Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream | Lex Fridman Podcast #237

1. 0:00 – 0:44

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Steve Viscelli, formerly a truck driver and now a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies freight transportation. His first book, The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, explains how long haul trucking went from being one of the best blue collar jobs to one of the toughest. His current ongoing book project, Driverless: Autonomous Trucks and the Future of the American Trucker, explores self-driving trucks and their potential impacts on labor and on society. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, here's my conversation with Steve Viscelli.

2. 0:44 – 12:57

   Ethnography

   1. LFLex Fridman0:45

      You wrote a book about trucking called The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, and you're currently working on a book about autonomous trucking called Driverless: Autonomous Trucks and the Future of the American Trucker. I have to bring up some Johnny Cash to you 'cause I was just listening to this song. He has a ton of songs about trucking, but one of them I was just listening to, um, it's called All I Do is Drive, where he's talking to an old truck driver. It goes, "I asked him if those trucking songs tell about a life like his. He said, 'If you want to know the truth about it, here's the way it is. All I do is drive, drive, drive. Try to stay alive.'" That's the chorus. "And keep my mind on my load, keep my eye upon the road. I got nothing in common with any man who's home every day at five. All I do is drive, drive, drive. Drive, drive, drive, drive." So, I gotta ask you, uh, same thing that he asked (laughs) the trucker. (laughs) You worked as a trucker for six months and, and now wh- while working on the previous book. Um, what's it like to be a truck driver?

   2. SVSteve Viscelli1:55

      I think that captures it. (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman1:58

      (laughs)

   4. SVSteve Viscelli1:58

      It really does, um-

   5. LFLex Fridman1:59

      Can you take me through the whole experience? What it takes to, uh, become a trucker. What actual day-to-day life was on day one, week one, and then over time, how that changed.

   6. SVSteve Viscelli2:09

      Yeah. Um, well, the, the book is really about how that changed over time. So, my experience, and I'm an ethnographer, right? So I go in, uh, I live with people, I work with people, I talk to them, try to understand, you know, their world.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:26

      Ethnographer, by the way, what is that? The science and art of capturing a, uh, the spirit of a people?

   8. SVSteve Viscelli2:35

      Yeah, life ways, you know? I think that would be a good way to capture it. You know, try to understand what makes them unique, um, as a, as a society, maybe as a subculture, right? What kind of makes them tick that might be different than the way you and I are sort of wired. And really sort of thickly describe it, would be at least one component of it, that's sort of the basic essential. And then for me, I, I want to, you know, exercise what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, which is to, you know, put that individual biography into the long historical sweep of humanity, (laughs) if, if at all possible. Um, my goals are typically more modest than C. Wright Mills'. And to, you know, then put that biography in the larger social structure, right? To try to understand that person's life and the way they see the world, um, their decisions in light of their interests relative to others and conflict and power. All these things that I find interesting.

   9. LFLex Fridman3:40

      In the context of society and in the context of history.

   10. SVSteve Viscelli3:43

       Yeah.

   11. LFLex Fridman3:44

       And a small tangent. What does it take to do that? To, uh, capture the, uh, this particular group, the spirit, the music, the full landscape of experiences that a particular group goes through in the context of everything else? You only have limited amount of time and you come to the table probably with preconceived notions that are then quickly destroyed, all that whole process, so it's g- it's, I don't know if it's more art or science, but what does it take to be great at this?

   12. SVSteve Viscelli4:14

       I do think the- my first book was a success as, you know, relative to my goals of trying to really, you know, get at the heart of, of sort of the central issues and, and the lives being led by people. If I have a, a resource, a, a talent, it's that I'm a good listener. Um, I can, (laughs) you know, talk with anybody, um, you know, my, my wife s- you know, loves to remark on this that, you know, I can, I can sort of sit down with anyone. Uh, I think I learned that from my dad, who, uh, worked at a factory and actually had a lot of truckers go through the, the gate that he operated, and he always had a story, you know, a joke, for everybody, kind of got to know everyone individually, and he just kinda taught me that like essentially everyone has something to teach you, and I, I try to embody that. Like that's, that's the rule is for me is every single person I interact with can teach me something. And-

   13. LFLex Fridman5:14

       I gotta ask you, I'm sorry to interrupt, uh, because I'm clearly of the two of us the poorer listener. (laughs) Uh, you've done-

   14. SVSteve Viscelli5:22

       I think you're a great listener.

   15. LFLex Fridman5:23

       Thank you.

   16. SVSteve Viscelli5:23

       I, I've, I've been listening to the podcast.

   17. LFLex Fridman5:25

       (laughs)

   18. SVSteve Viscelli5:25

       I think you're a great listener.

   19. LFLex Fridman5:26

       I really appreciate that. Well, um, you've done a large number of interviews like you said of truckers for this book. The, I'm just curious, um, what are some lessons you've learned about what it takes to listen to a person enough, maybe guide, you know, the conversation enough to get to the core of the person, the idea? Again, the ethnographer goal, to get to the, get to the core.

   20. SVSteve Viscelli5:54

       Yeah. I, I think it's, it doesn't happen in the moment, right? So, eh, I...I'm a ruminator, you know. I, I just sit with the data, you know, for years. I, I sat with the trucking data for almost 10 full years, um, and just thought it, thought about the problems and the questions using everything that I possibly could. And so, in the moment, you know, my ideal interview is, you know, I open up and I say, "Tell me about your life as a trucker." And they never shut up and they, (laughs) and they keep-

   21. LFLex Fridman6:28

       Hmm.

   22. SVSteve Viscelli6:28

       ... telling me the things that I'm interested in. Now, it never works out that way because they don't know what you're interested in, right? And so, it's, um, a lot of it is the, as you know, as a, I think you're a great interviewer, you know prep, right? Uh, so you try to get to know a little bit about the person and sort of understand, you know, kind of the, the central questions you're interested in that, that they can help you explore. Um, and so I've done hundreds of interviews with truck drivers, um, at this point. And (laughs) I should really go back and read the original ones. They're probably terrible, yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman7:02

       What's the process like? Y- you're sitting down. Do you have an audio recorder and also taking notes or do you do no audio record, just notes or?

   24. SVSteve Viscelli7:09

       Yeah, audio recorder and, you know, social scientists always have to struggle with sampling, right? Like who, who do you interview? Where do you find them? How do you recruit them? Um, I just happen to have a sort of natural place to go that gave me essentially the population that I was interested in.

   25. LFLex Fridman7:24

       Mm-hmm.

   26. SVSteve Viscelli7:24

       You know, so all these long-haul truck drivers that I wo- I was interested in, they have to stop and get fuel and get services at truck stops.

   27. LFLex Fridman7:31

       Mm-hmm.

   28. SVSteve Viscelli7:32

       So, I picked a, you know, truck stop at the juncture of a couple major interstates, went into the lounge that drivers have to walk through, you know, with my clipboard, and everybody who came through and I said, "Hey, you know, are you on break?" You know, that was sort of the first, you know, criteria was, do you have time, right? Um, and, and if they said yes, I said, you know, I'd say, "I'm a graduate student (laughs) you know, at Indiana University. I'm doing a study. I'm trying to understand more about truck drivers. You know, will you sit down with me?" And I think the first, I think I probably asked like 104, 103 people to get the first 100 interviews.

   29. LFLex Fridman8:10

       That's pretty good odds.

   30. SVSteve Viscelli8:11

       It's amazing, right?
3. 12:57 – 31:36

   Challenges of driving a truck

   1. SVSteve Viscelli12:57

   2. LFLex Fridman12:57

      So let's return to your journey as a truck driver. What, uh, what did it take to become a truck driver? What were the early days like?

   3. SVSteve Viscelli13:05

      Yeah, so this is, I mean, this is a central part of the story, right, that I uncovered. And the, the good part was that I went in without knowing what was gonna happen.

   4. LFLex Fridman13:13

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SVSteve Viscelli13:14

      So I, I was able to experience it as a new truck driver would. It's one of the important stories in the book is how that experience is constructed by employers to, sort of, you know, help you think the way that they would like you to think about the job and about the industry and about the social relations of it. Um, it's super intimidating. Uh, I say in the book, you know, pretty handy guy, you know, familiar with tools, machines, like, you know, comfortable operating stuff, like, from, from the time I was a kid. The truck was just like a whole nother (laughs) experience. I mean, as, as I think most people think about it, it's this big, huge vehicle, right? It's, it's really long, it's 70 feet long, it can weigh 80,000 pounds. You know, it does not stop like a car, it does not turn like a car, um, but at least when I started, um, and this, this has changed and it's part of the technology story of trucking, the first thing you had to do was learn how to shift it. And it doesn't shift like a manual car. The, the clutch isn't synchronized, so you have to do what's called double clutch and it's, it's basically the foundational skill that a truck driver used to have to learn. Um, so you would, you know, accelerate, say you're in first gear, you push in the clutch, you pull the shifter out of first gear, you let the clutch out, and then you let the RPMs of the engine drop a s- an exact amount, then you put- push the clutch back in and you put it in second gear.

   6. LFLex Fridman14:47

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SVSteve Viscelli14:48

      If your timing is off, those gears aren't gonna go together (laughs) . And so if you're in an intersection, you're just gonna get this horrible grinding sound as you coast, you know, to a dead stop in the, you know, underneath the stop light or whatever it is.

   8. LFLex Fridman15:03

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SVSteve Viscelli15:03

      So the first thing you have to do is learn to shift it. And so y- a- at least for me and, and a lot of drivers who are going to private company CDL schools, what happens is it's, it's kind of like a boot camp. They ship me three states away from home, send you a bus ticket and say, "Hey, we'll put you up for two weeks." You sit in a classroom, you sort of learn the theory of shifting, the, you know, theory of kind of how you fill out your log book, rules of the road, you know, and you do that maybe half the day, and then the other half, you're in this giant parking lot with one of these old trucks and just like, you know, destroying what's left of the thing. (laughs)

   10. LFLex Fridman15:40

       (laughs)

   11. SVSteve Viscelli15:40

       You know, just, and it's lurching and belching smoke and just making horrible noises and like rattling. I mean, and these things like, there's a lot of torque and so if you do manage to get it into gear but the engine's lugging, I mean, it can throw you right out of the seat, right? So it's this, it's like, you know, this bull you're trying (laughs) to ride and it's super intimidating. Um, and the thing about it is that for everybody there, it's, almost everybody there, it's super high stakes. So trucking has become a job of last resort for a lot of people. And so they, you know, they lose a job in manufacturing, they, they, they get too old to do construction any longer, right? The, the knees can no longer handle it. Um, they get replaced by a machine, their job gets, you know, offshored and they end up going to trucking because it's a place where they can maintain their income and so it's super high stress. Like, they've left their family behind, maybe they quit another job, they're typically being charged a lot of money, so that first couple weeks, like, you might get charged $8,000 by the company that you have to pay back if you don't get hired. And so the stakes are high and this machine is huge and it's intimidating (laughs) . And so it's super stressful. I mean, I watched, you know, men, grown men break down crying about like how they couldn't go home and tell their son that they'd been telling they were gonna, you know, go become a long haul truck driver that they'd failed, and it's kind of this super high stress system. It's designed that way partly 'cause, as one of my trainers later told me, it's basically a two-week job interview, like they're testing you. They're seeing like, you know, how's this person gonna respond when it's tough, you know, when they have to do the right thing and it's slow and, you know, they need to learn something, are they gonna rush, you know? Um, or are they gonna kind of stay calm, figure it out, you know, nose to the grindstone 'cause when you're o- when you're a truck driver, you're unsupervised, you know?

   12. LFLex Fridman17:34

       Mm-hmm.

   13. SVSteve Viscelli17:34

       And, and that's what they're really looking for is that kind of quality o- of conscientious work that's gonna carry through to the job in the long run.

   14. LFLex Fridman17:41

       Well, so the, the truck is such an imposing part of a traffic scenario.

   15. SVSteve Viscelli17:45

       Yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman17:45

       So you said like, uh, like turning, it, it stresses me out every time I look at a truck 'cause they, I mean, the geometry of the problem is so tricky and so if you combine the fact that they have to, like everybody basically all the cars in the scene are staring at the truck and they're waiting, often in frustration.

   17. SVSteve Viscelli18:01

       Yeah.Yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman18:02

       And in that mode, you have to then shift gears perfectly and move perfectly. And if, when you're new especially, like you'll probably, for somebody like me, it feels like it would take years to become calm and comfortable in that situation-

   19. SVSteve Viscelli18:17

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman18:17

       ... as opposed to be exceptionally stressed under- under the eyes of the- the road, everybody looking at you, waiting for you. Is that the psychological pressure of that? Is that something that was really difficult?

   21. SVSteve Viscelli18:29

       Yeah, absolutely. Again, just, uh, I- I saw people freeze up, (laughs) you know, in that intersection as, you know, horns are blaring and the truck's grinding, you know, gears and you just can't, you know, and they, and they just shut down. They're like, "This isn't for me. I can't do it." Um, you're right. It- it takes years. Uh, if, you know, trucking is not considered a- a skilled occupation but, you know, my six months there, and I- I was a pretty good rookie but when I finished, I was, I was still a rookie. Even shifting, definitely backing, um, tight corners and situations, you know, I could drive competently but the difference between me and someone who had, you know, two, three years of experience, um, was a, it was a giant gulf between us. And between that and the really skilled drivers who've been doing it for 20 years, um, you know, it's still another step beyond that. So, it is highly skilled.

   22. LFLex Fridman19:22

       Would it be fair to break trucking into ... the task of truck, of driving a truck to two categories? One is like, the local stuff, getting out of the parking lot, getting into, getting into, you know, driving down local streets and then highway driving? Those two, those two tasks? What are the challenges associated with each task? You kind of emphasized the first one. Uh, what about the actual, like, long haul highway driving?

   23. SVSteve Viscelli19:48

       Yeah. So, I mean, and they- they are very different, right? Um, and- and the- the key with the long haul driving is really a set of, um ... the way I- I came to understand it was a set of habits, right? Um, we have a sense of driving, particularly men, I think, have a sense of driving as like, being really skilled is like, the goal.

   24. LFLex Fridman20:11

       (laughs) .

   25. SVSteve Viscelli20:11

       And you- you can kind of maneuver yourself out of, in and out of tight spaces with great speed and then-

   26. LFLex Fridman20:17

       Yeah.

   27. SVSteve Viscelli20:17

       ... braking and acceleration. You know, um, for a really good truck driver, it's about understanding traffic and- and traffic patterns and making good decisions so you never have to use those skills.

   28. LFLex Fridman20:30

       Mm-hmm.

   29. SVSteve Viscelli20:30

       And the really good drivers, y- you know, the- the mantra is always leave yourself an out, right? So, always have that safe place that you can put that truck in case that four Wheeler in front of you who's texting loses control. Um, you know, what are you gonna do in that- in that situation? And th- what really good truck drivers do on the highway is they just keep themselves out of those situations entirely. They see it, they slow down, they, (laughs) you know, they avoid it. Um, and then the local driving is- is really something that takes just practice and routine to learn. You know, this quarter turn, it- it feels like the back of the truck sometime is on- sometimes is on delay when you're backing it up. So it's like, all right, I'm gonna do a quarter turn of the wheel now, uh, to get the effect that I want like five seconds from now (laughs) in where that tail of that trailer's gonna be, and there's just no ... I mean, some people have a natural talent for that, you know, spatial visualization and kind of calculating those angles and everything, but there's really no escaping the fact that you've gotta just do it over and over again before you're gonna learn how to do it well.

   30. LFLex Fridman21:43

       Do you mind sharing how much you were, uh, getting paid, how much you were making as a truck driver in your time as a truck driver?
4. 31:36 – 1:04:41

   Trucking industry: State of affairs

   1. LFLex Fridman31:36

      from tangent to tangent. This is such a fascinating d- and difficult topic. Um, I heard that there's a shortage of truck drivers, uh, so there's more jobs than truck drivers willing to take on the job. Is that the state of affairs currently?

   2. SVSteve Viscelli31:53

      I mean, I think the way that you, you just put that is, is right. Um, y- we don't have a shortage of people who are currently licensed to do the jobs. So I'm working on a project for the State of California to look at the shortage of agricultural drivers and the, the first thing that, um, the DMV commissioner of the state wanted to look at was, you know, is there actually a shortage of licensed drivers? He's like, "I've got my database here of all the people who have a commercial driver's license who could potentially have the credential to do this." Um, there are about 145,000 jobs in California that require a, a class A CDL, which would be that, that commercial driver's license that you need for the big trucks. Um, about 145,000 jobs. The industry in their, you know, regular, um, promotion of the idea that there's a shortage is always projecting forward and says, you know, "We're gonna need 165,000 or so in the next 10 years." Um, they're currently like 435,000 people licensed in the State of California-

   3. LFLex Fridman32:55

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SVSteve Viscelli32:55

      ... to drive one of these big trucks. (laughs) So, so it is not at all an absence of people who... I mean, and again, uh, going back to what we were talking about before, getting that license is not something that you just walk down to the DMV and take the test. Like this is somebody who probably quit another job, was unemployed, um, and took months to go to a training school, right? Paid for that training school oftentimes, left their family for months, right? Invested in what they thought was gonna be a long-term career and then said, "You know what? Forget it, I can't, I can't do it." You know?

   5. LFLex Fridman33:33

      So that, and yeah, so it's not just skill, it's like they were psychologically invested potentially for months if not years into this kinds of position as perhaps a position that if they lose their current job, they could fall to. Okay, so that's an ind- indication that there's something deeply wrong with the job if so many licensed people are not willing to take it. What are the biggest problems of, uh, the job of truck driver currently?

   6. SVSteve Viscelli33:59

      Yeah. The, the job, the problems with the job and the labor market, right? But let- let's, um, let's start with the job which is, you know, again, just so much time that's, that's not compensated directly for the amount of time. Um, a- and that's just psychologically, and this was a big part of what I, you know, sort of I studied in for the first book was, you know, that that conception of like what's my time worth, right? And like what truck drivers love is, oftentimes, is that tangible, uh, outcome-based compensation. So they say, "You know what? You know, it's honest day's work, I work hard, I get paid for what I do, I drive 500 miles today, that's what I'm gonna get paid for," and then you get to that dock and they tell you, "Sorry, the load's not ready. Go sit over there." And you stew. You know?

   7. LFLex Fridman34:49

      And that wait can break you psychologically 'cause your, your, your, uh, your time every second becomes more worthless.

   8. SVSteve Viscelli34:57

      Yeah.

   9. LFLex Fridman34:58

      Or worth less.

   10. SVSteve Viscelli35:00

       Yeah, and again, the, the industry is gonna say for instance, okay, well, you know, they've got skin in the game, right? That argument about sort of compensation based on sort of output, right? Um, but that's a holdover from when you couldn't observe truckers. Now they all have, you know, satellite linked computers in the trucks that tell these large companies this driver was, you know, at this GPS location for four and a half hours, right? So if you wanted to compensate them for that time directly and the trucker can't control what's happening on that customer location. You know, they- they're waiting for that, you know, firm t- that customer to tell them, "Hey, pull in there." Um, and so what it becomes is just a way to shift the inefficiencies and the cost of that onto that, onto that driver. Um, now it's competitive for customers so, you know, if you're Walmart, you might have your choice of a dozen different trucking companies that could move your stuff and if one of them tells you, "Hey, you're not moving our trucks in and out of your docks fast enough, we're gonna charge you for how long our truck is sitting (laughs) on your lot." If you're Walmart, you're gonna say, "I'll go see what the other guy says." Right? Um, and so companies are gonna allow that customer to essentially waste that driver's time, um, you know, in order to, to keep that business.

   11. LFLex Fridman36:14

       Can you try to describe the economics, the labor market of this situation? You mentioned freight and railroad. What is the sort of the dynamic, uh, financials, the economics of this that allow for such, um, low, (laughs) uh, l- low salaries to be paid to truckers? Like what, what's the competition? What's the alternative to, uh, transporting goods via trucks? Like what seems to be broken here from an economics perspective?

   12. SVSteve Viscelli36:44

       Yeah. So it's, uh, well, nothing. It's, it's a-

   13. LFLex Fridman36:48

       That's what- (laughs)

   14. SVSteve Viscelli36:48

       It's a perfect market. (laughs)

   15. LFLex Fridman36:49

       Okay.

   16. SVSteve Viscelli36:50

       Right? I mean, so for economists, this is how it should work, right? Um-

   17. LFLex Fridman36:53

       But the inefficiencies, like you said, sorry to interrupt, are pushed to the truck driver. Doesn't that like spiral, doesn't that lead to, uh, poorer performance on the part of the truck driver and just like make the whole thing more and more inefficient, and it, and it results in lower payment to the truck driver and, and so on? It just feels like in capitalism, you should have a competing solution in terms of, uh, truck drivers. Like another company that provides transportation via trucks that are, that creates a much better experience for truck drivers, making them more efficient, all those kinds of things. Is, or how is the competition being suppressed here?

   18. SVSteve Viscelli37:34

       Yeah. So it is, the competition is based on who's cheaper. Um, and this is, this is the cheapest way to move the freight. Now, you know, there are externalities, right? I mean, this, so this is the explanation that I, I think is, is obvious for this, right? There, there are lots of, um, there are lots of costs that, you know, whether it's that driver's time, whether it's the, you know, um, time without their family, whether it's the, you know, the fact that they drive through congestion and, and spew lots of diesel particulates into cities where kids have asthma and make our commutes longer, rather than more efficiently use their time by sort of routing them around congestion and rush hour and things like that. Um, it, this is the cheapest way to, to move freight. Um, and so it's, it's the most competitive. A big part of this is public subsidy of training. So when those workers are not paying for, um, the training, you and I often are.

   19. LFLex Fridman38:32

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SVSteve Viscelli38:33

       So if you, you know, lose your job because of, um, you know, foreign trade or, um, you're, you're a veteran using your GI benefits, um, you may very well be offered, you know, training, publicly subsidized training to become a truck driver. And so all these are externalities that, you know, th- that the companies don't have to pay for. And so this makes it the most profitable way to move freight.

   21. LFLex Fridman38:58

       So trucks is ch- way cheaper than, uh, trains? Yeah.

   22. SVSteve Viscelli39:03

       Well, over the long... So one of the big stories for these, for these companies is that the average length of haul, um, which, which becomes very important for self-driving trucks. The average length of haul has been steadily declining. Um, over the last 15 years or so, you know, and l- this industry collected data from sort of the, you know, the, the big firms that report it, but, you know, roughly been cut in half from typically about 1,000 miles to under 500. Um, and under 500 is what a, a driver can move in a day, right? So you can get loaded, drive and unload, you know, i- around 400 miles or something like that.

   23. LFLex Fridman39:44

       I want to steal a good question from the Penn Gazette (laughs) interview you did, which people should read. It's a great interview. Was there a golden age for long haul truckers in America and if so... This is just a journalistic question.

   24. SVSteve Viscelli39:58

       (laughs)

   25. LFLex Fridman39:58

       And if so, what enabled it and what brought it to an end?

   26. SVSteve Viscelli40:02

       Wow. I, I might have to have you read my answer to that. (laughs) That'll be, that was a few-

   27. LFLex Fridman40:06

       (laughs) Yes.

   28. SVSteve Viscelli40:07

       ... years ago. It'd be interesting to compare what I'll, what I'll say, but, um-

   29. LFLex Fridman40:10

       I mean, one bigger question to ask, I guess, is like, uh, you know, Johnny Cash wrote a lot of songs about truckers. There used to be a time when, um, perhaps falsely, perhaps it's part of the kind of perception that you study with the labor markets and so on, there was a perception of truckers being, first of all, a lucrative job, and second of all, a job, uh, to be desired.

   30. SVSteve Viscelli40:34

       Yeah. So I mean, this is a... The trucking industry to me is, is fascinating, (laughs) but I think it should be fascinating to, to a lot of people. Um, so the, the golden age was really two different kinds of, um, of markets as well, right? Today, we have really good jobs and, and some really bad jobs. Uh, we had the Teamsters Union that, that controlled the vast majority o- of employee jobs. And even where they had, they had something called the National Master Freight Agreement, and this was, um, you know, Jimmy Hoffa who, who, who led the union through its, its sort of critical, um, period. By the mid '60s, had unified essentially the entire nation's trucking labor force under one contract. Now, you were either, you know, covered by that contract or your employer paid a lot of attention to it. A- and so by the end of the 1970s, the typical truck driver was making well more than $100,000... Typical truck driver was making more than $100,000 in today's dollars and was home every night. That was without a doubt a- and even more than unionized auto workers, steel workers, um, 10, 20% more than, than those workers made. Um, that was the golden age for sort of job quality wages, teamster power. They, they were without a doubt the most powerful union in the United States at that, at that time. At the same time in the 1970s, you had the, um, the mythic long haul trucker and, and these were the guys who were, you know, kind of on the margins of the regulated market, which is what the Teamsters controlled. A lot of them were in agriculture, which was never regulated. So i- in the New Deal when they decided to regulate trucking, they didn't regulate agriculture because they didn't want to drive up food prices, which would hurt workers in urban areas. So they essentially left agricultural truckers out of it.And that's where a lot of the kind of outlaw, you know, uh, uh, asphalt cowboy-
5. 1:04:41 – 1:30:57

   Future of autonomous trucks

   1. LFLex Fridman1:04:41

      um, another exciting technological development, as you write about, as you think about, is autonomous trucks. So th- these are often brought up in different contexts as the, um, uh, examples of AI and robots taking our jobs. How true is this? Should we be concerned?

   2. SVSteve Viscelli1:05:01

      I think they've really come to epitomize this anxiety over automation, right? Just it's such a simple idea, right? Truck that drives itself, you know, classic blue-collar job that pays well. You know, um, a guy maybe with not a lot of other good options, right? Um, to sort of ha- make that same income easily, right? And you build a robot to take his job away, right? Um, so I think 2016 or so, that was, that was the sort of big question out there and that, that's actually how I started studying it, right? I'd just wrapped up the book. It just so happened that somebody was working at Uber. Uber had just bought Otto, saw the book and was like, "Hey, can you come out and talk to our engineering teams about what, what life is like for truck drivers and maybe how our technology could make it better?" And then, you know, at that time, there were a lot of different ideas about how they were gonna play out, right? So, um, while the press was saying, you know, "All truckers are gonna lose their jobs," there were a lot of people in, in, um, these engineering teams who thought, "Okay, you know, if we've got an individual owner-operator, you know, and, and they can only drive eight or 10 hours a day, you know, they hop in the back, they get their rest, and the asset that they own works for them."

   3. LFLex Fridman1:06:22

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SVSteve Viscelli1:06:22

      Right? Sort of, sort of perfect, right? Um, and at that time, you know, there was a bunch of r- reports that came out and sort of basically what people did was they, they took the category of truck driver, you know? Some people took a, a larger category from BLS of, you know, sales and delivery workers, that was about three and a half million workers, and, and others took the heavy duty truck driver category, which was at the time about 1.8 million or so, and they, you know, picked a start date and a slope (laughs) and said, you know, um, "Let's assume that all these jobs are just gonna disappear." And, um...... really smart researcher, Annetta Bernhardt at the, uh, Labor Center at UC Berkeley was sort of looking around, um, for people who were sort of deeply into industries to complicate those analyses, right?

   5. LFLex Fridman1:07:09

      Yeah.

   6. SVSteve Viscelli1:07:10

      And reached out to me and was like, "What do you think of this?" And I said, "The industry's super diverse. You know, this is just, I haven't given it a ton of thought, but it can't be that. You know, it's not that simple."

   7. LFLex Fridman1:07:19

      Yeah.

   8. SVSteve Viscelli1:07:19

      "You know? I mean, it never is." Um, and so she was like, "Will you, you know, will you do this?" And I- I- I was like ready to move on to another topic. You know? I had like been in trucking for 10 years. Um, and that- that's how it, I- I started looking at it and it is. It's a lot more complicated and the- the initial impacts ... And here's the challenge, I think, and it's not just a research challenge, it's- it's the fundamental public policy challenge is we look at the existing industry and the impacts, the potential impacts, they're not, you know, nothing. Th- for- for some communities and some kinds of drivers, they're gonna be hard and- and there- and there are a significant number of them. Nowhere near what people thought. You know, I- I estimate it's like around 300,000 but that's a static picture of the existing industry. And here's the- the key with this is, uh, at least in my- my conclusion is this is a transformative technology. W- we are not going to swap in self-driving trucks for human-driven trucks-

   9. LFLex Fridman1:08:22

      Mm-hmm.

   10. SVSteve Viscelli1:08:22

       ... and all else stays the same. This is gonna reshape our supply chains, it's gonna reshape landscapes, it's gonna affect our ability to fight climate change. Um, this is a really important technology in this space.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:08:37

       Do you think it's possible to predict the future of the kind of opportunities it will create? How it will change the world? So like when you have the internet, you can start saying like all the kind of ways that office work, all jobs will be lost because it's easy to network and then s- s- software engineering allows you to automate a lot of the tasks like Microsoft Excel does, you know? Uh, but it opened up so many opportunities even with things that are difficult to imagine like with the internet, I don't know, Wikipedia, which is widely making accessible information and that, uh, increased the general education globally by a lot. All those kinds of things like, and then the- the ripple effects of that in terms of your ability to find other jobs is probably immeasurable. So, is- is it- is it just a hopeless pursuit to try to predict, uh, if, uh ... Y- you talk about these six different, uh, trajectories that we might take in, uh, automating trucks, but like as a result of taking those trajectories, is it a hopeless pursuit to predict what the future will result in?

   12. SVSteve Viscelli1:09:50

       Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:09:51

       (laughs)

   14. SVSteve Viscelli1:09:51

       It is.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:09:52

       Okay (laughs) .

   16. SVSteve Viscelli1:09:53

       It ab- absolutely is because it's the wrong question.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:09:56

       Yeah.

   18. SVSteve Viscelli1:09:56

       The question is what do we want the future to be and let's shape it.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:10:00

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SVSteve Viscelli1:10:01

       Right? Um, and- and I think this is, you know, and- and this is the only point that I really wanna (laughs) make in my work, you know, for the foreseeable future.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:10:09

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SVSteve Viscelli1:10:10

       (laughs) Is that, you know, we have got to get out of this mindset that we're just gonna let technology kind of-

   23. LFLex Fridman1:10:19

       Right.

   24. SVSteve Viscelli1:10:20

       ... d- go and it's a natural process and whatever pops out will fix the problems on the backside. And- and- and- and we've got to recognize that one, that's not what we do, (laughs) right? Um, you know, and- and self-driving vehicles is- is just such a perfect example, right? We would not be sitting here today if the defense department, right, if Congress in 2000 had not written into legislation funding for the DARPA Challenges which followed fr- actually I think the funding came a couple years later, but the priority that they wrote in 2000 was let's get a third of all ground vehicles in our military forces unmanned, right? And this was before aerial unmanned vehicles had really sort of proven their worth. They would come to be incredibly like, you know, just blow people out of the- the ... Blow people's minds in terms of their additional capabilities, the lower cost, you know, keeping, you know, uh, soldiers out of harm's way. Now, of course, they raised other problems a- and considerations that I think we're still wrestling with, but that was even before that they had this priority. We would not be sitting here today if Congress in 2000 had not said, "Let's bring this about."

   25. LFLex Fridman1:11:27

       So they already had that vision? Actually, I didn't know about that. So for people who don't know, the DARPA Challenge is- is the- the events that were just kind of like these seemingly small scale challenges that brought together some of the smartest roboticists in the world, and that somehow created enough of a magic where, uh, ideas flourished, both engineering and scientific, uh, that eventually then, uh, was the catalyst for creating all these different companies that took on the challenge. Some failed, some succeeded, some are still fighting the good fight, and that somehow just that little bit of challenge was the- was the essential spark of, uh, progress that now resulted in this beautiful up and down wave of hype and-

   26. SVSteve Viscelli1:12:12

       (laughs)

   27. LFLex Fridman1:12:12

       ... and, uh, profit and all this kind of weird dance where the B word, billions of dollars, have been thrown, being thrown around and we still don't know, and the T word, trillions of dollars, in terms of transformative effects of autonomous vehicles and all that started from DARPA and those initial, that initial vision of I guess as you're saying of automating part of the military, uh, supply chain. (laughs)

   28. SVSteve Viscelli1:12:35

       Yeah.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:12:35

       I did not know that. That's interesting. So they had the same kind of vision for the military as we're now talking about a vision for the civilian, whether it's trucking or whether it's autonomous vehicle sort of, uh, ride sharing kind of application.

   30. SVSteve Viscelli1:12:48

       Yeah. I mean, what an incredible (laughs) spark, right?

Episode duration: 3:12:16