Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Arelos.

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're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 12th. On today's show, we'll talk about the electric scooters that are suddenly wreaking havoc on city streets and why Silicon Valley venture capitalists are swooning over them. We'll discuss the layoffs at Tesla and what they

might mean for that company and its workers. Then I'll be joined by journalist Sarah Kessler of

Quartz. Her new book is called Gigged, the end of the job and the future of work. It looks at the

so-called gig economy from the human side. She talked to people around the country who are trying to make ends meet by working for services like Uber, Amazon Turk, and TaskRabbit. And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs, some of the best things we saw online this week. All right, as you may have noticed, my co-host April Glazer is out this week, but we have a special guest co-host. I'm joined from Slate Studios in New York by Maya Kossoff, tech writer for Vanity Fair. Hey, Maya, thanks for joining us. Of course. Hey, well, thanks for having me. Yeah, I've followed your work for a long time, so I'm glad to get a chance to talk tech with you today. And I wanted to

start with a story that you wrote recently about the electric scooter company Bird. And I'm going to go

look at the headline here of what you wrote. This was maybe like two weeks ago, and it was your

piece in Vanity Fair, and it was trying to explain how it could

be possible that this electric scooter company nobody had heard of a few months earlier

was suddenly seeking to raise money at a valuation of a billion dollars.

And so you made this, like, game attempt to sort of explain, like, what are people thinking

here?

And now, two weeks later, we get word

this week that it is seeking to raise more money at a valuation of $2 billion. So Bird is definitely

worth twice as much today as it was two weeks ago, right? That's a totally legitimate. Yeah.

Absolutely. It reminds me a lot of like, it harkens back to like 2014,

2015, when any company could kind of go out and raise, you know, a hundred million dollars at a

billion dollar valuation. We went from having like a handful of a billion dollar unicorn companies

to having, what, like 140 of them in the span of maybe like 18 months?

And this, there was a period of calm and quiet for a while, but Bird certainly harkens back to like the Uber fundraising days of 2014.

Yeah, why are people so excited about these things?

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