TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* 500,000 Cool Latinos feat. Wendy Liu

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Wendy Liu joins the gang to discuss some gumshoe reporting she did at a network state type event. Also, we look at a plan to turn the entire UK into prison, and review a very unusual visit to the vet. Get the full episode on Patreon here! *TF LIVE ALERT* You can get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Let's talk about Frontier Tower because I did some digging myself. Wendy, I mean, I know you were there, but did you notice when you were there that this actually isn't a real estate project, but a prototype of the future? I did have that feeling. Yeah, I walked in and it just everything was different. The people seemed smarter than normal people. Yeah, I don't know. It was just this buzz. It felt like we were building something new. We were building something to do with longevity and human flourishing.

I don't know. Every floor just had this had had a different, different vibe. And I was so excited to be going up and down the floors and feeling like this was like a vertical village for building the future. Sorry. This is, this is hard for me. This is really hard for me. It takes a vertical village to raise a vertical child. So they say not even three months ago, we opened the doors for the first installment of Frontier Tower, a 16 story vertical village in the heart of San Francisco. What's unfolding inside is more than a new way to live and work,

which I believe, Wendy, you saw, you were like, wow, this isn't just a new way to live and work. This is a global experiment. And it has an elevator. Yeah. A decentralized network of community governed spaces for building what comes next. Sounds quite centralized. A new civilization layer. Ooh. This is, this is network state alarm, network state alarm, network state alarm.

I say San Francisco is a contradiction. One of the world's most advanced and most broken cities. To us that makes it the perfect frontier. I mean, what a use of the word frontier. Right. Yeah. I think, I think as I'm not usually around these types of people that often, right? There are many people in San Francisco who are not like this incredible, right? But so when I'm around groups of people like this, I'm always like, wait, is this real?

Do people really believe these things? And so having to sit in that room and hear demo after demo of startups who really think of themselves as within this project to advance humanity and just to hear the things they're talking about it, it feels, I feel like I'm like I'm in a prison of my own. You know, this a demo day can be a prison too, it turns out. It's very, very strange drawing experience. What were some of the startups that that were presented to you? So okay, just sighing, just thinking about it. I think I blocked some of them out from my memory

and I had to, when I revisited my notes for this episode, I was just sort of plunged into trauma all over again. So there's one that it's called, it's Simera, I don't really know. I think it was S-I-M-E-R-A. And the way the founder pitched it is it's about hiring cool Latinos Yeah, I don't know she kept saying the word cool so it's helping Latinos get cool jobs at remote companies But it's also about helping global corporations hire cool Latinos at cheaper rates

And I really I was very confused at the cool I wondered if maybe cool meant something different from what I thought but I think think it's just, you know, it's just they're cool. They're really cool people. Listen, guys, we all love Despacito. OK, so here's my idea. Cool. What about what about the humble uncool? No, they're no. What do you do if you if you if you just are charmed?

Sorry, you just got you've got to become cool or you're out. So it helps companies hire remote workers for obviously a fraction of the cost. And it helps cool Latinos get access to jobs in the global market that they otherwise wouldn't have gone access to. So not exactly a new business model. And I don't really understand why it was pitched as if it was. But maybe the cool Latino thing is what makes it special. My favorite of your notes, my favorite thing that you wrote down is that if you just said we have 500,000 like remote professionals ready work for you, but no, they said we have 500,000 Latinos ready to work for you.

It's like, why do you keep saying the race? It's so weird. And a lot of people have been saying that Filipinos aren't technically Latino. Counterpoint, they speak basically Spanish. I think in some weird way, this was making it almost almost about like diversity or something. You want to bring some Latinos on board your team. I think that's why Latino can't be emphasized. Otherwise it feels very strange, but I think there's some kind of cachet. We're very happy to underpay people who aren't white. I'm

sick of all of this implication that we only give out these kind of global South slave jobs to white people We'll give them out to people who aren't white. They're as good as anyone else Okay, so I don't know how we're gonna top Semerra, but what were a couple of the other ones then we'll go back into it's like a civilizational 500,000 cool Latinos ready to work at your company. Yeah, I was amazed as well.

That was amazing. So there's a startup called Thala, T-H-A-L-L-A. And just to give you a sense of it, the founder is someone who, he terrified me. He had this intensity that I really felt like, you know, if someone told him to like just slit everyone's throat in that room and then he would raise some money, he would do it. Just, no question. He'd just have a knife in his pocket.

He just had that kind of, I don't know, sort of deathly intensity. I think he's going to succeed. You're meeting someone without a soul, basically. That's how it felt. And so his pitch was, it's for a product that will never let you forget anything again. It's AI for entrepreneurs. Yeah, it's called having anxiety. I don't want the guy who's not in sold to give me the thing that lets me not forget

anything, particularly if I worry that the thing he's using it to not forget is his kills. So they're solving humanity's biggest problem, which is memory. Well remembering the names of those 500,000 cool Latinos you just hired, I mean, that's gotta be pretty challenging. So far from what you've told me, this feels weirdly Biden-esque, right? Worrying about losing your memory, corporate diversity. Like, I gotta hire 500,000 cool Latinos, man. Is Joe Biden capable of mentally comprehending 500,000 cool

Latinos at the same time? Yeah. Picture 500,000 cool Latinos and now rotate them in your muffin. What happened to Batista? So I think the Thala thing, I mean, also, like you have been cursed by a soulless man to

remember everything feels like a very poetic thing that would happen in a magical realist novel. Yeah, I met him on a on a kind of like wooded track and I lost a game of chance to him and now I have to remember everything. Remembering the time that I called the teacher mum for the rest of my life. What do you mean the time?

So, they say, we envision a world where you call the shots, your information, your communications, your workflow, everything tailored to you. But the journey doesn't stop there. Once we've optimized your life through connecting to your WhatsApp, we'll provide you with the options that emerge from it, expanding your control over your digital environment. By taking charge of your feed, you shape your reality and your future. Yeah, they use a lot of grandioseose language and I'm not really sure what it does but I don't think what it does is that interesting. I mean it's it maybe

reminds you of things but I think I think what's interesting about it is that the pitch is just so ambitious and it's all-encompassing like we're solving memory you know you'll never forget anything ever again which is not really what they do but I think they have to pitch it that way and they have to pitch it as AI like again AI for entrepreneurs that way. And they have to pitch it as AI. Again, AI. AI for entrepreneurs. That's how they're selling it.

And their plan is that they'll displace existing sales tools so that their market size is massive, because they can replace every other tool. You quoted what they claim their total addressable market was. And I love that they're very ambitious. No one else has this document in front of them. Wendy, you had it. So of the remaining three, what do you think the total addressable market for Thala is? God, I have no idea. Seven billion people.

Hussein? Um, I'm gonna go with like one billion. No, I don't even know. November, please. Oh god, okay. Is it trying Okay. Um, is it trying to do something like where it's like 12 billion people because it's going to be earth and the off world colonies? I'm afraid closest to that going over is Milo. It is all eight billion humans is the total addressable market for that one. They missed a trick there. They should have, they should have like leaned into the Mars colonization bit. Oh yeah. They

totally should have been like our total addressable market is all of the trillions of humans who will ever exist in the fullness of time. What's been coming to the market? Yeah, maybe aliens, you know? Yeah, aliens too? I think that's a pretty standard accounting practice in Silicon Valley these days, just to, you know, amortize. Yeah.

Doing a bit from Arrival, but I'm trying to explain the concept of a cool Latino to the Hexapods. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's Emily Blood holding up the whiteboard, but she just pointed to this cool Latino 500,000. Getting thrown out of the vet. Cause my alien being is too fat. On the point about, about, you know, market size, like really ambitious market size, I do just want to quickly point out there was this, um, this company, not really a company, just like a prototype of this robot arm that will rearrange things. And so we saw a video

of it. And the founder was telling us that the total addressable market is $25 trillion because that's the total market for human labor. And the idea is that this robot arm can eventually replace all human labor. And I just, I kind of love the ambition of that. Just kind of the founders being like, yeah, you know, the market size is $25 trillion. Just showing us a YouTube video of an arm that can move a few things around. And the best part was that because he was signed out of YouTube, YouTube showed the screen that said,

you know, like prove that you're not a bot before he could show us the video, which I really, really loved. I just, I love, yeah, the increased arms race of grandiosity. The other one I enjoyed was one that was just called Thermopylae, which is just for- You only need 300 cool Latinas. Yeah, where they brought a prototype surface to air missile launcher

to the new civilizational layer to show the builders and investors. Well, cause you might need air defense for your tower block. Yeah, and you said that their goal was to make the world more stable so we can go to space. Yeah, they were really... They wanted to sell us on their bigger vision, right? You start with surface-to-air missiles and then you eventually go to space. That's the dream. I think it's important to have a dream.

It's important to believe in something big.