Radiolab - Gigaverse

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

A pizzeria owner in Kansas realizes that DoorDash is hijacking his pizzas. A Lyft driver conquers the streets of San Francisco until he unwittingly puts his family in danger. A Shipt shopper in Denton, Texas tries to crack the code of the delivery app that is slashing his pay. This week, Host Latif Nasser, Producer Becca Bressler, and Philosophy Professor Barry Lam dive into the ins and outs of a new and growing part of our world: the gig economy. Special thanks to, Julie Wernau, Drew Ambrogi, David Condos, David Pickerell, Cory Doctorow, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Coby McDonald, Bret Jaspers, Peter Haden, Bill Pollock, Tanya Chawla, and Mateo Schimpf. Episode Credits: Reported by Becca Bressler, Latif Nasser, and Barry LamProduced by Becca Bressler, Eli Cohen, and Sindhu Gnanasambandan.Original music and sound design contributed by Jeremy Bloom and Becca Bressler.Mixing help from Arianne Wack Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton Edited by Pat Walters CITATIONSArticles:Subscribe to Ranjan Roy's newsletter, Margins, here. Jeffrey’s story was originally reported by Lauren Smiley for WIRED. Check out her piece for an even more in-depth look at his life as a gig driver. Audio:Check out Barry Lam’s podcast Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas.  Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail].   Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

Quick heads up, this episode does contain some profanity, which is not bleeped. Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC.

I'm Luthe Vanosser. I'm Lula Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.

Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. college, eventually came back to Kansas and decided he wanted to start his own business. Wasn't sure exactly what was any realized. Wait a second, maybe I can bring to Kansas the thing I love most about New York, which was an authentic New York slice. Pizza.

That was one of the first things I missed. I kept asking myself why does this not exist here? Why does this not exist here? I mean, there are a couple places in Kansas City, but it's not widespread. And so he's like, I'm gonna start a Pizzeria. Okay. It's just called A.J.'s NYPizzeria. And Manhattan Kansas is where I opened my first one.

It's actually what I live now. Manhattan, Kansas? Yeah, Manhattan, Pizzeria, Manhattan, Kansas. Our motto at the beginning was from the big apple to the little apple. Oh, that's cute. Is it actually called the little apple or you made that up? Yes, no, it's called the little apple.

Amazing. And he loves it. And his customers love it. And he's like serving up great pizza and they are all enjoying it. Yeah. Okay, so now, cut to, yeah, this is about three years ago now. It's Friday night. and he gets a call From a customer saying that the pizza that they got was wrong

They were delivered to different pizzas and they ordered but the thing is his restaurant doesn't do delivery It's dine in and take out only he decided not to do delivery for this very reason to preserve the quality of his pizza So it's a busy Friday night. I'm trying to figure out what's going on I did not do delivery for this very reason to preserve the quality of his pizza. So... It's a busy Friday night. I'm trying to figure out what's going on, or slammed. I can't figure out who they got it delivered from, be I don't know how to fix it,

because I mean, we can't just deliver a pizza. So later that night, I got their number, call them back and then figured out exactly what happened. What he finds out is that this person ordered the pizza through Dordash. Now, Adam didn't have any deal with Dordash. He hadn't even heard of them at that point, but he discovered that if you went to the Dordash app or even just googled the restaurant, and at the time Dordash would call in the order, have someone go get it.

No Dordash jacket, nothing like that. So Adam had no clue. But then the customer would get the wrong pizza and think it was Adam's fault. And when he saw all the pieces, when he put it all together, he was pissed. When you're building a brand, when you're the new restaurant,

or you're the new pizza restaurant, you want to present your pizza in the best possible way. When you're building a brand, when you're the new restaurant, or you're the new pizza restaurant, you wanna present your pizza in the best possible way. Did you feel like it was almost like your pizzas are being hijacked or something? It's been stolen. So first he tries to just get his business off of the app. That was the first thing, and there's no easy way to do that.

And when that didn't work, he basically just is like, okay, let me order a pizza myself and just see what exactly way to do that. And when that didn't work, he basically just is like, okay, let me order a pizza myself and just see what exactly is happening. Okay. So he goes on to DoorDash to order a specialty pizza, but when he's there, he notices something weird, which is that- The pizza is no made 23.99 and they are charging 15.99.

What? The customer is paying less than what we're actually charging. So that's really weird, right? So he's like, we're really weird. They're charging $15.99. What? The customers paying less than what we're actually charging. So that's really weird, right? So he's like, way too weird. They're charging less, $8 less for a pizza. So then he was like, wait a second, are they ripping us off? Are they paying us less?

But then he looked in his, you know, his account books and he was like, no, no, they're not shorting us. They're just paying more than they're charging, which does not make sense. So I didn't understand what was going on at all. And then that's when I was chatting with Ron John. And so we'd kinda banter back and forth on G-Chat

because he's completely confused at first. He starts chatting with his friend Ron John, Ron John Roy, who was actually a roommate of Adams when he was in New York. Yep, so I used to work in trading, 2002 to 2009. Went to the financial times, I was working on the business side for a couple of years, went out, started a startup.

He's also an expert in all things business. I actually found this story in his newsletter, super fun newsletter about business technology called margins. So anyway, so Adam reaches out to Ranjan on G-Chat to see if he understood what was going on here. Again, the business model is scrape a bunch of menus, put them on your platform. And Ron John was like, they probably just have an algorithm that scrapes menus and prices off the internet. You're not going to invest the time to have someone actually validating every single price there.

I bet it just scraped the menu wrong. It was just literally misread. Literally a misread thing. But because this company is so enormous, DoorDash, they haven't even noticed. It doesn't even matter. It doesn't even matter to them. It's like not even a rounding error, you know? Okay.

Wow. Yeah. But whatever the reason for the pricing error, the bigger thing that Ron John thought was, this is where the arbitrage comes in. All of a sudden I get on a G-chat of the arbitrage, which I didn't even know what arbitrage is. Yeah, say it again with the definition is. So arbitrage is buying and selling an asset

at the exact same time and achieving a profit with no risk. It's a dealer trade that's just instant free money. And finance, it's kind of this magical goal that people are always aspiring to. So Rangian is like, oh my God. This is like, we found this perfect glitch in the matrix. When I saw, buy for 16, sell for 24 at the exact same time, it seems like a no brainer, right?

So Rangian is like, jump on this. Okay. Here's what you do. You order 10 pizzas, pay Dordash $160, and then Dordash goes to your restaurant and pays you $240, and then those pizzas, you can just take, eat. Eat them, throw them out, doesn't matter. As long as you keep buying them, you keep making money. Rodron came up with that and we just started doing that.

He's already sending pizzas to his wife, his friends. Then Ron John has this kind of, he's like, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. We can't even take this to another level. What if we just have a box with dough? Do we even need a pizza? Because dough at that point is effectively costless. The driver will still hold something

and the driver doesn't really carry their way. So his cost now is even going down. I'm sweet, this is so funny. He's basically just ordering dough balls. And he's like a minting money, right? Yeah, yeah. And Ron John is like, okay, here's what we do now. I sitting here in New York, I'm joking with him.

I'm like, fire all your employees. Oh my God. Just basically become a do-ball factory. Wow. Like, there's no need to do anything else. Your top line revenue is just gonna explode and then you go to Domino's and say, look at this business, it's incredible.

You know, like, that is the Silicon Valley way of doing business. I mean, this is basically the game that Dordash is playing. Like, so many of these Silicon Valley startups, it doesn't matter if you're actually making anything as long as it looks like you're growing and you're a good investment.

So, let's just beat of it their own game. I mean, it is easy to like just see DoorDash as the bad guy. Yeah. Is that how you see it? Well, to me, it's not the bad guy necessarily. It's just like the emperor has no clothes. It's a skyscraper built on sand basically. Like, and it's just, it's the financial logic of it. It doesn't make sense, and it's just, it's just, the financial logic of it.

It doesn't make sense, and it's unclear whether it'll ever make sense. But aren't they, does it truly not make sense? Are they not making, like, so few of these giant companies, like Uber and so few of them actually make any profit? And according to Ron John, like this is how the system is designed to work. That is actually the business model that we're going to lose money per transaction

in order to grow our overall usage and get people used to it. That's it. And to hear Ron John tell it, like even a glitch, like the one at Adams Pizza Place, even that sort of feeds the system. Yeah, yeah. A regional sales manager of the Midwest

could go to his boss and be like, look, I am killing it in Kansas right now. We're growing, you know, like 40% year over year, then they are gonna go back to their investors, they're gonna go back to their investors, and it could actually weirdly work out for everyone. But how could, like, like, how could this be so ridiculous? Like all these towering colossus companies around us

are actually all throwing stacks of money out the window. It feels like a way. But the idea, the unspoken part of the strategy is it's monopoly kind of ingrained the customer behavior where everyone is just used to taking an Uber, ordering on DoorDash and then once you own that entire value chain, the customer, the supplier, which would be the restaurant or the Uber driver, you get to set the price. Hmm. I mean, this way of doing business is everywhere, right?

I mean, and it's a relatively recent thing, but now rides, food delivery, apps where you get your groceries or whatever you want, delivered to your door. Millions of people use these apps every day, millions of people work for them, but the rules of the road for these businesses and these workers are just all sort of up in the air. So today in Radio Lab, we're getting into the gig game. We've got several different stories from different perspectives about what exactly as customers or business owners or drivers, we're getting sucked into.

And who's really playing who? Well, before we get going, I mean, how does Adam's story end? Once he found that dobal vulnerability, is he just exploiting it and rolling in the dough? Well, no, okay, so Adam is basically like, look, I'm, I don't care about any of that. I mean, Ronson loved it. Yeah.

He was all in this. He's like, this is soft baked money, and I just kind of, all right, Ronson, calm down. We're not, we're not, you know, running a major arbitrage out of this little pizza shop. I've got pizza places for Runman, so I'm cool, he's at it. So I'm not going to send 500 pizzas to my house. He decided he just wanted to actually run his actual business that sends actual pizzas to actual people with actual mouths. You know, even if it wasn't easy money. Go Adam. Resists, I'd agreed. But what he does do is like, so if I had to spend 30 minutes on the phone doing with an issue with this

Then that is when I would say okay, I'm sending myself to inboxes It was kind of a justification Got it every time he gets a call from a customer being like doordash screwed up my order He's like okay doing one Doble delivery Like just as a kind of as a kind of like you've- Cosmic retribution. Yeah.

It was one of those kind of, if they're going to use strong arm tactics on me, I feel like I should be able to use strong arm tactics on them. Have they fixed it all now or still there? So it went away after two months. We found out after the fact that this is a demand test. So what they say is we put your restaurant on our website. You were ordered X amount of times.

This is why you should partner with us. So that's what it was. It was kind of like a, they wanted to prove how good they are before they approached you to actually partner with you. Yeah. We should say DoorDash told us that they do not do this anymore, that as of 2020, everyone on the platform is there with consent, including...

No, it's where we're partnered with them. Adam. Yeah. Wait, really? Yeah. He gave it. I mean, it seems like these days, if you're gonna run a restaurant, it's almost impossible, not to.

But when we come back, we'll meet some people from the other side of the app. Who are pushing back? I should just start by how I can kind of go to the bathroom. Let's do it. Okay, let me take a sip of water. And now a story from producer, Becca Bressler. I should just start by how I can kind of go to the... Lutthiff. Radio lab. Okay, let me take a sip of water. And now a story from producer, Becca Bressler. Okay. I mean, I guess it kind of starts with you, Lutthiff, with your piece of story.

You were the sort of original door-tash ambassador at the show. I'm the door-to-door-dash, you might say. I knew Dash through it. Yeah. I mean, your story, I think in general, it got me thinking, I've always kind of thought about door dash a little bit because I actually use door dash quite a bit. And like the fact that all you have to do

is pull out your phone and press like three buttons to have food show up at your door is pretty amazing. And on the one hand, it feels kind of like magic. On the other, obviously, this incredible thing happens because there are people on the other side of the app and they're out there busting their asses, doing this work. And I realized I don't actually know anything about what it's like to do that work.

But there's actually the street corner near my apartment. Ba, ba, ba, ba. Okay, we're a bunch of delivery guys. Hang out. I'm gonna put my headphones on. And so a couple months back, I grabbed a mic and walked over there. Could I ask you a few questions? Yes.

Is that okay? To see what they had to say about what it's like to do this job. How long have you been doing pickup orders for DoorDash? Like a... Like ear. Yeah. Like is this your hotspot sort of?

You can say like that. So I was standing there talking to this guy, Jewel, and he was just staring down at his phone the whole time. And every 10 seconds or so, he would get these things. Like this one. And when it would ping, it was like this order that popped up on his phone. It had, you know, the restaurant where it was going.

And how much it would pay. Okay, so you're going to take this one? No, no, I don't accept this one, because it's small. And he's like, not too small, probably not gonna be a good tip. Who are you gonna do you wanna take this one? No, no, it's going like too far. Oh, too far. Yeah.

And so like, I don't know, it was like standing there and it almost looked like he was using a dating app. Like he was using Tinder and just like going like, no, no, no. And it's his job, like he's doing his job, but it did feel like he was playing a game. And there were dozens of people just doing the same thing. See a guy with a green backpack, which I think maybe means insta-cart.

There was grub hub. Oh, it's an Uber Eats bag. And I started, like when you see the scale of it, I just started thinking about this whole system, where whenever any of us presses a couple buttons on our phone, there are millions of people all around getting these things, and then doing these calculations on the fly,

deciding whether they're gonna take it. No, yeah, I do this one. Oh, you'll accept it. How much is it for? It's nine-quadipit. And I just started to wonder what it's like to have this constant pinging in a sense, like, be your boss.

Mm-hmm. And to really have to play a game for your job. And as I was talking to drivers and honestly just reading everything that I could find, I came across this story about a guy that answered these questions in a pretty shocking way. I hate driving. I hate it. I hate driving. Period. I did not want to learn how to drive. So his name is Jeffrey Fung. Mm-hmm. And he is a former gig driver. So where should we start this? The year probably I would say 2012. That would probably be a good point. So 2012, Jeffrey was a student at City College of San Francisco studying philosophy. He didn't have good grades

and so we ended up dropping out. And at that point, I did not have an answer to what's next or what else. He didn't have a job lined up. And so he decided to fly home to visit his parents. I took a trip back to Beijing where my dad, mommy, that was. To regroup and figure out what's next for him, but also while he was out there. I met my now wife there in Beijing. He fell in love. So we decided to get married. So he gets married, it comes back to San Francisco. And does he come back?

He comes back with his wife? No, he doesn't come back with his wife. So that's the thing. So he needs to get his wife would need a visa to be able to come over to the United States. And for reasons I don't totally understand, he needed around $50,000 to make that happen. Okay. And I was sort of like shit.

I was down to like maybe a few thousand dollar in my name. And he just had no idea what kind of job he should even be looking for. But just on one random morning, I was at one street corner of the Union Square in San Francisco, and I saw a car with this giant pink mustache. I'm like, huh.

What is Susan G. Coleman breast cancer foundation up to? This is something new. But he does Google pink mustache. I was like, oh. And he learns about lift. It's driving people for money. I was like, well, I know how to drive and I live in services go for, you know, at least over 10 years now. And maybe I could do this to make a little money to seem like it could be an easy temporary fix to his money problems. And one of the great

things about this job for Jeffrey in particular, is that it's super flexible. So if he wants to work like a ton of hours for a few months and then take a couple weeks off to go visit his wife in China, he can do that. I'm my own boss. So he just downloaded the app, signed up, he doesn't have to do any interviews or anything like that. But this job would end up becoming like a defining part of who he was and sort of take over

his life. Do you remember like your first day on the job? I do, I do. I remember I was doing having cold sweats, picking up people, because I was very mess up on the app. But within a few days, I'm like, okay, I could do this. I could do this. And he started doing it pretty much every day.

Like a day job. And so every morning, he'd hop in his car, turn on the phone, the app would ping him with a ride. And in the beginning, he figured, okay, best way to make money is just accept every ride. Right. Only problem was... Sometimes really pays really well, sometimes it doesn't. The pay on any given day was all over the place. Yeah. Because when a ride shows up on the app... You have 15 seconds to accept it. But it doesn't tell you where the person is going until after you accept it.

Like it could take you downtown, it could take you somewhere totally outside the city. Where there's no other rise for you to have, to be had for the next 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, even an hour. You also don't know how much money you're gonna make until after you drop them off. Whoa.

So each time Jeffrey hits accept, it was like a slot machine, like pulls, push, what do you do with a pull pull yeah these hidden little like slot machine pulls where you don't know what's gonna come out of it until you finish it you're playing your luck right so after doing this for a while I was sort of like shit he's like who knows how long this could take to get my wife over here. Oh, man. But then, his fortune kind of changes when he finds out about this crew.

Jeffrey found out that there is a parking lot in San Francisco at a shopping center where lift drivers kind of meet up on their lighter hours of the day or. So this Lauren Smiley, she wrote about Jeffrey for wired and she says this motley crew of guys. The Jim rats, the vapors, the DJs, there were a couple people who had spin tunes out of the back hatch of their car. And a lot of

these guys have been driving since the early days of lift. And when Jeffrey showed up and was talking to these guys, they were like, dude, you can't just accept every ride. You got to learn how to play the game. What does that mean? It means a couple of things. One, pay attention to the incentives that the app gives you, so if you do a certain number of rides, you can get a bonus. Okay.

Also, they told him like, you have to go out and get the good rides. So early morning, head to the airport, because those are the money makers. Pro tip, 2 a.m. Go to club booty. So early morning, head to the airport because those are the money makers. Pro tip, 2 a.m. Go to club booty. There's a club called booty. Yeah, there is.

I've been there, it's awesome. But the main thing that people are talking about in this parking lot is The big magic dollar called the prime time. What's prime time? So if you're a driver and you open up your app, you'll see some part of the city highlight an impank, and that just basically means a bunch of people are requesting rides over there.

And so the lift app is just saying like, hello, we need you, a lot of people over here come and grab a ride. And if you do, you could double your money. Boom. 200% Primetime. Oh, cool. Yeah. So Jeffrey starts chasing the prime times.

So say there's a game. The Giants got the win last night. A baseball game. Giants. Ready to go tonight to try and take a three game, so Julie. That's a money-making bet. People will be there. So Jeffrey would be in the car looking on his phone.

He's looking at road closures. And what are the police going to start setting up barricades, like setting up in terms of where we can't get to. Maybe he's got a map of the stadium looking at where the exits are. Where it naturally people will congregate, find a score right. And then he'd go check on the game. We'll head to the seventh thing.

He's like, all right, okay, seventh inning, okay, all right, let's start positioning ourselves. Put himself in exactly the right spot. The curve ball puts him away. And the Giants have won it. And then a ride comes in. Tap to accept. Take up the passenger. Go Jeffree.

Drop them off. Oh fuck yeah. If you can double back, you can get another one. Boom. I feel like I just unlocked the secret vault level where I get the big load of cash. Yeah. The rewards is instant. It makes you feel really good. And he's raking it in. Oh yeah, yeah. Over and over again. Games, concerts. Boom. He started making $1,000 a week. Boom.

starts boom. He started making a thousand dollars a week. Then 2000 a week. Then $2,500 a week. That'd be like 130K a year, by the way. Wow. Not to be bragging about it, but there's a bit of a satisfaction in knowing that I am capable of doing something just out of driving and making that money at the end of the day. So Jeffrey's feeling pretty good. He takes a little time off and flies home to China. For Chinese New Year, the Christmas of Asia.

You know, to spend time with his family, his parents, his wife, and their new baby. Son. And while he was there, he heard from some friends that lift was starting to make some changes. They lowered the per mile pay as well as per minute pay. We were all looking at the number, we were like, oh, that's bad. Dropping a bomb on us and letting basically just say, well, here you go, guys, go fuck yourself. This is Jeffrey on a podcast he did with some driver friends in January 2016. It was just $5 right after $5 right.

And if I get anything above $5, it involved the trip across the entire city. Essentially, it made it unprofitable to drive people to drive lift at all. I mean, at this point, I'm just looking for my exit strategy from ride share because a bunch of Jeffrey's driver friends got out of the lift game. But Jeffrey decides to keep driving. Even though he's figuring it's unprofitable, no? Yeah, well, he sort of didn't know what else to do, but it was also like a new puzzle.

You know, a new game to be. That's kind of like the drug that kept me in, too. It was just like he leveled up. Your brain starts thinking, your pattern of thinking started to become like, okay, you want to go out and grab that money. So how do you do that? Well, for lack of a better word, be kind of a bastard driver. For example, like,

He'd accept a ride and I would go to the pickup spot, tap that arrive, see the destination. If I don't like where I'm going, I just drive off, leave the passenger hanging. And then go chase a better ride. Exactly. If you can get the passenger to cancel the ride, it doesn't hurt your acceptance rating. Okay, so by this time he's driving with Uber 2 and with Uber there was this hack that he did with the app.

If you put your phone into airplane mode and dropped off the network, dropped off the app. Again Lauren Smiley. You could accept the ride and then it would show to you where that ride was going. And then if it was a bad ride, you could just cancel the ride and then hop back onto the network. And it was like it never happened.

Clever. And Jeffery's new set of moves were paying off. Oh yeah, oh yeah, it's like, I'm making more money than before. Holy cow. Damn. Yeah, probably not more than his peak back in the day, but he was able to keep making it work even after the fair cuts.

And for Jeffrey, it felt like he had beaten the next level of the game. To be able to figure out these hacks, you're a maverick. And there were times that this was all he could think about. Like he would be at dinner with his friends. I would have my apples. He's just constantly looking down on his phone. You would check what's the incentive, what's the bonus, is there a prime time?

He'd become obsessed. So they're like, damage of freaking turn your phones off, dude, just turn it off. It's like, there's their rides, man. Yeah. They're rides. Okay, so we're gonna fast forward a bit. It's 2020.

Okay. He saved a bunch of money and with a little help from his parents, his family comes over from China, his wife and now one, two more kids, so family of five. The house was not exactly ready. It has sort of, it still had a kind of a bachelor pet kind of thing. But they moved in. They came over and said, I'm always like, what? You'd live like this?

You know, like me. But anyway, this dream that he's had for years has finally come together. Yeah. Now, it wasn't long after they came over that the pandemic hit. So at this point, nobody's taking rides, but now he's got a family to support. So he hops over to food delivery. You have Uber Eats, you have DoorDash, Postmates, you have GrubHub. Which for Jeffrey felt like a new game? Your criteria for taking order where I'm going to end up. Is there going to be restaurant there?

I can take order back. Second, the restaurant is their food usually ready. Are there on time? He figured this one out pretty quickly. But about a year into the pandemic, something happened that for Jeffrey sort of turn the whole game job like his whole life upside down. Yeah. It was Saturday, in February of 2021. It was a sunny day.

Jeffrey's at home with his family in the late afternoon. And his wife wanted to stay home and tutor their eldest son, online Zoom lesson for schoolwork. So he had to figure out something to do with the other two kids and he checks his phone. That's when I say, you know what? I'm gonna go do dinner. Go for the dinner run.

So we grabbed the two kids, got him strapped in. Turned on Shrek too. And turns on his door dash at and heads out there. It was kind of a cold weekend, good night for takeout. He's doing pretty well. Lots of orders, it's getting pretty late, dark out and this order was kind of a cold weekend. Good night for takeout. He's doing pretty well. Loss of orders, it's getting pretty late. Dark out, and this order comes in from a pizza place. Tap to accept.

He heads over, hops out of the car, grabs the pizza. Pop back in, and then I go to the destination. To an apartment building. And I deliver. So we pulled up to the building. Put the car in the driveway of the apartment building. That's my strategy for now getting ticketed or getting honked at. He's going to be super quick. No more than five minutes, right? So I knew

super quick I'd kept the engine running instead of turning the car off. Because in that way, I don't disrupt the DVD playing in the background for the kids. So he goes into the apartment building, drops off the food, comes out. I see a man in my car. He's in the driver's seat who was sitting in my seat. Or something like, what the fuck? This guy's trying to jack my car, shit, my kids inside. So I've ran up to the car, opened my car door, I yelled at him, get out, get the fuck out.

Jeffrey grabs the guy's arm and tries to drag him out of the car. We struggled, but man, I couldn't move him. The guy cuts his losses, jumps out of the car, over Jeffrey, and grab my phone. He's seeing this guy running off of his phone. He's everything. The thing that has ruled his life for the last seven years, the thing that had given him a job,

had allowed him to bring his family over, and set up his life for the last seven years. The thing that had given him a job, had allowed him to bring his family over and set up this life for himself that he wanted for years. And he thinks to himself, he doesn't seem too fast. He checked on his kids in the back seat, made sure they were okay. And I just ran.

I ran after him for my phone. So there is a getaway car. The guy he's chasing jumps into the car and Jeffrey, he catches up to the car. Rabs, the passenger door handles. I held onto it, ran with it for a little bit. Opens the door. And hops into the passenger seat

to actually ride shotgun. And he just started screaming at them. Oh yeah. I mean, what do you do know someone's literally in your car screaming at you. They gave me a phone back and they let me out of the car. So now he's about two blocks away from his car and he starts hustling back. I ran and walked, ran and walked as much as I as with as much as strength as I could muster. I got back, it was gone. The car was gone. They were gone. Oh my God. I scream as loud as I can into the night so you help. And the same time, dialing now on what?

Right away, breaking news coming out of San Francisco tonight, an amber alert has just been issued for two small children. So the police showed up and a news crew showed up. We're on absolute nightmare situation out here for that father and his two children who he says, and Jeffrey stood in front of the camera and... I pleaded, I try to plead it to the car thief. I just want my kids back. I know times are hard if you're gonna resort to stealing.

That's one thing. But please don't hurt my kids. I know times are hard if you're going to resort to stealing, that's one thing. But please don't hurt my kids. Let them return safely back to me and my wife, please. Jeffrey just waited there on that sidewalk in front of that apartment building, calling everyone, calling family, calling friends, looking at his phone, reading alerts. I was there for four and a half hours. Oh my God.

And then it was near 1 a.m. He gets a call from the police. They found them. They found the kids. His car was abandoned in someone's driveway. It was in a random house, and his kids were safe in the back seat. When they reformed me, it was relief. You will, I will feel relief, and his kids were safe in the back seat. When they were informed me it was relief.

You will, I will feel relief and finally they were found and at least they're safe and I can just, to start dealing with it. I can allow myself to feel at that moment from that point forward and deal with the aftermath. By the time I got home, they were sleeping at home. I didn't get home until morning. I was exhausted.

What was that next day like for you and your family? Like, how did you talk about it with them? That I prefer not to address. Okay. He did at least tell me about this call he got from a friend. He made me promise him to really take a break for my family. Just stop for a while and just recuperate.

But later that day, you know, the day after this whole disaster, he opened up his phone and he looked at the DoorDash app. I did. I did because the bonus, the bonus was super high. I mean, what was it? It's like $4 extra per order. Did you go out there?

No, I didn't go. I just out of habit, I checked. Out of addiction, I checked. But no, I didn't do anything. So after, I mean, after hearing this whole story and talking to Jeffrey about what happened, what does it leave you thinking? Yeah. I mean, I think about Jeffrey pretty much every time I use DoorDash, which I do a lot, I still use DoorDash a lot. And like with Jeffrey, I think about that moment

when he checked the app the day after his kids were taken. Yeah. And I see him doing a thing that he's done for seven years, which is picking up his phone and checking an app at any time of day. If he's sitting with friends at dinner or if, you know, it's a Saturday, but there's a big event going on.

And, you know, one of the benefits of this job is like the flexibility. You get to do this whenever you want, but with Jeffrey, that notion of flexibility is so complicated. I mean, one, he really needs the money, okay? Two, there are all these incentives built into the app that make it really hard to not drive when the company wants you to drive. There's the thrill of it, the gaming-ness of it that keeps you going back to that app. So yes, there's flexibility. But when you look at Jeffrey and you look at all of these factors, for him, and I'm sure

plenty of other drivers who really need the money, the fact that you can do it anytime means that you end up doing it all the time, even when you'd be maybe better off not. Thank you, Becca. Yeah, thanks, Becca. Sure, and big thanks to Lauren Smiley, her wired piece on Jeffrey was totally amazing and that's actually where I learned

about Jeffrey's story. We'll be back in a second with another look at the giga verse. Lulu. Lutth. Radio lab. Okay, so we just heard a story about a guy who figured out how to play this gig economy game really well, decoded the rules, found loopholes, exploited them, and how that sort of ran them into the ground. Mm-hmm. Next up.

Oh my God, Barry Lamb. Oh, Miller. We have a story from Philosophy Professor and Fellow Podcasts or Barry Lamb. Alongside once again, Hey! Producer Becca Bressler. And this one's about a group of people

at one of these companies in a moment when the rug, in this case, the rules, was sort of pulled out from under them. Oh, okay. And it starts. Have you ever had someone stick a mic in your face before with this one guy? I've had a camera in my face, but not a microphone. Named Willie.

My name is Willie Sulease, and I am a gig worker based in Ditton, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas. So what brought you to the gig economy to begin with? Basically, what ended up happening was... Willie had a job as a construction worker, but when he was trying to get himself a new roofers license, he found himself without work. I ended up having to figure out a way to make money,

make ends meet here, and gig work provided a very low bar of entry for me. And so I decided to enter the gate economy. He first tried shopping with Instacar, but I quickly, probably within the month, gravitated towards ship. Hi, we're ship. Then moved to this newer app called ship. We're grocery delivery service, but actually with the service part.

It's delivery service owned by Target, where customers place an order on the shipped app. And a shopper like Willie will go to the store, grab the items, and deliver them. I'm having someone with the service that they really need. I think ships just delivered our dog food. And what Willie loved about shipped, compared to Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, or any of the other delivery service apps,

is that instead of having a complicated algorithm deciding how much you'd get paid, shipped paid its workers this one simple flat percentage fee. Yeah, at the time, it was 7.5% plus $5. 7.5% of the total order cost plus a $5 base fare. So initially, I was really happy. I was making roughly between 18 to $25 an hour depending on the day.

Like I really enjoyed it and the pay was equally as good. Okay, so this sounds good. This sounds great. Ships sounds kind of cool. Everybody's happy. Right. But then a few months into using the app. So now we're at January 2020.

Will he scroll through Facebook? And he sees that a bunch of ship shoppers are posting on the official ship shopper page. They were just kind of rumblings of, this pay change isn't good, or this pay change has just happened overnight and we weren't expecting it. And those complaints were coming from two cities

in particular, Calabasue, Michigan, and San Antonio, Texas. Ship shoppers in those cities weren't getting paid that flat fee anymore. In fact, they couldn't tell why they were getting paid, what they were getting paid. We were all like, what is going on? Like, why is this paying this, and this is paying this? And I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to it anymore.

This is a shopper we'll call Heidi, because she doesn't want to use her real name. I mean, you could no rhyme or reason to it anymore. This is a shopper we'll call Heidi, because she doesn't want to use her real name. I mean, you could sit there and rack your brain for hours, days, weeks, and you're not going to make sense of it. So Heidi was an insurance agent full time. And when she had her third kid, she wanted more flexibility in her life, so she started shopping for shipped. And she loved shipped for the same reason Willie did.

It was simple. It was very transparent. But then it changed. Um, I mean, in my head, I've still got that old pay model. And I'm thinking this would have paid X amount of dollars. And now it's paying, wait, hold on, let me do the math. You know, are there, are there days I'm like, how am I going to get milk and dog food and dinner for my family? Yep, absolutely. And so I was really concerned, is that pay change going to happen here in Dallas as well? Or is it going to not affect me at all? What's going to happen because it's coming up?

So Willie's sitting in Texas trying to figure out if the pay change is going to affect him. But as he talks to more and more people on Facebook time I talked to over 650 people Hearing all these stories she has three children and she didn't know how she was gonna be able to feed them eventually He's like somebody has to do something somebody has to speak out But first he had to figure out what actually changed like how much less were people making in this new pay model So what did you call it? We called it the ship list. Made a Facebook group.

Is that a pun? It is, it's a pun. And then I used that Facebook group as a way to communicate with other shoppers that we needed information. We needed data. Asked people in the group to share the data from each of their orders. People were putting screenshots of what the order pay was like and how much they were making. Then he'd take that data. I would put

it into an Excel spreadsheet on my phone. So that he could use those numbers to compare how much people were paid in the new model, call it V2 versus in the old one, V1. But I was spending very little time working. I was basically consumed by I just gathering all the data Eventually, he just got overwhelmed So that's when I decided to reach out to Dan from MIT. I study the relationship between labor, the labor movement and data and algorithms. He brings in Dan Kalachi who's a PhD student at MIT's Media Lab and formerly a gig worker himself. I biked around Boston, like delivering ice cream

in the middle of this summer. Someone wanted a single pint of ice cream. And Dan gets right to work. I was looking at this spreadsheet, and immediately I was like, oh, we could do this automatically. Automates the data entry process with a handful of code that I could write in an afternoon. Wow, ripped the numbers from a photo.

That's exactly right. He then makes this chatbot that shoppers can text their screenshots to, and that leads to a lot more entries. Now we're talking about thousands and thousands of data points that you can do, rather than a few hundred that you have to enter my phone. So after eight months of running the chatbot,

Dan and Willie finally had enough data to figure out how was version two paying workers compared to version one? Do you want to know the results? I'm like, oh my god! Okay, so from about 200 people who had submitted orders, 41% of people were getting paid less under V2 than they were under V1. Okay. Just so then that means that 59% of people were getting paid more with V2 than V1.

Yes. Yep. V2 pays out more. Really? That is so surprising. Yeah, and this checks out with what shipped said in the statement, quote, while some orders may pay more and others pay less in the updated model, we have seen average base pay levels remain consistent overall and slightly higher in some markets.

Okay, wait. Huh. But averages can hide nefarious truths. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's exactly right, wait. Huh. But averages can hide nefarious truths. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's exactly right, Lily. Oh, I was ready to leave. I was ready to be done with the story, and I'm like, I'm gonna download Shaped, I'm gonna start ordering stuff,

stock up on Turkey, and lotion, plethora, purses, let's go overpriced earrings, bring her. Clatter, clatter, clatter. Okay, no cover. No, no, no her, clatter, clatter, clatter. Okay, no caviar. No, no, no, no, no, you got it exactly right. The average is hit so much. When you disaggregate and you look at by person, how much a person is getting paid for the same work,

then you see that there's this whole group of people who are getting paid less. And not just like on average across weeks of shops, it's week to week to week. They're getting paid less under this new algorithm. Basically, when you look at each individual person, they're typically either consistently making more money or they're consistently making less. And when the new pay model came to Texas, where our guy Willie works, are you able to provide for your family right now? Not through the gig economy I had to actually take on

another job. He ended up making a lot less. A regular W2 job. And so I'm basically working between the gig economy and my regular W2 job. Is that W2 job, is it like full time, or is it part time? It's full time. So I'm working a full time job.

I'm working two full time jobs basically. it part-time? It's full-time. So I'm working a full-time job basically. When do you sleep? So like actually when do you sleep? I have to find time. So meanwhile Dan he's looking around and he's like what is going on here? Why are some people consistently making more and others less? We just don't know why. Because of course the algorithm is proprietary. It could be biased based on your location. It could be something about your demographic. It could be that you're just a fast walker, or a fast driver.

And then one day, he stumbled across this blog post from Ships Engineering team about this new tool that they were developing called a shopping time estimator. Okay. It basically used all sorts of data. The square footage of a store, people's walking speed, you know, number of items, how they're distributed

physically across the store. To estimate the length of time, a specific job should take an average worker. And then he thought, wait a second, what if I calculate the hourly wage each shopper is making? And when you did that, he saw basically the same number popping up over and over.

Somewhere south of $15 an hour. I think that the V2 algorithm was attempting to pay people an hourly wage. That's my guess. That's so weird, why don't attempting to pay people an hourly wage. That's my guess. Wait, that's so weird. Why don't they just pay people $15 an hour now? That's a great question. It's like this is like the round of that way to do that.

Right, right. But being round about, according to Dan, might actually be an advantage for a company like Shipped. I think companies like ShippedT are willing to pay premium, a kind of premium, in order to reduce transparency so that they have more autonomy. And I think a big reason for that is that it allows you as a company to adjust and change pay completely opaquely.

Like, they had one change, right? This was the big shift for them, from V1 to V2, but now it's V something. It's been, you know, two years since we did that campaign. Their algorithm could have changed dramatically in that time. According to Shipt, what the current algorithm is trying to do is make pay based on quote unquote effort, which honestly might result in it being more fair overall, but we still don't know exactly how they calculate effort.

And so for an individual worker trying to work harder to make more, there's no way for them to know how to do that. And the rules keep changing. And as soon as you think you've figured it out, they change again. And then you spend a bazillion more hours trying to figure it out, trying to figure out how to play the game, trying to make as much money as you possibly can. And then, oh look, they change again. And it seems like for most of these gig workers,

that just is the job. Day in, day out. This episode was reported by Lachif Nasir, Becca Bressler and Barry Lamb, and was produced by Becca Bressler, Sindir Niamasan Bandan, and Eli Cohen. Original music and sound design contributed by Becca Bressler and Jeremy Bloom, with mixing help from Arianne Wack. Special thanks to Julie Wernow. Drew Ambroke, David Condos, David Pickerel, Corey Doctorow, and Catherine Mangu Ward.

You can find links to Barry Lam's podcast, High Fying Nation, from Slate and Ron John Roy's newsletter margins on our website, RadyLab.org. Thanks for listening. Be careful out there. Nikkegaverse. RadioLab was created by Chad of Enrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler, Lulu Miller and Lots of Nasser,

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