TRASHFUTURE - Thanks, Wonga! feat. Oscar Rickett

Episode Date: September 7, 2018

It’s a busy start to September, and now that we’ve all renewed our dhimmi permits, we can enter the no-go zone of Whitechapel to record and episode. This week, Riley (@raaleh), and Milo (@Milo_Edw...ards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) joined journalist and writer Oscar Rickett (@oscarrickettnow) to discuss his work reporting on ayahuasca entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and, more importantly, on the demise of predatory UK usury magnates Wonga. Hussein (@HKesvani) dialed in from exotic Vancouver, fatigued and red-eyed from another night of gaming. You can read Oscar’s piece about ayahuasca in the Guardian here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/ayahuasca-tourists-risk-death-henry-miller-colombia You can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. You can also purchase useful kitchen implements from our socialist cookware sponsor, Vremi (https://vremi.com/).

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, welcome to the Trash Future Shopping Channel podcast where we're talking about all of the purchases you can make to protest the radical Islamic Majority of Sadiq Khan. I for one am protesting the creeping Islamization of London by wearing exclusively yellow bikinis which also protests protesting fat shaming. I am joined in solidarity in this effort by a large sexy balloon that costs upwards of £50,000 for some reason. Yeah, I really care passionately about protesting Sadiq Khan and showing that his brand of radical Islamism is not welcome in London which is why I have had a custom-made designer Italian suit made entirely out of Serrano ham. It has sent me back around $7,000 but you know like that's the
Starting point is 00:00:49 price you pay for showing the Islamists that you know they're not going to get away with it. Well I mean I'm an American college student I'm here on study abroad but I really care deeply about fighting the Islamization of Europe and so you know for me I think the most important thing is I opened up a Sharia compliant bank account but I've made sure to constantly violate my overdraft fees so that I'm just paying through the nose but it's all right because at some point this bank is going to be shut down if all of its clients just fail to correspond with the rules so I mean it's like a little trickle but at some point if enough people do it it's you know terminal mass. I'd like to congratulate Nate for being the successful recipient of the Milo
Starting point is 00:01:24 Yiannopoulos white boys scholarship to study abroad. A man who is once again not me. Milo Yiannopoulos famously managed to get himself banned from a payment app for being racist with numbers. Is that like painting by numbers? It's like racism for people who aren't quite you haven't got quite got the hang of it yet like they can't do like just free form racism. To be fair I mean you have to give the man some credit in the sense and I can't believe I'm saying give him some credit but if you really think wow I'm going to own somebody by giving them money but in a denomination that's going to make them aware that I'm being racist like you're still giving them money out of your pocket.
Starting point is 00:02:06 Yeah it's I mean that's how he protested. I'm transferring Sadiq Khan the right number of pounds says bank account always says boobies which means sensibilities. Hussain what have you done? Have you helped? Hello. Hello from sort of sunny Vancouver. Yes I decided to spend my entire savings on exactly one pair of underwear made by Givenchy and I'm going to be wearing that pair of underwear over every pair of trousers I own because that's how I'm going to protest islamization. I think it's a very wise investment because Sadiq Khan is famously a very very bad mayor who has for example introduced very draconian measures like banning streetwear or banning
Starting point is 00:02:59 Aziz because it's not quote unquote appropriate streetwear despite the fact that it is definitely that's a hadith I think and it was in the hadiths that they said Aziz are not appropriate streetwear. But who's he to judge? Who's he to judge what type and what isn't? Who's he to send his Sharia police all the way down Bethnal Green down Roman road demanding everyone who wears supreme or palace or any of these quote unquote mainstream fashion brands to just give them their streetwear as jizzy attacks. I think it's a real outrage and hopefully we're going to be I'm hopefully I'm going to be writing about my personal experience dealing with London Sharia racism for a very established political journal soon so news on that as it comes.
Starting point is 00:03:53 And Oscar Rickett our guest sitting in today how have you protested Sharia? I think annexed a large part of East London turned it into a golf club and we you know we may also have room for some kind of pig farm but we're in we're in discussions with local planners so that's yeah that's that's that's how I'm that's how I'm going to do it and maybe you know maybe kind of confusingly I'm going to back look for ramen for London mayor as a sort of Trojan horse you know get him in power people will think the islamization is is getting worse but actually I'm behind the scenes you know uh reversing the tide as it was I mean look for her in discussions about that at the moment it's this is this is genius five
Starting point is 00:04:45 five delicious plans all of which equally incredibly expensive ludicrously ineffectual and downright embarrassing fantastic stuff your favorite if you dial one eight hundred trash future yes our famously american podcast with an american phone number always get the bill payers permission hello everybody welcome back again to trash future let's do it how about that uh I'm still trying to find a new form of doing the introduction I'm trying let's do it and then sort of non-committally saying how about that uh how do we feel that's how you initiate sex let's do it that sounded coercive how about that hey baby are you in for a good time madam although you're just referring to her by several different monikers in one sentence like you know
Starting point is 00:05:52 it's like it's like crossfit you've got to keep your muscle confusion muscle confusion yeah I think people who do crossfit are just generally confused that's fine uh we have a a wonderful lineup today we you've heard some of us introduced earlier uh oscar rickett is a journalist and writer journalist and writer both both at once as opposed to journalists who never write yeah as opposed to the damn it's my current way of billing myself I don't really know I suppose it's to separate the writing journalism from the other journalism which I which I do secretly yes of course the uh the journalism that's inscribed in grains of rice the pure hieroglyph journalism but journalism it gets unseen you know what it's like editing and the documentaries I'd say some of the most
Starting point is 00:06:41 important political writing of our time has been in linear a I'm more of a linear b guy it's very important but no one has decoded it yeah so shout out to Arthur Evans we got we got a lot we got a lot going on today and one of the things we're gonna do is we're gonna finish introducing the rest of everybody so you already know what it is you already know the lineup it's me Riley hello once again it's also Milo hi it's me Milo Edwards at Milo underscore Edwards on Twitter I've just I've just moved into my new sharia compliant dwelling in the caliphate of tower hamlets no it's it's it's excellent I've got boxes and boxes of hadiths everywhere none of them can touch the floor
Starting point is 00:07:30 which is inconvenient so all of the surfaces are taken we're all sitting cross-legged on the floor out of respect yeah we got we got Hussein still in Vancouver yes hello it's me Hussein IMB music editor of brightbar.com um and uh yeah it's it's fine here like I don't really know what I was gonna say I had my first Tim Horsens the other week the other day um four out of ten like honestly it was pretty disappointing ringing endorsements from Hussein oh no I was oh no no wait wait wait can we do like a little bit of like a because I actually had a joke for this for this bit um when I was going to introduce myself and then I forgot so um pretend that I didn't say any of that nobody has ever gone to Canada and found that anything but underwhelming
Starting point is 00:08:19 yeah I'm Nate you can find me on twitter at in these deserts the producer and sometimes co-host um true little detail about me that a lot of people know I have an enormously expensive lucasade habit and I found that it's much cheaper to just live in Britain than to constantly import it into the United States and so after years and years of suffering I've had living in utter destitution we're just finally here so and the irony of course is that I have a la Croix habit that's sending me into utter destitution should have just traded flats because yours is disgusting so I couldn't do that what it's really nice fuck you it's a nice flat but you'll never get in the smell I don't know what that professional helps me to say I mean it's a nice flat but there's the
Starting point is 00:08:56 room you dwelt in and that's the problem well I like living in a cave very much the thing about having a king-size bed is that you don't need to put your clothes in a closet because you can just put them all in the parts of your bed you're not using it's way more efficient it's how I keep tech entrepreneur mindset it's gonna say I mean it gives you more time to drink fuel when you're like why do laundry I mean the clothes just gonna get dirty again yeah exactly living in a cave is very appropriate for riding he tends to go to bed at some point on Friday and not emerge until Sunday afternoon also the room he dwelt in would be a good name for something uh yes a room and a room let's say affect of his own it's it's it's it's Virginia Woolf for podcasters
Starting point is 00:09:39 and yes Oscar Rickett as you mentioned before journalists writer extraordinaire I recently you have penned an article on some of the on ayahuasca that led me down a rabbit hole of learning about getting addicted to ayahuasca I I don't know I don't know that's how powerful my writing is I don't know how if I hallucinated entrepreneurs awakening or if it's a real thing but we're gonna get into that it's a real thing um but before we do I'm gonna resurrect I'm gonna resurrect an old bit from the the the hallowed antiquity that's right everybody it's time up the trash future vault we're opening up the trash future vault and bringing out a terrible product that I have found oh I miss the days of the product right they were it's a nice fun
Starting point is 00:10:29 structured joke it just you know sometimes they're hard to find actually if you find a product do send it in uh because that would help me a lot because I'm very lazy um so uh he's not the laziest person on this podcast so you really need to send us more stuff in if you're all invested in getting this podcast say me regularly please do our job for us we're extremely lazy and we're socialists um okay so the name of this product is the blue horizon it is the blue horizon sounds like an erection pill yeah that's certainly is what it is or a computer but plays chess the world's first blind computer we shot its dog and now I can play the blues or like David Attenborough's very elegiac final program the blue horizon which would be a nature program but it doubles up as a
Starting point is 00:11:30 kind of meditation on death and ends with in fact the death of David Attenborough yeah the twist is that he's been narrating the whole thing from the dignitas clinic and you don't find that out until the final scene and the final scene is him kind of traveling into some kind of synthesized blue horizon oh yeah it's like a it's like a sort of like nature program version of shutter island with like the whole thing is just inverted at the end so wait hang on we're guessing that this terrible piece of over-engineered technology is either a boner pill or a kind of suicide note rendered and in bbc earth by david attenborough that's right that's correct I was going to throw in that knowing silicon valley types that it might also be some sort of strange clunky lucid dreaming
Starting point is 00:12:15 device that one wears you know with lots of blue light on your eyes it's going to cause you to dream whatever you want you know be productive in your whatever hours of sleep every night again all of you couldn't be more wrong um so I have now a blank a sentence with some blanks in it uh the basic premise um you pay for the use depending on how much you blank and beyond that the blue horizon automatically takes over the blank purchase for you okay so it's like helping you buy stuff I mean that's all the best all the all the best products are helping you to buy things which famously is very difficult but it's invariably it must have something to do blue is integral to this name then is like something involving raw water I I imagine it could conceivably yes use
Starting point is 00:13:03 raw water it's something that filters your water yeah it finally we can finally we can have um we can have raw water without the dysentery but then without all of the rawness it will be it will be like like Michael Jackson used to have bars in Evian so it was sort of replicating that experience but I mean maybe it's like maybe it's like your your massive ridder filter oh yeah maybe it's a ridder filter in reverse it it actually dirties the water to make it raw water it's like take the clean tap water and put it through this thing and then it's like into seawolf and it's because it's it's it's just concentrated effluent from the sea that they've put together so what we're saying is it's like if you took like a coffee cone filter and then put a dead rat in it and then just ran
Starting point is 00:13:50 all of your water over that but that dead rat has a lot of nutrients yeah yeah absolutely it has healthy deadness it's the young urban professionals who have been cut off from nature and it synthesizes some kind of you know natural phenomena that allow them to feel partially connected to the earth oh wait it's a subset of raw water it's wwe raw water we're like you're just about to take a sip of delicious cholera and then someone just hits you with a steel chair okay so to recap it's either a water dirtier um a form of raw water wwe raw is war cross promotion a guy in a suit just runs out and starts shouting at you you know yeah okay so that's where we are again you're all embarrassingly wrong you're all i think you might actually all be the biggest idiots i've ever met
Starting point is 00:14:45 is it something to do with like printer toner uh again that would be so great how depressing it's just it's just orders your printer tone of is it is it like a hewlett packard product no okay i'll tell you this it's made by mealy oh hey what is it like some kind of uh fancy hoover a fancy hoover are we talking about it's going to be like a household appliance but remember you pay for the use is it so i'm going to do number three the technical requirement is it an elaxis service but for waifus it's like kreger's wife in the van no it's like it's it's like someone who swings but with multiple anime body pillows i have a threesome every night with my two anime body pillows okay so the technical requirements to use the blue horizon blank the following conditions
Starting point is 00:15:38 are required which must be insured in any case i translated this from german um at the site of the blank wlan with internet access must be permanently available in specific in sufficient signal strength and to register the blank you will need the mobile app this only works in mobile devices that are equipped with either the operating system android version 4.4 or higher or ios version nine or higher man this is a this is a very demanding product yeah like it really wants a lot from you it does i mean it wants you to speak german among others yeah i mean i've gotten boners a lot easier than this and i'm gonna lie what wait there was a call back to the idea that it's a boner pill oh that was not obvious hang on honey i'm just updating my ios the new maps really gets
Starting point is 00:16:30 my tick hard yeah i'm updating my ios in order for me to now have an erection my on my previous ios like i wasn't able to but hopefully with this update i will finally be free to i i love to use the strava run tracking app to draw an outline of boobs in the streets near me uh and then i can i have that to to whack it too i mean we already talked about we already talked about the possibility of a juicero but for lube and this doesn't sound too far off from the technical requirements for juicero i when you get down to it yeah that's true it's uh paper paper use for use uh it requires wi-fi it automatically orders refills it has basically a threshold of who can use it based on how updated your i your app is or your your phone server is yeah i think i think that's right
Starting point is 00:17:21 you've you've more or less cracked the code on this one which is that it's kind of like a juicero but for are you ready for this it's a washing machine but it's a paper use washing machine when it squeezes the water out of your clothes into an eight ounce glass that's how you can get raw water is you drink your own stink why wait what's for pay what's yeah i thought there are so many recursive layers of us making jokes here that i'm not quite sure what's real anymore so maybe can you confirm what about this washing machine moment okay what is this washing machine actually do uh so it is a paper use internet connected washing machine um oh wow and uh so what the idea is and this is the this is the thing here is the here is the pitch that mealy gives um
Starting point is 00:18:14 do you often live in two places and may need to use a laundrette do you want a high quality and reliable washing machine but at the moment you have to invest in other purchases and the blue horizon is just just right you pay only for the use without buying the device so you where does the device what do you mean okay first of all when they say device they mean washing correct yes they mean washing machines they mean fucking washing machine they mean washing machine and and it's jammin's you know where where does the washing machine is is it in your house or is it in some kind of holding bay so you rent it you or you you have the privilege of possessing it but yes paper use and so for example if your wi-fi goes down you can't do laundry uh i'm just gonna say as
Starting point is 00:18:59 somebody who just had to figure out at like midnight last night how to unfuck a stupid german washing machine in this country i don't think making the more complicated is a wise idea no it's if you have two houses though do you ever think of that a problem i have struggled with on a regular basis having too many homes no but there's all people who buy this that is a problem that they struggle with it's like it's an interesting demographic isn't it because you're rich enough to have two homes but you're not rich enough to buy a washing machine in each of those homes yeah correct it's because you spent all your money on that second home and now you have to like just sit on the bare floor like oh shit i love my home but i'm washing my clothes in the sink
Starting point is 00:19:37 because it's just what i have to do yeah they probably are rich enough to add to washing machines but they just can't be bothered they were like well they're just like oh this is so much more efficient this is great darling this is the future um but the the government i mean the british government is is intending to roll out these smart meters across the country which double up basically as surveillance devices oh good good yeah i mean i'm so glad that there's more of those it's a way of it's a way of sort of you know knowing what people are knowing who's mining bitcoin and who's gaming you know and it sort of like doesn't really you know like does it really make it much easier to to heat your home or whatever this is just for electricity
Starting point is 00:20:20 or is this for water because i'm just thinking like what would they what would they suspect people of doing if they were using too much water i say it's just electricity they're using they're using too much water they they they must be washing their hands feet and nostrils five times a day they're just there is lamifying the neighborhoods all the ablutions they know if you're doing secret ablutions gotta put it something they're having loads of clean sand delivered when the water's not available um but no this is that's that's kind of what i was thinking right like this is kind of the same argument that companies like uber and fiverr use around flexibility where it's it's like yeah the oh so it's where this it's like yeah it's about flexibility you have a car you have
Starting point is 00:21:01 spare time why don't make a little extra cash and do whatever you want but at the end of the day you have a date you have spare time why don't make the extra cash it's quite a red boy it's quite right to point out that a wealthy person with two homes will not really care about saving a few hundred dollars by having a washing machine that's like extra inconvenient and needs to have an always on internet connection to use um or realistically will it be poor people who are engaging with a more uberized form of higher purchase i mean probably i think we might be talking about millennials it hey hey i've heard someone you know sound the millennial klaxon yeah i mean i hate to drop the m bomb yeah but sorry i am what i think we're talking about millennials who maybe they're a
Starting point is 00:21:46 little time poor never go to hell but then millennials so but but if like your internet goes out to they just assume you've absconded and they show up and just repossess your washing machine yeah i'm sure that there are some like like mealy jackbooted thugs who will just like crash through your skylight and sort of breach and clear your entire house before like through rolling a flashbang into your room and say laundry infraction laundry infraction comply i need to know what's your motorcycle and your washing machine i have a mealy uh hoover and i'm beginning to feel conflicted about it i mean it's it's it's that it could like measure the amount of dust it actually busts and then uh charge you on a per weight basis you know this is great i i love i love every
Starting point is 00:22:32 element of my life being exactly like calculated and rationalized so that everything about every moment of my life just kind of sucks more well i mean that's the thing is that riley is naturally skeptical of these kinds of things because at some point if they do measure every moment of your life someone's gonna put the data together and be like wow he jerks off all the time he's not really doing anything else slight increase in electricity use then a washing machine i think washing his clothes because they're covered in semen i think what mealy needs to sort out first is the fact that like no one knows how to pronounce their name sort that the fuck out what is that it's just letters when you said mealy mealy jackbooted thugs i was like
Starting point is 00:23:18 mealy jackbooted what the fuck is he talking about i didn't realize it was there now i recognize the brand name i thought you meant mealy like made of meal like just like a just like a bag of horse feed just a bunch of insufficiently just a bunch of insufficiently ripe apples coming in to like mealy malls sucks to come in like and like fucking murk my family because i tried to do a load of laundry all my wi-fi was down infraction they would never mark you this is brand infraction massage is very different company anyway um and so do you want to know how much it uh it costs oh yeah uh the plans i actually i i don't have them in front of me but i remember the plans there are several plans uh there is a uh 599 per wash plan that's expensive that's yeah then
Starting point is 00:24:05 or you can pay a flat rate of i of that of like 29 euros a month and then have a 299 per wash plan up to a limit of a certain number of washes that adds up to the cost of a washing machine in like about a year assuming you're washing like say once a week yeah yeah that's also more expensive than a than a lawn dryer yeah yeah it's it's almost as though this large company has invented a way to sort of extract more resources from people who are unable to sort of make a single large purchase at once on a continuing basis by you know basically making it so that they don't own anything i really uh hate listening to this opposition to creative enterprise Riley i mean you know these guys are coming up with a wonderful new way for us to live and
Starting point is 00:24:52 fucking disrupting like dirty love you know why why can't you enable the disruptors why you trying to wait hang on Riley can i pay for it by selling them my blood no actually that's the thing you get a lot if you get a lot of blood on your clothes you know because you're because you're like a young conservative male and you think that fight club is your american psycho because you think that yeah because you think like american psycho and fight club are unironically just cool stories about guys who hang out then yeah then i'm sure it will sell your hang out it will sell your blood back to mealy so that they can be used by peter teal to give him like vampire longevity just a guy who's really passionate about q louis
Starting point is 00:25:30 and the news he took things a little bit far but you know come on that was moving music exactly feel collins you know i've got two ears and a heart i was i was i was just about yeah i was just about to save it like it's fine if you're kind of like a fancy boy who has lots of clothes but if you're like a standard millennial who only has their one shirt their one kind of minor fret t-shirt some cargo shorts um you know it's not you know i i sort of wonder like who who is the target market for for this app like you know who would be willing to pay 5.99 a month to like wash to like wash like their shitty like gap clothes look this is why i have three versions of the same shirt and i never wear anything else is this is this why like is this
Starting point is 00:26:17 why you just what you guys are saying is laziness is praxis yeah actually laziness is praxis closets are reactionary down with washing machines let's order one of these and then just never use it because then they'll never make anybody else like how that's basically what i'm doing with my sharia compliant banking so let's close the circle it will take out a sharia loan buy one of those and never pay it back um okay i'm gonna put a pin in this one and we can move on uh oscar i was very interested in your um in your piece about no your piece was actually more about these experiences of one particular person trying a relatively unregulated uh drug you just uh kind of go through it for us um so basically in 2014 a 19 year old british boy
Starting point is 00:27:06 uh died in a remote part of the columbian rainforest because he he took part in an ayahuasca ritual and it went wrong which is obviously something that can happen the statistics that i've looked at suggests that about maybe five foreigners have died in the last few years taking part in these interestingly i i read a statistic as well that the ayahuasca experience that's gone the most wrong has been the continuing existence of the joe rogan podcast i mean there's been a lot of casualties there as well how many lives have been ruined i am so certain that the joe rogan experience has caused at least five to ten guys to be killed by attempting to do like um a really intense backyard mma like small joint locks on one
Starting point is 00:27:56 another and then just like caused a sort of suspended car to fall on them the joe rogan experience is just having like a mediocre tv career and then going bald isn't it but the the baldness caused you to go on like the kind of vision quest to take every intoxicant you can possibly have and then decide laws are bad all the time can i hallucinate that i have a hair in my in for me the joe rogan experience is not actually knowing who joe rogan is you're better off he's like one of these guys i've kind of deliberately not found out about jordan pierson for the same reason that's such a good idea i wish i did that like so some things i i i don't want to like some things i go horribly like damn a rabbit hole into and some things i'm just like
Starting point is 00:28:37 no i'm i this is gonna this is probably gonna go on for about two years and i'm just not gonna i'm gonna try not to participate in it does it look like prelapsarian bliss in oscar's eyes the listeners can't say so we're all just like dead it's like dead behind the eye it's husks of men mule of men i mean in other ways i'm a complete husk um the the the ayahuasca thing i think is interesting because um i mean you know the friends i friends i know who've got into who who were into it it seems to be quite a good it can be quite a profound experience it's quite nice it's it's worked for a lot of people in terms of relieving trauma or dealing with depression also it's like really fun and you know you get some pretty intense visions from it you throw up a lot that's
Starting point is 00:29:27 fun oh sweet everyone loves that um i think there's a sort of we've developed this secret vision quest drug it's called white lightning during eight pints of it you throw up and you throw up but you will see some shit the things you'll see um the the the thing that i sort of stumbled upon which i think is it's sort of it's sort of also an example of how like tech millionaires are trying to ruin everything and and don't say this is this is ayahuasca rituals have been going on for centuries and centuries right in the amazon area which is massive and i'm full of people being paid less than the minimum wage and lots of and lots of westerners go there with a with a kind of right attitude
Starting point is 00:30:17 which is you know one of kind of curiosity and exploration and you know respect wanting to get things out of it but it seems like something something's turned up something's happened in silicon valley where basically they've decided that it would be quote unquote a way to find shortcuts to success in the ultra competitive tech scene and there's a company called entrepreneurs awakening oh god fucking murder me now which allows silicon valley people to go to peru uh you small outlet of eleven thousand dollars for for a week i spent more on four washes of clothes and um you know this will then uh you know you take you take part in a ritual and then you go back and you you know you quit that job at microsoft for it was bringing you down and you
Starting point is 00:31:10 set up your startup you've always been dreaming of and with the clear vision you bring in the venture capital you put on a swimming cap and you start a podcast i was gonna say i mean this is getting dangerously close to what i actually did with my life so i'm like maybe i just sit this one out a little bit i also love the idea of these guys being like okay we're gonna go to the amazon it's gonna be a shortcut to success which is basically what the conquistadors did what's the original get rich quick scheme i mean funnily enough the first westerners who apparently came across ayahuasca were jesuites in the 18th century and they legend party animals they are they called it a diabolical potion um and it's a it's a shame that
Starting point is 00:31:54 the uh tech pros aren't taking the same attitude it's just kind of like what what you're ruining drugs now you fucking pricks you're ruining everything you're gonna have to ruin drugs as well well something that's interesting to me though about it is that it's it for what i understand of it it's very much a religious ceremony or spiritual ceremony for people from that region and so in a way there's a certain degree of like reverence required i mean a friend of mine who had done it had mentioned that he tried to have a conversation with somebody about it in a bar someplace in peru and they were drinking the guys like i'm sorry but like we're having drinks right now like it's too it's too sacred to like talk about over drinks like this is something that i you know it's that
Starting point is 00:32:33 important and like i just don't think that's a thing you can communicate to someone who you know lives in the world of juiceros and uber and shit in a place like silicon valley like perhaps this is not something that you you know that is going to be well received in the places in which it it originated also it can really fuck with your brain if you have a bad experience and i'm not i've never done it but having had friends who have tried it and who've had extremely bad nights on it i have heard that one has to tread lightly i mean yeah i think i mean my life's comparison to the conquistadors is probably right you know if if oh god i don't like being right it means bad things happening but if i mean you know of these guys of the tech
Starting point is 00:33:12 of our tech lords or are they the sort of you know of the imperialists of our time i mean yeah certainly the what part the great thing is is in addition to sort of copying these sort of imperialist uh strategy they also seem to all have habsburg brains which is probably the only thing saving us uh i actually clipped from from a from an article that uh that you shared with me on entrepreneurs awakening i have clipped one particular story of a guy called sebastian who i think quite wisely decided not to share his surname sebastian pain sebastian pain yeah it's seb pain i want to say that he didn't he didn't share his surname because he was like worried about ramifications back home in silicon valley so even his reason for being anonymous is kind of
Starting point is 00:33:59 annoying oh yeah no he definitely he definitely has the he has this he has the special kind of brain that uh that felix always talks about which is like the kind you're incapable of self reflection or feeling shame um and you'll see you'll see this uh when i read this paragraph or a couple of paragraphs here and please do let me get to the end of it it will be hard at one point you will want to break in uh but just let me get to the end of it because it's wonderful during a ceremony on his retreat sebastian says he remembers virtually sitting at the base of a tree in the amazon a voice called out this is the day of your initiation into manhood that's when a cluster of spiders arrived in a great white shark flung itself from the ocean for hours sebastian witnessed his
Starting point is 00:34:45 greatest fears come to fruition he saw himself as a boy in class lying in a pool of his own urine while his classmates and teachers stood and laughed i had that moment you know where i was like what the fuck really every kid pees in his pants once in a while it's not a fucking catastrophe let it go sebastian said i re became an adult in the months after the retreat sebastian talked through his vision with his fellow participants and the organizer in video chats he says he returned to the office with a clearer sense of purpose ready to quote do what i meant to do in this life wow wait his he hallucinated the p-tape you're like you're like donald is that you are you sebastian devotes his life to finding the p-tape that's like so but now riley i what what is
Starting point is 00:35:34 he now please tell me that you know what he's now devoting his life to i mean i can i can only assume that he's now i know he's gone on to make like a range of internet connected adult diaper or something um veganism it's not what he actually does now i just asked myself was that the thing that was holding him back it was just everything in his life hinged on the one terrible moment when he pissed himself because i mean you imagine if like you're gonna see have a vision and it's gonna reveal the secrets of like your subconscious that perhaps it might be something more significant than like you wet your pants when you were six yeah like if that's it then like like what what is this guy what was it about that moment that has frustrated he frustrated him so much he's like
Starting point is 00:36:14 well i had to go to the jungle to get over this one accident i had one time in grade school but now i'm good now i can live my life i mean the the comedian simon amstel talks about how he he he was in therapy for two years and it and it was good but it wasn't until he went to peru and took part in a ritual that he got to the root of his depression and the the thing that he talks about is how he he had a he well he sort of became himself as a baby and he witnessed his father hitting his mother and he felt the kind of trauma of not being able to help and not being able to kind of protect her and like and that he'd sort of carried that with him now that's a profound thing but simon was interested in going to take part in this ritual because he wanted to get
Starting point is 00:37:05 to the root of you know kind of deep serious personal things these guys all want to do it so they can like make their 10% better at spreadsheets now it's all for the reason of capitalism i hallucinate i hallucinated myself pissing it pissing in front of all of my my classmates and teacher and i woke up and i invented a new kind of shock collar for amazon employees exactly that guy like that being like a traumatic childhood experience for him in like the pantheon of actual childhood traumatic uh did like you know incidences it reminds me of like there was a guy i was at university with who was like really fucking annoying look like v for vendetta and was always trying to like one up people on like how left he was and then he used to like pretend to be
Starting point is 00:37:53 disabled and then if you question him on it he'd be like well i'm dyslexic like is this the kind of guy who has dyslexia and then gets a cane pretty much he would like show up to like the disabled students means that people have like terrible like life altering disabilities you're like uh actually i'm dyslexic so well so something i point out is i mean so i had i used to be in the military and i had a soldier who had was a medic and had some really traumatic experiences and it messed with him pretty badly uh specifically one experience he had um where he had to treat some a young child who was it was fucked up but it was a 12 or 13 year old girl in afghanistan who had been raped who had been impregnated and they had basically pretended it
Starting point is 00:38:34 hadn't happened and she had had a stillborn that she had been unable to give birth to and he had to deliver the dead baby and that experience was so cost has got a lot heavier very quickly got so was that fucked him up very very badly and he did he tried ayahuasca and he said it actually really helped him come to terms with things but like there was an extent to which there was like a certain level of treating it as a thing you had to be you know had to be taken seriously as opposed to like what you just described where you go down because it's a lark or because it's a thing that you think is going to make you more efficient somehow and to me it's like on one hand i'm i'm happy when i hear a story like that that someone has been able to get over trauma because like it's certainly
Starting point is 00:39:09 better than getting prescribed drugs that are made by for-profit companies but at the same time it's like is that something that's actually going to lead to people having some kind of breakthrough that improves their quality of life or is it once again going to be made into a kind of like profit-seeking venture that's not just going to make a lot of people unfulfilled and unhappy but also potentially cause this thing to be yet another resource like like brain quinoa basically something else that you know a less economically uh he has developed part of the world in service of some asshole who drives a tesla yeah but i'll have you know uh i hallucinated shitting myself in front of my uh my jazz band and now i've invented a new kind of shoe that charges you every time you
Starting point is 00:39:56 take a step brain quinoa also totally already exists it's like definitely a thing it's quinoa for the brain okay i can imagine like brain quinoa is going to be something that alex jones is going to start selling um to try like makeup for his youtube revenue brain quinoa if alex jones pivots sort of to the if alex jones decides to pivot to the liberal then yes definitely absolutely he will sell range on the subject of uh you know pour him one out for our boy alex jones so we can now load no longer buy brainforce plus from our usual outlets emma bought me this thing it's called brain gear brain performance formula focus clarity memory and it's pineapple mango flavor which is just too shit i'm just gonna i'm gonna chug it now and see if it improves the
Starting point is 00:40:42 second half of the podcast let's see guys this is an experiment live on tape this is real science here we go oh it's like a little it's also got a protective seal on it so just in case you get too smart you've got a really really it's almost a bit alcoholic it's got like um okay well let's all drink let's all drink some of the brain juice it's this is this is how trash future becomes like the joe rogan podcast this is how it starts it tastes horrible jesus why oh my god that's the worst thing i've ever tasted pineapple and mango is not a good combination as a new tropic i don't want to try it a taste of brain that's like a hope that came across so it's a really bad pre-workout drink mixed with a dissolved aspirin yeah it's got a real sort of it only has 10 calories
Starting point is 00:41:38 in that whole bottle let's say what they've done is they've really um enjoy on an empty stomach oh well well great we all we haven't eaten anything i don't enjoy anything on an empty stomach to be honest like all right anyway um yeah so that's that's but that's that's how that's that's that's the that's the ayahuasca portion of the of the evening um it is it's it's hilarious because it is a a thing of great sort of cultural and historical significance that many people from around the world have used to make like profound personal breakthroughs and dealing with mental illness but we've decided as a society that what we're going to do is we're going to charge like you know tech dipshits 11 000 to go and take it for a couple of days so they can figure out like
Starting point is 00:42:21 you know a new way to fire someone via drone i mean what is drone warfare but a kind of firing in its own right damn you really you do get terminated from your job damn fire philosophy wedding it's it's it's what the Inca gods would have wanted damn dude philosophy is like business but for your brain i only do business with my ass um hey hussain are you about to drive into a very long tunnel that will probably take up the balance of the episode yes i am planning to um i'm planning to drive away from Vancouver um i'm going to go to california um where i'm going to leave podcasting and journalism for good and i'm going to make a living selling um ayahuasca to um well meaning
Starting point is 00:43:13 vegans um so i'm going to be driving now and will you hear from me again i don't know you know you know my you might hear my voice on like other podcasts for example um the joe rogan experience or um 99 invisible or probably i don't know um this podcast you might have heard of um the spectator um the spectator podcast or the remady yeah they're both interested in my business acumen um which is very important in this place brexit climate where um i feel that everyone is going to be selling some version of like new tropic um as we all kind of as we all stockpile in the trend not in our in our in our backyard suburban trenches oh wait final i think i have the final thought on the i on the ayahuasca thing um which is that what's one of our listeners should
Starting point is 00:44:06 do is go to peru take ayahuasca and then figure out a way to sell embarrassing and expensive um anti islamic islamophobic doodads uh to sadeekan protesters well clearly they have money to spend so it should not be a challenging thing that could be your mba project listener who some reason is going to business school a zoon user the zoon user is is going to be the hero that we need following in my footsteps we're bringing going to business schools a spy we're bringing kotes the way he would have wanted yeah but no we're bringing back all kinds of classic bits on this episode the zoon user we haven't talked about him or her in a while probably him please write in yes if you're the zoon user we still want to hear from you
Starting point is 00:44:48 that could be someone's mom on a zoon actually and the guy he used to send us like finished folklore stuff what happened to him he got banned yeah he didn't actually listen he just got angry with us on twitter yeah it's only a folklore yeah he just got really mad at us on twitter hussain uh good luck good luck driving through your tunnel um and uh we will see you all in a few minutes ah damn it looks like hussain has uh gotten lost in a giant tunnel and will be unable to join us for the second half of this episode i know the the the the vancouver london tunnel which isn't quite finished yet he's well that's what sadee khan's been planning this entire time
Starting point is 00:45:42 import canadians more of them anyway uh we hope hussain gets out of his tunnel uh in one piece and safely um you know press f press f to pray for his soul yeah please please go down into tunnel and bring hussain a hot cup of soup to keep him keep him strong in this tough time anyway and unrelated to the tunnel incident um who wants to talk about the biggest dumbass in british journalism being the biggest dumbass in british journalism and actually choking to death on wonga's boot wait what's piz morgan done with wonga let's just say that's not a very specific description how about this how about this the nerdiest dumbass in british media no we've already trashed sebastian pain ah okay help me think of a superlative for a certain mister hummus ball
Starting point is 00:46:32 he's james ball deep in wonga yeah so uh i'm sure many many of our listeners may have seen this for those of you who haven't mr ball recently wrote an article for the guardian i won't cheer if wonga fails i was grateful it was there for me by james ball now i've just a little bit of a backgrounder here wonga if you don't already know what it is is an online payday lender that routinely charges borrowers in excess of 5000 interest plus versus rather a 0.5 bank of england base rate um and then would continue to pile on fee after fee onto any customer who had difficulty repaying the loan which at its enormous price and its targeting towards the financially vulnerable was quite a
Starting point is 00:47:22 few of them and then tended to clean out bank accounts with continuous payment authorities direct debits and standing orders it used cute puppets to tempt people to come and just have what feels like free money basically creating demand for itself and don't forget in 2013 when wonga was at its peak 23.4 percent of its of its clients had been tipped into financial disaster through high-cost short-term credit debts and by 2017 after financial regulators had belatedly acted to cap interest rates and fees that number had fallen to 16.8 percent of its clients in short wonga is a predatory monster company that has no business existing what i love about using the the like the sweet innocent puppets to advertise this to people is that in a way it's actually
Starting point is 00:48:07 foreshadowing because whilst all of those puppets look cheery and happy on the outside each of them does have a whole fist inserted into its ass yes they did they advertised in children's tv programs with fun puppets i have another favorite thing about wonga which is that they're called wonga how can you pick just a couple i know it's it's tricky right but right okay so here's the thing about wonga right so if you're if you're for our american listeners for our british listeners who may not have grown up in a cockney environment as i did you may not be able to tell that from my voice but genuinely yeah um so wonga is like a sort of cockney east london term for money or cash which is like never used like no one ever says it it's like it's like saying like oh yeah
Starting point is 00:48:47 hand me over a stack of that green like no one ever says it um and then and it's like clearly a bunch of posh people have gone together and gone what do the working classes call money what do they call the queen's shilling um um spondulis no no wonga yes sounds like breasts as well they love breasts don't they yes that's all of that i've read the sun although wonga is my cashlies company right oh no is it actually him so the owner of sports direct i mean he's a he's a legit he's wait hang on a minute he is a man who's paying less than the living wage to his workers and then giving them payday loans to cover the gap in their own damn how much ayahuasca did he do before thinking of that genius idea but to be fair to him he did uh he did buy his son
Starting point is 00:49:38 radar radio and uh that worked out well so yeah radar radio what is that all right well maybe we're talking about a different there's a different demographic for a trash future okay that's fine um okay i know nothing just assume zero i don't know who joe rogan is you don't know who radio radio is we're getting to know each other it's fine we're a we're a venn diagram that's just miles distant between the circles with it we're the dj's preachers cops venn diagram so uh who would like to read the uh wonderful and puzzling words of mr ball well is this like you're throwing it open to the class that we know it's gotta be it's gotta be one of youtube because it's gonna seem so strange we need that it's soothing no no it's gonna be
Starting point is 00:50:25 right no i will i will be reading it you'll be reading it i am the captain of the show i was gonna say okay fine teachers pet so this was a sort of a long time on my captain of my show for a long time on my on my twitter avi it was me wearing a captain's hat that i'd found discarded at a party uh that we'd had at our house i plan on maintaining that attitude if not the avi he's the captain of this show then read mr uh mr james mr james bald face stupidity jamey bull i wanted to make a john woodcock style joke but i realized with james bald's name it's just it's just far too easy it's it's low hanging fruit it's low hanging fruit like the balls exactly his name is bull james bull guys let's just let's stop late hey you guys let's
Starting point is 00:51:11 stop with the childish insults come on let's talk about wonga a not childish thing at all the name is ball james ball i just made that joke man oh did you oh sorry i didn't oh shit i just no one heard it and then here he comes in we're just classic comedian classic comedian those those laughs that you just laughed at my joke those were actually on those laughs are on loan to me from oscar at an extortionate interest rate okay let's get into some of my first appearance it'll be my last let's get into let's get into some of the terrible words that mr ball has graced us with to many wonga made a perfect pin-up villain an example of the kind that was willing to exploit those struggling in an era of austerity real terms cuts to wages in working age benefits
Starting point is 00:52:00 and people who were just looking to get through the month wait can i stop you for a second then who pins up villains like the fucking like the hate chart on the wall just having god damn you just just just having just having a furious wank to dr claw on my prison wall i don't know about you but when i was a teenager the walls in my bedroom just you know villains wall to wall villains you know yeah people i despise that's what i put up on my wall yeah fucking to be reminded of them so i can just be angry all the time i have wallpaper made entirely out of bin laden also like here's the thing here's the thing it's like like so many sort of dipshit liberal articles it starts with a completely reasonable statement if ball had then ended his article
Starting point is 00:52:47 there i'd have been like yeah that sounds about right well that's the rule about the spectator the first paragraph of any spectator article is a sarcastic statement of what is actually the correct opinion and then the rest of the article is just insane all of this just equivocation they'd be like but actually the thing that's correct is not correct it's wrong and you should feel bad poor people should have rights no no we're not about this gender intersectionality let's say in the australians this is something i i look here's the thing this is am i repeating a thing from our last episode with the boon to vista guys and ladies yes i am but my favorite thing of all was i think it was one one of their terrible columnists just saying it wasn't a bunch
Starting point is 00:53:30 of transgendered wind power activists who saved those tie boys it was western gas generator it was a bunch of pedophiles we're getting so incredibly off track we're getting old-fashioned catholic pedophiles it's good to see you doing uh elon musk work here man we're getting so very off track so here is where james ball starts to become wrong um that view is not necessarily wrong except for ignoring just how bad most of the alternatives to wanga are the reality is that there are almost no other options on the table and all of them are worse i know this because a gasp as an overeducated middle-class journalist admits that he was poor for like three months i was a wanga customer damn damn bro i didn't know you had to go through that thing temporarily
Starting point is 00:54:24 without a family or like any major obligations and you know also coming from a white background with some relative privilege that you could never possibly have fallen back on damn i feel for you it got to a point where i was going down to the docks and sucking dicks just to pay for a single wash cycle um ball continues which i was paying for on a two pound 99 monthly cycle no it's not two pounds 99 a month it's two pounds 99 a wash but it's 29 pounds a month for the privilege of having the washer that you pay for use correct yes i'm in here i am keep fact checking of a journalist keep your extortionate bullshit straight here yeah absolutely all of these are different ways of nickel and diming the working class into oblivion get it fucking straight
Starting point is 00:55:09 so um ball continues my financial position was probably better than many people who needed the service for one i didn't have children to feed but it was quite tight anyway earning 20 000 a year every month i was paying 500 in rent plus bills plus a 200 210 pound graduate loan and then 220 pounds a month on a rail travel card just paying 500 pounds in rent look i i don't want to sound like a smug asshole here but 20 000 pounds a year is is more than the median income in this country is it not no it's not i think it's about 25 really i'm just i for some reason i was thinking uh i thought it was 18 i think i think 18 outside of oh wait yeah i'm sorry because i'm above the minimum wage because i know that that from personal experience i know that that you
Starting point is 00:55:56 can't sponsor somebody for a visa if you don't earn at least 18 five a year because that's the cut off for when you'd be eligible for benefit so in a sense he was earning more than that which is not which is not the disparity but just to say like that's still more like the median income in like northern Ireland it's like 14 000 a year i also feel like the problem with this article is not that it's not the in the personal anecdote he's not sufficiently impoverished although that is obviously part of the problem it's it's it's the kind of bad faith of using this temporary situation as the sort of totality yeah yeah of what's going on because of 20 000 and ignoring everything else that was happening when 20 a year with a graduate loan is still in a much different position than
Starting point is 00:56:41 somebody who's been working on a minimum wage job who doesn't have a university degree i mean and that's just or who may have less than a minimum wage job because like someone did ayahuasca and figured out how to like have them only get billed for like the delivery the moment they're putting the dpd package down on someone's doorstep i think yeah i think james ball is like a classic candidate for getting getting his money stolen by the wallet inspector because like he seems to like genuinely think that like the wonga.com mission statement is like lifting people out we're gonna be there for poor people you know it's a shame we can't get this money at any of a lower interest rate but just no one will give it to us for less than 3000 percent
Starting point is 00:57:23 you don't see the chrisma in uh my cashly make poverty history collab this sounds to me like a collaboration between all the worst stuff britain has to offer when you have poor play and extortion at rents hey man that's a combo i can get behind you got yeah hang on coldplay like pre 2008 is like fine but coldplay after that point is a war crime now we're now we're on a digression get get off the podcast milo there you go tank is get on to some actual war crimes coldplay album since 2008 i'm going to replace you with the tropical fish but rather you hate any music that's not techno or occasionally pc music you're not a normal person you're really not a normal person that comes to music riley you're a great guy but but your music
Starting point is 00:58:07 taste is so uh ball continues uh credit unions cheered on as the supposed fix for situations like these are in practice slow to lend useless if you're trying at short notice to avoid bouncing a bill payment and are often more conservative than other lenders especially when refusal is not only humiliating but also hurts credit ratings and that's to say nothing of loan sharks or similar leave in less savory alternatives we might not like lenders such as wanga but their disappearance would help no one especially as regulators had finally taken action to cap interest rates charges and other fees making it harder for companies to roll over loans which was often when the worst problems began now i would just like to say that we should not cheer the disappearance of wanga
Starting point is 00:58:50 when the regulator introduced a regulation to protect consumers that destroyed their entire predatory business model that's i'm just looking at this and i'm literally like my brain is melting because it's like how can you look at something that you effectively could never pay off if you were making norm like it's not just like oh wow it's going to take me 10 years to pay off this credit card balance if i pay the minimum payment it's literally unless you happen upon an enormous lump sum you will never be able to pay it off because 5 000 annual percent annual interest is insane like that's i don't have a calculator in front of me with which like with mich to to add this up but like so so the idea you say oh well that's just the best we can do and we've got just you know
Starting point is 00:59:31 like they're providing a service like i unless someone is correct me from wrong here but it seems that unless someone is able to get get their their paycheck and immediately pay this loan off within say a couple of months it's going to become so astronomically large that like they're never going to pay it off and it's going to become the kind of thing where they're going to be in default correct that's absolutely right that's the best you can do like be like oh wow you know like at the end of the day child traffickers are providing a service i mean they are giving money to those families when they sell their children to sleep yeah this is totally why did you get this solution to grinding poverty hey a fella for truck that's the thing it's that he just
Starting point is 01:00:09 imagines that these things are basically natural and that they're the best we can do but the great thing is is i can't as i was reading this terrible article um i i so i was sort of wondering where have i seen literally all of these points made before in much the same way without the trite personal anecdote and i remembered during an ayahuasca experience oh yeah in a press release from the consumer finance association the industry group for payday loans nice same things from the consumer finance association in its response to a cap on interest rates without access to a regulated form of finance many consumers they cite six hundred thousand are unable to take action to manage their cash flow recover emergency financial costs they could end up using turning to more expensive
Starting point is 01:00:55 forms of credit or using an overdraft facility which could cost up to 180 pounds in fees or and this was in another paragraph turning to dangerous for sources of credit like loan sharks james ball here representing the best interests of the payday lenders as they have written them loan sharks you know the threat from loan sharks is greatly exaggerated i mean to be honest like the waters around britain allows you to cold for loan sharks to inhabit and you know in any way if you stay out of the sea you're not any much danger thank you my love for making that wonderful comparison it feels like this is a sort of great example of a kind of like a sort of you know kind of pee pee oxbridge sort of history boys kind of form of journalism where you basically
Starting point is 01:01:44 make a horrible point in a way that you think is clever so you're kind of what you're doing is you're sort of saying you know it's it's the sort of you know to use a kind of outdated reference you know alan bennett's play you know it's you know the kind of the the fight is between the modern history teacher who says you know the way to get into university is to make a horrible point but in a really kind of clever and flashy way and you know not not to say that this article is clever because it's because because it's not but but but that is essentially it's the sort of what's what you know what's the common sense reaction to this wong was a horrible company in providing a horrible product with the the the desire for which it kind of created itself it's like crocs you know
Starting point is 01:02:38 and so so the common sense reaction is to be like well this is this is a good thing it's a bad thing and it's ended but no the way you know the way to get published the way to have the take you know the way to sort of it's it's it's it's this kind of you know it's like you may think that i'm being stupid here but actually i'm being far cleverer than and and and it's sort of it's like smart idiots it's like cleverness in the in the in the kind of service of something really well i i guess i'll just look at this because when we mentioned the point previously that it's shocking where you encounter something where britain is less regulated and more insane than america i mean there are some weird things like you pay your landlord's property tax for him which
Starting point is 01:03:24 is insane here but oh yeah periodically that's a classic one exactly but but people make similar james bull style arguments for that like well if you don't pay the property tax the landlord's just going to put the rent up but to pay for the property tax that's like wow that seems like something regulation could stop yeah it's insane it's like you would literally i mean for american listeners in britain you basically pay your landlord's property tax for them and the only exceptions are if you were disabled or if you're a student otherwise you pay it and it's a flat rate it doesn't matter how much you earn so somebody even if you're making the kind of wages where you might be in a situation to take out a long alone you still pay the same amount in your landlord
Starting point is 01:03:56 unless he's living in the property place pays nothing yeah that's fair assessment i mean because i i obviously am of yeah that's the g it is full so i want to point something out here while you were talking i looked on my phone and looked this up and i basically couldn't get a loan calculator to give me the rates at 5000 interest because they're like no we won't it has to be like one says max 20% one said max 100% i finally found one based in northern ireland where i was able to calculate it and here's what it says if you took out a thousand pounds at 5000 i don't know the the term whether it's you know 12 months i just put in 12 months it said the bottom line is that for this loan for a thousand pounds over 12 months will cost you 4166 pounds a month taking out this loan you'll
Starting point is 01:04:35 pay a total of 49 000 pounds in interest the two two true cost of this loan is 50 000 pounds well the real the way this the way it works is they say they have to give a representative ap r which means that they but they usually charge up a fee so but okay well it's a fee it's not an interest it's a fee and that's what they say uh to forward you a thousand pounds it costs you know um it costs you know 200 pounds or whatever and so what happens is that represent is that that represents this extortionate ap r but the in the but they're like well that doesn't really represent the true cost of the loan unless of course you can't pay it back and you get hit with further fees which is an enormously common element of their business model i guess i'm just looking at it and say
Starting point is 01:05:17 that it's so usurus to the point of it being ridiculous that there's absolutely in my opinion no way that you can defend it even from the practical standpoint because it it's so clearly puts people in in in like an inescapable situation they literally would just not be able to get out unless unless they won the lottery and wonga had a wonga had a kind of range of of brutal sort of methods for dealing with people who didn't pay their loans back on time which is a lot of people uh and and and again sort of the problem with the article is sort of it you know there's a lot of journalism which has to be or is made to be filtered through the kind of through like personal experience quote unquote and you know there's a sort of problem with that
Starting point is 01:06:10 generally maybe but the issue here is you know james ball's personal experiences that he was able to pay the loans back okay so great it's not that hard to find out about people who weren't able to pay the loans that back for a guy who's so interested in data and facts apparently he hasn't he he he hasn't it's like make a fucking phone call man you don't even have to do that use get you know riley over here has you know done done all the journalism that james should have been doing i did slightly more because i actually looked up something else wow effort posting but we went to the page for master dawn went beyond like the wonga website so but that's the thing is all the nuance that ball here is providing is basically just serving
Starting point is 01:07:08 to mystify a power dynamic that says it is basically permissible to charge working class people thousands of percent interest and rich people little interest if any at all simply because the poor have little other choice than to accept financial ruin now or later yeah more or less that's what ball is doing here his point is quite like whoa who boy do we live in a society it's quite difficult to say who's to blame no i mean that's what he's effectively saying is it's the best it can possibly be and i think what was so striking to me was your comparison riley when you when you put out your summary and you said that the the bank of england rate is 0.5 0.5 percent the idea that you're taking i've got 50 000 times that or five or 10 000 times
Starting point is 01:07:54 that to get that the idea that that's the best you can do when even in the insane health state that i come from it's like one tenth of that amount and that's still extortionate yeah well here's the here's the other the other fundamental thing according to ball's logic it is merely a symptom of our times that wanga routinely would lend people sums that knew they couldn't pay back and then earn orders of magnitude more by charging fees to people who can't pay the fees forcing them to roll over credit and accept financial ruin inventing fictional law firms to hound borrowers and then somehow managing to escape prosecution and then cleaning out kane sparring price's bank account leading him to kill himself later that day ball's logic is when
Starting point is 01:08:38 you nut and you have that moment of clarity yes you have the moment of clarity where you're like actually the fact that this company's business practice is directly led to a suicide is basically fine and there's nothing we can do about it because nothing can ever be done about anything you read about that suicide and you do a benjamin netanyahu and you're like the strong will feast the strong will feast so once again this is a question that i'm asking that i would imagine that given our 40 ish percent american audience might ask as well our paycheck garnishments great day to that yes i'm boo would be proud i mean we are a data driven podcast we believe in technology they are so so wage garnishments like if you owe a debt it's not a wage garnish
Starting point is 01:09:23 what it's called a continuous payment authority where basically the company can um i think as many times as it wants within a monthly period just clear out whatever's in your bank account oh wow okay yeah that's what that's what led to the suicide of of mr sparring price yeah okay because i was i was wondering if that because that obviously that definitely exists in the u.s as well i wasn't sure you ever hear a wage garnishment is a selection of like delicious sauces and accoutrements that you get at least like it's i wouldn't possibly ever dream of defending the insane practice of wage garnishment but at least garnishing wages is a percent of what someone's making as opposed to a hundred percent of an amount that you have but in the
Starting point is 01:10:02 united states there's there's situations when people are on benefits for example where they'll clear out everything in your savings account too or your second account that's so cool of them yeah it's it's it that does exist i just i love the convenience of payday lending it's it's a very insane but there was a lot of anecdotal evidence i mean martin lewis wrote a good post about this there's a lot of anecdotal evidence of like people drunk late at night gambling on tv seeing wonger ads and then grabbing instant cash at five thousand percent apr to bet with and then obviously you can't afford to repay it and payday lenders like wonger would make you know they make people sign up to to you know these are moral agreements that
Starting point is 01:10:46 mean cash can be taken directly from their bank accounts without their request you don't need their permission but james bull reminds us those people could have won at gambling and then you know they could have been rich beyond their wildest dreams and who would they have to thank the humble people at wonger they might have used those loans to you know to set up small businesses sending people for ayahuasca experiences sending people for ayahuasca experiences and installment plans it's this sort of i mean the lads went to ayahuasca when we was 19 it was fucking legendary when i say ayahuasca getting chlamydia if i can i think we're we're we're beginning to time out soon so i'd just like to take us home again to really emphasize the sort of
Starting point is 01:11:35 moral and intellectual nullity of ball's position here is that after the suicide of mr sparrum price wonger released a statement we were sorry to hear about the tragic death of mr sparrum price we take our responsibilities to our customers very seriously and we have strict lending criteria in place we conducted a full review of this case at this at the time to confirm we acted according to regulatory guidelines and continue to improve our engagement with customers incidentally if any of his relatives are looking for find ways to finance the funeral all right i don't think we're going to get a better better ending note than that it really is the stop all the clocks of the late capitalist age um uh so i'm going to say uh oscar rickett thank
Starting point is 01:12:23 you very much for coming on today thank you very much it's been a genuine a genuine delight and you know press f to pray for hussein's safety in the very long tunnel anyways um uh before before we close out the usual um the usual ending uh number one thank you to jin sang for our theme song here we go you can find it on spotify it's very good i recommend that you do and you can find us on spotify now so you guessed you can't find us on spotify we we have joined the platform economy um secondly uh if you're interested in commodifying your descent you can't possibly do better than a t-shirt from lil comrad where you can post where you can choose one of the many of your favorite lines from the show or in the case of some of our listeners
Starting point is 01:13:07 just some stuff we said at the pub once also i point out little comrades shirts are extremely soft and have passed all of the softness tests of people who have purchased them in the u.s where they do in fact ship so please sponsor our friends capitalist endeavor but it's actually not the same it's not that capitalist now it is a worker-owned business it's a worker-owned business by someone who actually does really really good work so definitely buy it and finally if you're looking to cook up a little revolution you also can't do better than the fine stoneware of the vremi family of products it's not socialism if it's not vremi

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