Revisionist History - I Love You Waymo

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Revisionist History travels to Phoenix, Arizona to learn about the future of the automobile. It’s not what you think. It’s much better.Warning: Some of the actions depicted in this episode are dangerous. Do not imitate Malcolm!  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm standing outside a Sozo coffee house in a strip mall near Phoenix, Arizona. Perfectly blue skies, maybe 70 degrees, an imperceptible breeze. My producer, Jacob Smith, is here with me. We're waiting for the coolest car ever made. So it's a, hold on, let's see. What do we got here? We got a, uh,

is it a Nissan? No, no, it's a Pacifica. Oh, it's a Chrysler Pacifica. Actually, a Chrysler Pacifica hybrid. A minivan 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 Waymo. And here on the outskirts of Phoenix, you can order Waymo on an app like an Uber. Our Waymo silently glides up like a spooky ghost ship and we get on board. So hold on, we have this thing. Should we start the ride? 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 Waymo 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 not what we expected. It was better. Doors are closing. Heading to Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Tempe. Oh man, here we go. Make sure your seatbelt is fastened. We sit in the back.

You have to sit in the back of Waymo. 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 limit. Well, I'm curious about that. That's a good question, right? Like, what if we had to? What if... Can I enter like, my wife is pregnant and we're rushing to the hospital? Exactly. I think the only things we could do is press a button that says pull over.

If we were scared or something. I see that. What is it? Pull over? We do not pull over. We cruise down the streets of Chandler. Somewhere unseen, algorithms and artificial intelligences are guiding us unerringly towards our destination. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Tempe. We approach a tiny Toyota with a student driver nervously navigating an intersection. Oh God, the irony. A human learning a task that will, within years of its completion, be obsolete.

In that human's rearview mirror is the future. We should yank the student driver out and just say, 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 Waymo would mean for our future? For all of our future? Not yet. We were still in the bliss state. My epiphany would not come until later that afternoon when I found myself sprinting desperately alongside our Waymo.

Let's go, Waymo! While Jacob looked on helplessly from the backseat. Waymo doesn't know what he's doing. Actually, Waymo knows what he's doing. He doesn't know what I'm doing. We'll come back to this. I promise. He thinks he's gotten away from me. Not so fast, my friend!

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 their iPhone 12 Pro Max.

So in 1885, Carl Benz invented the automobile. Later that year, he took it out for the first public test drive, and true story, crashed into a wall. TED conferences always have at least one speaker gliding across the stage, clicking through PowerPoints on the future of the automobile. For the last 130 years,

we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, the driver. 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.

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 Waymo of the steering wheel turning by itself as the houses and sidewalks whoosh 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 podcast. 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, Waymo. There's no way I would have, I didn't even, I wouldn't even,

I would have gotten boom over that thing. Waymo slowed smoothly for a stoplight, kept a respectful distance from other drivers. One time, we encountered a man in a wheelchair sharing the road. Waymo decelerated elegantly, gave him a generous berth, then cautiously pulled away. I also have to say, totally trust the thing. Like, I have not thought for a second, I feel safe.

Yeah. This is a safe space. This is an automotive safe space. I'll tell you one thing, it's certainly a safer space than the passenger seat of my car when I'm driving. Okay, we just got, someone just pulled out in front of us. Oh, nice. Drove a... Oh, Waymo anticipated the second person, slowed right down.

That was some great defensive driving. Yeah, we encountered some terrible driving from another vehicle who just cut across like six lanes. And Waymo kind of unfazed. Waymo handled it. Waymo, like a pro. We reached our destination,

the Alamo Cinema Drafthouse parking lot. We were so excited, we decided to call up Sashwat Penigrahi, the Senior Director of Product Management at Waymo. We had so much to ask him about, like all the sensors on our minivan. So we have a few. So you're clearly on the dome, what you're seeing on the dome at the top, that's where we have a 19-camera complex over there.

So those are cameras, plus two lasers. One is a medium range, one is a long range. The lasers are technically LiDAR systems, 3D 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. So that can see almost three football fields away. Wait, three football?

That can see 300 yards in every direction? That's right. That's right. Wow. Yeah. And, you know, it can become very helpful. You may have noticed this. As you were going on 45-mile-per-hour roads in Phoenix,

the higher the speed, the longer the car needs to reason about is anything coming at that speed right if it's a very 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 they're very well complemented by those smaller spinning things you must have seen on the sides of the cars yeah and so that helps example, imagine you were in a busy parking lot in front of a Costco or a Walmart. Cars are parked very close to each other. He went on, sensors on the back, radar on the side, microphones to pick up things like a police siren. I asked Sashwat whether Waymo had a blind spot,

like anything it couldn't see. 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, you just check.

No, absolutely not. So that we do not have. Absolutely not. Waymo has no blind spots. Arizona has the 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. Would a city full of Chrysler-Pacifica hybrids, tricked out with radar, LiDAR, 19 cameras, microphones, and the ability to see 300 yards in every direction make Phoenix safer? Yes, it would.

But the future will get even better than that. Way mo 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?

If there's complete information, and so you know exactly how costly 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. 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 you 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 possibility. 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're 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. I'm going to have another talk with Herr Hitler. Only this time, he has told me that it is his intention to come halfway to meet me. So walk us through that scenario, what happened there, and why that perception of Hitler allowed him to get his way. So he's negotiating with Chamberlain, who doesn't really want to have another war, having just had World War I not too long ago. And he tells Chamberlain, look, I'm a German nationalist.

The German people in the Sudetenland are suffering. I want to unify all Germans. That's my mission in life. And 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. So that's his extreme preference. He will do anything to unify Germans. That's how he's presenting himself. Exactly. Yeah. And it seems like Chamberlain believed that. He believed it at least enough to give it a shot and to make this deal with Hitler. 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. 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. 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 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, text at that moment, than me walking in front of them.

Right? 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 Waymos around the streets of Chandler, Arizona, I want to dwell on the issue of deterrence on the streets, because drivers are not rational.

And I think we sometimes lose sight 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 40 years. Cars freak me out. Being out on the road with cars and drivers and distracted drivers, it scares the shit out of me. But, you know, Malcolm, I actually now prefer the mountain bike just so I can be totally away from cars.

And if I'm given 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, I always take the bike path. I don't want to have to think about, you know, cars and people checking out their cell phone or having a few cocktails. It freaked me out. This is Lance Armstrong, a man so utterly and completely badass that he would happily go out on a bike for 100 plus miles

in the middle of the southern French summer, riding at insane speeds up and down massive mountains. I'm a runner. I think runners are the greatest thing ever. 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 a car? Of course. Oh, yeah, yeah, many times. How many times? How many times? Well, I say many times.

I mean, probably, look, getting hit once is too many. I'm probably ride around five. The two worst ones was when I was young. I ran a yellow light on my bike outside of Dallas in the suburbs where I grew up. And I got to the intersection and it turned yellow. I was like, I got this. Well, I made it five of the six lanes. And the sixth lane lady was coming and just hit me straight from the sides.

And I was banged up but 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 and i uh cracked two vertebrae. You could be dead. Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. Next, I called up Jonathan Vaughters, another former professional cyclist. He and Lance were teammates at one point. I wanted to make sure Lance wasn't an exception. No.

Vaughters, just as terrified. 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 kid, 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, there are consequences for me running over this cyclist, but they're viewing you as essentially like subhuman. 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. There's a multi-billion dollar industry, I should say, built upon fear of traffic. Peloton, Zwift, these are, you know, in-home riding a bike and whatever pieces of equipment, hardware, software that are entirely a result of people being afraid to ride in traffic. To Vaughters, 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. To me, the only possible explanation for that, well, there are two possible explanations that society as a whole has gone insane, 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. Yeah, so I don't I don't think we've gone insane yet. There is a reason why when you drive down the street, cyclists and runners and pedestrians aren't inundating you,

competing for the road. They're afraid of you. You. And why are they afraid? Because you're nuts. And in any confrontation, the madman has the upper hand. All drivers are nuts. With one exception.

Waymo. Waymo doesn't have emotions. Waymo doesn't text. Waymo doesn't eat a burger and drive with his knees. Waymo doesn't get angry if you behave like an idiot. Waymo doesn't give you the finger. Waymo doesn't do road rage. Waymo wants to live and let live.

Waymo is your grandmother, only with lightning reflexes and perfect vision to 300 yards. In a world of Waymos, cars aren't the madmen anymore. But if cars aren't the madmen, guess who gets to be crazy? The answer is obvious, my friends. We do. I will admit that I was slow to grasp the actual implications of autonomous driving. I'd been too busy watching all those TED Talks where the Silicon Valley types explained 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 Andersen story, The Emperor's New Clothes. This was framed as a technological problem. It was framed as a space where we just need to figure out the right programming and other technological solutions. To Millard Ball, the issue with autonomous vehicles was people,

specifically the people outside the vehicle. So if you're a pedestrian and you have that confidence that the autonomous vehicle is going to stop and yield to you, as legally it should, then there's nothing to stop you from taking that right-of-way. Pedestrians and drivers now engage in a dangerous game of chicken, each daring the other to do something stupid. But if Waymo takes over, the rules of that game change.

If you know that the other player is much more cautious and is likely to follow the rules, then you're going to win. When you're playing chicken, it helps to be the most crazy player in the game. 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 in its preferences, right? And that allows you to be unpredictable as a pedestrian. Absolutely.

And it gives you an incentive to be seen to be unpredictable. Wait, that line. Hold on. That's lovely. Explain that. Why does it give you an incentive to be seen as unpredictable? The more unpredictable you seem, so the more you behave like you're intoxicated or distracted, then it's the equivalent of being a five-year-old child on the street. The autonomous vehicle is

likely to recognize that unpredictability and be more cautious 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. You need to be obvious about it. Absolutely. 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? 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. 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 LIDAR

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 1920s. 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 a big hug. My running club meets on a crowded track on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where speedy runners compete with errant 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 at rush hour. A hundred of us and the Waymos will sit patiently until we finish. Do you understand how awesome the future is? We get the streets back. We've arrived. Please check your surroundings before exiting the vehicle

and remember to close the doors after you exit. Back in Tempe, Arizona, Jacob and I are wandering the parking lot of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 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 Waymo. When Waymo pulls up,

let's try and spook him with a beach ball. Okay. A beach ball. Jacob has one folded up in his bag. We quickly inflate it. But I could start. Here he comes. All right. Bring it, bring it. Okay. Waymo's coming. We get inside the Waymo. Jacob stays outside, holding the beach ball. Let's see how Waymo responds to a beach ball thrown.

This is known in the literature as the beach ball test. Should I do a gentle roll, or just float it up in front? It should be like, full on. Okay, okay. Jacob doesn't hurl the beach ball at Waymo. He gently floats it in the direction of Waymo, an errant beach ball that retails for maybe $4. Beach ball thrown, and it stopped short. I might have broken Malcolm's neck that time.

Waymo slammed on his brakes. Slammed! I was a little worried about you. It stopped so short. That was intense. Stopped about as hard as, you know. Which makes me wonder, will a stopper, will birds stop this thing? Like, this is not the biggest beach ball in the world. No, that was impressive. It's a 14 inch beach ball.

That was super impressive. Yeah. It wasn't a threatening beach ball. It was a beach ball thrown with love, not anger. Floated outs, right? Floated. Gently lofted. And Waymo was like,

this is not happening on my watch. I'm stopping this right now. Waymo 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 I'm going to do is I'm going to try and outrun the Waymo, and then I'm going to cut in front and we're going to see what happens.

Please make sure your seatbelt is... Jacob gets in the Waymo in order to monitor Waymo's movements. I do a few warm-up stretches. I'm going to run beside... I'm going to run in front of the Waymo and see what happens. Okay, let's go. Waymo's moving. Waymo's moving.

Wait, where's he going? Come on, Waymo. Come on, Waymo. Stopping, starting. I think I'm making him nervous. Come on, Waymo, come on Waymo. Stopping, starting. I think I'm making him nervous. Come on Waymo, come on. Waymo doesn't know what I'm doing and now he won't move. This is actually, Waymo is the most gracious.

Oh he's taking, Waymo's gone the other direction. Now I'm running alongside Waymo. Waymo's stopped. Waymo's, I'm making Waymo nervous. Let's go Waymo, let's go, let's go, let's go. I'm outrunning Waymo stopped. I'm making Waymo nervous. Let's go Waymo, let's go, let's go, let's go. I'm outrunning Waymo. Don't cut in front of Waymo. Waymo's come to a stop.

Now Waymo is trying to get around me. Let's see. This is exhausting. Let's go Waymo! Oh, he stopped again. I'm gonna let him. Waymo doesn't know what he's doing. Actually, Waymo knows what he's doing. He doesn't know what I'm doing. Waymo's going the other direction now. He thinks he's gotten away from me! Not so fast my friend! Waymo's not come back to a stop.

I'm messing with Waymo's head. Cutting in front of Waymo. Wait what does Waymo want to do here? I wonder if Waymo's angry at me. No he's taking off! Oh he comes to a halt! Waymo is freaked out. Freaked out!

He thinks he's going. He's got ahead of me. I gotta catch him! Waymo! Waymo! Waymo! Oh! Hold on, Jay.

Wait, let me get in. Waymo! Waymo! Waymo! Waymo! Waymo! Waymo! Way let me get in. Waymo! Stop! Waymo was the perfect gentleman. He let me be the crazy one. Remember this the next time 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. I love you, Waymo! Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle, Leemon Guistou, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton, and Ananayin. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra,

mastering by Flan Williams. And engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Amy Gaines. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, head of fame Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of course,

Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gap. 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 buy the audiobook at bomberberMafia.com. And you'll get a bonus listener's guide, and you can listen in the podcast app you're using now. That's awesome. We got our first response to the tweet. This will all end in tears.

Oh, yes, it will. It will. But not for anything. Thanks. this will all end in tears oh yes it will it will but not for anything oh my god that's perfect ghost ride the whip ghost ride the whip. Ghost ride the whip. Thank you Waymo!