Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete?

0:04PJ, how have you been?

0:05I've been good.

0:06How have you been?

0:07Yeah, I'm a little better now having listened to your series.

0:10I love it.

0:10Oh, thank you.

0:12Do you recognize that voice?

0:14It is PJ Vogt, host of the podcast Search Engine and friend of Freakonomics Radio.

0:19You 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 Berghein in Berlin.

0:31That was a great story.

0:32And not too long ago, PJ came to us with another one.

0:36It's a two-part series on driverless cars.

0:39This is a topic that we have touched on many times over the years at Freakonomics Radio, but PJ decided to go deep.

0:46The other day, I had a chance to ask him how he got interested in this.

0:50There's a whole lesson in this, but I'd gotten, and this is not the next sentence you're going to expect me to say, too into bench pressing.