PJ Vogt

We will be right back.

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.

Today we are running an episode from the Search Engine podcast with host PJ Vogt.

Chapter four, something actually useful for the world.

The race in the desert had been designed as a spectacle, something flashy to draw out America's smartest roboticists.

But it had drawn another person who'd come for his own reasons.

Google's Larry Page arrived at the DARPA Grand Challenge in a baseball hat and sunglasses, a disguise.

He found Sebastian Thrun and buttonholed him, asking him a million highly specific questions about things like the wavelength his LIDAR system used.

But this meeting in the desert, this was not actually their first introduction.

Well, the first time I met Larry was a bit earlier.

He had built a small little robot that acted as a telepresence for meetings.

And he was trying to drive it around the Google offices instead of himself going to meeting with a robot.

And he sent me a message and said, I'm going to show you the robot I've built.

And I, in a spur of like craziness, I sent a message back saying, Larry, I'm so glad that Google lets you use 20% of your time to do something useful for the world.

I couldn't.

I either expected a rapid response or never hear from him again.

It turns out I was lucky.

He responded immediately.

I took his robot, I fixed it in the next 24 hours, and he was very happy.

Larry Page, it turned out, had actually been interested in autonomous vehicles since at least grad school.