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The Uber Files
24 Plays2 years ago
The Uber Files told us a bunch of things about Uber that we probably assumed already, but it's nice to know for sure. M and Josh take a look into some of the company's dodgy dealings.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Rideshare Satire and Scandals
00:00:08
Speaker
And you may find yourself living two years into the apocalypse. And you may find yourself in another part of the world. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a rideshare corporation. And you may find yourself in a beautiful rideshare car with a beautiful lobbyist. And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? Do the days go by driving taxi rates down? Letting the days go by hiding the scandal underground.
00:00:37
Speaker
Into the road again, after the money's counted. Yet another scandal takes evasion all around. And you may ask yourself, how can this happen again? And you may ask yourself, where is the accountability? And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful right chair. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful lobbyist. Doing the days go by, driving taxi rates down. Letting the days go by, hiding the scandal underground.
00:01:06
Speaker
Into the root again, after the money's counted. Yet another scandal takes evasion all around. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
Podcast Introduction from Two Countries
00:01:39
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Imdenty.
00:01:48
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I'm Josh Addison, and in Shuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy currently working on a reply track to Paula Cole's 1997 hit, Where Have All the Cowboys Gone, entitled, There They Are, it's Dr. M.R.X.Tenteth. Although I should point out, by the time the song is released, they will have moved on. And then my subsequent track was, actually, where have all the cowboys gone?
00:02:16
Speaker
That's what they do, Cowboys. You can't tie them down. Well, you can't. I mean, you, you can, you kind of, well, that's what the lessons are for you, but Cowboys are canny. They, they, they know how to both tie knots and also untie knots. It's kind of astounding. Like an untie knot. Unbelievable.
00:02:36
Speaker
They're a rare breed. Now, do we have any... No, I'm thinking breeding cowboys. I mean, we breed horses. We could breed cowboys. We could breed the perfect cowboy.
00:02:47
Speaker
Well, yeah, but you'd need to breed them on some sort of a ranch, and then you'd need people to look after them to make sure they stayed there. So you'd end up with needing cowboy boys to look after your cowboys. Things could get recursive pretty quickly. This is what cowgirls are for. You have the cowgirls to look after the cowboys. But then the answer is the question, who's breeding the cowgirls? And that's where things get very messy and very sexist very quickly. Yeah, OK. Well, then let's put that one to bed then.
00:03:16
Speaker
Put it to bed like a cowboy. With a cowgirl, indeed. Did you want to talk about... Or another cowboy. Did you want to keep talking about cowboys? I regret bringing up this. It's not the heteronormative about this. Indeed, yep. Cowboy with whoever that cowboy happens to prefer. Cowperson with cowperson.
00:03:36
Speaker
Did you want to talk about Joe Yusinski's new study or will we save that for a later time?
Conspiracy Theories Study: No Increase?
00:03:44
Speaker
I basically mentioned Joe Yusinski along with a bunch of other political scientists and psychologists and a historian has released a paper on PLOS ONE. It's looking at the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the current age. His argument is
00:04:01
Speaker
There is no uptick in belief in conspiracy theories going on. There hasn't been for quite some time. I've been pushing this line for quite some time with other researchers and journalists. It's great to have some actual empirical data to support this clan.
00:04:17
Speaker
I haven't read the paper yet, so this is a classic case of someone has come out with a paper whose conclusion I agree with, and thus I think the paper is good, but I'm not going to be that person when it goes well, the paper must be good. I'm going to read it and work out whether it's good or not. And if I can, maybe arrange a chat with Joe, which may or may not get recorded for this podcast. So there'll be more news about Joe Yusinski and Joe Yusinski's new paper, or co-authored paper.
00:04:43
Speaker
in future episodes. But if you are interested, look out Jo Jusinski and Plus One. You'll find a newly released paper looking at the prevalence of conspiracy theories in our current age and the findings are interesting just for the sheer fact that they go against the kind of common wisdom that we live in a kind of golden age of conspiracy theories. Actually it turns out that golden age was still the 1960s and it's just trending down ever since.
00:05:13
Speaker
I'll be interested to see though, I don't know if the study would show it, but there may not be a quantitative difference, but is there any sort of a qualitative difference? I mean, the thing people will say is that you don't
00:05:25
Speaker
I don't know, maybe there are plenty of politicians who believe that Kennedy was killed by the CIA or something, but they weren't making a big deal about it as much as you get people in high positions in the states, at least, talking the QAnon talk and things like that, or great replacements or what have you.
00:05:44
Speaker
So I don't know if there's any difference, but I know we're in a numerical one. Yeah. As I pointed out on Twitter earlier today, no matter what's going on, we know there's other stuff going on. We live in an age where fascists and white supremacists are given the right of reply in the media, which was not true. It wasn't obviously true 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
00:06:09
Speaker
So no matter what is going on with belief in conspiracy theories, there are other things going on in our society where it turns out that having the attitude of bash the fash is no longer the fashionable thing to do. No, we have to let them have their time on air. So there is other stuff going on. And that may mean that even if belief in conspiracy theories isn't up,
00:06:33
Speaker
people might be more open to discussing their belief in conspiracy theories. And we might be seeing more open discussion of these beliefs, even if the beliefs are no more common than they've ever been. As they say, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Anyway, let's not pursue this any further, because we might be depriving ourselves of material for a later episode, because that's not what we're here to talk about today.
The Uber Files Leak: A Deep Dive
00:07:01
Speaker
Today, we want to talk about Uber, which doesn't spell its name with Umlaut, so I shouldn't say it in an exaggeratedly German way. Yes, we want to talk about Uber and the Uber files, which are not some sort of special files that are better than any other files. Well, should we play a chime first? If we're going to actually start the episode properly, should we do it all formal-like? Yes, Mr Maestro, play that tune.
00:07:36
Speaker
That's more like it. So the Uber files, what the Guardian newspaper in the state, not the States, in the UK is called the latest. I mean, there is a version of the Guardian in the US. The distinction between the US Guardian and the UK Guardian owned by the same company is that the UK Guardian is quite transphobic and the US Guardian is quite anti-transphobia.
00:08:05
Speaker
Hopefully, that will not affect anything that we're about to talk about now, because this is the leak of a whole lot... What's the number? Over 124,000 documents leaked to The Guardian by a man called Mark McGahn, who was quite a high up sound lobbyist for Uber. Can I just put it in here?
00:08:26
Speaker
The notes here, and this is a note written by Josh, was that they were linked to the Gajian by former Uber lobbyist Mark McGann. And I realize Uber there has the capital U to say, a lobbyist of Uber, but also does make it so that he's the best lobbyist there is. He's an Uber lobbyist.
00:08:46
Speaker
From the sounds of things, he probably was both an Uber lobbyist and an Uber lobbyist, because as we'll see, Uber's done a lot of lobbying quite successfully over the last wee while, and that's kind of the problem for a lot of it. So the documents Mr. McGahn leaked
00:09:07
Speaker
cover a period from 2013 to 2017, which is when I think he was with the company. It's also when co-founder Travis Kalanick was in charge of the company. And so he's been getting a lot of the stick here, which has worked in Uber's favor at least, because as he's left the company and is no longer running it, the
00:09:30
Speaker
people who are currently in charge of Uber, their line on the whole thing has been, oh, yes, no, this is very bad. And obviously, it should never have happened. And we're sorry it did. But that was under the old guy. And you can be sure we don't do any of that sort of stuff. We're under new management now.
00:09:50
Speaker
The old guy's gone. I mean, he was bad. He was a rotten egg. He was a bit of a stinker and he did some really bad things. Modern Uber, of course, does none of this bad stuff. We're a squeaky clean company. We've got rid of all of the dead rats. We haven't swallowed dead rat in ages. I mean, you can inspect all of our holes. You'll find no dead rat in any of our holes.
00:10:14
Speaker
Right. I don't wish to inspect any of your holes, but that's okay. I'll take your word for it. So this, I don't know, maybe we'll get another leak to show what's been going on from 2018 up to the current time. So the time it covers was really when Uber was expanding all around the world as fast as they possibly could.
00:10:36
Speaker
And without much regard to trifling details like laws and permits and regulations and what have
Uber's Aggressive Strategies and Lobbying
00:10:46
Speaker
you. Yeah, this is a classic case of that Silicon Valley idea of innovate through disruption. So rather than obey laws, you just end up going, oh, we'll disrupt the market and then the market will adapt to the disruption.
00:11:03
Speaker
Who's moved fast and break stuff? Was that Zuckerberg's motto? I can't remember. It's one of them. I thought it was the Roadrunner. No, no. I'm pretty sure it was the Silicon Valley billionaire. But it could have been a cartoon bird. I don't know. It's hard to tell the difference these days. Now, I should point out the Guardian reporting on this is interesting for how
00:11:29
Speaker
non-conspiratorial they want to make some of this reporting to be. So in the kind of lead document the Guardian produced about the Uber files, they refused to call any of the shenanigans conspiratorial, relying instead on phrasing such as during the fierce global backlash. The data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs, and media barons.
00:11:58
Speaker
Although the next line they have, which is leaked messages such as Uber executives, were at the same time under no illusions about the company's law-breaking, with one executive joking they'd become pirates, another conceding, we're just fucking illegal. So they don't really want to use the C word, and yet they're kind of describing quite a lot of conspiratorial action.
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe we can come back to this afterwards as a more general point, but yeah, it does seem, maybe it's simply because, like a lot of people, they consider conspiracy theory to mean just something crazy and silly and not as mundane as businesses doing dodgy dealings. And The Guardian is a sensible newspaper for sensible people, which is why the UK version is so transphobic.
00:12:48
Speaker
There's over 124,000 documents. So there's a lot of stuff that could be talked about here. So I think, I don't know, I don't know about you. I've just sort of picked out the things that jumped out at me is looking interesting to talk about, but there's a lot there. I think the common theme though seems to be this idea of, as you say, disruption of
00:13:12
Speaker
moving into various companies and basically doing as they pleased and then trying to retroactively make themselves respectable by lobbying to get laws changed in their favor. So there are a lot of these lobbyists doing their lobbying.
00:13:30
Speaker
much like Mr. Mark McGahn. But not just lobbyists, but they had a bunch of politicians on their side, most notably Emmanuel Macron in France.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, and this isn't the case of Emmanuel Macron prior to becoming the leader of France, engaging in lobbying with a corporate entity. This is Emmanuel Macron brokering secret deals with Uber. And secret deal here is interesting because this is a classic case of how lobbying works with government.
00:14:08
Speaker
The French cabinet knew that Macron was having meetings with Uber. The lobbying was secret with respect to the public, not with respect to the cabinet and other high-ranking officials within the French government. So it was a secret deal in that it was being kept private, so the public had no idea that Uber was lobbying to get into the French market.
00:14:36
Speaker
And it's still unusual to have the president of France be the person who's kind of leading or engaging in
Macron and Uber: Secret Lobbying in France?
00:14:46
Speaker
that lobbying. You tend to think of lobbying as kind of low ranked officials trying to get up through the ranks to get to Cabinet, to get a paper across someone's desk to get interest here.
00:14:57
Speaker
Uber went, I mean, we could start from the bottom. Or I could just ring my good friend Emmanuel. Like, hey, Emmanuel, let's get Uber into France.
00:15:09
Speaker
So what's interesting about this is A, it was lobbying being directed at the president, doing it in front of the cabinet by keeping things secret, and also the fact that when this was revealed, Macron was going, yes, I'm very proud of the lobbying I did for Uber. He's entirely unapologetic, thinks he did absolutely nothing wrong.
00:15:32
Speaker
and it was all to the benefit of France. But what's disturbing about this is when you start looking at the details about how Uber were acting in France at the time this lobbying was going on. So there was a lot of protest by taxi drivers in France, particularly in Paris. Yes, because the French aren't afraid to protest and occasionally indulge in a bit of light rioting
00:16:00
Speaker
at the drop of a hat. I mean, they're onto what, their fifth republic now, given the revolutions they have. They're fond of toppling regimes from time to time. And so there was a lot of protest by taxi drivers about Uber and the disruption that Uber was doing for the traditional taxi driving class.
00:16:24
Speaker
And there was a certain amount of antipathy towards Uber drivers in Paris in particular. And when Kalanick was told about this, there actually might be threats of life to Uber drivers due to these protests, he was going, well, actually, that could be quite good because, you know, violence could actually be very useful for getting these law changes through.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yes. So it's not just he asked the president of France to engage in lobbying. He's also going, look, we can engineer a toxic situation, which will kind of force the government to lobby because we're actually going to kind of almost tacitly encourage the violence here in the hope it's going to get the law changes that we want.
00:17:13
Speaker
Yes, yes, violence against Uber drivers basically makes Uber look like victims and the taxi industry look like violent oppressors or something. So it is a good way of getting people on their side. And yeah, the model they seem to operate on is that, yeah, move fast and break stuff.
00:17:33
Speaker
or the good old expression of it's better to seek forgiveness than permission. They would just go in and just start doing stuff. They wouldn't ask if it was okay. They'd just come in and do their thing and then try and smooth it over afterwards.
00:17:50
Speaker
And this isn't any sort of ignorance defense. It's not like they just did their thing assuming it would all be cool. They went into knowing full well in some cases that they were actively breaking the law, but with the plan that they would get the law changed to retroactively legitimate themselves.
00:18:13
Speaker
As the Guardian puts it, it is a tactic the company has used repeatedly in markets around the world. Launch first, establish a loyal customer base, and then lobby aggressively for laws to be changed.
00:18:24
Speaker
people like Mr. McGahn come in. So the Guardian has one example of how things went in Australia, and I believe it was a similar scenario here in New Zealand. Yeah, so the New Zealand one is interesting because, like the Australian case, Uber arrives in the market back home.
00:18:43
Speaker
And they rolled out their app, and they've got their ride shares operating, and the government responds by going, well, you're a taxi company. You need to be licensed the way a taxi company does, which means your drivers have to have special licenses. They need to have the right kind of training. They need to be the right kind of insurance operating in the background as something goes wrong. And Uber's response was, oh, but we're not a taxi company.
00:19:08
Speaker
We're a rideshare app. I mean, our drivers aren't working for customers. It just happens to be the case that if I want to go from, say, Ponsonby to Devonport, I use the app, and I find someone who's already driving there, and I simply share their car, and I give them some money. They're not my taxi driver. They're my rideshare companion.
00:19:34
Speaker
And even the people who were driving the Uber were going, yeah, that's not what we do. It's not as if I'm driving from point A to point B and I'm picking people up.
00:19:44
Speaker
I'm picking people up and then going, so where is your point B? Because I can make my point B be your point B, because I've got nowhere to go apart from point B, which you're paying me to go for. And so they would do this thing where they would enter a market which had regulations around taxi companies and go, oh, no, no, we're not a taxi company. We're a rideshare app.
00:20:11
Speaker
I mean, I know we act like a taxi company, but we describe ourselves as a rideshare app. So the laws don't apply to us, which is why we think that your laws need to adapt to us rather than us fitting to your restrictive notion of how taxi, I mean, sorry, rideshares should work.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is a large part of what they've done all over. I mean, essentially, Uber's big innovation was a way of having a whole bunch of employees who you don't have to pay. They've always argued to drive down to our employees. They're contractors. They're just contractors. They're just using the app that we've provided, but they don't work for us, so therefore we don't have any responsibilities towards them.
00:20:57
Speaker
And so in various companies, there have been various legal cases, which I think sometimes have cited some way and sometimes cited others, but I believe there have been some decisions like, no, no, they are effectively your employees, so you need to treat them like employees.
00:21:12
Speaker
And this, I mean, we're kind of skipping ahead in our notes here, but one of the things which kind of speaks to the fact that the people using the Uber app as a rideshare income generating mechanism, using my words very carefully here, we're never contractors, but we're in fact employees, were the various surveillance models that Uber used to keep track of their contractors.
00:21:41
Speaker
Because if these people really are contractors who are travelling from point A to point B and picking people up along the way, there would be no need for Uber to have the kind of surveillance tech they built into their app infrastructure to keep track of their non-employees as they go about their work.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yes, we'll get to that in a bit. But returning to Australia, so just sort of as an example of how these papers shows that they've operated. So they started up in Australia in 2012 and obviously, as we said, didn't have the sort of permits that the various state laws in Australia required for taxis. So the Uber files contain a lot of information about how they lobbied and lobbied hard to state governments to try and change this.
00:22:32
Speaker
and keeping operating all the while. So it took until 2015, I think. So they'd been operating for three years. By 2015, Sydney and Melbourne were Uber's seventh and biggest, quote, unprotected markets.
00:22:47
Speaker
which is what they called markets where they were illegal, essentially. So they're unprotected in that there was a chance they could be booted out of the country for not following the laws. But fortunately for Uber, ACT was Australian Central Territories state, legalized them in 2015 and the other Australian states did starting from 2016.
00:23:11
Speaker
Now this obviously annoyed the Australian taxi drivers and so a bunch of licensed Australian taxi drivers have brought a class action suit against Uber. According to the Guardian, Uber is defending the class action suit and has denied as part of the proceedings that it deliberately sought to flout state laws governing the licensing of commercial drivers and vehicles.
00:23:31
Speaker
which going by the Uber files just seems to be a complete lie. They knew full well that they were flouting state laws and that was their plan from the beginning.
00:23:42
Speaker
So moving from Australia to Russia and actually this is one of the more worrying aspects of the story for Uber and the entire story we're telling here is worrying for how vulture capitalism actually works.
Uber in Russia: Legal and Ethical Concerns
00:24:00
Speaker
But the Russian one is interesting because this is where Uber might have actually broken US anti-bribery laws because
00:24:10
Speaker
When Uber has tried to go into non-Western markets, say like China, which they've now exited, so the business DD has basically taken over the remnants of what Uber used to be in mainland China.
00:24:25
Speaker
And when they've moved into places like Russia, they're often dealing with market systems which do not resemble those in the West. So in China, people talk about how it's a capitalist system with Chinese characteristics.
00:24:41
Speaker
And when we talk about Russian capitalism, we talk about a capitalistic system which is run by oligarchs. So if you want to get ahead in the Russian system, you need a few oligarchs to help kind of guide you on your way.
00:24:59
Speaker
And so Uber engaged in its move into Russia, and like China, it's largely left the Russian market. I think it's now Yandex is taking over the remnants of Uber, because Uber kind of
00:25:15
Speaker
bought at the cost of doing business in Russia eventually. But when they tried to get into Russia, they tried to get a number of Russian oligarchs on their side. And so they caught a whole bunch of them, largely from what's called the L1 group. So there's Roman
00:25:35
Speaker
Abram Abramovich, who we've talked about in previous episodes, Alicia Usmanov. I practiced saying this name before the podcast and now I hear Usmanov. Usmanov.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yep. And Mikhail Fridman. And eventually they settled on Vladimir Sennin, who at the time was a highly paid, well-respected lobbyist in Russia. He's now a pro member, pro pro pro pro member, a pro Kremlin member of the Duma, so the parliament of Russia.
00:26:14
Speaker
And the reason why their actions are likely to have broken US anti-bribery laws is that when Sennin was involved in lobbying on Uber's behalf to try and get taxi laws changed in Russia,
00:26:29
Speaker
so that they'd be able to operate Uber there. It turned out there was a bit of a quid quo pro nature of the arrangement. That CNN at one point wanted about 800,000 US Smackaros to be able to influence, I'm putting that in scare quotes, influence taxi legislation. And Uber at the time was going
00:26:54
Speaker
That's quite a lot of money. And we kind of think that if that's the nature of doing business, that money should be coming out of the L1 group. It should come out of the oligarchs. They should be paying Senon to do this work. I mean, if we pay Senon to lobby on our behalf,
00:27:14
Speaker
And he's got connections with the doomer that kind of looks a little bit like we're trying to grease the wheels of politics by giving money to politicians. And that's probably not very good. And 800,000 smackaroos. It's quite a lot of money. Now, the Guardian notes that they seem to agree to pay about 650,000 K.
00:27:37
Speaker
600, yeah, 650,000 K. Although the stories were in such a way that it's not actually clear that money was paid. So it might have been a case of, I want, I don't know why it's Transylvania, but he's now, I want $800,000. And Uber goes, we can give you 650,000.
00:27:58
Speaker
But it's not clear they actually did give him that money. But if they did, then they may well have been engaging in not just lobbying, but actually bribing a foreign member of state to change laws, which is the kind of thing the US does look ever so slightly askout upon. Unless you're the CIA, you're not meant to actually get involved in changing other government opinions.
00:28:25
Speaker
No, no, so we'll see how that goes. Worldwide, there seems to be a lot of stuff being conducted in secret. You talked about the meetings with Emmanuel Macron and what have you, and a lot of it seems to be quite a sort of informal secrecy from where government ministers just didn't mention
00:28:55
Speaker
that they'd been at this meeting and these Uber folks were there lobbying for them to change laws and, you know, just kind of escaped their attention, I guess, a little bit. Just didn't seem worthy of mention. Yeah, so I'm not quite sure how it works in the US, but in a Westminster system like they have in the UK and we have in Australia in Aotearoa.
00:29:16
Speaker
When a minister has a meeting, it's meant to go into their diary, and those diaries are public information, so you can ask for a copy of the minister's diary for a week, month, or a day through an official information access request. And so the whole point about putting meetings into diaries is so the public can then go, oh, so you had a meeting with someone with Uber?
00:29:43
Speaker
three days before there was a vote in parliament about rideshare legislation. I mean that's kind of interesting. You should probably ask what was said in that meeting, who attended the meeting, are there any minutes? So one really convenient way to make sure that people don't ask those inconvenient questions is to conveniently forget to put the meeting into your diary.
00:30:09
Speaker
or not just commit me forget, just decide to deliberately, I'm just not going to note this one down. No one needs to know about this. Yeah, so there's a bit of dodginess around. What was the business with Biden and the Devos group?
00:30:26
Speaker
So Biden was meant to be attending a meeting at the Davos Group and he was in a meeting with Kalanek at the time and was running late for attending the meeting at the Davos Group.
00:30:41
Speaker
And Kellyanne texted someone else in Uber saying, well, she's actually quite good. The more time he spends talking with me, the less time he spends talking with them. She's going, well, look, this is actually quite good. If they're going to talk about anything which affects our bottom line, delaying Biden arriving on the floor means less can be done.
00:31:04
Speaker
So yes, they were quite happy to have done that. I didn't note it down, but I remember an exchange where he was held up by the president. And so he made a point of saying every minute where we have to wait is a
00:31:25
Speaker
they were very petty about making sure that they were made to wait, so therefore they were going to give him less of their time or something. He was quite, quite blase about chatting with the president, I think. But moving on, one thing that stuck out to me, which was a thing, I don't think this was any sort of a secret at all, but the Yuba files did give a bit more detail on exactly how it worked, was just the fact that
Investor-Dependent Business Model of Uber
00:31:53
Speaker
Uber was, and as far as I know, still is heavily subsidised by basically bottomless well of investor money. It's always been the case. They move into a territory and the prices charged to passengers are very, very low. The paid to drivers is very high to encourage both passengers and drivers to start using their system.
00:32:19
Speaker
And once things get established fairly quickly, the prices start to go up, and the amount of money paid to drivers fairly quickly and fairly significantly starts going down. But at least to begin with, this is all made possible because everything is subsidised by this investor money. And it almost, I mean, it's not a Ponzi scheme, because in a Ponzi scheme, you're using investor money to pay out people who invest later on.
00:32:45
Speaker
But it certainly seemed it had echoes of a Ponzi scheme where, you know, this whole whole system is simply being propped up because they're taking money from their investors and not investing it into their technology or company or anything. They're paying it straight to drivers to keep them on board. I mean, isn't this why they kind of talk about investors in vulture capitalist things like this as whales?
00:33:11
Speaker
There's a bit of that. I mean, I don't know. I've I've read stuff about sort of Silicon Valley in general and the whole sort of disruptors and what have you. I think the article I was reading about was about the what was the one that collapsed? We work. Oh, yes. The one that Apple TV is making a TV series about with Jared Leto hot off the presses from his award winning portrayal of Michael Morbius in the film that got released twice.
00:33:41
Speaker
That's how good it was, I assume. Never seen it. No, neither. Yes, so it was an article in particular about WeWork, but it was talking about how this is the general thing where you'll get you these whales, these giant investors, will essentially just anoint. Anoint one company is, okay, you're the one we've picked to succeed, and then just pile endless streams of cash into them so that they're able to
00:34:08
Speaker
undercut all their competitors and take the dominant position. And Uber seems to be one of the earliest examples of that happening. As far as I know, the Uber files don't get into the question of money laundering, but I understand that that is why in some cases, some of these people are willing to
00:34:25
Speaker
to funnel huge amounts of cash through them. But yeah, just the talk of the subsidies being paid directly to drivers, which then dry up, which in various places drivers are taking legal action against them because they're getting to the point where they can't make a living off of doing this when they used to previously. But perhaps we should move on to some of the other legal issues around privacy and use of data.
Privacy Issues with Uber's Godview App
00:34:54
Speaker
which is what you brought up earlier. So there's Uber, and this is something we've known about for a little while, Uber has a thing that they call God view, or sometimes heaven, which is part of the system that lets them, this is what you were talking about before, lets them monitor individual rides going through their system in real time, if necessary. So there's one instance where Sir Peter Hendy,
00:35:24
Speaker
who was the London Transport Commissioner in 2014, noticed in one of these communications released as part of the Uber files, there's a note dated March 2014 where the company internally notes that Sir Hendy himself has used an Uber car at least twice, presumably as something they made a note of to use as
00:35:52
Speaker
ammunition against him, perhaps, you know, if he starts complaining about it. And once again, if Uber is a company of rideshare contractors,
00:36:03
Speaker
then really Uber shouldn't care about who the customers of their contractors are. They should be providing the infrastructure to allow the app to work, rather than being concerned about the clients of their company, which is quite obviously what they're interested in when they're looking at the God's view or Heaven view. They're tracking the customers of their company, which once again speaks to the fact that it's not a ride share app.
00:36:28
Speaker
Yes. I could see how they could justify tracking this information and storing it in case for things like dispute resolution or what have you. If a customer complains they were taken a long way or something like that,
00:36:46
Speaker
it would be useful for them to be able to pull up the details of a particular ride so they could prove exactly what had gone on. But there are still other things like, for instance, Mr. McGahn himself says one of the things that made him sort of
00:37:07
Speaker
worry about who he was mixed up with, I guess, was one time he was on his way to meet Joe Bertram, who at the time was Uber's regional manager for Northern Europe.
00:37:17
Speaker
and he was running late and he sent her an email saying, sorry, I'm on my way, but I'm running late and received a reply from her. Yeah, I'm watching you on heaven already saw the ETA and realized that he was being watched. He was taking an Uber vehicle to this meeting and realized that people could just watch your ride in progress in real time.
00:37:42
Speaker
Without your knowledge. And the disturbing part about that is we consider how many people are using Uber at any individual moment. The fact that Bertrand knew it was McGahn who was in that car.
00:37:59
Speaker
I mean, presumably when he got in the car, it was flagged. It wasn't a case of, oh, I should do a random search through all the travel going on in Uber at this time to see if the person I'm meeting with is in a car right now. Presumably is more of a case of, ah, so one of the members of our team has just got into a car. So it's a quite egregious privacy break when you think about it.
00:38:23
Speaker
Well, yes, no. In my day job, I've worked for several software companies that store users data and all that. So I've had to do training courses on privacy. So company-wide things, they make everybody do these things. So you know exactly how the law works. And assuming privacy laws work pretty much the same all around the world, there's a whole lot of requirements around you have to tell people that you're
00:38:51
Speaker
storing their data, there has to be a good reason for it, essentially, you have to, you know, you can't
00:38:58
Speaker
collect information from them that has nothing to do with the purpose, the things that you need to know about from them. And one of the things is that you're only allowed to use the data that you collect, A, with the permission of the user, and B, for things directly relating to what you're doing. So again, like I say, if it were around settling a dispute, for instance,
00:39:28
Speaker
and a passenger had sort of given you permission, yes, please, please pull my data for this trip so that we can prove exactly what had gone on and sort something out, then that would be a legitimate use of a person's data. But keeping tabs on what people are doing without telling them and for, you know, doing it for your own gain or simply to check up on
00:39:53
Speaker
on a colleague would very much be against privacy laws in New Zealand, and I'm pretty sure privacy laws around the rest of the world. And that wasn't the only app they were using to engage in misusing data,
Deception with Uber's Grayball App
00:40:08
Speaker
was it? There was also the Grayball app. Grayball, yes. So Grayball, I think it came out of that they referred to people as eyeballs, meaning people watching the system or something.
00:40:21
Speaker
But basically, how Grayball worked was that Uber would identify people, or in some case, areas that were likely to be in either law enforcement or regulation. So those areas could be the area around a police station or something like that.
00:40:37
Speaker
And if they'd identified a person using Uber as being one of these people or being in one of these areas, then the app would be directed to show them a fake view so they could see in the app cars moving around and their car that they'd ordered possibly coming for them or have you. And it would be complete fiction. These cars that they were seeing that were being shown to them in the app did not exist at all.
00:41:05
Speaker
And so it seems they used this to try and thwart regulators or law enforcement people trying to set up stings to
00:41:17
Speaker
you know, you've, if they want proof that these people are basically acting as unlicensed taxi drivers, then you go on Uber, book a ride, and then see how it works. And then afterwards, you can say, Haha, look, this is obviously an unlicensed taxi service in operation or something. And so they could, by using Grayball, if they figured if they were on to someone and figured this is probably what they were doing, they would then send them this fake data so that they'd think that
00:41:47
Speaker
ordered an Uber, but then it would just never arrive because it never existed in the first place. And then they could use this in combination with the Godview application to monitor the cars that were going on. And if one of these people who they thought might be in law enforcement or some sort of a regulator had genuinely ordered an actual Uber car, they could then follow that and would at times send instructions to the driver to
00:42:16
Speaker
to drive in circles or just hijack that booking or what have you. So this, again, this was not brought to light in the Uber files initially. The existence of Grey Ball was exposed in 2017. So we've known about it for a while, but we've known that it existed, but not much in the way of detail about how long it had been in use and how it was used.
00:42:43
Speaker
and the uber files show that it's been used for quite some time before 2017. And they also show that top executives, including Kalanick himself, knew about it, approved of it, and in some cases seemed to actually encourage its use. So there was one particular email exchange from 2014 where Kalanick
00:43:05
Speaker
doesn't seem to have directed people to use Grey Ball to fight attempts at regulation, but having been told that they were using it to fight regulation in the Netherlands, in this case, responded to being told that with great response and plan moving forward. So there definitely seems to be evidence that he was entirely on board and approving of their attempts to use this.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, so this is actually a classic case of what Chomsky at all calls institutional analysis. So Chomsky's example is when talking about why you don't need to say there's a conspiracy that Fox News has an anti-liberal bias going, well, look, all you need to do is you need to know that Rupert Murdoch is at the top of the chain and you do anything to get Rupert Murdoch's acclaim. So Rupert Murdoch never needs to tell people
00:44:00
Speaker
paint liberals in a bad light, paint Republicans in a good light. You simply need a whole bunch of managers who know that Rupert Murdoch's views on these things are, I like this thing. And so they do things that support Rupert Murdoch's views and would never upset him. So Kalanak never needs to say, use the Grey Ball app. All Kalanak needs to say is, you're doing great work there. Now,
00:44:30
Speaker
Kalanick has responded to all of these claims, and he's gone, well, look.
00:44:36
Speaker
neither myself nor anyone else at Uber has ever been equipped with charge with any offense related to using Grayball by any enforcement agency. And there's kind of an implied ellipsis there of dot, dot, dot. So that means we did nothing wrong. And this is a common move in this kind of corporate malfeasance or shenanigans. You go, well, look, nobody's charged us with wrongdoing.
00:45:04
Speaker
Which means, of course, we can't have done anything wrong because we did do something wrong. They would have charged us. So episode factor that proves that we didn't do the bad things associated with us. And this is a curious kind of legal reasoning here that look, if the authorities don't feel they have sufficient evidence to charge us in a court of law with this kind of malfeasance, then that is obviously evidence we did nothing wrong.
00:45:34
Speaker
which of course is not actually how evidence works in the real world, it's simply in a court of law we have different evidential standards, but people use that legal evidential standard to go, well look, if the courts haven't charged us, then obviously we are squeaky clean, no moral wrongdoing on our part, no siree, nothing to see here.
00:45:58
Speaker
No, yes. That claim came from a statement, I think, given through a spokesperson, about Grayball. The justification for Grayball, because obviously you could say, well, we've never been charged of any crimes for it, and a person still might ask you, but why are you even doing it in the first place? Their justification
00:46:21
Speaker
is that Grayball is supposedly meant to protect Uber drivers from assault and harassment by taxi drivers. I guess the scenario is they've
00:46:33
Speaker
they've identified someone as working for a taxi drive. When they see a person who works for a taxi company hiring an Uber, maybe they're afraid that they've hired an Uber just so that they can beat up the driver when they arrive. And they do that to thwart them or something. But it seems a very, very elaborate system to have set up for what sounds like a fairly niche scenario.
00:46:58
Speaker
and hard to predict. As far as I can tell you could just use god's view or heaven to do exactly the same thing. You don't need a separate app which then spoofs things. You simply need an app or view like god's view or heaven and go well we'll just block that user from being able to use uber. If you think that person's going to go around assaulting people
00:47:21
Speaker
you simply make it impossible for them to summon a Uber taxi, I mean, sorry, Uber ride share car. And of course, there's the question of how they come up with the list of people that the Grey Ball app gets used for in the first place. I mean, some of it's geographically based. So if it's someone who's summoning an Uber from outside a police station, then they go on the list. But it was also individual users of the system would get flagged as people who
00:47:51
Speaker
given the Grayball app and the only way basically they could be putting people onto this list
00:48:00
Speaker
is by violating their privacy. Essentially, there are claims that Kalanick directed people to look at the credit card information or something of Uber users so that they could identify them as being particular police officers, regulation, people from departments concerned with taxi regulation or what have you. So even if they were only doing it with people who worked for taxi companies or something rather than law enforcement,
00:48:30
Speaker
there'd still be a breach of privacy laws there. So it doesn't, no matter how they spin it, it definitely seems that dodgy, and by dodgy, I mean illegal things have gone on there. Now that brings us to the end of our list. I put a list at the end that we could maybe tie this into the other corporate conspiracies we've talked about, but I kind of did that assuming that we might not have enough to talk about to fill a whole episode, but I think it kind of looks like we have.
00:48:59
Speaker
maybe we don't need to see exactly how much it compares yeah it turns out there was a lot more to talk about i mean i guess the reason why we wanted to bring up the previous examples we've talked about and those are the vw emission scandal the panama papers and the paradise papers which of course
00:49:18
Speaker
stars our favourite Star Wars character, Mossack Fonseca, who's only, only near, equalled by my new Star Wars character, Durian Spliff, who I'm, I'm sure must exist in Star Wars universe. It sounds so Star Wars-y, Durian Spliff.
00:49:36
Speaker
uh the guardians already run a section i think was it last year the polluters project looking at kind of yeah not too long ago big pollution and the way that they've been lobbying behind the scenes josh of course is a really big thing about the purdu family and oxer content and we've probably talked about a whole bunch of other ones in the past we must have yes and the rationale behind that was
00:50:02
Speaker
What's interesting from the perspective of studying conspiracy theories about the uber files is this has all happened before. This is just a repeat of another scandal by a large corporate entity engaging in shady secretive practices in the background.
00:50:23
Speaker
And every time this occurs, people say, oh, we should we should bring in regulation to make sure this kind of thing never happens again. And then we don't. And so it happens again. And part of the worry, of course, as we see with the kind of lobbying activities going on by Uber,
00:50:40
Speaker
is that these corporations are aware that governments want to regulate this kind of behaviour out of existence, so these corporations engage in lobbying behind the scenes to ensure that that regulation never occurs. And so we keep on getting the same issues coming through, and we get governments saying we're going to do something about this, and then we let the lobbyists
00:51:07
Speaker
not allow us to change the system. So last week's patron bonus episode was called All Lobbyists Must Die, because in that patron bonus episode, I made the rather milk toke of milk toke? Milk toke? Milk toke is a kind of weed version of- That's what you do with the durian spliff. Yeah, durian spliff is a very milk toke character in Star Wars.
00:51:32
Speaker
I made the rather milk toast observation that lobbyists should be killed. There should be no lobbyists, and if there are lobbyists out there, they should be exterminated from good society, which I take to be a non-controversial and humane thing to do.
00:51:50
Speaker
for the good of the human race. I would have said fight into the sun but yes. I mean it's a slow death and I just I want it over and done with now. I don't want to waste our technology on launching lobbyists into the sun. There's a waste of resources and this is just more evidence for my hypothesis that we should not have lobbyists.
00:52:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of hard to argue, really. So that's Uber, Uber. Just have you have you been an Uber user before when you weren't in China? I mean, I've used I've used Uber back home. So coming back home, we've got Ola, which is the one which I think I used by preference. It's the homegrown. I think it's locally owned. But I have been known particularly on
00:52:40
Speaker
on a night where drinking has been involved to load up all the different rideshare apps I have, and especially given I was living in a position of precarity back when I was at home, finding the cheapest ride back from Auckland to the North Shore. So yes, I have used Uber in the past, and this does make me less inclined to use them in future. Yeah, I mean, I've been in other people's Ubers
00:53:10
Speaker
before, but I don't think I've ever actually used it myself. I've always found it very dodgy.
00:53:17
Speaker
My understanding of, quite aside from all the illegalities that we've just talked about now, it always seemed like Uber, I don't know if it's still the case, it certainly used to be the case that they posted the largest loss of any company in the world because the whole point was they operated a massive loss held up by the gigantic quantities of investor cash they had at their disposal.
00:53:44
Speaker
and that the only way their business model could work is if they completely destroy the taxi industry so that they become the only game in town and then hike their prices up enormously, which the whole thing seemed a bit dodgy. But I do have to say,
00:54:00
Speaker
I knew without comfortable using over knowing about it's a market disruption thing but there is a and this is the problem of the charity in a situation where you can't afford to be you can't afford to be virtuous because then you can't afford to wait you end up having to make some really reluctant decisions about you don't want to use this company but i do also want to go home to my bed.
00:54:25
Speaker
Now, literally, you might say, I should have made better decisions earlier on in the night. But those decisions have already been made, and there are consequences, which is my ethic.
00:54:39
Speaker
The thing that actually disappointed me the most, though, is just how rubbish taxis have been, certainly here in New Zealand at least. The thing about Uber is that it actually gave a much, much better experience than booking a taxi from what I've seen. The one time, because I'm not a drinker, so I'm usually able to drive myself home no matter where I am, but the one time I've needed
00:55:02
Speaker
to be driven somewhere in recent time was when I was going in for a medical procedure which I'd be I needed to get there early in the morning and because I was going to be under anaesthetic I wouldn't be able to drive myself home and what have you and so because I had to get there George had his second penis attached I should point out
00:55:22
Speaker
something like that. And so I had to be there early in the morning, too early to want to get my wife out of bed to drive me there. So I thought, I'll book a taxi. And so the night before I went on one of the bigger taxi company sites and booked a taxi to pick me up early in the morning and drive me off to this place, it was only a very short drive.
00:55:46
Speaker
And so I hauled myself out of bed at some ungodly hour that morning, got myself dressed, all packed up, stood outside to wait for my taxi and the taxi never came. And I rang the taxi company and got a dispatcher who'd just come onto their shift and seemed to have no idea what was going on and couldn't find any record of the taxi that I'd booked and eventually just grabbed a nearby, a guy who happened to be in the area and assigned him to me and I got picked up and
00:56:14
Speaker
I arrived there in time only because I'd allowed lots of extra time beforehand, but the whole thing was just a complete shambles. And so after that, frankly, I didn't actually blame anyone for using Uber after that, because it really did seem to be just sort of disappointing that it was actually, it is a genuinely good product, but the business behind it is just so dodgy.
00:56:38
Speaker
Yeah, I remember in the pre-Uber days, if you had a party and then finishing up at two or three in the morning and people wanting to get taxis home, and you'd have to ring the taxi on a landline or your cell phone.
00:56:54
Speaker
And then you'd have to describe your address over the phone, which was never particularly good if the person was slightly drunk. So they would always blame the dispatch if not understanding what they were saying. It was quite clearly user error. And then you'd be so right. So the taxi will be with you in 45 minutes.
00:57:12
Speaker
And so then you'd go, well, the party is over and done with, but now I've got these guests who are going to be around for another 30 to 40 minutes. And so you do that. Do we have another drink or do we start to sober up?
00:57:25
Speaker
was Uber, you were just, you know, it knew where you were, and there were lots of cars around. So I can see why it got adopted so quickly. Because A, it was a better service, and B, it took at least in Altaroua, taxi companies a very long time to admit that the reason why people were using the service
00:57:49
Speaker
was because it was a better experience than getting a taxi. So there was a big resistance to any kind of change in the taxi industry, which then led to what appeared to be the saddle grapes hypothesis of taxi drivers going, well, people don't want to use our services anymore, which kind of was saddle grapes because they were refusing to move with the times. Even if moving with the times meant competing with a company with a vast trove of money,
00:58:18
Speaker
which they were then going to use to destroy your business. And that's all fairly depressing. Well here I have to use taxi apps all the time because I don't speak the language and also almost everyone uses a taxi app here because the way that apps work in this country, there's an app for everything and it tends to just link up with existing subs.
00:58:42
Speaker
Well, it's not depressing either. I was going to say what's not depressing is antiquities being found and returned to their rightful owners, which is the thing we're going to talk about in our bonus. A kind of reverse Indiana Jones. Kind of. Did you ever watch the Carmen Sandiego series they made recently?
00:59:02
Speaker
I saw my boys watched a cartoon, a recent cartoon, Carmen Sandiego. What was that? That was a case of her stealing antiquities or precious items to return them to their rightful owners. So it was Carmen Sandiego as a heroic figure. So we're going to be talking about someone who's essentially Carmen Sandiego in that case. We're going to be talking about the Snyder Cut.
00:59:30
Speaker
which was released. Because we had to get around to that eventually. Eventually. And dodgy dealings in a local university. Local to me and local to your heart.
00:59:44
Speaker
So if you'd like to hear about those things, then why don't you just become a patron and then you can. As simple as that, go to patreon.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And if you're already a patron, then your work is done. You can go about your business and safe in the knowledge that a patron episode will be winging your way because I know how to upload them properly now. I'm not going to forget this time like I did a couple of times before.
01:00:10
Speaker
And I think, I think that we're done for the week. We are. Have you any last thoughts? No. I took a taxi via app earlier today. Jolly good. Or in that case, I don't think we should prolong things any longer. I'm just going to say goodbye. Goodbye. The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Anderson and me, Dr. M.R. Exdenter.
01:00:39
Speaker
You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.