The Tudor Dixon Podcast: Uber Assault Allegations, Wokeness & Consumer Safety EXPOSED

Summary

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The Tudor Dixon Podcast: Uber Assault Allegations, Wokeness & Consumer Safety EXPOSED

Date: February 11, 2026
Host: Tudor Dixon
Guest: Will Hild, Executive Director of Consumers Research

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Overview

In this episode, Tudor Dixon delves into the alarming allegations of sexual assault within Uber rides, exploring the intersection of corporate accountability, “woke” business practices, and consumer safety. With guest Will Hild—an expert in consumer protection—the conversation exposes Uber's handling of sexual assault claims, the company's internal culture, and broader industry implications. The episode also touches on how corporate “wokeness” sometimes serves as a smokescreen for deeper issues, and how consumer and government pressures can drive change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening: Personal Experience and Initial Shock (02:00–03:43)

• Tudor Dixon shares how she and her mom debate Uber’s safety: “I use Uber. My mom complains... she says to me this is like not safe. You can't use Uber. And I legitimately have completely ignored her... It's a huge company... It must be safe.” (02:16)
• Dixon confronts the assumption of safety after learning sexual assault is reported to Uber roughly every 8 minutes, seeking expert insight from Will Hild.

2. The $8.5 Million Judgment and Systemic Problems (03:43–05:56)

• Will Hild: Discusses a recent $8.5 million verdict against Uber for failing to remove a driver known to be high-risk from the platform, and the broader context of thousands of similar claims.
  • “Uber basically knew that this driver was a high risk... They allowed this driver and a whole host of others to continue to drive on that platform.” (04:18)
  • These judgments could collectively total “about $24 billion... a quarter or fifth of their market cap.” (05:10)

3. Profits, Politics, and Reluctance to Act (07:09–09:25)

• Profit motivation: Uber may have been reluctant to remove drivers to maintain a large workforce during early market share battles.
• “Wokeness” and legal exposure: Hild explains Uber’s hesitancy possibly stems from fears of facing lawsuits over disparate impact if they remove drivers and it disproportionately affects certain racial or demographic groups.
  • “There's been an issue with that, especially after Obama's second term, that a lot of companies were sued if there were any kind of differential disparate impact... It is conceivable you could get sued as a corporation for that policy.” (08:17)

4. California Ballot Initiative and Changing Accountability (09:25–10:32)

• Dixon and Hild discuss a California initiative making rideshare companies liable for assaults—not just individual drivers.
  • Hild: “It does seem to suggest that there needs to be an incentive or disincentive applied directly to these rideshare companies to clean up the problem.” (09:57)

5. Alarming Allegations: Company Policies and Cover-ups (10:32–14:42)

• Every Eight Minutes website alleges Uber prohibited employees from contacting police even when drivers admitted assaults.
  • Dixon: “Uber strictly prohibited employees from reporting driver assaults of the riders to the police... Even if the driver... admitted to committing the rape, they didn't go to the police.” (10:32)
• Hild likens the issue to other large institution scandals (e.g., Catholic Church), connecting Uber’s policy failures to its public positions on unrelated issues (e.g., facilitating out-of-state abortions). Uber’s focus, he suggests, is on “woke signaling” over real reform.
  • “They have tried all of this woke signaling instead. And that's a really troubling thing for this company, to tell you the truth.” (13:36)

6. Uber’s Origins & Regulatory Avoidance (18:30–21:22)

• Hild highlights Uber’s Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" culture—running illegal taxi operations in some cities, bypassing legal reforms, and rapidly scaling with few checks.
  • “The quote, you know, move fast and break things, used to typify Silicon Valley at around the time that Uber was coming up.” (18:33)
• Concerns over lax driver verification: Some exploit the app by letting others use their accounts/vehicles, increasing safety risks.

7. Real-World Consequences: The 2023 Assault Case (21:22–22:18)

• Dixon recounts the $8.5 million judgment for the 19-year-old victim: “She was drunk... This is what we tell our kids: Get a ride... you assume that calling an Uber is a safe ride. And then she was assaulted in the backseat.” (21:44)

8. Inconsistent Safety Responses (22:18–24:44)

• Hild: Uber responds quickly to some safety issues (like mistaken ride pickups via verification codes) but not to assault claims—possibly due to unintended DEI/“woke” consequences, especially since much recruitment is from immigrant communities.
  • “Why is it that they take some things very seriously and seem to be playing really fast and loose… with the safety of women in this other case?” (22:50)

9. Corporate “Wokeness” as Diversion (24:44–28:46)

• Discussion of Uber’s public stances—such as facilitating out-of-state abortions—used to distract from internal scandals.
  • Will Hild references the “Uber files” (leaked internal emails) showing callous attitudes toward victims: “One of the quotes is that ‘I just trashed one of the victims in USA Today.’” (25:55)
• Hild on corporate crisis management: Companies use big marketing campaigns to distract from scandals, with DEI and ESG programs often sheltering mismanagement.
  • “The G in ESG is supposed to stand for governance... Instead it is the refuge for bad executives who are doing wrong.” (28:32)

10. The Waning of “Wokeness” (28:46–30:38)

• Dixon questions whether “wokeness” remains dominant in business after consumer and political backlash.
• Hild: “The ESG and the WOKE capitalism movement put a lot of crazies and activists and far left radicals inside these companies... their goal now is... continue on a lot of this behavior and just not brag about it as much.” (29:44)

11. How Consumers Can Push Back (31:11–36:03)

• Hild urges continued consumer activism: “If you see a company signaling that they are woke... they always have skeletons in their closet.”
  • “The more you see wokeness, the more you should probably stay away from the company.” (32:52)
• Real-world impact: Consumer pressure on brands like Target, Budweiser, State Farm, and Cracker Barrel has driven change or internal reform.
  • “When consumers push back... it enables the voice of sanity in these companies to come to the go...” (33:30)
• Dixon: Offers practical advice for riders: “Maybe that's just the message to our daughters is if you're going to take a ride share... go with a friend.” (35:56)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Uber’s internal failures:

• Will Hild: “Uber basically knew that this driver was a high risk for this... They allowed this driver and a whole host of others to continue to drive on that platform.” (04:18)

On corporate “wokeness” and accountability:

• Will Hild: “Instead of just dealing with the issue directly and saying, we are going to take these allegations very seriously... they have tried all of this woke signaling instead.” (13:36)

On whistleblower leaks (“Uber files”):

• Will Hild: “One of the quotes is that ‘I just trashed one of the victims in USA Today.’... That was directly related... to the way that they were attacking their customers who had been victimized by their drivers.” (25:55)

Consumer activism works:

• Will Hild: “When consumers push back like they did with Target, like they did with Budweiser, it actually enables the voice of sanity in these companies to come...” (33:30)

Practical closing advice:

• Tudor Dixon: “Maybe that's just the message to our daughters is if you're going to take a ride share... go with a friend.” (35:56)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:00 – Tudor Dixon opens with personal Uber safety concerns and stats
• 03:43 – Will Hild lays out the $8.5M judgment and Uber’s systemic issues
• 07:09 – Incentives and DEI complicate Uber’s risk management
• 09:45 – Discussion of the California initiative making companies liable
• 10:32 – Claims that Uber prevented staff from contacting police after assaults
• 13:36 – Uber’s use of “woke signaling” instead of substantive reform
• 18:30 – “Move fast and break things”: Uber’s culture and regulatory evasion
• 21:22 – Specific example: 19-year-old passenger’s assault case
• 25:55 – The leaked “Uber files” and evidence of callous internal culture
• 29:44 – The persistence of “woke” activists within companies
• 31:11 – Hild’s advice on fighting back as consumers
• 35:56 – Dixon’s takeaway: “Go with a friend”

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Final Takeaways

• Uber’s handling of sexual assault allegations is deeply flawed both structurally and culturally, often putting liability concerns and image over customer safety.
• Corporate “wokeness” may be used as a distraction from serious internal issues, with surface-level virtue signaling replacing substantive reform.
• Consumer activism (e.g., boycotts, public backlash) has already changed corporate behavior and remains a strong driver for accountability.
• Practical safety advice for rideshare users—especially young women: never travel alone if possible.
• Ongoing vigilance by both consumers and government is necessary to ensure large companies prioritize safety and accountability.

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Transcript

[Tudor Dixon]

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[Tudor Dixon]

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[Tudor Dixon]

For healing, learn more and sign the [e-mail] welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. Today I have a question for you and the question is do you use Uber? I use Uber. My mom complains about it all the time because she says to me this is like not safe. You can't use Uber. And I legitimately have completely Ignored her every time. Because I'm like, what are you talking about? It's a huge company. It's in every big city. I was just in Europe. I used Uber there. Literally. It's international. It must be safe. Because a big company like that I assume is safe, which I get, that's naive. But when you think about everything being connected and your phones are connected and you can have a complaint through your phone, it's like there's cameras everywhere. They must not only be doing these incredible background checks, but they have to also be watching their Uber drivers. And then suddenly I hear that they get a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct reported to Uber like every eight minutes. And they're not really reporting that back. So I was like, wait a minute. What? I want a little clarity about this because I am a user of Uber. I don't want to stop using Uber. It's convenient. I mean, it's hard to find a taxi. I felt like actually an Uber was safer than taxi. But now I have to ask someone who's done a lot of research on this. So I have Will Hild here, he's the executive director of consumer research at the nation's oldest consumer protection organization. Will, what. What is happening? Why is this. Why is this happening with Uber?

[Will Hild]

Well, that's a great question. And obviously each company, it's a very specific circumstance to that company. But I can tell you, in general, this is something that Consumers Research has sort of become famous for pointing out. I think that's why you brought me, is that often a company's move into wokeness is to cover up from either misdeeds in the market or mistreatment of their customers. And I think with Uber, obviously you have both here. What you're referring to specifically is that there was recently a judgment found against Uber for $8.5 million because someone was sexually assaulted. Unfortunately, a woman was sexually assaulted during one of the rides. And it was proven that Uber basically knew that this driver was a high risk for this. They have an algorith that tracks and is able to somewhat predict which drivers. I don't know if that's based on complaints or just the driver's behaviors. I mean, sometimes, as we know from AI now, there are all kinds of things, statistics and behaviors that wouldn't seem relevant to predicting other behaviors, but they are. And Uber had a system in place that was supposed to flag that, but instead of either notifying the person, removing them off of the platform, which is what you'd assume you'd want to do if Someone was flagging their driver. Right. They allowed this driver and a whole host of others to continue to drive on that platform. And so because of this, a jury found again, $8.5 million judgment against Uber. But what's more alarming is that this claim is only one of thousands against the company over the last few years. And so these are all moving through the courts. Obviously this sets a very high precedent. If you multiply out, if each person who's suing Uber right now over an alleged sexual assault was to get $8.5 million, it would be about $24 billion. Judgments that company would have to pay are about a quarter or fifth of their market cap. So this is a clearly a serious, serious problem that Uber has been dealing with. But as somebody who's watched the company now for a number of years, it's been pretty stunning to watch the ham fisted and poor way in which they have, have handled this, this particular issue. And this, this goes back to why we launched a campaign against them many years ago.

[Tudor Dixon]

So there's a ballot initiative in California. And I have to say generally when I say those words, it's like a California ballot initiative is generally something that I'm not going to agree with. But there's this site, it's called Every eight Minutes. And you go there and they put up these statistics and say almost every eight minutes someone is sexually assaulted or attacked in some way sexually, by an, in an Uber, in an Uber vehicle. And they have all of these facts that they put up. I mean, they're saying their facts. I haven't done the research. I know you've done more research than I have. They're saying that these drivers oftentimes have multiple complaints against them and yet they allow them to continue driving. So, so do we have. It reminds me on a much more dangerous scale of like you go to a hotel and you think you have control over the temperature in the room, but it's just kind of fake and you don't actually have control. It's like I think I have control over saying whether my U driver was good or not by going into my phone and putting a review, but it seems like it's meaningless.

[Will Hild]

Yeah, it's pretty terrifying. And there are a lot of different theories as to what's driving Uber's lack of action. So the first and foremost is obviously look for a profit incentive. And the issue here may be that they are always hard up to get more people onto the platform. You know, there was a period of time in which they were subsidizing basically every ride to, to from the driver side, meaning they were paying the driver more than, than Uber was taking in because they were trying to soak up market. They were in a market share battle with Lyft and the other main companies that compete in that market. And so this may have been a situation where they wanted as many drivers as they could have. And so they were loathed to push anyone off the platform, regardless of how many objections. The other issue, and this is, you know, you mentioned California ballot initiatives kind of brings in California politics or woke politics as I like to call it. There's another, another issue that these reports and these flags may not have been evenly distributed amongst different populations. And there's been an issue with that, especially after Obama's second term, that a lot of companies were sued if there were any kind of differential disparate, they call it disparate impact of any kind of policy. So in other words, let me speak in concretes instead of vagaries here. If you had a policy that pushed people off of a platform, if they got too many complaints of sexual assault or something like that, and it disproportionately pushed people of a certain racial or sex based demographic, obviously in this case it would almost exclusively be men. But let's just use race for a second. If it pushed off disproportionate number of people of a certain race, it is conceivable you could get sued as a corporation for that policy, that it was racist or that you were doing something wrong. And so a lot of companies, as we saw during the height of the DEI era, which is something that we did a lot of work on, were doing this kind of stuff. Sometimes it was internally driven. They had a DEI director that was woke and crazy and pushing all kinds of absurd policies. But sometimes it was because they were afraid of either the Obama or then the Biden doj and that it was, this was being pushed top down from, from, from government, government policy. So that might also be the reason why they were loath to push, push people off is they were worried either the bad, bad press from that or even legal, legal consequences.

[Tudor Dixon]

Is this California initiative strictly for Uber or is this rideshare companies in general if you get assaulted? Because if I'm reading this correctly, if you are assaulted in one of their vehicles, they are responsible. Rather than you trying to track down the driver, you can sue the company.

[Will Hild]

Yeah, that would, that would theoretically apply to all of the rideshare services, which is, you know, it's probably good because it, you Know, in general, one likes to have a light touch with government. You want small government, but once it's been proven that they, whatever entity can't handle it, it does seem to suggest that there needs to be an incentive or disincentive applied directly to these rideshare companies to clean up the problem. And obviously there is no amount of sexual assault that's acceptable in our society. Obviously it's, you know, all crimes are unfortunate and probably inevitably happen at some level, but there's no reason why, if someone has had these accusations, that they shouldn't be fully investigated. So putting that liability on these companies which have, you know, by their own admission, an algorithm, a complicated algorithm that's supposed to predict these types of things does seem like the right answer.

[Tudor Dixon]

But that's the crazy thing to me. So on this site, and I'm going to say that, you know, this is not coming from me, this is the every eight minutes site, they actually say that Uber strictly prohibited employees from reporting driver assaults of the riders to the police. So if you got a, if you were like the monitor, I mean, I'm assuming AI flags this stuff and then it goes to an actual person who finds out, oh, this person says they were assaulted. The company was supposedly, according to the site, saying you can't contact the police. Even if the driver, and in some case apparently one driver did admit to committing the rape, they didn't go to the police.

[Will Hild]

That is truly astonishing. And such a damning piece of allegation, as we noted, like that explains the $8.5 million judgment. When you have behaviors this egregious and if that turns out to be, you know, widely their policy internally, I think what they're going to find is that eight and a half may be a low, a low amount. They might want to settle all these for eight and a half million if they can, because, I mean, the thousands of victims would total, you know, near what we heard from the Catholic Church when they were in the middle of all of their problems with moving priests around who had done things to children, this is of that scale. If it turns out that those, those allegations are proven, and this is something I should take a quick step back in the history of consumers research with Uber. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, there was a whole rush by companies to weigh into that political issue. Part of this was again driven internally. You had woke activists within the companies who wanted to push back and weigh in on the side of abortion. But Uber in particular was sort of out in front of saying that they would help people cross state lines in order to receive abortions that would be illegal in the state where they currently reside. And this was a pretty incredible thing for a company to be saying that they were going to aid and abet avoiding state laws. And so when we looked into the company, this was the first thing we found, was that they had a significant problem with sexual assaults with their drivers that they weren't solving. And this was years ago. I think we hit them in like 20, 22 or 20. I can't remember exactly when Roe v. Wade was, was overturned. But this has been years of, of problems that they've had. And you may recall they, they also had an issue where it seems like this was an attempt to maybe with, without, without going down the roads that I, you know, we've talked about, like removing some of these drivers and for whatever reason, they didn't want to do that. You recall they were sort of a widely mocked policy about a year ago where Uber was going to allow you to choose the sex of your driver so you could choose a woman. But of course, that runs them headlong into the far left progressive trap of, okay, well then how are, how are you defining a woman? Because somebody could just put that as a check mark. And unless Uber is going to define a woman, as medical science does, by their chromosomes and their genitalia, then there's nothing to stop all of these drivers from simply selecting into that program and actually making the problem worse. Because maybe a woman is a particular vulnerable moment, maybe she's inebriated, coming out of a bar or something like that that wants to make sure that she's with a female driver. And there they select a female driver and they get a man pretending to be a woman or saying that he's a woman or something like that. So again, this seems like an issue that Uber has been grappling with for years. But instead of just dealing with the issue directly and saying, we are going to take this, these allegations very seriously, we are going to report them to the police, have them properly investigated, and we're going to remove drivers that have, you know, substantial or, you know, coherent, plausible allegations against them for sexual assault. They have tried all of this woke signaling instead. And that's a really troubling thing for this company, to tell you the truth. I wish I could tell you, I sit here and could tell you why and that I fully understand it. I don't. It's just that they have done it and it's been a repeated pattern for years.

[Tudor Dixon]

Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on the Tudor Dixon Podcast.

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[Tudor Dixon]

I need to be healthy every day to survive it and go through the next chemo round and the next chemo round. So it's important that work was part of that to keep my mind busy for 89 hours and then I had to go back and face the reality. I had a goal and the goal is to survive.

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[Will Hild]

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[Tudor Dixon]

For healing, learn more and sign the [e-mail] they must have known that this was coming though. I Mean, as you said, you were pointing this out. It's weird to me because I look at this and I think you would think you've seen yellow cabs and, you know, taxi companies all across the United States, all across the world, actually. There's taxi companies in Europe, there's taxi companies all over. Right. So there have to be some regulations that you can kind of model yours off of. There were. They're saying, okay, we've got to keep. This is our business. We have to keep people safe. It's shocking to me as someone who comes from a family business where safety was the top concern. Every meeting was opened with a safety report. Every time we met with people, we talked about safety first. Everything across the walls of the shop were about safety. And how can this not be a top priority? Wouldn't there be all kinds of background checks for every driver? And I say this as someone, like I said, who uses the service and thinks I'm safe because they've done their homework to make sure that when they pick me up at point A, they get me to point B safely. That should be your number one priority. How does this happen?

[Will Hild]

It's a great question. I think this goes into this somewhat of the Silicon Valley mentality. You know, it's sort of a cliche now, but the quote, you know, move fast and break things, used to typify Silicon Valley at around the time that Uber was. Was coming up. And we saw that. I'm a. I'm a longtime D.C. resident, and I saw that D.C. was one of the first cities where Uber deployed. And at the time, it was basically what they were doing was illegal. They were running an illegal taxi company outside of the regulations of the District, which, in their defense, were cumbersome and draconian and had no space for innovation or kind of improvement on the service. But their solution to. Was not to lobby for changes or to try and fix it. They simply ran the program illegally. And when people would get pulled over and fined for this, they would pay the fines. And eventually they had enough of a customer base that they then used the Uber app to push people on the customer base, push customers of theirs to call their alderman and demand that they make changes in favor of Uber. I remember this. I was a very early adopter of Uber. And obviously the, you know, the efficiency of the system of hiring, of. Of getting a car through a phone is. There's no doubt, is better than, you know, it seems archaic now to wave to a car randomly from the side of the street, but. But it does sort of typify that mentality of who cares if we're breaking the law, we're going to do it our way, whatever works. And you know, I have some admiration for that when they're pushing back against big government regulations and sclerotic oversight. But it's very different when you are playing fast and loose with, with female security and the safety of a lot of women who apparently were sexually assaulted because they weren't doing their job. So I think it goes back to that, that move fast and break things. Silicon Valley mentality. They'll just figure it out. So the, a lot of the background checks and pretty much everything is done digitally and so there isn't like a face to face connection with these people. In most cases they're submitting documents online, which obviously we live in 2026. That's happening more and more often, but changing topics just ever so slightly. And I can't confirm this, I've just heard a lot of rumors of this. One of the issues that the companies are now running into is that one person will sign up as a driver and go through the background check system and then they will lend out their car and their phone to other people that are gonna use the system. And to my knowledge the Uber has not been quick to fix this or. And some of the other ones have allegedly not quick to fix this either. Again, I have no direct knowledge of. This is just what I'm hearing as I monitor the situation. And that introduces all kinds of other obvious problems which you may not have even been in the car with the driver that you thought you were, which you know, obviously creates all kinds of safety. Right?

[Tudor Dixon]

Because then you can't even report it because you don't know actually who you were with. So just so we, so that the audience knows, Uber was ordered to pay eight and a half million to a young woman that they were found liable for a 2023 sexual assault of a 19 year old passenger. And you are worst case scenario. I think this is everyone's kind of worst case scenario, especially for people my age who have kids that are going to college. You think that they're doing the right thing because she was drunk. So this young woman was intoxicated, she was alone, she didn't have a way home. This is what we tell our kids. Get a ride, don't get in a car. Get a ride, don't get in a car with someone you don't know. Get a safe ride. You assume that calling an Uber is a safe ride. And then she was assaulted in the backseat of the vehicle.

[Will Hild]

Yeah. And what's truly astonishing to me in some ways is that there have been other safety type incidences that Uber has responded to. So for example, there was a problem for a while of people getting into the wrong car. There was someone kidnapped and murdered because they got into what they thought was their Uber, I believe at an airport or maybe in front of a grocery store. And unfortunately that person was not an Uber driver and simply was kind of using that system as bait and took the person subsequently. Sometimes when you get an Uber, and sometimes I've seen heard about this on Lyft as well, you will have a code on your phone when you get into the car and you have to give that code to the driver in order to make sure that you've matched up correctly. I've seen this in areas where they've had problems with people getting into the wrong car. So in some. So what's weird about this is in some areas Uber has been responsive to the safety of passengers. And so it leaves the mystery of why this. As you articulated earlier, it appears that they aren't even fully investigating or reporting to police some of these cases of alleged sexual assault. So why is it that they take some things very seriously and seem to be playing really fast and loose and I mean obviously incredibly recklessly with the safety of women in this other case. And the best I can figure out is that this is somewhat of a case of wokeness, that there's something area of this that they don't want to have to touch or deal with. As I hinted at earlier, it may be a case. One of the things Uber does is they recruit heavily in immigrant communities. You notice that in any major city, especially over periods of time, you will see overwhelming numbers of drivers coming from the same nationhood, immigrants from the same countries. And I'm just, I'm wondering, I have no proof of this, but I'm wondering if some of the issues that they've had would have led to having to show that there was a disproportionate number of these complain or incidences coming from certain communities. And the wokeness within the company, their DEI programs or just their own political views has kept them from really solving that. And that's something we've seen, I mentioned we've been on this beat of pushing back against companies going woke for about six years now. And that's has been a repeated, repeated pattern we've seen with so many corporations where they have a real problem with Chinese slave labor, with sexual assaults by their drivers, with antitrust violations. And instead of fixing the issue, they virtue signal and go woke in order to hide the issue. Because it's.

[Tudor Dixon]

Yeah, I was going to say you brought up the. So. So this, obviously this assault was 2023. You imagine that they've probably heard of quite a few other assaults and had quite a few complaints before that. So 2022 was when Roe was overturned. This is a big deal. Everybody's talking about it. It becomes bigger and bigger as states start to put in different rules, saying, okay, we're going to have a limit up to this number of weeks or going to have no abortion. And that's when you started to see Uber coming out and saying, you know what, we're going to help you break the law. Which seemed really weird. Like, okay, you have a problem within your company. So to like bright shiny thing over here, look away from that. You say, we'll help you commit a crime. That seems weird.

[Will Hild]

Right. And I should mention here, one of the things we brought up in our tweet thread about this, this earlier last week is there were emails, they call them, you know, we've Epstein files right now. Well, they were the Uber files somebody hacked or somehow it may have been through discovery. There were a whole bunch of emails from internally at Uber while they were dealing with this problem that were released. And what was really scary is the glib and almost celebratory nature that people that were handling this issue within Uber, this issue of people suing them for these sexual assaults, how they describe their interactions in the media and the way they were talking about these victims. One of the quotes is that I just trashed one of the victims in USA Today. One of the people that worked on Uber that was handling the fallout from this said that they used to feel like they had a soul, but now they're not so sure anymore. And that was directly related to Jermaine, to the way that they were attacking their customers who had been victimized by their drivers. So like I said, it's an astonishing, you know, breach of trust. And really, it's scary. I mean, why not just fix the problem? Why not? I mean, who wants, you know, women to be successful?

[Tudor Dixon]

I was going to say, how common is that, that you see a company that has a big problem and they just put out a giant marketing campaign to distract you from it?

[Will Hild]

Yeah, unfortunately, much more common than you'd like to think. And a lot of times it's not so much. People tend to think of corporations as singular things like Uber thinks this or Uber thinks that. If that was the case, it would probably be cheaper for Uber to just f the problem. The issue is that all of these companies are made up of individual people and they are called to account for various problems or successes or that you know, what have you. And so when there's an issue, if it's you, if it's your career that's going to get destroyed, you have a strong incentive to simply cover up the problem instead of fix it. Because the consequences for having the problem been on your watch could be very high. And this goes all the way up to sometimes to the CEOs themselves. And so it's one of the real issues with corporate governance. And you know, I don't, we probably don't have time to get into, into this but one of our big things we push back on is BlackRock and the so called ESG movement. Well, the G in ESG is supposed to stand for governance, but instead of focusing on how do you solve that problem, how do you solve the issue of making sure that corporations, when there are problems, deal with them in the right way that doesn't get more passengers and Ubers sexually assaulted, how do you make sure that people feel like they can bring these issues up and fix them? They focus on dei, on race and sex based quotas, more of the same wokeness that they're using to try and cover the problem. And fact, one of the real refuges of corporate charlatans is to run to ESG and wokeness to hide when they've had bad quarters, bad profit earnings, they've had a big blowup like what Uber's going through. So it weirdly this movement that was supposed to just like wokeness, right, it's supposed to be about virtue and treating people great. And what does it do? It covers up, you know, industrial level sexual assaults. The ESG movement, the ghost is supposed to be all about good governance and instead it is the refuge for bad executives who are doing wrong. And they run to the ESG movement, run to people like BlackRock to cover up their issues.

[Tudor Dixon]

Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on the Tudor Dixon podcast. Do you still see wokeness as a popular method of doing business? I feel like since this past election and a lot of people have been saying like, you know, a lot of people have turned against the men and women's sports, the, the surgeries for children, a lot of these things that they were standing up and saying, this is who we are, we are willing to make sacrifice these children, sacrifice our morals, do all of these things so that we can meet the far leftist progressives. Do you feel like that has. They've kind of been hit on that, that people have turned against that? I mean, a lot of these clinics have had to close. A lot of these politicians that were pro boys and girls sports have lost their elections turning at all?

[Will Hild]

Yeah, I would say it absolutely is waiting. You've had a lot of shifts in behavior across corporate America over the last two to three years, especially as sort of the US and others have waged war on WOKE and esg. I will say this, unfortunately, the ESG and the WOKE capitalism movement put a lot of crazies and activists and far left radicals inside these companies. And while those people might not be bragging in their annual reports about their activities anymore, they're already there. They're already there and their goal now, now is to keep their jobs and continue on a lot of this behavior and just not brag about it as much. So unfortunately, our movement to push back against this, our last easy day was yesterday because that was when they put it on the, on the masthead, right at the front. We now have to chisel these people out of these companies and push on these companies to focus on serving their consumers, not on WOKE activists and WOKE politicians. Because when you do, when you focus on WOKE activists and politicians, what happened at Uber is what you get.

[Tudor Dixon]

That's interesting. I think we so often when we're in the political world, we're so deep in the political world that we are focused on the election and the person and the individual and how they can affect government. You're, you are looking at a totally different picture. So this, honestly, this report on Uber was stunning to me because it's, it's not something I think of. I think of what the policies are rather than what's happening when I get into that vehicle. Give us a little insight. What else should we be aware of? What else are you guys working on?

[Will Hild]

Well, like I said, we are full spectrum attacking esg. ESG is sort of the disease and then WOKE capitalism is sort of the symptoms. So if you look at the cause of the disease, it's big asset managers like BlackRock, State street and Vanguard, it's big banks and big insurers that are using their market share that they have sort of this bottleneck of financial services to push wokeness across, across all of corporate America. Even companies otherwise wouldn't want to do it. So we're going to have to have that same mentality on our side to push back against companies. And like you Said government is great and government can be used to push back on these companies for violating their fiduciary duty, engaging in securities fraud, and a whole host of other things. But we as consumers should be pushing back on these companies when they, when they do that. And I, I want to leave everyone with a good note. Obviously this is extremely morose and morbid topic of women having been affected.

[Tudor Dixon]

We're.

[Will Hild]

But consumers should not feel hopeless or powerless or weak. There has been a monumental shift in tone in corporate America just over the last five to six years, and that is because consumers have been pushing back. Our campaigns don't mean anything on their own. They're afraid of two things. They're afraid of consumers changing their behaviors, and they're afraid of government changing the rules and bringing enforcement actions against these companies. And I'm happy to say that our movement is getting better and better, pushing back again. And I'll just leave one note. One, one bit of advice. If you see a company signaling that they are woke, we had one, the Redfin, the Zillow competitor that just had an ad that was super woke during the Super Bowl. When you see a company pushing a woke agenda, they always have skeletons in their closet. That has been the iron law of every company we've looked into.

[Tudor Dixon]

That's crazy.

[Will Hild]

Company signals they are woke. They are mistreating their customers, or they're using slave labor, or they are in bed with the communist Chinese. I don't know what it is, but 100 times out of 100, when we've looked into a company signaling wokeness, they've had serious, serious issues with their business models. So the more you see wokeness, the more you should probably stay away from the company.

[Tudor Dixon]

But we have had some effect on some of these companies because I remember Target and the whole Pride Month debacle and people said, you know what? I don't want these swimming suits in with my daughter's swimming suits. And the next year, things were a lot different at Target. So do we have consumer power still?

[Will Hild]

100%. And as I said before, remember, these corporations are never one human being making one single decision. They're made up of different factions. When consumers push back like they did with Target, like they did with Budweiser, it actually enables the voice of sanity in these companies to come to the go with the people. The head of dei, the head of marketing, those are the two, two big people that usually push this kind of nonsense. Those people, those people should be eliminated in almost every corporate setting. They're usually completely idiots. But it Enables when consumers push back, it enables those people say, listen, this is clearly not good for our business model. I don't know what excuse you, you use to try and get us into, into this but, but you have hurt the company and your voice needs to go away for a while. We saw this. We, we went after a company called State Farm Insurance. They were pushing transgender ideology books on kids as young as five. And it turned out that it was their head of DEI had without really alerting the CEO to this, partnered with something called the Gender Cool Project, which whole aim is to put these books, it says right on the book kids five five plus into public schools using State Farm agents. And a whistleblower came to us and, and as it turns out from what's come out from that issue since is again, this was one small faction's radical transgender ideology faction within the company that had done this and it changed radically the culture within that company. The CEO apologized and so again, this wasn't an issue where everyone at State Farm was in on it. It was a small radical minority that had been enabled by neglect collect to engage in this. And that's where it is a lot of companies. And so pushing back on these companies, you're actually aiding our allies inside these companies to, to clean them up.

[Tudor Dixon]

I mean, look, people didn't like how they were going to redecorate Cracker Barrel and they said no. You know, so we, we obviously can have an effect. We just have to be loud and, and you know, money talks. So I think we, we can make a difference when these things start to happen. But I, it's been fascinating talking to you. I'm. I will say still use Uber, but maybe I'll just use it when I'm in a group of three. I don't know. I feel like I need to have more people with me. It seems like that was another thing that I had read with those assaults was it seemed like it was generally someone that was alone because you obviously don't want to take on more than one person. So maybe that's just the message to our daughters is if you're going to take a ride share, you're going to use one of those rideshare apps. Go with a friend.

[Will Hild]

Great advice. Great advice. Advice.

[Tudor Dixon]

Wil Hill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[Will Hild]

Thanks for having me.

[Tudor Dixon]

Absolutely. And thank you all for joining the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, go to the tutor dixon podcast.com or you can subscribe at the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also watch it on YouTube or Rumble Uterdixon. But make sure you join us and have a blessed day. This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.