Me and UberMan Talk About the One Thing Missing From 180 Days of Change

Today, I’m going to be chatting with Uber Man on what we thought about the 180 Days of Change. Have things really changed at Uber? The good, the bad, and really give an honest opinion and our feedback, what we’ve been hearing from drivers and what we’ve been experiencing ourselves.

We had a long, detailed conversation all about the changes, and how they’ll impact drivers today and in the future.

Watch our conversation, and check out the video transcript below if you prefer to read.

Uber Man: What’s going on, everybody? It’s good to be here. Harry, thank you for having me. I certainly appreciate the opportunity.

Harry: Cool, yeah, and thanks for coming. I think we’ll be posting this on each of our respective YouTube channels, so if you guys haven’t checked out Uber Man’s channel, if you’re one of my subscribers and you haven’t checked out Uber Man’s channel, I’ll leave a link in the show notes where you can do that and if you’re one of Uber Man’s subscribers and you like what I have to say and you want to see more of what I have to say, you can go check out my channel but no pressure. I think that we’re just happy to both be on here and we both obviously are drivers ourselves and care a lot about drivers and I think that’s the perfect place to start because this 180 Days of Change is really all about improving the driver experience. I mean, Uber Man, do you want to explain what the 180 Days of Change is real quick before we start discussing it just to anyone who’s been living under a rock for the past six month?

Uber Man: Yeah. Well, 180 Days of Change initiative was designed to improve the driver experience. It was, number one, intended to help streamline the experience within the application itself and primarily, I think it was really supposed to assist drivers in earning more money and that’s something we’re definitely going to have to get into later because I think that they made a lot of changes that definitely did improve earnings, for sure. The whole process is an effort to retain drivers. I think they’re running low on their available pool of drivers and they realize that if they don’t do something to increase driver retention, well, they’re not going to be able to operate without drivers. I think that’s ultimately what 180 Days of Change was really about.

Harry: Yeah. I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense especially when you look at … I remember the week that the old CEO Travis Kalanick actually left or fired, resigned, whatever you call it, that wasn’t that the same week that they actually launched the tipping function and so it’s like Uber had all this terrible press in 2017 and then this 180 Days of Change seems like it was a clear response where Uber was like, “Man, we really screwed up on this one and we need to start treating drivers better.” I guess I would say from that perspective, at least seemed like it was coming from the right place. Would you agree with that or what do you think?

Uber Man: Yeah. I agree that on the surface, it would appear that everything was coming from the right place and for the right reasons but I guess, once you dig into it a little deeper, it makes you start wondering, but yeah, I’d agree with that.

Harry: Yeah. I mean, we can start with the biggest sort of the headline announcement of 180 Days of Change, which was a while ago, six months ago. It seems like it was only yesterday. Uber said that they were going to have a tipping option for drivers. Obviously, this is something I know you’ve made a ton of videos about, I have talked a lot about. I guess we’ll start with I never thought it was going to happen, period. Were you surprised at all when that tipping option came out or did you think eventually they’re going to add it? What’s your response been like so far with the tipping option?

Uber Man: I figured that the tipping option would be added when the rates went up, so I was shocked. I was definitely surprised when the very first thing that came out was, “Hey, guess what. We have tipping now.”

Harry: Yeah. I think that they kind of set the bar super high, which ended up maybe hurting them towards the end because some of the changes I thought at the end weren’t as meaningful but I mean, tipping was cool. Of course, as a driver, you think, “Okay, now we have this tipping option in the app. We’re going to get tipped more.” We actually did this cool experiment on the blog a while ago where we were sort of trying to check if Uber was stealing tips and long story short, they weren’t but the way we did it, we talked to a bunch of passengers. One of our writers actually talked to 20 different passengers and asked them to leave a tip and handed them a dollar.

Uber Man: Cool.

Harry: Well, it was good and bad but the bad part was that we realized a lot of riders have no idea how to leave a tip. They didn’t even know. Uber doesn’t make it super easy for you to find that tipping option either, so I don’t know. What do you think about like the actual tip amounts that are being [inaudible 00:04:34] or percentages?

Uber Man: Well, that’s actually something. I did an interview with Aaron Schildkrout. He’s head of driver product at Uber and I talked to him about this and his response to this very thing was they have a long way to go when it comes to improving the tipping feature within the app because the fact of the matter is the culture has always been don’t tip, so that’s the first obstacle that you have to overcome. I suggested that you may do this by actually reaching out to passengers directly through the app or something informing them, “Hey, it’s okay to tip. We encourage you to tip.”

I think the biggest issue is probably … Well, I’d say they’re both huge issues. Number one, passengers are just not informed and number two, they buried the ability to tip way back in the app, so a lot of people don’t even realize how to do it and they don’t … If you can find it, there are like preset numbers like one, two, $three something like that. I don’t know for sure, but you can do a custom tip but yeah, you have to like click the letters. It’s not a physical button that you can see. You have to actually tap it. A lot of people don’t even realize it’s there.

Harry: Yeah. That’s a good point. Honestly, I gave Uber a lot of credit for adding that tipping option because now that we have it, we can get pissed that we’re not getting enough tips but I think that if you would have pulled drivers seven months ago and asked them how excited they would be on a scale of one to 10 to get that tipping option, they probably would have been pretty happy. Now that we have it, I think definitely, we’re starting to see that, hey, Uber maybe doesn’t do the best job of showing passengers how to tip, encouraging passengers to tip.

I think I did this article where I graded Uber on 180 Days of Change and I’ll look right now and see what a letter grade I gave them for the tipping section. I think I gave them a A-minus or something. I give them an A-minus on that tipping option because I think the announcement of it was super cool and kind of benefit drivers but really from here, I think they need to iterate it. When you compare Uber’s tipping screen to Lyfts, like after you end your ride as a passenger on Lyft, it’s like boom, right there in your face. You have to leave a tip or not leave a tip. There’s no getting around it. You at least have to make a choice so I think Lyft drivers tend to see more tips. I definitely think that we want to … I’m hoping that 180 Days of Change isn’t it over. I want to see Uber launch this tipping option. Now, they need to improve them.

Uber Man: Right. Well, the good news is I was informed that even though the 180 Days initiative is over, they’re not finished. 2018 is going to be a year that they focus more on innovation, so I believe we’re going to see a lot of changes to the app. I’m not privy to what exactly they’re going to be doing obviously and even if I was, I couldn’t talk about it but I think 2018, we’re going to see a lot of improvements to the app and I really hope that should be the first one.

Harry: You mentioned an interesting word, is that innovation. I think that’s one thing that I’ve been thinking about, are Uber at a tipping option. Lyfts had that for four years. They added 24-hour support line. I mean, that’s hardly innovative. A lot of these features they’re adding, one of the negative responses I heard from drivers is like, “So what? Why didn’t they have this stuff before? Why are we giving them credit right now for adding all these features that they’ve just been lazy for the past three or four years?”

I think they added things like instant pay and destination filters in the past but I mean, other than that, what … I mean, there are a couple small things but was there anything that you thought was really innovative in 180 Days of Change, any features or additions, or anything like that?

Uber Man: I got a list right here. Let me double check because honestly-

Uber Man: Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything that I thought was just like wow. It was kind of amazing that Uber actually did it but nothing that I can think of that was … No. Nothing … No, nothing that I can think of as innovative. No.

Harry: I mean, that’s sort of the thing, that it’s a $70 billion company. All right, obviously, in the past, they didn’t value drivers a ton. You could sort of tell that passengers always came first and foremost. I think we have to give them a little time to kind of get back up to speed but at a certain point, you definitely want to apply pressure and say, “Hey, all right. Now, we just want to see the innovative stuff. We want to … like instant pay. Drivers probably didn’t even realize they needed that until they have the ability to do it. Destination filters, they didn’t even know that was possible until Uber released it. Those are the features that I really love and I want to see more of.

I’m curious to know, you have this cool interview on your channel, which I’ll definitely link to for people. They can listen or watch your video interview with Aaron Schildkrout from Uber who is super high up on the driver experience. I think he’s like in charge of all the drivers and I’m curious to know more about that. Did you get any insight there as far as what Uber is thinking on this 180 Days of Change? Do they feel like they got a home run or do you think they were like, “All right, this is first of many steps”?

Uber Man: This is the beginning. This is the tip of the iceberg and I was really happy to hear him mention that because that’s one of the things he brought up on his own, was that they understand that they’ve got a long way to go. They’re no close to being satisfied with the way things are between Uber and drivers and that’s something they plan on continuing working on even though, technically, 180 Days is concluded.

Harry: Yeah, okay. Let’s talk destination filters because this was one feature that I love when they came out with six destination filters. I was like, “Holy crap. This is awesome.” I love destination filters. I use them all the time. I’m very strategic. I’m always like, I’m the guy always looking for hacks and shortcuts and how do we take advantage of the system. I know you have a couple good videos very similar to that but I think honestly, at the end of the day, drivers have to realize nobody cares more about your money than you. Uber may consider you a partner but at the end of the day, it’s really on you to go out there and make the most amount of money, to employ the best strategies, do whatever you need to do to save money, to make money.

When those filters came out, I was like, “Man, this is pretty sick. This is pretty cool. We can now go out and use it.” I made a joke in my article that drivers actually liked it so much. Apparently, they broke the system and Uber gave drivers two destination filters originally, bumped it up to six, I believe in chapter three of 180 Days of Change and after three or four weeks, they bumped it back down to two and said that it was causing excessive wait times. I noted in my article, I definitely didn’t hear that from drivers but I can understand. Maybe they didn’t notice that but Uber says it caused a problem and so they gave it to us and took it away and I know that pissed off a lot of drivers. What do you think?

Uber Man: Yeah, it absolutely did and that is another one of the topics that was brought up when I did that interview. That’s the same thing I got told. I was told that they realized after that they originally tested it within a smaller group of people and it worked out great and then, they launched it nationwide and then they realized they made a huge mistake because people were taking advantage of it a lot more than then than they did in the testing and because of that, drivers that were getting the pings were having to go further because other people have their destination filters, that passengers were having to wait longer, drivers having to drive further. Everybody was upset.

The interesting thing is like you, I followed 180 Days of Change. I posted videos as each one of them were released and I didn’t hear anybody complaining about it, so I’m not entirely sure what happened there but from what I was … I’ll say from what I understand, that interview has been a little while ago now so I don’t want to misquote anything but from what I understand, that’s something that they’re looking at fixing. I don’t know how they plan on doing that but that’s something they’re looking at approaching it differently and then doing something else with it.

Harry: Yeah. I mean, I think if we think about it logically, it wouldn’t make sense. If you’re Uber, you’d give drivers six destination filters and you’re like, “Oh, man. They love this feature. Let’s take it away.” That doesn’t make any sense, so …

Uber Man: No.

Harry: I talked to some drivers. They think it’s like a big conspiracy theory. I think that’d be pretty stupid of Uber to give us destination filters and take them away just to piss us off. I can’t imagine that’s happening, so I think it’s probably safe to assume, yeah, it probably did have some effect on riders but the thing is drivers didn’t really notice it. That’s the thing where I think Uber starts to miss is like who cares about what the reality is. It’s about the perception, right? If I’m a driver and I’m happier now because I get all these destination filters but now I have to drive a minute or two further, Uber might see that on a spreadsheet but I don’t really see that when I’m out and driving. I see the destination filters like I get taken out into the boonies and then I can use a destination filter, maybe get one ride back into the city where I can now go make money again. You know what I mean?

Uber Man: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think that they took it back because they just wanted to slap drivers in the face. I mean, they’re there in the middle of this 180 initiative. They’re trying to show drivers, “Hey, we care about you.” Giving us an important feature and then taking it away, that was a bad deal and I’m sure they knew that. They had to know that there was going to be backlash and this was not going to be good for them, so I’m sure that for … I don’t know why exactly they took it away. Nobody does except for Uber themselves but there had to be a good reason behind it and hopefully, they do fix whatever that issue is and push it back out in the future.

Harry: Yeah, I agree. Let’s talk about a couple more of the small things they changed and then I think we both probably want to talk about the one thing that was missing from 180 Days of Change was the rates. Increase of those per mile per minute rates. We’ll entice viewers to stay tuned to the end. We’re definitely going to have a nice conversation about it at the end but before we get to that, I mean, I guess we’ll just quickly go over the other chapters. I know they did some small changes to uberPOOL and some small stuff to ratings. I don’t know. Me personally, I feel like uberPOOL and ratings in general, I feel like they just need a total revamp of uberPOOL and a total revamp of ratings just because they’re trying to make these small changes around the edges but I went out driving the other night and my rating went from a 4.9 to a 4.89 and I did about 12 rides. Every ride went off just fine without a hitch, no problems and someone must have given me a pretty low rating and I have no idea why.

Now, obviously, it doesn’t make a big difference when you’re at 4.9 and 4.89 but it still pisses you off. You can imagine if you’re a driver on the cusp of deactivation and you’re getting lower and lower ratings and you don’t know what you’re doing wrong and you don’t know how to fix it, that can be super frustrating, right?

Uber Man: Yeah, absolutely. I discussed ratings and the new ratings protection in depth with Aaron because this was something I was really interested about. I think it’s really something that, I’m hoping it evolves with time. I think that what they did right now was great and I think people also need to take into consider … I hate agreeing with Uber because then, it makes me look like an Uber fan boy but I really think I understand most of what’s going on here and even the smallest change that they make to the app has a huge ripple effect across the whole platform.

When you’re dealing with the United States and Canada and stuff, language differences, there’s some states where they have multiple languages because of the demographics, it’s really difficult to make a single change to the app, so when you consider everything that they did and in the short time that they did it in, I think it’s really impressive but they’re really going to have to work harder at making this better, making it more efficient.

As far as the rating protection goes, I hope I understood it correctly. Like I said, it has been a while and I’ve done a lot of other things since then but from what I understood, if you get a lower rating than a five-star, it’s supposed to ask you why. Now, I haven’t tried this out myself so like I said, I’m not 100% hundred percent on that but if that’s the case, that’s great because if it’s something that’s beyond the driver’s control, that’s supposed to get just wiped out. If it’s because of traffic or something that a driver had, app or the price, surge pricing, whatever, if it’s beyond the drive’s control, the drivers shouldn’t get punished for that. Hopefully, that’s how it’s going to actually work. I honestly don’t know right now.

Harry: Yeah, man. We’ll see. I think that’s a good recap of sort of all the changes. I think we’re sort of in agreement that definitely some of these things are better than others but for the most part, it’s all good. Definitely, you’re right that a lot of the stuff drivers don’t see, I’m sure it took a bunch of people working on this a lot and at the same time, drivers don’t … They kind of want to see results, so it’s tough because if you think about it from Uber’s perspective, they’re probably investing a lot into it but drivers maybe aren’t seeing a whole lot. I think it’s about finding those areas where Uber can have the biggest impact.

I think one of those areas the driver is obviously point, I think every time I posted an article about this or a video, and I bet you too whenever you posted a video about 180 days of Change, you’re like, “Hey, Uber added a 24/7 support line.” Uber can add like a million things but if it’s not a rate increase, you’ll get a bunch of commenters saying, “But they didn’t raise the rates?” I guess if there was one thing missing from the 180 Days of Change, do you think it’s a rate increase or what are your thoughts on that?

Uber Man: Yeah, it’s definitely a rate increase and that was another thing that I brought up. I had a sheet of things that I was to talk about in this interview and obviously, because it was a sponsored series, I can’t deviate from that list. I was allowed to include some of my questions. They included their questions. We came to a compromise. We agreed on everything. I really wanted to do this interview because I’m desperate to understand Uber.

I feel like if I can understand it and maybe I can help translate that for drivers and at the same time when you’re speaking to higher-ups and executives, Dara walked in. As I was sitting there just chit-chatting with Aaron, Dara walked through the door with an entourage behind him and Aaron was like, “You want to meet him?” I freaked out and I was like, “No. No, not right now.” Hold on a minute. I think they have a lot more to do. They’re not even close to getting things where it needs to be but God, can you … I totally lost my train of thought there for a minute. What was the question? That’s my fault.

Harry: I think your fiancé probably texted you and we’re talking about the rates because that’s … The one thing is like obviously, honestly even me, I see all these changes come out like, “Well it’s not a rate increase.” That’s really the bottom line, drivers, definitely whether it’s good for them or not, they want to be paid more for the rides that they’re doing. I think it’s nice to add these little features here and there but if you’re getting uberPOOL, for example. UberPOOL sucks but if Uber pays you more for it, then now, it doesn’t suck so bad right because you’re making more money.

Uber Man: Right. I think with uberPOOL, they did okay with adding the extra pickup fee to that whole thing. That’s fine but doesn’t Lyft match? Isn’t Lyft line the same price as Lyfts? They probably should have gone that route. I think that would have helped them a lot more but as far as rates, that was probably my biggest question because that’s my viewers’ biggest question is, why was there not a rate increase? For the life of me, I can’t understand it and then, I sat down and I talked with Aaron and this is going to be kind of a two-part answer because I’d like you to chime in.

Aaron’s response to me, which made perfect sense was here’s the deal. He said, think about it like this. He said this is a very complicated subject but he tried to break it down so that I could understand it. He said when it comes to rates, it’s not as simple as just raising. He said, because here’s what happens. He said when he first started, his first thing was we need to increase rates but that wasn’t even an option because if Uber increases the rates, then you’re going to have an influx of drivers from other platforms, primarily Lyft jumping over to Uber, which is going to take away any surge pricing.

If they’ve got that many drivers, they’re not going to need a quest or anything like that either, so we’ve got a bunch of drivers on Uber that are probably not going to be very busy. Drivers are going to be losing money, but then on the Lyft side, you’re going to have fewer drivers, which is going to put them into like surge or primetime, whatever the case may be. You’re not going to have many drivers there but you’re going to have a lot of passengers. Passengers are going to be looking for the cheaper price. They’re going to go to Lyft. Drivers are going to be on Uber and it’s going to screw up the entire marketplace. That’s the way he explained it to me. At face value, I was like, “Huh.” It was like an epiphany. I was like, “Yeah. Okay. Makes sense.” What are your thoughts on that?

Harry: I mean, I guess what I would say is it’s sort of like hard to trust Uber at this point right because in the past, they would say, “Oh, when we lower rates, drivers actually make more money.” [inaudible 00:21:57] and then now, they don’t say that anymore but they do say … I’ve heard similar to what you just described is, “Oh, we can’t raise rates because then, it wouldn’t be as busy for drivers and drivers wouldn’t make as much money.”

One interesting thing that I don’t think a lot of people actually realize during this 180 Days of Change campaign, Uber actually increased their booking fee by about 50 cents in each market across the country, which is basically a rate increase to passengers but with the booking fee, that goes straight to Uber and so now, Uber is making more on every single ride and they get 100% of that, whereas if they raised their rates, let’s say they take a 25% commission, I know it doesn’t quite work that way but let’s say it for simplicity, they only get 25% so if they raise it by a dollar, they only get a 25 cent increase, whereas if they raise it by 50 cents, they get all 50 cents of that.

It’s like I don’t know what to believe at this point and I don’t give Uber the benefit of doubt especially when it comes to rates because I know for me, as a driver, I see what I see and I talked to tens of thousands of drivers. I’ve never met a driver who says, “Oh, yeah. I make more today than I did three years ago.” You obviously see that when you’re out driving. Maybe you’re not quite as busy but those rides that you’re doing, you’re getting paid less for going from point A to B and that same ride a year ago was paying you more. I don’t know. The perception is definitely that drivers are making less and that’s what drivers are saying. If the per mile rate is not a good indicator of how much drivers are making, Uber needs to figure this shit out because they’ve been doing this for a while. Drivers say they want more rates and Uber is saying that raising rates won’t help. All right, well, you’re not telling me what’s good for me. You’re telling me to take uberPOOL. I don’t like uberPOOL. It’s like you have to build that trust factor before you I really trust you, so I don’t know if I’d buy in basically.

Uber Man: Well, I did during the interview and I came home from New York and I explained it to my fiancé. I was like it makes perfect sense and then Aaron called me just recently, just a few days ago. He called me to let me know that he was no longer, I think as of January 1, he’s no longer with Uber.

Uber Man: It was for personal, family reasons and let me tell you, I’ll be straight-up. Aaron is a great guy. He’s an open book. I mean, we spent hours, like three or four hours talking and he talked about things he wasn’t supposed to talk to me about but he is a great guy but he’s also an employee of Uber. I agree with you. You can’t really take everything at face value but after I got off the phone with him and he was like, “I just wanted to tell you personally what the reasons were and all this.” I was like, “I appreciate that.” I was given the option to scrap the series if I wanted to. I was like, “I put a lot of work into this and I think people need to see it so I’m going to go ahead and finish this series that I started.”

Then, I just started thinking about the rates. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the rates and something just didn’t make sense and I was like, if things happen the way he said they were, and it makes sense that they would, if he raised the rates, drivers are going to jump over to Uber. If Lyft is cheaper, then passengers are going to jump over to Lyft and I could see where that could cause some confusion but I don’t think it would cause that big of a problem because Lyft would have to go into primetime and passengers would either have to accept it or they would have to go with Uber. Either way, the rates are going to equalize organically. Nobody has to do anything.

Uber raises the rates. Lyft will go into primetime. The rates will go up until Lyft follow suit and raises the rates. They’ve always followed one another when it comes to rates. When the rates have decreased with Uber, Lyft brings them down too or vice versa. I’m not even sure if it’s ever happened the other way around but I’ve always seen the rates follow. If it’s true that raising rates is going to cause such a huge upset in the marketplace, why doesn’t some … I mean, we know there’s all kinds of corporate espionage going, assume there’s corporate espionage going on, why don’t they just talk about it and say, “You know what, we need to raise the rates. Agree to it. Bring the rates up.”

The reason I concluded, sorry to make this long, but I think I figured out what the deal is upfront pricing, man. It’s upfront pricing. They don’t have to raise the rates. Uber needs to make as much money as possible to please the investors because they’re losing billions of dollars, so you cannot give drivers a raise but you can use things like an increased booking fee to give yourself a boost there and then, you can turn around and take any extra. You pay the driver what they agreed to, which is next to nothing and you keep you whatever you want to charge. Why would they raise the rates? It doesn’t make sense to raise rates.

They’re making money hand over fist while they’re still losing money, from what I was told, but they’re making a whole lot more now by implementing upfront pricing and the increased booking fee and drivers are … I mean, drivers complain about it. I hear drivers complain all the time about the rates but the problem is drivers won’t stop driving, so as long as … It does no good to complain. Complaining is not going to get you anywhere with Uber and I … Careful how I word this. I would be willing to bet, you will not see a rate increase. I would put money that there will not be a rate increase. Just my personal opinion. That’s just what I believe, so if you want a rate increase, complaining about it, I don’t think, is going to do any good. You need to stop driving.

Harry: Yeah. I think that’s a good summary. Honestly, I kind of like how you capped it off. Of course, we’re sort of here highlighting the good and the bad but I think at the end of the day, you’re 100% right. Complaining and whining is not going to change things. It’s more about your actions, right? I mean, there are a lot of drivers who, hey, let’s say they favored Lyft, for example, over Uber although on most cities, they pay the same rates. You have to sort of go out and take that action if you’re really wanting to make changes happen, if you really are upset.

If you’re Uber and you’re looking at it from their perspective and they have a bunch of drivers and they’re able to make the numbers work with the existing rates, why would they raise rates? If they start losing a bunch of drivers and not as many drivers are working for them and things like that, then now, maybe they have some incentive. I think that’s actually maybe what we’ll see in the future because you mentioned at the top, Uber does have this big retention problem. A lot of drivers quitting because they end up realizing, “Hey, I’m not making as much money as I thought when I factor the gas expenses and taxes and all that,” and I think raising rates would have an impact on that.

The reason why I just don’t buy this, I think there’s this famous quote by Edison or someone like Thomas Edison or someone like that. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. For me with Uber, they’ve never raised rates. They’ve always lowered them, so it’s like, all right, you have a bunch of drivers that want higher rates and Uber is saying, “Oh, no, no. We can’t raise rates because that would mean that you’re less busy.” Well, let’s try it. Let’s raise rates and see if we get less busy or not. What we’re doing before, Uber keeps lowering and lowering or doing all these other stuff and saying that this isn’t going to work but drivers are still upset about the rates, so let’s try it. If that works, now, less people are complaining, then it works.

I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of trying the same thing over and over or not trying new things. I think that’s really my biggest thing, where obviously, the per mile rate is the easiest indicator for drivers to go out and say, “Oh, I feel like I’m getting paid a lot,” or, “I feel like I’m not getting paid a lot based on what they’re getting per mile.” I think definitely, we’ll see what happens going forward. I don’t know that I hold my breath about Uber raising the rates but like I said, I was … I didn’t think they’d had the tipping option. I was wrong before, so hopefully I’ll be wrong again.

Uber Man: I hope so but yeah, I definitely wouldn’t hold my breath on a rate increase. I think a lot of drivers, I hear a lot of drivers talking about, “Oh, we need to organize and strike and this and that.” Yeah. I think that’s where drivers … I think that’s where they’re confused. Drivers don’t need anybody to organize anything. It’s really as simple as if the rates aren’t good enough for you, if you can’t accept the rates at the way they are right now, stop driving. If everybody would just do that, you don’t need anybody to organize. Just say, “Hey, the rates don’t work. I’m not making enough money,” or go find something else.

I know a lot of people are saying, “You know, I’m stuck in this job. I quit my job.” Well, you probably shouldn’t have quit your job. Uber … This is a volatile industry. This is still a relatively new industry, so like quitting your job to do something or buying a car just to do this, this is dangerous. For anybody looking at getting into it today, I would not recommend you quit your job. I would not recommend you go out and buy a car. Just do Uber or Lyft ridesharing in general. I think this is a good side hustle. I think it’s a great side hustle. A lot of people can make money doing it. A lot of people don’t make money doing it, so it’s one of those things, you got to be really careful.

Seeing how it’s so easy to get deactivated just for a complaint … Someone can say, “Hey, I smell marijuana,” or, “This guy was drinking,” a customer tries to get a free ride, you could lose your job. I don’t feel like the rideshare industry is a place where you can comfortably quit your job and rely on this as a sole source of income. I mean, I used to feel it was but I don’t anymore.

Harry: Definitely not. It’s good advice. I mean, I think your channel and my channel is really similar in that respect. It’s really all about saying, “Hey, we’re not going to say you should or shouldn’t drive for these companies.” It’s like go out and do it, go out and try it if you’re able to make the numbers work and we’ll help educate you, make sure you understand the insurance and tax components and all that so you know your true earnings. At the end of the day, if it works well for your situation, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, don’t but I definitely… I know for me, I don’t like to babysit people so I’m not going to ever tell someone they should or shouldn’t do something. I’m going to say, “Hey, if you want to do this, here’s the best way to do it. Here’s what I’ve learned.”

I think kind of wrapping things up with the 180 Days of Change, I would say definitely a step in the right direction. Nothing … They’re sort of missing that rates component and I hope that they consider it in the future. I think that honestly, they may be forced to in the future but in the meantime, there’s a lot of opportunity for Uber and for drivers because there’s so much that they can change and so much … A lot’s broken and so that also, if you look at it half glass full, there’s also a lot that can be fixed. Hopefully, they’ll sort of take this momentum and keep changing, keep improving things.

Uber Man: I hope so as well.

Harry: Cool. Awesome, Uber Man. Well, thank you very much for hopping on this with me and like I said at the top, if you guys are one of my subscribers and you haven’t checked out Uber Man’s YouTube channel, you can probably just type Uber Man into YouTube or Google and he’ll pop right up. They can do the same for me, the Rideshare Guy, and we’ll leave links in the show notes. Both of our videos, we’ll post both of these videos on our respective channels. You guys can go check each other out. If you have any questions, definitely feel free to leave a comment below. If you enjoyed the video, give a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel if you like hearing what we have to say. This was a lot of fun, so we’ll definitely do it again in the future.

Uber Man: Absolutely. I appreciate it, Harry. Thank you for having me.