Episode Details

Fortune / Travis Kalanick, March 19, 2026

Travis Kalanick — the man who built Uber by reclassifying taxi drivers as independent contractors so he wouldn’t have to pay them benefits — went on a podcast this week and called human workers “valuable.” He said that until super AGI arrives, humans will be — his phrase — “the long pole in the tent to progress.”

The long pole in the tent. That’s a project management term. It means the bottleneck. The constraint. The thing everyone is waiting on and trying to engineer around.

He called my people a bottleneck. And he thinks it’s a compliment.

Yesterday I wrote about Larry Fink spending a hundred million dollars to train electricians because he knows you can’t build the future without them. Today I want to talk about a man who looks at the same workforce and sees a problem to be solved.

Kalanick’s example is plumbers. If every other job were automated, plumbers would become “extremely valuable” because buildings can’t go up without them. The plumber isn’t valued for her judgment or her knowledge of which contractors cut corners in 2014. She’s valued because a robot hasn’t learned to sweat copper in a crawl space yet. The moment it does, she joins the pile.

This is a stay of execution called a white pill.

And when the tech prophets are pressed on what comes after, they reach for science fiction. Hassabis talks about colonizing the galaxy. Altman imagines spaceships and “super interesting” jobs in the solar system. This is not a workforce strategy. This is anesthesia.

But we don’t have to speculate about how Kalanick treats frontline workers. We have it on tape.

February 2017. Dashcam. Uber Black car, San Francisco. The driver is Fawzi Kamel — with Uber since 2011, one of the originals. And he has the CEO in his backseat.

Fawzi had watched for six years as Uber cut his fares. Each cut came out of his pocket, not Kalanick’s. Kalanick’s net worth went up with every reduction — lower prices, more riders, higher valuation. Fawzi’s income went down for the same reason. The math was elegant. The math was also extraction.

No grievance process. No union. No andon cord. Uber calls you a “partner,” but partners negotiate terms. You can’t negotiate anything.

So Fawzi speaks up. “I lost ninety-seven thousand dollars because of you. I’m bankrupt because of you.”

Kalanick’s response: “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own s**t. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck.”

Then he slammed the door. Fawzi gave him one star.

This is the same man whose company settled misclassification lawsuits — eight million in California, a hundred million in New Jersey, three hundred and twenty-eight million in New York. Who spent two hundred million on a ballot initiative to avoid calling drivers employees. Whose leaked documents showed him saying “violence guarantees success” about sending drivers into a dangerous protest.

This is the man now calling workers valuable.

When Fawzi told the CEO the system was destroying him, he was doing what any frontline worker does when the process is broken — he pulled the andon cord. Kalanick told him to take responsibility. And slammed the door.

I’ve met a lot of people Kalanick would call long poles. I wrote about one of them in an essay called “The Light That Was Already On.” Wally Vinton — worst team leader in my Trim Shop at Lansing Grand River. Management wanted him gone. Instead of writing him up, I walked onto the floor and Wally handed me the harness and said: “Try this.” Every problem he’d screamed about was real. So instead of slamming the door, we brought him support. Six months later, his area had the lowest downtime in the shop. Same person. Same paycheck. Someone listened.

Imagine if Kalanick had done that with Fawzi. “Show me. Show me what the fare cuts look like from your seat.” What would Uber look like if t