Worst-case scenario—besides my own death, of course—I figured I’d see some hi-def Taxicab Confessions shit play out in my rearview mirror. And it did. I’ll get to that. But first I have to drop off Rope Bracelets and his drunk ladies at da club. Listen in as he moderates a C-SPAN-worthy debate on the definition of getting wild.

GIRL #1: She wants to get wild.

GIRL #2: I mean, I’m already wild.

ROPE BRACELETS: You want to take it in the ass.

GIRL #1: Listen, I’m not even going to comment on that. She wanted to get wild, and it had nothing to do with a dick in the ass.

GIRL #2: That’s what getting wild is these days. It’s getting it in the ass.

Suddenly, Girl #1 seems to remember that there’s a stranger (me) in the car. Are you enjoying this conversation right now? she asks. Yeah, kinda, I think to myself. By the way, our friend wanted us to squeeze six people in this car. We were like, That’s not going to happen.

GIRL #1: Safety first.

GIRL #2: Fucking safety first.

The clearest sign of Uber’s ascendance is that its name is no longer just a noun. It’s become a verb, too, as in: How did you get home from that party? I Uber’d. There are competitors in the field—such as Lyft and Sidecar—but when was the last time someone said they Sidecar’d home at midnight?

Uber capitalizes on what economists refer to as slack resources or underutilized capacity. Translation: Why let your car sit idle in the driveway when you can turn it into a cash machine? The future is all about monetizing downtime. The thing that’s really striking to me is that a lot of people who use Uber—it’s not like they used to take taxis, says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who specializes in the digital economy. It’s almost like you’re inventing a new way of organizing your day because you can get a car in three minutes. You can define a new lifestyle for yourself.

Every generation gets the app it deserves. Uber was co-founded by Travis Kalanick, a bro-y alpha nerd who’s been coding since he was in sixth grade and whose first brush with success came in the late ’90s while he was still an undergrad at UCLA. (That venture, called Scour, an early experiment in Napster-type file sharing—translation: file stealing—imploded in the face of a $250 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit.) Not to make assumptions, but Kalanick probably wasn’t the first kid in his class to lose his virginity. But the way he talks now—which is large—he’s surely making up for lost time. When I tease him about his skyrocketing desirability, he deflects with a wisecrack about women on demand: Yeah, we call that Boob-er.

My cabbie-for-a-week experiment wasn’t pre-sanctioned by Uber. I signed up online like every other prospective driver, a relatively painless process involving a background check and an online tutorial. (Hint: Offering bottled water to customers is a good way to improve your customer reviews.) Uber won’t accept older, crappier wheels, or rust, so I had to upload photos of my car and proof of insurance to the company’s website; a week later, I picked up my Uber phone—an iPhone loaded with Uber’s driver app—at a hotel near LAX, and by the time I walked out, I was making money. Uber will not divulge how many drivers are working the Uber grid, but the day I picked up my phone I saw a good 300 people doing the same thing. (Not to stereotype, but mostly they looked like guys who drive cabs.) From there, Uber operates more like a pimp than a boss: Depending on the city, Uber gets approximately 20 percent; the driver pockets the rest.

Easy, right? You pick people up, drive them where they tell you, drop them off. Well, there was definitely a learning curve. That first night, I pulled up to a house in Beverly Hills and watched a teenage girl with a backpack hug her mom good-bye on the porch, then climb into the backseat of my car. (I did my best Sherlock Holmes trying to work out the story here. Where would a teenage girl go alone at 9 P.M. on a weeknight? To Dad’s house. Shared custody, my dear Watson. BOOM.) I don’t think I’ve talked to a teenage girl since I was a teenager, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. She gave me an address in the Palisades and looked down at her iPhone for the next twenty minutes. I tried to think of a conversation starter, but really, anything a 35-year-old man says to a girl with a backpack sounds pervy. How was school today? Is it cold back there? Is anyone waiting at home? So rather than make potentially litigious small talk, I just turned up the radio. (Uber bill: $26.)