Are you a good driver?

March 23, 2026·1 hr 10 min·6 clips

Imagine waking up to a knocker-upper in 1800, a job now gone, while driver persists—but for how long?

The episode begins before dawn. PJ asks you to picture a professional driver almost 200 years ago, in a world where a knocker-upper still raps on the window. In that world, some jobs look permanent. The lamplighter, the driver, and the person paid to wake people up all seem fixed in place, until they are not. Then the story turns toward Google. Sebastian Thrun traces the odd route from DARPA's autonomous-vehicle challenge to a company that wants street photographs first, then something much harder. Larry Page keeps pressing. He hires Thrun and Anthony Levandowski around the systems that helped Stanley read the road, then comes back to his old interest in cars that drive themselves. Thrun says no at first, and his reason is blunt. He pictures desert technology dropped onto Market Street in San Francisco and hurting someone. Page asks again. The question stops being whether the idea sounds reckless and becomes whether Thrun can point to a technical reason it cannot work. He cannot. That missing objection becomes the turn in the episode, where no starts to sound like a problem. PJ keeps it grounded, moving between vanished work, engineering nerve, and the awkward space between possible and ready. The episode closes with the second part still ahead, and one question still running: what happens when driving is no longer only human work?

As heard by us

A sharp origin story for self-driving cars, built around the moment an expert runs out of reasons to say no.

Search Engine turns a simple question, whether humans are good drivers, into a technology story about work, automation, and the early logic of self-driving cars.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a slow-burn origin story for driverless cars.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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