Flex and Frooms, Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex and Frooms catch up podcast. Happy Monday, guys. Today we chatted about why flights always get canceled. Thank you to Monik Ryan from cou Jong and the Prestige Trap. Let's go. This is Flex and froomes on CADA. Do you ever wonder why so many flights in Australia are late? Tell me why one in three flights are delayed on three? This is an endemic of the highest order. We clearly have not recovered post COVID, but we persevere. We have
a TikTok from Monique Ryan. She is the She's a teal member somewhere in Victoria.
Coo youong?
Perhaps she usp Josh Rounberg. Anyway, guys, obviously I what is it?
God?
Is it up?
Dog?
Let's make the TikTok. She's got an explanation.
Do you want to know the real reason why flights in Australia always get canceled? It's because the Australian government pretty much allows Quantas and other airlines to.
Get away with them.
In other countries, there's laws which force airlines to pay customers if their flights are delayed or canceled not Australia. It means they're ripping off customers and they're recording huge profits from it. As a result, one in three flights are delayed and one in twenty five are canceled.
I need no babes. How else am I supposed to get from Melbourne to Sydney? Do I need to take a boat? At this stage, I really don't get it. I would really like there to be a fast train. Clear that's not going to happen.
But then what is the alternative?
Because the system in America or the United States of America and Canada is pretty flawed as well. I'm not sure if you've experienced this idea of standby. So when you buy a ticket for a flight in the United States of America, you it grants you access, but you're not guaranteed a seat, And so after you buy your ticket, you need to select your seat to confirm that you
have a spot on the plane. Now, they openly oversell these seats because they know that there's a lot of money to lose if you fly a plane or you leave and all the seats aren't full. So what happens is if you get put on standby It means that you have to wait to see if everybody else is boarded the plane, and if you don't have a seat there, they'll I think this is Delta and it was a couple of years ago.
They'll offer you eight hundred dollars. Oh really.
Now there's a bit of a conspiracy or a theory or a scam where people purposely book themselves on really full flights, really popular flights that they don't have to catch, knowing that they're going to be given this eight hundred.
Dollars incredible, So it's like a two way scam.
The Kansas is each other out. Listen. When I flew with a redacted airline in America, I thought it was like the real Boogie one, but it was actually the lowest tier situation. I'm not I won't tell you on air it was. Now the guys, I will not share. You never know where the dollars are going to come in, guys. Yeah, Mickey knows it too. Tell me why they put me a flight from Sydney to San Francisco and then San Francisu to New York and there's a half hour layover
when I'm coming internationally. Thing, Oh, this is brilliant. I paid extra for this, like very.
Specific, it was a fast track moment.
And tell me why I then had to go to Ohio of all places. I did meet some ministering people on the plane, and by interesting I meant by the end of the trip, I wish I wasn't seeing next to them. But you live in your learn.
Do you agree with the sentiment that if it didn't suck, if it wasn't the worst in the world, it wouldn't have to be marketed as prestigious.
You might think of being a.
Politician, you know, like it feels like a prestigious job to do, but realistically when you're there, it might just suck. You might say dating rich, you know, like pursuing someone who has more money.
Than you might seem like a really cool thing.
We've heard a lot of horror stories about people feeling as though they can't escape those dynamics because they don't have anything to their name and they can't go anywhere. I was scrolling through TikTok as I do and came across this video from Go Beyond Ambition that's talking a lot about how we might need to be a bit more discerning about things that are presented or marketed to us as being prestigious, because again, if it really was all that would it needle this extra pay off.
If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
Here's another bombshell that blew my mind. If you have two options, one being more prestigious but not as enjoyable, versus one that's like something that you're more into but less prestigious, do the less prestigious and speaking from experience, do the.
Less prestigious one.
Yeah, this essay completely blew my mind. It's like kind of ironic though, because the writer of it, Paul Graham, he's literally the founder of y Combinator, another company. He went to Harvard, so I would say he's pretty qualified to talk about prestige. He gets on to basically say that prestige is the opinion of the world, and it's how the world gets people to do.
Things that kind of suck.
Honestly, I think about a few of my friends who currently lawyers, and they are some of the most depressed morally.
Areft.
Yeah, it's like this.
You know, a lot of us deal with like this moral contradiction of like not really feeling as though that we are acting in a way that truly aligns with us. But you know the lengths that they've expressed having to go against their morals and to uphold a system that is truly built for one person in mind. I was talking to a friend of mine who dropped out of
law school. It was just part of the curriculum, and they were talking about whatever, and they were talking about common phrases and so innocent until proven guilty, Like the origins of that are as sinister as you'd imagine it to be. Because the people who would need that, the people who wouldn't have to benefit from that kind of rule, are people doing objectively bad things, and what more lea
way for that? And she was like, wait, so I'm gonna have to use this as permission to let someone who's doing a terrible thing get more leeway so they can muster up the money and muster up the support and muster up the connections to fight against this thing that they are probably guilty of and do it again and again and again.
And this reminds me of like every person who did like a double degree, like King, you did that thinking of you, it's your parents or like friends who've gone to do like uni degrees when they really wanted to do like a trade. They thought they had to do the you need to go and then they've gone back to do mature age trade. That's got to hit differently.
Well, you got it, some derogatory mature age trade. But I see you, I hear you.
You don't ever saying yeah like the people who've been doing it since I fifteen.
But I would say it's one of those things where I am a personally likes to make my own mistakes. I really hate hearing from other people what I should and should not do, So I can understand that like this might come across as like do the thing that you really want to do for fear that it might be bad. But it is interesting to see that when we look at people in positions of prestige, very few of them have glowing things to say, Hello, lovely.
We had a listener message us. They are under duress, which is something that we have all experienced, but this one is particularly bad. She wants to tell us about a time her ex boyfriend has tried to force her to pay back all the money that he spent on her in their relationship, which is now defunct. The relationship has been canceled, the investment discontinued. Here is her story. My boyfriend and I got together when I was a teenager.
He was a few years above me. We would sneak around and have a little fun, and our relationship was pretty much toxic. Okay, I'd have to beg for a little time for him to spend with me or to talk to me. He was just always quote unquote busy, and he wrote down every single thing he paid for me or bought me as a gift. I'll do that in my head, but he took it one further. This is me listening to speaking, not the room speaking, not the guy. When we broke up, he started demanding money
back and it's just so stupid. And he keeps threatening me to sue me because he has proof that he lent me money. But he just wrote down everything he paid for in brackets, trips, movies, festivals, gas, restaurants, clothes. Mind you that I paid as well, but I never asked for money back. The money I actually did ask him I already returned. Is his stupid behavior or am I tripping? Who's in fault here? Can he sue me
for this. Oh my words, you were saying earlier, Flexi, that we spoken about a similar thing on the show.
Right, Yeah, we told a story of a BBC article I was reading about this trend or this social movement that was happening in China and Singapore where where women who felt as though they lost their best years to a partner who broke up with them were entitled to some kind of payment after the dissolution of that relationship, and for the most part they were getting money.
Yeah. My personal opinion on such an experience is that he played the game and he.
Lost one hundred like I believe.
Oh my word, where does one even begin.
This is ridiculous, it's one hundred percent.
I'm sick of it, appalled. I think you should block him.
Just know he can't sue you.
I mean, if there was a verbal contract that he was giving you these things with the intention to keep the relationship strong, maybe he could sue you. That's a verbal contract in Australian law. But for the most part, you can't give someone something freely and then claim after the fact that it was transactional and therefore you can sue them.
Like he's not going to sue you.
And also, respectfully, what did you give him that you cannot put a monetary priceless price?
The love of a partner is priceless.
Honestly, many people would pay.
Maybe one could argue he was overcompensating with the finances because he knew that he was cashing in a check that he could not pay, that he could not shop for you as a true partner, So he had to give you all that he could, which was money. Now there is no relationship. He's lost out of that money. He feels entitled to it. Get it from someone else.
Think about the memories, King Price. You know what, maybe if there was like a way for a napp to wipe all the memories, then it would be a fair trade. Yeah, like wipe all the memories from his brain.
Yeah, you know that he wouldn't know that he was owed money, so it.
Would be amazing with all parties here. Have you ever considered being a digital nomad?
Yeah?
Oh, have you ever done it? No? Of course not.
Listen.
I found this story by a woman called Francesca Specter. She's a writer somewhat of our similar vocation. FLEXI did just launch a newsletter? When do we find it? No?
Deep dives please at substack.
Correct. So Francesca has written in The Guardian about the realities of being a digital nomad. Here's what she said. I would be sitting outside a hostel in Florence, doing a nine to five riding shift for a Nottingham based health and beauty retailer, cooling my overheating laptop in the shade,
while looking enviously at holidaymakers relaxing by the pool. Tell me why all the times I've decided to bring my laptop out into the wild, say at a beachside cafe in my Chrosen suburb, I have to go home because the flies are swatting around me. Is because having showered today, Potentially then I go down to the beach. Why don't I want to go sit the laptop at icebergs? I can't. I'm in the full pelt of the sun.
Got it.
These are the realities nobody talks about when it comes to being a digital nomad, working for yourself, working from home. I'm under duress, the hidden truths, the hidden truths. I want to know if it was actually I mean, I guess people do go to balley and do it illegally. I thought you, I thought it was legal. I thought it was.
Leathal mean m no comment, no comment.
I'm not saying everybody is doing it, but people definitely go on visas that don't allow you to work and then work online and get taxed in their home country. Don't give me ideas not stimulating the Balinese economy, economy, but you know, it is what it is.
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