Matthew Crawford argues that shifting from being a driver to being a mere passenger represents an existential risk in and of itself, as well as a symbol for the potential loss of much broader human values. In his new book, Why We Drive Toward the Philosophy of the Open Road, Crawford investigates the driver s seat as one of the few remaining domains of skill, exploration, play, and freedom.
00:08:10.640I mean, what we're talking about is all of the infrastructure of mobility being remade according to the dream of, you know, perfect order that is really, you know, a cartel of tech firms will be.
00:08:30.000They will make the trains run on time.
00:08:34.820But what it means is that we won't have any kind of democratic control over, you know, the cityscape, because what we're talking about is the smart city.
00:08:45.460That's kind of a necessary complement to the driverless car.
00:08:49.560You're going to have sort of sensors embedded in everything and all our movements through the city orchestrated by a kind of urban operating system, as it's been called.
00:09:02.040So, that's, I mean, for some of us, a pretty dystopian picture, given how frustrating your current operating system might be on your devices.
00:09:16.800Yeah, I mean, let's go down this strain of like, I mean, there's so many things you can explore this idea of private companies sort of doing a top down, this is what we're going to do, making decisions.
00:09:26.560Because they make it sound like they're doing it for you, and it's like, oh, we're benevolent, we're going to help, you're going to be able to do these things.
00:09:32.300But there's always an angle with these guys.
00:09:35.200And not only are they going to reimagine the cities, but because they control the means of movement, they're able to get information about you and use that information to, I don't know, nudge you to go to different places while you're getting shuttled in your little Google car.
00:09:54.920It's, what it is, is the world's largest advertising firm.
00:09:58.580So, I think the idea is, yeah, all of your movements will be surveilled, and as it turns out, your movements through the world are an especially valuable form of behavioral data for composing a picture of who you are and developing a sort of proprietary science of behavior management.
00:10:23.240I mean, this is the, you know, the new frontier of surveillance capitalism.
00:10:29.120And I think what we're talking about is the transformation of the car into a device that will kind of answer to the same logic of surveillance.
00:10:40.380And not only that, but you're now strapped in there, you're basically a captive audience.
00:10:46.000So, you can imagine that, you know, maybe there will be fleets of driverless cars trolling around, and you can hail one for free.
00:10:55.740Well, except it's not really free, because before you get underway, you're going to have to sit there and decline all these offers tailored to your unique lifestyle.
00:11:06.860So, yeah, there's definitely an angle.
00:11:11.980And, I mean, this idea, also, it's creepy about this.
00:11:14.420We already have this to a certain extent with our smartphones.
00:11:17.420I mean, even if you drive, you're not in a smart car.
00:11:19.360If you have a smartphone with you, Google knows where you're at.
00:11:42.000I mean, you don't really have any leverage.
00:11:44.980Now, you can decline the service altogether.
00:11:47.840You could get by without a smartphone, right?
00:11:51.480But the whole world has organized around these things, and so you would take it a genuine kind of countercultural orneriness to fully opt out of these things.
00:12:05.060And the terms of service are very one-sided.
00:12:07.900I mean, to fully know what you're agreeing to, you'd have to read, you know, sometimes literally dozens of contracts because that data is packaged and turned into sort of prediction products used to predict your future behavior.
00:12:28.040And these are traded on a behavioral futures market in real time, even as you're, you know, going through the world.
00:12:35.880So, you know, this starts to look like a kind of a new form of government more than a free market or something like that.
00:12:46.060Right, but it's a government that you have no say in.
00:12:56.540Well, another thing you highlight in the book about how governments and corporations have worked to modify the way we move ourselves, and in the process, we lose something.
00:13:09.140You talked about this idea, like, you don't see really clunky cars on the road anymore.
00:13:14.420And it's because, or even like in driveways, and if you do, it's like, oh, man, it's on cinder blocks, it's an eyesore.
00:13:20.240The homeowners association is going to, you know, send you letters, but it's because there's been this movement within the governments and corporations to this, like, where there's a cash for junkers program, where we get old cars, you know, off the streets, off the driveways.
00:13:35.060And they'd say it's for environmental reasons, but then you're like, well, what's the angle here?
00:13:39.640They're always like, what's the angle?
00:14:00.200They were facing the need to have expensive retrofits to their refineries to clean up their emissions.
00:14:06.060So, they tried this PR stunt where they said, we're going to destroy, well, it went like this, anyone who wants to give up their old car, meaning before 1971, we will give you $700 and a month-long bus pass.
00:14:24.340And the idea was that it's the old cars responsible for most of the pollution.
00:14:28.780And this led to, you know, a lot of rust-free Southern California old cars being destroyed.
00:14:37.040Now, the bigger picture here is that as this caught on, you know, in a lot of different states, and it actually created this regime of carbon trading, where sort of all sources of carbon emissions are considered fungible or equivalent.
00:14:54.400What it did is it created a kind of false environmentalism that, in fact, enforces obsolescence, sort of accelerated obsolescence, getting these cars off the road.
00:15:08.080Now, when you think about all the sort of energy and material flows involved in creating new cars, as opposed to just, you know, fixing an old car, the environmental picture is very mixed as to whether this is doing anything for air quality.
00:15:26.820And I actually was involved in air quality stuff as a physicist a little bit back in 1989, so I was kind of right there as this was going on in Southern California.
00:15:37.780But the other part of this is there's this kind of suburban aesthetic of tidiness, and someone with an outdoor inventory of used auto parts is not part of that equation.
00:15:53.180So, I actually got a letter from my insurance company telling me I needed to remove all the debris around my house, as they called it.
00:16:01.720So, what they meant is all this, my stash of auto parts, you know, I've got all kinds of stuff.
00:16:09.660And this is a pattern where municipalities, often they're acting on behalf of real estate interests against established residents, will declare it a nuisance.
00:16:22.420They'll sort of harass you bureaucratically to make you get rid of this stuff.
00:16:26.180And the reason that's significant, I think, well, a couple of reasons.
00:16:31.000One is just kind of at the level of sentiment.
00:16:34.320When you're taking care of old stuff, there's a kind of moral sensibility of stewardship.
00:16:43.320And, I mean, sentiment attaches to the things that you've had in your life, you know, they've been with you through a lot.
00:16:50.000It's almost a kind of loyalty to stuff, which sounds a little nutty, but I think it grounds a sense of the continuity of the world.
00:17:01.060And they can serve as a shelter from the relentless onslaught of the new.
00:17:06.240And then, of course, also, this bureaucratic piracy is dispossessing people of a real form of wealth, you know, frugal and resourceful people who might rely on a parts car or two parked out back.
00:17:22.180And again, there's, yeah, there's that sense of you're not in control anymore.
00:17:25.220There's like a reduction of your agency or what you're able to do in the environment.
00:17:30.980Yeah. And, I mean, it began with good intentions.
00:17:36.360So, Lady Bird Johnson, back in the 60s, sort of agitated for cleaning up the road and getting eyesores out of the way.
00:17:46.320And it was, for the most part, it was a good idea because there was actually a lot of litter back then.
00:17:50.040People forget that we sort of had to learn to not litter.
00:17:53.520And also, there were salvage yards that weren't screened off from the road.
00:17:57.580So, it was a beautification effort, but then it kind of shaded into something a little more ruthless, namely this, you know, not in my backyard, no junkyards, no salvage yards.
00:18:10.160Even though it's places like that that are kind of keeping alive the ethic of repair, which is, you know, what could be more environmental than cobbling together a car from salvaged parts that have been cast off that you're sort of foraging locally?
00:18:29.300I mean, that's a pretty positive environmental thing.
00:18:35.380We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:18:40.820So, you started off talking about this conversation, talking about you riding your bike, your dirt bike, and sort of exploring the intersection of risk and safety and, you know, sort of existentialism and, like, what it means to feel alive.
00:18:53.760But you have this whole section of the book talking about the history of car safety.
00:18:58.100And cars are a lot safer than they were, say, 40 years ago.
00:19:03.100I mean, what are some of the stuff that's happened that we kind of take for granted and how cars have gotten safer?
00:19:07.420Well, the biggest improvements came with seatbelts and then airbags.
00:19:16.980That was the low-hanging fruit, and it was a massive increase in the safety of the car.
00:19:23.960And then, you know, there's traction control.
00:19:26.400There's anti-lock brakes and now sort of automatic braking.
00:19:30.620And these are slightly different in nature.
00:19:34.840They help at the limit, you know, in a kind of panic situation.
00:19:38.980But they can also have a slight de-skilling effect where you're no longer sort of getting familiar with the behavior of the car at the limits.
00:19:49.660There was a study of automobile safety way back in the 70s that discovered that some safety improvements in the car lead us to drive less safely.
00:20:04.980And the idea is that we have a risk budget.
00:20:08.480So if we're getting more safety from the car itself, we feel like we don't need to drive as safely.
00:20:14.720So it's a kind of a messy picture when you consider the effects of safety improvements in the car itself on driver behavior.
00:20:25.220And certainly now with the sort of partially automated driving, I mean, you'll see videos on YouTube of Tesla drivers going down the freeway reading a newspaper or something.
00:20:36.380Of course, the fine print tells you you have to be ready to reassume control at any moment because the automation really isn't at the level you can just trust it to take care of things.
00:20:47.560But, you know, that's not realistic to expect people to do that.
00:20:51.220They're going to get interested in something else.
00:20:53.440Well, the other thing, too, is with those sensors that tell you if you're drifting into another lane.
00:21:00.820What happens is, like, it's a safety feature, but it can actually make you less safe because instead of paying attention to your environment, you're paying attention for the signal that says you're about to mess up.
00:21:12.060And this, I mean, they found this also in airplanes.
00:21:14.240As airplanes have gotten more automated, they found this with pilots.
00:21:17.920Instead of actually focusing on what's going on in their environment, what their automation does is it trains them to just focus for the signals to let them know that something's wrong.
00:21:31.640So instead of, you know, paying attention to what the plane is doing, you're just listening for these little chimes and beeps.
00:21:38.040But another problem is that sometimes it's chiming and beeping at you so gratuitously that you just tune it out.
00:21:47.540So there's a whole literature, it's called the human factors literature on this problem with airplane pilots.
00:21:55.320And now we're kind of starting to develop a similar literature for driverless cars.
00:22:01.840But I think we need to get a little bit into kind of the logic whereby human beings and robot cars are not going to be able to share the road.
00:22:48.580And what the chief engineer who was in charge of this project said he had learned from it is that human beings need to be less idiotic.
00:22:59.700By which he meant, of course, they need to behave more like robots.
00:23:04.340And that's an inference that comes very easily if you think that the mind is basically an inferior version of a computer, namely following rules.
00:23:17.880That's the picture of reason that they have here, that reason consists of following rules and we don't do it very well.
00:23:24.960But what do you see at an intersection?
00:23:26.940Well, you see people make eye contact.
00:23:29.560Maybe one person sort of waves the other through in those ambiguous cases of right-of-way.
00:23:35.400There's almost a kind of body language of driving.
00:23:39.000So here's a form of intelligence that is socially realized by people together.
00:24:23.000Just two, artificial intelligence and human intelligence are just, they're so different in kind that they don't play very well together.
00:24:32.480Yeah, and that idea that driving is a very social thing, even though we don't think of it as social because we're sort of in our little bubble.
00:24:39.360But the other problem that you talk about that the automated cars are having is that every community has their own social norms for driving.
00:24:48.380So in Pittsburgh, I think you talked about in Pittsburgh, there's the Pittsburgh left turn.
00:24:51.960They let someone, you know, if you're at an unprotected left turn and there's a car going straight, the car going straight lets the left turn guy go first.
00:24:59.540And that's only, it's like a Pittsburgh thing.
00:25:00.880But like a Google car would be like, no, it has to be the same everywhere.
00:25:04.260So it doesn't allow for like bottom up sort of governance.
00:25:08.020Yeah, and it's interesting, there's a whole new kind of thing emerging in cognitive science that emphasizes that the human mind is exquisitely good at predicting others' behavior.
00:25:22.120And it's a kind of circular thing where we mutually predict one another's behavior.
00:25:27.940And social norms help to anchor our expectations of what others are going to do, and it makes that task a little bit easier.
00:25:38.020So, when you think of how exquisitely fine-tuned the human mind is for predicting each other's behavior, it starts to seem a little bit gratuitous to replace all that with, you know, rolling supercomputers, basically.
00:25:56.740If you look at an intersection at Rome, you know, Americans are often horrified, or they travel to Rome and they come back, it looks like chaos.
00:26:06.580Of course, they're also kind of admire it because it's such a, you know, it's just such a different way of proceeding.
00:26:18.420They're not really following any kind of rules, at least not any rules that would be apparent to you or me as a visitor.
00:26:24.820But here's the interesting thing, that the traffic fatality rate in Italy is actually lower than it is in the United States.
00:26:32.020Now, if we had driverless cars, from an aerial view, an intersection might actually look quite a bit like the Italian intersection because you wouldn't have to have stoplights, right?
00:26:46.980The cars would just mutually adapt and find their way through.
00:26:52.520But at this point, it starts to look like we want to spend billions of dollars in order to recreate the flow and efficiency of an old world intersection, which it seems like a failure to appreciate that human beings have already solved this problem.
00:27:13.300So, let's talk about, let's get a little bit more, you know, we've been talking sort of big picture societal stuff, but let's get a little bit down to the more personal.
00:27:23.960So, one of the things about, you talk about how cars have changed, the experience of driving your cars change.
00:27:30.540And you talk about the difference between this hot rod, you know, 60s VW Beetle bug that you worked on yourself and the way it drove, between a high-performance Audi RS3.
00:27:43.800When you drove those two cars, like, what was the difference?
00:27:46.680How does it feel different to drive a modern car compared to an old car?
00:27:50.020Well, for one thing, an old car lets you know right away if you've done something wrong.
00:27:57.440So, you know, there was more than one occasion when I almost rolled the bug.
00:28:03.520And, you know, it's very, it's crude, right?
00:28:06.400It is very direct mechanical connection to the road, which just makes it exciting to drive.
00:28:12.900You know, you're not insulated from the road by all these sort of forms of electronic mediation that dampen out all the sort of fuzzy information that's usually coming into the seat of your pants from the road.
00:28:28.260With a car that's really light and primitive and everything is sort of direct mechanical connections, after a while, it starts to become almost like a prosthetic.
00:28:39.800In other words, it kind of disappears from your awareness and you're just feeling the road.
00:28:46.900So, think about the process of learning to play ice hockey, where initially the stick and the puck is all very awkward and obtrusive and you have to look at the puck.
00:28:59.420And, but eventually, as you become more skilled, the stick essentially becomes an extension of your own body and you can feel the state of the puck through the stick.
00:29:11.980And so, the stick just disappears and becomes a kind of transparent conduit for both your intention on the puck and for sensing the puck.
00:29:22.480Whereas, in a modern car, when everything is passing through electronic mediation, it means that the only way you can stay informed about the state of the car and the state of the road is through various representations.
00:29:37.140You get these, you know, chimes and little bit of text on the dashboard.
00:29:42.000So, I had a Scion XB and for the first five years, I had no idea why it was beeping at me when I went around the corners kind of fast.
00:29:54.280And finally, I saw there was a little tiny bit of text that said stability, meaning that the stability control was kicking in.
00:30:02.000And, and I didn't even know I had lost traction because I just couldn't feel it.
00:30:07.300So, no, and I've, I've, when you mentioned that, when you talked about in the book, I was like, I was trying to think back when I've driven an old car.
00:30:13.640I've had that same experience when I've driven an old truck without any power steering, out any, uh, anti-lock brakes.
00:30:20.600Like, at first, it's very disconcerting because you're like, what the heck is going on?
00:30:23.880Like, it doesn't feel, but then after a while, you start, as you said, you start to feel the road.
00:30:29.240And then when you like in a modern car, it doesn't feel like you're like,
00:30:42.720And the windshield almost starts to seem like one more screen and, uh, it can't really compete with all the dopamine candy coming through your other screens.
00:30:53.700And so obviously as cars get more boring to drive more, you know, abstracted,
00:30:59.840this has definitely contributed to distracted driving because it's just not much to engage
00:31:05.600your interest because you're, you know, and an old car, it's your ass that's going 60 miles an hour.
00:31:12.280You're not, you're not cocooned in 4,000 pounds of plushness with, you know, the sort of elevated tank-like enclosure.
00:31:20.900I mean, cars have gotten so heavy and so enclosed.
00:31:24.780If you get in the car from the 80s or earlier, you'd be shocked at how much visibility we've given up.
00:33:01.200And you talk about that it's getting harder and harder to actually, for individuals to modify a car the way they want to than it was, say, 40, 30 years ago.
00:33:19.380So there was sort of the first golden rod of hot riding or golden age rather that went from like after world war two, right up until the eighties.
00:33:28.640And then electronic engine management made things a little opaque under the hood for the typical shade tree mechanic.
00:33:36.440But then an interesting thing happened.
00:33:40.320And now you have these technical forums devoted to all these different kinds of cars and people have figured out how to hack the software and, and turn it to illicit purposes.
00:33:51.580So this is actually, I would call the second golden age of hot riding.
00:33:56.780People are getting crazy horsepower out of engines these days.
00:34:01.640So one thing that when you, when you go really deep, like I'm, you know, this bug I'm building right now is so, it's going to have, let me put it this way, five times the horsepower it was designed for, which means you have to rethink every aspect of the car.
00:34:18.780And the thing is, you can't just look for available parts.
00:34:23.800You're often, you're mixing parts from many different manufacturers and you're sort of cobbling things together.
00:34:31.300And what that means is that the parts numbers that are used for inventory are not going to help you because what you need to know is like the actual dimensions of something.
00:34:42.740And that's very hard to find on the internet.
00:34:46.460You often end up, you know, it's making the part yourself.
00:34:49.720You know, if you have the machining and welding capabilities.
00:34:52.840Because it's just easier than hacking a bureaucracy where you, you know, you don't know the part number.
00:34:59.720You just need, you try to just go to a parts counter and describe what you need and you're not going to get anywhere.
00:35:06.120Yeah, you talk about how you use this sort of explore this idea that knowledge in a weird way, it feels like it's democratic, but we've also made it more medieval in a lot of ways.
00:35:16.660Where only certain like high priest of, of say gearheading, like car parts, like actually know the dimensions of a particular gear, whatever.
00:35:26.360Whereas before, you know, because you have, you can assign a part number to something.
00:35:29.580Anybody can just say, oh, part number, like you could just put anybody there.
00:35:32.720But like, if you really want to know that, like how big it is, you had to call like three different people to finally find someone who knew the size of this part you were looking for.
00:35:41.640Yeah, there's also this sort of opposite thing where the world of parts numbers only makes sense within some company, within their kind of bureaucratic parts inventory system.
00:35:54.680Whereas when you're talking about, so that's a kind of form of priestly authority, right?
00:36:00.360You have to go through, you have to go through the, the, the, the bureaucracy.
00:36:05.920Whereas if you can express something in universal units of measurement, then you're talking about a form of knowledge that's accessible to anyone with a few basic measuring tools.
00:36:19.400And it's interesting that that's the ideal of knowledge that we get from the Enlightenment, that, you know, we should be, get out from under the authority of priests and trust our own eyes and our own instruments.
00:36:34.120And that's kind of the dynamic I see with, with gearheads.
00:36:38.580You know, they don't, they're not depending on the bureaucracies that, that sort of want to provide things ready made.
00:36:46.780They're, they're going all the way back to basics and measuring stuff and making stuff and figuring it out.
00:36:57.360And this also kind of speaks to this movement you've seen with not only cars, but tractors where you're not really buying a track.
00:37:05.940This happens by, I guess, with John Deere, sort of the big example.
00:37:07.960You're not really buying a John Deere tractor anymore.
00:37:09.900You're leasing the right to use the software.
00:37:14.160And so, like, it's hard, it's becoming harder and harder for farmers to fix a tractor themselves and just use a part from another tractor.
00:37:21.880Because the terms and agreements of, you know, you, when you bought that, when you thought you were buying a John Deere tractor, don't allow that.
00:37:34.240Yeah, so the idea is that, you know, a lot of the car manufacturers are claiming intellectual property rights over the diagnostic software, which means that unless you work at the dealership, you're not going to be able to fix it.
00:37:49.320Or if you're an independent shop, you have to pay a huge kind of, huge rents, basically, every month in order to have access to that updated diagnostic software.
00:38:00.720So, you know, then it really does feel like it doesn't belong to you, that you're just kind of allowed to use it for a while.
00:38:09.080And that's a very different picture of ownership.
00:38:11.820And I think people aren't very comfortable with that for good reason, because it, I don't know, to be fully master of your own stuff gives you a kind of feeling of independence.
00:38:25.240And in so many areas of culture, including material culture, we're kind of sliding into this passivity and dependence, which doesn't sit that well with sort of the democratic personality as it has existed thus far, the spirit of self-reliance and the spirit of self-government.
00:38:52.140Well, yeah, I mean, a perfect example of that, instead of owning physical books, you own books on your Kindle.
00:38:58.840You think you own them, but, you know, in the terms and agreements of Amazon, they can delete that for whatever reason they want, if they want to.
00:39:12.720And you use, you know, drifting, you've used demolition derbies, soapbox derbies to explore this idea.
00:39:20.620And we typically think of play as just sort of light and frivolous, which it is, but you use the drive, these driving sports to highlight the fact that play can be very aggressive and competitive.
00:40:59.020And I think if, you know, dogs playing resembles human play, we could just as well say the opposite, that human play expresses the animal spirits in us.
00:41:11.600And as such, I think it stands against the ideal of rational control that has become so pervasive in contemporary culture.
00:41:20.820And play in this way, I think answers to a very basic need, but it's expressing this part of the soul that sits uncomfortably with the contemporary taste for order.
00:41:34.640So it's subject to censure as irresponsible on safety grounds, or because it's competitive as a threat to the ethic of equal esteem.
00:41:46.320It doesn't, you know, it doesn't sit very well with egalitarianism because it's basically a thirst for distinction among the other players.
00:41:54.880So it's like this closed circle, it's inherently exclusive, it stands apart from the rest of society.
00:42:02.920You see something like this in the movie Fight Club, you know, which really revived this idea of a basically masculine form of play that is, you know, can be violent.
00:42:15.900And motorsport, it sort of exemplifies that, I think.
00:42:20.300It's almost like, well, I have a chapter called The Motor Equivalent of War, where I'm seeing these war-like energies get channeled into motorsport.
00:42:31.440And like that sort of, what's interesting, that aggression of play, it's just aggression.
00:42:38.640It's not about, you're not trying to destroy the person, but you want to, I don't know, you want to aggress against them because it gives you something to push against and allows you to feel, I don't know, like you're a person, really.
00:42:52.380Yeah, I think we kind of confuse the will to distinguish yourself from, we confuse that with the will to dominate others.
00:43:02.280And so, the thirst for distinction gets, you know, a bad rap because it looks like the will to tyranny.
00:43:08.960And I think the irony here is that it's the effort to clamp down on play is itself a kind of tyrannical need to control everything.
00:43:20.720And you see that, you know, for example, in sort of affluent progressive schools where you have these playground minders who are, you know, on the lookout for signs of trauma to the fragile cells that they're busy cultivating.
00:43:38.820And yeah, in a weird way, like clamping down on that competitive spirit and trying to make everyone feel safe and equal, in a weird way, can actually end up disrupting like the social order and like you get chaos.
00:43:50.720Yeah, because, well, Heusengew points out that play is the origins of social order.
00:43:57.220Because think about it, games have rules.
00:44:00.900You have to submit to the rules of the play community.
00:44:05.600So, these rules are not just emanations from your own will.
00:44:10.140So, he finds the origins of institutions historically in these sort of competitive play fields.
00:44:18.800And it's interesting, you know, at one point in the book, I speculate about maybe this clamp down on play has some kind of connection to phenomena like, you know, the mass shooter.
00:44:32.680Where here you have some kid who is not able to find any way to make a name for himself, to distinguish himself.
00:44:41.980But through this eruption of infantile rage, that strikes me as the opposite of fighting and playing, where you're coming up against the civilizing influence of other people who push back against you.
00:47:05.660But I think it was maybe a saltier version of this saying that Plutarch records among the Spartan women.
00:47:15.280He relates another thing where the Spartan army had gone out to fight and they got routed.
00:47:30.960And now they're running back to the city and the mothers of the city, they get up, they close the gate against them.
00:47:39.220And they get up on the wall and they lift their skirts and they say, what are you doing trying to climb back in here?
00:47:48.280And the army goes back out to fight and prevails.
00:47:51.920So, in all of these, it's like the women are demanding strength of their men, you know, man up.
00:48:02.000And the sociologists tell us that that's fairly typical in the working class, that the women prefer their men to be manly.
00:48:10.640Whereas in upper middle class society, both men and women adopt more feminine norms.
00:48:17.380So, that struck me as quite a contrast to the more polite precincts of society where, you know, sort of the meritocracy where you're dependent on these institutions and gold stars to sort of keep moving forward.
00:48:34.140And there's this kind of propaganda program of girl power and female empowerment that doesn't seem to work very well.
00:48:42.380Because it creates these very fragile young women and a kind of sexual paranoia on campus where it's all about, you know, trying to protect their feelings.
00:48:52.000So, it just, the contrast was really striking.
00:48:56.080And it was a nice picture of a community kind of working things out for themselves that I think we kind of do well to keep it, you know, in mind as a, as a kind of, for a critical perspective.
00:49:09.860Yeah, that Roseanne Barr lady who demanded strength from her son, like she herself was a strong lady.
00:49:15.120You probably wouldn't want to mess with her.
00:49:18.060Yeah, so it doesn't, it doesn't really look like patriarchy.
00:49:24.460Well, this idea, so I want to hit on this really quick, but this idea of these races that you go to, they're often self-governed.
00:49:30.120There's not some corporation putting them on.
00:49:31.780It's just people getting together and doing it.
00:49:34.440And you talk about how you're seeing less and less of this these days because people have forgotten how to self-govern.
00:49:42.500Like that idea that Tocqueville saw in Americans, Americans can get together and they do things together without some government or some entity telling them to do that.
00:49:53.700So, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to read a little passage from Tocqueville here.
00:50:02.900So, as your listeners probably know, he was this French guy who came to America, traveled around and reported what he saw back in the 1850s.
00:50:12.320He writes, children and their games, he's talking about Americans, are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined.
00:50:26.920So, he's marveling at Americans' habit of self-government and the temperament that it both requires and encourages from a young age.
00:50:37.100He writes, the same spirit pervades every act of social life.
00:50:41.480Now, it used to be that Americans had a lot of voluntary associations, things like volunteer fire departments, fraternal organizations, mutual insurers, trade associations, labor unions, where they had the habit of this kind of, you know, like the town hall meeting in New England.
00:51:06.260But at some point, that way of life more or less collapsed, and there's a Harvard political scientist who documented that in a book called Bowling Alone.
00:51:18.800We still have voluntary associations, but they're now usually run by salaried professionals, not the members themselves.
00:51:26.680So, I described this desert race out in Caliente, Nevada, where the same families have been coming to, you know, participating in this race for generations.
00:51:37.880And so, at the driver's meeting the day before, they're kind of going over the terrain, they're going over sort of land use issues, because, you know, they have this relationship with the ranchers that allow them to do this, and with the town.
00:51:52.680And this phrase kept popping up in the driver's meeting, it was, use your head.
00:51:59.940You know, there's no, this isn't like a certified safe experience, this is being handed to you.
00:52:06.720It's, you know, you're out in the desert amidst the rattlesnakes, use your head.
00:52:12.100And it was sort of a bracing idea that you would use your head, and that this community would be self-governing in this way.
00:52:23.860And it's funny, the spirit of it, it's not like these are kind of vandals wrecking the desert.
00:52:30.360They have a very keen awareness of kind of stewardship, not only for the desert itself, but for the relationship with the townspeople.
00:52:39.100This is an activity that gives meaning to these families over a long period of time.
00:52:47.020So, it's, they're basically taking care of something, and fully invested in it, and fully responsible for it, and for themselves.
00:52:57.680And that struck me as a, very much what Tocqueville was describing.
00:53:01.600But as you, yeah, you said that we've lost that, because now we have organizations that just tell you all the rules, take care of everything, and it's convenient.
00:53:09.400But in the process, you lose, you're like de-skilling yourself in a way to, that allows you to govern, or take part in the democratic process.
00:53:18.340So, self-government, I think you can think of that in at least a couple of different ways.
00:53:27.440So, self-government can mean the ability to skillfully control your car, the ability to temper your impatience with other drivers,
00:53:38.620the ability to keep your attention directed to the road in the face of multiplying distractions.
00:53:45.080And on the other hand, I think self-government is a question when you're talking about who gets to decide what sort of regime of mobility we're going to have.
00:53:58.600And these two different senses of self-government kind of are, they imply one another.
00:54:05.040So, for example, if we're so distracted behind the wheel that we're already driving as if our cars were self-driving,
00:54:12.580I think that suggests, you know, we need some benevolent entity to step in and save us from ourselves
00:54:19.120by automating the tasks that we're no longer capable of doing for ourselves.
00:54:25.060So, I guess my book is an attempt to kind of defend everyday practices and the forms of intelligence that are on display in them,
00:54:39.120if you look closely, and say that, in fact, we're pretty good at cooperating and improvising when we're left kind of to our own devices.
00:54:52.820Now, this is not simply a libertarian argument because one thing that's most impressive to me on the road is the kind of social trust that you see.
00:55:04.520And that's not a concern you see much articulated by libertarians.
00:55:09.400So, for example, if you're leaned into a blind curve on a two-lane country road on a motorcycle,
00:55:17.360it becomes very clear that the road is a place of mutual trust.
00:55:22.500And I think that's one of the most interesting things about it.
00:55:27.020So, I guess I'm trying to understand this fragile thing while it still exists in sort of little pockets of daily life like driving.
00:55:36.420And maybe such pockets can hold clues that could guide our hopes for the renewal of social trust more broadly.
00:55:46.720Well, Matthew, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:55:49.900Well, the book is called Why We Drive, and it's just out, and it's sold wherever fine books are sold.