Grubstakers - Episode 244: Will Shu (Deliveroo)

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

This week we talk about William Shu the CEO of Deliveroo. Rhymes are fun. Anyways, we talk about how he came up with this brilliant idea of getting food delivered to you. What a genius! The twist is instead of trying to compete in America he decided to subjugate the minorities and impoverished into delivering food as "Independant Contractors" in the UK instead. SPICY. All because he wanted to order 25 whoppers at Morgan Stanley. Comment below if you think this will be the first episode that doesn't have a connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Also be sure to check out Yogi and Sean performing in Portland on Sept 16th and in Seattle Sept 17th and 18th. Follow Grubstakers on Twitter for more info.

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance for one to get to be a complete red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the future is always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

And listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's dating. She tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. In five, four, three, two today in five that's why you need to take a meeting with kanye west bernard arnaud hello and welcome to grubstakers the podcast about billionaires my name is yogi pollywall and joining me are my fellow hedonistic hosts

andy palmer steve jeffries sean p mccarthy and today we are going to be looking at a almost billionaire pseudo billionaire depending on the net worth of the company, who is a domestic product imported across the pond to monetize convenience and make a fat profit from the exploitation of his workers. What else is new? We're going to be covering the founder of Deliveroo, Will Hsu, who brought food delivery exploitation to a worldwide market with the expressed idea that he wants people to never make food at home. The idea that all people must be dependent on others to exist is the ultimate goal, if you ask me. You need someone else to eat, sleep, shit, hell, at some point breathe. Yeah, that's the great reset. The goal is to be an invisible mother to a global population. Now, it's easy to say Will Shue is just a fat ass from Connecticut

who wanted to be a fat ass in the UK, but the end goal, I think, is much more sinister. The Connecticut dream. Steven, you have some comments on the company as it is right now? Yep. So, at one time, Shue was a billionaire, but that, sadly, has passed

for him. So, the company recently IPO'd. He lost it all on Dogecoin. Spent it all on Dogecoin. Well, they targeted a valuation for the IPO of $10 billion for the company, which would have put Shu somewhere in the neighborhood of like $1.1 to $1.3 billion.

Right. Day one happens. IPO happens. 24% drop in the stock price. He's no longer a billionaire. That's that Marshall Lynch drop. He's worth more like about $600 to $650 million right now. Still a pretty penny.

But we're not choosy when we cover billionaires here. So he probably, in all likelihood, in the next five years, he probably will regain the status. Yeah, most likely. Although people in the United States might not know of Deliveroo, it seems to be one of the three to four choice options in the UK and a few other European and Middle East markets. We're actually going to record this episode and put it in a time

capsule and then release it when he becomes a billionaire again. We're going to set it into space on that fucking Carl Sagan thing. That's right. Well, we have like a dead man switch. It's tied to his network.

So once he becomes a billionaire, it automatically drops, including all the scandals that we're going to get into. I love the idea of us starting an episode, researching a billionaire and being like, guys, this is really dark. We should release this as a dead man's switch. We just can't put this out while we're

alive. I think we've recorded all of the episodes, but we just released them as they become billionaires, as the dead switches occur. And that's like our threat to the CIA and everyone is like, well, look, the real dirt is behind the dead man switch. Like, we're just giving them the limited hangout. As long as you don't kill us,

like, that's when the real shit will drop. Watch for a new Patreon tier. Dead man switch tier. It's like you get you get it first and then the rest does the rest of the world. Indeed. I did have one comment. This is one of the first UK billionaires or one of the

or we haven't done that many UK billionaires basically. We're kind of switching it up. We're leaving the United States and just the company itself Deliveroo. Could British people just name things normally? Like every fucking company in Britain sounds like it was named by a seven-year-old. Well, this guy is an American technically, so I don't think we can really blame the UK

market on this. I mean, that's just what startups sound like. If I'm trying to apply for a job and um with coding like i'll often read the job descriptions where they're like uh well we're looking for proficiency in zap bonk and then uh uh familiarity at least with uh pewter pow and um ruby on rails and ruby on rails and then there's some things like if you like are in like i don't know let's say video production and then you're like well i used to edit for a pewdiepie like that's almost like oh wow he used to edit for pewdiepie like i'm sure there are some things that just sound absolute bullshit but at the same time are reputable to people look if they call it uh

deliveroo just on the way over here i was thinking like you know they probably if you go to the uk there's like a strip club there called Nippers. This is what you're thinking about on your way over here? I was just like, Deliveroo. Like, okay, Uber Eats makes sense. Seamless makes sense. Deliveroo is the laziest food delivery. Uber doesn't make sense.

That's a car company. You're just used to it. Well, no, but you think of the word. When you thought of Uber pre the company, what did you think that meant? Like a genocide in Eastern Europe? No, that one doesn't really make sense either. Let's be real. That one, I mean, it's not the same type of stupid as delivery. Right.

But it's a different one. You can't just add ooh to the word that's fair i will say that there i do have three other names that they almost went with we were oil ooh gas station ooh uh these were these were three names they kicked around that they decided to kick to the curve first one is food pony second is food mule things seeing a common scene here and then the third one is booze food that is that is the i will say this about will shoe uh creativity not not as strong suit uh let alone anything else i will say it is good that they didn't go with food mule considering their

employees are actually shitting into bags yeah more on that in a moment um you know before we do begin the episode i was curious what were some of your worst food delivery stories do you think do you guys have any where you're like oh my goodness i fucking yeah no that is a disgusting amount of food that i put in my body that i've gotten delivered i'm a new york times writer so all of my worst food delivery stories have been posted to twitter about how i like screamed at an immigrant making $3 an hour. Well, they didn't know it was me. I don't know.

I mean, sometimes it hasn't been delivered, but it was still hard to get mad because I'm like, I'm doing research for, for, for the Wilshire episode. Well, my,

my question was more, what's the worst thing you've gotten delivered? And I would say for myself, when I first moved to New York, I lived like around the corner from a burger place that would do macaroni and cheese and i got their mac and cheese and fries delivered like five days in a row i was fucking disgusting about it and it cost me i think like 40 bucks for per meal but i'll tell you what delicious to have macaroni cheese delivered to you wow mother's milk that was fucking great i mean that is disgusting i've never had anything that gross delivered i order normal things

um sure like pizza yeah pizza and mozzarella sticks a lot yeah that's kind of it is the unhealthiest vegetarian you'll ever meet it's just like pure, but there's no meat in there. That doesn't mean he's better than you, Sean. Well, no. It's not wrong. Still better. That's right. Okay, what if Deliveroo, they set up like a prostitution like delivery service?

Of course. Alcohol. And it's called Fanny to go. That would be good in the UK market, I think. It would work. So moving along, to begin our bio on Will Hsu, he was born in December 1979 in New Haven, Connecticut. Couldn't find a day, just a month for some reason.

His parents are... CIA. His parents are Taiwanese immigrants. And from the Diary of a CEO podcast, Will Shue says that his mom is a scientist who worked at Yale and his dad was an actuary. So these people were well-educated professional individuals. Steven, you were talking about what an actuary is earlier.

You want to explain that again? Oh, it's just someone who does statistical analyses to measure the risk for insurance insurance or banking products something like that some of them find out when you're gonna die really yep or just estimates for like life insurance sure that makes sense yeah that should all right so that's that's what his dad did and his mom was a scientist at yale no other information just scientists his big break was he did the insurance policy on the world trade center that's why he doesn't have a birthday he worked on the silverstein deal that's right uh in that same podcast he claims that new haven has the best pizza in the world which is a blasphemous

food statement but then again that is the type of trash that creates an industry of food delivery you can't be making those kinds of statements if you're Taiwanese. That's just going to create racism. But people in Connecticut are wildly territorial about their pizza. Really? Yeah. I didn't know any of this. Oh, yeah. It's true.

Why? How? I don't know. They all think that they have the best pizza in the world. It's because they go here so frequently. They come to New York. Yeah, they come to New York City and experience it. They don't live here. They need something to have againstork yeah they come to new york city and experience it they don't live here they need something to like to have against us i don't get it i know i mean

i understand that sentiment but that's fucking dumb like if i if i lived i don't know it just is stupid of me to think that like connecticut's like you want pizza come on down to new haven like that to me makes no fucking sense i mean i it's goofy, but I've heard it from enough different people that I'm like, maybe I should try New Haven pizza. Were they all white? Yeah, they're from Connecticut. Well, she's not white. As opposed to the

sultry Italians who the swarthy Italians who invented it. I don't admit this that often, but I don't trust white people's taste buds. I think that they're wrong and I think that they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. This comes from several years

of white people being like, oh, I love this food place. I'm going and being like, this is terrible. This is horseshit. Too fair. I should probably have better white friends, but what are you going to do?

Yeah, sorry. All I want to know is like, how do you tell good pizza in connecticut because here you just look for the italian flag and the blue lives matter flag did i make that joke on the pod i don't know he did now did i make it in a conversation did i make it on a podcast who knows sean's too big time to remember what he said where yeah well did i say that to the cia agent that was interviewing me or did i say that on the podcast the other day yeah did i say that to the CIA agent that was interviewing me, or did I say that on the podcast the other day? Did I say that in my grand jury testimony against my fellow podcast hosts, or did I?

Oh, yeah, that was the deposition. Never mind. So, Will Shue would receive a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University, and then he would get his, he later would get a degree from Wharton Business School. But before he would go to Wharton, he got his first job at Morgan Stanley in 2001 as an investment banking analyst. So every billionaire, for the most part, except when inherited wealth comes into play, has about a decade of just working. These banking jobs are when shoe has his come up, basically. And in New York, he worked for three years before then he would be transferred to the UK. So he got his first job at Morgan Stanley at 21. And then three years later, he's 24 years old working in the UK. So because at these jobs, according to Shu, he would have to work 100 hours a week.

And he would get food delivered when he was working in New York. And it's like one of those things where if he just had like an assistant that had to go get him food we wouldn't really be fucking having a delivery conversation right now he's being overworked and in new york and so he's like i'll just get where the fuck i want and when he was working at morgan stanley there's a moment where that he would get a 25 stipend a day for dinner and this is a quote from that podcast with him talking about his experience

getting dinner in New York. For work. Because in New York, you got $25 dinner allowance. You can order whatever you want. Actually, funny story. My first kind of day at work in 2001, I was pretty cheap, right? So I was like, $25, I can get, I can do whatever. So I actually

ordered 25 Whoppers because Burger King had this dollar Whopper special. And everyone's like, what are you doing? And by like day three, the sort of novelty wore off. I'm like, oh, I got to work 100 hours a week. It's not, you know, this isn't that much fun. But no, this is the type of guy we're talking about here when he got a 25 a day food allowance he decided to get 25 whoppers on his first day which is insane who orders who orders nearly 30 burgers for dinner doesn't it like immediately give you the neurovirus if you leave it out more than three hours like you should immediately consume any products from burger king mcdonald's is that not insane i feel like the three of you gave me zero reactions to this.

I'm trying to think about it to justify it, basically. I just assume he made it up. Yeah, he probably made it up. But if he didn't make it up, maybe it was for the office? I don't know. Yeah, like 25 Whoppers. Like what? You put them in the fridge? You microwave them? I don't know. It doesn't make any fucking sense.

I've had I've been hung around Road Trip, had two whoppers with fry like the whole meal but like i've never 25 i don't know if i could even do 10 i mean i could if you put a gun to my head but that's a different story were they beyond whoppers were those your first whoppers now that they're beyond they were my first whoppers now that they're beyond but i had gotten a whopper without the meat so i knew what everything else had tasted like. Oh, weird. Yeah, when you're a vegetarian and you're fucking like, I got to eat something.

So you're like, just give it to me without the meat. You just get a lot of shit when I first started doing it. They'd be like, what? We cannot do that. I'm like, you know that part where you put the meat on it? Don't do that part. They're like, all right. Like there's nothing in the computer for that. What was weird is whenever that would happen,

they'd always give me extra cheese. And in my mind, I'm like, this is the right move. Imagining shoes training for Nathan's, the competition. He's like, instead of business school,

I'm going to do this. That's funny to imagine, like just this Asian guy in the Morgan Stanley office eating hot dog after hot dog. His $25 dinner allowance. What are you doing? She's got a train man. Gotta be Kobayashi. Dipping Whoppers in water.

It's like, yeah, if I can get my lunch break down to like four minutes, I can work more. But this is the type of individual we're covering here. This is a very suburbs, Connecticut-driven guy. When he's given a little bit of money when he first gets a job, he goes, I'm going to get 25 Whoppers for dinner. So as far as I can tell, this is kind of our common billionaire scenario where what we know about his early life is just what he tells us.

There hasn't really been much investigative journalism here even the fact that his parents uh his mom was scientists at yale and his dad was actually where i only was able to get from the podcast there's very little information online like his mom was a scientist at yale his dad was an actuary so he grew up let's say upper middle class or easily easily yeah do you know if he went to public or private school i got no other information about schooling except his college which is do you know if he went to public or private school i got no other information about schooling except his college which is like you know we've seen this happen on the episodes before it's just they they've scrubbed the internet of any and all information i mean will shu if i were to find anything about him growing up he's kind like uh later on we're

going to talk about uh greg uh orla fossky, the partner who would help him found. And he talks about in this podcast that him and Greg would go to the Yale Unix lab and mess around with computers because his mom worked there. So like, I don't know exactly what type of schooling or education they had, but am I going to presume a motherfucker that grew up in Connecticut and and claims connecticut's got this great best pizza world as a rich kid yeah sure but then again he does end up creating this company what if his his delivery was so bad that it made the uk just racist enough to vote for brexit and he's the one who broke up the european union i mean you know i can't confirm that but i would argue that what he does makes race relations worse in the world i that seems kind of uh very uh wild sentiment but as we cover this you'll see why i feel no i mean yeah having a a slave cast who are mostly a different race that doesn't

impact race relations at all yogi oh really Back when I was working in the office in Midtown, during lunchtime, there would just be a large group of, not delivery, but in our case, Uber Eats and stuff. And it would be all brown people waiting for white men

and some Asian women to come down and get their food. Yeah, that is. And that's basically how it worked. Yeah. We'll talk about this more in the last third of the podcast. But when you add convenience to any task,

you're just adding slavery to the equation. There's no real other way to cut it out besides that. Well, that was the thing earlier when you were like asking about like our worst delivery experience. And I'm sure I could like think of one, but just like every time I've had a bad experience with delivery, you guys took it as like the worst, as in like you being mad at someone.

I meant more like the most disgusting thing you've ordered. Yeah. I realized that after, but I think both, I think both questions are interesting, but I just kind of realized like, I'm sure I could think of something, but anytime I've ever had a bad delivery experience,

I'm like, I deserve it for using this because this is extremely unethical. Right. So from 2004 to 2006, he would work at Morgan Stanley. And then after that, he spent four years in a hedge fund. Didn't describe which hedge fund he went to. 2006, huh? Is there something about to happen in the financial world that involves Morgan Stanley? I wonder what he was working on over there. Yes. So he is at Morgan Stanley right before that, and he goes to the Wharton Business School afterwards. And then in 2012, he would move back to London.

And Stephen, I believe you have some more information about his time then. He got an MBA at Wharton, right? warden right yes he did yeah he went to business school and uh immediately after that he joins the summer analyst program at sac capital and he's working in the equities research division so like stock market and stuff right and this actually happens at the same time that, I'm not saying it was him, but someone in his department was working with none other

than Jeffrey Epstein. At SAC Capital? I didn't even know they had an Epstein connection. Because what I was going to say... He had money being managed by SAC Capital. Right. Well, what I was going to say is like, so we did an episode he had money being managed by SEC Capital.

Right. Huh. Well, what I was going to say is like, so we did an episode of the podcast you can listen to about Epstein's SEC Capital. It's like, slow down on the burgers, buddy. I'm just like, the day that, the one day that Epstein shows up there. Right.

Shoot it and say shit. Yeah. No, his head was buried in the burgers. Maybe 25 Whoppers was code. shoot it and say shit. His head was buried in the burgers. Maybe 25 Whoppers was code. Yeah, three cheese pizzas, 25 Whoppers. That's right.

They let the high roller clients just visit the trading floor or whatever. Shoe's fucking nuts right now with the burgers so he doesn't notice. I wanted to remind the listeners who might not know, SAC Capital was Steve Cohen is a billionaire hedge fund guy. That was his hedge fund.

And we did an episode about Stephen Cohen. And basically, he was accused of insider trading. Him and his firm would plead guilty to a lesser charge. But they did a frontline documentary about it. insider trading, he would, him and his firm would plead guilty to a lesser charge. But, you know, they did a frontline documentary about it. They did a lot of, there was a book written about it. It's, in my opinion, extremely well documented that insider trading was endemic at his hedge fund. And in fact, he became the basis of the TV show Billions, which depicts a hedge fund where insider trading is endemic. So I think it's like, you know, clearly if he was working there, he was caught up in that

same kind of environment. And one thing I did want to mention about Steve Cohen that I found amusing and I just saw on Twitter is some of the users might know that he has, since we did our episode, he's bought a controlling or a large stake in the New York Mets, the baseball team. So he's the owner of the Mets. And somebody on Twitter, they booted up Microsoft Flight Simulator and they geolocated his house and they flew a plane into it. And then they tweeted at him, this is for not signing Springer. Honestly, the only house that it's ethically acceptable to fly plane into

in Microsoft Flight Simulator is Grover House in Pennsylvania. I was looking through this guy's Twitter, and he just geolocates different houses and flies planes into them. I was like, this is so much better cultural commentary than what we're doing. He's got a million people on Patreon. Send me that profile. Yeah. So he started at SAC Capital with the Summer Analyst Program, and he continued in that

role in the equities trading department from 2011 to 2012 or so. Right. At which time he was working on the beginnings of delivery that's right so the concept of deliveroo you know will shoes fat ass thinks about this the moment he hits london because his the concept of deliveroo is like he's sitting there with jeffrey epstein like man i wish we could get some whoppers to go right now you know nothing nothing makes me hungry like my massage. The idea comes from Jeffrey Epstein. You can't get a decent meal

delivered out here. I'm kind of hungry right now. He's talking to his PR person. They're like, you can't say Jeffrey Epstein gave you the idea for Deliveroo. You're going to have to make up some bullshit about whoppers when you were working at Morgan Stanley.

Allegedly, allegedly. Yeah, Jeff's coming. We have to get some whoppers for the meeting. Extra ketchup. They're going to hire a hitman off Deliveroo to kill Ghislaine Maxwell. You know, Italian underage women, some whoppers. In the delivery box of the writer is just like weapons

rip off the uniform and it's like the hit you're like the hit man you know sometimes I think we can do an episode that people will be like yeah that one's like a tame light episode that they could send around it just never happens on our show we could never we could ever produce a piece of content that doesn't end up having at least a five minute riff on uh children being raped mercilessly well we were doing so good because we were like 20 minutes

deep and i had no idea there was an epstein connection yeah that's right i was like we we did it we did a billionaire without an epstein connection but no Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I'm picturing a scene with the hit man, you're poisoning someone music. It's just a first person perspective of the delivery guy mixing

it into a soft drink. And then he gives it to Ghislaine. Right, of course. A slavery app 47. Very clever. Alright, so Wilshu thinks of this idea the moment his fat ass reaches London, and his co-workers

in the UK, when he asks, hey, what are we going to eat tonight? They just take him to Tesco, incidentally, and they just grab, like, microwavable burritos and shit, because, you know, they're used to this concept of not utilizing slavery for their food, and Wilshu's like, fuck that noise. microwavable burritos and shit because you know they're used to this concept of not utilizing slavery for their food and uh will she was like fuck that noise yeah i think the quote was uh brav you gotta try tesco in it and yeah that's a direct quote um and so you know he has this idea

and pitches to his uh future co-founder greg that hey i think a delivery app out here would be good. But the concept of a app or a user interface that relies on a mobile tech doesn't really exist in 07. But in 2012, Apple releases the iPhone 5 and the App Store is launched. And I want to make a quick aside here. The App Store integration on iOS devices shouldn't be credited to Apple and their engineers because when the first iPhones came out, modders had unlocked right at the time, jailbroke the phones and created amazing shit for the iPhone. And Apple panicked

and went like, we will lose the phone war if we let modders take our fucking device and hot rod it essentially. So let's create like a garage for them, which would become the app store and they'll allow them to develop in there and then it leaves us to create the guts of what we're doing here they also just stole that idea straight from linux that was something that existed in linux for like years before that yeah i'm not shocked can i say

when yogi said i want to take a digression to say apple doesn't deserve the credit for the app store i was really hoping he would launch into a defense of microsoft no but i just remember like when that happened like because they were like incredible uh people who had you know and obviously these people were probably linux users who had you know joe broken the iphone and really made it you know more incredible than it was at the time and i within like a few years apple was like we created an app store it's like you motherfuckers you just wanted to make money from what people could build on this thing but in the end i think it makes our technology worse

vis-a-vis the Linux argument of what we're talking about here. So just from my understanding here, Will Hsu, he was in London at Morgan Stanley for a bit and then he was working for SAC Capital in London? Yes, because he moves back to the US to go to the Wharton Business School and then moves back to the UK and calls himself a

londoner without a british accent which i found very funny he's he's at the wharton business school mba program he's like oh pile a bunch of mortgages that are shit into a derivative well i already know this this is an easy test yeah he he self-describes his time at business school being two years of drinking and partying while doing homework and it's like yeah that makes sense yeah you've made you made a boatload at morgan stanley or you've made enough to live comfortably and you're just at business school in your mid to late 20s so wait you don't you don't have to work hard to pass business school no andy you do not so he says that in 2007 when he thought of the idea, he was like, I'd have to make like basically what an iPhone is to be able to communicate to the drivers and all that. Basically, within seven years, his idea of the slight future comes to fruition in an easier way. And this is when him and his childhood friend Greg would team up and launch Deliveroo in January of 2013.

So Greg Arlovsky would design the website and make it usable for customers. It wasn't mobile integrated. There was no app. It was just a website that if you had on your phone, you'd have to zoom in, which was very common in those stages of smartphones. smartphones and will shoes job would be to get restaurants signed onto the service and then deal with writers and training them as well as well as being a delivery driver for deliveroo at this time he claims that he worked there for eight months to a year every day but honestly i don't know i at this point it's one of those things where all of will shoes delivering for deliveroo stories feel very this is good for pr so they won't ask me how come my writers are getting paid slave wages to take care of something.

Right. And we'll talk about it. There was a strike where the strikers nicknamed the company Slaveroo. So it would make sense to be like, oh, I'm the CEO and founder. I do the job, too. It's not slavery. And even though masters did work with their slaves on occasion to say like how benevolent they were.

And it's one of those things where like if he screws up, it doesn't mean that he might be homeless. Right, right. Precisely. This is something where if he messes up, then there's no repercussions for his actions outside the fact that he lost a sale, but he, you know, kind of owns the company. Yeah, I ordered the chicken penne and this idiot brought me 25 Whoppers. I did want to ask, did he ever give any reason why he started in London as opposed to like, I don't know, New York, California, all these fucking places?

I mean, he was born in Connecticut. This is my take on the situation. In his time at Morgan Stanley and the hedge firm he worked at, NSCC, he learns how genuinely competitive and how much money are in those markets already. The UK had a demand for this need. They didn't have a good takeaway service that that was well manufactured and this this diary of a ceo podcast uh by this fucking douche that hosts it that guy is like once i found out about once i found out about delivery i just couldn't stop using it i used it every day mate and it's one of those things where it's like that that is the

ultimate type of guy that you need in those markets that you're describing sean he would have been swallowed immediately i mean like yeah but the the u.s markets my understanding is the u.s markets were just too shut too saturated correct with uber eats and seamless and the united states is built for you can get food delivered and also we probably really loved panel shows um and so in the uk greg is doing the interface and will shoe is taking care of the face of house stuff at first he's just telling his friends to use the service and like he's like hey guys you guys want your food delivered please please check out this thing i'm doing and he even says that i know my friends ordered just to see me deliver the food like you gotta realize these are like upper middle class

fucking bankers slash investment analysts and so he's like please please use my delivery service and like okay sure will and uh he has a lot of embarrassing stories in this time where he like at one point would wear a kangaroo outfit and hand out like handbells and flyers and stuff and he says that like these two girls not like young but like in their 20s would pick up the tail and like like tease him basically like pull it and like tease him and then everyone around him started to do it like when he says he's like so that was probably one of the worst days i had and it's like you're just being bullied. Like, you're just straight up being abused for the position that you don't want to be in, which is not surprising that he tolerates abuse of his employees, technically contract employees. Now, it is interesting because, like, you know, doing that to somebody who, like, appears somewhere out there as like a service worker is a really shitty thing to do. But those girls were correct to bully this man yeah what he learned though from convincing his friends to use the service was that they would

use it again afterwards so even if the first time they did it like all right sure fuck it afterwards they're like no this is i mean it's not really hard to figure out why people want food delivered to them like the thing is is that like as much as people in interviews with will she were like the visionary will shoe figured out people want to sit their fat asses at home and have food delivered to it it's not it's pretty hard to convince people this is a revolutionary idea exactly yeah and like he he kind of stopped trying to convince people of that yeah will she went to a british football game and like, there's a market for food delivery here. These people do not like to move and they like to eat. Riots really get the munchies going.

That's right. What if you could sit where you are and in food, press a button and food appears in front of you? And there's no slave market supporting this system. His first delivery, he says, he delivered to a friend. He was delivering a pizza. And when he showed up, he delivered the pizza upside down. And it basically went from a pizza to calzone. And he was so embarrassed that he just ate the food himself.

He was just like, I'm sorry. I was going to hang out here and eat the pizza. But the through line here is that this is a guy that had enough money to be shitty at the job until he was good and could afford the time because it was his own wallet that he was putting into the business. Well, you know, upside down pizza is just how they do it in Connecticut. Okay. All right. Well, yeah, like the story there is like, oh, I was kind of embarrassed in front of my friend and then I ate a perfectly edible pizza as opposed to like yeah someone was having a bad day so they gave me one star and now I'm sleeping on the street

right exactly the thing you gotta understand about a shoe is he's on the Michael Phelps diet at this point he eats 14,000 calories a day right and he but he doesn't exercise either well he works for well other than doing Deliveroo. That's right. Yeah, I mean, I will give him credit. It's definitely harder to operate that bicycle when you're in a kangaroo suit. At one point in this interview, he tries to claim that hanging door hanger handbills, so like a do not disturb sign in a hotel, but just that for Deliveroo, where he would hang it on a door with like

the numbers of the restaurants nearby, if you want, if they wanted their food delivered. And he, he, he says like, you know, we were doing the kangaroo thing and then we figured out if we did these door handbills, that could be a good thing. Cause people would didn't know what companies, what restaurants would deliver to them. And it's like, I, you've seen that everywhere. This is not a new concept. And the idea that we'll choose like one original idea that we had that really really innovated our marketing scheme was

we put numbers of restaurants that people could order to in the areas they were in on their door he got in trouble with the police though because they thought that he was putting door handbells on doors and then if they didn't take him he was gonna rob the house that was his innovation that was the innovation yeah I figured out how to rob houses easier famously not racist British Metropolitan Police I didn't research what what he thinks about on the Taiwan question yeah I don't think anyone's really asked him. I don't see that going around that much.

I don't know if we've gone into it on the pod, but I'm sure we will at some point. But an interesting point is that essentially the Taiwan lobby in the United States used to be like the Israel lobby is today. We might have talked about it on the nuclear war episode because of the many times there was almost a nuclear war one of them was when uh the chinese the people's republic of china was shelling some islands controlled by taiwan and you know it really did seem like the united states might go to nuclear war to protect taiwan and that was like partly because obviously taiwan is like

at the time and still to an extent today but to a lesser extent served a similar client state role that israel currently serves for the united states so uh chan kai shek and many others were always lobbying the united states to directly invade china right so they could take it back over um but yes i would be curious to hear his thoughts on the taiwan well yeah that's that's kind of the thing with like the what are they called, like the tiger economies of countries. It's like all these countries that had the so-called like post-war miracle were countries basically controlled by the United States that were immediately adjacent to major communist powers.

So, of course, the United States was just pumping in like whatever they could into those countries to prop them up as best they could. I think, realistically, I mean, I don't think he... I didn't see any public interviews when I was researching where he talked about Taiwan, but I think, realistically,

he's probably in the Taiwan independence movement to some varying degree. It's a standard American view. He might not care too. Or he just doesn't care. He's probably smart enough to shut the fuck up because you immediately lose access to this

giant market if you say the word Taiwan. That's true. I mean the man works tirelessly. It's funny to imagine his parents have a huge KMT flag when he's growing up, and they make him recite Ching Kai-shek.

Well, actually... Ching Kai-shek sayings. I'm reading the Peter Dale Scott book, Drugs, Oil, and War. Very much recommend. But he makes the point that, and he's not the only one, but he kind of puts this together.

The heroin trade in Southeast Asia was controlled by KMT mafias the the Golden Triangle you know and that continued on throughout the Vietnam War and all that and they were if not you know I think they were the CIA was directly running drugs with them but at minimum the CIA was just allowing them to run drugs so that they are KMT allies

could be an anti-communist proxy force that supported themselves through the drug trade. So what I'm saying is Wilshu's dad was a heroin trafficker. It could be. It could be. So moving along from his bio, we're going to talk about Deliveroo, the company itself, their scandals, and then we'll, at the end of the episode, talk about the future of Deliveroo itself.

From now, I'll be quoting from a business insider piece that looks at the timeline and history of Deliveroo from 2018. So Deliveroo sets up, they start giving their employees better looking uniforms. They got reflected gear on it. And, you know, one of the things that Deliveroo does is you can track when you're losing money from them being run over by insane London drivers. I mean, yeah, basically. I think that was a part of the idea, but

yeah, they'd only lose money if they were employees, but they ain't losing shit. Oh, we're supposed to drive on the left side of the road? It's like, well, they walk into the business meeting for the month and they're like, the deaths from people

getting hit by double decker red buses just increased. I'm sorry. So in 2004 Oh Laurie means truck. That's what you're telling me that they're getting hit. I thought I thought Hugh Laurie

was smacking our delivery driver. I told them to stay away from Hugh Laurie. In 2014, they've only been working with three restaurants, but at this point they raise their first $2.75 million funding round from Index and

Hoxton Ventures. The money's going to... Just all Chinese opium money. As Yogi well knows, any great British fortune or venture capital that invests in a new startup, it was all either selling opium to the Chinese or literally ripping every factory out of India and bringing it back to London. Yeah. And bringing it back to London. Yeah, for what the United States benefits from the continent of Africa, the countries of India and China were physically raped for their resources, for the UK monarchy to exist.

Yeah. Fuck them Brits. There's a Michael Parenti lecture, and he made the point that, you know, at the turn of the 1800s, India was, by manufacturing, a wealthier country than the United Kingdom. They had more manufacturing base and they were systematically destroyed and looted. But had that not happened,

we could be doing a Deliveroo India episode. Yes, yes, precisely. At Deliveroo New Delhi. Or we could be recording this in India because our families moved there and got tech jobs. And Yogi's slumming it in Mumbai while we've got these massive apartments. That'd be great if it was like all the same except like Andy's dad founded Microsoft in India.

Or did Excel or whatever. So in 2015, after about two years in operation, Deliveroo is a unicorn, which is worth more than $600 million. It would take more than a year from there where the startup would reach their $1 billion in valuation, though. But at this point, Deliveroo has hundreds of cyclists riding around and taking people's foods, except these riders are not directly employed by the company. The startup is drawn into the emerging debate about worker pay and conditions in the gig economy. They're all their own CEOs. It's like, yeah,

they make less than minimum wage, but they own a small business. You want flexibility. Do you want to be your own boss? Do you want two pounds an hour? And to quote a story from will shoe when he first started his first four writers were i believe all pakistani and they were like in a coffee shop talking about like i don't know who gives a fuck and the owner came out and he just said that because he's indian sure but the owner came out and was just

like you guys got to get the fuck out of here like you have to leave and will she was like why he's like you just have you have to leave four four uh brown people and one chinese person in a uk coffee shop get the fuck out of my shop yeah and will she's reaction to this is kind of like he's mad and he's like but the writers are like this happens to us constantly which is an indicator of where will shoes at in the um hierarchy of um of class if you will because he's he's new to the idea that an owner would look at him and say you're not good enough to be here he seemed pretty shocked about this and i don't know if that comes from living a somewhat sheltered life in connecticut or um realizing that your company rests upon this exploitation and you're experiencing it directly.

He was like, I grew up rich. That counts as being white. I mean, it's a combination of things. I think that him being mad about it is like him being like, oh, this is a problem. But I mean, like, yeah, bro, you're in UK. What do you fucking expect well i think it's a mixture of like naivete plus not wanting not liking the fact that your wealth is predicated on this behavior yeah and i mean he he talks about in like all the interviews that

like restaurant owners are terribly rude to the delivery drivers and it's like yeah that's that is how that shit works he was like yeah the other night i was doing some deliveries and i was like hey it's taking a long time for me to get the food and they're kind of like yeah we don't fuck you where you'll get it when you get it and when i finally got the food i was like the food's kind of cold and they're like go deliver it buddy that's that's that's what you do and that's the you know that is the standard of what a slave economy builds yeah and it's an interesting thing. You see this all over the place where I think a lot of people know that these various delivery apps fuck over restaurants.

And so it's like, well, the restaurants are mad at delivery apps. They don't get to talk to the board of directors or the CEOs. They just get to see the delivery drivers. And that's like all throughout the economy. You're mad at Comcast. You don't get to talk to the board of directors you talk to the customer service rep in india so that's like in addition to all the other um trials and tribulations of the job you just have to kind of absorb this abuse this kind of like free floating hostility that all the exploitation created by these companies causes.

Yeah. And I think that some of this that we're discussing, the exploitation and the general class division that's going on here, Will Shue's co-founder, Greg Arlovsky, I think realizes this because in February of 2016, according to Business Insider, he quietly leaves the company. To work on the Nigel Farage Brexit campaign. No, he actually goes on to find, found an app called Peanut.

It's a meeting app for moms with Michelle Kennedy, which I believe is his wife. But the advertisement for Peanut is, it's like a pink peanut and it says peanut. And underneath it says, mommies comma meat. And it's like a pink peanut and it says peanut. And underneath it says, mommies, come a meet. And it's like for moms to meet one another. But this screams 100%.

I've created an app that is destroying a class of people. I need to help rich moms meet one another. Well, Business Insider insinuates that he left because of that. And by saying, well, it's weird for one of the founders to back out years and years, like right in the middle between when they first get funding and an IPO.

Right. It's even weirder for the one of the founders to not be the one connected to Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, that is true. In September 2016, they leave their cute kangaroo logo and they get this geometric abstract design

which looks like two peace fingers almost. I don't know. Yogi's showing it to us right now. That's a very Silicon Valley design. Like the pastel. It looks like a boss you kill in Rayman, the video game. It's still supposed to be a kangaroo, but it's

like a Picasso kangaroo. It's like that progressive photo of somebody drawing a painting as their schizophrenia gets worse and worse. So it starts at a kangaroo and then it's like two fingers by the end of it. You won't be shocked that at the same time, Mike Hudak,

former director of product management at Facebook, joins Deliveroo as its new chief technology officer. Are you doing a Saints thing or just the name Hudak you find funny? I just find the name funny. So I thought I would say Hudak like I'm saying Hudat

so that you would be like Mike who dat and then it would become a who's on first type situation see I thought you were doing the New Orleans Saints thing which they go who dat who dat there it's a very Saints Andy you don't even know the amount of faith Yogi had in you to assume you were making a sports

reference there I really was yeah if it's not the Mariners and even the Mariners unless they're winning I don't know anything about them. I wonder why they're losing then Andy.

We're five games back from the wild card. So let's not. It's because Lou Piniello won't come back to the Northwest. That's why. There's no good blow there.

So then in November 2016 a small union called IWGB targeted at gig economy workers demands new employment status in recognition from Deliveroo. In 2017, Deliveroo hires Thea Rogers, a former political advisor to ex-British Chancellor George Osborne as the business model grows. Basically, anytime they deal with problems, they're like, let's hire a person to solve this problem. And that person just goes, disappear and it kind of does they actually have to start committing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of capital just set it aside basically for the predictable legal challenges right based on like violation of labor laws of like the dozen

or so countries they're operating in right and we we should just kind of underline this for a second because I think a lot of our US listeners are aware of just like how Uber and Seamless and all these fucking apps work and Deliveroo in the UK is a very similar story where essentially these apps are trying

to, they make their money by destroying existing labor laws. In the US case, those labor laws date back to the New Deal. You know, 40-hour work week, minimum wage, X amount of benefits if you're an employee. And they get around all that

by just saying, they're not employees, they are independent contractors, or they are self-employed. And it's like, in every single sense, they are employees, but you just create this legal fiction and then you hire the former chancellor of the United Kingdom, chancellor of the Exchequer to lobby for you. So you just hire enough people to lobby for you and then throw enough money around and everybody closes their eyes and pretends, well, let's go along with this legal fiction so that we can undo all of the existing labor laws. And this point that you bring up leads to, in 2017, they unveiled something called Deliveroo Additions, which are these pop-up kitchens, which basically, let's say you live near a restaurant, but you're outside their delivery zone. You could set up a ghost kitchen, or as more racists would call it, dark kitchens, in another district to allow customers in that region to get delivery.

I like the name, a ghost kitchen. I just imagine a chef floating three feet above the ground with a bullet wound in their head like, I'm making pizza. Or it's just got that cummy slime from Ghostbusters. Slimer? No, no, the other stuff. The green one? The white stuff.

Ectoplasm? Yeah. Could you pick that plate up for me? My hand will actually go right through it. This is a i just picture a line cook is slimer sure that could be a thing well just because they're mexican steve wow steve how dare you yeah so for these ghost kitchens though deliver who does something unprecedented where they buy like uh what is called those containers called steven uh the shipping container shipping containers they buy shipping containers and setting up in parking lots and then put kitchens in them yeah so there's literally there's like a an array of like two by five of these shipping containers in this

documentary yogi and i watched where each one is each one is a restaurant but it's not like its own brand. It's like using the brand of a restaurant management company and then people select food set by them and then order it from these containerized restaurants

and it's easier. It's like more efficient for the delivery writers to come closer yeah yeah you know just say i was laughing because you know you say in my head i'm like well there's nothing sinister about that uh epstein connected billionaire and shipping containers what could he be moving but the point i want to make here or articulate is that this thing sean mentioning about the the workers rights being stripped away from them. I mean, when you have people that are working in a restaurant turned into people in a windowless box that is forcing them to make food from restaurants that they don't even own or operate, you're leading towards a reality where in the future, the of a restaurant is is very loose and the idea that a chef is working 20 hours because they don't have fucking protections if i own the place

is something that's a reality and it's worth mentioning that there's no there's no seating capacity or anything right no one actually goes there it's just the delivery riders who go there to pick up the food and from this like this like beehive of little and small restaurants and like you can't check the rating on like how cleanly the the the restaurant is on the app like it it robs you of the reality of knowing where your food is fucking coming from which leads us to to what we will close on uh in this episode the idea of the invisible mother that is funded by Silicon Valley

that's willing to fucking do everything for you so that you don't have to do anything and you can live like the people in Wall-E. But you haven't had real burrata until you've had shipping container burrata. So in 2017, they move into a giant London headquarters. And around this time is when our old friend Masayoshi-san and the Japanese giant SoftBank is interested in investing in Deliveroo.

But three days before the deal would materialize, Masayoshi-san decides to go with Uber Eats instead. So he fucking cock-teases him right there. It was a good call. Yeah. Another atrocity by the japanese against the chinese basically so in 2017 their valuation is pegged at 2 billion and it raises 385 million from investors including u.s fund giants fidelity and t-row price this meant delivery status is one of the most valuable startups in the uk and this goes back to he knows of these people or he knows who to go to during his time at sec morgan stanley and the hedge fund and he also so he he did the ipo from the london

stock exchange right which for like a tech startup like this is unusual part of that is because it's just cheaper yeah honestly um in 2017 in october they they the people that are neighbors from those shipping containers are complaining about the noise and the guardian would report that the startups didn't ask council permission to create its own pop-up kitchens so it's not even like they're like we're gonna set this thing up properly it's just like yeah we put all of your kitchens and a couple of windowless boxes in a parking lot and we don't see anything that's wrong with that i don't see what's what the problem is but that's the best pizzas in new haven but that's the silicon valley ethos yogi as you break things you just you set up your shipping containers full of slaves and then you just like innovate

and you disrupt the food industry and the labor laws i'm sure the the restaurant management company that he went to if this or someone went to if this idea was probably like they probably have some story where they pitched a shoe it's like i went into individual restaurants where people sat down and enjoyed themselves and there were labor laws and i'm like there's gotta be a better way yeah yeah well in 2017 they would win their legal battle against the union iwgb a tribunal rules that the startup doesn't need to regard its drivers as workers shoe tells insider there's lots of misunderstanding about workers rights among politicians and

journalists see these journalists think slave labor is a bad thing but the politicians and i who we know is actually good do you think like one of his like british founders like got their money from just their ancestors like stealing treasure out of the winter palace that'd be kind of like full circle if like you know a chinese man he gets his startup capital from like artifacts that his ancestors lost when the Winter Palace was looted or some shit. That could be. In June of 2019, Will Hsu will make an appearance after the Amazon investments. A Chinese American man.

Let me be clear. Taiwanese American. Taiwanese American. He would describe the firm as a strategic investor he goes on in that diary of ceo saying that they it took 16 to 18 months for the amazon investment to go through because of the uk regulations where they basically were like well we don't really give a fuck fucking regulations too many of them uh amazon owns about 16 while it was private and today it it's still about 11%. They're the biggest single shareholder of Deliveroo.

Interesting. They decided to pull out of Germany in 2019. From Deliveroo, they say that German consumers don't order takeaway as much as they did in the UK. But I believe it's from regulations from the German government saying, hey,

don't treat your workers like shit. One other factor in them leaving Germany, they said, I believe it's from regulations from the German government saying, hey, don't treat your workers like shit. One other factor in them leaving Germany, they said, I believe in their official statement for why they left Germany, they said, quote, the inability to provide sufficient quality of service, unquote. But it might also be related to a May 2017 Berlin workers' strike. You'll kind of notice the countries that they leave tend to be preceded by labor strikes. Yeah, I mean, that's...

And I like that, you know, like in this piece that I'm reading, that's a bit of fluff, they get to claim like, Germans don't like ordering food as much as everyone else does. When it's like, no, they just regarded their employees as humans, unlike you did. Yeah, we like to say food is delivered by slaves but we don't like to say they're not jews and this would be something that would follow suit in italy and spain steven yeah spain is a bit more explicit and they they said they were leaving because of

a proposed labor law that ended up passing saying you have to it's it's the same story as like with uber eats here right um you're the workers are essentially employees in the eyes of spanish courts sounds like communism yeah you have to pay the hourly wages for the full time that they're on the clock instead of just when they actually have an order right right because like they're it's so funny to me it's like yeah you know these laws that uh fdr passed in 1933 that's communism if you do it in 2021 when you watch documentaries of that are like like vice style documentaries showing what um the delivery workers are going through they they'll say like i'm on the i'm on the job for 12 hours a day and i made like 38 pounds or some shit and on a good day

mind you yeah yeah i'm like a decent day business wise and you think like wow so many orders and that's all they get well i, part of it is just waiting around for the restaurants in these like fucking shipping containers and shit. And you don't get paid for that. No. You only get paid when you're actually delivering. And that's why Wilshu can claim they only work, you know, five to seven hours and does the thing that, you know,

typical bootstrap Americans will do where it's like, why should a fast food worker be paid a fucking living wage? It's just a part-time job to them. And it's like with Deliveroo's case, the time in between orders is not time that's on Deliveroo's dime. So they're just waiting to work. And that's the fucking middle finger because they always talk about the flexibility and the freedom

and all this bullshit. And it's like, you're waiting around for money you're still at work you're just not being paid right and it's it's it contrasts that with his story about wearing like 11 hour days at morgan stanley when you know clearly a bunch of that was probably doing cocaine and right and you know posting on on Bloomberg terminal message boards. Waiting for 25 whoppers. Yeah, let's just pack like 200 of these ninja loans in. That's a AAA security. Time to do blow.

In September of 2020, the IPO rumors will occur. And as we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the IPO flops. And so in April 2020, Deliveroo would have to fire 300 people in layoffs during the pandemic. And then Deliveroo decides to go into delivering groceries because, you know, they fucking it's the pandemic. So the restaurants are shutting down. And if the restaurant's shutting down, then the riders don't have work. And so what can we deliver? Well, people still need to fucking shit and brush their teeth. So let's start delivering those groceries. In the interview I mentioned, the diary of CEO, he talks about that the restaurants were

shutting down in all of the European markets, but that the Asian markets, which they have locations in Dubai and a few other markets, they were not affected by COVID, which goes to show you that all of these labor wins that we're talking about in italy spain and germany are unfortunately not a full-time solution for every delivery rider because those that are in the fucking asian countries they weren't even able to get off for fucking covid like all the restaurants went to work the riders went to work they continued living as if they still had to operate in regular circumstances and that's and some of in some deliveries investor marketing documents they're like you know once once the actual lockdowns for the restaurants lift this will actually be an amazing opportunity because

people are still basically at home and they'll once the restaurants are operational people will get more deliveries as a as a percentage of like all the food they consume in march of 2021 deliver will go public but the stock would then collapse minutes after the market opens oh uh deliveryoo priced its IPO at the lower end of its range at 390 pence a share, giving it a 7.6 billion pound valuation and raising 1.5 pound billion. And the company tanked as much as 30%

in the first minutes of trading. Got to buy GameStop to get those kinds of numbers. This is down from a 10, like a $10.1 billion dollar valuation i like this burn that business side puts in one analyst aj bells russ molds branded the listing flopperoo which it's all right all right business insider that's fine that was pretty shitty for the retail investor i mean with any ipo uh the insiders will get out before the ultimate bottom of the

first day of the IPO. So if you're becoming happy because you think, oh, rich people lost money, well, they might not have. In fact, many of them did not. No, I think if we've learned one thing from this podcast, it's that the purpose of an IPO is to dump the stock on retail investors. Right, right. Yeah, so having IPO flops are somewhat common, but not to this magnitude, though. Right. So many consider it to be a failure, even for the insiders in this case. I just wanted to mention there was a quote that one banker described it as,

quote, the worst IPO in London's history, unquote. And that might be true financially, but I would just like to say morally, that's probably the East India Company. The South Sea Boat. Yeah, the South Sea Boat. Newton buys the dip on... Newton should have pulled.

Newton had paper hands he makes a tick tock about the super cycle this shit's gonna pick up in six months here's why we're about to gamma squeeze and so this is uh will shoes deliver

I mean it's a common story that's being taken apart by different companies all around the world right now. But at the end of the day, you have a man who wants his fat ass fed whenever he wants. And this leads to a global slave crew to deliver food whenever Will will shoe pleases and people that ride for deliveroo you know obviously there are dangerous conditions in delivering anything whether it be food or whatever but in 2000 i believe 17 from one of the documentaries steve and i watched one of the riders was a victim of an acid attack because you know that's a thing in the uk they throw acid in people's faces bruv we love throwing acid and like it's not like oh a writer got knocked by a car and got a couple of scrapes it's like

motherfuckers got acid in their face and then delivery was like oh that's nice did they get their order though they're like what what is the deal with uh the pizza because if it didn't get there on time we have to cut your pay and this is you know when you have silicon valley convenience you're paying for slavery that is as simple as that there is no middle ground of like well actually it's not that bad no it is that bad and this is when they're trying to break into the chav market right right and i certainly am one to poo-poo this but at the same time i understand the price of convenience i've had food delivered to me uh to a disgusting level as i open this episode with but uh if you can

rationalize slavery for this you can rationalize slavery for just about anything and um it's very very easy to look at wilshu and the delivery companyoo company and be like, it's not that bad. It's just a convenience company. It's like, no, no, no, it is. It leads to human beings being more dependent on corporate vultures to take care of all of their personal needs instead of feeding and cooking for yourself. Well, I think we're going to do, obviously in the future, we will do Uber and Seam seamless episodes and and several of those other you know app billionaires and i think this is actually probably the most important issue in american labor law right now again this is like they're literally

destroying the remnants of the new deal right in front of everybody's faces and guys like will shoot just figured out oh we can export that model to europe if we just you know spend enough money and we hire enough lobbyists and enough chancellors of the exchequers, we can do what they're doing in the United States and Europe and undo labor laws there. Yeah, but Biden said during a press conference that companies should pay their employees better,

which was probably the most revolutionary thing since the October Revolution. But they're not employees, Andy. They own their own business. They're self-employed. I love that this episode.

I do want to mention that the idea that Will's shoes in London, he's like, but I can do it in New York. Why can't I do it out here? It's the stupidest reasoning for wanting anything in life. It would be the equivalent of me being like, what, I can't jaywalk in front of Big Ben? I can jaywalk in New York. I don't see what the problem is out here. It is one

of the laziest ideas for why something should be more convenient somewhere else. It's going to take me three days to eat a boy's ass in the UK? Jeffrey Epstein has this done in 24 hours in New York. Yeah, if you jaywalk in front of Big Ben,

one of those guys with the fuzzy hats shoots you, and that's the only way to make them laugh is when they see you bleeding out in the street in front of Big Ben. Yeah, they do the Fortnite floss dance over your corpse. There's a couple of miscellaneous facts

I just have here just from the wikis, but it should be noted. As of 2020, Deliveroo has not yet made a profit. It loses money on every single delivery it makes. That's right. It remains a unicorn. Yes. But that's like, again, same story in the United States, Uber and such, they're just burning VC money until they can destroy the labor market and destroy labor law enough so that

they become established and can lock in profit. Well, they say the way they pitch to investors is like you're subsidizing it now so that we can basically just wear down the spirit of the worker until we can finally defeat them

in court and then we can raise the prices. And we should just mention like we did briefly mention but the safety of the drivers and kind of the need to like race the clock and all these fucking app things you know results in a lot of accidents and he was actually forced out of Taiwan

it seems over Deliveroo exited Taiwan in April 2020 and it does seem that it was because of safety regulations. The Taiwanese government said they had not applied for a business license to establish an automobile transportation enterprise

so they had to leave Taiwan over safety stuff. And in 2017 and 18 some Dutch journalists named Tim Hoffman, he investigated Deliveroo undercover, said that it forced the company in the Netherlands, forced its delivery staff to declare themselves self-employed rather than being employees of the company, which would give them the right to benefits such as sick pay. So, you know, it's like, again, this is, it's a complete legal fraud infection infection but they lobby so they get away with it yeah and it won't stop unless people say hey cut that shit out and i you know we rarely have a call action on this show um and i think that's a kind of a good thing but i don't know if this problem

is solved with any sort of like collective action i mean i hope it does but it's one of those things where these people seem to be locked into the positions that they are in. Well, it's definitely not solved by just waiting for Shu to be shocked by the conditions he sees in his own company. And then he just does some

mealy-maff thing about like, well, there should be like his solution that he sometimes talks about is there should be some sort of third employment class right right where you okay you are kind of an hourly employee but you still don't get it yeah his moral compass isn't fixed anytime soon i think i think it can be solved with collective action i just think that that collective action has to involve kalashnikovs yeah that, that's a fair point.

Yeah, so, you know, in addition to the other countries we've named, you know, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Taiwan, they had some legal issues in Australia. And every country where they have legal issues, it's the same story, which is like safety. And they're clearly lying about these people not being employees. They are misclassifying them

to avoid minimum wage and benefit laws. But I did want to mention, because we did tease it, the shitting in bags thing. We should mention there have been numerous complaints about Deliveroo's couriers poor hygiene practices such as some riders resorting

to defecating in Tesco bags while waiting for orders. Yeah, and it's like when you're on the clock in a shipping container, what else are you going to do? No public restrooms. Yeah. That's a problem here too. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think the shipping containers have that. No, there was like a porta potty situation. I didn't see that yet in the documentary. Yeah, but that's for the employees. Why can't they use the corner of the shipping container? That's not for the writers, I don't think. Probably not. They're not employees.

The future of delivery is rooted in a person's blood, sweat, and tears for you to get a new Tamagotchi. I don't know. It doesn't fucking matter what it is. But this issue with the delivery riders pooping in bags and stuff, we were seeing in the United States with Amazon's deliveries and them peeing in bottles

and if not worse. Seriously, they don't poop into a bag, though. Well, they've got boxes. They've got cardboard boxes. Am I just supposed to assume that the poop bags also exist? I think so. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. They definitely heard about the pee bottles. It's because we haven't brought Tesco to the United States yet. So they don't have the proper bags to poop in. I'm like 90% sure I read about Amazon drivers pooping in bags. I mean, I just assumed. I mean, this is a wild stretch, but I think they're running around so much that like their body just eats the calories of the poop that they would be.

I'm not saying that they never poop, but I think that like, because they walk like, no, they really do. They walk like 30 miles a day, basically. 10 to 15, yeah. Yeah, and so like, you know. There's a crisis. There's a total lack of public restrooms. I feel like Amazon will start saying that there should be more public restrooms.

Oh, yeah. No, the stuff squirting out your peepee and butthole problems at Amazon, they've shifted from the warehouses to the drivers.

That's right. And so that was like a whole big thing and that's where people are pooping in bags now is behind the wheel. Last thing I just

want to mention from Wikipedia. June 2021, Deliveroo announced a partnership with neighborhood watch united kingdom giving couriers the option to train and help spot the signs of everything from sexual harassment to domestic abuse and drug dealing so i really do hope none of them encounter the ceo because that would be my prime suspect yeah hi i saw a guy eating 25 burgers and fucking a child he's's the CEO of my company.

When can you be here? Well, you're not an employee, so I don't know if the police will show up anytime soon. It's pretty fucked up that not only are they paying them less than minimum wage, but they're training them to become snitches. Yeah. Thank you for joining us on our episode

on Will Shue and the company Deliveroo. Please let us know any details we've missed. We'll add it to our citations at grubstakersnet.com. Sorry, we'll add it to our citations at grubstakers.net. We want to, before we close out this episode- We should get that other domain though. grubstakers.net.com. .net.com.org.

.co.uk. Before we wrap things up here, we want to give a shout out to our fifth mic and producer of the program chris nill uh they are producing our show and they will be editing and guiding our social media content they've been working with us for quite some time now and uh give a shout out to chris yeah right yeah thank you chris and we're very happy to have chris on board because uh you the listener you might have noticed this thing we were doing where we did not release episodes for several weeks at a time. That was because we used to have to edit them and it's very annoying. But now we just we do the research, we record and Chris will help. We'll do the editing.

When Sean says we, I don't know if he can claim he was one to do a lot of the editing. But yes, we used to do the editing. I did up to 15% of the editing. That's high. Yeah, i did up to 15 of the editing that's high yeah that's i think a little high guy and sean did editing and he realized the appalling conditions yeah they were misclassifying me sean did about five percent of the editing and every single time he would complain about how the editing process needs improvements that he never noticed before. I was shitting in a Tesco bag, living in a shipping container. It's terrible.

And Sean McCarthy and myself will be doing stand-up in Seattle and Portland. We'll be in Portland on September 16th at the Siren Theater and at the Rendezvous September 17th and 18th. So come out and check out those shows as well as some other dates we'll be posting until now and then. They will be, I predict, both a hoot and a holler.

Tickets not on sale yet, but we'll post them on the Grubstakers Twitter if you live in Seattle or Portland. And if you happen to live on the East Coast and you are maybe driving distance from New York City and you would like to see us live or you maybe know a venue or whatever, just hit us up.

We might, in the not-too-distant future, organize some sort of East Coast tour. Yeah, as long as society doesn't collapse once again, we should be performing live in the near future. Exactly. We have dates in September in Seattle and Portland, but we do not know if they will be shut down by that time. So tentatively, you can see Yogi and I there. And with that,

this has been Grubstakers. My name's Yogi Pollywool. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening and check out our Patreon. And thank you, Chris. Yep. Bye. Did you guys like this batch of random beers? Or was the other batch of random beers better

you know i i always enjoy a free beer i i would never look a gift horse in the mouth they're not free technically well yes yeah we are paying for that it is sort of funny because like i think of the the grub stakers account is like my expense account but it's like no i actually own the company coming out of my bottom line. Right, right.