Pirate Wires - There's A War On Self Driving Cars | PIRATE WIRES EP#8

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

EPISODE EIGHT: The battle of self driving rages on. While companies like Waymo are producing their highest safety scores, politicians & unions are actively fighting to create anti-self driving propaganda. We review Sanjana's article "Labor’s Shadow War With Self-Driving Cars" and Lee Edwards joins us to break down all of the clown world discourse. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman and special guest Lee Edwards Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/labors-shadow-war-self-driving-cars Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Lee Twitter: https://twitter.com/terronk TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:30 - Welcome Lee Edwards To The Pod! 2:18 - Everything Self Driving Cars - Trolling & Discourse 5:25 - Sanjana's Article On Pirate Wires On Self Driving Cars 10:30 - The True Stats On Waymo Safety 18:00 - Traffic Fatalities In SF 19:15 - The People Involved In Anti-Self Driving Policies 22:20 - Why Do Unions Hate Self Driving? 29:30 - Gaslighting 31:10 - How The SF Fire Chief Is Involved 34:50 - How Unions Control Everything 41:45 - Apology 47:00 - Scooter Ban - Why Do Politicians Ruin Everything Good 51:30 - Response To Our Article 54:00 - ESG Lies and Racist Undertones 58:20 - Self Driving Isn't Going Anywhere 58:45 - Follow Lee On Social Media - PW Podcast Every Friday!! See You Next Week

there is just this kind of person who is attracted to power who likes to control people who just likes to like be in charge of shit you listen it's like substitute teacher energy and they are in charge of the critical infrastructure of every city in the country and there's like the worst people alive it's crazy let's say i i really do believe that scooters for example were banned because they just kind of bothered someone in charge of the government that was it they were like there's too much clutter and they banned it. It's like, that's crazy. You shouldn't get to make a decision like that. Welcome back to the pod. We've got Brandon back after a few weeks off on hiatus. He was exploring the Amazon. You can talk about it later. We've got Sanjana here today

to talk about her story about self-driving cars and the deranged San Francisco activists who have been, well, I mean, that's my framing, not hers. We'll just let her tell the story in a second. um i've known i've known i've known lee for a handful of years now um we've i think that like i mean i'm not even sure now where we connected or how exactly i remember but it was a uh there was a there was an event where we were connecting lgbtq uh vcs and media folks. Oh, that's what it was. It was a lot of tension, but kind of a tense peace until you started coming and blew the whole thing up. It was pretty fun. Yeah, they came hard for me. For no reason. I came friendly

and they wanted to attack. This was right after I launched the idea for Hereticon. They went in. One in particular, an ex-Docker person, but that's a whole other story for the time uh lee and i sort of like recon i want to say reconnect we never sort of fell out of connection but i think like where our friendship really became something else was over the on the topic of local politics in san francisco leaves a handful of people who are really involved in that

and um back when i was still living in san franc San Francisco, it was a journey to find just a group of people who cared about this and understood why it was important and also just knew a lot about it. And at least that guy, which inevitably drew him to this podcast today. And we're going to explain why in a second. So self-driving cars, we're going to talk about automation of the driver, I guess, and the fallout of that. So I'm in San Francisco. This is maybe a couple months ago. And because I don't live there full time, I hadn't seen this for a while, or I hadn't seen this in person yet. And coming back from the grocery store and they're in this self-driving car, just sort of like driving towards me. As I cross the road,

it sort of stops peacefully. I continue crossing, it parries on its way. And I thought, it's crazy that we're not talking about this more. There's like a car without a driver just sort of doing loops around the city. That's wild. That's the stuff of science fiction. That is the kind of thing and i before we even get into the topic of the reaction to that and the labor connections and how the city of course is clownishly trying to destroy this thing for no reason whatsoever um i think it's worth just sitting with like how miraculous that is like if you were a 10 year old and you were watching cartoons about self like and there was like a car without a driver that pulled up and you hopped in

and it kind of went on its way. That would have been, that's wild. Like, that's like a crazy, exciting thing that we should all, all of us, I think have something positive to say about. And we really don't. It's like somehow not a part of the news. It's, you don't see this.

There are no specials on HBO, like getting the behind the scenes of the self-driving car from Utopia. I don't know how we got to this place where something that miraculous is not on the front page of every newspaper in the back of my mind like wow there's a real dearth of information on this crazy miracle that's happening in san francisco a couple months go by maybe a month goes by a month and a half goes by um and people are coning the self-driving cars um and want to let sanja get in that in a second but basically you have all these people who ostensibly on behalf of like uncluttering our roads or something are going after self-driving cars. They found that if you put a traffic cone on the hood of a car, it will stop it. It's like sort of the only thing that can stop the self-driving car. And we got into this long conversation at PirateWiresHQ, which is just a Slack channel actually. And we got to talking about just like,

who is responsible for this actually? I think someone, I don't want to say who, said, oh, I think it's, yeah, they seem to really care about traffic or something. It's like, they don't care about traffic. These are all communists. I know it. I don't have to even look too deep to know this. And it's like a question of who I want to know. And I'm being jokey here, right? Like, this is my assumption is this, but I'm like, I want to know who is paying for this. Let me find out. Let me look into it. And so began the sort of journey that she took to get us to the piece on Pirate Wires, where we cover the whole topic.

Labor's shadow war with self-driving cars. And I'm just going to let Sanji sort of take us on the journey. Lay out the facts. We have, on the one hand, this incredible new technology. We've got an experiment. The city is running to see if they're safe. We have relentless media coverage about why they are not. And we have this strange activist class fighting back against them. Who are they?

What's going on? Just give us the story. Yeah. So I should say, Mike, to your credit, when we first started talking about coning, I think I was the person who was like, there's no way that anyone's funding these people. I was like, these are just trolls who have too much time on their hands and are having fun punking the self-driving cars. But when I actually started looking into it, it turns out there are people funding them. Most of the money funding it is coming from unions. And it's actually a pretty systematic opposition to the cars. I think one thing you learn as soon as you start looking

into self-driving cars in San Francisco is that all of the media headlines are terrifying. As soon as you look up self-driving cars, you see headlines about self-driving cars are killing dogs and they're blocking access for first responders to mass shootings and people are having near-death experiences. Well, because it's playing into a primal fear, experiences well it's playing it's a primal fear right i mean we're it's a car without a driver and so i think automatically your first impulse as a regular human in the world is like that's got to be not safe so i think it like doesn't take much just to whip up that kind of terror it's weird because when i read that headline my first reaction as a real normal human

was that's a block from my office nine people were shot um but instead jackie fielder was like look at the car and i'm like what about the that's just sad for us no it yeah i mean that's the thing is like i think you're totally right there's there's this already there's this fear about ai taking over the world and like us giving too much control to these computers. And then you get these headlines about robo taxis, like out of control robo taxis that are running over dogs and stuff. So then I started looking into the actual anecdotes. And first of all, a lot of them are either complete lies or misrepresented. A dog did die. or misrepresented. A dog did die.

So rest in peace to that one dog that died. But it was a small dog that ran out. It was just a small dog. It was a small dog that ran out from behind a parked car. The Waymo did detect it, but it couldn't stop in time because the dog came out of nowhere. A human driver would not have been able to stop either. And tragically, the dog died. but this is not an incident of like self-driving cars are

massively killing dogs you should sanji you should also mention that um there was a human driver that was monitoring the car in the driver's seat so the human didn't stop in time, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, so that's a great point. And the mass shooting thing, the thing about a cruise car blocking a mass shooting, that was completely fabricated. First responders actually came out afterward and they were like, no, this is not what happened. The cruise car stopped when it realized that there was an emergency happening it made a u-turn and it pulled over to the curb this is completely fabricated um and a lot of the near-death experiences are also just misrepresented i mean this is like we talked about in the article um this twitter user jason prado saying that he was nearly jackknifed, quote unquote, at the hands of a-

Was he in a semi-truck? How do you get jackknifed? Yeah, I mean, it's- My question is like, how do we not always just immediately go to, like just Google these people? It's like, he works, isn't he like, he's like DSA. He's a committed left-wing activist.

He hates tech. And it's like, this is obviously what's happening is like this has nothing to do with self-driving cars or safety this is a person staging a whole thing to go after this company because he has a problem with the concept of companies in general it's worth noting he probably does hate tech but but if you also if you look at his linkedin he's done three full vesting periods three of the four fact companies yeah that's i mean that's sandra's also working on a piece on Dean Preston. It's like, this is just, it's kind of like the background of all the anti-tech activists

in the city. So on the safety thing, it's like, so you have this class of the Jason Prados of the world who are really trying to weave this crazy story of unsafe cars. You have the media that's picking it up immediately and disseminating the information across Twitter. You've mentioned a few of the anecdotes, the sort of more popular anecdotes of why these things are not safe. Can you just lay down what you found just in terms of safety period? There have to be some accidents. So how many rides have there been? How many accidents have there been? How does that compare to accidents generally? Yeah. So, well, the cruise and the Waymo

cars, I should say by any metric, the rollout has been a resounding success. So they've now driven over a million miles, I think in San Francisco, and there've been no fatalities. The Waymo has been involved in two collisions, both of which were caused by the in this first million miles, both of which were caused by humans. And the cruise there, I think there was only one collision that resulted in injury and it was also caused by a human and basically a human. And I think the cruise is making like an unprotected left turn and the human sort of ram into the human driver ran into the cruise car. ram into the, the human driver ran into the cruise car. And, you know, we lay out like all of the numbers in our article, but it really, there have been like a vanishingly small number of incidents. And when you look at the major ones, of which there've been very few, they have all been caused by humans. And the real, what we found by looking at the data is that the real

safety concern actually seems to be that sometimes these cars are blocking first responders in certain instances. The mass shooting was a hoax. The mass shooting response thing was a hoax. But there have been some- The mass shooting was real. This isn't that kind of podcast. To be clear, there was actually a mass shooting that nobody seems to care about but the car didn't fuck up the the safety there was a gang-related mass shooting in the mission yes that is real the claim that a cruise car obstructed first responders at that mass shooting is false um and yeah so so we basically that was by jackie fielder who is she's running for

district nine after hillary ronan uh turns out and she's been endorsed by i guess what i would call the city family she does have challengers yeah um so i mean we and we saw we found i mean there was just massive amounts of of data manipulation on the part of the city in terms of assessing how dangerous these cars were. And I don't know if we want to get into that alone, I mean, not only at the top of the... Yeah, I said, this is a sort of miracle technology. We should all be excited about it. You would think that people who run the city would be proud of this. I mean, you're the city where this is happening. This is a paradigmatic sort of world-changing technology or a paradigm-altering world-changing

technology. changing technology um or a paradigm altering world changing technology and it seems like every single seat in the house is every official seat in the house where i mean like the board of soups and the mayor um the fire chief who we got to get into in a minute i mean everyone's trying to take these things down mayor especially i was surprised it's like this is supposed to be a moderate um what is going on there lee why don't you uh because lee actually originally um we connected sanji with lee and this is like the sort of orientation of here's how local politics works and i believe you took sanji on a uh yeah got the experiment give us like the sort of local political play of the land like why is this happening? Why are these cars, they're definitely safe. They're pretty exciting. Why are they being targeted?

Yeah. I think it's interesting to try to read into motivations, but maybe isn't so hard. I think there's a handful of folks on the board of supervisors. And I think chief among them would be Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston, who basically just hate tech at every turn. Whatever the excuse is going to be, it's going to be an attack on tech. These are people, they tweet about tech bros. Dean Preston has said a couple of times, the underlying problem is actually capitalism. We need to change that. He calls himself a democratic socialist, but he's actually a communist. If you look at what the DSA believes, look at the kind of book clubs and readings they do together, it's not social. I even had a DSA person say to me before he knew who I was, he was like,

I'm a, what do we call ourselves? I mean, I'm actually a communist, but we call it, oh, democratic socialist. That's what we're calling ourselves now. And I'm like, yeah, you'd have to tell me that. The mask has been off for a while. So yeah, they hate tech. That's their goal. They think that tech people are responsible for the rise in the cost of housing, which actually we're responsible for record-breaking tax revenue, and they're responsible for not building any housing. They're responsible for the most expensive infrastructure projects that this country has ever seen in terms of dollars per mile. And even when we managed to complete something like the Chinatown Muni stop, it's underutilized because it's not very useful in terms of where it connects to. And so I think that's their motivation. I think the other thing that's happened with them, there's been a market shift. All of them kind of started coming out against AVs at the same time and actually on the same day, just shortly after unions started really talking about this. And there was as at the same time and actually on the same day, just shortly after unions started

really talking about this. And there was a victory at the state level that they were above the board about. They said, look, we're standing with the unions. We're going to mandate that all self-driving trucks have a safety driver to protect the jobs. But for some reason- So wait, I'm sorry. The demand is that all self-driving cars have a driver for freight trucks on highways at a state level yeah um by the way like for people that want to get into the tech the the truck problem is dramatically easier than the city problem like we solved the truck problem years ago um and uh they cited safety here and that's a lie i i don't i don't think because it's because it's a different kind of program, I don't know that we have the data,

but, I mean, crashes per mile for a freight truck are going to be dramatically safer with an AV. But in any case, they started, after the Teamsters started talking about this stuff and right after that vote passed, I started noticing the city folks, city officials kind of talking about this. Tomlin came out against it. He runs

transportation here. And then I mentioned Jackie Fielder, who's running in D9 against Trevor Chandler, who, as far as I can tell, is more concerned with bigger issues in the mission than this. Jackie seems to be fixated on attacking tech,

and Trevor wants to improve the district. So if I'm going to be, you know, if I want to give them credit, I do think that a lot of what Tomlin wants to do, it is his point of view on transportation. He wants to reduce cars, he wants to move more people faster, but at the same time, I think, you know, the very

first thing he says in his most recent podcast is his exasperation when tech people come to him with these solutions and how he's seen it before. And he's like, you know, prove it to me, these tech guys, he calls us. So, you know, I think he's relatively fair from time to time. But if that's your mentality, I don't understand where we go. Like, imagine going to Mayor Francis Suarez and saying, Mayor, I have a technology that will save 50,000 American lives a year. And I want to start it in Miami. Do you think he's going to go, oh, I've seen this before. No, I think that he'll tweet about it and then do nothing because he's not a real mayor. But that's another podcast for another day. I don't want to try to be generous, but you're the one that you're closer to. Is Tim Lin the one that's doing the Vision Zero program that aims to reduce all traffic fatalities to zero? Yes, they claim. And Dean Preston also tweeted about it recently. He said, you know, we're revitalizing it. We're bringing it back. And I replied and asked him where AVs fit into

Vision Zero, considering they are the safest ride share vehicle on the road. And he, of course, didn't reply. Also, traffic fatalities san francisco were at an all-time high last year i'm pretty sure um like the vision zero plan is not is not succeeding at all what so let's i want to go back to i mean we're kind of dancing around the i think the meat of the story here you know it's like the clownish attack on the cars is one thing the media is inevitable um that you would have a handful of people on the board who hate tech going after tech. You kind of expect all of these things, that they'd all be connected, you would expect. You would expect the activists who actually working for this sort of like Dean Presson youth group or whatever the hell it was, which is a fact, like it was like one of his little minions was out there. One of the city supervisor, this is a person, this is your legislator in the city. One of someone who worked with him is out there attacking these cars. Um, you expect that in San Francisco.

Sergeant, can you tell us more about the labor connections here? And Lee kind of started to touch on it where, you know, on the same day, everyone sort of jumped out and, and started espousing similar talking points. It same day, everyone sort of jumped out and started espousing similar talking points. It felt sort of coordinated. Give me the picture there. All right. So I should say all of the politicians who have been most strenuously opposed to self-driving cars, people like Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston. I mean, Jeffrey Tumlin is not a politician, really, but even the fire chief who's come out and said that she's, you know, doesn't think A.V. is ready for primetime. They all have been endorsed by either labor unions like the Teamsters or they've received, I mean, they've been endorsed and received campaign money from Teamsters. received campaign money from Teamsters. And so we found a lot of very clear instances of Teamster involvement in anti-self-driving car activism. So one of the most clear things we found is

a Twitter account that is clearly astroturfed by the Teamsters and their consulting firm called Berlin Rosen. And the Twitter account is like dogs for autonomous vehicle education, where they're basically pushing this narrative of self-driving cars, killing dogs and being unsafe for dogs. And so that's a clear example of, of the Teamsters being involved. You know, they also, you have people like Aaron Peskin and Raphael Mandelman and Dean Preston, who came out in support of the bill for safety drivers for self-driving trucks and said, we're standing with the Teamsters. So they've actually tweeted about this. You know, this is verifiable information where you have them saying thank you to the teamsters for standing against autonomous vehicles

and protecting these important jobs. And also say Jeffrey Tumlin in his recent podcast, which we'll talk about in a bit, because he had to issue an apology basically and retract some of his misleading statements about self-driving cars, said at one point that the self-driving technology is not going to replace drivers because drivers do so much more than drive and so it's again this kind of he called them uh cruise cruise guides was that what it was he said he said that the people who drive the muni bus are driving a cruise i'm like if i were on a cruise where the kind of shit that happens on muni happened i would get a refund but um yeah and i mean so so the labor connection is is really clear in these instances of astroturfing

and also just you know it's clear that in the case of the trucks they are actually saying this is because of the teamsters um and so you know it's just a sort of classic, the sort of classic fear of labor being replaced. Is that actually what's motivating all of this? but there's a lot of shady stuff that happened with the the fire chief basically being appointed by the unions um and that comes on the head of like before we get to the fire sheet i i do i want to get into that for sure i want to tell here the whole fire chief story it's crazy but but why what is the motivation for the unions to oppose this at all i mean they're not it would have to be late it just seemed to me i mean the obvious the intuitive thing is just like it's labor like it's the it's the it's the idea of what should be a job being automated by a robot and this is a fear that we've seen forever really since the industrial revolution um i made the mistake of using the word luddite as a pejorative like a

year ago or something and i got this crazy pile on from socialists, which I didn't see coming. Usually I court it. I invite it. I love it. This was not that I was like, whoa, I didn't even know you guys cared about this. Like I thought socialists, I mean, I'm used to like communism socialists, like the Soviet union, they loved technology. They were all about automating stuff and going to space. And you look at some of the old pictures depicting Soviet Russia and it's like, they have like moon colonies and shit. It's like very science fiction-y. It was like the flip side of America back then. This was not that. There's like this really virulent strain of anti-tech, anti-technology, sort of socialist-y labor, sort of. That's the kind of thing. It feels like that.

It feels like we're right back there. And at a time with artificial intelligence, it seems like maybe this is going to become a much bigger reaction. It's not just in San Francisco, it's going to be everywhere. I mean, one of the big unions that's against I mean, one of the big unions that's against the AV rollout is the SFTWA, the Taxi Workers Alliance. So that seems like an obvious, I mean, I would expect them to be against the rollout of AVs just because they want to protect their own jobs. And they are out. I think they actually had, they've like protested. And there's pictures of them online, you know, saying like saying like basically we're going to lose our jobs if uh this av rollout happens um but i think less obvious to me is why for example for example the whole firefighters union is against av rollout um i don't know if it's just maybe lee you have some insight into the into the into the sort of relationships here but is it just a a matter a matter of the labor just rides together type situation? Yeah, for sure.

If one union is against something, they're all against something? For sure. I mean, look, and this is just descriptive. I actually personally have a lot of sympathy for the short-term displacement of labor, but you're seeing it in LA right now with SAG-AFTRA and then Hotel Workers Union is riding along with them to the point that the Lieutenant Governor of California, after going to a Taylor Swift concert a few weeks ago, has now asked Taylor Swift to postpone because of the hotel workers strike. So they do band together and you can actually see there are now deleted tweets that I thankfully have screenshots of firefighters and police officers, the official accounts, thanking Waymo for the training courses that they co-designed together.

Because obviously we want training for the firefighters. And these problems that they're putting up are solvable with training, right? And with software on their side. So they were working together. And then the day that the firefighters union decided to tweet, you know, just a few days after the teamster spoke at city hall, um, those tweets were deleted, um, all at once. So, um, I don't know the relationship between the officer, which, which tweets were deleted. Oh, they had, they were literally, there was a tweet, there was a picture of a Waymo and a firefighter. Thank you to the Waymo team. Yeah. Why would they delete it? I don't, this is,

why are they, I don't understand any of the strategy behind the labor stuff. It's like in the first place, if you were to just say, you're a union person, you're like, I don't like this because they're going to take away jobs, right? That is, I understand. I don't agree with that, but I understand that. It's an argument. I completely understand if they were to get mad about it and be protesting it on those grounds.

I think Tucker Carlson has made similar arguments to this respect. Actually, I know he has. He did it in the debate with Ben Shapiro. He talked about this. You'd have a lot of political support from the far right and the far left, and maybe even a lot of people in the middle who are like, I don't know about all this technology stuff. I get all that. One, they're hiding from it. Two, so it's like not a direct argument on those grounds. Two, they're hiding the fact that they're even opposing it. Like, what? Why?

What is going on there? Yeah, I mean, we sort of discussed this at the end of the article. I just think that, so I think that the Luddite response, and again, luddite is not a pejorative term in this case there was actually an op-ed that was published in the san francisco chronicle that we quote at the end of the article um and i think the headline is something like people are calling anti-av activist luddites and for them it's not an insult it's like i don't that's not the headline but it's something like it's a an identity it's an identity yeah well it was a labor movement i mean that article was sort of like hey you dummies an identity. Yeah. Well, it was a labor movement. I mean, that article was sort of like, hey, you dummies, didn't you know the Lada Tour labor movement?

I'm like, yeah, I'm quite well aware. Like every student in history knows that was a labor movement. But I think the journalist might have discovered it that day. Yeah, but I think. Well, let's not call her a journalist. I think that the intuition is that people are going to recognize that the benefits of self-driving cars, the fact that almost, I think it's over 40,000 people in the US die in car accidents every year and millions die worldwide every year. The benefits of this technology are definitely in the long run going to outweigh the downsides.

I mean, yes, AI is going to restructure our economy. And there are serious considerations, serious labor considerations to take into account. It's not trivial that these self-driving cars are eventually going to get rid of a lot of taxi jobs and bus driving jobs and all of these jobs that currently exist in the economy. But people recognize that the benefits are going to outweigh the cons. And I think that the fact that they're using safety and fear-mongering arguments instead of the labor argument is a recognition of the fact that people are going to sort of see through on some level this labor opposition to the technology. Because at the end of the day, I just don't think that you can sustainably oppose a powerful, beneficial new technology

on the grounds that we need to preserve our old economic paradigm. I think that's why they're not being upfront about the labor concern. That's a really good point. I mean, and even I would say about half of the transit activists here, about half of them are communists and hate this crap. The other half that just they're literally like, hey, the streets are safer because a cyclist, if I ride next to a Waymo, the Waymo will never enter the bike lane. I take a Waymo almost every day. It will not drop me off into a bike lane. It alerts me when someone's coming, so I don't door them.

And then, you know, it can be programmed to someone's coming, so I don't door them. And then, you know, it can be programmed to obey the laws, which humans don't do. Humans are horrible at riding with bicycles. So half of them recognize that. And so, yeah, I'd really consider that. Maybe it's just because they know it's a losing argument. So they're picking one that involves lies that they think is winning. Yeah, I think if you just think about it for a second, it's like so gaslighting, the argument that they're making. Because, I think if you just think about it for a second, it's like so gaslighting the, the argument that they're making, because I mean, when's the last time you were cut off by a crazy driver when you were driving? It was probably like yesterday, you know, like it's not hard to,

right. I mean, like every time you go out in a car, some crazy crazy person you see somebody acting crazy in in in their car and putting your life at danger you know and it's it's it's a i feel like it's a powerful meme to to you know like the dog meme right the dead dog uh meme or um right it's like how many dogs have been killed since that story came out actually killed by cars Exactly. They don't want to compare to a baseline, right? They never compare to the baseline. We can get into that if we dig into this data. But like, you know, if you compare to the baseline, these cars are incredible.

So I guess, and it's just, so you have, I mean, the media, it's obvious. It's like you have the whole lie, whatever, Solai, what is her name? Solai Ho. Solai Ho. So Sol I ho is just socialist. And that's why she's in the back for this stuff. You know, hardcore labor activist. She's writing for The Chronicle. It's insane. I of understand why they're doing it, even if everyone is sort of lying about the fact that they are doing it. What is, tell me about the fire sheet, like paint the picture for me of the sort of like the clownishness of all that. So her appointment, I'll say just to be generous looks strange the way that she got her job.

And by the way, I should mention that. So first off, her name's Janine Nicholson, and she is a, she's an impressive woman. She's a 25 year veteran of the fire department, has been on the front lines fighting fires. She was a paramedic at one point during her, during her tenure, a breast cancer survivor. And most recently before her appointment as fire chief was the deputy chief of administration. So like all due respect to Janine Nicholson, but the way that she got again elected to her position was a bit strange. So I'll try to explain it and hopefully listeners can understand the connections that I'm making. So in 2019, the previous fire chief retired. Her name

was Joanne Hayes White. And apparently what they do to replace a fire chief is they put a fire commission together. So this fire commission is in charge of creating a short list of candidates to then give to the mayor who picks, who chooses from that short list, who's going to be the next fire chief. And the mayor at that time is London Breed, okay, who also was a former fire commissioner, which I didn't know before today, which is kind of cool. So this fire commission considers an initial 36 candidates, each of whom has to answer this eight page questionnaire on everything from their management style, budget issues, how to do emergency medical procedures, high rise fire procedures. So like a super in-depth application process. They selected the fire commission, selected seven, super in-depth application process. They selected, the fire commission selected seven, 11 of these people to interview and then sent three to five names

from those 11 to Mayor Breed. Okay. So sometime after Breed gets these names and before she can pick a name, Firefighters Union Local 798, which represents the department's workforce, sends a letter to Breed saying they don't like anyone on that list because none of them have enough experience, I think was their reason. Okay. So previous to getting elected, local 798 spent $800,000 in independent expenditure money on electing Breed. Okay. So 798 supports Breed here. So after Breed gets the letter from 798, she tells the fire commission, you have to reopen the selection process, basically just redo the whole thing. Okay. Fire commission comes back with three new names. One of them is Janine Nicholson. Breed appoints Nicholson. Okay.

Then 798 immediately comes out backing Nicholson, praising Breed for the decision. And again, like we talked about earlier today, 798 is on record coming out against the AV rollout. And much of the anti-AV reporting has been based on comments that Nicholson has said, saying that the AVs aren't ready for primetime. So, I mean, these are a lot of different connections. for prime time. So, I mean, these are a lot of different connections and, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to make too strong statements here, but it kind of adds up to a picture of a union with leverage over a mayor who, enough leverage over the mayor who then installs their

pick for the fire chief who then goes out and does what they want so just saying i mean you know one thing one thing i found is as i've been tweeting about unions people get in my replies and say i should be careful talking about them so i feel you know it's just like very clear that they have an enormous amount of power and i think uh i think this is the next big, well, we'll see. I mean, my sense is that this should be the next big political fight in America. And it should start with the teachers union. You have a huge public sector union that shut down whole segments of the economy over COVID. But I guess we're entering this sort of memory holing of COVID era in America. So I'm not even sure if we're ever going to deal with that. But that was,

I think, when Americans first started talking a little bit more about unions and the power of unions. And in San Francisco, it seems like they control the whole thing up to and including the police officers union. It's like every one of these unions has a lot of power. You have unions controlling construction, you have unions controlling education, you have unions controlling policing. And then in these situations, we're seeing with the AV car sort of situation, it's like they work in tandem for strange reasons that don't seem to matter much to the average person, but matter a lot to whatever special interest happens to be attached to that alliance. And it's crazy. Yeah, it does. It's like

it seems a little bit nerve wracking. These people have a lot of power. They control sort of every element of the country. And it's like, maybe you don't want to oppose that. Maybe you don't want to speak out too hard against that. There's a veiled threat of violence like you know just to put it out there and uh i have people yeah i've had folks in government tell me some of the weird intimidation that's happened to them via various humans the thing that's weird to me is i no no no no no you can't just say tell me give me an example of the weird of the weird violence the weird intimid example of the weird violence, the weird intimation of violence or here is that the purpose of the union is to help the employees negotiate against the employer. Right. And the weird thing about public sector unions is we're the employer. They worked for us. Like when when the police when POA circles the wagons over some bad news story and kind of covers up things that happen or sort of defend against bad actors like actors, that's them negotiating against us. But it's funny-

Well, they're negotiating, but they're not negotiating with us, right? So that's the real insidious part of it is not only should you not be able to negotiate against taxpayers, but they're negotiating with other agents of the state. So it's like you have people negotiating against each other and they all agree. And so that negotiation goes one way. The unions get whatever they want. And now we're in a situation in California, these massive, these crazy pensions that can't ever pay back and just incredible amounts of power in the hands of the dumbest people alive in the case of the teachers union. And look where it leads us, like sort of again and again um and i think it's gonna get worse because we're sort of we're entering this this

new union era so the funny thing is even to make friends let's just say quickly like even my friends who are very defund the police um when i talk to them about the police union they're they don't want to touch it because they're worried that attacking one union it kind of hits the other they're pro teachers union they're pro they're worried that attacking one union kind of hits the other. They're pro-teachers union, they're pro-firefighters union, pro-labor unions. And I'm like, but if you care about the defund the police stuff, if you care about police violence, I'm surprised the POA gets a pass. Lee, what's your read on the, why is the SFMTA anti-AV? Why is the SFMTA anti-AV? They're the ones that released that bogus data that included a six-fold increase in absolute number of collisions over the course of 2022.

Right. Without qualifying the fact that there was a huge increase in number of driverless hours and a big increase in the fleet size. Why are they opposing it? I think the generous read is they're looking to kind of remake the city to be less car dependent. increase in the fleet size, why are they opposing it? I think the generous read is they're looking to kind of remake the city to be less car dependent. I think that's maybe fair. I do think that's part of it. I also think there's some job security involved here, frankly. They're sort of blaming... In the Sumlin's most recent interview, he kind of talks about how Uber and Lyft sort of promised to reduce car ownership and reduce traffic by having these sort of rideshare and things like that.

And he says it's moved the other direction. I think it's kind of deflecting responsibility, though, because the reason people don't ride Muni like they ride the MTA in New York is because Muni sucks. And MTA in New York is awesome. And the MTA, Mike Bloomberg rides the MTA. He could take a helicopter everywhere he wants and he rides the MTA because it's amazing. It's convenient. It's fast. It's available. Muni is kind of garbage. I take it all the time, but it's only because I happen to live in service

areas. The service area coverage is bad. When they kind of launch into their rants about equity, I'd love to get an equity analysis of where Muni lines railed. Muni rail is late. And, you know, I think, yeah, I think it's a good way to deflect responsibility. They can always blame tech for their problems instead of accountability.

Tell me about this, the Toonland thing you've referenced a few times, Brandon. What was that one? I don't have anything on Toomlin. I think Sanjay looked into the podcast where he apparently misrepresented some of the facts behind. Is this like another, he works for the MTA?

He's the head of San Francisco's MTA, Municipal Transportation Agency. And he was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago where, Elias, you've been saying, he really misrepresented the situation with AV. And he made some statements. It's not, so I listened to the podcast and it's not clear which statements he's now going to issue.

Because all of it was like, he said at one point, I have a quote from him. But he said that he talked about the car's complete inability to respond to unpredictability, which is causing systematic failure or systemic failure, which doesn't make any sense. Anyone who's seen the cars knows that they're very capable of responding to unpredictable circumstances and, you know, scooters coming everywhere in San Francisco's urban environment is just about one of the biggest, it's like you can't get much more unpredictability on the road than the

streets in San Francisco. You can't get much more unpredictability on the road than the streets in San Francisco. And so he was on this podcast and he issued, he was basically, the podcast issued a statement two days ago. This podcast came out two weeks ago, but they just issued a statement two days ago. They said, we've been informed that some of the statements made by Jeff Tumlin in this episode were not factual and misrepresented some practices of AV companies, including prior engagement with SFMTA. And then they said they don't specify what the misrepresentations are. They're everywhere in the podcast. But they say that Jeffrey Tumlin is going to be on the podcast again in late August to issue, like he's going to basically give an addendum and say what he got

wrong. Weird that it's happening in late August. But yeah, that's the tumlin, the lowdown on tumlin. We could go line by line on that podcast. But I think the one thing it's sort of, you know, as part of this bigger narrative, I think one thing that was really interesting about this is how much he talked about, you know, these tech guys are going to come to me and I need them to pitch me. And the one thing I care about is we move more people faster. Because there makes some sense here. The size of the roads really isn't going to change. Can we kind of push more people through them?

And then he also talks about equity and he talks about environmental considerations. And then he talks about their business model and how the Uber and Lyft business models are working. By the way, check Uber's last earnings report if you think that the narrative that Uber's business is failing is kind of bunk now. But it reminded me of what Dean Preston said in his first tweet about EVs that he's like, what are they doing for our city? What are they doing? Why are they here? What are they doing for us? And what is he doing for our city? That's an even better question. That's the question that I have, but sorry, continue. Yeah. Nothing good is the answer. But my response to both him and Tomlin is like,

it's not your job. I don't care what your business strategic assessment of these businesses is. I don't care. Tulip's assessment of these businesses is. I don't care. Tulip's talking about the sustainability of the business model, and I'm like, are you qualified to do that? Does it matter? No, you're here to focus on public transit, and you're doing a terrible job of it. Please just stay in that lane and fix that. And when you're done with that, you can come and talk to us about business. I agree. It is a weird sort of ownership. For Preston, it makes sense because Preston's a

communist and it's like his impulse is that he should just own every business that exists. He should be running it all. He was elected a supervisor in Haight-Ashbury. That should make him naturally in charge of all the industry in the city. I understand where he's coming from. From the rest, I really don't. You guys seem to have quite a big plate. We have endemic homelessness. We have no working transportation. We have education that you can't get your kids into, like a safe, healthy, good school. It seems like the problem of human shit in the street has been taken care of. Has anyone else noticed that? I don't know.

Like it's when you're in the city, it's like not quite as bad as it used to be. So I don't know whoever got on that. You know, there's someone out in city government somewhere who's responsible for that. Thank you. Well done. There was a dog that went to the hospital recently from a fentanyl overdose. We were told that dogs eating poop with drugs in it is not true, but it just keeps actually happening.

Yeah. The fentanyl problem. So it's just like they seem to have a lot of problems and I would like for them to focus on just one or two of those before they move into business. I will say, I do understand if your job is to like, you're responsible for transit. I understand being curious about, interested in the topic generally. And I will also say that I don't know that Uber did necessarily what we thought it was going to do. Maybe it's a good business, but why not ask the question of whether or not these things are good for the city? And I will say, I think I'm glad Uber exists. It's definitely like an unambiguous good in my life.

Love being able to call a car and get to the airport and things like this. I could never find a taxi late at night. I think that probably Uber has saved a lot of lives from drunk driving and things like this. All of that I love. I will just say though that when Uber emerged, my expectation of Uber was that it was going to be like people were going to own less cars and that I guess there would be, because they weren't going to be parked in front of my house, there'd be less congestion and things like this. This was certainly 10 years ago, a narrative that we told ourselves and I believed, and it's not true. It's like actually it just increased the demand for rides. Taxis were so bad that people weren't taking them. They had found other

ways to get around the city or get where they were going, or just they traveled less, things like this. Uber increased the demand. And so you created a new market for something that didn't exist before. It actually increased congestion in a lot of these cities. Something like self-driving cars, we're expecting it to be better, but that's not really how these things work. I think that the end sort of results will be probably a little bit unpredictable. And it just comes down to the question of whether or not we should be allowed to make choices about what we want to use or we should not. I think one very easy example of this is the scooter where like, I don't know, what was the great public good of having these scooters? I can think of some stuff. I can sit here and make arguments, but at the end of the day, I just

fucking liked them. I liked the scooter. I liked driving the scooter. I'm in Miami. They ban them here too. I loved hopping on a scooter and scooting off to Wynwood. It was an easy ride. It was cheaper than Lyft and Uber. And it was fucking fun. And they're gone now. And why? Why are they gone? It's my right. I have a right to a scooter. They have to prove their right to exist to the ruler. The market can't decide. The supervisors must decide. You have this nanny, separate from the labor thing, separate from the power thing, separate from the power thing, separate from the money thing, there is just this kind of person who is attracted to power, who likes to control people,

who just likes to be in charge of shit. It's like substitute teacher energy. And they are in charge of the critical infrastructure of every city in the country. And there's the worst people alive. It's crazy. I really do believe that scooters, for example, were banned because they just kind of bothered someone in charge of the government. That was it. They were like, there's too much clutter and they banned it. It's like, that's crazy. You shouldn't get to make a decision like that. Dean Preston also had a tweet about the bike share that he thought it was crazy that some of these private companies were making money off these bike shares and he wanted to remove the private ones and replace it with the public ones. It's like, it's nice that you as a communist think that business is crazy, but it's like not what you're here for. You're here to

basically make sure the trains are running on time. And guess what? They're not. So let's stay in our lane, please. It seems also like a sort of territory issue. You have these companies like Lime and Bird, which I think Bird is not doing so well anymore. But who just, I think they didn't ask for permission. I think they just put their, suddenly like there were scooters everywhere. Right. Right. Because there is no way to get permission.

Yeah. And as a person in charge of transit in a city, I could see, you know, you being like, wait, you know, nobody asked me here. And there's a bunch of people using a type of transit that I didn't approve of. So I don't like that. But if they make it so difficult to get approval, then... And they do and they will. It's like, yeah, you're never going to get the approval. And also there are all sorts of things like, I mean, we ride bikes, we don't have to get approval for that. Rollerblades, we need approval. Skateboards, still no. Unicycle, I saw riding down the street the other day. I

don't think anyone got a permit for that. What is it about scooters? I guess it's specifically like they're parked on the side of the sidewalk. I don't understand why that matters. I think it's stupid. It's like a public... It's also also it seems like a public good in a way, but it's actually a private business. You know, I want to get to this for everyone. But yeah, for everyone. So what happens when you have a tent city on the sidewalk? That seems like why is that allowed and not a fucking scooter? That's crazy to me.

Like, yeah, it is. It is a public space. Someone's living on it right now. So who's taking care of that? There is someone suing. I haven't gone deep in this. I just saw a tweet, but there seems to be someone who is taking an ADA complaint. They called 311 about a tent that was completely blocking the sidewalk and she's vision impaired. I was kind of wondering when this was going to happen, right? Because ADA in the city is nuts. We use ADA to like stop new

affordable housing from being constructed. We use ADA for everything. And I look at the sidewalks and I'm like, wow, I'm really glad I'm not a wheelchair user because I would have a hard time. I'd have to go into the street. So someone's finally suing. I think they just tweeted a couple days ago, so we'll see what happens. Yeah, I saw one blocking access to a beach the other day. There was no other way on it.

It was a public access thing and the cops were just very, it was in LA. There's a venture capitalist who went all the way to the supreme court for a similar thing um so for a beach i don't know if you catch my oblique reference i don't want to get in trouble yeah but he was going was he not going to to to block the beach i think he was like on the side of the right to block yes he wanted to write the right to block the beach and the supreme court told him um so did they i'm on his side for the record. It's on his property.

It's on his property. I believe that what happened was the night circuit ruled against him and the Supreme Court refused to hear it. They're like, we have gotten in way too much trouble right now. Come back in a few years. We can't handle the press at this point. We can't be taking on

the cause of a node's private beach like next year, perhaps. We're busy banning abortion and interracial marriage, potentially. Spot got to cover every topic, really. Last thoughts on the self-driving car. What did we miss on the self-driving car? The war, labor's war, secret war on self-driving car. What did we miss on the self-driving car? The, the war labor's war secret war on self-driving cars in,

in San Francisco. I mean, I feel like we have to talk about, uh, the, the tweet response from a street safe rebel to our, to our article. Um,

they tweeted in response to our article, you all good with indigenous land being desecrated for lithium mining and tire wear pollution killing all the salmon is that your definition of safety and uh it's hard to know whether or not this is i mean it almost seems like this account is run by a troll this was in response so basically someone says you know self-driving cars are perfectly safe or it was i guess our tweet you know talking about the safety of self-driving guards our our article because of sanchez um this person says you know what about the the lithium mining i will say that like that's quite a base tweet like like there is something to that like we do this is a broader there's a there is a it's not just it's all the really complicated

tech stuff so anything that any smart refriger, all the smart devices, and then certainly anything like solar battery technology, all this stuff requires mining of rare metals. And that then requires processing, none of which takes place in America because our environmental regulation won't allow it. So most of it takes place for the processing in China. A lot of it is done by, I mean, we suspect at this point there's slave labor involved in that. And it's a gnarly situation. So when an environmentalist comes at you and is like, we need more, Elon's not going to like this, but when you need more, we need more solar powered cars and self-driving technology, things like this, like there, solar specifically, let's just focus on the environmental impact.

Like it's not actually clear that solar is better for the environment than something like natural gas. Like there are huge downsides to it that no one really wants to face. And at scale, a world of self-driving solar-powered vehicles seems like the future, and it seems utopian as hell, and I want to live in that world. But also, who's going to fix them? Certainly not. You're no longer in the day of your dad getting outside and tinkering around with your car

and fixing it. It's got to go off, not to a regular guy to fix it. It's going to be some specialist. It's going to cost off, not to a regular guy to fix it. It's going to be some specialist. It's going to cost a lot of money. And it's going to be made from metals, mined by slaves and processed in a country we are potentially at war with. It seems like there are complications there. I will just grant that deranged person in our comments.

What about salmon? Are you going to comment on the salmon? Well, I love salmon. And I think anything that improves the salmon population, I'm sort of in favor of. I think he was confused, he or she, because he said tire wear pollution killing all the salmon. And that reminds me of something that we found or Sanji did. One of, I think maybe it was SFMTA or maybe it was like the Office of Disability had an equity concern with AVs. And their specific equity concern was that there was tire wear pollution from these AVs and it would disproportionately impact disadvantaged communities.

The four special words there. They always throw them in. It's like, this is bad at self-driving cars, especially bad for black people. And you're like, wait, what? Did you just, like, you can't just say shit like that. That's crazy. Like, you have to back that up.

That's in this report. How do you make up or down of that? You know, like, because presumably bike tires would also create pollution. So they say it's because of the weight of the EV. Yeah. So the EV is way more. And the crazy thing, I mean, this is why everyone should be forced to build something.

Because there is no, there's nothing in engineering that isn't a trade off, right? And so we're trying to get emissions down. Everyone's like emissions, emissions, emissions, emissions, carbon, carbon, carbon. And then you say, oh, but the vehicle will be heavier. And they're like, ah, well, you, carbon. And then you say, oh, but the vehicle will be heavier. Well, you can't do that then. So on the equity thing, this is one of the things SF put in our way. I think this is such an interesting microcosm for the way that the board of supervisors kills things they don't like. When you look at housing projects, they're like, we need an equity study, we need an environmental study, we need a fire study. Like here's a fire study. Oh,

well, I don't like that one. We need another one. And they ship the goalposts, they change what they're measuring and delay, delay, delay, delay. So one of the things they're asking for is an equity study of DAB. And like I said, I'd love to know the baseline. What's the equity study of the muni? Do we think the muni is going to poor neighborhoods, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or do we think it's mainly supporting people that are going up and down markets for work? And the key thing here is Tumlin said that it needed to have improved equity. And the host of the podcast, the mobility podcast, his credit said, well, why would it be any worse? And he's like, it doesn't matter if it's the same.

It needs to be better. podcast to his credit said well why would it be any worse and he's like it doesn't matter if it's the same it needs to be better um so so like it needs to solve racism in order to get a permit um so so is this whole order complaint that that people in disadvantaged communities won't be able to download the ride hailing app on their phone it might be that right and this is always what we get to with these conversations about improving marginalized communities. They're implicitly extremely bigoted. It's like the idea that what like a black person doesn't know how to download an app. Like they doesn't have a phone. Like, have you met a black person? This is crazy. Like you just don't know what you're talking about. And it's like insulting and racist actually. And these are the people in charge of the critical

infrastructure of the entire country. It is like this all the way down. There's nowhere in this country where important critical infrastructure is not controlled by this exact kind of person. And by the way, the AV, just like most things, software is awesome. There is a decent argument for yellow cabs in new york if you talk to black people who live in new york they'll often say hey the yellow cab won't stop for me particularly if i'm like in harlem and i'm african-american the cab won't stop guess what the av doesn't give a fuck the av doesn't know i mean it could know but there's no reason that it would need to know and it's um so i don't know man it's like a lot of these things are actually going to

get improved by the avs and they're not only like they're just gaslighting us it's like a lot of these things are actually going to get improved by the AVs and they're not only like they're just gaslighting us it's 100% gaslighting shifting to goalposts you know rat fucking I'm just I'm so tired of this stuff well you better rest

up because it's not going anywhere and we are still just in our 30s got a whole life of this guys thank you for joining me well again Brandon and Sanja didn't have a choice you had to join me

Lee thank you for joining us on the PirateWare's pod talking to us about the fucked up San Francisco City government and it's war on self-driving cars that's all for today please I guess you guys definitely have all for today. Please, uh, uh, I guess you guys definitely have to subscribe,

rate, review, comment, tell us that we all look good in the comments, please. Um, I have a very fragile ego. Okay.

Talk to you guys later.