In this conversational YouTube segment, Mike Michalowicz and Chris discuss Waymo’s self‑driving cars as the safest drivers on the planet, highlighting the company’s “hive‑mind” system where thousands of vehicles share data and learn from each other, resulting in an accident‑free record. They contrast this collective learning with the unpredictable, often unsafe behavior of human drivers and ride‑share services, noting public hesitancy toward both autonomous and traditional taxis. The dialogue then pivots to a broader business lesson: embracing failure as a necessary learning process. Mike cites Thomas Edison’s view that each failed experiment brings us closer to success and shares the story of a figure named Esen, who endured dangerous, often painful experiments yet persisted, illustrating how confronting and mitigating failure can accelerate innovation. The overall message urges entrepreneurs to adopt a group‑mind approach—leveraging shared data and rapid iteration—while accepting the discomfort of failure to achieve faster, safer outcomes.
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Safest driver today in the world, hands down, is artificial intelligence. There's a car system called Waymo.
Uh-huh.
Have you seen those?
Yeah, actually we have a little bit of a news article about it.
Oh, I can't wait to talk about it. Chris and I were, were recently out in Arizona. We landed in Phoenix and we're sitting waiting for a car and a car goes by and Chris is like, there is no one.
It's not like there's no passenger. There's no one in the car.
There's no one in the car. There's no driver. There's no passenger. She's like, there's a car just went by. I'm like, oh my God, that's Waymo. I've seen, I've heard of it. I haven't seen it. And another one came by. So I, as we're sitting there waiting for our ride, I go on Google and Waymo argues, and I believe it, it is The most accident-free driver of all time. What they do is they have this hive mind of their hundreds or thousands of cars, and they're sharing information, and they're learning from each other rapidly. Where an individual, the only learning is, I got in a car accident, I'll try to avoid that again. I cut the curve too short and I hit—
I'll look over my right shoulder better next time. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a very slow process. We need to have these failures to learn. And when we can expedite the process through a group mind, or in this case, artificial intelligence, the better outcome comes so much faster. But ironically, there still is hesitancy. Like, I don't know if I feel safe getting into a car. But honestly, I question if I feel safe getting into one of these Ubers where the dude is like, what is it? How are you driving? How do you even know an Uber anymore?
I know, I know. Christopher always says, they're doing 40 in like a 65-mile-an-hour, we're gonna die. Oh, I'm the reverse. They're going too fast for you. I'm like, they're doing 80 in a 30.
Like, what the hell's going on? Oh yeah, there's that too.
There's that too.
So we have to embrace failure. We also have to admit it's scary and difficult, but Edison's framing of you find a way that doesn't work is something we need to embrace. Now, we can also mitigate failure. It's not just be Mr. Rando, try things out, and if this explodes, we'll see what happens. Esen had cases like that. He tried mixes and concoctions that caused acidic responses, minor explosions. It almost caused blindness for him. He had lung problems because he breathed in this stuff.
No.
He was notably deaf, like could not hear a word. Maybe also facilitated through some of the experiments he was doing. Maybe it was purely biological or genetics. But nonetheless, none of those impedances caused him to stop. If anything, it fostered a greater growing intensity because he's finding ways that don't work. He's that much closer to a way that does work.
