TRASHFUTURE - Nate Will Be Synonymous with Failure

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Riley is out this week, and in his stead we’ve convened a special episode of Trashfuture featuring Milo, Hussein, Nate, and Alice on the topic of a failing ‘AI’ startup called Nate. Yes, it’s called Nate. And it’s a pure, concentrated example of ‘what if your robot was just a guy.’ We draw heavily from Malique Morris’s article from The Information, and you should read it https://www.theinformation.com/articles/shaky-tech-and-cash-burning-giveaways-ai-shopping-startup-shows-excesses-of-funding-boom and also follow him on twitter at @luxeoflique If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to this week's free episode of Trash Future. It's the free one. It is, in fact, the free one. Riley isn't here to get mad about it. He can't get mad. I feel like I can't do voices, so I'm going to sub for Riley when I'll be like, can you not do any voices, please? It's the free one.

It's the free one. I'm so stressed. I'm so stressed that he's doing voices, so I'm going to go eat this raw meat, which is salt, and then have some inappropriate thoughts about my daughter. Riley would do that, apart from the daughter thing. Riley would never have a child. If he told him that the raw meat was, like, you know, artisanal. It's keto.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm going to go for a really fancy meal to, like, calm my anxiety. It's a Michelin-starred restaurant that serves you raw meat and desiccate asapines. The wait list is, like, a year. Yeah, setting up a restaurant that exists chiefly as a trap for Riley personally. Riley's eating only beef carpaccio at the Michelin-starred restaurant for reasons of gains, but then he's also washing it down with, like, eight bowls of wine. You know, like, in the Looney Tunes, when they sort of, like, you know, you had the

roadrunner who, like, part of, like, paints the fake tunnel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll do that, but we'll do it for, like, a small place restaurant called, like, Zing or something. I don't know. Taken in by a Tromploy painting of Legamorage on a cliff face. Yeah, exactly. He's just very frustratedly reaching out, trying to grab the oysters from the plate.

They eat amazing plates of oysters that I've disguised a landmine to look like. Tantalus Brackets podcast. Yeah, it could be. What we'll do is we'll go to, like, we'll paint, like, a, we'll paint, like, an exact replica of, like, the Nighthawks, the half-rimmage. Yes. Yes. Fucking hell.

Yeah, but they do small-place bar food in there now. The barman has, like, a full-sleeve tattoo. Yeah, they just look, they look like they're having a great time as a woman, like, dressed in a cocktail dress, like, looking disapprovingly. It's, it's... They're all wearing Alcatraz prison uniforms. But she's covered in stick-and-poke tattoos. Yeah.

And she has what I can only describe as an ill-advised dye job. Hair cut, she did herself. Yeah, yeah. Just as, just as a side note, I was walking through East London the other day and I saw the Alcatraz, like, the, the, the kind of, like, a bar experience thing. Brick Lane's finest. Yeah. And it's right opposite, like, not just one, but two, two of the Jewish, like, bagel shops,

famous bagel shops, like, right, I was, like, I, I, I was, like, I, I was disgusted when I first heard about it, but I'd never seen it before. And, like, when I saw, like, what it was opposite of, it was just, like, come on, like, I, I, like, oh, why, why wouldn't you think about it anyway? Anyway, I just wanted to add that. I mean, to me, it's actually, it feels like it makes a lot of sense. You either observe cash or you go to jail. So, you know.

Um, so today we were going to talk about an article Riley found about a startup that is called, and I am not joking, Nate. He's with us even in our thoughts. This is correct. How are we spelling Nate? Is it just like your name? N-A-T-E. Wow.

It's my name. It's my name. So this is an interesting article and it's going to, it's going to take. It's a pitch to investors. It's going to probably take a, take the full episode to go through it, but I want to read this paragraph by paragraph, A, because I am, I'm lazy if nothing else, but B, because I feel like so much of the details in here are like real life versions of jokes we've made.

And I think in totality, it just kind of like summarizes the extent to which the startup tech economy, all of the valuations involved and the services provided are completely fake. And specifically it harkens back to what we thought was a throwaway bit. What if your robot was just a guy? This is one of the better examples, perhaps even more than the bot, you know, the robot delivering your food being piloted by the guy in, in Columbia. This is an example of AI that is 100% just a guy. So I'll start from the top.

Some startups are bold and original. This is not one. And some, like Nate, had more modest goals, automatically filling out shoppers contact and payment information on retailers websites in exchange for sparing them a minute or two of data entry on their phones, Nate charged shoppers $1 per transaction. I didn't know you were up to all this. I know. I'm just always doing, you know, if I'm not producing literally every podcast, I'm doing

this too. This is from an article in the information, by the way, a comment who wrote it. We will, we will link to the article in the show notes since we are fully pulling from this article. But like I said, I feel like this is correct as a leftist to make a dollar off of every time someone's too lazy to write in their own name. I, I, I don't know. I mean, I thought about it a lot, but I realized that if I charged more than a dollar, I would

just want to open a small plates restaurant and that would also not be around after communism. So yeah, yeah. Have the people paying for this ever considered using Google Chrome? Or as you will discover, many other services that also do this more easily, but let's get through this. But it struggled to turn even that vision into reality. While the company said it was using artificial intelligence to populate customer information during the checkout process, it had actually hired workers in the Philippines to manually

enter the data on retailer sites for a significant portion of the transactions Nate facilitated in 2021. Fantastic gods. Meaning to two people with direct knowledge of, or according to two people with direct knowledge of the company's practices, that meant customers orders were sometimes placed hours after they clicked the buy button through the Nate app. Nate didn't disclose decidedly low tech methods to at least some of the investors from whom the startup tried to raise money, according to a person with direct knowledge of fundraising

discussions. I'm studying an AI and instead of all of the other guys who like start an AI that doesn't work or just do nothing, they go to the Philippines to open a data entry sweatshop. So basically, yes, because they couldn't figure that you, as you'll discover as this goes on, there's a reason why an automated function was unable to achieve its goals based on sort of e-commerce safety protocols. And so they decided to circumvent it by just having people in the Philippines making way less money, manually entering the orders for people so they didn't have to type their own

names. That must be the most depressing job in the world, by the way. I would say it's hard to overstate the extent to which workers in the Philippines get exploited through the tech economy. I think the combination of the fact that the Philippines was fully a U.S. colony and English is widely spoken there and the fact that wages are so low means that tech companies outsource some of their absolute worst stuff for their English speaking audiences to the Philippines. There's a great Adrian Chen article, I believe, and wired from a couple of years back about

how all of the content moderation for Facebook is done by people in the Philippines and this left people horrendously traumatized because they were basically the people, the human shield between your Facebook feed and videos of stuff like animal murder, child sex abuse, stuff like that being uploaded. I've been a guy doing the tears in rain speech about how many minions memes he's seen. I mean, really, really hideous stuff and these people were being paid. And we know this, unmoderated, the English psyche is entirely posting videos of cat torture and ISIS beheadings.

And much worse stuff than that that I won't share in the interest of this not being like racist. So I'll continue in this order, yowing this shahad attempt to store a guy's head off with a bar knife. I'm holding clumsily between two boys. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, that sounds really bad. It was like, oh, I can't. Basically you're describing a meme called I can has caliphate.

Still, Nate has landed backing from well-known venture capital firms, including Coat you management and forerunner ventures who collectively invested more than $50 million in the start up in the past two years. Transaction volumes never took off and late last year, Nate offered a juicy promotion to get people to make purchases through the app. New customers could receive $50 to spend at select retailers like Best Buy and Walmart. But the move backfired when users discovered they could create multiple accounts, launching a feeding frenzy to collect the free cash said two people with direct access to an internal

transaction data dashboard. We accidentally gave everybody the infinite money sheet, but only for Walmart purchases. Customer orders surge during the promotion, but tumbled back to pre-promotion levels when the company ended it around Christmas, these people said. Wait, but so hold on, you have to order this through the app, right? So the best way I could describe it is, have you ever seen the things like Bayi or some of the ones that let you buy stuff from Japanese retailers, but through a sort of translation service?

Yeah, it's basically that, but for any kind of e-commerce thing that's already in English, it's already based in the country you're in, in this case in the United States, just because it would effectively let you log in with your account and then never have to enter in your personal data. Okay, so if you tell that app all of your details, if you tell them your name and your address and your postcode or zip code or whatever, why did they claim to need an AI to do this? Well, I think the issue here is, as the article gets into it, so I'll just continue reading in a second, but the quick summary is basically that because most of these e-commerce sites

are set up to avoid what we presume to be bots or crawlers, and so as a result, the function of getting to the click your basket, click your order, submit your information thing, it couldn't be automated in one size fits all in general because it's different in terms of layout and staging on every site, and then also because when they tried to automate it using bots, the sites basically will sort of rightly were like, wow, this is clearly a fucking bot and basically blocked the transaction or blocked their connection, so I'll keep going. But then also, I think what I'm struggling to get my head around here is that there are just like any web browser just does this for you anyway.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, you definitely can save your card information and your profile Why would you need an AI to recognize that in a field marked name, you put the name that you already have that you've put into order a bunch of other stuff before? You're also going to find this very, very funny as many people in the US and also in the UK will probably know there's already the service called Stripe that works or Shopify that also works for that if you want to go that route that already pre-filled stuff for you. And that's an API, I think, that you have an account and then the website is sort of set up to interface with it and handles it for you. So once again, my namesake, not fucking doing a lot of good right

now. It takes like a minute to type in your name and address. But is a minute worth a dollar to you to make an AI or someone in the Philippines do it for you? Alice, consider your grind set. That's true. How much money could you have made in that in that minute? How much crypto could you have traded? How many Richard Scary books could you be reading at this moment in order to be reading 52 books a month? In the time that it takes me to put in my name and address, I could have recorded a minute of podcast which would remunerate me to the tune of millions of dollars. That's right. You call this a busy town and yet this worm doesn't even get up at 4am. All right. One consequence of the pandemic fueled shopping boom is that venture capitalists

facing fierce competition for deals and paranoid about missing the next Stripe began practically hurling money at all startups that promise to make e-commerce smoother, even ones with questionable business models or technologies. This speaks to a bigger problem with VC. We've just started hearing what VC does, which is you throw a shit ton of money at everything in the hopes that you hit something that's very successful. But they have this thing where they throw good money after bad, where if something is successful, they go, oh, okay. Well, clearly what everyone needs is another 50 of the startup that does the same thing, just in case one of those is also equally successful. Yeah. And I mean, also, I think that you'll get, well, actually,

let me continue on because I feel like there's a couple of things that references they make to how these businesses grew in the web 1.0 e-commerce phase. But obviously, there's not going to be that kind of exponential growth anymore unless there's a massive change in the technology which hasn't happened yet. So I'll continue. Today, amid slowing e-commerce sales and macroeconomic challenges, many startups like Nate face a reckoning. Quote, across the startup landscape, there's this realization that a lot of companies had a great story, but their reality wasn't, says Keval Desai, an investor at InterWest Partners who previously backed e-commerce firms such as the RealReal. Great name. People are waking up and

saying these valuations cannot be sustained. You fucking think. The economy is real again. Fuck. Shit. Oh, shit. Shit. As venture investor sentiment sours, payment startups and established companies such as PayPal are laying off staff and taking other measures to preserve cash. Stripe backed FAST, a one-click checkout startup that had around 450 employees despite generating almost no revenue, was among the first startups to implode after a series of reports in the information detailed its profligate spending. Another one-click checkout startup, Bolt, this year attained an astounding valuation of $11 billion, the equivalent of nearly 400 times its revenue before growth hit a wall. It laid off hundreds of people last month after putting a

fresh fundraising effort on ICE. What were these hundreds of people doing for these companies? Was this just sort of like a Huey long, like universal basic income by means of corruption thing? I genuinely- She vibes off as a beanbag coordinator. A slide tester. Yeah. So continuing on, bigger companies like Shopify, which already have relationships with millions of merchants, easily replicated the technology FAST and Bolt developed. Nate's model of charging shoppers set it apart from FAST and Bolt, which charged merchants. But Nate's app, which also offers features that allow users to send gifts and take out small loans to make purchase, just didn't catch on or work as intended in many cases. So it was trying to do claw on a ship as well.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Who are also going bankrupt or laying off a bunch of people. Yeah. They're laying off lots of people apparently. Based in New York and founded in 2018 by fashion entrepreneur and former Amazon employee Albert Sanniger, Nate describes itself as an artificial intelligence startup with an app that allows iPhone shoppers to make a purchase from any retailer's website with a couple of taps, quote, like magic, unquote. When shoppers see something they want on a mobile retail website, they can click the browser's share button to open the Nate app and then just click buy in the app. Let the machines do the heavy lifting of completing the order Nate's website says. A pro. The heavy lifting. Filling out your name

and address on a web. I love what small beans do it like the modern world has turned people into. Like, oh, I can't type out my name and address is too hard. So I'm on the CEO's Twitter page right now. His profile picture is himself hugging his own knees, wearing like denim turnips and boat shoes, which is in itself very funny. Oh, very nice. Optimist dad spouse CEO of Nate. So apparently, to summarize one of the paragraphs, apparently they were at one point valued at 307 million dollars and they had 150 employees who were mostly based here in London. So very no idea of how, why lending weight to my theory that this is all your secret side hustle. Exactly. That's where Nate is on Wednesdays. Exactly. On Wednesdays, I don't come into the

office because I have to go to my other office, the most expensive suite in the shard where I have all these dudes basically like outsourcing purchases to the Philippines. Yeah, Nate's got like Dr. Weetow hair sitting on like a desk high above them all, yelling to work harder as like lightning bolts kind of like strike the ground around him. Nate's doing so much Pride month stuff, by the way. Oh, yeah. I mean, I presume you mean the app because for me, it would just be my commitment to Pride month is liking a tweet with a dog standing on the table. Nate, the app has been liking a lot of homophobic dog posts. But to process transactions automatically on retailer sites without the aid of humans,

Nate's software needed to figure out how to locate specific buttons on the page, such as the one that adds an item to the shopping cart without being blocked by trackers on the site that look for automated bots said to people with direct knowledge of the technology. That proved difficult. As a result, throughout 2021, the share of transactions Nate handled manually rather than automatically range from 60 to 100% according to people who had direct access to internal data from Looker. So there was theoretically some technology going on here. It's just it didn't work. So they just faked it with guys. Yes. Yes. So basically, they were foiled by this incredible, inscrutable technology called website design and click button. And as a result,

they had to outsource all of the things where you're pushing the magic button to get your order processed one minute faster for a dollar to people in the Philippines who would do it manually. And as it said earlier in the article, this could sometimes create a delay of hours for your order because they had to go through and locate the information and type it in for you. I'm the UX person at eBay who every day moves the shopping cart button by one pixel effortlessly defeats whatever software they've developed. Guy in the Philippines making $2 an hour having to process your third order this week for $500 of gamer girl bathwater just like rubbing his temples as he does it. Oh my God. That's a horrifying thought that like a human might

have to supervise any of your online purchases. Yeah, no, those are between me and God. That's right. That's right. It says employees at Amapta, an Australian owned offshore staffing company, handled most of the manual work in the Philippines. These people said a job posting from last year shows Amapta was hiring purchasing assistance in quotes to enter online purchases that per the posting had failed in Nate's system. Noor Sakali, a Nate spokesperson said the 60 to 100 percent range was incorrect and the claims questioning our proprietary technology are completely baseless. May I see the proprietary technology? No. We continue to be laser. It's actually 100 percent. It's not a range at all. We continue to be laser focused on our

upward trajectory of growth while remaining laser focused customer service obsessed as we continue to build Nate as a one-stop shop for customers. It doesn't get more obsessive in your customer service than hiring a Filipino person to do the customer service for you. Yeah. That sounds like a Tumblr account, customer service obsessed. We'd post lots of sassy memes about working in retail. Potential name alert Inga Zwick, an Impada representative, said the firm was proud to work with Nate. Didn't think we'd come across a better name than the one we already had. But the one which I cannot say because I'm embarrassed. And if you spoonerize it, it's even worse.

To Nate's credit during the first quarter of this year, the company improved its software to be able to automate more transactions. But Nate still struggled overall to overcome bot detection and other technical issues across many major retailers. The two people would know what the technology said. Of course, Nate presented a rosier picture of its technology at a meeting in early March. There, Sanagar was trying to attract investors using hedge fund Gladebrook Capital Partners, which previously batched companies such as Uber and Lyft when they were privately held, for a potential $70 million Series B round at a $700 million... Just $70 million more dollars and we will be able to make it hit the fucking shopping cart button

most of the time. That's right. For a potential $70 million Series B round at a $700 million valuation according to a person with knowledge of the episode, Sanagar wanted to demonstrate how quickly its AI-driven software could process transactions. When Paul Hudson from Gladebrook went to order a pair of Levi's from the Denim Maker's website using Nate's checkout, that triggered a notification in a corporate Slack channel Sanagar set up called VIP notifications for Albert to alert colleagues that a transaction needing processing right away, according to a Slack message viewed by the information. The team then told the Impada workers to process the sale.

The team then told the Impada workers to process the sale, said two people with direct knowledge of the incident. The Impada workers started the transaction, but when they were unable to add the size of jeans that Hudson wanted to order, Nate's engineers jumped in to add the item to the cart and complete the purchase according to two people with the knowledge of the incident and Slack messages viewed by the information. This is perfect. This is absolutely perfect. It's such a little microcosm of how so much VC shit works is some idiot goes, oh, can I get a 46, 28 gene please? And then this sets off this chain of people screaming at each other in a Slack channel across four different countries.

46, 28 gene, a man who's built like the MF Penguin. It's killing me too because this whole thing basically seems like dumb startup guy steamed Ham's incident. As you said earlier, may I see them? No. It just continues to the point where- The secret ingredient, it's just fraud and really, really low end fraud. What? Legally, we cannot say that it is fraud. They claim that this never happened, but the journalists involved have in fact seen the messages and stuff. So this is very funny. I'll continue. Nate joins a long list of software startups that have exaggerated their AI capabilities, you think. Six years ago,

several developers of automated chatbots secretly employed many humans to handle what customer queries. Later, some now defunct self-driving vehicle startups privately claimed their AI safely automated cars or trucks, but that wasn't the case. More recently, Scale Factor, which claimed to be an AI-powered accounting service, shut down after the pandemic began. Forbes then reported that the startup used Philippines-based contractors to do some of the work it claimed was automated, similar to how Nate was operating. The thing is, most of these companies that are claiming to use AI to do something and then

they're just using a guy to do it. It's because getting an AI to do that is very difficult, or it would be like a pie in the sky thing, like a self-driving car or whatever. In this case, there's literally non-AI solutions to it, but which are still automated, which work more or less perfectly, like just browser extensions that just do this without AI, but without it. It's like reasoning to it backwards, because all of those things that put a big cardboard robot suit on a Filipino guy to try and solve some intractable problem like a self-driving car. Because those are solving intractable problems, even though they're not solving them,

that makes them the way of the future, and that makes them the thing that gets big VC funding. Therefore, if you want to get big VC funding, you have to put the big cardboard robot suits on a guy, regardless of what you're having him do. Mason We've put the big Apple Safari in 2006 suit on this Filipino guy to demonstrate our impressive AI. This also gets very funny, because when you think about some of the figures we've heard about valuations, seed money, etc. It says, apart from technology issues, Nate also faced challenges appealing to consumers. In the first few months of its launch, Nate struggled to get shoppers to use the app after downloading it, because they couldn't

use it to browse for products. Shoppers could only use an eight app after first identifying a product they wanted from browsing a retailer website, and then sharing that product page with the eight app. Because Nate has largely handled transactions manually, users can only buy one item at a time, according to three people with direct knowledge of the technology. Remember what we said about the valuation, valued at $377 million. They were trying to claim $700 million. They wanted $70 million in seed funds, and they charged a dollar per transaction to be handled through their app. Toward the end of 2021, Nate was processing about 100 transactions a day. Two people with direct access to the daily transaction data said.

Wait, wait, wait. So each transaction in their theory was worth $7 million. Basically, yes. To jumpstart growth, the startup launched a Nate cash promotion in the fourth quarter of last year and took out ads on TikTok, television, and public transportation to tout the giveaway. Shoppers who downloaded the app and created a Nate account with their contact, shipping, and banking information were able to apply $50 towards a purchase on select websites including Walmart, Best Buy, and Macy's. At one all-hands meeting in November, Nate's head of marketing, Tyus Castello Bronco, responded to skepticism about the campaign by telling the team that the company's previous marketing efforts, including Facebook ads,

were not pulling in the users they were hoping for, according to the person who was at the meeting. But this gets better. Bronco went on to say giving free money to new users was an approach that had worked for payment firms like PayPal in the early days, one person said. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in his book Zero to One that the payments company in late 1999 offered a $10 incentive to new customers and an additional $10 of time they referred a friend. The strategy was unsustainable on its own, he wrote, but the huge costs were sane for PayPal because the company had a clear path to profitability if it grew a large user base. Now, this is where it gets funny. After the promotion launched,

transactions skyrocketed from around 100 a day to as high as 10,000 a day, according to two people who saw the daily transaction records. But many shoppers signed up with Nate to get the $50, created multiple accounts using the same banking information but different emails and phone numbers. One thing we didn't want to happen. Some even took to Reddit to brag about exploiting the offer, with one person saying they bought almost $500 worth of goods by making new accounts. Eventually, Nate's payment team manually banned accounts that shared the same banking information. Team members painstakingly combed over a spreadsheet of transaction details to identify the perpetrators that a person familiar with the process. I wonder if that

was done at the Philippines too. And when the incentive ended around Christmas, daily transactions plunged back down to around 70 to 100, according to two people with direct access to the transaction data. Imagine being one of the 70 to 100 rubes who was actually using Nate. Loyalists, yeah. Yeah, like this is the best app I've ever had. It's also probably not even loyalists, it's probably people who work there. Oh, fuck, you're right. It says it wasn't clear if Nate will succeed in raising more equity financing following its effort in March. According to one investor, Nate Approach, the company said that month that it had around $20 million left in the bank and

around that time, Nate received a total of $4 million in venture debt from Triple Point Capital, a startup financing firm, according to securities filing by the firm. Nate's loans... PC shit is so, so funny because it's like you can get thrown this amount of money and it's like even after fucking up in every conceivable way, you're like, oh, shit, we're down to our last $20 million. $20 million. Nate's loans carry floating rate interest that's currently as high as 6.75%, which is on the low end of recent loans, Triple Point made to other startups, the filing shows. So I think, Alice, I greatly appreciate your ability to do mental math and determine that they have decided their valuation is $7 million per individual transaction where

they gross a dollar. Yes. Each of those transactions adds $6.999 million worth of use value and that's just how it is. What's interesting to me about this is the way in which it encapsulates so many things that we've talked about all in one example. I think we said that earlier in the episode, but I think the bullshit valuation is one thing that we've talked about a lot, like the extent to which companies will just have these absurd nonsense numbers and that's how they're assessed in order to receive funding. Getting the big valuation in the first place, getting it because something else has been successful in the same space and other VCs are chasing that success. Sure. And then if it does go public, the insane share prices

and things like that, the extent to which none of this is actually based on earnings or certainly not for the newer ones. Some of the more mature ones, there is actually an assessment of earnings, like their quarterly earnings and things along those lines. Now the economy is real, VCs are like, wait a second, are you just all texting back there to order me my jeans? I remember something that was really enlightening to me when the debate was going on about Amazon moving its second headquarters to Queens, New York and the extent that they had accepted basically like a sweetener from the state of New York. And it was something to the order of like, I don't know, 168 million or something along those lines of tax breaks. Basically,

I did the math on my calculator app and it came out to like $38,000 per employee that they were going to hire there. And it's just sort of like, I realize we're leaving the error of 0% interest rates and free money and all this shit. But it's just sort of like, I always struggle with the extent to which it feels like if you just gave people money to do business or just to have their own, like to improve their life circumstances, it would make such a massive, massive change. But you do give money out for free because give it to morons for shit that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah. This is the thing, right? We believe strongly in universal basic income without precondition for people who can get into a room with venture capitalists. Everybody else, you're on your own. And that's

the most rational way of running an economy. And the thing that gets me about this too is, as Milo was saying earlier, this isn't really providing a novel solution that isn't already done better by far more successful companies. As you pointed out, if you use Google Chrome or other similar browsers, you can save payment profiles. And it's pretty good at detecting when you need first name, last name, you know, credit card number. Yeah, it fucks it up occasionally. But correcting it doesn't take very long. It usually only makes trivial errors. It takes seconds. Or you could use, if they use Shopify or something or Stripe, you're, you have an account registered with them. Well, you could just eat the convenience,

the inconvenience of like a minute. How often do you fucking buy shit anyway? Is that big of a deal? One reading of it is, and I don't know like, I don't know like a lot about the startup world now. So this is like very much based on like when I was much more interested in it a while ago, which is that you have these companies that sort of like produce this technology, not because they sort of want to be industry leaders, but because and like, you know, so many of them who sort of go through like the VC funding system, like what they want to do is kind of like reach a sort of level of valuation where they can kind of make a quick sale to like your Googles, your Facebooks, your Amazons, right? So like the point is not to sort of like

develop a technology that necessarily has a kind of market demand or something where they sort of identify that, oh, this is like a real problem. And like we're trying to kind of like come up with a solution for it. This, like a lot of other like startups, especially some that have like, we've talked about on the show, but like have emerged over the past few years, like it smells like a type of service that is purely designed for like the most cynical reasons, which in this case, like it sounds like they just wanted to sort of make a quick sale to a big company that could like absorb their product. And if they choose to use it, they can and they choose not to, they don't like in so many, like if you read like profiles of startup founders, for example,

or even if you kind of like look into, you know, the sort of space where aspiring startup like, you know, founders like exist, so many of them aren't, they're not really trying to solve problems. They're not trying to be like, you know, when we like, they don't even, they've actually dropped the pretense of even wanting to improve the world in any way. For them, it's literally just the case of like, we're trying to build this product that will kind of like reach a huge level of like valuation and then sell it and then just use that money to sort of like be an angel investor into other startups and like just taking advantage of a market, which as Nate, as you mentioned, as in Nate, not the company, Nate the person, just to clarify that, you know, as you, as you

sort of mentioned that like, you know, we're sort of exiting that period where, you know, venture capitalists and like angel investors and stuff will be able to do that. So these are very much like the last remnants of the system that like for a very long time was very happy to kind of like burn its losses because it just had so much access to capital. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think that what is frustrating about this is the extent to which it felt, I mean, it's gotten, call it easy year to push back against it because you see just the obvious like lack of arrival of this miracle success that everyone's been promised. But I, I do genuinely feel like there were all these times during call it the previous decade and change

where it was so obvious that, you know, if you want to just like guy who barely passed fucking college economics 101 level of just do some Keynesianism and fucking put money in the economy that way, that was absolutely forbidden, anathema, but you could basically do it for the dumbest shit on the planet via more or less the same mechanism of, you know, taking out, you know, whatever the fucking T bills or how the fucking shit it works, you know, like, I don't know, I'm not Riley, I don't think about money, but like basically being granted zero, zero percent interest loans, you know, in order to have access to financing that then would be given, you know, out via VC stuff or institutional investors who just make so in such enormous

amounts of money through, you know, various other things in the capital markets that they have these like more or less throw away VC sort of gambling funds, like, you know, the equivalent of bullshit crypto investing for these guys is like they have a fund, you know, that's valued in hundreds of millions of dollars that they can dump into like any stupid doodad thing that promises it might do something just in case it does wind up actually succeeding and they can it was a very funny and dumb time to live. I mean, my friend Titus and I often reminisce about in like 2017, 2018, there was a startup competitor to Uber in London called ViaVan, where you could get a taxi back of a van anywhere in zone two. So from any point in that now zone two in London is like pretty,

pretty big. That's like easily like, I mean, we're in towards the northern end of zone two. I live towards the southern end of zone two. It's about six miles by road to get from where I live to here. Yeah. So pretty, pretty decent sized space. Yeah. Yeah. And and you could get a taxi anywhere within two points in that zone for six pounds. No, it was three pounds. It was three. Yeah. I mean, is that going to be financially viable? Oh, they went so bankrupt. They were burning that for like a year. And also you could get huge amounts of credit if you referred a friend. We're talking like 25 pounds of credit for referring a friend. So me and Titus were like signing up all of our friends. I don't think I paid for a taxi for like 18 months.

It was a beautiful moment for like, if you're on the kind of subredditor, if you had the kind of friends who are good at collating all of these deals that just trickled down from companies that had too much VC money that you could get away with so much shit that way. If you knew if you if you knew someone who had like a fully remote job who just did those airline miles scams and was always flying like that person would absolutely be able to hook you up with some ridiculous deal like this. And and now it's I don't think that guy exists anymore is the thing like I don't think that it's possible anymore to be the sort of person who just like is like I have to fly to Dusseldorf this weekend specifically in order to keep my inexplicably obtained Lufthansa Platinum

thing. One of my friends from the American equivalent of year seven moved to Boston and then went to Harvard and I didn't connect with her again until we had finished college. And she I think worked in private equity and was one of those people and for the longest time her Facebook updates just basically like more or less how to describe it was sort of like a Yelp page for all of the different business class lounges of the most fucked up out of the middle of nowhere airports you could imagine. Yeah to get miles I have to fly to Guam but it has to be in 10 minutes. Yeah I mean that I'm in the business lounge of Nusseldorf Nazarbayev International Airport Almaty reviewing the the horse meat milkshake. Yeah there was there was a great moment for

like most rational economic system in history. Exactly it's just sort of like you have one of those jobs where you genuinely make enough money that you could just buy like you could buy like a full townhouse in San Francisco and just make insane the amount of money that like anyone outside of that small coterie of people with those credentials will never see in their entire working lives like the aggregate income across their lives and you're like god the Moe Chandon and the Paramaribo airport fucking sucks I don't understand it fucking Surinamese have no concept of European fine dining like and it's reading from Riley's LinkedIn page. So watching watching this stuff happen I think but what I want to kind of pivot towards is just the extent to which

this normalized the sort of like call it wage arbitrage with the developing world because I feel like this is a thing that you always seem to learn about whenever there's the kind of automation you know miracle startup and the thing that kills me about it is that like and credit to the information for doing all of the legwork on getting this but when I read this stuff it's always sort of like wow they lied to their investors but then to me it's always like wow they're fucking exploiting people to an immense degree and it's like basically to maintain this fiction that what they've developed works at all and yeah like it's it's basically call center jobs in countries like the Philippines. I don't know if there's a reason why it's shifted because it used to be they would open these things

and they would invariably try to automate them in in India and I don't know if it's because of time zone things if it's because Indian wages have risen I genuinely couldn't tell you I think it's because yeah the India's India has gotten too expensive but like when it was they used to do this shit in like Hong Kong and mainland China too and looking for a new frontier right well and the thing I think that gets me the most about it is like in a country like the Philippines you know if a company is offering I think like five six seven dollars an hour like that is an attractive wage but you realize that like these also are jobs that people get and are now going to lose when this company eventually goes under because it is a huge joke. Yeah it's terrible

humiliating menial work but it also is incredibly insecure because irrespective of whether they get criticized for it or not it's not sustainable it's going to collapse very quickly and there's so much shit that's like underpinned by that kind of remote labor and I think this is like a critique that we can make on the left too is that when we had a little like fully automated luxury gay space communism moment it was our podcast had nothing to do with that please do not listen to any episodes before 2019. Not doing any self-criticism but our version was heterosexual space communism is a very different thing with the fellas I think we can identify that in some cases it came from some of the same impulses which is to believe that your PCOR or whatever came out

of a fucking replicator you know. Yeah all of the fellas we're all in in the towel on the communist space station sorry we're all wearing a towel on the communist space station we're in the big communist space sauna and we're all massaging each other in a heterosexual way. I'm sorry whipping ourselves with like birch branches that we brought from earths. In a way you could you could make the argument that we really want to deep down was fully automated luxury homophobic communism. Yeah we brought this dog up here he's like floating around he's very funny homophobic joke we're all wearing the felt sauna hats but they also have like a space visor on them. I think I think the thing that gets me about it is yeah it operates on like if we're going to do

self-criticism about sort of belief that this stuff is inevitable. That's a treat. Yeah I mean because because it really is nice to believe like it's certainly relieving to believe that these technologies will develop well enough and you know quickly enough that they will be able to take to basically make machines perfectly perform menial labor and that will deliver us our treats too. Well also yeah and I think I mean it also just sort of comes out of the moment so like I remember when like that book came out and there were like a few others that were like in Matt Vane as well where and I think it was kind of like and you know I think I just just before getting to the main point because like I think there are definitely some parallels with like

crypto and blockchain and stuff like that where I think it was very tempting to kind of like believe in like what the sort of like tech business guys were saying right and because like so much of the finance because it was so dependent on like a type of financial structure that was dependent all with dependent itself on like cheap access to money and just the fact that like you had these companies that were sort of seemingly coming out of nowhere saying that they were like tech companies and they like were able to master the algorithm to the point where like they were worth this amount of money and where you have like governments that are like like putting their faith and like orientating policy towards them. I think it's very tempting to kind of look at

that and be like yeah well we could you like how do we sort of use this how do we use this to kind of like achieve left-wing goals like progressive goals wherever you want to call them and I think those books are sort of an example of like you know kind of like ceding the settlement that okay this is like the world we live in where like you know this type of tech is going to be here but shouldn't the left be in control of it and now we've sort of reached the point where it's like oh actually none of this tech actually works and like for kind of like right-wing governments who have sort of like had a lot of faith in that technology and like seen it as a way of subversing the act of doing governance like they're in the shits because like they now have to sort of figure

out what they do with like a state that they've basically destroyed but like with the leftists or like with some aspects of the left um those who sort of bought into this idea I think there's this other crisis too about like well you know how do we like is there a way to sort of like reconcile the ambitions of like automated gay space luxury communism with like the idea that none of the actual like technology does what we felt they would do yeah the concern was you know if in the wrong hands the technology once deployed would not liberate people and make you know allow people more leisure and more compensation but rather would just accrue even more grotesque profits to the people who you know put it in place uh while everyone would continue a life of being

underpaid and overworked and what we're discovering is that all of that is true however the technology also does not work it's only function which allows it to function poorly requires an even further exploited class of people you know outside of them they call it the the metropole and so that it's depressing because none of the guarantees none of the promises none of the ambitions were delivered they just you just discover that shit doesn't work at all however I think the other thing too is it would be easy to believe that this stuff was ascendant and that it was going to you know achieve all of its like most hyperbolic goals because everywhere you looked it seemed as though this stuff was everywhere it was ubiquitous you know like that Netflix and

Spotify and and Facebook and companies like that could make these insane investments they could acquire small apps small startups for hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars they you know and Netflix is doing everything you could possibly imagine it had everything ever it had all this new content all this stuff was being generated and what you discovered was that like that wasn't because of any any degree of financial success growth stability even you know achieving a break even point that was just that they had the infinity money cheat from sim city but also that was being handed them by the government while the government slash services that people depend on to a massive degree yeah I mean I guess that you know there was the big debate between the

people who thought that you were going to keep your job and the people who thought that the robot was going to steal your job but no one really predicted the third possibility which is your job is now pretending to be a robot the ultimate indignity well the thing is it drove its whole like next generation of whatever because uh you know some of us seeing Netflix make all of this stuff uh decided that that was what the future the left needed to control was going to be and some of us started quippy well I mean and the thing that gets me too is though is like think about how difficult it is for someone who has a startup particularly a startup that would be in a in call it like a not broken mortar sort of space to achieve any kind of funding to grow a business for

example uh that wasn't you serious unless they were super tight in with that startup world already which meant they probably you know have the same pedigree in social circles and background as all this other stuff so like anything that would be genuinely novel anything that would be genuinely DIY your access to this infinity credit was basically zero it just doesn't exist or if you did have it it would be at like a long interest rates meanwhile the people who do have access to it are making stuff that doesn't work over and over and over again lying about doing fully uh fully steamed hams levels of just like yeah this technology works as as the wheels fall off of our electric truck or whatever yeah and uh the thing the the thing that gets me about it is that I feel

as though we're now entering a different phase because I mean as we're as we're recording this it's Monday night I'm going to have this out at midnight tonight you crypto markets are crashing massively which is yet another example of sort of the economy becoming real on this this this got me fucked up I can't believe the crypto market is crashing no one no one predicted this but the other point I would make too is that the crypto crypto market crypto being sold is like this well the you know index funds and investing inequities isn't isn't delivering huge returns but you can make take it to the moon with this bullshit that we you know bought a fucking uh a huge arena in America the name after it that level of once again ubiquitous everywhere telling

you this is the way to get ahead in the in the economy that's collapsing at the same time that inflation in the u.s. is now I think was estimated like almost nine percent so highest it's been since the the the early Reagan administration you're seeing all this stuff it feels like it's closing out this era where like any of this this the infinity money might have been used to you know correct the rot and fix the problems and make even if you're just looking at that in like a social democracy since not even like huge structural change that was an opportunity it was completely squandered in favor of quibi and Spencer confidential it's really funny is that that's how that you that's how you get Peter teal right is that like he like all of those guys started

off as being like a sort of like quasi center left libertarian right and they fucked it up so badly that now all of them want a king it's hysterical although I don't necessarily know if that's true Alice to be honest with you because everything I've read about Peter teal is that he was fully right-wing libertarian from earliest days oh well I'll retract that bit but still the fact that I could have believed it says a lot about our society yeah you're not entirely wrong in the sense that like you know Nate you're right in the set you know I I've seen like a few videos of his like from like his Stanford days where he's very much like quite overtly like right-wing in like a very sort of social sense he doesn't go as far as I think like the whole like Curtis

Yavin thing is like I want a king teal doesn't go quite that far but he's like definitely over time as he's kind of realized when as all these tech guys have kind of realized that like the honeymoon is all like the kind of like rainbow period is over and crucially that they fucked up and like you know um their their kind of observation is very much a rejection of democracy as a whole right so and you know it's not just teal you can sort of see that with Zuckerberg in the sense of like viewing the metaverse like not as like a commercial product in and of itself but as this kind of like new universe that like should have its own politics kind of embedded into it like Dorsey in like web 3 very much is like not just like a commercial thing it is very much

like a political decision based on like certain political epithets that he has um a lot of these tech guys like you can see with the movement like a lot of these tech guys have is one where like they have kind of like had to accept that they fucked up they've also had to accept for like the mechanisms that would have sort of bailed them out and crucially like what led to their ascension which is like the post 2008 uh like the moments of post 2008 like that's no longer sort of feasible so their thing is very much like oh well the only way to sort of like stay on top and the only way to sort of like stay not even like relevant in a way that people like but to stay like you know to not cede any power is to kind of like push for the entire like

rejection of democracy and obviously having destroyed democracy uh well it's clear democracy doesn't work right yeah we'll get basically and then I think for like with crypto like the crypto stuff may I think the reason why that was so appealing to a lot of these tech guys is that it kind of felt like a way in which you could subvert it but without like seeming or sounding like totalitarian right so it's the idea that like oh with crypto and web 3 sort of expand then people will naturally see this as like a better settlement and all they'll want is like managers right people who can kind of like keep the system running but they can kind of build their own sort of crypto cities and they can buy their own crypto traffic lights or whatever the fuck

and now that that's fucked up right I imagine what's probably gonna happen um now that all the apes are gone uh is is is that they'll just be a lot louder in their sort of like as like a session that like democracy is not like a functional it's not like a functional system for managing human societies and like in order to do that especially to like governments who have sort of given away most of the powers of the state is oh well you you know philosopher king those governments like only have one source of like you know authority left to turn to right it's very it's very it's very it's very much like it's very much um the guy in the fedora holding the samurai sword um you know claiming that like while you went to parties he was studying the blade yeah well while you funded

three pound taxes within zone two I was reading mentions mold bug and now I think that I was making a reaction about that yeah something I was something I wanted to add in though also is I just was thinking about this as you were discussing like the sort of the collapse of these kind of farcical notions of how this stuff was going to reinvent whatever is that so much of what you might take as like received wisdom that you you know acquire through watching the news and reading the news you're seeing advertisements all this stuff was telling everybody who was you know unsatisfied with their their sort of financial station that the solution was to invest in crypto the crypto was like this new frontier was going to change everything like in the future you know

like every city will have its own currency that's done on the blockchain or some bullshit and like no one can really explain the use case because no one's really being demanded to explain the use case it's just taken as a given and so it's also so funny because crypto you know back in the day it's one of those things that did have a use case and they quickly got rid of the use case to turn it into something and say like the use case is buying drugs on the dark web yeah and child pornography but oh suddenly we're too good for child pornography you know it's gotta be a financial you gotta buy an ape you know at least the child pornography was real well the thing about supposedly the drugs were real too but the thing about it is child pornography never

collapsed an economy in a South American state well the thing about it is with uh with the point I was trying to make though is that like a lot of people got hoodwinked and are gonna you know felt they were they were more or less told you're an idiot if you don't get in on the the ground floor on this take out by mark warburg even take out take out loans at whatever interest rate you can get the money at to buy crypto and you'll you know tenfold increase your investment and now these people are buying fucking child pornography you're a sucker you should be taking that quote buying apes mark warburg investment advisor like who's a man damon that not important basically the same guy I just feel bad because a lot of people got hoodwinked and even if we can

look at the people who made these decisions you're like you're a fucking idiot like you like any comparable to this the knock on effects are like people in their lives are gonna suffer to their families are gonna suffer their communities are gonna suffer and like that's the part about it that drives me nuts is that it's not even like a oh people should have known better you know people in positions of influence should have been more responsible it's like at no point has anyone been like hey guys could you please explain what the fuck any of this is actually supposed to do because like it just looks cool it has cool icons that's literally it other than that one of the few scams where like the people in charge of the scam really weren't much smarter than the

people falling for it like a lot of them genuinely believed it was gonna work what's really sad about a lot of it like and I know a few people who like did invest in I don't know how much they've done or like how much they've now lost or you know whatever um but like they did kind of like invest into crypto and like when I sort of asked like we know why are you doing I'm like just genuinely out of interest like why are you doing this because it feels to me like this is like very very risky and as someone who's quite risk-averse like I wouldn't I wouldn't do this and for them it was very much like it wasn't saying they love they love Mark Wahlberg films um no what they what what they were what they were kind of saying is that like oh this you know the vibe that I got was

very much like they felt hopeful in like being part of like you know seeing all this happen and seeing like people kind of like at least say that they were kind of benefiting from it um you know these are people like who like I went to school with right so they have these jobs that are kind of like low um low you know fairly low stagnant paid like white collar jobs um you know the the future is not necessarily the one that like was necessarily what they envisioned for like you know when we were all in school but for them it was very much like they felt that they were investing in a future and what like the crypto what what like these kind of like the online crypto world did and crucially all the PR firms that like have like I don't know about anyone else but like all the PR emails I get

are all about cryptocurrency so like these PR agencies are very like were very very I don't want to say they were very good at it but they went all in on just like promoting crypto as like you know the inevitable future like you know something about like if you don't kind of if you don't get in on it it's not the fact that you're like missing out a good opportunity it's that you're sort of like forgoing your future at a time when like there isn't really any other option or feels like there isn't really having any other option so the fact that like this crypto what this cryptocurrency like what the what the crash has done and what the kind of subsequent crashes will do is like really kind of like you know it will really sort of degrade like a lot of the

senses of hope that people who don't really have hope in anything else um have and like I've been worrying about this for like quite a long time like what the political consequences are when you have like a much younger generation for whom like they are aware that like the state doesn't really back from they can't really like afford families or buy houses or like do all the sort of things that like were kind of conventional of people their age and suddenly this thing but like they did have a lot of hope in crashes like almost immediately like what are they left with and like what happens after that? Do we say that they are saying three words for you by the ghosts of lost futures? Prime Minister Matt Hancock. That would yeah yeah that that would be it that's right.

Well I guess in wrapping up all I can say is I too am often disappointed when uh when people are taken in by the promises of something called Nate so I'm not surprised that saying this to my wife when Nate's Matt at the Nate app. We're not the only person who's been taken in by the promises of Nate. I just realized something funny that was very serious as a slight little detail before we close is that the Nate app worked on iOS so that presumes it's only on iPhone which presumes you have to send a link to a thing to go to the app but also like if you were too lazy to uh to fill in your information to purchase something and you're using iOS you can just use Apple Pay you literally click a button twice and you can pay for it. So effectively like so effectively

they've created a thing like what do you guys want to use our app? It does shit way worse and slower and it's harder than just fucking clicking the side of your dollar and it costs you a dollar every single time but please please do because you're creating jobs in the Philippines. How could this have failed? You and 99 other people today will grant us a hundred dollars of revenue. We're worth nearly a billion dollars. Um how could it have failed? Well you know impossible to say. If it hadn't failed we wouldn't have had an episode this week. We wouldn't have been able to to you know explore the state. We would have simply have given up. We just wouldn't have done any content. We would have stopped podcasting so here's the thing. We've actually run out of

ideas. It's a real it's a screeching in up to the deadline every week which is waiting for something to hit our e-mail. So basically the haters and losers what they need to do is take over Bitcoin and shit app companies and make them solvent and then we will have to retire. Then we'll be owned. We will be incredibly owned. The podcast about booms and now we're in a bust but uh before we go I want to pass it around the table if people have anything to plug. Milo have you got anything to plug? Alice Hussain plug. I don't know how Alice has got anything to plug. You're not ready for that conversation. Just the regular stuff. Well I mean well there's your problem. Kill James Bond. Yeah plug to those. I'm just like a full-time wife guy now so I just

want to promote my wife. That's all I'm going to do from now on but if you want to like do like yes in my previous non-wife guy phase I did have a podcast called 10,000 posts. It's now renamed 10,000 wives. You can follow that 10k post on Twitter and like we have Patreon and everything. Yeah and I do masters of our domain with Phoebe Roy who also does 10,000 posts. I also have a show called What a Hell of a Way to Die and we have a Patreon for Trash Future. Five dollars a month gets you a bunch of bonus content, one free episode. As inflation wears on it becomes a better and better deal week by week. And if you and if you and if you want two Britonologies a month we offer that the 10

dollar tier and if we reach our next Patreon goal we will invest in an app that promises the ability to travel through time and we can change the American English lingo used to talk about product placements in movies. And so instead of being called plugs it'll be called pegging and Alice will be so fucking happy. Each week on the Trash Future Patreon you'll receive a limited edition figurine whichever time builds into a fantastic collection of apes. But anyway otherwise it's been Nate, Milo, Alice and Hussain. Thank you so much for listening and we will speak to you next week. Bye bye.