[Sal Khan]: Well great to have you here, Tekedra.

[Tekedra Mawakana]: It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

[Sal Khan]: Well I thought before we start, because there was, it seemed like, about 40 percent of the audience who had never had that experience, I thought I would share some of our family videos of our first Waymo ride with my two sons. I also have a daughter, but we kind of split up into two cars. But if we could play the video.

[儿子 1]: Alright, here we go.

[Waymo]: Hello from Waymo.

[儿子 2]: "Hello from ..." oh, my ... (Laughter)

[儿子 1]: This is cool.

[儿子 2]: Oh, my gosh.

[Waymo]: If you're traveling with little ones or expecting, please see the --

[Sal Khan]: Are you expecting? We're at the beach, being driven by a ghost.

[Waymo]: Almost there. Don't forget your phone, keys or wallet.

[Sal Khan]: And sons, don't forget your sons. (Laughter)

[Tekedra Mawakana]: That's great.

[Sal Khan]: So Tekedra, what’s next? I mean, every time I look at the news, I see a new city, I see new models. What's new?

[Tekedra Mawakana]: So we are currently operating in 11 cities. In the US, we're providing 500,000 trips per week. And we have a goal, by the end of the year, to be at a million trips per week. And just to sort of help people wrap their minds around what that means, or how to think about it, our fleet of vehicles is about 3,000 cars ... The single Waymo driver drives over four million miles per week. And so the way to think about that is a human drives around 700,000 miles in a lifetime -- a human who lives sort of the full lifetime -- and so this is like six lifetimes of human driving per week. And so we're, you know, really excited. We're also in four airports right now. You can fly in to San Antonio or Phoenix, San Francisco or San Jose and jump in a Waymo, use the Waymo app. It'll take you from point A to point B. And we're at this point where the technology has moved from, “Will it work?” and “Can we produce the kind of safety outcomes that we care about?” to scaling. And so we're really excited. We are also in London, in Tokyo, [and] we've moved from manual driving to fully autonomous driving. We still have people behind the wheel, so we haven’t launched a service yet, but those will be our first two international markets.

[Sal Khan]: What’s the rate-limiting factor: is it some notion of safety, or is it regulation? What is it?

[Tekedra Mawakana]: It really depends. In certain markets, it’s absolutely regulation. I think when you think about the evolution of this technology as a whole, it's been making sure that we could have the safety outcomes that we want. And all of that is the technology. Can the driver produce these kinds of outcomes? We’ve driven over 200 million miles in our time and based on 170 million miles of data ... we are now seeing [a] 13x reduction in serious-injury-causing crashes over a human, and the same amount of reduction as it relates to injuries with pedestrians. So we can now say that we are just over 10 times safer than a human at 170 million miles. That’s the kind of superhuman performance that we were seeking in order to then be able to scale this technology. Now we have markets that are closed, markets that are open, and we have to do all of the work with the cities, with the regulators, first responders, everyone, in order to advance our technology. So we're laser-focused on doing that. And the reality is, you know, [for] citizens, consumers, riders -- those who’ve been cut out of the mobility systems and cities -- they're demanding and requesting and advocating for us to come. And so that’s a really exciting inflection point.

[Sal Khan]: It’s worth triply underlining what you just said: over 10 times safer, at least based on the current data. We were talking earlier, y'all have already driven the equivalent of 300 lifetimes --

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Two hundred and forty lifetimes.

[Sal Khan]: And Waymo has not caused a death, knock on wood. And there’s an argument: roughly 40,000 people in America, every year, who die of a car accident. I think in the world it’s on the order of a million every year. So in theory, if this became everywhere, you could be saving 900,000 lives globally. You could be saving 30, 35,000 to 36,000 lives just in the United States. Why isn't there more -- I know you all are growing maybe as fast, but why not roll out as fast as possible? What's stopping that from happening?

[Tekedra Mawakana]: I think we are now focused on rolling out safely as quickly as possible. There is an adoption curve that has to happen, though, right? I think what you’re saying is what undergirds our entire company, which is: safety is urgent, saving lives. If this technology can perform at this level, then we have a responsibility to figure out how to do it. Doesn't mean, though, that we're not being met with opposition. And so we also have the burden of making those policymakers, who are not welcoming us with open arms ... to demonstrate our safety record. So we have a safety hub. We make all of this data transparent, [and] we hand it to researchers so they can make their arguments. And so it's been really fun lately to watch different sectors of the economy start to talk about how powerful this technology is. You know, we have Dr. John Slotkin, a neurosurgeon, who has just calculated that $900 billion to $1.25 trillion could be saved if our technology was rolled out, if every car on the road was a Waymo. But this is the problem: people are really comfortable with the number of people who die on the roads. 40,000 people dead, 1.2 million globally and avoidable in many cases, isn't something upon which we share collective outrage or even moderate discomfort. And so we have to introduce sort of that reality in order for the technology to be viewed as solving a problem that society currently faces, because we've just accepted it. Why? Because we don't experience these as 737s falling out of the sky every day. But that's what it would be if we actually experienced it as mass casualties. We experience it, you know, [as] this person’s mom, my uncle. And so because of that, we have to remind people that the status quo is totally unacceptable. And it's even more unacceptable when you have technology that could help address it.

[Sal Khan]: Yes, definitely. (Applause) I think it was a couple of months ago -- you would know it much better -- I saw a headline, it was a very clickbaity headline: “Waymo hits an eight-year-old outside of a school.” And I was like, oh my God. And I click on it. And then they described what happened, and it was outside of a school and there was a car parked. And if I remember correctly, there was a kid, he just darted into the street. And the Waymo, everyone who was observing that assumed the kid was going to die because he just darted into a street where traffic was coming. And the Waymo, I don't know what the reflexes are, you probably know the numbers, it just immediately came to a stop, and it hit him at like, four miles an hour or something. Like he literally just fell on his knees, brushed it off and looked at the Waymo kind of weird. Why isn't -- You know, it's convenient. I mean, you feel like you're in the future. Why is it the safety -- I mean, it feels like that message, Is that something that y'all might want to lead with? Because that seems like such a clear value proposition.

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think what you're saying is how comfortable are humans with this technology being better drivers than humans? You know, it goes back to the status quo. People don't generally view themselves or their neighbors or their friends or everyone they know as unsafe drivers, even when they're distracted, drunk, tired and angry. We just kind of accept that that's the human condition. And so I think, you know, in the case of the child in Santa Monica ... our car was traveling 17 miles per hour. And we were able to get to six miles per hour before making contact. Obviously, we want to make no contact, but we know that was superhuman performance and as so many of the bystanders said after observing it -- “The child would not have survived” -- is what we were told. We weren't obviously there. Those moments actually cause entire communities to think differently about this technology. And so, you know, to your point: it’s clickbaity. And on the other hand, it actually demonstrates what superhuman performance is.

[Sal Khan]: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I actually do assume most of the people I know are not good drivers. I'm the biggest backseat driver. The economics of the industry, y'all are the first mover. Obviously there's a Tesla robotaxi. They've taken some different approaches. You have many other competitors. Amazon's coming into it. How are you thinking about the competitive space? What do you think is going to happen to the economics of it? It's already cost competitive with a typical rideshare drive.

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Yeah, I think, you know, right now for us, we're the only company operating at this scale. We think it’s really important to just stay laser-focused on that. You know the way to think about it, because everyone’s calling everything either autonomous or robotaxi, is if you do not need a driver’s license to be in the car by yourself, which is for many, many people who do not have a driver's license, it’s their first time ever in life -- and so those are very special moments -- but if you do not need a driver’s license to be in a Waymo to get from point A to point B, that is fully autonomous, [or] what is referred to, in the geeky sense, [as] level four and level five. If it is anything less than that -- if you have to be behind the wheel, if you have to take over when there's a beep, when there’s anything -- that's level three or level two or level one. And it's really important for people to internalize this distinction, because what we found back in 2012, when we had sort of a supercruise capability, the Waymo driver was at that ability, [was that] we could go from ramp to ramp, no problem. But when we got to surface streets, you needed to pay attention. And we told employees this is early days: “When we go from ramp to ramp, we have a camera in the car” -- this was just for employees -- "we need you to pay attention." And people immediately unplugged from the driving task, and they started shaving and curling their eyelashes, and they were like, picking up things from the backseat and plugging things in. And so that's when we decided, you know, cars have gotten safer over the years, right? They've gotten airbags and seat belts and all of these things as a result of a lot of deaths. But what hasn't gotten safer is the human. And so we decided we're patching around the problem. Actually, the way to make sure that this multi-ton vehicle is not as dangerous is to actually let humans be humans. Be distracted, make your phone call, do the thing you want to be doing. Let the Waymo driver get you from point A to point B. And so when you ask me about competition, I think there are a host of companies that are in the level-two-plus and level three. They need an attentive human after inviting the human to be inattentive, to be the most attentive at the moment when being most attentive is least convenient. And so to me, that is not -- that is still patching around the problem. Doesn't mean it won't result in safer driving when you are attentive, but it isn't actually level four autonomy.

[Sal Khan]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you extrapolate all of this, how much do you all think about what the world is going to look like just because of this? Maybe just because of you all and some of the other players, 10 [to] 15 years, what will it look like? You mentioned, if you don't have a driver's license, could this be a replacement in some ways for traditional public transportation, how are our roads different, are parking lots going to turn into parks -- what’s going to happen?

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Yeah, we’ve partnered, from the early days, with transit. We think it's a really interesting way to take some of the congestion out of the city, have sort of the kiss-and-ride from the suburbs in, have people take Waymo rides. We've gotten really favorable sort of reviews in the reports that have been done there. We've also partnered with people who take public transit in LA. You know, we've offered discounts if you do public transit to a Waymo or vice versa. You know, we want to think about the ways that this could become part of that fabric because we think it's important that this is also very accessible to a lot of people. So that's one. But when we think about 10 to 15 years from now, it's really fun to think about parts of cities that would get recaptured, you know, space right now where cars are just sitting all day, people are at work, the cars are just sitting. Most of those parking lots in major cities around the world are central. And so the idea that that could get recaptured -- there are city planners who've reached out to us to try to understand, you know, do we have to make these investments for the next 10 or 15 years, or can we start imagining a world where parking structures could move out, parks could come back [and] community life could sort of come back to the center of a city. So that's a vision. I mean, who knows, right? I think some of this is as the technology rolls out more and more, I think people's imagination actually starts to get sparked in ways that are very exciting. I said to you before, it's like, in some ways people go from, you know, is it safe, kind of to your poll, right? Is it safe, should I get in? OK, I got in. It's kind of boring and amazing. I really like it. Oh, this is kind of not a big deal. Now I'm going to be the coolest person I know in my friend group. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, what could I do in this thing if it got really exciting? So I get pitched on like, you should make it a yoga studio you know, on wheels.

[Sal Khan]: I'm glad that was what was pitched. I thought this was going in a whole other direction.

[Tekedra Mawakana]: This is my point, is everyone kind of starts to imagine, what do I want to do instead of commuting? So that's the fun part.

[Sal Khan]: I had a very G-rated thought in a Waymo on the highway on 101, and then I remembered. But it would have been embarrassing. And then I remembered, you do have a camera without sound, so I didn't even act on my G-rated thought. (Laughter)

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Just to be clear, I do not have a camera.

[Sal Khan]: Just to be clear, I do not have a camera. SK: No, no, I was just going to do some grooming type of thing. Jobs. I don't see this as something that's your responsibility in totality, but my uncle drives an Uber in New Orleans and I believe that one of the largest jobs for men globally and not just men -- obviously women also drive vehicles -- but definitely for men is driving some form of a vehicle, taxis, rideshares, long-haul trucking, etc. What happens?

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Yeah, I think, you know, I'll answer the question in a few ways. My uncle was actually a truck driver too, and that job was really important to him. And for better or for worse, it was also a really hard job. And so I think there’s an opportunity, and it’s going to take a really thoughtful approach, right? Because, I mean, I'm sitting here talking about building the world's most trusted driver. And so it's a really tough place for me to sit in and [to] facilitate the dialogue around it. However, over time, what I’m starting to see just from us is [that] there are new jobs being created. So we have running our fleet, we have fleet technicians who we need, fleet operators as well as smart depot professionals. All of that didn't exist ten years ago. These are like AV-focused jobs. One. Two, jobs that exist today, everyday drivers, we have to hire them too, in order to validate our software. We have to accumulate miles in order to validate our software. So we hire drivers constantly, or our partners hire drivers in different parts of the world. We also need people who can, you know, take care of our depots, build our depots, EV charging infrastructure. And so what we’ve started to see, as we have these partnerships of fleet operators, is they are driving a lot of job growth as we scale. We’re just too early to be able to really quantify it. But in addition to that, earlier this year, we did a partnership with TechForce Foundation where we’re helping people who are in school to be mechanics, to actually become mechanics of autonomous vehicles, because we think that transition doesn't have to pass anyone by. We just need to be mindful about it. So that's one thing we're doing. And then in addition, we are doing apprenticeship programs. We’re doing one in LA, and we’re doing curriculum development with [a] community college: Bronx Community College, City University of New York, because again, there's an opportunity for people to learn the skills that are needed. And then I think while there's a lot of focus on sort of the jobs, there are also small businesses in these places where we’re launching where because Waymo has launched, like in San Francisco, our first year, we actually drove $40 million of economic development for local businesses from out-of-towners because we were the number-one destination for tourists to try out a Waymo and then to go to a coffee shop and go to a restaurant. And so I think this is a long conversation. I appreciate you for saying, you know, we're one part of it. We take this seriously. We think it's important for us to be focused on it. And we're also really excited when we get to go and talk to folks as they move from logistics into now AV-adjacent roles with their current skill set. So it doesn't all require upskilling.

[Sal Khan]: Well, we could talk for hours about this, but thank you so much.

[Tekedra Mawakana]: Thank you.