TRASHFUTURE - Thanks, Wonga! feat. Oscar Rickett
Episode Date: September 7, 2018It’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
Discussion (0)
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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