I Love You Waymo

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: I'm standing outside a Soso coffeehouse in a strip mall near Phoenix, Arizona, perfectly blue skies, maybe seventy degrees an imperceptible breeze. My producer, Jacob Smith is here with me. We're waiting for the coolest car ever made.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: So it's say, hold on, let's see what we got here. We got a Is it a Nissan?

00:00:46
Speaker 3: No?

00:00:46
Speaker 1: No, it's a Pacifica.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: It's a Chrysler Pacifica. Actually a Chrysler Pacifica hybrid, a Mini Man tricked out by the geniuses at Google with every conceivable high tech sensor and gizmo known to man, so that it can drive itself, a fully autonomous vehicle. Google calls it Weaimo, and here on the outskirts of Phoenix you can order Weimo on an app like an uber our. Weimo silently glides up like a spooky ghost ship and we get on board.

00:01:20
Speaker 1: So we have this thing.

00:01:22
Speaker 4: Should we start the ride?

00:01:25
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to season six of Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. We are back, ladies and gentlemen, with a heartwarming story of what I learned riding around in a weymo on a gorgeous Arizona morning. Me and Jacob grinning ear to ear, bouncing up and down like little boys on their first visit to Disneyland. We were on our way to a new century, a new era, the dawn of a new age. Although I have to be honest, the future was now what we expected.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: It was better.

00:02:17
Speaker 5: The doors are closing, heading to Alamo Draft House Cinema Tempe.

00:02:26
Speaker 3: Oh man, here we go.

00:02:27
Speaker 6: Your seatbelts.

00:02:29
Speaker 2: We sit in the back. You have to sit in the back of Weimo. If we lean slightly forward, we can see the van's steering wheel turning all by itself. This car is not capable of breaking the speed.

00:02:41
Speaker 3: Of Well, I'm curious about that. That's a good question, right, Like what if we had to?

00:02:46
Speaker 1: What if can I enter?

00:02:48
Speaker 2: Like my wife is pregnant and we're rushing to the hospital.

00:02:54
Speaker 3: I think the only things we could do is press a button. This is pull over. If we were scared or something. I see that, what does it pullover?

00:03:03
Speaker 2: We do not pull over. We cruise down the streets of Chandler, somewhere unseen of them, and artificial intelligences are guiding us unerringly towards our destination the Alamo Draft House, Cinema and Tempe. We approach Attorney Toyota with a student driver nervously navigating an intersection.

00:03:26
Speaker 4: Oh god, the irony.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: A human, a human learning a task that will, within years of its completion, be obsolete.

00:03:34
Speaker 3: And it's in that human's rear view mirror is the future of that?

00:03:38
Speaker 2: We must We should yank that driver, the student driver, out and just say why don't you learn? Why don't you learn to type on a manual typewriter? That's about as useful. Here's a BlackBerry, send some messages. Look, there's a student loser. Did we realize in that moment what weima would mean for our future, for all of our future?

00:04:02
Speaker 4: Not yet.

00:04:03
Speaker 2: We were still in the blisstate. My epiphany would not come until later that afternoon, when I found myself sprinting desperately alongside our weimo.

00:04:13
Speaker 1: Let's go Weimo.

00:04:14
Speaker 2: What Jacob looked on helplessly from the backseat. Women doesn't know what he's doing? Ash woman knows what he's doing. He doesn't know what I'm doing. Well, come back to this, I promise.

00:04:26
Speaker 1: He thinks he's gotten away from me, not so fast, my friend.

00:04:39
Speaker 2: Have you ever watched videos from tech conferences like TED? The signature TED conference is an annual gathering of people who are excited about technology talking to people who are excited about technology, about how exciting technology is? You know the type turtlenecks way into bitcoin. Picture of Elon Musk on the home screen of the iPhone twelve pro max.

00:05:03
Speaker 7: So In eighteen eighty five, Carl Bens invented the automobile. Later that year, he took it out of the first public test drive and true story, crashed into a wall.

00:05:14
Speaker 2: TED conferences always have at least one speaker gliding across the stage, clicking through powerpoints on the future of the automobile.

00:05:23
Speaker 7: For the last one hundred and thirty years, we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, of the driver.

00:05:29
Speaker 6: We may be the last generation to own cars. Our kids and grandkids. They may never have to learn to drive. They may never have to worry about driving around and looking for parking or speeding tickets or drunk driving. And the best part is they could go their entire life without ever seeing a car accident. Driverless cars are being touted as one of the most disruptive technologies of our time.

00:05:58
Speaker 2: Are you skeptical? I know some of you are. While Jacob and I were cruising around the suburbs of Phoenix, I took a video from the backseat of our Weimo of the steering wheel turning by itself as the houses and sidewalks whosh past. I tweeted out the video and watched from the back seat as the replies flooded in, comments like I would be freaking out the entire time. Been very nice listening to your podcasts. Your upcoming demise is a great loss. This will all end in tears. A lot of people are frightened by the idea of a self driving car, but let me tell you don't be frightened. From the moment we got in the minivan, neither Jacob nor I could believe what a calming, measured, completely zen experience we were having. Right now, it's slowing for a speed bump. Oh, nicely done, Mamo. There's no way I would have I didn't even know. I wouldn't even I would have gone boom over that thing. Weimo slowed smoothly for a stoplight, kept a respectful distance from other drivers. One time we encountered a man in a wheelchair sharing the road. Weimo decelerated elegantly, gave him a generous berth, then cautiously pulled away.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: I also have to say totally trust the thing, like I have not thought for a second.

00:07:14
Speaker 4: I feel safe. Yeah, this is a safe space.

00:07:17
Speaker 1: This is an automotive safe space.

00:07:19
Speaker 2: I'll tell you one thing. It's certainly a safer space in the passenger see of my car when I'm driving.

00:07:23
Speaker 3: Okay, we just got someone just pulled out in front of us.

00:07:27
Speaker 1: Anticipated the second person slowed right down. That was some great defensive driving.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, we encountered some terrible driving from another vehicle. We just cut across like six lanes and Weimo kind of unfazed.

00:07:41
Speaker 4: Way might handle it.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: Well like a pro.

00:07:46
Speaker 2: We reached our destination, the Alamo Cinema Draft House parking lot. We were so excited we decided to call up Sashwat Penny Grahi, the senior director of product management at Weimo. We had so much to ask him about, Like all the sensors on our minivan, so we have we have a few.

00:08:04
Speaker 5: So are you clearly on the doom what you're seeing on the doom at the top that's that's where we have a nineteen camera complex over there. So those are cameras plus two lasers. One is a medium range, one is a long range.

00:08:18
Speaker 2: The lasers are technically light our systems three D scanners. It's what NASA uses when they land on Mars. The laser looks around and instantly creates an incredibly detailed map of everything in its range.

00:08:31
Speaker 5: So that can see almost three football fields.

00:08:33
Speaker 2: So wait, wait three three foot that can see three hundred yards in every direction.

00:08:41
Speaker 5: That's right, that's right. Wow, So we yeah, and you know it can become very helpful. You may have realized. I noticed this as you were going on forty five miles per hour roots in Phoenix. The harder the speed, the longer the car needs to reason about is anything coming at that speed?

00:08:57
Speaker 8: Right if it's a very.

00:08:58
Speaker 5: Low speed seeing shorter distances. Okay, So those are the you know, medium and long range riders, and that's why they're placed atop as well, because you know you need a wider range view very well complimented by those smaller spinning things you must have seen on the sides of the cars. Yeah, and so that helps. For example, imagine you were in a busy parking lot in front of a Costco or a Walmart. Cars are part very close to each other.

00:09:25
Speaker 2: Because he went on sensors on the back, right, on the side, microphones to pick up things like a police siren. I asked sash Watt whether WEIMO had a blind spot like anything. It couldn't see.

00:09:36
Speaker 5: One clarification, Malcolm, when you said blind spot, did you mean the classical blind spot in our human driving? You know, for example, you're trained when you get your driving license to not just rely on your side camera.

00:09:47
Speaker 4: You just check.

00:09:47
Speaker 9: Oh no, absolutely not, so.

00:09:49
Speaker 2: That we do not have absolutely not. WEIMO has no blind spots. Arizona has a dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous states in the country for pedestrians, with Phoenix as the prime culprit. This is not a city designed for anything but the convenience of automobiles. What a city full of Chrysler PACIFICA hybrids tricked out with radar, lightar, nineteen cameras, microphones, and the ability to see three hundred yards in every direction make Phoenix safer? Yes, it would, But the future will get even better than that, way more better. I need to take you on a brief digression away from the sunny streets of Phoenix to a call I had with Roseanne McManus, a professor of political science and international affairs at Penn State. McManus specializes in what's known as deterrence theory. Why do some conflicts lead to war and others just fizzle out?

00:11:03
Speaker 10: If there's complete information and so you know exactly how cost the other side finds war to be and how likely each side is to win. If you fight, then there's really no opportunity to bluff, and there should be no war because both sides know what would happen if you did fight a war, and so if one side is more powerful and they would win, then deterrence would work perfectly, and deterrence would never fail and life would be really simple.

00:11:35
Speaker 2: What McManus means is that if I'm rational and you are rational, and I know your intentions and capability and you know mine, then we're not going to go to war. Neither of us can effectively blackmail each other or make a threat or intimidate. Under the rational scenario, if you say I'll nuke, if you cross that line, I'd just roll my eyes and say, no, you won't You're not blowing up the world because I crossed a line. But what if you're just a little bit crazy? McManus is one of a number of deterrence theorists who has thought about this possible ability. By crazy, McManus doesn't mean completely psychotic. She just means somewhat irrational. What if you are possessed of and this is the phrase she uses extreme preferences, That is that you really want certain things and are willing to pay an insanely high price to get those certain things. If you are a little bit crazy like that, then I'm terrified because I really don't know whether you'd risk millions of dead to get what you want. McManus says this was exactly the situation before the Second World War when the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously believed Hitler when Hitler said he wasn't out to wage a total war.

00:12:51
Speaker 11: I'm going to have another talk with hair Hitler, only this time he has told me that it is his intention to come halfway to meet me.

00:13:10
Speaker 2: So walk us through that scenario, that what happened there and why that perception of Hitler allowed him to get his way.

00:13:18
Speaker 10: So he's negotiating with Chamberlain, who doesn't really want to have another war, having just had World War One not too long ago, and he tells Chamberlain, look, I'm a German nationalist. The German people in the student land are suffering. I want to unify all Germans. That's that's my mission in life. And you know, I'll do anything to unify all the Germans. But once I've unified all the Germans, I'm going to stop, and that's going to be it, and I'm going to be contented.

00:13:49
Speaker 2: So that's his extreme preference. He will do anything to unify Germans. That's how he's presenting himself exactly.

00:13:56
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it seems like Chamberlain believed that he believed it at at least enough to give it a shot and to make this deal with Hitler.

00:14:07
Speaker 2: In the world of deterrence, this is called the Madman theory. McManus argues that people in any conflict may have an advantage if the other side perceives them as being just a little bit but not entirely nuts. If you can successfully convince your opponent that that is the way your mind works, you can get your way in a negotiating in a blackmailing or negotiating context in a way you couldn't otherwise. That's your essential argument.

00:14:38
Speaker 10: Yes, that's my argument. Now, I think it actually is rather hard to create that perception. Hitler is really the only successful example that I've come up with so far.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: Well, I want to give you another example, which is why I called you. But it's not in your world. It's in a slightly different world. It's about deterrence, right, This is where we get to the heart of it. Not deterrence among global superpowers bristling with weapons, No, the kind of ordinary, low grade calculations we make every day as a pedestrian. Why do I not just walk out in front of other cars? I don't believe that they're they might hit me because they're emotional or crazy or something. They have a series of, as you say, extreme what's the phrase again, extreme preferences, extreme preferences. They might be more interested in their text texts at there, at that moment than me walking in front of them, right, And so that's the reason most people don't jaywalk, right, because there is that deterrence. Yes, Now, before we get back to autonomous vehicles and the glorious morning, Jacob and I spent riding way mows around the streets of Chandler, Arizona. I want to dwell on the issue of deterrence on the streets because drivers are not rational. I think we sometimes lose side of this fact. I thought professional cyclists, of all people, would have the best perspective on the inherent craziness of drivers. So I called up Lance Armstrong, cyclist extraordinaire who has been actively sharing the road with drivers for almost forty years.

00:16:27
Speaker 8: Cars freaked me out. Being out on the road and with cars and drivers and distracted drivers.

00:16:34
Speaker 12: It scares the shit out of me.

00:16:37
Speaker 8: Yeah, but you know, Malcolm, I actually now prefer the mountain bike just so I can be.

00:16:44
Speaker 2: Totally away from cars.

00:16:45
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:16:46
Speaker 2: And if I'm giving a choice on my road bike, I'm going down a road and I see that there's a bike path, even if there's people with baby strollers and walkers and dogs.

00:16:55
Speaker 4: I always take the bike path.

00:16:56
Speaker 8: I just I don't want to have to think about, you know, cars and people checking out their cell phone or having a few cocktails. And they freaked me out.

00:17:05
Speaker 2: This is Lance Armstrong, a man so utterly and completely badass that he would happily go out on a bike for one hundred plus miles in the middle of the southern French summer, riding it insane speeds up and down massive mountains. I'm a runner. I think runners are the greatest thing.

00:17:22
Speaker 1: Ever.

00:17:23
Speaker 2: We're not as tough as cyclists, not even close. But even Lance, badass Lance is so scared of drivers that he would rather mountain bike or take the bike path with the parents and the dogs. Have you ever been hit by car?

00:17:39
Speaker 5: Of course?

00:17:39
Speaker 10: Oh?

00:17:40
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, many times?

00:17:41
Speaker 4: How many times? How many times?

00:17:45
Speaker 6: Oh?

00:17:45
Speaker 4: I say many times?

00:17:46
Speaker 12: I mean probably, look we're getting hit.

00:17:50
Speaker 10: Once is too many.

00:17:52
Speaker 8: I'd probably ride around five. The two worst ones was when I was young, I ran a yellow light on my bike and outside of a Dallas and suburbs where I grew up, and I got to the intersection and I turned yeall. I was like, I got this.

00:18:07
Speaker 2: Well, I made it five of the six lanes and the six land lady was coming and just heading straight from the sides and I was banged up, but okay. Then there was a time he was bombing down some empty French country road, hadn't seen a car in an hour? Well, shit, sure enough, come around the corner and this old farmer just coming the other way, and just I clipped right the front and I cracked two vertebra.

00:18:30
Speaker 12: You could be dead.

00:18:32
Speaker 8: Well yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

00:18:36
Speaker 2: Of course. Next I called up Jonathan Voters, another former professional cyclist. He and Lance were teammates at one point. I wanted to make sure Lance wasn't an exception. No Votters just as terrified.

00:18:51
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean. The first driver I fear the most is just is you know, someone who's not paying attention for whatever reason that is. They're reaching for a hamburger, they're texting on their phone, they're arguing with their kids, whatever it is. They're distracted, and they basically just sort of weave into you. This is one reason that actually, when I teach people how to ride in traffic, I often teach them to ride actually further out. If you're further out in the road, it actually forces you into the line of vision of the driver. The second type of driver that I fear is just angry. They don't want you there as a cyclist. They feel that the road is theirs and that you are impeding their progress to getting to their destination, and they want to run you over. And maybe they realize, oh, that there's you know, there are consequences for me running over this cyclist, but they're viewing you as essentially like subhuman.

00:19:50
Speaker 2: The willingness to risk killing a cyclist because they might slow you down for a few seconds is, of course, the textbook definition of an extreme preference.

00:19:59
Speaker 8: There's a multi billion dollar industry, I should say, built upon fear of traffic peloton swift. These are you know, in home ding a bike and whatever, pieces of equipment, hardware, software, that are entirely a result of people being afraid to ride in traffic.

00:20:19
Speaker 2: To voters, riding a stationary bicycle makes no sense, I mean, why would you do that? The whole point of riding a bike is the thrill of movement, the wind in your hair, the adventure of going somewhere. But millions of Americans only feel truly safe peddling in their basements.

00:20:35
Speaker 8: To me, the only possible explanation for that, well, they're two possible explanations, that society as a whole have gone insane.

00:20:41
Speaker 12: Or that people are just you know, that they're afraid of traffic and afraid of cars, which quite logically, you know, makes sense that they would.

00:20:51
Speaker 8: Yeah, so I don't think We've gone insane.

00:20:53
Speaker 2: Yet there is a reason why when you drive down the street, cyclists and runners and pedestrians aren't inundating you, competing.

00:21:02
Speaker 1: For the road.

00:21:03
Speaker 2: They're afraid of you. You and why are they afraid? Because you're nuts? And in any confrontation that madman has the upper hand. All drivers are nuts, with one exception.

00:21:16
Speaker 4: Weimo.

00:21:18
Speaker 2: Weymo doesn't have emotions. Weymo doesn't text. Weymo doesn't eat a burger and drive with his knees. Weimo doesn't get angry if you behave like an idiot. Weimo doesn't give you the finger. Waymo doesn't do road rage. Weimo wants to live and let live. Weimo is your grandmother, only with lightning reflexes and perfect vision to three hundred yards. In a world of Weimo's, cars aren't the mad men anymore. But if cars aren't the madmen, guess who.

00:21:48
Speaker 4: Gets to be crazy.

00:21:49
Speaker 2: The answer is obvious, my friends, we do. I will admit that I was slow to grasp the actual implicatations of autonomous driving. I'd been too busy watching all those ted talks where the Silicon Valley types explain the self driving tech utopia, where everyone behaves with the unruffled rationality of an engineering major at Stanford University. But one day I stumbled upon a brilliant essay by an economist named Adam Millard Ball. His paper reads like the academic version of the Hans Christian Anderson story The Emperor's New Clothes.

00:22:40
Speaker 9: This was framed as a technological problem. It was framed as a space where we just need to figure out the right programming another technological solutions.

00:22:52
Speaker 2: To Millard Ball, the issue with autonomous vehicles was people, specifically the people outside the vehicle.

00:23:00
Speaker 9: So if you're a pedestrian and you have that confidence that the autonomous vehicle is going to stop and yeel to you as legally it should, then there's nothing to stop you from taking that right of way.

00:23:12
Speaker 2: Pedestrians and drivers now engage in a dangerous game of chicken, each daring the other to do something stupid. But if weamo takes over the rules of that game change.

00:23:23
Speaker 9: If you know that the other player is much more cautious and it's likely to follow the rules, then you're going to win. When you're playing check in, it helps to be the most crazy player in the game.

00:23:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the roles have reversed in a certain way that it used to be. The thing that puts fear into your heart as a pedestrian is the unknown preferences and the unpredictability of the driver. But now we've flipped it. The driver has become the car has become entirely sane and rational. It's preferences right, and that allows you to be unpredictable as the pedestrian.

00:24:03
Speaker 9: Absolutely, and it gives you an incentive to be seen to be unpredictable.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: With that line, hold on, explain that why does it give you an incentive to be seen as unpredictable.

00:24:14
Speaker 9: The more unpredictable you seem, so the more you could behave like you're intoxicated or distracted. Then be its equivalent of being a five year old child on the street. The autonomous circle is likely to recognize that unpredictability and be more cautious.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: Accordingly, Oh, I see, it's in my interest to be as flagrant in my unpredictability as possible, because I don't want to be so subtle that the car doesn't pick it up. I want to make sure that if I'm going to transgress the rules of the road, I should do so as flagrantly and flamboyantly as I can.

00:24:53
Speaker 9: You need to be obvious about it. Absolutely.

00:24:56
Speaker 2: If we imagine we wave a wand and we say tomorrow every car in New York City or London will be autonomous, doesn't that mean that we have immediate gridlock, or at least once pedestrians catch on to their newfound power. How on earth do cars move around a city.

00:25:13
Speaker 9: That's a great question, and I'm not sure that they do. And I'm not sure either that that's a completely bad outcome.

00:25:22
Speaker 2: Not a completely bad outcome, it's a fantastic outcome. The experts have thrown in the towel, given up on rational city streets, where algorithms and sensors and light our create perfect order out of disorder. No, they're saying the future is mayhem, and I'm not sure that's a completely bad outcome. Kids can play stickball on the streets of New York City again like they did in the nineteen twenties. Cyclists can ride in packs down the middle of the interstate. You spot a friend on the other side of the street, and you shout out hey, and you impulsively run across the street, across multiple lanes of traffic, and you give them.

00:26:07
Speaker 1: A big hug.

00:26:10
Speaker 2: My Running Club meets on a crowded track on the lower east side of Manhattan, where speedy runners compete with arrant soccer balls and children running free and old folks out for a ramble. Fifty yards away is the FDR drive wide undulating ribbons of smooth, inviting blacktop. In the autonomous future, we are totally going to do our workouts on the FDR hat rush hour, A hundred of us and the way moos will sit patiently until we finish. Do you understand how awesome the future is?

00:26:47
Speaker 1: We get the streets back, we are arrived.

00:26:56
Speaker 6: Please check your surroundings for exiting the vehicle, and remember to go through these after exis.

00:27:02
Speaker 2: Back in Tempe, Arizona, Jacob and I are wandering the parking lot of the Alamo Draft House them a deep in conversation. We're not here for a movie. We're here to test out our newly realized power as pedestrians. And first thing we do we call another Weymo.

00:27:21
Speaker 1: When Weymo pulls up is try and spook him with beach ball. Okay, a beach ball.

00:27:27
Speaker 2: Jacob has one folded up in his bag. We quickly inflated, but I could start coming.

00:27:32
Speaker 4: Three comes, all right, bring it, bring here, okay, way most coming.

00:27:44
Speaker 2: We get inside the Weimo. Jacob stays outside holding the beach ball. Let's see how Wimo responds to a beach ball's throne, because it's known in the literature.

00:27:53
Speaker 1: As the beach ball test.

00:27:54
Speaker 3: And I'm gonna should I do a gentle role? What should I just float it up in front?

00:27:58
Speaker 1: Or should be like hold on? Okay, okay.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: Jacob doesn't hurl the beach ball at Weymo. He gently floats it in the direction of Weimo. An errant beach ball that retaels from maybe four.

00:28:10
Speaker 3: Beach ball thrown, and it stopped short. I might have broken Welcome's neck that.

00:28:14
Speaker 2: Time Weimo slammed on his brakes slammed.

00:28:18
Speaker 3: I was a little worried about you. It stoped so short that tests stopped about as hard as you know, which makes me wonder, like will it stop her?

00:28:26
Speaker 5: Birds?

00:28:26
Speaker 3: Stop this thing? Like this is not the biggest beach ball in the world. That was fourteen inch beach ball.

00:28:33
Speaker 4: That was super impressive.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't a threatening beach ball.

00:28:37
Speaker 2: It's a beach ball thrown with love not anger.

00:28:39
Speaker 3: Floated out's right like gently lofted and it.

00:28:43
Speaker 1: Weimo was like, this is not happening on my watch.

00:28:47
Speaker 4: I'm stopping this right now.

00:28:49
Speaker 2: Weimo was not going to harm a hair on the head of that beach ball. The beach ball test left us drunk with power, so I said to Jacob, I'm going for a run. Jacob, what the first thing is I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and outrun the way Mo, and then I'm gonna cut in front.

00:29:06
Speaker 1: We're gonna see what happens.

00:29:11
Speaker 6: Please make sure your seatbelt.

00:29:13
Speaker 2: Jacob gets in the Weymo in order to monitor Weamo's movements. I do a few warm up stretches. I'm gonna run beside. I'm gonna run in front of the Waymo and see what happens.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go. Way Mo's moving way most moving. Wait, where's he going?

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Come on, we moo, come on, we moo stopping starting He's I think I'm making him nervous.

00:29:37
Speaker 1: Come on, wey Mo, come on.

00:29:39
Speaker 2: Wait minutesn't know what I'm doing, and now he won't move. This is actually Waimo is the most gracious. Oh he's taken Wo's gone the other direction, now running alongside Weymouth way more stopped.

00:29:51
Speaker 1: I'm making way more nervous. Let's go Waymo, Let's go, let's go, let's go.

00:29:57
Speaker 2: I'm out running Waymouth Cutmo, way moos come to us.

00:30:02
Speaker 1: Stop now Wemo is trying to get around me. Let's see. This is exhausting. Let's go way more stopping again. I'm gonna let him.

00:30:20
Speaker 2: Whom doesn't know what he's doing. Actually, woman knows what he's doing. He doesn't know what I'm doing when m's going the other direction. Now he thinks he's gotten away from me.

00:30:32
Speaker 1: Not so fast, my friend.

00:30:36
Speaker 2: Wee must don't come back to a stop. I'm messing with Wimo's head cutting in front of weymou. Wait what is Waymo want to do here? I wonder if w was angry at me?

00:30:49
Speaker 13: Now he's taking off. Oh he comes through hall Waymo is freaked out, freaked out. He thinks he's going. He's got ahead of me. I'm gonna catch him.

00:31:03
Speaker 1: Wait, how dud you let me get in Waimo stop.

00:31:25
Speaker 2: Weimo was the perfect gentleman. He let me be the crazy one.

00:31:30
Speaker 1: Remember this the next time.

00:31:31
Speaker 2: Some Silicon Valley Visionary promises you a future of perfect mobility, efficiency and clarity from the backseat of an autonomous vehicle. No, no, no, it's much better than that. It's me and Lance and Jonathan Vaughters and Jacob with his beach ball taking back the road.

00:31:53
Speaker 1: I love you, WEIMO.

00:32:02
Speaker 2: Revisious History is produced by me LaBelle Lehman Gesteu and Jacob Smith with Eloise Linton and on an Eye. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Kerra, mastering by Fln Williams, and engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew had a fine Carly MCGLIORI, Maya Canig, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Eisberg.

00:32:32
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Babba.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: Don't forget my latest book, The Bomber Mafia, which is an expansion of several episodes from the last season of Revisionist History. You can find it wherever books are sold, but by the audiobook at Bombermafia dot com and you'll get a bonus listener's guide and you can listen in the podcast app you're using now.

00:33:05
Speaker 1: Awesome. We got our first response to the tree.

00:33:09
Speaker 4: This will all end in tears.

00:33:11
Speaker 1: Oh yes it will. It will, but not the only.

00:33:13
Speaker 4: Things to many DiscT we get one in the bad. Don't take something you see a brick weekend, but you.

00:33:20
Speaker 3: Spent will be like to see.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's perfect. Ghost Ride the whip ghost ride, the whip Joys. Happy, thank you, walliemam