TRASHFUTURE - Crazy Taxi feat. Paris Marx

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Paris Marx from Tech Won’t Save Us joins Riley and Alice to discuss the Uber Files - a trove of documents confirming Uber was doing what we were alleging it was doing the whole time. But first, we review a fight between a practitioner of the Reddit style and a master of the Page Six style. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ 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 *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *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)

So I was talking to Malcolm Harris earlier because there's this new Stuart Brand biography out and we were basically talking about how after Stanford, he like wanted to become an Army Ranger and like went into the military, but then like figured out it was hard. And so then couldn't do that. And then he wanted to be a green beret, but then that didn't work out either. And so like me, wait, wait, wait, wait, just like, wait, I have to do a second push up fuck this.

Yes, he was just like, I'm going to be in the military. And they were like, no, oh, OK, all right, well, run through these tires. He was like, this is hard. I'm going to be a green beret instead. I assume you just have to wear a hat for that. Yeah. And they were like, you know, you need to actually do the training to be a green beret. And he was like, oh, OK, well, that doesn't work either. And so then his like sister's husband was like higher up in the military.

And so then they just like gave him some cushy jobs to like ride out his army time because like they didn't actually trust him to do anything. You probably would have like fucked it all up. That's like my dream job, my dream careers. I do basically the same amount of work that I'm doing now, which is to say next to nothing, but I get a 10 percent discount on like any breakfast sandwich at Denny's and people like thank me for my service. Yeah, that's what I want.

You want to be in, you want to be in like the 101st PowerPoint division. Yeah, yeah, my M.O.S. is hat model. It's like you want to be, you want to be just like making a PowerPoint about, you know, you know what it is, you want to be making a PowerPoint about how I made, I made the database that stores information on what all of the little patches say, and I get to like go and like look through all of the stocks of patches just to make sure that they say what they say, because I was going to say you could make a PowerPoint on like how to handle information on USB keys

for British soldiers stationed in Germany, something really specific like that. But no, I think it would be better if you just went through boxes upon boxes of inscrutable patches and just had a little clipboard ticking them off. Hi, everybody. It is, of course, T.F. It's that podcast you're listening to right now. It's the free episode. It's the free one.

You'll notice that only one back on three only one. Of we won annoying zoo crew style voice came in here because it is a rare much depleted. Yeah, we are running on fumes here at T.F. Acres and I'm going to let you know why it's because Milo was on a much deserved vacation and I locked myself in to our office. Yeah, the thing is, the thing is you've been trying a few solos to get me into wine for a while. You've been like sending me links to the Wine Society website.

You've been telling me about different vintages. And now you've fucking casque of a Montiado'd yourself. That's right. I have. I have locked myself into our office because for some reason my keys. I have the joke keys that everyone gets locked in here with you. Yeah, well, except in a second, more real sense, you are locked in there with you. Absolutely.

You and your Elon Musk cut out behind you. Yeah, that's right. And so Hussein will be joining us probably for the last third of this if he gets here in time because he is coming from Dartford to let me out. We're the most competent professional band of podcasters in the country, I think. And that's the problem is that you're not wrong. I'd like to see the Remaniacs do this. All right, I think I think if they put their mind to it, the Remaniacs could all

lock themselves in different offices. And so, of course, it is myself, Riley. I'm joined ably by by Alice. And we also have delighted to be making a, I think, fourth appearance on the show. It is turning champion. It is Tech Won't Save Us's Paris Marks. Paris, how's it going? Hello.

Thanks so much for having me back. As I said, free episode again. I absolutely love it. You know, love being on the show. Yeah, no, I think you might be sessing like a sort of new land speed record for how quickly anyone's come back on the show, too. Which is great. I just keep coming back and back and back.

And it seems like the time like keeps shortening. I think I'm just going to become a co-host soon. That's right. That's the thing, they turned on the big machine at CERN that makes Paris Marks host your podcast. Well, if you're a bottom and listener, you'll also know that the most recent bottom and episode to be out, Dan Beckner was too busy doing rock star stuff to co-host a podcast.

This is all pal Riley. And so Paris filled in for that as well. So it's just piles of Paris. Yeah, the large podcast these days. Yeah. That's right. That's right. So look out for Paris on Masters of our Domain.

Look out for popular. Kill James Bond. Yeah, absolutely. On all of them. I'm going to have to watch a James Bond movie now to. Yeah, that's right. No, so we've evolved long beyond the need for that. Yeah, yeah.

OK, good. Absolutely. I played the GoldenEye game when I was a kid. Perfect. Yeah, it's you're trying to speed run facility. It's going to the podcast last for two minutes and it's mostly you going. We did we did try and make an episode out of the video game. And let me tell you, despite our best efforts, a video game is not very

conducive to a movie review podcast. That's fair. Yeah, you're sitting there. You're just like, come on, do something just as a start menu. So look, if you're a British listener and you're listening to this, number one, thank you. Number two, you might be wondering thanking them. They haven't paid us any money.

Oh, yeah. Well, well, for those of you that pay money, thank you. For the others, what are you doing? Yeah, you do the layabouts. No, in my opinion, welcome to the Iran podcast. No, no, no. So you might be wondering, oh, boy, I can't wait until these my favorite, you know, Goof-Hmups talk about further insane developments

in the sort of Tory leadership contest. Absolutely not. Not going to do it because we did something smart, right? The only thing we've ever done that's smart. And this is also why parents are serious when we don't know about something, which is all of the time, we go and find someone who does. And we say, would you like to listen to two to five hooting morons for an hour and then say the correct thing about this?

Correct. And very often, surprisingly, very smart people say yes to that offer. And so we got another one. Yeah, that's correct. We got we got Phil Burton Cartelage back on to talk about the Tory leadership election he is going to be on at a further point in time when we will know more and be able to say more things that we think sound smart. That's absolutely right.

I was nervous for a second that you were going to expect me to say the smart things for the Tory leadership contest. Yeah, I think what we can do is say there is one correct take about the Conservative leadership election. You know, we all share it and Harris is going to deliver that take to us right now. Oh, shit. Um, Rishi Sunak for the win. What I'm afraid the correct answer was that Penny Mordant is hot.

I'm sorry. Is that evil border one going to get him Ron? No, she's already dropped out. Well, well, it depends which evil border one. I know the one you're talking about. They're all evil border ones, but you mean. So yeah, you're talking pretty, but she's since dropped out. A couple of the other evil border ones have since dropped out, but there's

like all the rest of them are all evil border ones. So at time of recording, it's between Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordant. And although we said we weren't going to talk about this, I will say this. I don't know that the United Kingdom is prepared to have a hot prime minister. I don't emotionally, psychologically, economically. And you know, if Penny Mordant does win, that puts me in a very difficult position. And I'm just going to have to stop talking about politics because everything I say will be unacceptable.

Look, look, see, I said Rishi Sunak because I don't know the rest. That's why you know what he's he's got name recognition among Canadians. He was Superman in that in that little BBC thing. Well, well, well, I want to sort of move on to a couple of bits of front matter right before we get into our main subject today, which of course the gigantic trove of internal documents and emails that have been leaked from Uber, which Paris you have written an excellent write up on in Tribune. So do do do check that out.

We'll link it in the description already has the Portuguese and Italian translations German come in next week. So, you know, if you speak other languages, there you go. You made it into if you made it into this English language podcast, you would rather read it in Portuguese, Italian or German. Yeah. But then by the time you're hearing this, you're covered. It was very difficult to translate a story about the company Uber into German. I'm glad they found a way to make it work.

No one who speaks German could be an evil company. Two bits. Number one. Yeah, shaving a haircut. The D the D the the DWP Department of War work in pensions. This is sort of apropos of you mentioning Rishi Sunak being dressed up as Superman has decided that in order to cut costs and bizarrely improve fairness, they are going to be decisioning like outcomes for who gets benefits

using an AI system. Now, we're plugging we're plugging benefits sanction into Dali Mini and seeing what kind of like fucked up little forms it generates for us. Yeah, that's right. It's great. I have to be immiserated. Sorry. It's great how like no, that's OK. It's great how like different countries keep like trying the whole AI welfare thing. And like every single time it like basically causes people to kill themselves

and cuts off people's benefits when they really need them. And then other countries are like, hey, look, AI, this works really great. Hey, see, in Britain, in Britain, the way our benefit system works, that's kind of seen as more of a benefit than a hazard. And I wonder to what extent this is like useful in the sense of it saves the DWP time or money or useful in the sense of it allows the DWP to appeal to a greater computer that has said no. And therefore, please don't cry in my office.

So what it's what it's specifically aimed for is at detecting fraud, but using patterns that indicate fraudulent behavior. Benefit benefit fraud is miniscule. And it's miniscule, both in absolute terms but also in relative terms compared to, you know, any number of other kinds of frauds, most notably wage theft. But the good news is that, you know, this will not work. Oh, yeah. I mean, the thing is it just fully will not work with the DWP.

What this is essentially going to do is it's like it's it's like a kind of it's like a machine that just lets them say no faster. Like it's going to put some people whose job it is to say no to people out of work, basically, that's the only thing that it's going to do. And then and then they can apply for benefits and get turned down by the computers that replace them. Yeah. And you don't even have someone to turn to, you know, it's just the computer made the decision.

So what I always think is really sort of notable about this and the sort of the point that I want to drag out of it is that what the DWP spokesman said, says, we do not use artificial intelligence to make decisions on how a universal credit claim should progress. Well, this is just about identifying fraud. But the problem is that it always starts exactly. Yeah, exactly. And but because it's so opaque and in fact, they reject multiple freedom of

information requests for like for someone very reasonable, saying, OK, how's this going to work? They were like, no, sorry, we can't tell you. Otherwise, people will use what we know to commit fraud. Jesus, because it's it's just this like, I mean, I think it's it's just this one place where I think the the national security state and the welfare state have really become the same state. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

And they say it is right that we keep up with fraud in today's digital age, they said, from 2006. So we can prevent, detect and deter those who try to cheat the system. And more importantly, improve our support for genuine claimants. Because that's the other hat, right? Because they always say whenever AI is being introduced into a system to make it work worse, they there are two claims that are usually made. The first claim is this is to identify unusual cases misuse.

Yeah, this this is to identify misuse, whereas people will always be making the important decisions. This, of course, never addresses the fact that identified as misuse could just end up basically bucketing someone who's very desperate for the last 20 pounds into a possible fraud bucket. And then it's very then who's going to be like whose job is it to review that possible fraud bucket really quickly to take mismatches out of it? We don't know.

And secondly, talking about this idea of that also this is going to let us free up resources to improve our support for genuine claimants. Another lie that never ever actually is what happens. It only ever is involved in reducing the amount of people working there and reducing the quality of service that gets put out. Yeah, the amount of benefit fraud is, as we've said, so small that, you know, even if it ceased to exist tomorrow, even if people never fiddled the benefits ever, the amount of like excess benefit you would get off of that that you could if

you wanted to give to other people would be vanishingly small. Absolutely. Yeah, the savings generally aren't worth, you know, putting people through the hell of of having to do this or putting these systems in like what it brings to mind for me is Australia went through a scandal a few years ago because they're, I can't remember the name of their center link. They're like, yeah, they're like welfare system did something quite similar, you know, brought in this AI system that was supposed to like review these applications and look at the amount of benefits that people had compared

against like their reported income and then see if they actually owed stuff back to the welfare agency. And what it ended up doing was like sending out all of these basically fake, not fake, but like miscalculated benefit claims or whatnot or benefit like invoices or that people had to pay back. And, you know, it was all a load of bullshit. It created a ton of anxiety for people. It cut people off from benefits that they needed.

It caused people to commit suicide and the government ended up having to pay billions of dollars in compensation for it. And like these systems do not work in the way that as you're describing, you know, they get promoted. They just really hurt the people who can least of all be hurt in this way. Well, which again, Britain benefit rather than a hazard. Yeah. Yeah, although I'll tell you more than Britain, unfortunately.

And now for a jarring change of tone. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this, I had a joke in there in the middle that the Centrelink scandals because they accidentally got the wrong AI and instead of an artificial intelligence, they had an Australian intelligence. But it kind of fell a bit by the wayside due to the sort of overbearing grimness. Yeah. Well, I'd say I'll say one thing. I'm certain that that that events you described Paris won't happen in Britain

because compensation would never be paid in Britain. That's right. The DWP has agreed to employ a single Australian man to find benefit fraudsters. Yeah, that's it. Look, he already lives in Britain. He wasn't working anyway. And we'd rather have him. It's like poacher turned gamekeeper.

We'd rather have him finding the fraudsters, you know. So I want to talk about one other thing before we get into our main comment. A little fun thing, which is, boy, the king is back. I don't miss the incitement to riot. I don't miss the sort of like incitement to racial hatred. I don't miss the like the violence, the bizarrely homophobia, the racism, the transphobia. However, I do miss some of Donald Trump's tweets. And we got a classic of the form on his like fake Twitter, which it's so funny that he has.

He has Truth Social, a social network that is just I want to follow Donald Trump on Twitter and no one else. To be fair, that was Twitter for a while. That's true. That's true. I don't know exactly if it's not like emails anymore and he has these little truths now. Can I ask you something guys? Do you know what the retweet function on Truth Social is called?

Don't look. You have to guess. Is it a retruth? It is. Fantastic. So that was a heavily re-truthed post. I quote truth that with LMAO. Because our favorite space boy Elon Musk is in the news again.

And Donald Trump, more than anything, is just kind of a Cassey bitch. He loves to comment on people in the news insultingly. We have that in common. He's way better at it than we are. Well, I think so. He insults so good. I have the history of this essentially, which is that Trump has been basically has been relentlessly owning Elon Musk in the way that only a regular guy from Queens could.

And could sort of, I'd say, bring his ability to be a dickhead to bear on Reddit Immigour Guy. Effectively. Yeah, what's happened is Elon Musk has very much brought a Reddit meme to a page six gossip fight. And this all started. Beautiful sentence. This all started because when Musk, who's increasingly like, increasing thing has just been that he's kind of an online contrarian divorced conservative. And so he did the ultimate version of that, which is endorse Ron DeSantis,

the man whose main constituency is like 3000 rollerback pack guys and, you know, people who want to attend a Brooks Brothers riot, but then couldn't do it because of their asthma. They, he basically was like, I endorse Ron DeSantis because he's epic in his owning the Libs from a position of government and is a vaccine skeptic, whatever. And largely because Elon Musk is, she loves Twitter and Ron DeSantis loves Twitter and just basically governs how Twitter tells him to govern. Yeah, he's sort of a Libs of TikTok kind of kind of government. Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean that in the sense of Chayarajic has like an inside woman in his office kind of Libs of TikTok governance. And so Trump has basically even fuming about Musk for months now, apparently. Petty, petty slights consume like 70% of that man's sort of energy and it's perfect for him. That's why I think that's why, you know, posters recognize posters. So basically a source, this is from Rolling Stone, a source close to who spoke to Trump about Musk's pseudo endorsement of DeSantis, recalled Trump saying, what an idiot and then called him a bullshit artist and that he didn't know what he was talking

about. Then at a rally, he said, Elon, Elon is not going to buy Twitter. He's got himself a mess. He said to me, he said the other day, oh, I've never voted Republican. And I said, I didn't know that because you know what folks? He told me he voted for me. Should I tell you? Should I tell you the secret? And then the crowd, she's like, tell me, tell me the gossip about that bitch.

Just like love blood and like own jet ski dealerships being led into, as you say, a page six gossip column is perfect. Yeah, a fanta. And then that led us to like the post, the truth, if you will. A truth that is like up there with the great and Carter truths that's up. It's up there with, in my opinion, the Coca-Cola company. It's not very happy with me. Oh, your dad gives good brain.

It's called genes, all of that. All these, the top truths that we all love and remember so well. We missed out on another great Trump truth, which was the, when Elizabeth Warren had to do the apology video for falsely claiming to be nice for American. And he said, weird as part of that video is when she turns to her husband and says, thank you for being here. It's his house. He's supposed to be there.

Exactly. And so we are, and then the problem was like, for most of the time when he was actually governing and for like, when he was trying to, you know, stay in illegally return the results of the election. The swamp got to him, you know, he wasn't posting that kind of classic messy bit shit. He was just posting things like, hey, you guys should go and overthrow democracy now, wink, wink, which isn't very funny. No.

But now, now he's, now he's out of power. He's back. And what he has posted is a photo of himself with Elon in the Oval Office, which looks like, I can't even tell if it's photoshopped. It looks like a hostage taking. It looks like he has the same standee that we have in our office. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's another photo.

There's another photo that he posts with it of Jack Dorsey. And it's like, he looks like he's in the exact same position. But as you're saying, as if like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have been like, separately photoshopped into this image. There's like a mark on the floor like you were in a film set. But are you thinking that like, Corey Lewandowski was just like, they're covered in tennis balls ready to have a great screened onto him? Yes.

So, so the truth here that I'm going to read is from real Donald Trump. When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere, perfect Trump subsequent cause closure, without which subsidies he'd be worthless. Where's the lie? And telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, drop to your knees and beg and he would have done it.

Now, the thing is, there's a part two to that truth, which says, now Elon should focus on getting himself out of the Twitter mess, because he could owe $44 billion for something that's practically worthless. Also, lots of competition for electric cars. I mean, just and then, you know, Elon's only response is just to be like, you know, to post a meme of Chuck Norris. And it's like, meanwhile, here's a guy who is going to, you know, who's using his power, not for good necessarily, but certainly for chaos,

as he just sort of disassembles him. Whoever loses, we win. Yeah, that's right. And of course, we'll talk about this at some point more fully in a future time. But the thing that the Donald is referencing here is that Elon is being sort of raked over the coals, he has put his hand in Twitter, sort of bear trap, and is now in the Delaware Court of Chance, where he's trying to argue that actually he was just being epic and memeing, and he shouldn't have to own Twitter.

And the funniest possible outcome of this, slim chance, but it is possible, is that he ends up like getting a large judgment against him that he can't pay, and Twitter ends up owning or part owning Tesla, which is, I think, the world that we all want to live in. Can you imagine? If this is a Tesla, somehow has more Nazis on it. It's wild though, because that truth as well, like there's been kind of a back and forth too, right?

Like they've kind of been hitting back and forth at one another, and the truth came after Elon Musk posted that Trump should hang up his hat and sail into the sunset, because he's endorsing DeSantis now and saying Trump is too old. And so that was, I guess, the final straw for Trump, and that is what his truth was in response to, that really like, can anyone take down Elon Musk as well? Never call this 70-something-year-old man old. That's the thing, right? These are two guys where you know that they have powerful followings, because people who get too

into them regularly bankrupt themselves in insane financial schemes, like it's just so it's going to be ultimately like the war of people who lost everything on Tesla versus people who lost everything on DNRs. There was a story about sort of from the January 6th commission, about how his weird coterie of advisors slipped through the sort of Trump handlers, his staff, and had a long meeting, an hour's long meeting where they all screamed at each other. And the guy from Overstock.com was there, and he kept eating meatballs the whole time, and telling Trump to order the military to seize the voting machines.

Where do all of these random people come out of the waterworks from? The MyPillow guy, the Overstock guy? It's some kind of sort of autochthonous, sort of deep small business psycho thing. Also, the phrase that Pat Siff alone, Trump's chief of staff, used to describe this guy, lives in my head rent-free, which was, he was, non-stop housing meatballs. And presumably, if you're non-stop housing meatballs, that means by the time you're giving your idea of what that Trump should send in. You're bloated, you're gassy, you're full of meatballs.

You're talking through a meatball. There's a meatball in there. Through a meatball, you should have the National Guard seize the voting machines. Honestly, the more I learn about the circumstances of January 6th, the more I feel like what has happened to America is the beginning of a final destination movie. Like, it was all so appropriate. It kind of should have happened. And it's just an incredible moment in American history, one which, and it's only going to get worse somehow. It's like they cheated debt. They avoided the sort of strange coup,

because it was planned by people who were slightly too stupid to do it, which is because they were talking through a mouthful of meat. So what's going to happen now is that America is going to go to an amusement park, or go to the gym, or whatever, and get final destination. Go to their Tesla boring company amusement ride? Perfect. I do wonder what it does to the Republican movement now, because they've all been embracing Elon Musk recently,

because he has been wanting to get to know Jordan Peterson, and repeating their bullshit on trans people and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, now if the same people who were embracing Musk, and now they also love Donald Trump, and now they're in a feud, what does it mean for them? Because the thing about Elon Musk, like voting Republican that really kicked that off, was him voting for that one in Texas. I can't remember her name now.

And she's like anti-abortion, anti-gun control, pro-Trump, like questioned whether the election was a variety of Republican, essentially. Yeah, basically. My sort of conclusion here is Donald Trump has never lost a Page Six gossip column fight in his life. That's fair. But the thing is, what I notice after he voted for that woman Republican, is that ever since then, she has been citing Elon Musk all the time. She's always in his replies saying, yeah, great Elon or blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Like very much using him to legitimize herself as a new Republican congressperson. And so now if the person who she really owes allegiance to Donald Trump is feuding with the person who she's been building her reputation on because she got the Elon Musk vote, I don't know. I guess what does that mean for them right now? He's going to have to go back to his real 80s dirty tricks things to defeat Elon. You're going to get phone calls from John Barron in the middle of the night about how cool Donald Trump is.

It's like, you know how when you turn 100 here, the queen phones you? Like if you turn 100 and you're a registered, yeah, you turn 100 and you're like a registered Republican voter that you should get the midnight call from John Barron. Please don't know what it is. I mean, to really sort of answer this before we move on. And this sort of, I think actually does have some bearing on like Uber and how it acted and everything is that one of the reasons I think this is actually kind of the split between Elon Musk personally and sort of the Republican party generally is that like

Elon Musk has become culturally the most famous inventor. Even if none of that is true, obviously, that's what he is in the culture. Yeah, it's a persona. And so what's happened is and because the less and less politics has been able to credibly say we are going to deliver a better future, right? Because the sort of the Reaganism sort of small state austerity vision, that did have a really powerful vision of a better future just turned out to be bullshit. It's morning in America.

Yeah. And now that you can't really sell anyone that on that anymore because it's America as well as the UK as well as, you know, well, not Canada, but the America in the UK have run through every flavor of that. Canada's had the same flavor most of the whole time. But they've run through every flavor of that at this point. We're like starting to get the real right-wing crazies that they're really popping up now. Alice, I don't know if you know about this, but our putative next leader of our conservative

party loves to like make speeches about Bitcoin next to a gigantic nickel in Sudbury. That's incredible. No, but so what happens, right, is that it's people, like individual people, personas of progress, something like Elon Musk is purported to be by the sort of gormless tech press and then the rest of the press as well and politics and media stuff, blah, blah, blah, these people, right? This is the person who we have to say like where our low-tax state is going to be all about enabling this guy.

And he's been playing his part for quite a while. He's been, he's been fitting in like a nice little puzzle piece in as the kind of- And now he doesn't want to play ball anymore. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. And so it's like, it's certainly, I think it's probably worse for the people with their actual hands on the levers of, sorry, it's probably the people with their actual hands

on the levers of power in the polity probably have a much, probably are going to get the better of this particular fight, much like, you know, Trump is going to get much, get the better of this particular bickering, piddling contest. But it is interesting to see just that like he wasn't able to kind of play his part in the big political drama and is sort of kind of kicking and screaming a little bit about it. So you kind of wonder whether this big character is going to go. Yeah. I think it's interesting with Musk as well because like, you know, you can see how his

relationship to Obama and the Democrats was important in that period because he needed those subsidies for Tesla and for SpaceX. And then it was still important for him to suck up to Trump and the Republicans when they took office, you know, Elon Musk got on Trump's advisory committee. He wouldn't leave when he left the Paris. Was it no, he wouldn't leave when he did the Muslim ban, but he would finally, he later left when they, when he left the Paris agreement. And so like, you know, the immigration stuff didn't matter, but I guess the Paris agreement

did even though it made Paris agreement is kind of for Musk's business, right? He sees it as for his own business. Yeah. Well, whether he gives a damn, you know, I think we could, we could question. But, you know, I think it, he would alienate more people if he hadn't done it at that point, because he also didn't have like the reputation he has now. But I think then it's interesting to see how he was willing to suck up to Trump and he felt it necessary to suck up to Trump in the way that Trump describes in his truth and in his

speeches and whatnot that he's saying now. But then to see the reaction that Musk has had to Biden and to the Democrats coming back in, and I think it's, it's a reflection of the fact that Elon Musk now has become powerful enough that he doesn't need the government and the state to back him in the way that he did before. Like, yes, he still needs the subsidies for SpaceX and things like that. But he, because he has accumulated so much wealth, because he has this cult following that like is just diehard Musk. It seems like he doesn't feel the need to like, you know, I guess try to work with these Democrats

or try to get them to like him as much as he would have felt in the past. Yeah, kind of, kind of like Trump's own sort of twisted arrangement happening again in miniature. Many such cases as the man himself. I want to move on a little bit to talk about our core topic for the show. Who could have predicted that talking about some Trump and Elon bickering, we'd go stay on way longer than planned. They're both really funny absolute preachers. I'm waiting for the 10k post episode now on Trump's truth.

There has to be one. And you're going to be on it, presumably if history is any guy. So we're talking, of course, we're talking about the Uber files are being called the Uber files, which is a trove of documents released by an Uber whistleblower guy who was a lobbyist. A lobbyist for Uber just could not. Yeah, really knows where the bodies are buried. And he basically like headed up. That's the one guy you don't want to be like telling anyone where the bodies are.

But he basically headed up like the Uber's like European and Middle East push. Like he was like among the top people. So like he knows what happened. And on the one hand, yes, he definitely did reveal a lot. But on the other hand, you wonder, you do sometimes got to wonder why, what's in it for him and so on and so on. So with all of these kind of grains of salt, I'd say in the background, I would love to go through some of the revelations of let's say things

that we've always had to say allegedly before. And now we no longer have to say allegedly before. Some things where we can just say, yeah, this is like uncontested facts now. And so I'm just going to do a little little sort of table setting here. So this is sort of hundreds of thousands of emails, slide presentations, things of this nature basically saying, hey, everyone, we've realized what the ideal rate is to suck drivers in and get them to leave all their other jobs before we crater what we pay them. Getting sucked off by Travis Kalanik.

And of course, the other thing is that these emails all are from the Kalanik era. And so Uber's response very predictably has been, no, we've got a Persian guy in now. It's fine. Yeah, we have hired a single Persian man and he is our bulwark against corruption. And that's right. Kasim Soleimani and he's working very hard. It's where he went. Well, you were about to make these questions.

Yeah, he's working so hard. We haven't even heard from him in a while. In years. Yeah. So efficient. Oh, no, it really spreads himself all over. Yeah, he's all over the room. It feels as though, right?

After reading this, if there was to be a movie made about Uber at this point, it would be quite a bit more tonally close to Wolf of Wall Street than it would be to the social network. They could call it the car of Wall Street. Well, my God, Alice, you should get into the film title of business. That's right. However, I think also it suggests that due to operating now, sort of just in the side of credibility and glad-handing enough politicians and pushing

enough favorable, fake academic studies on two willing PR-loving journalists, it's a version of the Wolf of Wall Street where Stratton Oakmont is very much still around today and promising that it has changed, which in a sense, it sort of is because he's richer than Jordan Belfort is richer than he's ever been. So, Paris, this is what you've written in your Tribune article. You say, the Uber files add to our understanding of the evil deeds that made Uber what it is today and how aspects of that playbook continue to drive its global war against workers. As the company's business model seems to undergo a fundamental shift,

seems set to undergo a fundamental shift rather, we have an opportunity to correct a mistake made years ago. Uber's campaign to remake our transport system to serve its commercial imperatives, regardless of the consequences, should end here because we can do much better. So, do you want to sort of go into that a little bit? Yeah, sure. Obviously, we know or I think most people would have an idea of what Uber has done over the past number of years in order to entrench its business model. And certainly, we get more details of that from the Uber files,

from this big trove of documents that's been released. It tells us how Uber was able to develop relationships with key political figures in order to get regulations that were favorable to it, that included people in the Obama administration or who were previously in the Obama administration. David Plouffe, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that properly, and Jim Messina. And they basically use their connections and the goodwill from being in the Obama administration in order to help Uber in order to get Uber in the room with important people. They even contacted ambassadors in countries like France and the Netherlands

when Uber was facing regulatory pushback and governments were looking at regulating the company. But it's far beyond that as well. People in the European Commission, the mayor of Toronto, George Osborne, when he was chancellor of the UK, there were a bunch of meetings with British officials that were not even officially reported, that were revealed in these documents. So there's all those. Our favourite Jupiterian president of France makes an appearance. How could I forget?

Yeah, and it looks like Emmanuel Macron is facing a potential parliamentary inquiry now as a result of those revelations. I haven't kept up on it the past couple of days. I don't know if they've voted on it or whatever. It's not as though he's the most very recently betrayed half of the people in parliament who are supposed to be in his block. That's Jupiterian. My question arising from all these revelations is, to what extent is this distinct from, I want to say ordinary, even though there's nothing ordinary about it,

commonplace lobbying or is it distinct? Is this just that we're seeing what lobbying is start to finish with a cross-section? Or is there something new about it? That's a good question. I would say I'm not a lobbyist expert. I'm not sure I would be able to speak too much on how much it resembles what we would usually see. I would say the thing that is distinct for me, and that stands out, especially based on what Mark McGahn said, who's the Uber guy who leaked this stuff, is he basically said that because this was a tech company,

because they were promising that this was the future, this was progress, this was how the transportation system was going to work, a lot of these politicians not only were open to hearing what Uber had to say, but wanted to get in the room with Uber, wanted that contact, wanted to find out what they needed in order to legitimize this service. There was a big desire to look like they were at the forefront of progress, embracing innovation, all this bullshit that we've heard for years. These revelations and what McGahn says, because he was in the room with all these presidents

and prime ministers and people like that, was really that they wanted to know what Uber wanted, so they could help it to achieve those things. That's a serious problem if we think about the orientation of governments to the tech industry and to tech policy and all these big proposals that these companies have been making. They love to fall for the hype, and so Uber's pushing on an open door, right? Totally, totally. Whatever these companies promise, these politicians want to believe it, right? Because for some reason, they feel that it works for them or that this is how they want to present themselves to the public, and so Uber was really able to take advantage of that because it was one of the primary companies

that were getting portrayed in this way by the media. Of course, the Uber files reveal that Uber also had very close relationships with media. They even allowed some media barons in India and parts of Europe to buy into the company at favorable deals and get these other deals with Uber so that they would benefit as Uber grew. That Uber could take advantage of the power that they had, the influence that they had with governments, and Uber also paid off academics to do studies that were favorable to it and then to promote those studies in the media. If we're thinking about how we actually take on the tech industry and what it's selling us, the absolute bullshit that it's selling us that's making the world the worst place,

and then we see that the politicians are so eager to embrace whatever these companies are going to say, that shows that it's a real uphill battle and we really need to change the way that, I guess, the people in power are able to think about these tech companies and how they approach these things. We need to elect fewer rooms. Speaking of rooms, I do have the tougher thing to do. I do have Matt Hancock's response to being revealed in these documents in front of me, but before I go that way, I want to say also, but one of the reasons why I think there's multiple reasons, I think, why electoral politicians love to get hosed, basically. One of them is, I think this is something I've discussed many times before, is that this much like Elon

offers a vision of a better future, a marketing vision of a better future that politics really can't credibly offer inside the bounds of the Overton window anymore. The other thing, I think, is that a lot, is that this is, it's common sense, or at least it was common sense in the mid to, in the mid to like 20 teens, that everything needed to be uberized or tenderized or what have you, right? And what you'd like, you got uber... Precisely, yeah. And what it meant was, it was that the people who are desperately trying to generate a positive headlines are going to just, who live in that media world, are just going to think in terms of more boosterism, more boosterism, more boosterism, because they're trying to follow where things are going.

In a world now, in a world where I think there is widespread disenchantment with something like uber or whatever, you now get, and I think the example of Matt Hancock here is pretty good, right? You now get people who are trying to distance themselves from these things and might not have, might not have, let's say, been quite so willing to bend over backwards for them, if only because they sort of were trying to bend over backwards for some other thing that they thought was going to be more hype. It was a fad, right? Like it was sort of, it was a fad, it was a bubble and people got very tired. So here's what Matt Hancock said after being accused of taking an undeclared meeting with them in 2014.

It was the policy of the government, quite rightly, to attract tech companies to the UK. All the efforts Matt undertook in pursuit of that were above board and declared properly. You're referring to a spokesperson there? Is the spokesperson Matt Behran? It's Matt Behran. Mr. Hancock had previously tweeted his support of the ride hailing app during the London Black Cap strike in 2014. Of course, we always, we all know Matt Hancock doesn't need to be unduly influenced. I mean, he'll do it himself. However, what I say is that he takes pains to say that he's been unafraid to criticize Uber and other tech companies when necessary and

appropriate. I don't think you necessarily, well, no, of course he hasn't, right? They've all been saying this kind of stuff too. The mayor of Toronto was named in these revelations as well as basically having these meetings with Uber and then passing regulations in Toronto that basically matched exactly what Uber wanted the regulations to look like. He put out a statement the other day too being like, no, I wasn't unduly influenced. You can see that we were one of the first cities to regulate Uber, ignoring that they regulated Uber exactly as Uber wanted to be regulated. Then said, we've updated those regulations as the circumstances have changed. It's like, yeah, but you legitimize the company in the city and decimated the taxi

workers. Because you had these close relationships and the Canadian media has outlined all of the people who were around him who have worked at Uber before or had relationships with Uber or gone on to work with Uber after. In Canada, the Canadian Conservative Party in the last election last year actually had a plank in their platform about regulating gig work along the lines of exactly what Uber wants. The head of the policy committee was actually an Uber lobbyist. They're just deeply entrenched in all of these political circles. You should know about us as we have people everywhere. What's really funny as well is that most of these, you can always tell if a legislation was written by someone from Uber because it will basically have something that

says gig economy slave, but in a euphemistic term, followed by plus. So California is now branding their C-22 bill. The proposition C-22, the one you can't be a gig worker, that one. Prop 22. Prop 22. It's now the law, the status is independent contractor plus and the Canadian Tory plan for gig workers was called flexible work plus. It's always called plus if an Uber guy wrote it. Apple TV plus, flexible work plus, everything's a plus. It's also bearing in mind, it's like all of the things it was supposed to accomplish. So its marketing said it was supposed to accomplish lifestyle benefits for middle-class people who just aren't using their cars all the time and then that is all to fulfill this impossible dream of flying robotaxies and autonomous cars.

They've been unable to attain that particular promise obviously because that was always a fake promise. The flying cars were a fake promise for the Saudi investors. When none of it worked, they did what any business has to do after it takes over a bunch of markets, which is hike fairs, increase wait times, reduce quality, all that stuff. But beyond all of these ostensible goals and sort of covert goals or goals for investors or what have you, there's another goal which is basically, I think this is something you mentioned in your article Paris, that it's kind of the apotheosis of what turned out to be a Koch brothers plan to deregulate the cab industry everywhere. Them again. Yeah, those guys. They love the turn up. Yeah, it has a penny. It absolutely

is. And I would just say on the documents, I would say one of the things that's important to note about them is they do kind of fill in a lot of details, but largely they're kind of reinforcing things that we already know about the company. We know that it had these kill switches for the devices in the offices around the world. We know that they were using gray ball to distract from regulators. We knew that they had relationships with academics and with politicians and with the media, but we didn't have confirmation exactly and all of the kind of background or details. And these files do give us that, which I think is important. I do want to talk about gray ball at some point as well.

Yeah, we can definitely get to that. I would also say that, as you were saying, these revelations cover 2013 to 2017. And so that is really the period when Travis Kalanick is still in charge of the company and then he gets replaced in 2017 with Dara Koster Shahi, the guy you were mentioning earlier. And what they say is that, okay, Dara comes in and he changes the culture of Uber. He kind of overhauls it and so they're not this evil terrible company anymore. He makes them turn off the big criminalities. Exactly, yeah. Stop the sexual harassment in the office and all this kind of stuff. But the thing to recognize about that is that, okay, maybe you change some internal culture

stuff. Maybe it's not as terrible to be a woman at Uber. I don't know for sure. Maybe it's still really shit. But they're trying to frame these papers as though, okay, yeah, we were bad before everyone knows that. But post 2017, when Dara is in charge, we're actually good again. That's the old tummy. Maybe I've changed. Take me back. Exactly. But what we can see is that when Dara takes over, they escalate this war on workers by pushing for Proposition 22 in California to ensure that workers aren't made employees. They start pushing for this, after they win that vote, they start pushing for it to extend to other states in the United States. Washington State recently passed a new gig work bill that

resembles most of what Uber would like. They've run into trouble in Massachusetts. In Canada, they've been pushing flexible work plus and there have been developments in that direction in Ontario. In the UK, there's the recent decision recognizing gig workers as workers instead of as independent contractors. But that ruling said that the workers should be paid from log on to log off, not just the time when they have an order or a ride, but Uber ignored that and is still just paying them the minimum wage for when they're actually active, you would say, when they have a ride, right? Even though that goes against what the Supreme Court said should happen. They use all of these things to try to say that they're this great employer that they've changed,

blah, blah, blah, when actually they are actively working to entrench a form of employment status that reduces the rights and benefits and protections that workers actually have while using their PR machine to make it look like a positive thing. And the final thing I would say about that is that the Uber files, as I've been saying, shows how they had these relationships to politicians. And in saying that those things have changed, that we're not doing those things anymore, it's just total bullshit because they continue to try to gain these relationships with politicians all over the place so that they can pass these regulations that serve their benefits over the workers. We can see that in

Canada. We can also see after Saudi Arabia murdered Jamal Khashoggi, Dharakos Rashahi was like, oh yeah, people make mistakes. We all make mistakes. And it's just like, they just murdered a guy in cold blood. What are you talking about? But Saudi Arabia is one of their mass shareholders. So sometimes you just have to like walk backwards out of a building and when you do that, you might want to catch an Uber. I think that the defining moment of Khashoggi's tenure at Uber certainly was just kind of forgetting that you're supposed to pretend to be mad at the guy who did the murder of the journalist, at least for a bit before continuing to take his money. Really funny. The other thing is that we talk about this being a Koch Brothers

dream, a zoom back in on that, where Uber did all of this stuff and it was based on this premise of completely deregulating these taxi industries. And you could argue that the Koch Brothers dream in terms of the taxi industry specifically didn't really work because it's not as though there is now sort of one profitable company that you, the Koch Brothers can invest in, that you can just like buy a whole taxi market because Uber still doesn't work very well. But what did happen, it's always in effect, they kind of lost the battle, but they did win the war because it was Uber that created the model of gig work that is now spreading everywhere else. Absolutely. And I dig into this a bit more in my book and

it's really pulling from some work that Vina Dubal has done, that Hubert Horan, a transportation consultant has done, and they have kind of outlined how the Koch Brothers really pushed this notion or we're part of funding this campaign to deregulate the taxi industry in the United States in the 1990s that largely failed because taxi workers did still have some power at the time and were able to push back against it. Yes, they had successes in some parts of the country. Yes, they rolled some things back, but taxi workers still had the regulatory framework that provided them some protections in terms of regulating the price of the fare, regulating the number of drivers that could be on the road so that they wouldn't just see their work conditions

and their earnings just plummet because the market would be flooded or people would be competing on price and what have you. And so when Uber comes along, they're able to really pick up that playbook from the 1990s, from that deregulatory campaign that ultimately failed and really push to destroy the taxi regulations that existed, to write themselves out of those regulations, to decimate the taxi industry that was already there, to kind of become the taxi industry and to create, as you were saying, this new form of gig work that is able to carve a whole load of other people out of regular kind of employment relationships and employment status. And that even though Uber is like a company that has never turned a profit, that's still really beneficial for a lot

of capitalists to be able to decimate workers like that, to remove their rights and to set up this new framework that they can kind of benefit from going forward. And so I wanted to get into some of the specifics here. Specifically, because we talked so much about tech media on this show, as you do on yours, as do our friends at This Machine Kills and other fine podcasts. But I wanted to talk a little bit about their PR work and the worked example that I think most people will know, which is the university economists targeted in France to do paid work for Uber. And the first thing I noticed about this, which is that they would give an academic sort of 100,000 more, more euros just to do a piece of favourable research for them.

It is so much more expensive to buy a European academic than a Tory MP. I mean, that's the thing. Academics know they're worth, they're forced to. Tory MPs, they already get paid enough and get expenses enough that they can just be like, indulge their little whims, be like, oh, get me some little tiny jockey furniture or whatever. If you give Matt Hancock a branded hat, he will legalize you. He will push for you to be able to run people over. He would steal bombs in your workers' skulls. Yeah, absolutely. He'll be like, yes, fine. You can drive on the pavement. That's cool. This is basically, I was written up across this sort of international

investigative journalist, but they would say they negotiated, for example, a 100,000 euro consultancy arrangement with a rising star of University Economics, Professor Augustine Landier, the Toulouse School of Economics, and some of his colleagues. This is an article in the FT from 2016 citing the study. I'm going to read quite a bit of it, because it is genuinely jaw-dropping, considering what we know about Uber. Baba, or Sanka, as he is known to his friends in Bourbigny, a suburb in northern Paris, likes to say that Uber got him out of jail and kept him out. That was nice of them.

A high school dropout, Baba started to slip into petty crime in his teenage years, much like many youngsters in the unemployment-stricken immigrant enclaves that circle France's capital, and he went to jail several times. Then, Uber rolled out its ride-hailing cap in France. A friend who started a mini-cap company using Uber's technology offered Baba a job as a driver, and a judge led him out early under judicial review. Uber basically did a great escape. They broke this guy out of jail so he could start his own business. Yeah, they were putting a team together to ferry Parisians around. Laughing as he drove his Peugeot 508 to a garage through run-down rows of small houses,

Baba says, without this job, maybe I would still be in prison. It took only a few years for Uber and other platforms, and this is where we basically see say, who is keeping Baba in prison? It's Parisian taxis monopoly on transport in the capital. They say it took only a few years for Uber and other platforms, challenging the Parisian taxis monopoly to create more than 15,000 jobs. I'm sorry, if you don't want to deregulate everything for Uber to come in, just look at Baba and his kids and tell them he has to go back to jail. Sorry, there'll be no father this year. Yeah, I'll tell the children.

They love these little anecdotes, right? They'll always pick out the one person they can find who really benefits from Uber, and then ignore everyone else who's sleeping in their cars and stuff because their livelihoods have been decimated. It's a feel-good story. Why aren't you feeling good? It goes on. This is sort of just the fluff before we get into the actual sighting of the study. There has been a tidal wave of startups in the Balus. An entire generation want to be Uber drivers, said Sabrina Loro at Planet Atom, a non-profit organization that helps residents in the suburbs set up businesses. And that's a good thing.

Are they considering the Uber driver startups? Is that what it's referring to? The France model is you can have a mini cab company that then just subcontracts to Uber, and then that is a quote-unquote startup. That's fucking grim. Research seems to bear this out. Here we go. Charles Bocell, a PhD student at Achesse Paris, a business school, found that most mini cab registrations were in the suburbs of north and southeast Paris, where economic conditions are the harshest. After Uber agreed to partly open its database, Professor Augustin Laundier, the guy who has paid 100,000 euros,

professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, and David Thémar, Professor Achesse, conducted the first detailed study of Uber drivers in France on data Uber gave them. And again, at the time, there didn't seem to be much of a desire to say, hey, wait a minute. What? Of course not. How? Why? Because if you say, hey, wait a minute, pause for a moment. Why? Then you are sort of called disparaging Leo Luddite, because that's the moment when this whole thing is so flooded with venture capital that no one's really asking how you can get all the way across Paris for like five euros. It's just great. The party is here. I don't know who's paying for this.

The price of oil seems to be up. I can't imagine those are correlated. It couldn't just be the Saudis recycling petrodollars into demolishing the world's cab industries. Hey, listen, they broke that guy out of jail. All right. Would they have done that if they were bad guys? Some of the drivers have the highest Uber grades. Do not fit the stereotype of the perfect employee. For example, one is tattooed and another has dreadlocks. Oh, wow. That's fucking crazy. Because the thing is right, being a cab driver, you used to be like insanely tough dress code. If you didn't have shine shoes to polish when I got into your cab, I would get out the other side.

No, no, no. We all know that if it's like going to a white tie thing, you need to have the sort of tweed hat with the little visor. You need to have the kind of leather jacket open over the stained white shirt and the chain. They take it very seriously. It's like a worshipful company of taxi drivers. Actually, I think that is one even. And so basically, the research just essentially says that, oh, yeah, look, the research bears it out that the more you deregulate taxis, then you don't have to make these people better off through welfare spending. They just make money themselves by being Uber drivers. That's the research that was done that Uber basically paid for.

They can drive Ubers forever, we're pretty sure. It's exactly the narrative. Just hearing you describe that, it's exactly the narrative that was used in the 90s by the Clinton administration to justify their neoliberal program or part of what they used to justify it because the internet was going to provide economic opportunity to poor people. And so you could gut the welfare state and also increase the carceral state. And that's what they did. That was part of their project. And so it's always fascinating to me to hear those narratives become recycled because we heard them again recently from Elon Musk. Elon Musk was saying that Starlink is going to create opportunity all around the world

by extending access to the internet. And it's like, dude, we've heard this before. It's all a load of shit. Listen, just the fact that it's been disproved multiple times by experience isn't enough to write it off this time. Maybe we can find some other sector of undervalued labor that we can exploit using the internet and all those people become entrepreneurs. Exactly. So here's the ending of that article. Then we're going to go on to Grayball before we close it out. It says, people, this is Baba. If 10,000 drivers are gone because of new regulations, it is heavily implied, and we won't be able to meet demand, prices go up and wait times could be longer. Many will just go back to the Bonyos and most will go back to crime. You're making these

guys go back to crime by recognizing them. Absolutely. Look, if you don't completely... Brown was right, actually, by allowing Uber in. Yeah, that's right. It should be brazed. He's managed to save on the police budget by making everyone in France an Uber driver. Speaking of the police budget, let's talk about all of the things that they did. Again, here's the thing. I can now say this without fear of being sued. The thing about Uber and almost every corporation you can think of is that the people running them are criminals. That's an important fact. Understanding what's going on here is that a great deal of what business is, is criminality that you are terrified anyone will discover and that you might face any

consequences for. We get to talk about Grayball and Godview and the kill switch, all of these fun little tactics that they developed to... Really, it is fully like flushing the evidence down the toilet. There is no distinction between those two things. And I think it's also worth saying that, right? Because a lot of this is also for evading police. I think it's important to remember that the police would not have meaningfully stopped them from doing much of this. I disagree. I think that this is the reason why you do it, is because you're afraid of at least the possibility. I think there's a difference between the police would not have done this, which is certainly true. Uber had enough pull,

higher enough up. That's what I mean. It made a difference. And the difference between that and only the police out of any of the bourgeois institutions of society could have done anything. I think the police were the only ones that like the tax authorities or whatever other enforcement. The only ones that made Uber feel threatened. And I think we should take them by their own actions, take their word for it on that. I think what I have written down in my own notes is that I don't think that because of how, because of the relationship between the police state and capital and Uber's relationship with the state, I think it's sort of unlikely that they would have ended up doing

much. But I think what is true is that Uber saw this as an arm of the state, which it perceived as providing kind of democratic oversight of its activities, which could not be tolerated. I think that's the key. It depends on the jurisdiction as well, right? It's very different depending on where you're looking. There's some places that were much more forceful than others. Some places were like, yeah, we don't care. Let the Ubers come in, whatever. Other places, I would say, where the taxi industry was more powerful, were able to push back more effectively. Like in Portland, Oregon, which is where I believe Grayball is the main story of where

Grayball was used. And I think where it was pioneered was the regulators were basically going into Uber vehicles, ordering them on the phone, and then basically handing them, I can't remember what the type of thing would be, but basically saying we're impounding your car because this is illegal, you're not supposed to be doing this. And that's why they develop Grayball, because then Grayball put fake cars on the map, and every time they would try to hail a car, it would cancel on them because they wouldn't actually get a real car. It's a pretend toy version of Uber that you can show to a regulator, or you can use to diffuse regulation. I'll just imagine being a sort of a Eurocrat or whatever who's trying to get home

from their job as some kind of regulatory role in Brussels, and just be like, why can't I fucking get a car? They did this. They targeted these people by ring fencing, by geofencing things like police stations. So if you worked in a police station, if you're in a police station, you could not hail an Uber because that would be intercepted partway through. Which is, again, very amusing. Again, flatly concealing your own crimes. There is no other gloss you can put on it, that's what it is. Absolutely. And you can see in the Uber files that people at the company are admitting what they do is illegal. They absolutely know it, but they don't care. And

they know that they're basically not going to face any real consequences for it. Like, okay, yeah, they might face monetary fines somewhere, but they have more money than God. No one's going out and handcuffs over this. Yeah, exactly. I think the extent to which it's very brazen, I think you said earlier, Paris, to what extent is this, or you said this, Alice, and you gave an answer to Paris, and I want to sort of go back to that, which is, to what extent is this just normal activity? And what is really striking is that any time the lid is lifted on this kind of thing, it always looks really similar. Like, I'm sort of...

Listen, this is playbook stuff, as far as I'm concerned. When I said that any corporation is run by criminals, because that's what a corporation is, that, yeah. You know, whether that like offends you on sort of a procedural or a moral level or not, that's just sort of in tech also how they do business. Yeah. And I would say the more and more that we see, like how these tech companies act, the more similar it is. Like, the more you can see that they're taking the same sorts of actions to evade regulations, enforcement, all these sorts of things, just to benefit themselves, their own business models. And so we have Grayball, right, which is the fake Uber that you give to people who might

ask questions about it, where every car just is like, oh, another legitimate car. But we also have another couple. So one is Heaven, which basically, much like the Mark Zuckerberg thing, where he can just go view any message on Facebook, that Travis Kalanit could look at every Uber, any Uber going on, going around, and so they could use that to determine when there was a raid planned. So they'd say, you could see them ordering a driver, speak to the driver and ask them to do circles or call the rider to say he's blocked in traffic and so on. So you could kind of... Yeah, it's fully the same stuff like having reception stall them while you're like throwing hard drives out of the window or whatever.

Which of course, they also had a button to do it. I mean, look at the... The kill switch. Yeah, the kill switch is my favorite example of like a sort of regulation defeat. And that is, if your offices are raided by tax authorities, the police, whoever else, someone in Uber headquarters can push a button and it just denies access to data in a like deniable way to that whole office. You know what it was? It's like that there used to be like file corruptors that you could get for like, if you wanted to get extra time. Can't send my essay because it must have gotten corrupted or something. Yeah, exactly the same thing. They had one of those, but for their entire like tax records, for all their financial...

Oh, sorry, I can't send you the details of how we vetted all of our drivers according to the rules of this jurisdiction, because I'm afraid the file has become corrupted. Can I have an extension? The one thing that like rockets me up to the sort of the top left of the political compass here and like makes me appreciate enforcement as a mechanism is seeing the emails about using the kill switch where, you know, Travis Kalanick will be sending an email at three in the morning going, hey, we need to fucking burn all the shit in Amsterdam right now. And I feel like the guy at the end of Starship Troopers with his hand on the bug, like it's afraid. Like, great, wait, you can terrify these people. All it takes is like...

A big metal probe and also raiding their offices. They really don't like that. And it's good and you should keep doing that. Be it that that is in itself insufficient because they have like done work around, but like, there's something there, I should say. Also to be, I think my interpretation of the end of Starship Troopers is that Doogie Hauser just says that because he thinks everyone else is going to think it's great. I don't think the brain bug is actually afraid. So I want to sort of move on just to this sort of, sort of by way of wrappings, wrappings up, which is what Uber has sort of, I mean, we have barely scratched the surface of the surface of this, of course, mostly because we spent so much

time talking about Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Because he's too good at posting. Yeah, because he's doing important topics. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. This is what Uber has said, right? They've said, look, this is why Uber has hired a new CEO, Dharakas Rishai, who is tasked with transforming the culture of the company. But I think one of the things that we talk about, right, is if your

business is pure volume, if your business model is to literally buy market share and then jack up the prices, you are going to have to bulldoze every regulation that's designed to prevent entrance into a market from doing that. By its own nature, you have to commit crimes. Yeah, and so the culture of Uber was never, I mean, the culture with Uber was terrible, but the thing that like caused it to be... Even if things had been nice, they still would have done all of the same. Precisely, right? And so just, it is such an obvious smoke screen. And you can even see that

they also try to hide behind Eric fucking Holder, another Obama alum. They say, Khaas Rishai, he was guided from the start by the recommendations of Eric Holder. Fucking these Obama guys love to just go... It's like the pod save America, Johns are like the poorest Obama alums at this point. They could have all gone to work for like a splorch anti-food waste startup and gotten paid like $40 million a year, yet they fucking didn't. They're stuck in here with us in the podcasting dojo. One of the rare examples was Stacey Apocos is a bad business decision.

I think it's interesting to note as well, though, that when Travis Kalanick has kicked out in like 2016, 2017, it's framed as though this is because of the culture of the company, because the culture is a problem and he created this culture. And I don't get into this in the piece, but I think it's fair to say that that is bullshit. The investors and the board and whatnot don't really give a damn about the culture of the company. They're concerned that because it has reached the scale where people are really concerned about it, it's not so much that they're concerned about the workers in the headquarters and what they're subject to, but rather that Travis Kalanick

is becoming so toxic that it threatens their ability exactly to make back their capital, to earn a return on their investment. It's not that they really want to clean up the culture, so to speak. Of course. So they had to get one Persian man. So they say, we moved on from the era of confrontation to one of collaboration. We've listed all of the things they've done since Khazershahi's taken over the beginning, some of the things they've done, they've done many more. Which ones were those? Were those confrontation or collaboration? It's collaborative to destroy California liveable.

They're actually doing it for the workers. They're helping the workers by taking away their rights and benefits. I suppose they are collaborating with California Democrats. They should rename California female Democrats to California Democrats. I say demonstrating a willingness to come to the table and find common ground with former opponents, including labor unions and taxi companies. Again, I struggle to identify where common ground has been found. Why aren't you compromising with them, Paris? Why aren't you compromising with them right now? They're reaching out to you. You as their enemy, you should be around the table.

Yeah, I should be taking my payment and starting to say that Uber is fantastic. One of the people who comes up in some of these articles is Alex Rosenblatt, who wrote a critical book about Uber a few years back. And then a couple of years after the book came out, it was like, oh yeah, so I'm going to work for Uber now, guys. I didn't realize you could literally sell out like that. That's incredible. And the other person who will come up as well is like, if you want to think about the legacy of post-causer Shahe Uber, in the same way as the legacy of Uber in general is the creation of gig work, the legacy of post-causer Shahe, collaborative Uber, is the legacy of entrenching

two-tierism, of not just having this gig work thing that's terrible, but then creating all of the legislative framework around it that makes it impossible to get rid of. And you see that anytime you talk, and this is an example of announcement from Mark Warner, but you can see this in the UK, you can see this in even the fucking liberal parties plan, not just the conservatives, it's basically written by an Uber guy. And this is all about, say, how you get gig workers' benefits, for example, right? And doing that kind of thing as opposed to destroying the category entirely entrenched it and makes it impossible to get rid of. So thank you, Dharakasar Shahe, for sitting around the table and thrashing this out with all of your friends.

Yeah, and let's say as well that the benefits are complete bullshit. Like, they're not real in any sense. Like, they'll talk about a minimum wage, they'll talk about health benefits, but most workers don't get that. The minimum wage is only for the time you have a ride. So in California, they estimated its equivalent to $5.64 an hour, like it's a pure joke. And I think I would also note that like, you know, we've talked about the evolution of Uber, like what it has become, right? Like it sold off all of its big bets during the pandemic because it admitted that autonomous vehicles and flying cars and all this stuff was complete bullshit. And said it was refocusing on ride hail and on food delivery. And now we've seen, you know, Uber is very much like an easy money

company, a cheap money company, right? And now we've seen interest rates are rising, it's going to be more difficult for that. And I think one of the notable developments is that Uber has started to make agreements with taxi companies, the very taxi companies that it tried to like eradicate in New York City, in San Francisco, in Italy, I'm sure there are more coming to put the taxis on the app. So after decimating the conditions of the drivers, after effectively deregulating the taxi industry, now Uber is coming in and saying, put your taxis on our app and you, you know, I'm not exactly sure how the regulatory framework works right now, but it looks to me like the final step to just subjecting the taxis to the rule of Uber and having them be able to

make the rules for how the taxi industry works now that the regulatory framework is essentially being decimated. Right? Perfect. So I mean, even though they didn't win in the sort of corporate sense, they won in the lobbying sense. And this these disclosures just didn't really seem to like put a damper on it. But we'll see. Yeah, it's the, I mean, I think they will see stuff like what happens to Macron, for example, like, does this actually end up damaging political careers? Will it hamper Matt Hancock's return to conservative front benches? I surely hope not. But I think that the thing to the thing I've sort of learned from this whole thing, right, is just it really puts into context the extent to which Uber has clumsily and embarrassingly lost almost

every battle it's gotten into, well, very handily winning the war. Yeah, absolutely. So with all of that, I think on that cheery note, I want to say Paris, it has been an absolute delight to podcast with you a second time in as many days. Yeah, thanks so much. It's great to come back on the show. Great to chat with you many, many times. You know, forgive me for saying, you know, if you enjoy talking about Uber, if you enjoy hating on Uber, I have a new book out that you probably already know about called Road to Nowhere, what Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation. You know, you should like consider going buying a copy. That would help. Look, if you didn't buy a copy last time Paris came on, it's said to buy a copy.

Or even if you did. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, and also don't forget, we have a Patreon. It is a second episode every week for $5 a month. And Paris has also a podcast called Tech Won't Save Us. One time, we, Tech Won't Save Us and This Machine Kills, accidentally put out more or less the same episode, the same day, one week, which was very funny. So-called free thinkers. Yeah, no one tells us what to write. Meanwhile, Molly White is just pulling the strings like a marionette. Anyway, we'll see you all later, friends. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.

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