Why I Voted No on California Prop 22 - No more subsidies for fake businesses like Uber

So I had to make up my own mind on this and this great website, CalMatters does a really good job. Then you’re digging and I’m texting people, I’m calling people. Lisbeth and I are like what do, we have arguments, you know, it was like a really, it was really dope. So anyway, on this Uber exception, cause this affects, I’m not going to go through everything on the California ballot, cause most of y’all are not in California with me, but this stuff affects the whole world. And you know, on the one side they’re asking for an exception from treating their contract workers as full employees.

00:33 - And they’re saying, “you know, “we don’t need to be weighed down by full employee status. “Instead, we’ll offer them a little bit more money, “little tasty tastes of healthcare, little smidgen.” You get to like, you get to look at the mask, you can’t wear it, but you get the look at the mask, you know what I’m saying? You get to feel insured, whatever. But they did come some distance from the total exploitation that they had been running under, that would have been required in AB 5. So you see all that and you’re like, “Okay, part of me,” it’s like, yo, maybe people who work in these service industries and these gig economies, they don’t want to be full-time employees either, they want that flexibility and the union certainly want to grab up as many people as possible and there some good and some bad to that.

01:14 - So I was leaning toward like, yo, let them have the exception. Let’s let’s have a third way. We talked about it in the house, we’re researching, very smart people saying, “Yo, I’ll let them have that exception,” including the California NAACP. But the fact that they were for it, I was like, “What’s going on here?” Like once you realize the game, you’re like, “Oh, you got paid to think that? “What else you get paid to think?” So now I’m like leaning against your money, cause I’m like,” You didn’t tell me you got paid to endorse “so let me dig a little deeper.” And I ended up voting no on this. As a Uber and the list*, Yo man, like they have spent $200 million to get this exception. There’s never been any amount of money like that spent on any ballot initiative in California’s history. And this state is made of money.

02:04 - Gold, silica, silicone, you know, (giggles) like silicone and it just didn’t sit right. I mean, are you tryna buy your way out of this accountability. Furthermore, your business doesn’t make any damn sense. Right? I could understand that these were profitable entities making a profit. They’re not. They are VC-subsidized, low arbitrage games. They are special projects.

02:33 - They are extracurricular activities taking advantage of people’s need to have three, four jobs and you’re gonna make them do all that and then they gotta carry their own insurance and then they don’t get paid for the time that they’re waiting for the passenger, only the time the passenger is technically in the car and you can’t come up with enough sense in your business model to have a positive margin, yet somehow you come up with $200 million to tell me how to vote? Psht! Get up outta here. You know what? And shame on the regulators and the elected officials who let it go this far too. I’m not letting y’all off the hook. This little game should have been wrapped up years ago. And now you’ve got these weird norms in the system where people are dependent on exploitation for their income. What kind of box you putting people in? So I say no, let’s have some natural selection up in here.

03:25 - Let’s expose these businesses to the real model, to the real environment and you stand on your own two feet, but you don’t get to bend the system to your will like that. And what put it over the top, it wasn’t the pay off to the NAACP head in California and it wasn’t the fakeness of the business model, this money-losing venture, “We’re unicorns. “We’re worth a billion dollars “and we lose money every quarter.” Really? You’re supposed to be the smart ones. Do something smart and make money. I know people out on the corner selling t-shirts, got better business model than you and they don’t get all these subsidies and exceptions and bending the law to their will, so cut it out.

04:07 - But the thing that really bugged me, because these companies have such reach, they’re in your pocket. When I lived in New York, Uber did this nonsense. Throw a little notification in the app, “Tell Mayor de Blasio blah.” You tell him. You come here and enlist me in your political lobbying efforts. That’s an abuse of information access. That’s an abuse of notification access. That is abuse, I didn’t grant you that right to enlist me in your political lobbying efforts as a business.

04:37 - And then they did it to their drivers too. They put it in the driver’s dashboard, “Talk to your passengers “about why they should vote yes on 22.” So manipulative. So they’re trying to pay off the politicians. They’re trying to pay off the endorsers and they’re bullying their drivers and they’re bullying their own customers. Without the drivers you don’t have a business, without the customers, you don’t have a business. Don’t enlist me in your scam.

05:05 - I wanna send a signal to these fake businesses, free ride’s done. If you can figure out how to make money, then you’re not a business. You don’t just get to coast. And the fact that there’s so much excess capital in the system that you got VCs chasing down terrible business models just to over fund it and get it on an early round, so they can pass the buck to a later round and call themselves quality investors, that’s also a scam. We gotta call shenanigans on this whole thing. Cause you got little brown kids out here trying to make real businesses.

05:39 - You got people who’ve been in the game for decades, older folks who have solid ideas and they can’t get none of this money. The banks ain’t trying to loan Pocky nothing for his legit business, which is actually cashflow positive. We got still essentially red lining going on in terms of financing of entrepreneurs and small businesses in this country. And there’s billions of dollars from people who were never taxed enough, going to shambles of a fake ass business plan to then pay off the California NAACP to try to bully me cause, “Oh, we found a black person to say, ‘well, we should be subsidized by the state’” Miss me with this bullshit, come on now. So that was fun, again, I was like the raccoon.

06:24 - Excavating, excavating the truth on that matter. Nope, nope, not with my vote. So you know, had to make a little statement about that. If you still in California and you haven’t voted yet, don’t let these little worms off the hook. Mm-mm, mm-mm, you made your bed, now you sleep in it. You try to make a real business. Otherwise, move along, move along. I’m tired of people celebrating money-losing as innovation.

06:56 - I’m tired of people celebrating labor exploitation as the future of work. I’m tired of people celebrating funding your friends as good at business. This is the lie. This is a, it hits me. It hits me, cause this whole time, this whole time, I work, “What do you do?” “I work for Uber, we arbitrage human capital.” (scoffs) Respect to Scott Galloway who planted that thought. He said, Uber arbitrages people, playing them off each other. It’s disgusting. Come back to me when you can do math.

07:45 - Ooh! All right, so we talked about the baby possum (laughs) Apparently I have some things to say (laughs). Ooh, hydration break, okay (gulps). Ah, thank you Rachel Kelly, seeing the passion appreciate that. Stephanie, pyramid schemes upon games, is right, is right. I think to draw one extra line when abject mathematical failure is hailed as success and worthy of further reward, that’s how you get the current president. That’s how you get the current president. Oh, but he’s good at business. This dude’s the $400 million in debt. And that’s after Deutsche Bank wrote off 225 million.

08:40 - That’s not even counting the people he just outright didn’t pay. How many hundreds of millions of dollars do you have to lose before you are not good at business? So as far as I’m concerned, Uber, Lyft, all these cats, they ain’t no better than the president at business. Cut it out. Stop lionizing this type of failure, this upward failure, which is not extended to everybody. If you’re gonna extend that upward failure mobility to the immigrant, to the refugee, by all means, to the formerly incarcerated, let’s do it. But we all know that’s not how this works, no.

09:25 - You gotta prove that you’ve already failed at Stanford first, that when you got kicked out of school for disciplinary, your parents could afford to put you in another highfalutin school to cover up on all your mistakes. So you never did time. You never went to juvie. It’s the same stuff. I’m not saying everybody who runs Uber should have been in juvie (scoffs) I mean, maybe they could learn something, you know, from kids who’ve been through some things, but that’s not the point. The point is just to heighten the contradiction of who gets the white glove treatment and who gets punished in the face. Same country, different rules. We gotta call that out and we gotta do better. Got to do a lot better. .