Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Joahini Bara and I wrote The Battle for
Speaker 1: the Soul of Buy Nothing for Wired magazine and it's
Speaker 1: the story of the Week. In twenty fifteen, I wrote
Speaker 1: a cover story for a Time magazine in which I
Speaker 1: tried to live my entire life through the sharing economy.
Speaker 1: I turned my house into a restaurant somehow, charging people
Speaker 1: thirty five dollars for my pretty mediocre food. I drove
Speaker 1: a lift for a night, taking a TV executive to
Speaker 1: a bar just because he heard a rumor that Momar
Speaker 1: Kadafi's son was there. It was all really fun. I
Speaker 1: loved the promise of the sharing economy. Why should I
Speaker 1: own stuff I rarely used, like a vacation home or
Speaker 1: a lawnmower or a sex swing when I could just
Speaker 1: share them. The only thing that didn't work out for
Speaker 1: me was this site I used called Yurtle. The idea
Speaker 1: was that people would give and take items for free,
Speaker 1: and as a journalist, I sometimes get stuff for free,
Speaker 1: even though I tell people I'm not allowed to take it.
Speaker 1: So I went on Yrtle, and I offered up this
Speaker 1: pair of really expensive genes that I would never wear,
Speaker 1: as well as this pair of goalie skates that the
Speaker 1: NHL gave me. No one took them, and they were free.
Speaker 1: So I saw how hard it is to give away
Speaker 1: stuff for free, and I was really impressed when two
Speaker 1: women figured it out, getting millions of people to share
Speaker 1: free stuff through a group called by Nothing. What I
Speaker 1: didn't know was that even when you figure out a
Speaker 1: way to remove capitalism and create a community that really
Speaker 1: cares about each other, you can still piss people off,
Speaker 1: even when they're getting stuff for free, maybe especially then
Speaker 1: writing It's hard. Who's got that kind of time when
Speaker 1: you're already busy trying to be Joe Stein until it
Speaker 1: turns on a mic mab it twiddles and knob because
Speaker 1: a journalist Frand has got in that jewal job of story.
Speaker 1: Single story. Just listen to smart people speak conversation. Filming
Speaker 1: information is a story of Wahini Vara is a contributing
Speaker 1: writer at Wired and the author of the novel The
Speaker 1: Immortal King Rao. She followed the story of the two
Speaker 1: founders of Buying Nothing. It's a simple utopian concept, except
Speaker 1: that it's tethered to Facebook, which is more like an
Speaker 1: algorithmically controlled dystopian concept. Wahiny, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming on and teaching me about buying nothing. Now, explain,
Speaker 1: how did your mom tell you about buying nothing? So
Speaker 1: I learned about buying nothing when my mom was living
Speaker 1: in West Seattle, in the Seattle area, which is where
Speaker 1: I grew up. It was around twenty fifteen, and my
Speaker 1: mom was like using it to get rid of all
Speaker 1: my old stuff and her old stuff and put it
Speaker 1: on buy Nothing. And I was like, buy nothing. What
Speaker 1: is this and she explained to me that it's this community.
Speaker 1: At the time, it was like this community that was
Speaker 1: mostly popular in Washington, where people post in this Facebook
Speaker 1: group things that you wanted to get rid of, and
Speaker 1: then you could also post in the same Facebook group
Speaker 1: things that you needed, and people from your neighborhood would
Speaker 1: respond and say like, yeah, I've got that, or I
Speaker 1: need Mom is like looking for old kombucha bottles. Yes,
Speaker 1: my mom had a phase, a big kombucha phase, and
Speaker 1: she would get like she got kombucha starter, I believe
Speaker 1: from they call them scobies, like the whatever that stuff
Speaker 1: is that you use. My wife had Jesus no, agreed, agreed.
Speaker 1: I was like, what is this? And you got up
Speaker 1: from a stranger. So she got us Scobee, I think
Speaker 1: from buy nothing that is not fact checked. I know
Speaker 1: for a fact she got these old bottles and then
Speaker 1: she would fill them with kombucha and give those away.
Speaker 1: Do you think she was nuts or you thought this
Speaker 1: was cool? I thought she was nuts in the way
Speaker 1: that like you always like assume your mom is nuts, right,
Speaker 1: and like you learn about something new that your mom
Speaker 1: is doing awful, and then in retrospect objectively, I'm like,
Speaker 1: well that's a good way to be environmentally friendly. Okay.
Speaker 1: So there are these two founders, Leesel Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller.
Speaker 1: They look to me like the women who run the
Speaker 1: Women and Women First bookstore in Portlandia. They're very idealistic
Speaker 1: women from Bambridge Island, which is this community to this
Speaker 1: island outside of Seattle, near where I grew up. And
Speaker 1: it's now like anything in Seattle, like it's now very
Speaker 1: bougie and expensive, but historically like it was thought of
Speaker 1: as this sort of granola community of like minded people,
Speaker 1: like a lot of environmentalism. A lot of artists lived there,
Speaker 1: and they became friends actually through this other platform for
Speaker 1: giving things away, and they would like put things on
Speaker 1: this list, serve and then the moderator for that list
Speaker 1: Serve would be like, like, the things that you're giving
Speaker 1: away aren't really that great? Is a free cycle that
Speaker 1: they were on? Yeah, they were on freecycle exactly, and
Speaker 1: Rockefeller had recently gotten divorced, she went, you said, from
Speaker 1: being working class to very poor, living on food stamps
Speaker 1: and medicaids. So she was using this list serve to
Speaker 1: get a lot of stuff and they were trying to
Speaker 1: give away stuff. At some point she tried to give
Speaker 1: away like twigs she had pruned, right, Rockefeller did yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So she was giving away like all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: They both were, and so she had she posted these twigs,
Speaker 1: and the moderator of the group wrote to her and
Speaker 1: was like, listen, lady, these twigs like this isn't a gift,
Speaker 1: can you not? And but it turned out somebody wanted
Speaker 1: the twigs, and the person who wanted the twigs was
Speaker 1: Leesela Clark, And so that's how these two women met.
Speaker 1: They both loved twigs. They love twigs, yes, And so
Speaker 1: lizel Clark then posts to Facebook to see if people
Speaker 1: would be interested in this idea of a less moderated
Speaker 1: version of free cycle. They call it buy Nothing and
Speaker 1: people go nuts. They love this, right, yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: within days they've got a hundreds of people in their
Speaker 1: town using this thing. Why do you think it works?
Speaker 1: Because there's already ways to give away free stuff, like
Speaker 1: you said, like free cycle and other places. The founders
Speaker 1: talk a lot about how they feel that the reason
Speaker 1: it was so successful and really took off is that
Speaker 1: it was really community oriented and people like could give
Speaker 1: what they wanted and ask for what they wanted, and
Speaker 1: like it was so cozy. I believe there's another reason
Speaker 1: that it took off, which is that it was on Facebook.
Speaker 1: Like it was one of these early communities to spring
Speaker 1: up on Facebook, and it made it so easy, and
Speaker 1: you would like come across people's buy nothing post when
Speaker 1: you were just surfing Facebook, and I think that played
Speaker 1: a big role plus compared to like Craigslist or freecycle.
Speaker 1: When you don't see the person and learn something about
Speaker 1: them and know who their friends are, like you might
Speaker 1: feel much more comfortable and safe going to bring your
Speaker 1: twigs to someone's house if you saw their whole profile
Speaker 1: on Facebook exactly right, Like people will post on there,
Speaker 1: will comment in response to your posts saying like hey,
Speaker 1: I want those twigs. And if you can hover over
Speaker 1: their name and see that you know so and so
Speaker 1: in comment, or your kids go to the same school,
Speaker 1: you're gonna feel uncomfortable. And so what sort of stuff
Speaker 1: is being given away? Because you list crazy things A
Speaker 1: used stick of deodorant that someone took, a half eaten
Speaker 1: artichoke pizza that someone took. Absolutely yeah, and the list
Speaker 1: goes on, and then you have a crazy story about
Speaker 1: this couple who had a bunch of miscarriages that when
Speaker 1: I'm buying nothing, yes, so Liesel and Rebecca talk about
Speaker 1: this couple who had a bunch of miscarriages, and so
Speaker 1: they had some you know, some baby stuff that they
Speaker 1: had put on buy nothing and somebody said, yes, they
Speaker 1: wanted it, and they came over to pick it up.
Speaker 1: And it turned out this person was coming over to
Speaker 1: pick up the stuff on behalf of a friend who
Speaker 1: was pregnant but didn't know if she wanted to keep
Speaker 1: the baby. And so eventually one thing led to another,
Speaker 1: and this family, this couple who had the miscarriages, ended
Speaker 1: up becoming the adoptive parents of this baby. No free baby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. As this thing is blowing up across the country.
Speaker 1: How are Clark and rockefellerre managing this huge thing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they could They could have gone a bunch of ways, right,
Speaker 1: Like they started this thing in their community and it
Speaker 1: went really well, and then other people said, hey, we
Speaker 1: want to start this in our own community, and they
Speaker 1: could have just been like, cool, go for it. But
Speaker 1: what they felt was that they had like a really
Speaker 1: strong sense of what they wanted by nothing to beat,
Speaker 1: and so they decided that every group would have to
Speaker 1: like sort of follow certain rules that they came up with.
Speaker 1: But these were all like sept individual Facebook groups that
Speaker 1: it wasn't a business, it wasn't a nonprofit. It was
Speaker 1: just like this network of Facebook groups, and they had
Speaker 1: to have all these administrators like read it almost who
Speaker 1: are doing all the work? That's right, yes, because Facebook
Speaker 1: groups all have to be run by an administrator. They decided, Okay,
Speaker 1: each of these local Facebook groups will be run by
Speaker 1: an admin, and then we'll have another Facebook group that's
Speaker 1: like the hub, the admin hub, where all the local
Speaker 1: admins can belong to that and that's where worlds share
Speaker 1: information about what's new and help problem solve. And then
Speaker 1: they eventually had many, many, many thousands of groups in
Speaker 1: the US and then internationally millions of members. And as
Speaker 1: that was happening, they started creating the system where they
Speaker 1: would have these like regional administrators to oversee the local
Speaker 1: ones and then global admins to oversee the regional ones.
Speaker 1: And so it started looking a lot like some kind
Speaker 1: of corporate structure, right without any money exactly, And they
Speaker 1: had no money, and the moderators have to follow these
Speaker 1: ten rules of buying nothing, Yes, And the main one
Speaker 1: you talk about is that they have to keep it
Speaker 1: local through something called sprouting, because it's all about community exactly.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that when it reaches a certain size,
Speaker 1: like a thousand people, you have to break off into smaller,
Speaker 1: geographical buy nothing groups, right, that's right. Yeah, So if
Speaker 1: the membership goes past a thousand, you're supposed to sprout
Speaker 1: into two or more smaller groups that are sort of
Speaker 1: geographically more compact. The idea is to like have a
Speaker 1: smaller environmental footprint and keep because you're driving not as
Speaker 1: far to drop off your twigs exactly exactly. Maybe you're walking, right,
Speaker 1: maybe you don't have to drive. Because these groups are
Speaker 1: getting smaller and smaller, and they have this really what
Speaker 1: I think is a really kind of lovely, idealistic vision
Speaker 1: of these groups sprouting and becoming smaller and smaller and
Speaker 1: so small that eventually buy nothing doesn't have to exist anymore,
Speaker 1: because like your group is everybody on your block, and
Speaker 1: then you can just walk over to your neighs house
Speaker 1: and ask if they want a twig or whatever, right,
Speaker 1: which is probably how it was for most of humanity. Right.
Speaker 1: And they're trying to re establish having people in a community,
Speaker 1: oh exactly, and that kind of politics of say twenty
Speaker 1: thirteen when they started bumps up against the politics of
Speaker 1: the Trump administration, you know, the time we're living we
Speaker 1: were living in twenty eighteen. And sprouting causes some trouble, yes,
Speaker 1: very much. Though specifically in this place, Jamaica Plains, which
Speaker 1: is a suburb of Massachusetts that it's really liberal, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a suburb or I think it's technically a
Speaker 1: neighborhood of Boston. So in this community there were almost
Speaker 1: at five thousand people and they were getting pressure to
Speaker 1: sprout because that's what you're supposed to do, and they
Speaker 1: knew that their members would hate the idea because there
Speaker 1: would be worries about the process of sprouting sort of
Speaker 1: entrenching like the existing segregation and the legacy of redlining
Speaker 1: in their community, right, right, Because the idea of sprouting
Speaker 1: has a beautiful idea of community, but it means that
Speaker 1: you're going to be with people of your exact same
Speaker 1: demographic because of real estate prices. So you know, if
Speaker 1: you're in a rich neighborhood, you're only going to be
Speaker 1: trading your super expensive twigs with your rich neighbors, whereas
Speaker 1: if you geographically expand it, poorer people can get your
Speaker 1: really sweet twigs. Yeah, and so what happened in this
Speaker 1: community is that members totally kind of revolted and we're like,
Speaker 1: this is horrible. We're worried about segregation, We're worried about redlining.
Speaker 1: And then what happened was that some of the regional
Speaker 1: admins started jumping into the conversation and pushing back and saying,
Speaker 1: you know, this is what buy nothing is all about.
Speaker 1: You have to sprout, and tempers got heated and it
Speaker 1: all kind of blew up, and eventually Lisa Clark, one
Speaker 1: of the co founders, got pulled into the situation and
Speaker 1: said something. She used some language about how she was
Speaker 1: quote unquote saddened by the behavior of this local group,
Speaker 1: and then everybody got really really mad because it felt
Speaker 1: like she wasn't understanding what the underlying problem was. And
Speaker 1: she eventually apologized, but a bunch of damage had already
Speaker 1: been done. But I mean, how do you fix that
Speaker 1: tension between wanting things to be hyperlocal and you to
Speaker 1: know your neighbors and wanting to connect people in disparate
Speaker 1: socioeconomic and racial groups who don't live in the same neighborhood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, one thing they could have done is like
Speaker 1: loosen things a little and said, like, hey, we do
Speaker 1: want you to sprout, but you should figure out how
Speaker 1: to sprout on your own and make sure you come
Speaker 1: up with lines that don't reinforce segregation in the legacy
Speaker 1: of redlining, for example, Right, But that's not what they did.
Speaker 1: We'll find out what Clark and Rockefeller are actually did soon,
Speaker 1: but first we have ad for things you actually have
Speaker 1: to buy because we're late capitalist pigs. Lizel Clark and
Speaker 1: Rebecca Rockefeller have this wildly popular group on Facebook called
Speaker 1: buy Nothing, which is like this utopic idea of a
Speaker 1: Facebook group for your hyperlocal neighborhood that shares free stuff.
Speaker 1: But in twenty eighteen, it's starting to splinter in Jamaica
Speaker 1: Planes Boston, this incredibly liberal area, and it's fighting about
Speaker 1: really racial politics. So how did Clark and Rockefeller decide
Speaker 1: to handle this situation in Jamaica Planes? So they did
Speaker 1: this whole kind of rethinking of Buy Nothing, and when
Speaker 1: they came out of the other side of that rethinking,
Speaker 1: they decided that what they needed to do was like
Speaker 1: get rid of the requirement for sprouting altogether and let
Speaker 1: communities do it if they want, but not make it
Speaker 1: a requirement. So they form an equity team to figure
Speaker 1: out how to be actively anti racist and anti appression.
Speaker 1: There was an argument about whether Buying Nothing's rules of
Speaker 1: enforced civility were kind of classist and racist too, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there were all these things that got brought into it.
Speaker 1: Buy Nothing had historically had this language about like being
Speaker 1: kind and being civil, and the argument was made that
Speaker 1: was sort of being deployed in a way that was
Speaker 1: shutting down people from non majority, non dominant backgrounds, right,
Speaker 1: like a person of color or a queer person or whatever,
Speaker 1: who would maybe have a complaint and like state it
Speaker 1: in a pissed off way about something that was happening
Speaker 1: in our local group, for example, like people offering Confederate
Speaker 1: flags or people offering quote unquote Native American costumes right
Speaker 1: for Halloween. And then they would get accused of being
Speaker 1: unkind right because they're living now in a time where
Speaker 1: everything is political and they're on Facebook where everyone fights
Speaker 1: about politics now, which is not when they join Facebook
Speaker 1: what Facebook was like. So they're wondering if maybe Facebook
Speaker 1: is the problem. Plus everyone's turned on big tech, so
Speaker 1: they start to think that Facebook's the problem, right exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they start to think, wait a minute, we created
Speaker 1: this idealistic community all about buying nothing, all about sort
Speaker 1: of like standing outside of capitalist structures. But oh no,
Speaker 1: the place where this exists is sort of like the
Speaker 1: most capitalists of structures of all. So they decide they
Speaker 1: want to get off Facebook entirely. They want to make
Speaker 1: this a big move and divest themselves from it, and
Speaker 1: they're going to do it on Black Friday of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: which is celebrated as buy Nothing Day in buy nothing world. Yes,
Speaker 1: they post this announcement on buy Nothing Day, is saying
Speaker 1: they are starting a platform called soup Soop, which stands
Speaker 1: for share on our platform, and it is going to
Speaker 1: be this like independent platform, and they don't want it
Speaker 1: to have anything to do with corporate interests. And so
Speaker 1: what they're doing is they're going to their community to
Speaker 1: tell them about it first, and they have a little
Speaker 1: website they've set up where they're going to take donations.
Speaker 1: And so what happens after they make this announcement is
Speaker 1: there's a mini revolt in their community. And the reason
Speaker 1: is that another one of the rules of buy Nothing
Speaker 1: is that you don't go on buy Nothing and ask
Speaker 1: for money, which they have just done by saying, Hey,
Speaker 1: we're starting our own platform, can you give us money
Speaker 1: to fund it? Oh, then that's like the first rule
Speaker 1: of fight club. I mean, that's a serious rule. I
Speaker 1: mean it's called by nothing, and to be fair, some
Speaker 1: people feel that way, and other people think it's a
Speaker 1: good idea and they donate. But at this point they
Speaker 1: have millions of people using buy Nothing, but they raise
Speaker 1: less than twenty thousand dollars, which in the world, as
Speaker 1: you know, Joel, the world of tech is like not
Speaker 1: a lot of money to build. I guess when people
Speaker 1: are giving each other twigs, twenty thousand is about right, ye, right,
Speaker 1: twenty thousands actually a lot of money. So it should
Speaker 1: be noted that because they raised only twenty thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: when they tried to build their own platform, they ended
Speaker 1: up like just scrapping the idea and giving all the
Speaker 1: money back and continuing to grow on Facebook. So while
Speaker 1: this fight is brewing, the pandemic happens and everyone is
Speaker 1: stuck at home and buy Nothing like so many other things,
Speaker 1: just blows up, right exactly, And so they went from
Speaker 1: like from nothing in twenty thirteen to four million members
Speaker 1: during the pandemic. They added about a million members during
Speaker 1: that first period of the pandemic because people were staying
Speaker 1: home and not going to stores and going on Facebook
Speaker 1: and trading things on Buy Nothing because they realized that
Speaker 1: could keep them from from having to shop, and probably
Speaker 1: they wanted social interaction, yeah, absolutely, And people were sharing
Speaker 1: like you know, masks and over the counter medications and
Speaker 1: pandemic related things too, and supporting each other. And there
Speaker 1: were places where it became a kind of like mutual
Speaker 1: aid that was happening as part of the pandemic, with
Speaker 1: you know, neighbors just like coming together in informal ways
Speaker 1: supporting one another, and then at some point they decide
Speaker 1: that they really need to get off Facebook, and they
Speaker 1: need to do it by starting their own company, which
Speaker 1: they must know is going to piss people off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what was happening during the pandemic was there were
Speaker 1: just these two women who were working these really you know,
Speaker 1: nine hour days on top of having other jobs, having families.
Speaker 1: They're literally they have millions of people doing this and
Speaker 1: they're not making anything, right, yeah, exactly, and so they
Speaker 1: really start to feel like they're reaching some kind of
Speaker 1: breaking point. And then they get this message from a
Speaker 1: man named Tunji Williams, a former lawyer who had started
Speaker 1: a tech company fairly successfully. This is when a man
Speaker 1: finally enters the scene. This is when trouble is going
Speaker 1: to start. I'm very sure that's the first man in
Speaker 1: this story, right. So they get a message from this man,
Speaker 1: Tenji Williams. They get on the phone and they decide
Speaker 1: that they this time are really going to start something together.
Speaker 1: And unlike the previous time where they really were idealistic
Speaker 1: about it and thought they would just raise money from
Speaker 1: their community and be scrappy about it, this time they
Speaker 1: realize that that didn't work and they're just going to
Speaker 1: start a company and raise money in a more traditional
Speaker 1: way at first through family and friends, and so this
Speaker 1: time they raised one hundred thousand dollars. So they decide
Speaker 1: to start this company, which they must know is going
Speaker 1: to annoy people, but they proceed anyway they do. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think they have a sense that there could be tension.
Speaker 1: I don't think they realize at the outset how hard
Speaker 1: it is to do what they're trying to do, how
Speaker 1: hard it is to take this like thriving Facebook based community,
Speaker 1: which thrives in part because of all of these things
Speaker 1: Facebook has built into its platform to get all of
Speaker 1: us to keep coming back to Facebook, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: all these things that you don't even think about. It's
Speaker 1: not just like it's not just the programmers who build
Speaker 1: Facebook and provide the platform or the computing power. It's
Speaker 1: also it's also like an aspect of the marketing. Right.
Speaker 1: It's the fact that if you're on Facebook, buy nothing
Speaker 1: is going to pop up because you're in the buy
Speaker 1: nothing group, and so you'll see people's posts. Whereas if
Speaker 1: you need to use an independent app to be on
Speaker 1: buy Nothing, you have to remember to open that app
Speaker 1: and you know, you can't see whether you have friends
Speaker 1: in common with the other people on the app. You
Speaker 1: can't see where they went to college. Right, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: just something about seeing everyone's face and their life that
Speaker 1: makes this a more welcoming kind of warm community. Like
Speaker 1: as much as you want to hate Facebook, the original
Speaker 1: idea of Facebook still works in that way. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, And so their app just sucks. Right, I've
Speaker 1: tried the app obviously, while reporting on the story, I
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on the app, and it
Speaker 1: is a little more maybe even less free cycle than
Speaker 1: like a Craigslist or something, Right, So that was one issue.
Speaker 1: But then as you said, also they had one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars at first, that still not that much money.
Speaker 1: They eventually raised another like four hundred thousand dollars also
Speaker 1: in the world of tech, not a lot of money.
Speaker 1: And so they subcontracted the building of this app to
Speaker 1: this like development shop in Poland, which made a version
Speaker 1: of the app that's especially at first like kind of clunky,
Speaker 1: kind of buggy in general, like it wasn't a very
Speaker 1: robust experience, and they are the rules of the app
Speaker 1: that you have to sprout, like is it about having
Speaker 1: a local community or is it about rich import trading
Speaker 1: their couch duffing. So through that Jamaica plane experience, the
Speaker 1: founders became so convinced that this idea of sprouting that
Speaker 1: they built into the original idea was wrong and misguided
Speaker 1: that they decided that in the app there shouldn't be
Speaker 1: any boundaries at all. So what you do is, if
Speaker 1: you have the app, you open the app and you say,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in giving things to and getting things from
Speaker 1: people within either like a point five mile radius or
Speaker 1: a twenty mile radius. And then they try to figure
Speaker 1: out how they're going to make money in this company
Speaker 1: that they've launched, and they're screwed because it's called buy Nothing.
Speaker 1: So what can they possibly do? It's so hard, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, they just keep coming up against the fact
Speaker 1: that they're buying nothing, right, and so they have kind
Speaker 1: of made a promise that they're not gonna like run
Speaker 1: targeted ads, and they're also not going to mind people's
Speaker 1: personal data. The idea that is the most straightforward and
Speaker 1: logical that they had was to allow people to post
Speaker 1: on buy Nothing that they would help with things like
Speaker 1: delivery or fixing things. So yeah, so like if I
Speaker 1: have a couch and usual want a couch, but neither
Speaker 1: of us have trucks, somebody can offer to drive my
Speaker 1: couch to you, and then we have to pay that
Speaker 1: person and buy nothing. Takes a cut. Okay, so it's
Speaker 1: a pay to pay for labor because you're still not
Speaker 1: buying anything. And so people don't dig that. I assume
Speaker 1: people don't love these ideas. No um. But then furthermore,
Speaker 1: they're running out of money, right, So they're going out
Speaker 1: to Silicon Valley and they're they're paying for this out
Speaker 1: of their own pockets. They're in the red, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and lisl Clark is covering the business expenses, which are
Speaker 1: about five thousand dollars a month, which isn't nothing at all.
Speaker 1: And they've tried to raise money from Silicon Valley. They
Speaker 1: send some emails, you know, they send some messages through
Speaker 1: the website's of venture capital firms. They have no connections,
Speaker 1: they have no idea like how to reach these people,
Speaker 1: but they try and it's nothing. You know, they get
Speaker 1: some responses but no money. But also they have a company,
Speaker 1: which is where people don't spend money. It's a tough sell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's tough, Yes, absolutely, and they're still on Facebook, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They posted information on their website that you could use
Speaker 1: to start your own Facebook group if you wanted, but
Speaker 1: they weren't deeply involved in that formally at all. They
Speaker 1: were focused on this app that really not a ton
Speaker 1: of people were using, and Facebook. The Facebook groups were
Speaker 1: really continuing to grow and grow, and by last year
Speaker 1: they were up past seven million people. Meanwhile, there's this
Speaker 1: one woman is particularly pissed off, Andrea Schwalb. Where is
Speaker 1: she and why is she? Some hat? So? Andrea Schwalb
Speaker 1: is a long time buy Nothing admin and she has
Speaker 1: been getting gradually more and more pissed off at the
Speaker 1: various changes that are taking place at buy Nothing. She
Speaker 1: starts her own like rogue buy Nothing group. It's called
Speaker 1: Gifting with Integrity og Buy Nothing Support Group. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: no absolutely, Andreas started like including all these old buy
Speaker 1: nothing documents that harken back to the kind of earlier
Speaker 1: way of doing things at buy Nothing, including sprouting and
Speaker 1: not talking about money. But this has to piss them off.
Speaker 1: They've tried to start this company and instead everyone's still
Speaker 1: doing the free thing on Facebook, and so eventually they
Speaker 1: try and stop them, Right, they go to war with
Speaker 1: their own people. Yes, so they trademarked the phrase buy nothing. Actually,
Speaker 1: that's got to be hard, actually, yeah right, it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's ironic, it's really interesting. But they're a business now, right,
Speaker 1: So it's also it's both like kind of like what
Speaker 1: they did? What? How could you do that? And so
Speaker 1: they trademark this phrase, and they filed a complaint to
Speaker 1: Facebook about the OG group, saying this OG group has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with us. They're a totally separate thing,
Speaker 1: but they have buy Nothing in their name, and they're
Speaker 1: making people think that they're representatives of buy Nothing and
Speaker 1: they're not. So that OG group what they did was
Speaker 1: they scrubbed everything buy Nothing related from their Facebook groups,
Speaker 1: from their documents, from their website, and they kind of
Speaker 1: like re emerged as something called just Gifting with Integrity.
Speaker 1: So how big is Gifting with Integrity versus the original
Speaker 1: Buy Nothing? To be fair, the original Buy Nothing is
Speaker 1: still orders of magnitude larger than Gifting with Integrity, But
Speaker 1: Gifting with Integrity does have thousands of admin members, and
Speaker 1: in fact, my local group in Fort Collins is one
Speaker 1: of these groups. And my local group in Fort Collins
Speaker 1: is now called something else. It's now called the Northeast
Speaker 1: Fort Collins Gifting Community. No integrity, no integrity, interesting thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what do you think is going to happen here? I
Speaker 1: hate to speculate. I'm a reporter. I hate to speculate.
Speaker 1: This could go either way, right or third way? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I really and I should I should say that as
Speaker 1: I was, you know, all this drama was unfolding, and
Speaker 1: I thought the story was finished, and I thought I'd
Speaker 1: written the last sentences. I had a draft where I'd
Speaker 1: written the last sentences that were like, Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't look like doesn't look good for Buy Nothing.
Speaker 1: But then I had a last couple of phone calls
Speaker 1: with the founders and they told me that actually, and
Speaker 1: maybe it was because they were re engaging with Facebook.
Speaker 1: I don't know why, but the numbers of users of
Speaker 1: the app had recently gone up. Maybe they now have
Speaker 1: all the ingredients in place to figure out how to
Speaker 1: make this out work, or maybe not. Who knows. Wahini Vara,
Speaker 1: you wrote the Battle for the soul of Buy Nothing
Speaker 1: for Wired Magazine. Thank you for telling us about it.
Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. This was fun. I signed
Speaker 1: up for my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook. It's
Speaker 1: been almost six days and it hasn't accepted my request.
Speaker 1: So because I wasn't admitted, I turned to the second
Speaker 1: best thing. There's an Instagram account that posts the best
Speaker 1: of buy nothing, or at least the weirdest. I found
Speaker 1: a Tommy Chung autographed thong, toilet paper roll, binoculars, an
Speaker 1: iPhone three G still in its packaging, a chandelier made
Speaker 1: out of Barbie dolls, Chrissy Teagan's Cravings cookbook, and a
Speaker 1: life size cutout of George Clooney, which I will be
Speaker 1: inquiring about. Get Ready los velis buy Nothing group. I
Speaker 1: am coming in hot. At the end of the show,
Speaker 1: what's next for joel Stein? Maybe he'll take a never
Speaker 1: poke around online. Our show today was produced by Mola
Speaker 1: Board and Nisha Bencutt. It was edited by Lydia Gencott.
Speaker 1: Our engineer is Amanda kay Way and our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Katherine Girado. And our theme song was written and
Speaker 1: performed by Jonathan Colton. And a special thanks to my
Speaker 1: voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer laurenz Alaska.
Speaker 1: To find more Pushkin podcast, listen on the iHeartRadio app
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm
Speaker 1: Joel Stein, and this is the story of the week.
Speaker 1: What's the last thing you got off? If you're buy
Speaker 1: Nothing group? My son was in a summer theater production
Speaker 1: and I'm in the group, but I'm not that active,
Speaker 1: So I asked my mom to post it. I was like, mom,
Speaker 1: can you post something ask for like something that could
Speaker 1: be part of a leopard cut costume. And she posted
Speaker 1: in like within hours somebody had offered a leopard tail
Speaker 1: and leopards. That's really specific. That's amazing, it's great. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend it.