 A self-driving car was destroyed in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown streets during a Lunar New Year celebration. But what really happened? You know, this is not a traditional New Year celebration. What's going on? It says video captures Google self-driving robotaxi being set on fire in SF Chinatown. Let's just run the clip. New at 11, today's Lunar New Year celebrations took a dangerous and destructive turn in San Francisco's Chinatown tonight. A Waymo car was graffited and set on fire by a mob of people on Jackson Street near Grant Avenue at about nine o'clock. Waymo tells us nobody was inside the vehicle at the time and the fire started after a window was broken and a firework thrown inside. Firefighters quickly extinguished those flames. The car is a total loss as you can see. Police are now investigating. Oh my goodness man, you hate to see it enter. This was a jaguar. David, talk about, you know, burning some incense for the ancestors. But why don't we just go and burn a car? I think immediately when I saw this video man, I hate to see it in Chinatown, especially when the people who are destroying the car and ultimately setting it on fire are not even Chinese because that's just not something that Chinese people would do. I'm not saying in the video there's not some broccoli hair-cutted teens probably being like, yo, dude, this is lit. This is lit, but they're just recording it. They're not the ones setting the car on fire. Yeah. Yeah. It was probably people who were not there for the Chinatown celebration. Well, they have skateboards, so I'm assuming they might have been skaters. Right. I mean, some of them had skateboards. But anyways, guys, we're going to go through the comments section. Please hit that like button. Check out other episodes of the Hot Pop Boys. Also, check out Smala Sauce sold out right now. But we're going to start pre-orders for the next batch soon. Be ready for it. When you see the clip, it looks like SF is being stereotypical, lawless, post-apocalyptic society, but it gets more complicated once you look at the details. Okay. So, David, I think, first of all, you see people destroying a car in the middle of the street, not good for any reason. But what is the reasoning probably? All right. There's a lot of reasons that the articles talk about. But let me just say one of the unspoken reasons is that people feel like Chinatown is like another world where you can just do whatever you want, whether that's hurt old people or set the cars on fire. That's not that's the unspoken element that you won't see in any of these articles. You know what it is? It's not their neighborhood. Yeah. So you're more willing to cause destruction outside of your neighborhood. It doesn't feel like some other world. You're looking at these crazy neon signs, all these characters you can't read. Sure. Yeah, to them, yes. Yes. And here's the part where it's like, this is the part that all the articles obviously are savvy to Cruz, which is not Waymo. They hit a pedestrian in their self-driving car. Cruz lost his license. So if you guys don't know, San Francisco had multiple driverless taxi services operating, essentially robo taxis. Waymo didn't have that issue, but Waymo did like, you know, bump into a biker and stuff like that. So there's already this feeling of like the old SF versus the new SF. The new SF enter is all the Robo, you know, tech founder moguls that want to like do dystopian futures. And the old SF is like hyper anti establishment V for Vendetta. We want to fight against the matrix. Well, basically the people generally don't like these robo taxis. Well, the old SF. No, well, yeah, just the people like the skateboarders. They don't like it. Right. The skateboarders are more fighting the resistance. Well, because the robo taxis, one of them critically injured a woman did not die, but did critically injured pedestrians. So this Waymo car is on its way to pick up people, but it doesn't understand that it's Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year. The streets of Chinatown are packed. So the car is like stalled out, but trying to move forward. So it's kind of moving through the crowd. Yeah, it's like stopped at the edge of it, but it gets stopped for a while. And then people start to go, you know, and I don't think they're they're celebrating the year of the dragon to be honest, these skater guys, they're just hanging out, maybe enjoying just the litness. Maybe they think the Chinese New Year is not lit enough. So they just started to start breaking the windows, tagging up the car. Eventually, they break open the windows of the Waymo, which is a Jaguar eyepace. Throw the fireworks in there. And I'm just saying that, like, you hate to see it because, but I guess I guess it could have prevented a lot of ways. I'm not asking Chinese people to like stop these people because there are some of the young Chinese are like recording it and they're like thinking it's lit and stuff like that too. So it's like kind of just a really unfortunate scene all around. Yeah, I just think that even though no humans were hurt in this destruction of this car, still any time you bring that energy to a celebration, it can lead to other things. So it doesn't make Chinatown safer because you burned a car in the middle of the street. Not only that, the emissions from burn metal are incredibly toxic. Yeah. And it causes a mess. People got to come through. There's that reputation. Oh, a car just got burned here. Everybody has to go clean it up. So obviously I'm against this. I do understand why people don't like these Robo taxis. Right. Because they rushed the technology, right? I don't. Maybe the technology got adopted too fast, too quick, right? Yeah. You know, and I think that this is maybe not something that the Robo taxi company saw coming, but this is definitely not good for them. Well, they should learn from it, right? Yes. Avoid Chinatown on Lunar New Year. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So I think it's just a lot of people want to set something on fire, though. They want an excuse to destroy something. No, because that's lit to them. And that's the issue, though. That's the issue. Anyways, let's get into the comment section. We must fight against them at Madness, Sarah Connor. People are talking about framing it in terms of these guys are V for Vendetta, Andrew. These are the robots in the Matrix, you know, in Zion where they have to like, you know how Neo like enters the real world and he got to fight. Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes to the self driving cars, I actually think a lot of people are like, you know, hesitant about it. Like I'm not in a rush to jump into one. Right. Like I think it'll be a really long time before they adopt it in New York or a city outside of SF. To be honest, if you know the environment of SF, one side of it, like I said, hyper liberal, like almost anarchist in one side, it's like hyper like pro-protect. So it's kind of a weird convergence. Like I said, of old SF thinking and new SF tech SF, right? Other people were just saying, man, I can't believe it was non Asians. You know what I mean? But then it is true that some of the younger Asians, Andrew, they're enjoying it, trying to get their IG or Snapchat. Yeah, everybody's trying to get an IG moment. Yeah. Somebody was like framing it framing it in terms of like, well, maybe we should do that because they're taking our jobs and destroying humanity. Some people are viewing it through the lens of humans versus robots. Was it a successful protest? I, you know, in a messed up way, I think it does think make Waymo think differently, but it also kind of hurts Chinatown. So I'm, I'm like, about it. Let's just say this. Like I said, I'm not against a convergence of factors that have to come into play because you're not going to feel comfortable doing this in any other place other than Chinatown too. I see a lot of people. I would never want to normalize destruction of property. So I'm against that, but also. Dude, just because this incident didn't hurt anybody, the lack of law and order, it's going to spiral to just leading to more people getting hurt. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Don't deserve to get hurt. It's not about street people on street people. I'm talking about street people on regular law abiding citizens. Is it even illegal? Is anything even illegal in San Francisco anymore? People are just saying, dude, civilization ends when people stop acting civilized, which in America was about four to five years ago. And they're not saying, I'm not saying it's any side. It's everybody. It's crime in the streets. It's theft. It's January 6th insurrection. Is it Andrew has civilization started to end because people are no longer acting civilized. Well, this is what they call civil unrest, right? It's like a lot of an uptick in maybe not necessarily crime on individuals, but just destruction of things. People just generally not following rules. Yeah, people feel like they want to destroy things. And I think that that's not good. It can't be, bro. I'm not saying I can't empathize with some of the reasons and the feelings and the emotions. Of course, there's multiple sides to everything, guys. Somebody said, you know, I think Waymo's actually drive better than most human drivers because they're less aggressive and they're always trying to follow rules and they come to a super full stop at stop signs. It just hasn't gotten the programming to understand holiday behavior yet. Right, right, right. I mean, dude, you think it's just a matter of time. They need to get the computer programmers to update the firmware, right? Put the Lunar New Year pack in there. No, I get that human drivers probably make more mistakes on average. Like the rate of injuries with robo taxis is probably lower actually than the injuries by driver humans. But but is it lower than the injuries caused by professional drivers? If you take all drivers in general, which are just people who are drunk out on a Friday night driving their own car or reckless in every every aspect of their life, but like of taxis. What's the rate of crashing and hurting people? I'm curious about that. Yeah. Well, even in that cruise situation where that lady got dragged 20 feet, she was running her red on the pedestrian sign. But then they're accusing the cruise car. And I'm not saying right or wrong. The cruise car didn't stop quick enough because it dragged her. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, like I said, you know, she could have died. Honestly, if she died, they should not reinstate cruise because cruises with GM waymos with Google. And you trust General Motors more. You trust Google more technologically. Does does General Motors even got good tech in their cars in 2024? I doubt it. Ultimately, Andrew, what's going on? Like a car gets set on fire. Chinese New Year. Yeah. What the heck? Yeah, just it's not good. Yeah. That's my whole thing. I'm saying, listen, guys, I don't know. Hey, you know what? Both cannot be good. Both are true. Self-driving cars, not that great. Destroying cars in the middle of the street. Bad. Both bad. Do you think that Chinatowns could do a better job self-regulating? Because it's true that they weren't able to, like, I guess stop the people from destroying the car. But also Chinatowns are not like that. I mean, to get involved with destructive people as long as they're not attacking people, I mean, I see a lot of Chinese people just not being involved in that. Or not wanting to get involved. But anyways, guys, you let me know in the comments down below what you think. It's just another bad SF story classic. It almost feels like a meme now. Oh, SF is this way. The human versus robots elements and the V-Viver Vendetta elements. Yeah. This was not human on human, thankfully. It was human on computer. Anyway, guys, let us know what you think in the comments section below. Until next time, we're the Hop Hop Boys. We out. Peace.