So, a vice president of Netflix called Karen Berrigan was said to have responded- Head of a name. Excuse me? That's a fun name. Yeah, I wouldn't have named her that, but whatever. It's full of good ideas. Responded to the allegation that it created a culture of fear.

Good, fear drives you. Cool. Like, this is the upside, right, of like doing stress positions on nerds. Is that like a handful of them will thrive and prosper. And you end up with like these gile-wearing dickheads being like, I am the scourge of God. I am the scourge of the approach department. This is basically what the CIA is.

Yeah. It's like, this person then went on to dispute that she ever said this. Just, you know, so we're clear. Oh, see, that's the difference. The CIA wouldn't bother. But like- What I actually said was work makes you free. I cannot find a picture of Guy Fieri with Donald Trump.

And that really upsets me. Mark that down in your bingo cards. Guy Fieri with Donald Trump has not been found this episode. No. Oh, no. I take it back. There is one. So unmark your bingo card and then mark the space that says Guy Fieri was found

with Donald Trump this episode. It's impossible to fill the entire card. I'm going to put it in the DM just so you can appreciate it. It's a good photograph. So, this goes on. The article goes on. Double standards on transparency create confusion. One executive said he was fired because he did not inform others about another

employee's medical condition out of respect for their privacy. Netflix said this was not being forthright with us around a major employee issue. Now, before we even get into that, though, in the book, Hastings- That's very illegal. Like, already. Hastings makes a big deal of talking about how he says it would be wrong for an executive to, quote, sunshine their own struggles with addiction and instead just demur that they were taking time off for personal reasons.

So, I think that there are, what actually might be happening is a lot, is bourgeois court politics where some people have to sunshine their addictions and then get fired or whatever. And other people are just allowed to carry on with relative privacy. And a lot of these rules seem, I don't know, arbitrary? Yeah, you get moved to a Netflix office in rural Ireland. And the thing is, right, like we say if these are arbitrary, what this actually does is it creates a culture of fear and uncertainty, which basically means that you're constantly like, you're going to work every day, but you're going to work every day wondering if it's

your last day at work. And where Netflix is able to say, we are like a sports team, not a family. So, we're going to fire whoever we want to fire whenever we want to fire for any reason. And you're just supposed to be glad to have worked here. What that looks like to me is a kind of professional zero hours contract. Yeah. Welcome to Netflix where the bullet will always come from behind. Wait, what was that last bit?

I hate it when I work for Netflix and my boss asks me to take a long walk down a vinyl hallway. Hey, look at those flowers. Aren't they beautiful? Just keep thinking about the flowers. It's yogurt day. I wonder if this contains the pills. Yeah, actually in Netflix, we operate a buddy system where everyone is assigned a much smaller and smarter co-worker to keep an eye on them. I love to work for Netflix.

Open my desk drawer and find the orientation manual in a silenced macaroon. Yes, at Netflix, everyone has a code phrase and the code phrase will activate the to kill one of their co-workers. Commissioning our new series, Flatlander Woman. This morning, the announcement is Apple Pie, Jaundice, and Slovenia. And then three shots just right now. Wait, is it each of those as an individual code word? The three in sequence is unique enough to be an activation,

but just any mention of Apple Pie might just lead a murder, murder attack. Oh, wait, wait, I fucked up that code word. I'm submitting myself to Sunshine League. Commissioning a new series in Slovenia, and you just hear sounds of someone being beaten to death of a ring bus. Anyway, the also this comes back to Jonathan Friedland, no relation, former chief communications officer, who I think we all recall this was a big deal on Twitter a couple of years ago, like kept dropping the like the n-word in separate

meetings, but to say that you should say that you shouldn't say it. To be fair, the whole n-word would be a very safe code phrase, right? Because you just hang out with liberals often enough. You just like hope they never say, you're probably fine. And if they do, you take one of them down with you. I love the energy of a guy who thinks he's found a workaround to say the word, and he's just going, oh, you know a word I would never say. So Hastings, however, waffled for months on whether or not to fire

Friedland, keeping him on for a long time. And then subsequently Hastings sunshineed his failure in judgment at a retreat, apologizing on stage, apologizing on stage, subject line, the full n-word. Hard R. Hastings waffled for months and firing Friedland, and subsequently then sunshineed his failure in judgment at a retreat on stage, where he sliced a lemon in half, juiced the whole thing, and then drank a glass of pure lemon juice. I really don't like it when my boss at the MK old for a factory that makes TV shows, pulls out a knife on stage.

That's actually the denouement of Spencer Confidential 3, Hard R. Can we like this episode twice to MK Netflix? Yes, sure. When you said that he broke it like he had a lemon and he sliced it in half, I was really half expecting him to put both of those slices in his eyes and squeeze. That's what he needs to do. That's the real struggle session. He's doing suicide shots. Yeah. At what point do you just check if Reed Hastings has a boner for all of this?

Yeah. He has the sunshine about his boner. Wait, do you think that actually the guy, the Serbian war criminal who drank the poison in the dock at the Hague was just like a... He was just working at Netflix. He was sunshineing. Yeah, that's right. He didn't kill enough people fast enough. That's the new thing I thought you were. People are going to be very mad at you for calling Croatian war criminal a Serbian war criminal.

Oh, correct. Some activation phrases will be said. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, he says basically, if you give employees more freedom instead of developing processes to prevent them from exercising their own judgment, they'll make better decisions, and it's easier to hold them accountable. Netflix is now run by the anime avi people.

I love it when people are held accountable. It's my favorite thing. This also makes for a happier, more motivated workforce and a more nimble company. No, it doesn't. It clearly doesn't. It makes for an incredibly paranoid workforce that is always trying to knife itself. Yeah. The Borscha... No, it's great because the Basileus always knew that he would never have to die of an illness because he'd always be murdered. Yeah. That's right. You don't even have the hollow, shitty protection of like rooms anymore.

That's not a thing. Hey, Netflix, we have a monthly thing that we like to call the evening of the lengthy blades. So, this makes a happier, more motivated workforce and a more nimble company. And to develop... But you have to develop a foundation to enable this level of freedom, and you have to increase talent density, increase candor, and reduce controls. Now, I want to... I'll explain that. I want a little very dense talent. I want to pause here, though, and throw 50 wide-nose talent.

I want to throw back to Edward and Jason. It's very interesting that he talks about freedom here, and what he means by freedom. How do you feel he means by freedom here? Freedom to get donned, really. That's what he's talking about here. I think with a lot of these tech executives and a lot of these tech insiders, Silicon Valley people, when they're speaking about freedom, and they'll use language of voluntary contracts, a free association.

But what they really end up meaning is no barriers to authority and coercion and domination at all. And if you get in the way of a power system, you're fucked. But if you don't, then you're good. You're chilling. You can sunshine as much as you want, or whatever else you can do at Netflix. But if you get in the way of power, of autonomy of power, then you're in for a problem. Yeah. You started the episode talking about how this is laying the groundwork for what the precariat is going to experience. This is coming to everybody, but it is already here. I mean, flexibility is the watchword for all of the gig companies.

That was the whole impetus or the excuse behind Proposition 22, is that they needed the legal freedom to institute total flexibility in their workforce for the workers. But then when you actually look at the sociological studies and do interviews, like I have in my own research with people that work on these platforms, that flexibility very quickly is experienced as a freedom to work at all times. And I think the other thing here, and this is because I tend to think of everything in terms of going back to the Fed and the ECB and zero rates and stuff, is that this is a way to increase freedom of, this is almost a way to reduce the strategic workload on decision makers,

where you have to say, you can say something like, I don't know what our strategy is going to be. Why don't you figure it out? You have the freedom to do whatever you want, but you also have to know that if the thing that you do isn't not just in our best interest, but isn't so amazing that no one else could ever have thought of it, etc., etc., you will be immediately fired and will replace you with someone who does. And in another parallel to your Stalin or whatever, once you're at a high enough level, once you're like Reed Hoffman, you all read Hastings, you don't have to worry about the infighting because it's not coming for you, but it is keeping anyone who might down because

they're all trying to knife each other. Right. It externalizes, this is like a good strategy for them externalizing everything. We have in general markets, externalizing all the costs of every single horrendous odious toxic activity, but we're also having firms externalize their own costs on the books and to workers, and then we're also having them externalize like responsibility or any sort of accountability to the workers. And at the same time, that freedom gives them more ability to raise funds, to violate the law frequently, to operate in capacities that they might not otherwise, to gain more and more and more power at the expense of everyone else's autonomy. And I think we can talk then about like, because if we talk about this sort of

operationalized, let's sort of get really into the meat of this book, and how Hastings thinks about the relationship of the worker with work, this is a story about early Netflix navigating the first dot com crisis, where they had to lay off a bunch of people, and they were wondering if they were going to survive. How wet they said, a few months after the difficulty, the holidays arrived, DVD players were popular that Christmas, and by early 2002, our DVD by mail subscription business was growing rapidly again. Suddenly, we were doing far more work, but with 30% fewer employees. To my amazement, those same 80 people now were getting everything done with a passion that seemed higher than ever. They were working longer hours, but their spirits were sky high.

It wasn't just our employees were happier. I'd wake up in the morning, and I couldn't wait to get into the office. In those days, I drove Patty McCores, like a HR person, to work every day. And when I swung up to her house in Santa Cruz, she would practically leap into the car with a big grin. Read what's going on here, she would say, is this like being in love? Are these just wacky chemicals and this thrill is going to wear off? Patty had put her finger on it. Yes, we're on mushrooms. Stage one of the CIA experiment called Netflix is releasing LSD into the office water supply of a DVD by mail. The entire office felt like it was filled with people who were madly in love with their work. Remember to drink lots of water, but not too much water. So what Hastings

but basically Hastings concludes from this is that by firing a bunch of people and keeping just the best performers, everybody seemed to be very happy to be there. It must be because of something I've made up called talent density and not thank God I didn't get fired. Definitely not a highly abusive relationship. It's an extremely healthy relationship. Yeah, it sounds cool. What I love about this company is that they seem to have a culture of like when your mum is mad at you. She's obviously mad, but she's refusing to explain why she's mad and it's on you to do exactly the right thing. And if you do the wrong thing, your life will be absolutely hell. But also the idea, the freedom is the freedom to basically be psychotically

in love with your work at the DVD by mail company. And the freedom to do the kinds of things that do whatever that love drives you to do. But in order to have the freedom, you must also demonstrate how in love you are, how like, and again, we talked about this a long time ago, and when I talked about Youngchul, Bungchul Han's psychopolitics, you have to not just like your job. You have to want to marry your job. This is where it comes to like the Simpsons movement area in Coal. Yeah. And you have to like pretend not to need it. You have to buy into, for instance, Uber's original bullshit of, oh, we're just going to get people who like maybe want to make some extra money on the side. If you want to prosper, you have to act like that's the case, even if it is

as it will be for most people, your full time actual job. And so he says, in hindsight, I understood that a team with even one or two merely adequate performers brings down the performance of everyone in the room. If you have a team of five stunning employees, so talking like a London estate agent. Very hot models. Okay, we're talking about employees with huge racks here. And since some adequate ones, the two adequate ones will sap managers energy. This is the graph of grades declining around bars. The adequate ones will sap managers energy, lower the teams overall IQ and reduce the quality of group discussions. I hate it when we lower the teams overall IQ. Yeah. Well, everyone's like just fucking doing

poppers constantly. Like that's the measure measuring each other's balls. Yes. Yes. Literally doing eugenics to your like product. Being fired for having the wrong kind of brain pan. Interesting. You have this like little weird bump on the side of your head that's with submissiveness, low IQ, not too high energy, you know. So, hey, everyone, look at this weird bump. I've heard of the keeper test. This is the caliper test. Force others to develop ways to work around them, reducing efficiency. Drive staff who seek excellence in everything around them to quit. Cool. And show the team that you can be fired for not firing people. And show the team that you accept mediocrity in general.

Seems kind of fascist. Yeah, rightly. I mean, extremely. And you brought up Bong Jong-hyun's psycho politics. I feel like that is such the perfect and apt lens to view this through. It reminds me of a short passage from his book where he says, quote, power that is smart and friendly does not operate frontally, i.e. against the will of those who are subject to it. Instead, it guides their will to its own benefit. Smart power cosies up to the psyche rather than disciplining through coercion. And that is exactly what's happening here. It is psycho politics in every meaning of the word psycho. That's exactly right. Psycho mode politics. Exactly. Would you go sick or mo for an employee? We like people at Netflix

to be absolutely jokified. So basically, in chapter two, he talks about how he learned his lessons about candor. He learned his lessons about candor from going to marriage counseling with his wife. Cool. He's a wife guy. On top of it all, he had problems with his what he had problems with his marriage because he was working too hard. It is like, you know, debugging software startup. He was addicted to excellence and said, well, yeah, he was he was fucking getting weird on excellence. That's right. I'd wake up in the morning. I'd do a line of excellence straight off the mirror. He like fixed the problem. He tried to fix the problems and then he did the marriage counseling. He's like, you know what? What if I just ran the

company on this shit instead of having to go? That was what he did. Divorcing your wife because she should have divorced you years ago. That shows weakness. He says afterward, I tried to take the same commitment to being honest from my therapist back to the office. I began encouraging everyone to say exactly what they really thought, but with positive intent to get feelings, opinions and feedback onto the table where they could be dealt with. And then I gasped with them. In a marriage, there's a fine line between sunshining and exhibitionism. Yeah, sometimes there are those really annoying basic people on the internet who are like men getting therapy is the worst thing that ever happened. But this is the one time

where I agree with this. Normalize not going to therapy. Exactly. Normalize being a dude. Yeah, because like that's like modern day because what is Tony Soprano, but modern day Don Draper and modern day Don Draper has to go to therapy, right? Because essentially this is what Tony Soprano does as well. Like he goes to Dr. Melthy. He learns some like he misunderstands something from her and then he applies that to like, you know, passing over Polly for the big promotion and then he transfers that thing he half remembers from therapy onto running his crew. But because he's a moron, he hasn't understood the difference between say something Dr. Melthy says and how to manage Polly. And I feel like this is kind of the same thing that

happens here. Polly, your problem is you don't strive for excellence. That's something Tony would say. You could think you Tony could absolute there could be an episode where Melthy says something like like, you know, you must get something with striving for excellence. And he would say, sorry, just taking this podcast off the rails to write Soprano's fan. And he would say to both AJ and to like Chrissy, the problem is with you, you don't strive for fucking excellence. Yeah, that's right. You know, I'm the show right now. So something I discovered recently as a brief sidetrack is that Bobby Bacalar from the Soprano's has a podcast where he just gets other people who are also in the Soprano's just to talk about

being in the Soprano's. It's Bobby. It's, um, it's, uh, what is it? It's him and it's also Michael Imperioli. It's a really good show. I just found it really funny. That is peak podcasting. I just found it really funny. That's the snake eating itself. That like of all the people to have the Soprano's podcast, it would be Bobby Bacalar. Because he was a stand of comedian like IRL, he was. I'm just moot. I'm doing the Riley move. Sorry. Sorry, Jess. Basically, working at Netflix means you're going to be told how you're doing and have your mistakes pointed out to you constantly by everyone around you forever. So he's, they say, say for as an example, any locked area in the building is symbolic of hidden things. You must be able,

we've taken the door off the maintenance. Anyway, don't go in the pizza basement. Yeah, it's, it's, it's all of the guardian columnists are all just like, what we can expect. And signifies that we don't trust one another on an early trip to a Singapore office. I noticed that our employees had been given lockers in which they could lock their things and they left every evening. The next morning, I insisted we get rid of the locks. Cool. Cool. If you're taking a shit, someone should be able to walk in on you and check that that's what you're really doing. It's trust. It's trust. Now I'm hung up on the idea of Soprano's sun shining. Yeah. Actually, he's the one in it. Netflix is abolishing private property. Listen,

tone, you said he was an interior decorator. I don't understand. I believe that he was an interior decorator and I may have allowed to allow him to escape in the pine barons. I believe he was dead, but I did not confirm that. I just love the Sopranos. This is the peak version of capitalism actually taking all of the things that really thinks and fears about communism and just internalizing it, right? Yes. Soviet Union was shit and expensive. A gulag. The gulags famously did not have locked doors. Right. Everything they think is going on in North Korea or in China or the Soviet Union,

they just take all of those techniques and then devote them towards creating Spencer Confidential. That's peak capitalism. Communism for all the worst fucking ins and means. Exactly. Serious question here. You know that North Korea has like an intranet, right? Yeah. So do you reckon that North Korea has like Juche Netflix, like internal Netflix? Because that would fucking, I would watch the hell out of that. The thing is that all Netflix is Juche. This actually translates to Spencer Confidential.

It's a loose adaptation following the filmmaking principles of Kim Jong-un. All Netflix is Juche Netflix. It's just different. It's just Juche for different areas. It's Juche all the way down. The Barack Obama deal is absolutely Juche. It's like liberal Juche. Yeah. Netflix is just liberal Juche. So this is back to Kim Jong-un in college pretending to read like Milton Friedman to get posted. So basically this is back to Nazario Kranz again, who was before she was fired, was asked to sunshine what she did on a trip to Milan,

which was that she took some of their team to get their hair done and get some makeup ahead of a launch event in Milan. Ms. Nazario Kranz argued that if a manager took two men out for a round of golf and spent the outing, it wouldn't have been so controversial. And then it was spun into an issue of gender equality. But then he talks about how like, oh, if you want to buy an expensive suitcase for a trip and you are able to like justify the purchase later, if we ask you, then it's fine. And so again, what it seems to me is that like, this is just like, if he stops liking you,

then all of your decisions no longer make sense in terms of what the company needs. Again, it's the Soviet Union. If you make everything technically illegal and you just choose not to enforce any of it most of the time, as soon as you don't like someone, you can be like, oh, you've broken the law 400 times today. And then when they say, yeah, but everyone breaks the law 400 times every day, you're like, ah, it seems like you've broken the law. Yeah. Well, and also like, I don't know, like the Soviet Union was able to take like an agrarian, Eurasian backwater country that was like rotting and was able to like

how many episodes of Spencer Confidential did they produce? Exactly. I was going to say, and look at Russia today, modern forward thinking, right? And so it's like, at least in the Soviet Union, like they went to space on their own money. That is true. Yeah, like those were Union dogs. At least they produced tractors. Yeah. At least they made tractors. Whereas here we get Spencer Confidential in this book. So Nazario Kranz was either fired by Hastings as sources told by the journal, as you mentioned earlier, or she claims she left as a mutual decision spurred in part by

a medical condition. It is an artist spend more time with her children and insists to this day that she quote, loved Netflix. Yeah. She padlocks herself into a suitcase and jumped off the roof of the Netflix building in an apparent resignation attempt. I mean, not to keep hammering on this Soviet thing, but that's absolutely a Politburo ouster thing is like, yeah, I'm leaving to spend more time with my kidney transplant, you know? And it was mutual, by the way, like I wanted to leave. He wanted me to leave. A grateful nation offers its thanks for a lifetime of service. My ex-girlfriend is listening.

So and cut to Nazario Kranz standing on top of a skyscraper screaming, this is for you, Netflix. It was all for you. One Korean employee who left early assault on Wall Street Journal, one Korean employee who left earlier this year from the Singapore office, said the culture encouraging harsh feedback at times reminded her of North Korea, where mothers were forced to criticize their sons in front of the public. Well, the good Korea. Yeah, it's all. It's just it is. As you said, liberal Juche.

Oh, yeah. We love liberal Juche. Yeah. Combat liberalism. Yeah, I mean, soon to Netflix, liberal Juche. Yeah. Spencer Confidential for liberal Juche. So here's an example of an email that was that might be sent after it was sent after someone was fired. Dear all with mixed emotions. I've decided to exit Jake exit is common, like corporate terms for when you fire someone. You no longer say you fired them. You now say you're exiting them. You get given an exit. Yeah. Jake was an internal candidate for promotion with a senior level executive position.

While conducting due diligence for this promotion, some more information has been shared with me that Jake has not consistently displayed the qualities of a leader in all cases that we demand or expect. Specifically, it is now clear that Jake was not forthright with us around a major employee issue. So again, didn't rat on someone that impacted the business even when directly asked. Jake made a meaningful impact over as many years at Netflix. And for some, this will come as a shock because he did a lot of great work, but I'm confident that the feedback I've collected is clear and led to us needing to make this change.

Cool. Powerful Scientology energy. Yeah. And again, also remember, it's for not ratting. That's all right. They literally have a facility where you are in an office and you bond through trauma and they just put you on tables and in cubicles and you scream at each other and tell all your deepest, darkest secrets. And then they also take away your passport and identification. So you can't exit the bonding experience entirely. I'm very excited to make this episode of Spencer Confidential,

but why do I have to kill this rabbit? And also, right? Like I think you understand their version of honesty and high performance, which is that they say that because Netflix is known for hiring such good people and paying such ridiculously crazy salaries and offering such wild severance packages that you should get your job with the expensive expectation that you will at some point be fired. Yeah. I want to read a quick thing from Netflix's culture and value statement, which really puts a pin on this, right? They say, quote,

to help us attract and retain stunning colleagues, we pay employees at the top of their personal market. The market for talent is what it is. At all times, we aim to pay all of our people at the top of their personal market, just that language, their personal market, but also the market, it just is what it is. We have no say over it. We're just following the imperatives of your personal market. The invisible hand, which is actually a fist smashing into your fucking face. Your own personal market. Reach out and sack me.

If you're an Uber driver, your rating drops below a certain level, you don't get to be an Uber driver anymore. That's just your personal market. He shouldn't have talked to me. It wasn't DoorDash. It was another one of the gig economy delivery things. I think it's one specifically in America. Drivers were encouraged to get little gifts or tips for people who were getting them through the app so that their ratings would stay high, so they wouldn't get automatically fired. It's the Soviet Union again.

Stop saying it's the Soviet Union though, because remember, the Soviet Union did do things. This doesn't even do anything. It's the Soviet Union, but shit and expensive. I think you could also, you could feasibly say this is also bourgeois court politics. This is also like a Byzantine corruption game. What this really is, it's less that it's Soviet and non-functional version of the Soviet system. This is the product of a decaying system, because that's what all of those places were. You realize that nothing else is going to get really invented.

It looks like you're inventing stuff. It looks like you're doing stuff. What you're actually doing is you are fighting for a little patch of livable land that you know is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. You know that the more anyone else gets on that patch of land, the more likely they are to be able to take your bit. What you need to do is you need to proactively monopolize every single blade of fucking grass you can find. You need to invent new ways to fire people. You need to invent new ways to immiserate them, more ways to keep them scared of you, all that stuff, so that you can keep your empire growing because the moment it stops growing, you already know that you're in a shrinking world. To stop growing is to start dying.

Part of the reason why the Soviet Union did not follow through on implementing their version of the Internet, which it very nearly did, it very nearly had a worldwide web before the worldwide web, was because it was split between two planning directorates, neither of which wanted to let the other one share in the credit in the slightest. Which is actually how the US state operates as well. There's so much infighting between agencies and so on. Yeah, I have a proposal for everyone here. What if we monetized the rot? Oh, that sounds good. What if we loved the rot? What if we married the rot? Absolutely. What if we fucked the rot? What if we fucked the rot? Show me some decks. Show me some decks. You know, we can get something going together,

some fun stuff. A startup called Rot, but the O is like one of those Scandinavian O's with a line through it. Yeah, what that is, that's a restaurant in Brooklyn where you pay like $90 for different fermented fish. So, noticing we're running up against time here, I want to do a couple more things here. How there are no vacation policy works is that they basically they're like, look, we don't want to monitor you when you go. We want you to monitor you. Yeah, and everyone else. Yeah, so there's a little cop that lives in your head and people actually do take vacations when it's modeled to them by their direct boss. And so what happens is, read Hastings and their senior leadership team

know that they have to take really long vacations and tell people about them and excruciating detail all the time. So everyone else knows it's okay for them to take vacations. But if your direct boss doesn't take vacations, then you don't take vacations. So again, it seems like it's applying kind of a sort of a chaos principle where again, you can take however much vacation you're brave enough to take. And join me on the dangerous game island and every island is the most dangerous game. And the thing is like they do actually like the idea of a no vacation policy means a no vacation policy. That's intuitive. It actually bears out that that's not true. People take a kind of normal

amount of vacation on average. But what it means is that everyone's kind of worried about taking vacations because they don't really know if it's too much. They feel insanely stressed out about taking a normal amount of vacation. Yeah. And bear in mind, we shouldn't like inadvertently valorize Ford isn't too much. We shouldn't or Taylor isn't too much. We shouldn't say like, oh, previously your boss didn't have a way of making you feel bad for taking your vacations. But it's significantly more precarious when it's just like, well, do you feel like you should have a vacation? It's not that bosses have gotten worse or anything. It's simply that their means of

like treating you like shit have expanded because in the day, it's more arbitrary. Yeah. And the language is shifted right now. Don't be like, we're just calling you in. We're checking in on you and seeing why you haven't used some of your vacation days or if you've used too many. What's up? It's as simple as using the word culture fit as a veneer for things like racism or sexism. We're not doing any of that. You just don't fit our culture here. And the other thing, I think it's the kind of like right to work policies that a lot of the more red states in the U.S. have where right to work basically means a right to be fired at any time. And that's exactly what Netflix is doing. But again, they're putting that like really liberal

Silicon Valley innovation veneer on top of what are ultimately like a hyper conservative politician's wet dream. Yeah. Like if you are in a right to work state, the fantasy is that you are this like rational consumer and you could simply go and, you know, take a job somewhere else because you're both engaged in this kind of like contract of equals. And with Netflix, the same thing applies. But the fantasy is like you are this freewheeling executive where it's important for you to be creative and to like go and find yourself so that you can pull out at the last minute the Kodak carousel or Alan Partridge in a full track suit wearing like a 90s phone headset shouting, we're taking it to Amazon Prime. Well, I think Alice, to go back to something

you said earlier, not to valorize Taylorism. I think what you have to see is not as this as an alternative to Taylorism, but as a perfection of something that Taylorism was itself a continuation of. It is a continuation of that process where, yes, those rules, those rules in creating those rigid structures, like took a lot of employee freedom away to like define the way that they would work to, you know, maybe even to negotiate against their boss. We've made huge savings and delivered them on to you, the shareholder by realizing we can just make the employees internalize. And what I mean here as well is like those processes in making those controls did have little bits of like rules that you could kind of lean on, like some meager protections,

right? Like they had something, they had some structure that mostly was there to control you, but also it kept some of the blows raining down. Yeah, it's the thing that we always talk about now where it's just like the stuff is like the facades are dropping everywhere. And it's just like naked exercise of power for power's sake, which rules personally. I think it's I think it's awesome. Yeah, it's setting up this dichotomy where if you're privileged and in a kind of higher class position, then you get the Netflix, right? Where you get to be the cop in your own head, and you get the no rules rules and the freedom of context instead of control, but ultimately ushering you towards the same psychopolitics. Whereas if you're on the lower end of it,

if you're a gig worker, then you get an algorithm that does all of those same exact things because you can't be trusted to have a cop in your head. So you need an algorithmic cop instilling the same kind of discipline over your phone. Yeah, you can either have the shock the shock the shock color or you have to like prove to capital satisfaction that you don't need one because you're going to act in the same way anyway. And it's pretty good. Well, you know, just looking at and that's what and that's what you do. And that's what university does now. Like you say the function of university. Some have said the function of university is to like, give you this sort of the stamp of like acceptable liberalism and so on. And that's true. That's like how it functions

culturally. Like people know that they vote Democrat because they're good people and they don't are good people because they learned like, what are the bad words in university? And you know, what are the va, what is the value of diversity to diversity to the economy or whatever in university? But there's another thing you learn in university. And what you learn in university, especially at very, very high end universities, is you learn to discipline yourself. You learn, you learn to put the shock color on until you don't need it. Or you drop out and you start a podcast. So yeah, importantly, you learn to discipline yourself and you also learn through like hazing rituals, how to discipline everyone around you at the

same time. Struggle sessions, baby. That's what we're here for. That's what the Marxist professors teach you in the bar as well. So a last couple of things about about Netflix culture here, which is that, you know, they say to get cut from the team is very disappointing, but think of it like an Olympic sport. The person is admired for having had the guts and skill to make the squad in the first place. Again, the sport that they're talking about is delivering you episodes of Spencer Confidential. And the sport that they're talking about is also staying fed and sheltered. Like that never comes into because it's always assumed that everyone working for them is so terrific that, yeah, you get fired from Netflix and then 10 people are competing to hire you.

And in your personal market. Yeah. And even if that is true, which, you know, it may be like they hire really, they hire good people by paying enormous amounts of money that they borrow from the ECB. But like, you know, even if that is true, again, think about this getting applied three levels down the prestige chain, right? Where maybe you're, I don't know, you're an IT person and you make like, you know, 30, 35,000 pounds a year or whatever. But this same kind of thing is applied to you. You're not going to have people clamoring to hire you, but you are going to be worried about being able to pay your rent. Yeah. Also, the fact that like this may just be Netflix now, but it won't remain so. And so

the differences will become increasingly flat. So you may, even if you are able to get a job somewhere else, it will be the exact same sun shining bullshit that drives you out of the first one. And it leads you into this sort of permanent state of itinerant employment, where you're getting shuffled between one company's bullshit like this and another. And so we're all Cold War defectors running back and forth between these systems coming up. But to the end of the episode, I'd like to acknowledge some of my own failings. People are saying that I'm always in ready for call. Okay. So there was a Q&A toward adopting a radical system of responsibility. Yeah. One guy didn't really kill enough people in the Gabon last year. Came over and told everyone.

Sunshineing our failure to spot a giant bird. That's right. Yeah. I should have organized the logistics at Harare Airport better. I will try to improve next time because we always try for excellence. So Hugh Reed, what are you trying to do to mitigate a culture of fear at Netflix? Answer in whitewater kayaking. I fucking hate this shit. I hate it when they have some like Pat anecdote or their dumb ass analogy that they draw immediately to some kind of question. Yeah. So the analogy is in whitewater kayaking, they teach you to look at the clear safe water next to the dangerous water you want to avoid. So experts have found that I'm sure they have,

that if you stare at what you want to avoid, you're actually more likely to go towards it. Similarly at Netflix, we tell all employees that it's best to focus on learning teamwork and accomplishment. If a person gets obsessed by the risk of being let go, then they won't be able to play properly. And this book that again, some powerful ideology is happening here where you're like, okay, this game that we've set up for you all to play, the only way for you to like win at it is to never acknowledge it. Oh, it's the game. Yeah. But like in order to like do that, what you're selecting for are the kind of psychopaths who can play something like that intuitively and who are like able to like screw over the co-workers and denounce people and like

evade denunciations in their turn while never making it obvious that they even know what's happening. Employee of the month, Lovrenti Beria. Pretty much. I can't wait until my nearer link is able to turn off the fear center in my brain so I can produce Spencer Confidential better. Absolutely. So the last sort of bit of detail here, right, is this is someone describing what's called a live 360 Anderson Cooper Anderson Cooper. You were basically you and maybe nine to twelve people go to a very nice dinner together and you get a private dining room and then you smash it all up and give the place that you were at money. No. So you take eight or nine, ten, eleven, twelve people and everyone sits around the

table, eats a lovely meal and then over dinner people begin to talk about one another and they begin to talk about one another's biggest flaws. Where are they? Where are the keys? Are they in a bowl? I think I remember this scene from Leacake. I think I remember this scene from Salo. So here's a quote from someone talking about a live 360 quote getting publicly ripped apart may sound like torture. It doesn't sound like torture. That's like murder. Every time I go to a live 360, I'm nervous. But after you get started, you see it's going to be fine because everyone is watching. Everyone else is careful to be generous and supportive in the way they give feedback and knows that if they don't give you good feedback, they will get

bad feedback themselves later. Late nights. Late nights with Joseph of the dacha. No one wants to embarrass or attack you. And if they step out of line, they will obviously get immediately get feedback about their feedback. And if the live session goes well, everyone gets tough advice from everyone else. So you're not singled out. When your turn comes around, it might be difficult to hear what people have to say, but you'll come to realize it was one of the greatest developmental gifts of your entire life. I hate to get feedback about my feedback. That's the last thing I expected when I was thinking about that. One of the greatest struggle session is a great developmental gift, the greatest of your life. And they're using it to

build Spencer confidential instead of communism. I realize I just love being called a stupid piece of shit. I mean, I do. I do love that. Yeah, Alice, maybe you should get a job at Netflix. Yeah, yeah. You should get a job at Netflix, but just constantly fuck up in like little ways. Achieve a record for the most fired person from Netflix. You have to like keep being so incredible that like they never get rid of you, but keep fucking up in small ways so that you're always getting sunshined. You have to do the best sunshines, the best mass emails. They'll use that shit, but you're like, this is the energy that y'all need to come with. Can I give you some feedback on your feedback? It's hot. So the perfect Netflix employee is a switch. They can be both sub and

dom at the same time. That's right. That's exactly right. But also, that comes to the end of what all of the I read. I get I read this whole book covered a fucking cover. Another book that I read. No, what once again, once again, I have read a book once again. I will once again, I have read a book that was deeply unpleasant to read. So you better appreciate it. Can I plug a book since I mentioned something about it earlier? If you want to hear more about how the late Soviet Union was very much like late capitalism, read Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation, The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Yeah, sounds interesting. I mean, I think at least with this book, Riley, this is probably a book that at least some other people have read. They just

read it in a very different way to you. Yeah, that's right. And we're dead, I'd say. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, because I was going to say, like, I read some book reviews about on this. Like, I wanted to see what the financial press thought. So I read the FT book review. I read the New York Times deal book review rather of the book. So but all of these reviews are obviously and of course glowing, right? They think this is amazing. And they don't see any of the clear psychopathic nature of it. They don't see any of the analogies that we've drawn between like this is communism, but for really bad capitalism. They like to go back to the beginning of the episode. This is Cheryl Standberg looking at the culture that reads culture deck and being like this is the most

important document that Silicon Valley has ever produced. And you know what? It's it is coming to a workplace near you. That's the other thing. Don't forget that. All it's going to tell like in Europe, we think we have like decent social democratic labor protections and stuff. Yeah, right now we do. Will we in five years, will we, you know, and in five years, what's the idea of management that's going to be sitting around to replace what we have now? It's this. It's sunshining. It's culture fit. It's all that stuff. I'm sure this will also be applied evenly. Oh, for sure. Yeah, like it's I'm very excited for the trash future struggle session. Personally, that's just the YouTube stream. All right. Speaking of the YouTube

stream, don't forget that is happening. It is happening on Thursdays and Sundays, nine to 11 from nine to 11 UK time. Yeah, that's PM. That's nine to 11 PM UK time. It is also happening 30 minutes after the recording of this right now. That's right. So that's a little bit of a a little bit of a puzzler for you time heads out there. Yeah, who want to know when this was recorded? So mark that on your bingo card. How many of y'all got your stop watch out doing Taylorism? Yeah, podcast Taylorism. I have a little I have a little shot collar connected to all of my co-hosts and and why do you think I joined this? Well, I'll turn it on in most cases if they miss a joke. And in one co-host case, I'll turn it off. All right. I think that's good for all of

us from here at TF. Now, don't forget, listen to this machine kills podcast. Jathan, Ed, why should people listen to that show? You should listen to that show if you love innovation and progress and all the wonderful things coming out of Silicon Valley. You said why the show is good. Would you mind acknowledging some of its failings? One of our biggest failings is that we don't have enough Silicon Valley venture capitalists on. We need to hear their perspective. We need to understand the enemy better. I think we just need to we need to get more of them on. Read Hastings. Jason's, you know, yeah, read Hastings. Read Hastings, another one. He's on the he's a white whale for us. Absolutely. Ed was about to bring up Jason Kalanakis, who's a VC that's invested in

Uber and Lyft and all and he's just an awful person. He's really interested in our show and has come at us multiple times. Jason Kalanakis, Read Hastings, and then Muhammad bin Salman, they're actually like the they're like the liberal chaperotraps. They make fun of every book that comes out on like Verso. That's right. All right. Anyways, that's just called Clubhouse. That's Clubhouse. It already exists. All right. This is this is this. This struggle session has been going on for long enough. Thank you for sun shining here with me today. Thank you again to Jathan and Ed for coming on and sharing that all of your many wisdoms with us across no fewer than two episodes this week. You're really giving it your all guys. I'm glad

to see you giving 110% and being here after hours. So you can you can expect an extra hundred thousand dollars per year, but maybe you're going to be fired in a week. So you don't get any of it. And also thank you to the listener for listening to this show on Patreon. Patreon platform that you're listening to right now. If you have any of your failings that you'd like to acknowledge, don't message us. Yeah. If you have any of your failings that you'd like to acknowledge, do not email me. Write them on the front of the trash future shirt that you mail them to Alex Keely at Alex Keely and tell him what's going on with your personal life and maybe what you know what could be going better. And the trash future shirts web store is now

live. We got we got new shirts. We got reissue honkball shirts. Well, it would have been live when the first episode of this comes out, right? Yeah, but it's still life. It's still it's still live. It hasn't yet been fired. So get your pre-orders in for our third mainline shirt, our what if your robot was just a guy shirt and our and we found another box of honkball shirts in the old shoe polish factory. And this time we found a machine that makes the shirts, but we can only turn it on once. So we need to know how many of those shirts we have to print, which is our long-winded way of saying it's a pre-order system and then we'll order as many as you request. Cool. All right. Later, everybody. Bye. Bye. See you.