PJ, how have you been?

I've been good.

How have you been?

Yeah, I'm a little better now having listened to your series.

I love it.

Oh, thank you.

Do you recognize that voice?

It is PJ Vote, host of the podcast Search Engine and friend of Freakonomics Radio.

You may remember hearing him back in 2024 when we

published a search engine episode called The Fascinatingly Mundane Secrets of the World's Most

Exclusive Nightclub about Bergheim in Berlin. That was a great story. And not too long ago,

PJ came to us with another one. It's a two-part series on driverless cars.

This is a topic that we have touched on many times over the years at Freakonomics Radio,

but PJ decided to go deep. The other day, I had a chance to ask him how he got interested in this.

There's a whole lesson in this, but I'd gotten, and this is not the next sentence you're going to

expect me to say, two into bench pressing.

That's not where I thought you were going. And I injured myself, I had a hernia, and then I had to have a hernia of repair.

I see. So there were like some minor complications. I was not moving easily. I was in a lot of pain.

So I had kind of limited mobility. And I was visiting a friend in San Francisco. And I took a Waymo and it was such an experience of the future that immediately becomes normal.

First, the idea that I would press a button on my phone, a car would come out of nowhere, driven by nobody.

I would get in, watch the steering wheel turn itself. I was trying to button on my phone. A car would come out of nowhere, driven by nobody. I would get in,

watch the steering wheel turn itself. I was trying to describe to somebody recently. I was like the first time it feels like the first time you're in an airplane, and by the third time it feels like you're in an elevator. It was a moment where I thought, oh, a lot's about to change. And it was confusing to me that people were not talking about that more. What should we expect to hear in the series? there are two parts. The first is really about the car and then the second is really about the driver. Tell me who you think are

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