The “invisible army” behind Amazon’s robotaxi revolution

Summary

Masters of Scale: "The Invisible Army Behind Amazon’s Robotaxi Revolution"

Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Bob Safian
Guest: Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox (an Amazon company)

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Episode Overview

This episode features a candid conversation with Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox, Amazon’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary. As robo-taxis are moving from novelty to reality in American cities, Evans shares Zoox’s approach to safety, scale, partnerships, and company culture—including her philosophy on moving “as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary.” She also discusses the role of Amazon, Zoox’s market strategy, the impact of generative AI, and the invisible "army" of rebels she empowers inside Zoox. The episode blends optimism, practical wisdom, and sharp industry insights.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Zoox’s Industry Position and Progress

• Proof Point Stage, Not Hype:
  • Evans stresses the autonomous vehicle industry is well past speculation—“oh, it’s happening tomorrow morning” or “it’s never going to happen”—and now in “the proof point stage” ensuring safe, gradual progress.
    • Quote: “It’s not going to be like a consumer product where all of a sudden, boom, 100 million people experience it. It’s going to be step by step.” (Aicha Evans, 04:14)
• Purpose-Built Robotaxis:
  • Zoox chose to design vehicles from scratch, not retrofit existing cars, focusing on safety, customer experience, and optimal use of autonomous technology.
    • “In a regular passenger car...the safest place to be is actually the front seat. For us, we were able to look at redundancy...the customer experience just does not feel like you’re in a car.” (Aicha Evans, 05:12)

2. Building Consumer Trust and Scaling Adoption

• Becoming Routine, Not Novel:
  • Evans likens AV adoption to aviation: initially daunting, but eventually mundane. It will take ongoing deployments, proactive safety, and regulatory engagement.
    • “Maybe a decade from now we’ll be like, ‘yeah, I still own a car, but for certain modes of transport, it just makes more sense to use a robotaxi.’” (Aicha Evans, 06:34)
• Community Buy-In:
  • Entry into new cities requires evidence of local demand and willingness, favorable regulatory environments, and appropriate weather/tech considerations.
    • “Weather is important, no question...At least the seed of demand, the regulatory environment...New York is the holy grail. But first it has to be legal.” (Aicha Evans, 12:36)

3. Amazon’s Role & Zoox’s Autonomy

• Support, Not Micromanagement:
  • Amazon provides crucial financial backing, technological resources (especially with AWS), and seasoned advice from its extensive business experience.
    • “Focus, focus, focus. The financial backing is important, right? A strong relationship also with AWS...There’s a lot of pattern recognition, there’s a lot of the customer obsession.” (Aicha Evans, 07:42)
    • Evans rates Amazon’s stewardship an “eight and a half out of ten.” (Aicha Evans, 08:31)

4. Partnerships & Market Expansion

• Uber Partnership:
  • The new deal with Uber enhances Zoox’s scale and urban visibility, leveraging Uber’s brand to increase rider awareness and operational data.
    • “For us, it’s about learning, it’s about experimenting...If we can help serve [utilitarian transportation] together and scale faster, the experiment will have worked.” (Aicha Evans, 10:58)
• Competitive Landscape:
  • Evans highlights respectful competition with Waymo, noting her own son will use both brands depending on location and convenience. (10:19)

5. AI, Technology, and Continuous Modernization

• Generative AI Accelerates Progress:
  • Advances in AI and simulation are making the team more productive and enabling faster product development and iterative improvements.
    • “Simulation is more capable, ability to sort of correlate data and information...Every Zoox employee is way more productive. You get to answers quicker.” (Aicha Evans, 14:37)
• Explainability & Safety:
  • Emphasizes the need for transparent, explainable AI: “No matter what we do, these systems will be safer than humans. But they will also make mistakes...Being able to understand when a mistake was made, why that was the case, and be able to correct that is really key.” (Aicha Evans, 15:34)

6. Company Culture: The Invisible Army

• Fostering ‘Rebels’ and Psychological Safety:
  • Evans encourages a culture where dissent, constructive challenge, and feedback are valued—but only up to the point of decision, after which the team commits.
    • “You want to make sure that...my invisible army...are distributed across the corporation. But we also have to have a contract that...once we make a decision, we commit and we move and we don’t revisit unless there’s evidence or assumptions that were incorrect.” (Aicha Evans, 25:53)
• Balancing Enthusiasm with Discipline:
  • Her leadership mantra: “Go as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary.”
    • “If it’s a culture of fear...you won’t go as fast as possible.” (Aicha Evans, 22:45)

7. Personal Insights & Inclusion

• Lessons from Intel:
  • From her 12 years at Intel, Evans learned about hardware-software integration, process rigour, and the value of being a constructive rebel.
    • “I learned about hardware, software integration...Thank you for that training. Because then I came to Zoox...needed to be orchestrated and coordinated and put processes in place.” (Aicha Evans, 24:02)
• Diversity and Inclusion:
  • Evans credits her optimism and resilience to inspirational figures like Marie Curie and Nelson Mandela, focusing on perseverance, understanding, and inclusion over diversity for its own sake.
    • “Nothing is to be feared. Everything is to be understood so that we can fear less.” (Aicha Evans, quoting Marie Curie, 27:42)
    • “Inclusion is more important than diversity, because if you do inclusion, you will get diversity. If you only do diversity, you will get some drama.” (Aicha Evans, 29:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Autonomous Vehicle Safety and Speed:
  “Are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary? Because we all know what happens when you go too fast and you don’t consider safety. Then bad things happen—and they should happen, by the way. So the balance and the blend is the struggle and the triumph.”
  —Aicha Evans, 22:45

• On the Adoption Curve:
  “Look at aviation, it took a while, but then now you’re in at JFK and you’re like, how can so many planes be coming and going?”
  —Aicha Evans, 06:34

• On Cultural Philosophy:
  “I have this wonderful coach . . . who taught me . . . that it’s okay to ask for help. That is actually a sign of strength.”
  —Aicha Evans, 24:02

• On Inclusion:
  “Inclusion is more important than diversity, because if you do inclusion, you will get diversity. If you only do diversity, you will get some drama. And I think that’s sort of what’s happening. But it will all work out because it always does.”
  —Aicha Evans, 29:00

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|-------| | 02:09 | Aicha Evans introduces Zoox’s recent milestones and philosophy | | 04:14 | The “proof point stage” and scaling adoption | | 05:12 | Design choices: Purpose-built vs. retrofits | | 06:34 | Making AVs routine; lessons from aviation | | 07:42 | How Amazon supports Zoox’s growth | | 10:19 | Personal use at home—family’s adoption of Zoox & Waymo| | 10:58 | Uber partnership—market expansion and visibility | | 12:36 | Choosing deployment cities: weather, regulation, welcome| | 14:37 | Generative AI’s acceleration of Zoox’s development| | 15:34 | Modernizing the tech stack, explainability, safety| | 22:45 | Managing hype vs. enthusiasm; speed vs. safety | | 24:02 | Lessons from Intel and leadership style | | 25:53 | The “invisible army” and Zoox’s organizational culture | | 27:42 | Perspectives on inclusion, diversity, and navigating leadership as a woman of color |

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Episode Tone & Style

Aicha Evans converses with candor, warmth, and optimism, leavened by pragmatic realism about the challenges of autonomous vehicles and meaningful leadership. The discussion is direct and energetic, with Evans’s humor and positivity complementing her insistence on rigor, safety, and earned results.

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For Further Listening

Bob Safian notes an upcoming episode with Uber’s President Andrew McDonald for the other side of the Zoox-Uber partnership.

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Summary Takeaway

Aicha Evans foregrounds a future where robotaxis blend seamlessly into daily life—not overnight, but through deliberate, measured growth. Her “invisible army” philosophy is about mobilizing collective intelligence, valuing dissent and debate, but aligning in execution. With Amazon’s backing, a focus on safety, and cultural resilience, Zoox is pursuing AV breakthrough at the “speed of trust”—as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary.

Transcript

[Jeff Berman]

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[Bob Safian]

hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA administrator to the lessons from the Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

[Aisha Evans]

We're sending machines out there to go drive amongst humans. People should ask us questions. People ask me all the time, what's waking you up at 3am what's stressing you out? And I think they expect me to say, I don't know, capital or execution or this or that that. I'm constantly asking myself, are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary? We just passed 2 million miles. That's driverless miles on the robotaxi. On US public roads, that's a huge milestone. And as you do that, you do become a household name because you earned it, not because you said so.

[Bob Safian]

That's Aisha Evans, CEO of the autonomous vehicle business Zoox Z O O X. As robo taxis increasingly pop up across American cities. I wanted to hear about Zoox's strategy as a subsidiary of Amazon, about its competition with Waymo, and about the plan behind a new Zoox partnership with Uber. Ayesha talks with me about what it'll take for Robo Taxis to go from consumer novelty to everyday routine and how far down that path the industry actually is in 2026. She also shares lessons, both positive and negative from her time at intel and why she has what she calls an invisible army of rebels within the Zoox team. Aisha is direct, funny, and a beacon of optimism. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Aisha Evans, CEO of Zoox. Aisha, thanks for joining us.

[Aisha Evans]

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Bob Safian]

So Zoox is in the red hot center of building a new mobility future. Electric, autonomous vehicles. You have a new partnership with Uber. Your robotaxis are operational in Las Vegas and San Francisco. How close are we though, really, to like a dramatically different mobility paradigm?

[Aisha Evans]

I think as an industry there's a lot of progress. So I think we're at the proof point stage. I want to say that over the last 20 years, we've had a lot of kind of, oh, it's happening tomorrow morning. Oh, it's never going to happen. And we're past that stage now. The proof points are there, us and also fellow travelers. And now it's a matter of starting to prepare for scale. But I've always been very, very consistent that this is not going to be like a consumer product where all of a sudden, boom, 100 million people experience it. It's going to be step by step. But we're, well, which is really exciting.

[Bob Safian]

Your most well known fellow traveler, Waymo, has chosen to retrofit existing cars. You guys have opted for sort of purpose built vehicles with a striking design. Right. It's got two benches sort of facing each other. There's no driver controls, no steering wheel. It doesn't really look like a car. Why make that choice if AI is

[Aisha Evans]

going to be the doing the driving? It's really now about the customer experience and it's about also what is the best way to materialize this product. First, you have the safety aspect in a regular passenger car that is architected for a human driver. The safest place to be is actually the front seat. For us, we were able to look at redundancy, we were able to look at our optimal sensor architecture so that we can see things and we can See, occluded things in Silicon Valley sometimes. Maybe we think about the customer secondhand. Here they thought about it firsthand and the customer experience just does not feel like you're in a car. What we're seeing from folks, both people who ride, but also in the communities that we ride in, we're seeing curiosity. First couple of minutes, oh my gosh, what is this? And then, wow, this makes so much sense. Look, you're not doing the driving, so why have a bunch of things that are involved in the driving?

[Bob Safian]

Calling an AV still feels like a novelty, you know, like that's what I hear from others who sort of request these robo rides. Do you have clarity about what it's going to take for sort of self driving to become, I don't know, more routine? Like, is that about the design, is it about the tech, is it about the product? Or is it something else?

[Aisha Evans]

Look, this is a big deal. I mean, these types of transformation, they don't happen overnight, right? Look at aviation, it took a while, but then now you're in at JFK and you're like, how can so many planes be coming and going? So I think we're going to have to continue to deploy, continue to really put safety at the forefront, continue to engage in the diversity dialogue with the regulators and the communities. And then, I don't know, maybe a decade from now we'll be like, oh, maybe two. I don't know for sure. I'm not in the pronoxicating business, but at some point I know we'll be like, it's just, yeah, I still own a car, but for certain modes of transport, it just makes more sense to use a robotaxi.

[Bob Safian]

You must be good at projecting in some ways because you were part of the team that, you know, made Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon, which acquired it for 1.3 billion doll in 2020. How does Amazon help Zoox's trajectory? Like, is it about financial resources, access to technology and AI? I mean, how. How is Zoox different than if it were on its own?

[Aisha Evans]

Focus, focus, focus. The financial backing is important, right? A strong relationship also with aws. That goes without saying. The compute. One of the things I love about Amazon is the plurality and multitude of businesses and industries that it has been in. We forget Amazon started by selling books. So they've seen a lot, they've experienced a lot. There's a lot of pattern recognition, there's a lot of the customer obsession. So we get a lot of advice when something's going really well. Well, can you do more of that when something is going poorly. Why is that? And how are you looking at bottlenecks this summer? It'll be six years. So we're way past the dating phase. And I've been both sides of an M and A at big companies and I would say Amazon gets an eight and a half out of ten.

[Bob Safian]

Eight and a half.

[Aisha Evans]

Yes. I have the freedom I should have. I tell people all the time, it's not like when you have a startup that is fully in the private sector with a board. I mean, I've been on the other side where you have VCs and you have institutionalists, you have independents. There's always a decision maker and a boss. Make your peace with it. And we're sending machines out there to go drive amongst humans. People should ask us questions, whether it's the regulators or our bosses. It is the right thing to do and I welcome it. And we get. We are better for it.

[Bob Safian]

There are people who get nervous about the idea of robots taking over. Not all necessarily, you know, robots on the road, but robots in our lives.

[Aisha Evans]

Absolutely. I mean, I have two teenagers and I'm like, oh my gosh. On the one hand, you're so lucky because this is really an era of transformation in almost every sector because of AI. On the other side, I'm like, oh, why did I have to have young adult teenagers during the transformation phase? Because there will be a lot of change. Having said that, I'm on team Optimism, humanity, couple thousand years. I know we take ourselves very seriously because we're the ones alive right now, but there's been a lot of change throughout those years and somehow we're still here. So I tend to think that statistically, why should it be different this time? We'll have a lot of hard conversations, we'll have some hard transitions, but in general things will be better because they always. That's how it's always been

[Bob Safian]

with your kids. Do you teach them to drive? Or is driving a skill that they're not going to need, you know, in the world they're going into?

[Aisha Evans]

Well, they are, what, 18 and almost 20, so they, they did learn to drive. But with my son, it's interesting. If he's in the city, he'll. He'll order a Zoox. If he's around our house, he'll order Waymo, which is totally okay, by the way. It's great product. I use it too. I need to sit down and ask him on what basis is he making those decisions? And hopefully I like the answer.

[Bob Safian]

Your partnership With Uber, I'm curious how big a deal that is because Uber also partners with Waymo. What makes that deal meaningful for you?

[Aisha Evans]

So, I mean, yes, they do partner with almost everybody, which is great. If I were in their shoes, I would probably do the same. Dara has taken rides in Zoox and he totally gets, and Uber totally gets the differentiated experience for zoox for almost 12 years. This summer will be 12. We've been so focused on building the tech, on building the processes. And I want to say that over the last couple of years, we've really started thinking about commercialization and how we're going to do this. I don't see this category as just taking share from whatever exists today. I actually see an expansion of the market as far as Zoox and Uber, for us, it's about learning, it's about experimenting. I'm pretty sure if you arrive in Las Vegas, you maybe you know about Zoox, maybe you don't know about Zoox. Now you will see them on the strip and be like, what is that? Oh my gosh. But I'm pretty sure you know about Uber. So right there that makes it worth it to Zoox. And some element of transportation has nothing to do with pleasure. It's frankly, it has to do with, you know, being utilitarian. And if we can help serve that together and scale faster, the experiment will have worked.

[Bob Safian]

Hmm. You're expanding into other cities. You're testing in LA and Austin and Miami. How do you decide where to go? I'm not sure how. How soon before I might see them here in New York? Some cities tougher than others. For AVs, how much of that is weather? How much of that is density? How much of that is regulation?

[Aisha Evans]

A little bit of all of the above. Weather is important, no question about it. For example, for Zouk, snow is not really a short term. I mean, we're working on it, but that's not a city we're going to pick to having at least some evidence that this is something that the community welcomes. At least the seed of demand, the regulatory environment. You know, I've said publicly in the past that New York is the holy grail. But first it has to be legal to have a robotaxis there. So please, please, please tell the political and governmental infrastructure that you would like robotaxis in New York.

[Bob Safian]

Zoox isn't yet quite a household name, but it's kind of an old timer in AV terms. I mean, he mentions around for 12 years. Is that an advantage in AVs or is like you Know, the tech stack changes so fast. There's so much going on that you know that building today could be just as fast. Like, what are the pros and cons of that time?

[Aisha Evans]

I think part of it is choice and sort of leadership style and culture being a household name to me. I believe in the earned life. Nobody has a God given right to anything. You have to work hard at it. And as we're out there serving more customers, we just passed 2 million miles. For us, that's driverless miles on the robotaxi, on US public roads, that's a huge milestone. We have roughly 500k people on the wait list. We have close to 400k writers who have given us feedback and continuing putting points on the board. And as you do that, you do become a household name because you earned it, not because you said so.

[Bob Safian]

The explosive growth in generative AI, how does that change what you do? How the AV world is going to develop from here?

[Aisha Evans]

We're going faster. That's really how it's impacting us. Simulation is more capable, ability to sort of correlate data and information. Engineers. Actually, I shouldn't even say engineers. Every Zoots employee is way more productive. You get to answers quicker. Everybody's talking about physical AI too. I'm like, wow, yeah, we've been doing physical AI since we were born. Every time there's one of these big transformations, new set of sort of giant companies are born. And some companies also maybe don't adapt and don't figure out how to be the elephant that can dance and are replaced. And I expect basically the same dynamics, but just bigger and probably the fastest we've ever experienced.

[Bob Safian]

Do you think about like, oh, we should sort of rebuild our stack from scratch because we have this new capability?

[Aisha Evans]

Not for us, we have a certain architecture we believe in. There are really big parts of the stack that we are able to essentially modernize. And it's not the first time we've modernized it, by the way. Sometimes I'm like, well, what if somebody looks at our code? I'm like, by the time they can understand it, it'll have changed again. Because we're learning constantly, applying new techniques and new algorithms. We basically modernize our stack as we go. But it's important to have explainability and to have traceability because no matter what we do, these systems will be safer than humans. But they will also make mistakes. They will not be perfect. And being able to understand when a mistake was made why that was the case and be able to correct that is really key. You can't just have this part where you just draw a bunch of things and then a soup arrives and you can't decompose the soup backwards.

[Bob Safian]

Yes, I do love that term explainability, which is like for many Silicon Valley companies is a euphemism for we really don't know how we got to these outputs and we're trying to trace it back and figure it out.

[Aisha Evans]

Yeah, well, at least in driving, I mean, I don't like commenting on other people's businesses because I don't like it when people do it to me because I have no idea what's going on inside. But at least for physical AI, for driving these robotaxis in human communities, that is unacceptable. That's obvious.

[Bob Safian]

You have to know.

[Aisha Evans]

You have to know, period.

[Bob Safian]

I talked with Ford CEO Jim Farley recently and he was all amped up about China's auto industry. The scale, the advances, the pace. How much do you look at China and what's happening there?

[Aisha Evans]

From an AV standpoint, our expectation is that there will be an ecosystem in China that we don't have access to. As an American company now, I think that when it comes to Europe, Middle East, Africa, latam and so on, you'll probably have a mix of both ecosystems. So we keep track of them. With that basic foundational premise, I think with EV, as you go from internal combustion engines or ICE to EVs, you start going from sort of a machine with wheels to a computer on wheels. And that means that integration between hardware and software, and not treating software just as basic control functions or controlling the infotainment, but really software being a first class citizen in the architecture, design and having decision rights becomes very important. Lots of people very good at hardware, lots of people very good at software, not a lot of people good at both. And treating them as sort of equal rights, decision rights when it comes to major architectural and sort of strategic decisions. The ecosystem in China, when you look at a lot of these consumer electronics companies that came from the smartphone era, and that by definition had to be good at hardware and software and system level thinking are finding a glide path to EVs and AVs, because that foundational knowledge and mindset is already native to them. And if you're not native, then get busy being native.

[Bob Safian]

Aisha is definitely busy. She's digging into the details of Zoox's operations, managing Amazon oversight and trying to create a whole new future. So had a. Does she use what she calls her invisible army inside Zoox to get things done? And where did the idea for an invisible army come from? Anyway, we'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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[Bob Safian]

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[Bob Safian]

Before the break, Zoox's Aisha Evans talked about how she's leveraging both Amazon and Uber to get more robo taxis on the streets in 2026. Now she talks about leveraging enthusiasm without slipping into hype, why she deploys what she calls an invisible army inside Zoox, and lessons from her tenure at Intel. Let's dive back in. You clearly have a lot of enthusiasm about this area, and you alluded to this before the sort of this balance between, you know, not extending too far into hype, but, you know, maintaining that enthusiasm over a long period of time, how do you think about that? About. About sort of modulating those two things?

[Aisha Evans]

So I live by something that I was taught by a friend of mine, which is you. You have to think about going as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary. You also have to build a culture where you earn it. A lot of transparency. Sometimes people visit and they're like, how do you know people? I'm like, I work at it. Because I want to know that they all feel comfortable telling me if they think there's a problem somewhere so that we can deal with it. Because you have to earn it. If it's a culture of fear or if it's a culture where you're not making it easy and providing several channels to do that, you won't go as fast as possible. People ask me all the time, what's waking you up at 3am, what's stressing you out? And I think they expect me to say, I don't know capital or execution or this or that. But I'm constantly asking myself, are we going as fast as we can, but as slow as necessary? Because we all know what happens when you go too fast and you don't consider safety. Then bad things happen. And they should happen, by the way. So the balance and the blend is the struggle and the triumph.

[Bob Safian]

Prior to Zoox, you spent some years at Intel. Are there things from that experience that you draw on? Or is Zoox such a different business you look elsewhere for, for lessons and

[Aisha Evans]

inspiration, both in general? I'm a curious person. I have this wonderful coach who taught me 15 years ago that it's okay to ask for help. That is actually a sign of strength. So when I'm stuck, I'm known to pick up the phone and say, hi, I'm Aisha Evans from Zoox, an Amazon company. I please need some help. So and so told me about you or introduced me to you, but taking it back to Intel, I learned a ton at Intel. 12 years. It's a company that's important. I root for that company company to this day. I learned about hardware, software integration. I had a front seat to people who are hardware only or software only. And I was like, huh, that's a problem I learned about. You're going to laugh inside of probably some ex intel, if some X Intel or current intel. People who know me listen to this. They're going to trouble because I was known as a little Bit of a rebel. I complained about every process and why we sold slow and so dogmatic and so bureaucratic and. Don't you understand? And yeah, well, guess what? Thank you, thank you for that training. Because then I came to Zoox and it was still a very early startup, roughly a little less than 500 people and had a lot of technology, but really needed to be orchestrated and coordinated and put processes in place, put orgs in place, put sort of a common language in place in order to succeed. So lots of learnings that I applied, but also lots of things not to do that I won't tell you about.

[Bob Safian]

You won't tell me? Yes, well, because you have to move as fast as you can as well, right? Not just, not just slow. That's. I guess that's what being the rebel in that group means. I guess you want to have, you want to have your own rebels within your own organization, but maybe not too many of them.

[Aisha Evans]

I want enough of them. Because you need a uniform distribution in all functions. One of the things that at Zone is because we're vertically integrated. One day you are talking to a traditional sort of automotive engineer, you're talking chassis, battery, suspension, brakes, harnesses. The next day you're talking to marketing about how much do we want to emphasize safety or not. So you want to make sure that I call them affectionately my invisible army or the invisible army. You want to make sure that they are distributed across the corporation. But we also have to have a contract that we will debate, we will discuss, we will consider alternatives. But once we make a decision, we commit and we move and we don't revisit unless there's evidence or assumptions that were incorrect. And then we do a little bit of a feedback loop and then keep moving forward.

[Bob Safian]

I talked to the leader of a big, well known brand who, you know, was distraught about the way immigrants and other diverse populations and women are being. Sort of. Things have been made more difficult for them over the last year or so since the Trump administration came in, the second Trump administration came in. But at the same time she felt like as a woman of color who was born in another country, it is not her place to talk about it. Like she just can't. It makes her too much of a target. And I don't, obviously I don't want you to feel like you're a target, but I'm just, I'm wondering whether you have any thoughts or experiences about this or how you manage that part of being who you are.

[Aisha Evans]

My views pre and post, this administration haven't really changed. The person I admire the most is Mary Curry. Well, there are two of them. Mary Curie and Nelson Mandela. And I'll explain why Mary Curry. Every time I'm like, yeah, of course I get disrespected or assumptions are made that are very annoying. I mean, that happens on a daily basis. But I've basically made the decision that I was going to live my life happy and not miserable, and I am going to shut people up by doing the work. And when I succeed, it feels really good. And when I fail, I'm like, what the hell happened? And what can I learn? After a good cry, of course. And maybe that's a very selfish way of living life, but that's what I learned from Mary Curie. Nothing is to be feared. Everything is to be understood so that we can fear less. And on my worst days, I'm like, wow, she was an immigrant, she was a wife. She was in physics way back then. She was a mummy. You know, she had it way worse than I did. And somehow she figured out to thrive and get two Nobel Prizes, by the way, along the way. And so let's just understand why what's happening is happening, what we can do about it, and also understand that progress is never fast, and it's also rarely linear. So that's how I live my life. Then you have Nelson Mandela on the other side. I don't understand how. You are in jail for 27 years. 27 years. That's a long time. And by the way, it's totally unjust, right? By any. I mean, I think by any reasonable standard, you become friends with the jailers. You. I mean, what? Seriously? And then you come out of jail and you don't go on a revenge tour. You go on a. Okay, what have I learned and what do I understand and how do I bring people together? So that's sort of how I look at the whole situation. I think there's been a lot of progress. I also fundamentally believe that inclusion is more important than diversity, because if you do inclusion, you will get diversity. If you only do diversity, you will get some drama. And I think that's sort of what's happening. But it will all work out because it always does.

[Bob Safian]

This was great. Thank you so much for doing it.

[Aisha Evans]

I really enjoyed the conversation.

[Bob Safian]

Listening to Ayesha, I was reminded of the move fast and break things era of tech development that turned social media from a promising tool to something impersonal, often angry, sometimes addictive. Her admonition to move as fast as possible and as slow as necessary. Is a prudent mantra not just for Robo Taxis, but for all of us in the age of AI. I also want to double click on her encouragement that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, especially when things are changing so fast. We need to rely on each other for perspective and support. On Friday, we turn the tables. I'm talking to the other side of Zoox's recent partnership, Uber sitting down with President Andrew McDonald on how autonomous vehicles fit into their own evolving business model, plus Uber's surprising expansion into hotels and what gas prices are really doing to their driver community. If you're listening to us on Masters of Scale right now, search for Rapid Response and subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Rapid Response comes out each Tuesday and Friday, so if you just listen on Masters of Scale, you're missing out on half of our shows. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks. Thanks for listening. Rapid Response is a wait. What? Original I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Trow, our senior producer is Alex Morris, and our associate producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Malad. For more, visit rapidresponseshow.com.