Reply All - #4 Follow The Money

Episode Date: December 8, 2014

Writer Chiara Atik has a hobby -- spying on the financial transactions of friends and strangers. She thinks that Venmo, more than any other social media site, is the place you can find actual, accidental truth online. This week we investigate that claim.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I went to dinner at a friend's house. I have to be so careful that how I say this. But it was like a small group of friends. And I brought two bottles of wine. Everybody, like, brought something. And then the host ordered pizza. This is writer Kiara Atik. And before we go any further into this anecdote,

you need to know that there's a service called Venmo. People use it to pay their friends small amounts of money. You can Venmo money. Or you can get charged by your friends. Get Venmoed. And it was a really nice evening, and we had pizza and drank wine and had dessert and then left. And then like three days later, I got Venmoed, like, $10 for the pizza. I was so shocked.

And is there, like, a statute of limitations on Venmo? From Gimlet, I'm PJ Vote, and this is Reply All, a show about the Internet. The fact that somebody got charged for pizza after bringing two bottles of wine to a party is not that big a deal. But it's the kind of thing that if it happens to you, you obsess over it. You ask your friends about it. It comes up in interviews with podcasters. The one place you don't mention it is on social media. A, you'd sound petty.

And B, despite all the hand-wringing about our national overshering epidemic, there's still a short list of taboos. And money's on it. I would die if anybody saw my recent Google searches or, like, my credit card bill or transactions, you know, just like Dwayne Reed, 15. Like any, just the minutia of what you spend on, I think, is very private. Kiarra, though, has found a place on the internet where people do share all this private information. Information that in any other social media, they would never mention. It's Venmo, the site where a Pizza Gate took place.

Venmo's front page shows a feed of transactions. It's just a list of people and what they spent their money on. Blake paid Andrew reason utilities. Gillian paid Nicole reason two martini emojis. Reading through this list is an exercise in utterly mundane details with some bad jokes thrown in. You know, four times a minute somebody makes a joke about paying for sexual favors. And yet, Hira loves reading this. It's a really weirdly surprisingly addicting feed to look through.

People are surprisingly honest and unthinking. in their Venmo transactions, and it's so not dressed up. It's fascinating. This is what people are doing with their lives. Part of the reason she loves it is that she thinks it's the one place on social media where people aren't so image conscious. Kiarra thinks you can find real stories here in this shoebox of the Internet's receipts. For example, last year she got stuck on this one girl.

This girl that I see maybe like once or twice a year at parties. Melanie. She caught Kiar's eye because of these weird notes between Melanie and Melanie's girlfriend. First of all, the notes were very terse. Like, couples on VEMO tend to be pretty cutesy. Like emoticons or, like, you know, nice messages. But these were very, very utilitarian. In all these utilitarian notes, Melanie was charging her girlfriend for stuff,

which is unusual in a relationship, to live with someone and constantly be billing them. To Kiara, it looked like maybe it was a breakup. And then it started to be for, like, half a couch or, like, half a chandelier. And it actually would say that. It would say like half a couch. Yeah.

I mean, maybe it was a very acrimonious breakup where they were really dividing their property. Of course, it's one thing to make up a story out of snooped financial histories. But how accurate is the story you make up? Actually, pretty accurate, it turns out. We found Melanie. Well, I was living with my girlfriend and we broke up and I had to move out. And so, you know, it's New York City real estate. I couldn't take our, you know, sectional couch and our chandelier.

So in a sort of, you know, spiteful manner, I guess, that I only now realized I charged her for half of all of our furniture on Venmo. Before they were dividing furniture, Melanie and her girlfriend had been happy. They first met on the Internet, but then discovered they already lived in the same building. And a year later, they were living together on purpose in the same apartment. After a while, though, they started having problems. Melanie's girlfriend started cheating on her. Melanie found out when she checked her call logs on their shared phone plan, cross-referenced the number with Facebook, and found the other girl.

She was hurt. She was humiliated. And she wanted everybody to be on her side. So she went on social media and started telling the story of her breakup the way she wanted it to be told. I had been wronged and that I was the victim and that I was always the good guy and doing everything right and nice and polite and just. sort of like the stellar champion of a bad situation so that people would really sort of do, I mean, not pity me really, but just sort of would see that I was really the good guy. And in all of her social media, she carefully curated everything she did.

Even when her ex took pot shots at her on Instagram, thumbs-downing pictures of Melanie's dog. Melanie didn't take the bait. Online, she acted magnanimously. She played the blameless victim. Everything she did in her social media was designed to bolster that image. Everything but Venmo. I think that I didn't handle everything perfectly, but the only glimpse into that is definitely through the financial transactions, oddly enough. I can think back to conversations where she might have been trying to talk things out and be, handle the situation like adults, and I, you know, go to a bar and then charge her

for half the couch or whatever. So I would, you know, send follow-ups so that she would get constantly pinged that said, you know, Melanie's requesting this payment. Melanie's requesting this payment. Kiara, of course, had been watching the whole thing unfold through these random little transaction windows. But having witnessed the pain, Kiara also got to witness a happy ending. Eventually, Melanie's transactions begin to tell a story

of a person working their way through a breakup. Kiara starts to notice post-breakup single girl on the town payments. Pizza night with the girls. Those gave way to on the prowl dating transactions. Taxi, dinner, drinks. And then eventually serious relationship transactions. Little plain and moly. and like clearly like weekend away transactions.

Melanie never knew Kiara was watching. She actually only found out when we reached out to her for this story. And I thought she'd be freaked out by that. It's mortifying to think that somebody you barely know was spying on you while you were at your worst. But she was surprisingly okay with it, if a little confused. I do do my, you know, fair share of light stocking here and there, but I've never looked at a Venmo feed.

So I knew it was there. I just really didn't think anyone would ever look at it. You know, a list of financial transactions, you know, among everything you can find online about a person, never struck me as something of interest. I would have felt kind of exposed. You didn't feel that way? No, I didn't.

And I think part of that is because, in fact, the story has a happy ending and I'm very happy now. But, you know, the breakup at the time was a very difficult thing for me, and it was a hard time in my life. And I was upset and sad all the time. So I can imagine if I'd seen this closer to, to that period, I might have had a different reaction. You know, I think anybody really does know that your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram,

I mean, I'm making those. They're not sort of stories written about me. And I guess in a way, Venmo is more like a story written about me, even though I wrote it, too. And I think I'm totally okay with that. We got really intrigued by the idea of this kind of story. And we wondered if there are other ones like it, hidden away in the financial detritus collected on the internet. So we decided to do some light Venmo stocking ourselves. What we found coming up after a short break. Welcome back to reply all. So we went out hunting for stories

hidden in financial transactions, and they're out there. We found a 32-year-old woman who just moved back home with her parents. Her brother emailed her money with a note that just said sanity. Turns out this woman was finishing her dissertation and had moved back in with her parents for the first time since high school. She needed a little disposable income that she wouldn't have to justified to her mom and dad. We found another memo that said, quote, hush money for the time you saw me get beat up and didn't say anything. It was from somebody who was paying her parents back for a $4,000 loan.

She was paying it in weekly $50 installments, and each one included in the comment some childhood memory she had of them. And then our producer, Lena Massitizs, found this one. A guy named Evan had charged somebody for advice. Lena was curious, so she called him. This might sound crazy. and it's really kind of the first one I've ever told like a complete stranger that I do this. But people actually pay me for advice.

And, you know, he wanted a minute of advice. Okay, super backtrack. What do you mean people pay you for advice? How did that start? Yeah, so basically like, okay, so how did it start? I basically was, I don't know, I've always been the kind of person to help people out. And, you know, like whenever someone makes the status, like, hey, any suggestions on this? You know, I'd always make sure to, you know, give someone the best advice I could.

It kind of kept going. And people have always been coming to me kind of for their questions about all sorts of things. And a lot of them are like interpersonal relationship type of questions. Like, what should I do in this situation? You know, questions that aren't like Googled, things that someone maybe can't really find out on their own and they need a third party, you know, someone who doesn't really have a strong bias either way.

You know, like, and, you know, it's part of my policy that I don't tell. I don't really share anyone's question with anyone. I don't know. Like, what's like a thing vague that I could tell you that kind of tied to me at third? Okay, so like I've had things. like me and my manager have like been flirtatious at a bar and I'm trying to decide if I should use this as something, you know, to take advantage of or should I, you know, nip it in the bud right

away? Are you licensed to be doing this? What did you go to college for? Yeah, so I'm not licensed to do this. I studied art and I started communication and I studied some high-tech business stuff. I'm actually, yeah, so I'm actually really interested in entrepreneurship, and this was really, you know, kind of monetizing it and trying to sell my service is really something that's very recent. It's almost like a trial run.

Do you ever have people call you with questions that you feel so unqualified to answer that you have to say no? I haven't had any, it can come up yet where it's like, you know, like I am, I've you know, like, no one's ever called me that has, like, an addiction problem where my advice, you know, could, you know, there could be, you know, there could be a lot more liability tied to my advice. Or, like, no one's ever called me with, like, legal advice, right? Because, like, that's just illegal. You know, you can't, you can't give someone legal advice if you're not licensed to do so, especially if you're charging them. So, you know, yeah, the more I do it, the more I feel like I'm really totally unqualified to be doing it. And but, you know, I still like doing it. And it was an experiment to really see if people are, like, interested in paying for unbiased advice.

Evans 23. He works in tech. And then he has this other job. And people seem happy. The rate's five bucks per minute, although charging that gets tough. Can I ask, like, would you ever, would you ever, like, pay, like, five bucks for, like, totally non-biased counseling type of advice? Well, that way, I'm so glad you asked, because I was just about to ask you, what do you charge? And depending on what you said, I was going to ask if I could just ask you for some advice on this phone call.

Yeah, and I'll do it for free. Cool. Okay, well, I am in total, complete love right now with someone who is at this moment driving all of my stuff. across the country and meeting me in New York and like I'm like the plan is to be together. But I so a couple years ago I was diagnosed with something called polycystic ovary syndrome. One of the problems with that is that I'm probably infertile. And I haven't told him that. So we've been together for a long time and he's about to move to New York for me.

and I haven't told him that kids probably, or at least biological kids probably aren't on the table. And I've been thinking about it a lot. Yeah, I mean, my, like, so my gut is really just to say, you should just tell him. And, you know, the timing of that is going to be up to you. It's going to come up if you're in love with this guy and you really want to be with him

and you see yourself with him forever, like you're going to get married with. with him, or to him, rather. I think it's going to come up anyway, and the longer you wait, the more it's going to stress you out, and the more it's probably going to impact him when he hears it, you know, because, like, you know, like every month that goes by is going to be another month of him thinking, like, well, why didn't she tell me?

You know, maybe, maybe. The other thing is that, like, you know, he could be the kind of guy who's, like, not going to freak out terribly? I wanted to check in with Lena. See if she'd taken his advice, and if so, how'd it gone? What you asked him, that was your first question, right? Mm-hmm. That's a big question.

That's like a doozy of a question. Yeah. Had it been on your mind a lot going into that interview? So what's been on my mind a lot is that I moved to New York just a few weeks ago, and my boyfriend followed me in New York. in September he moved to California to be with me and then two months later I was like wait a second I know you just got here but can we just move to New York instead

so he's made all of these huge grand gestures for me which has worked out great because I get to be with the guy that I like and the places that I like but but the other thing I have to think about now is this person is like back and forth 3,000 miles each way just to be with me and I I don't, I don't know. I've never had to think about commitment as much as I'm thinking about it right now. Had you, have you, like, asked your friends for advice about, like, whether to tell him about this?

No. None? No. I didn't actually think about how serious my relationship was until a few weeks ago when I moved back to New York. Right. So it's only been a few weeks, really, that I've been thinking about the long-term future of me and this guy that I'm with. But the minute I sat down for that phone call with the guy on Vend. Mo found out that what his what his like job is is that he gives it people advice without

thinking about it it was just the first question that came out of my mouth so did you did you act on the advice yeah you're like you're like smiled in a way that suggests like it's going well he made a gaddicka joke wait a gaddica joke the movie gaddica where it's like the future of babies where you get to pick everything about them like what like it's like it's like a future of test two babies, I guess. Right. My boyfriend made a joke about by the time we're ready to have babies, like, it'll be got a good time and, like, technology will take care of anything that my ovaries can't take care of. That's really, like, sweet. So, did you feel like it was a good advice?

I felt like it was very young advice. Tell me what you mean. Well, I don't actually, maybe age has nothing to do with it. He wasn't, he didn't go at it in a very complicated way. I'm definitely used to people when there's a problem asking me like a bunch of questions about it. And I think what he did was just insert himself into how he would feel if he were the dude whose girlfriend was withholding. I'm sure it's hard as a 22-year-old dude to tell a woman who's a little bit older than you, like what to do with her fertility or like how to approach the topic of her fertility. But it did actually prompt you to have the conversation. Like it did help you. Yeah. In the end, in the end I told my boyfriend. How long have you known about this and not said anything?

I've known about the fertility thing since 2012. So it sounds like it actually kind of helped you. I know you say you would have done it anyway, but you hadn't and you did. And it was okay. In a weird way, calling this kid prompted me to tell my boyfriend the truth about our future together. Reply All is hosted by Alex Goldman and me, PJ Vote. Our producers, Elena Maseetis, our editors this week were Alex Bloomberg, Lisa Chow, Starly Kine, and Caitlin Roberts. Matt Lieber makes the ship run.

Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder. We're online at replyall.com. Our site, which is very beautiful, was designed in partnership with athletics. We're also on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next Wednesday.