Amid Reports of Protest Interrupting Interview, Stephen Colbert Grills Uber CEO

On The Late Show Thursday, Stephen Colbert got tough on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. There were reports that the interview was interrupted by a protester who started shouting about the company “ruining” New York’s cab industry. BuzzFeed news editor Rachel Zarrell said Colbert let the man speak his mind before continuing.

Unfortunately, the audience at home won’t get to see this, because the show edited it out. What we did see? The CEO explaining why Uber is better than New York’s taxi industry.

Colbert asked, “What is your response to ‘Uber kills professional, good-paying jobs and it’s unfair to the drivers and it’s destroying the cab industry’?” Kalanick replied, “A taxi driver spends $40,000 a year renting a car — that should be a Bentley you’re riding around in. But instead it goes to a taxi owner who owns a license to own and operate that cab. In the Uber world, you can use your own car. You don’t pay $40,000 to rent a vehicle. You make more dollars per hour, and it’s flexible.”

Colbert kept the pressure on when it came to Uber’s surge pricing, which makes the cost of the ride go up if there’s too much demand. The company got slammed when it introduced surge pricing during a hostage crisis in Sydney last December. Colbert pressed, “If I’m someplace in, say, Australia, and there’s a threat of a terrorist attack, why do prices triple? Is that how we should be treating each other?” The CEO replied, “Absolutely not. ... Sometimes, something happens in a city. We don’t know what it is. And if it’s an emergency, we basically turn it off.”

Finally, Colbert got Kalanick to admit he cares about his company’s drivers only so long as they keep making the company money. The late-night host pointed out, “You said you wanted self-driving Uber cars. That’s not for the driver, that’s — we’re employing robots at that point. How is that helping delivery drivers?” Kalanick defended it, saying, “The question for a tech company is, do you want to be part of the future or do you want to resist the future? We feel that, in many ways, we don’t want to be like the taxi industry before us.”