Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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PJ, how have you been?

**PJ Vogt** (1:12)
I've been good. How have you been?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:14)
Yeah, I'm a little better now having listened to your series. I love it.

**PJ Vogt** (1:17)
Oh, thank you.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:19)
Do you recognize that voice? It is PJ Vogt, host of the podcast Search Engine and friend of Freakonomics Radio. You may remember hearing him back in 2024 when we published a Search Engine episode called The Fascinatingly Mundane Secrets of the World's Most Exclusive Nightclub about Berghain in Berlin. That was a great story and not too long ago, PJ came to us with another one. It's a two-part series on driverless cars. This is a topic that we have touched on many times over the years at Freakonomics Radio, but PJ decided to go deep. The other day, I had a chance to ask him how he got interested in this.

**PJ Vogt** (1:57)
There's a whole lesson in this, but I'd gotten, and this is not the next sentence you're going to expect me to say, too into bench pressing.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:07)
Yeah, that's not where I thought you were going.

**PJ Vogt** (2:09)
And I injured myself, I had a hernia, and then I had to have a hernia repair.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:13)
I see.

**PJ Vogt** (2:14)
So there were like some minor complications. I was not moving easily, I was in a lot of pain. So I had kind of limited mobility, and I was visiting a friend in San Francisco, and I took a Waymo, and it was such an experience of the future that immediately becomes normal. First the idea that I would press a button on my phone, a car would come out of nowhere, driven by nobody, I would get in, watch the steering wheel turn itself. I was trying to describe to somebody recently, I was like, the first time it feels like the first time you're in an airplane, and by the third time it feels like you're in an elevator. It was a moment where I thought, oh, a lot's about to change. And it was confusing to me that people were not talking about that more.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:48)
What should we expect to hear in the series? There are two parts. The first is really about the car, and then the second is really about the driver. Tell me who you think are some of the most compelling characters and why.

**PJ Vogt** (3:00)
So in the first part, there's this guy, Sebastian Thrun. He's so good. He's this German-born roboticist AI expert who lost a friend as a teenager to a car accident, and he really thinks that his invention is not just going to make money for a tech company or be more convenient. He wants to reshape the modern world as it exists. And it's just the story of him and his team beginning to figure that out. And having ideas that sounded crazy 20 years ago, and with every year towards the present, have sounded more sane and at least plausible. And then in the second part, I find the Boston politicians to be very vivid talkers, very opinionated people.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:42)
Vivid is a very polite word.

**PJ Vogt** (3:45)
They're strongly opinionated. They sometimes commit gaffs. When you ask them about the gaffs, they are totally like, yup, I screwed that one up. The thing that I most enjoyed about this story, which is what I'm always looking for, is that particularly in the second half, every time I spoke to someone as they were talking, I thought everything they were saying makes sense. I totally get it. I would be nodding my head vigorously for the most part. And then I would go talk to the next person who saw things completely differently, and it would just spin my head the other way. And I would think, well, this makes sense too. And it was about trying to really do what I think we're all going to have to do a lot of soon, which is weigh competing, not totally reconcilable interests, and really take them seriously. And that was us trying to do it for this one thing.