Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. It was actually inspired by Kanye West lyric there, but that's another human for another day. Okay, January 2017, Donald Trump has just been inaugurated as the President of the United States. I'm living in Paris. We're recording Acquired episodes remotely over the Internet across continents. We have Brad Stone on the show to talk about everything we're just talking about with Uber, DiDi, and the Uber-DiDi merger. What is the first thing Donald Trump does in his first week in office? He enacts the travel ban. A terrible, terrible thing, in my view, not that this is a political show, but I will 100% stand by that statement forever. What happens because of the travel ban? People are stranded at airports, and particularly, people who are stranded at JFK in New York. People who have been flying to and from countries, predominantly Muslim countries where the travel ban has been enacted, demand for Uber and Lyft spikes off the charts, particularly at JFK because everybody's stranded there. They're trying to get home, they're trying to figure out what's going on. This completely throws off the market, and Uber has surged. Surge is how they respond to imbalances in supply and demand. They're trying to do the right thing. The drivers are getting screwed here, and the drivers are putting so much pressure on Uber. They geofence the JFK Airport in New York and enact surge pricing for JFK. The reaction to this among the public is not good. This is a super interesting story. Lyft, of course, does not go into primetime. It's Lyft's version of surge in JFK. Apparently, at the time, I don't know if it still is, Lyft's technical infrastructure was not architected to be able to turn on and off surge like draw arbitrary geofences. Their options were either turn on surge on all of New York, or don't turn on surge. That was one of the inputs into how they made their decision not to turn on primetime when this happened. Uber does, Lyft doesn't. You can imagine how this looks. The public excoriates Uber for what happens here. They're taking advantage of the travel ban, they're gouging people. Immigrants who have been stranded, they're charging them hundreds of dollars to get where they're going. People also realize, hey, wait, Trump has enacted this Technology Advisory Council. Travis is on Trump's Advisory Council. Is he in league with Trump? Is he trying to profit? Is Uber trying to profit on this travel ban? Definitely was not the intention or the case. Travis puts out a statement that he says, joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda. But unfortunately, it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that. There are many ways in which we will continue to advocate for change on immigration, but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that. He resigned from the council immediately, but the damage is done. What emerges out of this is #deleteUber. David, this geofencing thing, I think that's a pretty underreported little tidbit. I also think, people still, when they hear the delete Uber, they link it to all the events that would follow here. They remember something happened at the airport, but I think there was a massive misconception and misunderstanding between the company of what they were able to do, what they were trying to do, and then what they got roasted for. Yup, totally. I genuinely think they were trying to do the right thing. They were already under so much pressure from drivers about driver earnings massively declining in this new peer to peer world. They were trying to do the right thing for drivers, I really think that is the case. This was also not a Travis decision. This was way farther down in the company, I think they're trying to do the right thing.…

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