[inaudible conversations] i think we are going to go ahead and get started if you would like to take your seat. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us here today. We are excited to spend the next 55 minutes with you. Im the cofounder and ceo of a start up im honored to be the moderator today. As many of you may have guessed, then theres rick is not here today. He got sick this morning and absolutely couldnt make it. We will talk a little bit about his book just for those of you that are wondering [inaudible] [laughter] [applause] we are going to leave time at the end forng audience qanda s well so please be thinking of your questions. We would love to have an interactive conversation with you. Im going to start by saying a couple of words about the book before we gos through a to mme and his book. For any of you that havent checked it outut yet it is billionaires and its the story of the claims from the facebook story. They were the two brothers at harvard who actually hired mark to help them build out their social Network Platform at harvard. Mark helped them build their platform but then he actually ended up kind of spinning away from them and creating his own platform so they made a claim they were entitled to some ownership from facebook because of the role they played and he said that they stole their idea and so they were kind of the vilified in the social network. They were made to look kind of snooty and arrogant and kind of a pain in the buck but in this s book the book starts with them getting getting their settlement from facebook from Mark Zuckerberg and how they used the money to invest. The end result is they become the first billionaires from bitcoin and a sort of narrowly escaped getting involved in some of the underworld with the silk road and its a really exciting and preque pretty cool adventurm the story of genius, betrayal and redemption. Theres a few layers of betrayal in the book but then they end up having the last laugh. Its a quick read and it will completely change your view of the winklevoss twins a few salsa social network. Andal he talked about that in te foreword how he felt he had something to do because the social network was based on his previous book so he said he wanted to show them in a new light. If you havent picked it up i highly recommend it. Its a great read and we are sorry you are not here. Hopefully you are watching on tv. Now we will do a deep dive into the battle for uber. Before that i want to share a little bit about mike with you. Hes a Technology Reporter for the New York Times and is based in San Francisco where he covers facebook, twitter, uber and a lot of the Silicon Valley giants. His coverage won him an award for business reporting, so rockstar Business Reporter here with us. We are excited to have you. Please join me in welcoming mike with this. [applause] my plan for the conversation is to kind of get an overview of the book for how awesome and interesting it is and then the implications for what he found for the story for the rest of the world so maybe if we could just start off if you could some people may not even really know what the story of uber is and then we can be dive into the pieces of it. How did you even get involved in writing this book lacks i think by now 2019 everybody has to have some knowledge of uber or how it operates in the world. Back when i started covering the company it was 2014, the New York Times and it was a moment ridesharing was becoming a thing but there were no laws or framework around it for people to know what to do with it so an entrepreneur was in some ways probably in archetype for i like to call him Mark Zuckerberg meets a can of ax body spray. [laughter] she found a loophole in the way people got around or didnt get around. In San Francisco in 2010, 2011 i was working at wired magazine and had to leave like 45 minutes early because i didnt know if a taxi would even come to get me and the Public Infrastructure was crumbling so if you can remember back when pushing a button onou your phone to ge gee car didnt exist this was pretty revolutionary at the time. When i decided to write this, it was kind of wanting to sketch out how entrepreneurs go about ideas and maybe the limits of t nhiping founders that break the rules and norms and how that can be a positive for change but also how it can go bad. Uber launched and everything was going awesome and then what happens . There were periods when most people i think they kind of know uber went through a hard time some people are like i know its bad but i dont know why and i enjoy using it. The arc of the company was in the iphone was just coming out and smart phones are becoming something everyone could use and applications that were like singlepurpose ab is to do all sorts of stuff were becoming populared and it resonated becae it was so easy to call a car to come and get to you. So the idea for travis was put as m much money into this idea s possible because we need to scale it back. We need to be in every city not just in the United States but around the w world because there is no barrier to entry like other people can replicate this and to do the same thing. They dont have the ability to protect their business so thats what they did is they raised billions of dollars and started pushing into every city as quickly as they could. Normal folks for the most part were charmed you could call him a car easily they were pushing completely passed regulators and probably breaking the law with regulators. Its the story of the rise and epic fall. The story ends with travis basically being ousted as the ceo. Its pretty dramatic. Its not like a Mark Zuckerberg tale where hes still the ceo. It has a a dark side. It is a uber book but its kind of where we are with Technology Coverage and where we view the impact on the world. From the late 90s through up until a few years ago tech coverage and reporting l this largely like revering coders eating a bowl of ramen noodles in a college dorm room. I think its changed. You can tell me but i think that narrative has changed and we are starting to see some of the dark side of how tech can operate whether its people getting assaulted and murdered in vehicles or manipulation of information on facebook and better and social networks and i think it is worth exploring the secondary effects that are not positive to understand them at least. I want to dive a little bit deeper into the conversation and have you startrt by painting moe of a picture on thisut for everyone to add to the conversation in the book of mike writes even when the founders were bending the rules and the law they were treated as platonic philosopher kings. Many believed they were remaking the world to get smarter, delivering a new and much improved version, and upgrade on life. Elsewhere in the few talk about travis and say that in the view entrepreneurs were worthy of the praise that they received. Can you start the story for everybody kind of who is this guy and what was his worldview and how did he see himself. Who was the person that predictecreatedthe culture of t . Right now there is what i would say i its an aggressively libertarian view of just sort of in the pure meritocracy people can build themselves up by their bootstraps and create the next Great Company. He had a similar path as other entrepreneurs, dropped out of ucla doing coding early on, was a serial entrepreneur of other startups that failed. A one of them is a Prototype Version of like napster and he got sued for record of a billion dollars or something and that didnt end well and then he did another company but he only made like a Million Dollars on that which made him like middleclass in Silicon Valley i guess. So by the time he got to uber, hshe had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. Hed been betrayed by some of his investors at earlier startups but still wanted to prove that he could build the next great thing. Also post financial crisis right around that time so Interest Rates were dropping, capital was flowing into the money a lot more and archives were becoming somewhat more easy to build itself a lot of things have to happen at once to make uber have been limited. The access to the web services that make the need for startups to kind of get up and go on theirto own and then just insane amounts of money given out to the founders. We will talk about that. You portray him as someone that has a lot of ambition and a competitive side that what you havent really touched on is the kind of immaturity she exemplified as a 40 plus year old woman reading this book i am like this is like a man away. The parties and inappropriate behavior. One of the things that exemplify that in the book is where you y contrasted amazons leadership principle with Company Values that travis created. Can you tell everybody a little bit about that . Amazon like most companies have principles or guiding leprinciple philosophies. Amazon is something that uber, travis was obsessed with, he wanted to sort of creeps b12 in amazons image. Image. They have 14 corporate values like customer obsession, fairly benign [inaudible] traviss version of that was to avfrun it through a speak translation engines pick something out. Some of them were always be hustlin. Be an owner, not a renter. Champion mindset, winning which was a Charlie Sheen thing that he opted for himself, but my favorite one was super pumped. As a company value. [laughter] something they use use to evaluate employees on and higher employee. Hr people would sort of markup your level of how pumped you are to see if you are doing a good job which i dont know how you measure about but tha that that, he was just kind of a grown man child given billions of dollars to build a company in his image and i try to be fair there was value and he did create this enormous company that changed transportation works entirelyha but also there were no boundaries on how he did that or what his behavior was like because everyone attached would heres another quote from the book. Iit would take an extra of thoms hobbes, animal house and wolf of wall street. This toxic startup culture was the result of a young leader surrounded by yes men being given unlimited Financial Resources operating without serious ethical or legal oversight they struggled for power and is a primacy over a multibillionr dollar empire. Concepts like breaking the law were not applicable he be believed when the walls were bs in the first place. Can you give a couple of examples like i was really shocked by the things they were doing with the policehe and pubc servants they were messing with apps in their phones so that Law Enforcement officials couldnt catch then drivers. One of the interesting parts of the book does anyone here know what the word gray ball means . If you remember in 2014, like uberub now is a given, people cn get off the plane and look for one. 2014 when they were expanding cities there was no Legal Framework for any of this and they didnt know what to do. In austin there is a battle people were put off by the way they came in an aggressively and put up billboards that was kind of fostering that they knew better and they should be here. They had battles wit have battll transportation officials and Law Enforcement that were trying to stop them from coming in. Import when i open a book with a scene in portland where the transportation folks are like if you come y in here we are goingo arstart calling your drivers ovr and giving your tickets too sort of stop this like we are not messing around. The response to that was they hired a corporate espionage force csa contractors to follow transportation officials around him to sort of figure out in some cases where they lived or what their credit card numbers were were different ways to attach them to their apps and what they did they code named its gray ball anklets think you were a transportation official trying to call uber you hit the button into the car might say that its on the way and immediately canceled. Fullstom working or maybe it shows the service is too busy and no one can come. So they are not able to catch any of them and the plan worked so well because the city had no idea this was happening to uber decided to create a playbook and improve internal website to teach the rest of their employees how to do this and spread it across the world. When we reported on this in 2017, and a glut of engineers in the valley would like this is a creative solution to the problem. And a lot of lawyers i talked to her like thats probably obstruction of justice. But thats the sort of thing they believe that the walls were written unjustly or mobilized to benefit so they were acting out of the value number six which was principled competition. There were principles behind it even if you didnt quite agree with what they were. By the end of the day they were spearheading the revolution in transportation in the industry eathat was dominated and it woud sort of be brushed under the r rug. There is a legitimate argument to people in the industry that this is kind of here now. Theres a lot of people in Silicon Valley who will say about this is sometimes you have to push through even at the cost of whatever ticket to a better hplace. I dont know if i agree with all that. One of the questions for all of us anytime you have a Major Business innovation that could be in a gray zone thats the Financial Service crisis. They turned out to be harmful so there is another level and another layer thats how women were treated and it wasnt just the employees, it was actually the entire company culture. A lot of the parties that you write about in the book feature when then brought in as actually in one party as auction items. Can you talk a little bit and then the interesting thing is the turning point when things start going down is an open letter written by a former female engineer about her experience. Can you talk a little bit aboutl the role of the letter and the Tipping Point when they started to freefall. They were on the bleeding edge of the movements that are going toto materialize. They raised 3. 5 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund and continue raising because mutual funds were ready to give them as much as they can answer that resulted in 2015 they spent 25 million sliding everyone else to have a huge party and must take us in the desert where they hired beyonce to perform privately for 6 million in equity i think it made it into song lyrics and album if you look at one of the last songs on the last album theres something about equity and thats hreferencing that uber deal. We want you to pick the numbers and grow your division and office anin theoffice and then f turn a blind eye to the on the first day on the Engineering Team by the manager and it was just a real culture because it didnt matter what you did as long as you make your numbers. They had a lot of internal struggles. The whole philosophy is we are not going to build a department that works or some things that make it a little too corporate and maybe that was positive in some ways but also played out in a lot of negative ways. The phrase meant Sexual Harassment policies from the misconduct of the reporting procedures and reviews and all things that are hard charging young man rolled his eyes. It would be the board and the investors that had billions of dollars into this company and ended up being a very significant player. They are the oness that ousted him that for a long time they let this stuff go on. Maybe we can just start by talking about what that was in Silicon Valley where they would tolerate this and turnha a blind eye. So, ideally in a non dysfunctional company you have Board Members who support the ceo and challenge the ceos like the board is supposed to maximize the value and not violated their fiduciary dutiess about things like oversight of the company. The way that travis designed guber was essentially to have a service for his pleasure and he was unable to be removed from the ceo seat through slow changes to how he raised money for the terms of his financing and how the structure of the company worked. I think for a long time people didnt want to look too hard at how things wereus going. In 2012 or 201 2013 and was vald at 3 billion had been just like two to three years later it was valued at 40 billion then by 2017 and end of 201 2016 it wast almost 70 billion which was the most in same. Aninsane. And nonprofitable. Burning billions of recorder. If anyone here is interested enough another train wreck business study you should look up what is happening right now because it is the most insane anstory that ive ever seen. This book is like a precursor to all of that. But i think their incentive was im going to make you rich so just dont Pay Attention to all of that. And hes from benchmark capital and there is an interesting profile of him in the buck and he is trying to make his mark so from the venture capitalist perspective, they want to be the one that finds the next unicorn come in the next facebook, so hes kind of egging him on edit in the beginning and then later on its like no, what have i created and also for fear of his own reputation hes the one that starts leaving the syndicate ouster because hes afraid this is going to blow up and its all going to look down on me. Thats right. And i think that in dc culture and trying to pick the winners of the whole thing about being a venture capitalist is not defined Small Companies that will grow into huge things and you dont just want to double your investment, you want to like ten or 20 x. That is how they work it is high risk and high reward and so once you do that and it seems to be for a very long time like a very sureu bet and enormously lucrative for a lot of people it is hard to suddenly come in and intervene and be like stop doing what you are doing or whatever but i think the 2017, they were receiving this internal letter that described this topic culture internally and they had investigations by the department of justice space on some of the recordings. The city had Vice President s getting kicked out for harassing their employees or really problematic histories i guess is what i would say in a lawsuit they sued them for theft and trade secrets. It is lik was like a total nighe for three months basically. And then all of a sudden the Board Members including a texan whos like a legendary venture capitalist was like we have to do something. We need to save our investment. One of the other things i cant really weird about the story is that Arianna Huffington was in the mix and i was like what is she doing there. I dont understand this. You talk about her a little bit in the book. But what was the relationship between travis and Arianna Huffington ask why was she such a pivotal person in thatwh momet of crisis for uber . She was one of my favorite people to write about because she has the ability shes reinvented her career multiple times, political commentator caught creator oconcreator of tt and media mogul and now shes giving a wellness thing i m thik she just left but she always seems to find like the next little thing in a little bit ahead of time and then make a lot of money off of it. She ended up befriending travis and became a board member and one of his only allies later on in the book and in the story when everyone starts to turn on travis and uber and say we want this guy out of here and she tisentially i think that her motivation is just she likes being in the seat of power, close to power and it was one of the most powerful companies. And it was very much wrapped up in it and we were writing about this for most of 2017 and she was like right in the mix and some people are just attracted to it. T. Its a little weird. Also one of the moments that was a turning point, traviss mother gets tragically killed in a boating accident and he gets really emotionally taken out and as the reader i had to kind of wonder like is he taking Arianna Huffington as like a surrogate mother and it seems like it was kind of a weird relationship also woven into all this other stuff going on. It was totally. I mean, just very dramatic and very strange and awful thing that happened at the worst possible time in his life and he has no allies left and his board is turning on him so i think that eventually hes ousted from the company that he founded and there is a very big public or its all spelled out in public. But i dont think that he would have stepped down voluntarily if mother not for his passing and him being in this really gnarly headspace. Theres one scene where his team is kind of yelling at him and all this stuff is coming out in the news and i remember you write about him laying on the floor for an extended pure co finance of his executive team is there watching like this is our ceo. Thats right. This guy just crawling around on the floor saying im a terrible person, im a terrible person and then i think someone said to him youre not a terrible person you just do terrible things. [laughter] i dont t know what the distinction is. We will take audience questions in just a couple of minutes, but i want to kind of list off a little bit out of uber and think about what are some of the lessons that we can take from this as we move forward. One of the things i was struck by committed as a new ceo and a very respectable man who was brought in and you write about except for some there remains a lingering concern is uber under still going to spring fo swing e fences or have they lost their appetite for world domination, and another later is uber going intona a boring faceless Mega Corporation and its employees will become complacently lazy and efficient and so you know, isac there really this view is that in ordethatin order for a w really big and disrupt an industry and transform it has to have this kind of ends justify the means culture and if it doesnt, its going to become boring and inefficient and lazy. People even now, i mean i talk to more than 200 current and former employees, and like all of them wonder where they are still having this thought could we have built this company any other way than we did buy a bodily breaking walls were having a ceo that was like the most aggressive fighter that anyone has ever met and could trick any other ceo other than travis to have done this and i think that a lot of people dont know the answer to that. Andy. Its not just one example. , like if we look at facebook which youve also done a lot of reporting on facebook its not that different. I mean, theres some pretty ugly stuff going on there, too mac. So is that how it has to go if you are going to change the world . I would like to think that you dont have to be a jerk to build a Great Company. You can do things ethically, but that is the flipside of a lot of this. A lot of folks i talk to, im not the most beloved person by the employees, but i think that a lot of them were surprised that i was pretty fair on this and asked the question of like in the counterculture is this sort of required two build Great Company, like do you have to be endlessly optimistic and really just sort of a cheerleader for your self and very aggressive in every way or are you just going to be the next whatever mega tcorporation maybe its big or something but its not really going after the moon shots of the selff driving cars were flying cars or whatever. I remember in the book they talk about is it going to be the next amazon or just end up being like ebay. [laughter] like looking down like ebay is a small insignificant thing. But even that is like of course its market capitalism with billions but they dont want tohe be ebay. They wanted the rocket ships to send people to mars and be part of that and build its like a dome inside of seattle. Part of the insanity needs to be baked into some of this. Maybe you have to be a little crazy or optimistic. But i think that this is again the whole book talking about the downside of a lot of this stuff and i think particularly for right now we are seeing a reckoning around the limits of that mentality, like purely worshiping founders and progress in the name of progress that only positive its just not true. There are downsides and we should think about them. Why dont we open up for some audience questions i think i see microphones in the middle of the aisle if any of you would like to come and share a question. I certainly have more if you dont. Eluting to the issue that you made earlier about what is it take to build what you call a Great Company come and its more of a cultural question. And i think that this is something of a society we should ask and im just wondering your opinion on this. Sure, okay it has a large network, net value. But do we really need those. Not sure that we wouldnt have been better off if we stuck to our guns and not allowed the Big Companies back in. Im just wondering whether this all made sense or if it was another rockefeller kind of thing that needs to be broken up for the future anyway. Deciding what a Great Company means is a really important point. Like it doesnt just have a crazy market cap like you are worth the most or Something Like that. It could mean you are doing positive things for the world or affecting different things. One of the things i see now on this book tour or whatever is making young founders who are looking at these works of the world now face but its interesting because it went through a very small period of being beloved and now it is going through a rough patches but i would say. So they are coming in and saying what i want to build a company the right way, and do it ethically and work on things that can actually help people and not just worry about being a unicorn or like going to the club and abiding awesome cars or Something Like that. I think theres more consciousness around that which is probably a good thing. There was a great article by the ceo in the New York Times last week with the headline we need to fix capitalism. Weca need a new capitalism and i think even the more powerful ceos in the world arere starting to ask these questions and have this conversation about what should business be accountable to. Is it just shareholders or is it to a broad group ofho stakeholds that includes employees, the community, the environment. So i think that is happening. Next question please. So, a few years ago i asked this question and im interested in the response. That is my old boss. Can you speak up a little bit. As evidenced by your book, i think it was like three or four years ago when i asked you this but i asked are we still in terms of regulation and government response to these companies are we still in the wild west and she said yes, we are. And im curious if you think that we are at war we are not, where are we and what would it take to get us to the point where we already have a very thoughtful response help to regulate a company like that. Its a great question and i think that we are in a different time than we were three or four years ago. Ifag you look at the ftc theyve been kind of asleep for a long time and facebook was able to lie Companies Like what sapp and the rape to unmasthey rape to us enormous amount of Tech Companies or Mapping Companies or whatever and i feel like a lot of acquisition that would have happened ten years ago are probably not going to get approved today for anticompetitive reasons and now there are startups that are being formed in the valley for the entire pieces of the start of it is we are going to build to this point and then we flip over to google or facebook or amazon and places you can get sold to and that is where your exit strategy is which really is not innovation is just forcing companies to. So come the breeding ground for the innovative environment is changing and i also see some more willingness than i would be curious as a running start up to hear your perspective on this see some willingness from the doj right now they are actually doing investigations into how to regulate companies before it gets to this crazy planet. But it seems like the definition of innovation is always going to be that its not sometimes hear that the regulators are going to be behind them, so after reading the book young see that. They even went and asked the regulators before they started investing a bunch of money in it and they are like thats just the thing we dont know we are not worried about it. They just were completely blowing it off like i think they were about. Im sure in the early days the regulators thought its just a social network for kids. We dont need to regulate this. This isnt really business. So, i think its when you have these currencies all the things that are on the frontier i think for a while the regulators just dont even know what to do with it so it would be pretty hard to have them preemptively regulating. You dont know if it is going to be anything but actually also to that point, they have learned some lessons. Im curious here because i see a lot everywhere. There was like a scooter apocalypse and then there were thousands everywhere and everyone was so mad going to the lake and stuff. Im very curious if people like them or hate them. Its the same thing, no one knows what to do with them, do they go on the trail come the sidewalk, d tobago and the car lane. There is no infrastructure for it. I will say that there were some stored memories of them coming in and hammering it in San Francisco so that they would quickly shut down the scooter thing because they didnt want it to be like uber all over again. How about in the back. I cant quite see you but b theres another microphone. Thank you so much. I have a question in the context. I wanted to know if during the reporting you found out anything about the fingerprinting issue and if that is what we experienced here in austin. Also if you get any reporting on the other competitors similar to that. So, though that is a great question. Fingerprints, just for the folks whoor dont know, the ridesharig companies you had to pass a rudimentary background check it. If you are a taxi driver there is a much more strict process and that means fingerprinting and a somewhat argue a more thorough background check process which includesck fingerprints. With others they say that takes time. Back in the days and even now when they just need a body behind the wheel its possible they needed a faster way of doing that and they ended up startups essentially would be created with a faster background checks that did not do fingerprinting. And if so, what they did is essentially dispatch teams of lobbyists to the state courthouses around the country and really outside of the country to lobby for the law but diwallthat did not require the fingerprinting background checks. Andun we did some reporting on this that shows that they were outstanding at least four or five years ago it up spending most of the Companies Just on lobbying alone for this specifically. They managed to be really successful in most markets you still dont need a fingerprintbased background check to drive. Uber would argue fingerprint background checks know better. I dont think that is necessarily true, but they have been effective at doing that and en boarding as people as quickly as possible. I still think that the stories are damaging when someone gets assaulted because the driver wasnt properly vetted or some sort of oneoff thing happens that tends to be a really big deal. I think at this scale they are willing to s accept that because they needhe to keep as many drivers on the road as possible. Can you talk a little bit about the competitors . Ive always wondered why is it any better or is it just like with the pink mustache wax i think that its genius at marketing because they were able to create uber as the bad guy. Ythey can feel okay using it. It was a whole thing. Cool thing. After people would delete their account three or four days. I think internally the Corporate Culture is nowhere near the way it was so you can probably feel slightly better about yourself for that. But as far as driver conditions and if you care about wages and Labor Conditions for drivers, some would say the erosion of the labor rights on how to do workers are not even employed then its probably the same thing, like its basically just the same thing. What do you think is the current status and the question comes in from chicago and they are opening up a big office in chicago. I will read where they are laying off like crazy. So you find technical and they have a son that is, all things being equal i really want to go work for uber, something of a Technical Support . It seems high risk at this point. Totally. So, during this weird position where the last earnings they lost 5 billion which is ang lot of money and they have a lot of employees so they are laying people off into the same time they are trying to expand to different areas like trucking is one thing that they are doing i guess automating the logistics stuff and how to order the process and so that i think is the Chicago Office that they are hiring there and theyve committed to multiple years there so theres at least some job security. A lot of the layoffs that are happening right now it is really kind of interesting that under the new ceo eric essentially admitting that they cannot afford to compete with the engineering talent thats going to facebook and google of the world that make a lot of money. So they are considering outsourcing to basically the less competitive markets to rehire at a lower cost and that is the strategy. There are some people i talked to inside of it are grumbling about that saying our Engineering Department is going to hell because they dont have good people, but i dont know. Its a difficult timeim they are right now because everyone is worried that the ceo is not going to have the proper strategies in place and its mostly about costcutting and stuff. I heard Something Interesting this past week that with the troubles at uber and the trouble that we work i guess somebody said the whole millennial lifestyle has basically been underwritten by venture capitalists and private equity group in funding all these companies to operate and now that the economy is changing and those investors are kind of shoring back a little bit, the companies are falling apart and its just going to, you know, kind of old tumble. My favorite example of that is can take your free uber and by your free meal at the end of the day and lived entirely on subsidized and i think that is coming to an end now like people are starting to think that profits are a good thing which is a revolutionary idea but its starting to matter to wall street and thats that. Its different. There was another article on that last week or the week before but said Silicon Valley has a new mantra and it was something about profits. So yes, next question. Speaking on that, when do they raise the price is . Is that something they can do and how has the economy wall in california basically how does that affect them . Thanks for that. So, there are s. For as the prices go they basically have two levels. , but you can charge 5 for a 10dollar ride forever whichor s basically their expansion model for a very long time, just to undercharging subsidized by venture capital. So the two are raise prices for the customer which is hurtful to your business because people will stop using aswh much or lor the prices for chargers were cut into drivers and i think im starting to hear that they are cutting into drivers earnings are basically. Its definitely taking more insurgent cities and its really hard to get any visibility into that from like as a reporter if you dry for them and we have been trying to collect data over time from different receipts but its hard. So i think that is going to continue happening because they do have to squeeze out the profit. The other factor thats weighing against them is the food delivered a business. Its that their main growth areas because they are kind of leveling off and youre spending crazy amounts of money burning tons of money going into that. So its kind of hard to see where the profitability ever comes than when they keep burning money and then quickly on this bill in california that you were talking about basically that could make a comic could change the standard to determine who is an employee versus the contractor. They just signed that into law in california. I do think that governor is probably going to figure out some way to compromise and not make them fulltime employees just because there i because thf folks pushing back on it andmp there is an effect that it would have on freelance writers that people are very upset about. So, my guess is that we end up with some hybrid model where theres like a wage floor but not quite employee. They will fight with every fiber of his being because it is going to the Business Model to offload its many of the costs as possible onto the drivers. How about in the back. Drivers are not making a livable wage especially when you factor in the car usage. I just dont understand. Is there an endgame here . Do you know anything about Rideshare Austin its supposed to be a worker support for driver support organization. It does seem i mean this is like a technical idea if it is successful and people do love it and it is convenient why shouldnt it be something that is just totally driver owned . First of all you are completely sane and your thinking is rational. Thats the thing. I dont im very curious what that stay if profitability is going to look like. I think the nature of these funded entities requires a sort of payday or exit. I mean, they could never have been the way that it was designed to be worker owned the sort of thing just because i think there are so many People Holding on to the shares and waiting for their exit. Towards the end, and all that money. Hes also a billionaire three or four times over now. Anyone that is unlike the first 100 employees need insane amounts of money and benchmarked again. That is the greatest Venture Investment of all time. If not the greatest investment. So, i think that there is a lot of things against making workers share on the profits particularly because that is how the businesses work. I have heard of some different types of companies. There is one in new york im blanking out on if there was a similar worker owned cooperative where essentially they set foot we are going to give you shares in the company and like we are coming our Financial Health is your Financial Health and you have a stake in this. It didnt really have any it didnt have a happy ending because i believe they got bought out and they ended up not getting any of the equities of the workers and they ended up taking all the money. So its like in a cynical version of the world here where they might, i think that the idea is great and it might provide different incentives to build a lasting service, but its also hard to compete if they are undercutting the business by charging 10 for a 5dollar ride or something. That is all the time we have for questions. Thank you all for joining us. [applause] mike is going to be giving a signing. [applause] you have an american citizen they want to see is operating as an agent of russia. The only due process that american is ever going to get it is the Justice Department and fbi played straight with the core and the court forces them to comply with their own regulations which include making sure that you bring verified information only to the court and if they dont follow their own rules and the judge doesnt make them follow their own rules, then you basically have a surveillance going on against people presumed innocence and a full array of Constitutional Rights and they never find out about it. And what we found out in this investigation was that was precisely what they did but they did it for the purpose of monitoring a political campaign. That is what this was about through and through. When i started to write what became ball of collusion ultimately i have a different idea about what it was going to be. I thought the way to do this is to compare the Hillary Clinton email investigation would be trump, russia investigation and ask whether any objective person could look at both of them and say that the same degree of justice was afforded to both sides. To take the case where they bent over backwards not to make the case, where they have a mountain of evidence of criminal activity. In the mueller investigation, you lied to the fbi, youve got prosecuted. The clinton investigation and lied to the fbi they gave you a middle and an immunity. No grand jury to speak of. Make all kinds of arrangements. In the investigation they showed up at 6 00 in the morning or before if they needed to break into your house, they broke into your house but the ground that the evidence they wanted. In the clinton investigation they sent pretty please, and if the person said no, they would make a deal to get the evidence but not to look at it or not look at big sections of it. You are talking about a situation where they bent over backwards not to make the case when they actually had a real criminal evidence versus scorching the earth to try to find a case where there wasnt one and after two years, they still were not able to do it. So, my idea was to try to compare these two investigations into just pose that question. Whether you are a liberal or conservative, whether you are democrat or republican, can you honestly look at these investigations and to say by the way, these two investigations that were conducted by the same agents come at the same, the sa, the same Justice Department personnel and say that they did blind justice there is not a chance. To watch the rest of the Program Visit the website at booktv. Org. Search for Andrew Mccarthy or the title of the book. Its in the box at the top of the page