Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. I'm Aaron Mack.

Hey everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We are recording this on the

afternoon of Tuesday, September 3rd. On today's show, we'll talk about the new book Super Pumped,

the battle for Uber, which just came out on Tuesday. Written by New York Times Technology

reporter Mike Isaac, the book traces Uber's rapid rise and fall. He hones in on co-founder

Travis Kalanick's winner-take-all approach that helped

Uber transform transportation, but it also embroiled the company in countless scandals. We'll talk to

Mike about what he found. After the interview, my colleague Shannon Paulus will join me for

Tone Close My Tabs, where we'll talk about the best things we saw on the web this week. That's all

coming up on if-thet.

Uber told investors last month that it lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter. This caps off what has been a punishing few years for Uber. It seems like the company has weathered

every kind of scandal you'd associate with Silicon Valley, privacy invasions, sexual harassment, toxic culture, intellectual property violations,

and fights with gig workers. In 2017, a brutal year for the company, co-founder Travis

Kalanick was finally forced out as CEO. The new book Super Pumped, The Battle for Uber,

chronicles these back-to-back scandals. It's an account of the company's founding, quick rise, and even quicker fall. And it's just a bonkers read. Some parts just seem like a straight-up satire of Silicon Valley. But at the same time, I walked away weirdly admiring Uber's hustle. With me now is the author of the book, Mike Isaac, who is a technology reporter for the

New York Times. Mike, this is a really, really good book. Thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for

having me. Thank you for reading it. Yeah, it was a great read. I wanted to first get into the title

Super Pumpped, which is in one sense this kind of bro-y term that people in the book keep throwing

around. Why did you go with Super Pumped?

Yeah, I needed something to really capture the vibe inside of Uber, at least during the reign of

Travis Kalanick. And he came up with this list of 14 sort of maxims or rules in the name of, similar to

...