Podcast Summary: TRASHFUTURE – The Tetsuo Economy feat. Wendy Liu

Date: March 25, 2026
Guests: Wendy Liu
Hosts: Riley, Hussein

Overview

This episode dives into the world of startups, venture capital, and the ever-more bizarre intersections of real business, AI hype, psychic trauma, and late capitalism’s scams, exemplified by the company “Delve.” In conversation with frequent guest Wendy Liu, the hosts explore the “Tetsuofication” of the economy: where fake, hollowed-out, and self-cannibalizing tech fictions replace genuine production or oversight, resulting in a world degraded and made stranger by the current VC-fueled tech bubble. They also examine the rise of dystopian prediction markets, the fallout of ongoing conflicts on ordinary business, and the broader, nearly surreal, fintech environment.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction: “Delve” – The Latest Theranos, but for Compliance

• The hosts introduce Delve, comparing it to Theranos but with the claim that their product will “actually work” ([00:36]).
• Both Riley and Wendy have been researching and writing about Delve due to its massive, in-your-face advertising and its suspicious business model ([01:07]).
• Notable: Delve spent nearly $1 million blanketing San Francisco in bus, transit, and highway billboard ads to signal “seriousness” to clients/investors ([01:07])

2. Brief News Detours: Dystopian Betting Parlors and Second-Order Crisis Effects

• Discussion about Polymarket’s “Monitoring the Situation” bar in DC—essentially a real-life, gamified betting parlor where people wager on global crises, drone strikes, and political events ([03:37]).

  • “It’s like going for a drink inside Elon Musk’s Twitter replies.” – Riley ([04:28])
  • Guests discuss how these markets encourage speculation on violence and war, remove any moral filter, and facilitate potential insider trading.
  • Wendy skewers the justification: “I wonder if there's another way to get information about what's going on in the world that... I wonder if anyone's ever thought of that before.” ([06:09])

• Crisis Feedback Loops: Airline Industry, Oil, and the Strait of Hormuz

  • Riley outlines how disruptions in Iran and the Gulf have priced major airlines, like United, out of possible profitability; the end of cheap flights may be upon us ([12:17]).
  • Wendy notes, “Is it maybe good? Should we maybe be trying to deincentivize flights?... it shouldn't cost like £19 to go somewhere on a plane. That is... probably not a good thing.” ([13:02])
  • Hosts lament the total lack of functional alternatives in the US, with Wendy noting, “we don’t have great train infrastructure” ([13:56])
  • The shutdown of the Gulf also jeopardizes supply chains for tech (helium for chips), agriculture (fertilizer), and consumer goods (plastics), exacerbating overall crisis ([18:43]).

3. The Delve Deep-Dive: Compliance Theater at Silicon Valley Scale

• Wendy describes Delve’s omnipresent, surreal billboards and ad campaign, which play into startup mythology (dropping out of Stanford, getting into YC, etc.) with AI and compliance as the buzzwords ([20:13]).

  • “They’re entirely just selling shovels in a gold rush. Even more abstract than that, selling food to the people who are selling shovels…” – Wendy ([20:37])

• What Delve Actually Did: Systemic Fraud and Fake AI

  • Purported to revolutionize compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, etc.) with “AI agents” that could automate and simplify the process ([23:07]).
  • In reality, Delve auto-generated fake compliance evidence: minutes for board meetings that never happened, background checks that weren’t performed, audits that were simply templated and find-replaced for different clients ([34:03]).
    • “They would auto generate fake evidence…” – Riley ([34:03])
    • “I really liked the phrase I use which is ‘this is an incredibly high quality report.’ And it's like every person gets that email…” – Wendy ([34:03])
  • Their clients were largely other hollow “AI” startups, often relying on Delve to attain compliance so they could pretend to offer real services.

• Why and How Did They Get Funding?

  • Raised $32 million at a $300 million valuation, counting major VCs like Insight Partners, Y Combinator, and General Catalyst ([23:07], [24:47]).
  • Founders: MIT AI researchers, with one a Forbes 30 under 30 alumnus—a credential the hosts mock for its association with infamous grifters ([23:07]).
  • Wendy and Riley articulate how VCs’ lack of technical due diligence, the contagious hype around “AI,” and the culture of “fake it till you make it” green-lighted obviously fraudulent ventures ([31:10]):
    • “Even if the investors know that it's a lie, I think the market right now, rewards a certain level of audacity and fake it till you make it... especially with anything involving the concept of AI.” – Wendy ([31:10])

4. Wider Societal Critique: Everything Is TE.M.U. Now

• Wendy: “It feels a little bit like TEMU for compliance. You look at the screenshots… it’s so obviously shitty and cobbled together.” ([28:26])
• The Delve model is likened to the “sheinification” of everything—services and products that are cheaper, worse, and less regulated for the sake of convenience and profit ([38:35]).
• The panel sees Delve as part of a larger trend: a move to erode collective standards, oversight, and any semblance of meaningful productivity in favor of hollow growth and capital allocation ([39:58]).
  • “It is the stuff that made the thing kind of reproduce itself... getting eaten by the same kinds of motives...” – Riley ([38:35])

5. The “Tetsuo Economy” Metaphor

• Riley introduces the core analogy: The economy—like Tetsuo at the end of Akira—becomes a grotesque, all-consuming, self-cannibalizing monster, collapsing under its own expansion, driven by the proliferation of scammy, auto-cannibalistic tech fictions ([40:34]).
  • “We're living what Delve and Cluly and all this Polymarket, all this fake shit represents is the Tetsuofication of everything that these things touch.” – Riley ([41:19])
• Hussein distinguishes this from prior tech scandals: “With these guys, what's sort of worse about it is because they already exist within a system in which everyone is producing fake stuff anyway, no one can really sort of say to them ‘hey, what you're doing isn't a real thing’..." ([41:25])

6. Systemic Problems and “No Bottom”

• The episode closes with a bleak portrait of how startup world’s core incentives—disruption, corner-cutting, hype, and VC self-interest—have exhausted capitalism’s old legitimations.
  • “Entrepreneurship is supposed to be the thing that legitimates capitalism... we're at the stage where it is... the vulture stage or the almost like auto-cannibalist stage...” – Wendy ([49:56])
• Riley describes the new elite as performing “courtly rituals” with no real output or justification beyond self-reinforcing power ([50:40]).
• Final thoughts: Despite living through the obvious fictions and scams, ordinary participants have no real ability to choose alternatives (“You can’t pick your hospitals like cloud storage provider...it just happens to you.” – Riley [56:07]).
• Wendy notes the collapse of the “self-regulating free market” myth; with complexity, opacity, and monopolization, even the prospect of market correction vanishes ([56:59]).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Delve’s Model
  “They’re entirely just selling shovels in a gold rush. Even more abstract than that, selling food to the people who are selling shovels...” – Wendy ([20:37])

• On Compliance Theatre
  “They would auto generate fake evidence...auto generate fake reports that an auditor based out of a post office in India would then send back...90 days later you get an ‘independent’ US based auditor report where there’s leaked spreadsheet of 493 companies, 492 of them auditor reports were just find/replace identical documents...” – Riley ([34:03])

• On the Broader Tech Economy
  “It really does feel like there are all these things that are kind of replicas of things that already exist, but shittier and less regulated and less good for the world...the sheenification of everything.” – Wendy ([38:35])

• On AI & The Tech Hype Bubble
  “Even if the investors know that it’s a lie, the market right now rewards a certain level of audacity...as long as the founders are really ambitious people, they’re going to raise money…at some point, someone will figure it out and then some sort of use case will emerge…” – Wendy ([31:10])

• The Tetsuo Analogy
  “We're living what Delve and Cluly and all this Polymarket, all this fake shit represents is the Tetsuofication of everything that these things touch.” – Riley ([41:19])

• On the End of Legitimation
  “Entrepreneurship is supposed to be the thing that legitimates capitalism...we're at the stage where it is sort of like the vulture stage or the almost like auto-cannibalist stage.” – Wendy ([49:56])

• On the Free Market Myth
  “No one is really in a place to observe and to audit even. So it really does feel like we're reaching the end of days of this kind of the free market will regulate itself mythology. It doesn't seem like it really holds up...” – Wendy ([56:59])

Segment Timestamps

• 00:36 – 02:35: Introduction and Delve’s ads in San Francisco
• 03:37 – 09:13: Polymarket’s “Monitoring the Situation” bar and dystopian betting on global crises
• 12:17 – 19:37: Second-order effects of Gulf crisis on airlines, energy, and commodity supply chains; the end of cheap flights
• 20:13 – 22:32: Delve’s eye-catching but bizarre compliance ads
• 23:07 – 34:03: Delve’s founder backgrounds, rapid fundraising, and actual practices (fake compliance, templated audits)
• 38:35 – 41:19: Broader trend: “Sheinification”/hollowing out of real industry, AI hype, and systemic auto-cannibalism
• 40:34 – 41:19: The “Tetsuo Economy” analogy explained
• 49:56 – 56:07: Tech industry’s loss of even the pretense of social value, “vulture stage” capitalism
• 56:59 – end: The collapse of the self-correcting free market fable

Tone and Style

The episode has TRASHFUTURE’s signature sardonic, informed, and darkly funny analysis. The guests and hosts combine deep, technically literate explanations with sharp-edged cultural critique, using references ranging from obscure fintech jargon to Akira and “forbes 30 under 30” jokes. The mood oscillates between weary laughter and genuine despair at the late-capitalist fraud machine.

Conclusion

Through the lens of the Delve scandal and its “TEMU for compliance” grift, the episode diagnoses a tech economy that now lives mostly in mutually-agreed fiction—where nothing need be produced, compliance is gamified, and the only winners are those closest to the VC trough. Yet outside the “Monitoring the Situation” bar, ever-growing crises—energy, climate, labor, and trust—signal that beneath the Tetsuo economy’s surface there may be little but hollow shell and accelerating meltdown.