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

Lex Fridman 0:00 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.

Lex Fridman 0:45 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?

Steve Viscelli 1:55 I think that captures it. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:58 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 1:58 It really does, um-

Lex Fridman 1:59 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.

Steve Viscelli 2:09 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.

Lex Fridman 2:26 Ethnographer, by the way, what is that? The science and art of capturing a, uh, the spirit of a people?

Steve Viscelli 2:35 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.

Lex Fridman 3:40 In the context of society and in the context of history.

Steve Viscelli 3:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 3:44 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?

Steve Viscelli 4:14 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-

Lex Fridman 5:14 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-

Steve Viscelli 5:22 I think you're a great listener.

Lex Fridman 5:23 Thank you.

Steve Viscelli 5:23 I, I've, I've been listening to the podcast.

Lex Fridman 5:25 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 5:25 I think you're a great listener.

Lex Fridman 5:26 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.

Steve Viscelli 5:54 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-

Lex Fridman 6:28 Hmm.

Steve Viscelli 6:28 ... 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.

Lex Fridman 7:02 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?

Steve Viscelli 7:09 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.

Lex Fridman 7:24 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 7:24 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.

Lex Fridman 7:31 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 7:32 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.

Lex Fridman 8:10 That's pretty good odds.

Steve Viscelli 8:11 It's amazing, right?

Lex Fridman 8:13 Wow. Okay.

Steve Viscelli 8:13 I mean for, for, you know, any response rate like that for inter- I mean these are people who sat down and gave me an hour, sometimes more of their time just randomly at a truck stop. And it just tells you something about like, truckers have something to say. They're alone a lot. And so I had to figure out how to kind of turn the spigot on, you know? And, and I got pretty good at it, I think. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 8:37 (laughs) So, they have good stories to tell and they have an active life in the mind because they spend so much time on the road just basically thinking.

Steve Viscelli 8:45 Yeah. There's a, there's a lot of reflection, um, a lot of struggles, you know, and it's, they take different forms, you know. Uh, one of the things that they talk about is the impact on their families. They, they say truckers have the same rate of divorce as everybody else and that's because trucking saves so many marriages 'cause you're not around-

Lex Fridman 9:04 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 9:04 ... and ruins so many. And so yeah, it ends up being a wash.

Lex Fridman 9:07 (laughs) So, you know, I had this experience, um, I met another person and he recognized me from a podcast. And, and he said, "You know, I'm a, I'm a fan of yours and a fan of Joe Rogan, but you guys never talk ... you always talk to people with Nobel Prizes, you always talk to these kind of people. You never talk to us regular folk." And, uh, that guy really stuck with me. First of all, the idea of regular folk is a silly notion. I think people that win Nobel Prizes are often more boring than the people, these regular folks, in terms of stories, in terms of richness of experience, in terms of the ups and downs of life. And, um, you know, that really stuck with me 'cause I, I set that as a goal for myself to make sure I, I talk to regular folk. And you did just this, talking, again, regular folk. It's human beings. Um, all of 'em have experiences. If you were to recommend, uh, to talk to, uh, to talk some of these folks with stories, how would you find them?

Steve Viscelli 10:17 Yeah. So, I, I do do this sometimes for journalists who, you know, will come and they wanna write about sort of what's happening right now in trucking-

Lex Fridman 10:23 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 10:23 ... you know. Um, and I send them to truck stops, you know. I say, you know-

Lex Fridman 10:27 Just go to the truck stops?

Steve Viscelli 10:27 Yeah. There's a town called Effingham, Illinois.

Lex Fridman 10:30 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 10:31 And it's just this place where, you know, bunch of huge truck stops, tons of trucks, and really nothing else out there, you know. It's in the middle of corn country. Um, and, you know, again, truckers in this, you know, sadly I think, you know, the politics of the day, it, it's changing a little bit. I think there's a little m- the polarization is getting to the trucking industry in, in ways that, um, you know, maybe we're seeing in other parts of, of our social world. Uh, but truckers are generally, you know, real open sort of friendly folks. Um, now some of them ultimately like to work alone and be alone. That's a relatively small subset I think. Um, but all of them are generally, you know, kind of open, you know, trusting, willing to have a conversation. And so, you know, you go to the truck stop and you go in the lounge and, and they're usually, there's usually a booth down there and somebody's sitting at their laptop or on their phone, um, and willing to strike up a conversation. You should try that. You should, you know?

Lex Fridman 11:33 Yeah. 100% we'll try this.

Steve Viscelli 11:35 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 11:35 Uh, d- just again, we're just going from tangent to tangent when we return to the main question, but what do they listen to? Do they listen to talk radio? Do they listen to podcasts, audiobooks? Do they listen to music? Do they listen to silence? What-

Steve Viscelli 11:51 Everything.

Lex Fridman 11:51 Everything?

Steve Viscelli 11:52 Everything. Some, I mean, and, and some still listen to the CB, which (laughs) you know, it's a, it's a ever-dwindling group.

Lex Fridman 11:58 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 11:59 Um, they'll call it the original internet.... Citizens Band, you know, they, they, back in the '70s, they thought it was going to be the, the medium of democracy. Um, and they love to just get on there and, you know, cruise along, um, one truck after the other and chat away. Usually, you know, it's guys who know each other from the same company or-

Lex Fridman 12:16 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 12:17 ... happen to run into each other. But other than that, it's everything under the sun, um, you know, and, and that's, uh, it's probably one of the stereotypes, it, and it's, I think it was more true in the past, um, you know, about the sort of heterogeneity of, of truck drivers. Um, they're a really diverse group now, you know, there's definitely a large, still a large component of rural white guys who work in the industry, uh, but there's a huge growing chunk of the industry that's, that's immigrants, um, people of color, and even some women. Still huge barriers to women, women entering it, but it's a much more diverse place than, than most people think.

Lex Fridman 12:57 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?

Steve Viscelli 13:05 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.

Lex Fridman 13:13 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 13:14 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.

Lex Fridman 14:47 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 14:48 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.

Lex Fridman 15:03 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 15:03 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)

Lex Fridman 15:40 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 15:40 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?

Lex Fridman 17:34 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 17:34 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.

Lex Fridman 17:41 Well, so the, the truck is such an imposing part of a traffic scenario.

Steve Viscelli 17:45 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 17:45 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.

Steve Viscelli 18:01 Yeah.Yeah.

Lex Fridman 18:02 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-

Steve Viscelli 18:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 18:17 ... 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?

Steve Viscelli 18:29 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.

Lex Fridman 19:22 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?

Steve Viscelli 19:48 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.

Lex Fridman 20:11 (laughs) .

Steve Viscelli 20:11 And you- you can kind of maneuver yourself out of, in and out of tight spaces with great speed and then-

Lex Fridman 20:17 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 20:17 ... 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.

Lex Fridman 20:30 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 20:30 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.

Lex Fridman 21:43 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?

Steve Viscelli 21:50 Yeah. I- I started out at 25 cents a mile, uh, and then I got bumped up to 26 cents a mile. So, um, we had a minimum pay, which was sort of a new pay scheme that the industry had started to introduce to, you know ... 'cause there's- there's lots of unpaid work and time. Um, and so we had a minimum pay of $500 a week that you would- you would get if you didn't drive enough miles to exceed that. Um, you get paid in sort of ... uh, so you get paid when you turn the bills in, which are th- which is the paperwork that goes with the load. So, you know, you have to get that back to your company and then that's how they bill the customer.

Lex Fridman 22:30 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 22:30 And so you might get a bunch of those bills that kind of bunch up in one week. So, you know, I might get a paycheck for, you know, $1,200 and, I mean, I was a poor graduate student so this was real- real money to me. Um, and so I- I've- I had this sort of in- natural incentive to, you know, earn a lot, uh, um, or to maximize my pay. Um, some weeks were that minimum 500, very few, um, and then some I'd get 1,200, 1,300 bucks. Um, pay has gone up, you know, typical drivers now starting in the 30s, you know, in the kinda job that I was in, uh, 30s, you know, cents per mile, 30 to 35.

Lex Fridman 23:09 So can we- can we try to reverse engineer that math, how that maps to the actual hours? 'cause there's, the hours connected to driving are so widely dispersed. As you said, some of them don't count as actual work. Some of it does. That's a very interesting discussion that we'll then continue when we start talking about autonomous trucking. But, uh, you know, you're saying all these cents per mile kind of thing, what, um, how does that map to like hourly- average hourly wage?

Steve Viscelli 23:38 Yeah. So I mean, and this is kind of the ... this is also an- an interesting (laughs) technology story in the end and it's the technology story that didn't happen. Um, so pay per mile was, you know, invented by companies when you couldn't surveil drivers. You didn't know what they were doing, right?

Lex Fridman 23:53 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 23:53 And you wanted them to have some skin in the game. And so you'd say, you know, "Here's the load. It's going from ..." you know, for me, I might start in, you know, the Northeast, maybe in Upstate New York with a load of beer and say, "Here's this load of beer. Bring it to this address in Michigan. We're gonna pay you by the mile."

Lex Fridman 24:10 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 24:11 Right? If I was being paid by the hour, I might just pull over at the diner and, (laughs) and have breakfast. So, you're paid by the mile, uh, but increasingly, over time, the, the typical driver is spending more and more time doing non-driving tasks. There's lots of reasons for that, one of which is railroads have captured a lot of freight that goes long distances now, another one is traffic conges- congestion, um, and the other one is that drivers are pretty cheap. And they're, they're almost always the, the low people on the totem pole in some segments. (laughs) And so their time is used really inefficiently. Um, so I might go to that brewery to pick up that load of, of Bud Light and, you know, their dock staff may, may be busy loading up five other trucks, and they'll say, you know, "Go over there and sit and wait, and we'll, we'll call you on the CB when the dock's ready." So you wait there a couple of hours, they bring you in, you know, you never know what's happening in the truck sometimes. They're loading it with a forklift, maybe they're throwing 14 pallets on there full of kegs. But sometimes it'll take them hours (laughs) , you know, and you're sitting in that truck and you're, you're essentially unpaid, you know. Um, then you pull out, you've got control over what you're going to get paid based on how you drive that load, um, and then on the other end, you got a similar situation of, of kind of waiting. So-

Lex Fridman 25:34 So if that's the way truck drivers are paid, then there's a low incentive for the optimization of the supply chain to make them more efficient, right, to, uh, to utilize truck labor more efficiently?

Steve Viscelli 25:47 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 25:48 And s- so that's a technology, uh, problem that, uh ... one of several technology problems that could be addressed. Um, I mean, what ... so what did, uh ... if we just linger on it, what are we talking about in terms of, uh, dollars per hour? Are ... is it close to minimum wage? Is it ... you know, there's something you talk about, there was, um, uh, a, a conception or a misconception (laughs) that, uh, truckers get paid a lot-

Steve Viscelli 26:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 26:18 ... uh, for their work. Do they get paid a lot for their work?

Steve Viscelli 26:21 Some do. Uh, a- and I, I think that's part of the complexity. So, you know, what interested me as an ethnographer about this was, you know, I'm interested in, in the kind of economic conceptions that people have in their heads and, and how they lead to certain decisions in labor markets.

Lex Fridman 26:38 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 26:38 You know, why some people become an entrepreneur and, and other people become a wage laborer, or, you know, um, why some people want to be doctors and other people want to be truck drivers. That conception, right, is, is getting shaped in these labor markets is the argument of, of, of, of the book. And the fact that drivers can hear, or potential drivers can hear about these, you know, workers who make $100,000 plus, which, which happens regularly-

Lex Fridman 27:03 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 27:03 ... in the trucking industry, there are many truck drivers who make more than $100,000 a year, um, you know, is an attraction. But the industry's highly segmented, um, and, and so the entry level segment, and, and w- we can probably get into this, but, you know, the industry is dominated by, um, you know, a few dozen really large companies that are self-insured and can train new drivers. So if you want those good jobs, you've got to have several years, uh, up until recently now, the labor market's becoming tighter, but you had to have several years of accident-free, you know, s- perfectly clean record driving to get into them. The other part of the segment, you know, those drivers often don't make minimum wage. But this leads to one of the sort of central issues that has been in the courts and in the legislature, um, in s- in some states, is, you know, what should truck drivers get paid for? Right? The industry, you know, for the last 30 years or so has said essentially, it's the hours that they log for safety reasons for the Department of Transportation. Right? Um, now, since the drivers are paid by the mile, they try to minimize those because those hours are limited by the federal government. So the federal government says you can't drive more than 60 hours in a week as a long haul truck driver.

Lex Fridman 28:23 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 28:24 And so you want to drive as many miles as you can in those 60 hours, and so you under-report them. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 28:30 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 28:30 Right? A- and so what happens is the companies say, "Well that guy, you know, he only said he logged 45 hours of work that week, or 50 hours of work. That's all we have to pay him minimum wage for," um, when in fact a typical truck driver in these, in these jobs will work, according to most people, would sort of define it as like, "Okay, I'm at the customer location, I'm waiting to load, I'm doing some paperwork, you know, I'm inspecting the truck, I'm fueling it, um, just waiting to, you know, get put into the dock." 80 to 90 hours would be sort of-

Lex Fridman 29:00 (laughs) .

Steve Viscelli 29:00 ... a, a typical work week for one of these, these drivers. Um, and just when you look at that-

Lex Fridman 29:05 Just to be clear.

Steve Viscelli 29:05 ... it's th- they don't make minimum wage oftentimes.

Lex Fridman 29:07 Right, just to be clear, what we're dancing around here is that a little bit over, a little bit under minimum wage is nevertheless most truck drivers seem to be making close to minimum wage. Like, this is the ... (laughs) so like, we maybe haven't made that clear. There's, there's a, there's a few that make quite a bit of money but like you're, as an entry and for years, you're operating essentially, uh, minimum wage, and potentially far less than minimum wage if you actually count the number of hours that are taken out of your life due to your dedication to trucking.

Steve Viscelli 29:45 Well, if you count like the hours taken out of your life, um, then you gotta go, you know, maybe a full 24. (laughs) So-

Lex Fridman 29:52 That's right, yeah, from family, from-

Steve Viscelli 29:55 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 29:55 ... from the, the high quality of life parts of your life.

Steve Viscelli 29:59 Yeah. And there's a whole nother set of rules that the Department of Labor has which basically say that a truck driver who's dispatched away from home for more than a day should get minimum wage 24 hours, uh, a day.... and, and that could be a state minimum wage. But typically, what it would work out to for most drivers is that, you know, a minimum w- the minimum wage for a truck driver should be 50s of thousands. You know, 55, $60,000 should be the minimum wage of a truck driver, and you've probably heard about the truck driver shortage. Like if, you know, uh, which I, I hope we can talk about, um, if the minimum wage for truck drivers is as it should be on the books at, you know, around $60,000 (laughs) we wouldn't have a shortage of truck drivers.

Lex Fridman 30:44 Oh, wow. And to me, 60,000 is not a lot of money for this kind of job 'cause you're, this isn't, (laughs) this is essentially two jobs and two jobs where you don't get to sleep with your wife or see your kids at night. That 60,000 is, uh, very little money for that. But you're saying if it was 60,000 you wouldn't even have the shortage.

Steve Viscelli 31:11 If that was the minimum.

Lex Fridman 31:12 If that was the minimum.

Steve Viscelli 31:13 And I think that's what... Now we have drivers who start in the 30s. Um-

Lex Fridman 31:18 Wow.

Steve Viscelli 31:18 But yeah, and I mean-

Lex Fridman 31:19 So it's just-

Steve Viscelli 31:20 ... so we're talking two, three jobs really when you look at the total hours that people are working it, you know. They can work over 100 if they're a trainer, you know, um, training other truck drivers, well over 100 hours a week.

Lex Fridman 31:31 So a job of last resort. Maybe you can, um, jump around

Lex Fridman 31:36 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?

Steve Viscelli 31:53 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-

Lex Fridman 32:55 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 32:55 ... 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?

Lex Fridman 33:33 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?

Steve Viscelli 33:59 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?

Lex Fridman 34:49 And that wait can break you psychologically 'cause your, your, your, uh, your time every second becomes more worthless.

Steve Viscelli 34:57 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 34:58 Or worth less.

Steve Viscelli 35:00 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.

Lex Fridman 36:14 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?

Steve Viscelli 36:44 Yeah. So it's, uh, well, nothing. It's, it's a-

Lex Fridman 36:48 That's what- (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 36:48 It's a perfect market. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 36:49 Okay.

Steve Viscelli 36:50 Right? I mean, so for economists, this is how it should work, right? Um-

Lex Fridman 36:53 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?

Steve Viscelli 37:34 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.

Lex Fridman 38:32 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 38:33 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.

Lex Fridman 38:58 So trucks is ch- way cheaper than, uh, trains? Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 39:03 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.

Lex Fridman 39:44 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.

Steve Viscelli 39:58 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 39:58 And if so, what enabled it and what brought it to an end?

Steve Viscelli 40:02 Wow. I, I might have to have you read my answer to that. (laughs) That'll be, that was a few-

Lex Fridman 40:06 (laughs) Yes.

Steve Viscelli 40:07 ... years ago. It'd be interesting to compare what I'll, what I'll say, but, um-

Lex Fridman 40:10 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.

Steve Viscelli 40:34 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-

Lex Fridman 42:37 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 42:38 ... um, you know, imagery that we get. And, and, um, you know, I, I grew up, I know you didn't grow up in the, in the US at this sort of, you know, as a young child when, and I'm a bit older than you, but you know, in, in the late '70s, you know, there were movies and TV shows and CBs were craze and, and it was all these kind of outlaw truckers who were out there hauling some unregulated freight they weren't supposed to be trying to avoid the bears, you know, who are the cops. And, um, you know, with all this salty language and these like, you know, um, terms that only they understood and, you know, the partying at diners and popping pills, you know, the California turnarounds.

Lex Fridman 43:15 So asphalt cowboys, truly.

Steve Viscelli 43:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:18 So it's like another form of cowboy movies. (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 43:21 Oh, absolutely.

Lex Fridman 43:22 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 43:22 Absolutely. And I, I think that sort of masculine ethos of like, you got 40,000 pounds of something you care about, I'm your guy. You know, you need it to go from New York to California, don't worry about it. I got it.

Lex Fridman 43:34 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 43:35 That's appealing and it's tangible, right? And you think about people who don't wanna be paper pusher and sitting and deal with office politics, like-

Lex Fridman 43:41 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 43:42 ... just give me what you care about and I'll take care of it, you know?

Lex Fridman 43:44 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 43:44 You just pay me fair, you know? Uh, and that a- that appeals.

Lex Fridman 43:47 You mentioned unions, teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa. Big question, maybe difficult question. What are some pros and cons of unions historically and today in the trucking space?

Steve Viscelli 43:58 Yeah. Um, well, if you're, you're a worker there, there are a lot of pros. (laughs) Um, and I don't, you know, it... And this is one of the things I talk to truckers about a lot. Um-

Lex Fridman 44:07 Yeah. What's their perception of Jimmy Hoffa, for example, and for, of unions?

Steve Viscelli 44:11 Yeah. So, and this was p- probably one of the central hypotheses that I had going in there. And, and it may sound, you know, um, someone who does hard science, right? You may, (laughs) you may hear a social scientist, you know, sort of use that terminology, even other social scientists.

Lex Fridman 44:26 Hypothesis?

Steve Viscelli 44:27 Yeah. You know, they, they-

Lex Fridman 44:27 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 44:28 They don't like it, but I, I do like to think that way. And my initial hypothesis was that, you know, and it's very simple, that, you know, the, the tenure of the driver in the industry would have a strong effect on how they viewed unions.

Lex Fridman 44:43 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 44:43 That, you know, somebody who had experienced unions would be more favorable and someone who had not, would not be, right?

Lex Fridman 44:50 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 44:51 Um, and that turned out to be the, the case without a doubt. But in, in an interesting way, which was that even the drivers who were not part of the union, um, who in the, in the kind of public debate of deregulation, uh, were portrayed as these kind of small business truckers who were getting shut out by the big reg- regulated monopolies and the Teamsters Union, you know, the corrupt Teamsters Union, even those drivers longed for the days of the teamsters.

Lex Fridman 45:22 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 45:24 Because they recognized the overall market impact that they had, that, that trucking just naturally tended toward excessive competition that meant that y- y- there was no profit to be made, and oftentimes you'd be operating at a loss. And, and so even these, you know, the asphalt cowboy owner-operators from back in the day would tell me, "When the teamsters were in power, I made a lot more money." Um, and, you know, this is, you know, unions, at least those kinds of unions, like, like the teamsters, you know, they... there's, I think, a lot of misconceptions today, sort of popularly about what unions did back then. They tied wages to productivity. Like that was the central thing that the Teamsters Union did. And, you know, there were great accounts of sort of Jimmy Hoffa's perspective for all his portrayal as sort of corrupt and, and criminal, and there, there's, you know, I'm not disputing that he, he broke a lot of laws. Um, he was remarkably open about who he was and what he did. He actually invited a pair, a husband and wife team of Harvard economists, to follow him around-

Lex Fridman 46:35 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 46:36 ... and like opened up the teamsters' books to them so that they could see how he was, you know, thinking about negotiating with the employers. And the teamsters, and this goes back well before Hoffa, back to the, you know, um, 1800s, they understood that workers did better if their employers did better. And the only way the employers would do better was if they controlled the market. And so oftentimes the corruption in trucking was initiated by employers who wanted to limit competition, and they knew they couldn't limit comp- competition without the support of labor. And so you'd get these collusive arrangements between employers and labor to say, "No new trucking companies. There are 10 of us. That's enough. We control Seattle. We're gonna set the price and we're not gonna be undercut." Um, when there's a shortage of trucks around, it's great. Rates, rates go up, but you get too many trucks, it's very often that you end up operating at a loss just to keep the doors open. You know, you don't have any choice. You can't... It's what economists call derived demand. You can't, like, make up a bunch of trucking services and store it in a warehouse, right? (laughs) You gotta, you gotta keep those trucks moving to pay the bills.

Lex Fridman 47:47 Can we also lay out the kind of jobs that are in trucking? What are the best jobs in trucking? What are the worst jobs in trucking? What are we... How many jobs are we talking about today?

Steve Viscelli 47:57 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 47:57 Uh, and what kind of jobs are there?

Steve Viscelli 48:01 So, um, there, there are a number of different segments and the, the se- the first part would be, you know, are you offering... The first question would be, are you offering services to the public or are you moving your own freight, right? So are you a retailer, say Walmart, um, or, uh, you know, a paper company or something like that that's operating your own, uh, fleet of trucks? That's private-

Lex Fridman 48:23 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 48:24 ... um, trucking for hire. I- are, are the folks who, you know, offer their services out to other, other customers. So you have private and for hire. In, in general, for hire, uh, pays, pays less.

Lex Fridman 48:38 Is that because of the, something you talk about w- employee versus contractor situation? Or are they all tricked or led to become contractors?

Steve Viscelli 48:49 That can become a part of it, um, as a strategy. But the, the fundamental reason is competition. So those private carriers don't, um, aren't, aren't in competition with other trucking fleets, right? For their own in-house services.

Lex Fridman 49:01 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 49:02 So, you know, they, they tend to... And, and this, you know, it, it, the question of why private versus for-hire?

Lex Fridman 49:08 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 49:08 Because for-hire's cheaper, right? Um, and so if you need that, if that trucking service is central to what you do and you cannot afford disruptions or volatility in the price of it, you keep it in house.

Lex Fridman 49:19 You should be willing to pay more for that 'cause it's more valuable to you and-

Steve Viscelli 49:22 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 49:22 ... you keep it in house and that. So that's an interesting distinction. What about, and this is kind of moving towards our conversation, what can and can't be automated? Um, w- w- how else does it divide-

Steve Viscelli 49:33 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 49:34 ... uh, the, the different trucking jobs?

Steve Viscelli 49:36 So it's, it, the, the next big chunk is kind of how much stuff are you moving?

Lex Fridman 49:39 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 49:39 Right? Um, and so we have what's called truckload. Um, and truckload means, you know, you can fill up a trailer either by volume or by weight, um, and then less than truckload. And less than truckload, it, the official definition is, like, less than 10,000 pounds. Um, you know, this is gonna be a couple pallets of this, a couple pallets of that. The process looks really different, right? So that truckload is, you know, point A to point B. I'm buying, you know, a truckload of, of Bounty paper towels. I'm bringing it into, you know, my distribution center. Go pick it up at the, at the Bounty plant, bring it to my distribution center, right? Nowhere in between do you stop, um, or at least process that freight. Less than truckload, what you've got is terminal systems, and this is what you had under, under Regulation Two. Um, and so of these terminal systems, what you do is you do a bunch of local pick-up and delivery, maybe with smaller trucks, um, and you pick up two pallets of this here, four pallets of this there. You bring it to the terminal, you combine it based on the destination. You then create a full truckload, you know, um, uh, trailer, and you send it to another terminal where it gets broken back down, and then, and then out for local delivery. That's gonna look a lot like if you send a package by, by UPS, right? They sort of just take all these parcels, right? Figure out where they're all going, put them on planes or, or in trailers going to the same destination, then break them out to put them in what, what they call package cars.

Lex Fridman 51:02 Before I ask you, uh, about autonomous trucks, let's just pause for, um, your experience as a trucker. Did it get lonely? Like, can you talk about some of your experiences of what it was actually like? Did it get lonely?

Steve Viscelli 51:18 Yeah. Uh, no, I mean, it was, um... I didn't have kids at the time. Now, now, I have kids, I can't even imagine it. Um, uh, you know, I'd been married for five years at, at the time. My wife hated it. I hated it. Uh, you know, I, I describe in the book the experience of being stuck, uh, if I remember correctly, it was like Ohio, uh, at this truck stop in the middle of nowhere, and like, you know, sitting on this concrete barrier and just watching fireworks in the distance, and like eating Chinese food on the 4th of July. And, you know, and my wife calls me from like the family barbecue, and our anniversary is July 8th, and she's like, "Are you gonna be home?" And I'm like, "I don't know." You know? Um, I have a, a cousin whose husband drove, drove truck, as a truck driver would say, drove truck for a while, um, and he told me, uh, b- before I went into it, he was like, "The, the advantage you have is that you know that you're not gonna be doing this long term." Like, a- and Lex, I can't even... (laughs) Like, w- the emotional content of some of these interviews, I mean, I would sit down at a truck stop with somebody I had never met before and, you know, you open the spigot, and the, the, the last question I would ask drivers was, uh, that at, by the time I really sort of figured out how to do it, the last question I, I would ask them is, "You know, what advice would you give to somebody... Like, your nephew, you know, uh, a family friend asks you about what it's like to be a driver and should they do it? What advice would you give them?" And this question, some of these, you know, grizzled old drivers, you know, tough, tough guys would, that question would, like some of them would break down and they would say, "I would say to them, 'You better have everything that you ever wanted in life already.' Because I've had a car that I've had for 10 years, it's got 7,000 miles on it. I, I own a boat that hasn't seen the water (laughs) in five years. My kids, I didn't raise them. Like, I, I'd be out for two weeks at a time. I'd come home. My, my wife would give me two kids to punish, a list of things to do, you know, (laughs) on Saturday night, and I might leave out Sunday night or Monday morning, you know? I'd come home dead tired. My kids don't know who I am." And, you know, it was just like... it was heartbreaking to hear those stories.

Lex Fridman 53:47 And then before you know it, uh, you know, life is short and just the years run away.

Steve Viscelli 53:52 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:54 Hard question to ask in that context, but what's the best, what was the best part of being a truck driver? Was there moments, uh, that you truly enjoyed on the road?

Steve Viscelli 54:08 Oh, absolutely. There, there was, um... there's definitely a pride in mastery of, you know, even basic competence of sort of piloting this thing safely. There's a lot of responsibility to it. That thing's dangerous and you know it. So there's, there's some pride there. For me personally and I, and I know for a lot of other drivers, it's just like seeing these behind the scenes places that you know exist in our economy, um, a- and I think we're all much more aware of them now d- after COVID and, and supply chain mess that we have. I don't know if we'll talk about that. But, you know-... you get to see those places, you know, you get to see those ports, you get to see the, the place where they make the cardboard boxes that the Huggie diapers go in, (laughs) Huggies diapers go in. Or the, the warehouse full of Bud Light. I moved Bud Light from like Upstate New York and the first load like went to Atlanta.

Lex Fridman 54:59 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 54:59 You know, and then a couple months later, I circled back through that same brewery and I, I brought a, a load of Bud Light out to Michigan and I was like, "Holy shit, all the Bud Light like," (laughs) you know, but this whole giant swath of the United States comes from this one plant, this cavernous plant with like kegs of beer, and you see that part of the economy and it's like you're, almost like you're a, an economic tourist.

Lex Fridman 55:23 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 55:23 Um, and I think all, everybody kind of appreciates that like kind of, it's almost like a behind the scenes tour, um, that wears off after a few months, (laughs) you know, you start to see new things less and less frequently. At first, everything's novel and sort of life on the road, and then it becomes just endless miles of white lines and yellow lines and truck stops and the days just blur together, um, you know, it's one loading dock after another.

Lex Fridman 55:49 So you lose the magic of being on the road?

Steve Viscelli 55:52 Yeah. It's, it's very rare the driver that doesn't.

Lex Fridman 55:58 You mentioned COVID and supply chain. While being this for a brief time, this member of the supply chain, what have you come to understand about our supply chain United States and global and its resilience against, uh, tragedies, catastrophes in the world, like COVID, for example?

Steve Viscelli 56:20 Yeah, I mean, we, (laughs) we have built really long, really lean supply chains and, and just by definition, they're fragile. Um, you know, the, the current mess that we have, it's not gonna clear by Christmas. It, we'll be lucky if it clears by next Christmas.

Lex Fridman 56:40 Can you describe the current mess in supply chain that you're referring to?

Steve Viscelli 56:43 Yeah. So we've got pileups o- of, of ships off the, the coast of California, Long Beach and, and, and LA in particular in, in bad shape. Um, you know, last I checked, it was around 60 ships, all of which are holding thousands of containers full of stuff that retailers were hoping was gonna be on shelves for the holiday season. Um, meanwhile, the port itself has stacks and stacks of containers that they can't get rid of. The truckers aren't showing up to pick up the, the containers that are there, so they can't offload the, the ships that are, that are waiting, um, and why aren't the, (laughs) why aren't the truckers picking it up? Partly because there's a long history of inefficiency and making th- making them wait, but it's because the warehouses are full. So a- and so we've had all these perverse, you know, outcomes that no one really expected, like in the middle of all these shortages, people are stockpiling stuff. So there are suppliers who used to keep two months of supply of bottled water on hand and after going through COVID and not having supply to send to their customers, they're like, "We need three months." Well, our system is not designed for major storage of goods to go up 50% in a category. It's lean. If you're a warehouse operator, you know, you wanna be 90% plus, you don't want a lot of open bays sitting around. So we don't have, you know, 10% extra capacity (laughs) in warehouses, you know, we don't have 10% of... I mean, trucking capacity can fluctuate a bit, but, you know, you don't have that kind of, of slack, and, and now, I mean, and we saw this right when people shifted consumption, and I, I get a little... I get a little mad when people talk about panic buying as kind of the, you know, the, the reason that we had all these shortages. It, it really like, it's preventing us from understanding h- you know, the real problem there, which is that, that lean supply chain. Sure, there was some panic buying, you know, no, no doubt about it, but we had a enormous shift in people's behavior. So I, uh, with, uh, with my sister and brother-in-law, I own a couple of small businesses and we serve food, right? So we, we get, you know, food from Sysco, um... Sysco couldn't get rid of food, right, because nobody's eating out. So they've got, you know, 50 pound sacks of flour, you know, uh, sitting in their warehouse that they can't get rid of. They've got cases of lettuce and meat and everything else that's just gonna go bad. Um, so that panic buying certainly exacerbated some things like toilet paper and whatever, but we saw just a massive change in demand and our supply chains are based on historical data.

Lex Fridman 59:28 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 59:28 Right? So, you know, that stuff leaves Asia, you know, months before you, you want to have it on the shelves and you're predicting based on last year, (laughs) you know, what you want on that, that shelf. Um, and so it's a, it's a, you know, I guess at its best, it's a beautiful symphony of (laughs) lots of moving parts, um, a- a- but now everyone can't get on the same page of music.

Lex Fridman 59:52 But it's not resilient to changes in, uh, en masse, uh, uh, human behavior. So even like, um, I, I read somewhere, maybe you can tell me if this is true in relation to food, it's just the change of human behavior between going out to restaurants versus eating at home, as a, as a species, we consume a lot less food that way. Apparently, what I read, in restaurants, like there's a lot of food just thrown out as part of the business model. (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 1:00:22 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:00:22 A- and so like you then have to m- move a lot more food through the whole supply chain and now because you're consuming, you know, there's leftovers at home, you're consuming much more of the food you, you're, uh, getting when you're eating at home, that's creating these bottleneck situations, problems as you're referring to, too much in a certain place, not enough in another place, and it's just the supply chain is not robust, those kind of dynamic shifts in who gets what where.

Steve Viscelli 1:00:53 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so, uh, um, I have worked in agriculture a, a bit on sort of the su- the supply side, um, you know. And, and there are product categories, right, where 30% of the crop raised does not get used, right? It just gets plowed under or, or wasted. But he- here's the importance of this, in sort of getting this right. You know, like that, not that, like, panicked buying, you know, blame the irrational consumer. You know, look at the hard sort of truth of the way we've, we've set up our economy. And, and I'll, I'll ask you this, Lex. I know, um, you, you're a hopeful, optimistic person.

Lex Fridman 1:01:30 100%, yes.

Steve Viscelli 1:01:32 Yeah. I am too. I mean, I, I write about problems all the time, and so people think I'm sort of like a, just a Debbie Downer, you know?

Lex Fridman 1:01:38 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 1:01:39 (laughs) Pessimist. But I'm a, I'm a glass half full kinda guy. Like, I want, I want to identify problems so, so we can solve them. So let me ask you this. We've got these long, lean supply chains. In the future, do you see more environmental problems that could disrupt them? More geopolitical problems that could disrupt trade from Asia? You know, um, other institutional failures? Do, do those things seem, you know, potentially more likely in the future than they have been in, say, the last 20 years?

Lex Fridman 1:02:18 Yeah. It, it, uh, it almost absolutely seems to be the case. So you, you then have to ask the question of, uh, how do we change our supply chains? We- whether it's make them more resilient or make them less densely connected, um, you know, building a, it's like a, what is it, you know, the, the Tesla model for, in the automotive sector, of like trying to build every, like, trying to get the factory to do as much as possible with as little reliance on widely distributed, uh, sources of the supply chain as possible. So maybe like rethinking how much we rely on the infrastructure of the supply chain.

Steve Viscelli 1:03:02 Yeah. I mean, you know, there, there are some basic ... And I, I assume, right, that, that there are a lot of folks in corporate boardrooms looking at risk a-and saying, "That didn't go well, and maybe it could've even gone worse. Um, maybe we need to think about reshoring." Right? Um, at the very least, one, one of the things that I'm hearing about anecdotally is that they're storing stuff up, you know, when they can, right?

Lex Fridman 1:03:27 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 1:03:28 Which is, that's not, that's probably not sustainable, right? I mean, at some point, somebody in that corporate boardroom's gonna say, "You know, guys, inventory's getting kinda heavy and the cost of that is like ... do we, can we really justify that much longer to the shareholders?" Right? "Um, we should, we can back off and start, you know, back, things are back to normal. Let's lean out."

Lex Fridman 1:03:45 Well, uh, my hope is that there's a technology solution to a lot of aspects of this. So one of them, on the supply chain side, is collecting a lot more data. Like, having much, uh, more integrated and accurate representation of the inventory all over the place. And the available transportation mechanisms, the trucks, the, all kinds of freight. And how, in the different models of the possible catast- catastrhe- catastrophes that can happen, what, uh, like how will the system respond? So having a really solid model that you're operating under, as opposed to just kinda being in, in, uh, emergency response mode under poor, incomplete information, which is what seems like is more commonly the, the case. Except for things, like you said, Walmart and Amazon. They're trying to internally get their stuff together on that front, but that doesn't help the rest of the economy. (laughs) So,

Lex Fridman 1:04:41 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?

Steve Viscelli 1:05:01 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."

Lex Fridman 1:06:22 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 1:06:22 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?

Lex Fridman 1:07:09 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 1:07:10 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."

Lex Fridman 1:07:19 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 1:07:19 "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-

Lex Fridman 1:08:22 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 1:08:22 ... 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.

Lex Fridman 1:08:37 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?

Steve Viscelli 1:09:50 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:09:51 (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 1:09:51 It is.

Lex Fridman 1:09:52 Okay (laughs) .

Steve Viscelli 1:09:53 It ab- absolutely is because it's the wrong question.

Lex Fridman 1:09:56 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 1:09:56 The question is what do we want the future to be and let's shape it.

Lex Fridman 1:10:00 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 1:10:01 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.

Lex Fridman 1:10:09 Mm-hmm.

Steve Viscelli 1:10:10 (laughs) Is that, you know, we have got to get out of this mindset that we're just gonna let technology kind of-

Lex Fridman 1:10:19 Right.

Steve Viscelli 1:10:20 ... 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."

Lex Fridman 1:11:27 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-

Steve Viscelli 1:12:12 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:12:12 ... 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)

Steve Viscelli 1:12:35 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:35 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.

Steve Viscelli 1:12:48 Yeah. I mean, what an incredible (laughs) spark, right?

Lex Fridman 1:12:52 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 1:12:52 Um, and- and it just the story of-... what it produced, right? I mean, um, your own work on self-driving, right? I mean, you- you've studied it as an academic, right? How many great researchers and minds have been harnessed by this outcome of that spark, right? And I think this is- is sort of theoretically about technology, right? This is what makes it sort of so great is that, it's what makes us human in my opinion, right? Is that you- you conceive of something in your mind and then you bring it into reality.

Lex Fridman 1:13:22 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 1:13:23 Right? (laughs) I mean that- that's what is so great about it. Um...

Lex Fridman 1:13:27 Sometimes you're too dumb to realize how difficult it is, so you take (both laugh)

Steve Viscelli 1:13:31 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:13:31 And then- and then eventually you're- you're too, uh, you're in too deep.

Steve Viscelli 1:13:36 (laughs) Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:13:36 So you might as well solve the problem. (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 1:13:38 Well ma- and maybe we're in that situation right now...

Lex Fridman 1:13:41 Yeah.

Steve Viscelli 1:13:41 ... with self-driving. But, you know, so, and so let me throw this out there. I- I'd- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it. But, uh, the truck drivers alwa- always ask me, like, "Is this for real?" Like, "Is this really..." Do, like, it's harder than they think, like, right? And they, they're, they can't really do this. And, you know, at first I was like, look, you know, this is like the defense department and, like, basically the top computer science and ro- robotics departments in the world. (laughs) Um, and now Silicon Valley with billions of dollars in funding and just, you know, some of the smartest, hardest working, most visionary people focused on what is clearly, you know, a gigantic market. Right? A- and what I tell them is like, if the, if- if self-driving vehicles don't happen, I think this will be the biggest technology failure story in human history. I- I don't know of anything else that has just galvanized... I mean, you've had people in garages or weird inventors work on things their whole lives and come really close and it never happens and it's a great failure story. Right? But never have we had like whole... I mean, we're talking about GM, right? (laughs) I mean, these are not, you know, these are not tech companies, right? These are industrial giants, right? What- what were in the 20th century the pinnacle of industrial production in the world, in human history. Right? And they're focused on it now. So if we (laughs) if we don't...

Lex Fridman 1:15:08 It's like...

Steve Viscelli 1:15:08 ... pull this off, it's like, wow. You know?

Lex Fridman 1:15:11 It's fascinating to think about. I've never thought of it that way. I, there was a mass hysteria o- on the level, in terms of excitement and hype, on a level that's probably unparalleled in technology space. Like, I've seen that kind of hysteria just studying history when you go, talk about military conflict. So we often wage war with a dream of making a better world and then realize it costs trillions of dollars. And then we step back and like, and go, "Wait a minute. What did we actually get for, like, for this?"

Steve Viscelli 1:15:40 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:15:40 But in the space of technology, it seems like all these kind of large efforts have paid off. This, you're right, it seems like, um, it seems like even GM and Ford and all these companies now are- are a little bit like, "Hey," um, or Toyota and, uh, even Tesla, uh, like, "Are we, uh, are we sure about this?" (laughs)

Steve Viscelli 1:16:01 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:16:02 And- and it's fascinating to think about when you tell the story of this. This could be one of the big first, perhaps, but by far the biggest failures of the dream in the space of technology.

Steve Viscelli 1:16:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:16:16 That's really interesting to think about. I was a skeptic for a long time because of the human factor. Because for a business to work in this space, you have to work with humans and you have to work with humans at ev- at every level. So in the truck driving space, you have to work with the truck driver, but you also have to work with the society that has a certain conception of what driving means, and also you have to have, work with businesses that are not used to this extreme level of technology, you know, i- in, um, in the basic operation of their business. So I thought it was, it would be really difficult to, uh, to move to autonomous vehicles in that way. But then I realized that there's certain companies that are just willing to take big risks and really innovate. I think, uh, w- the first impressive company to me w- was Waymo or what was used to be the Google self-driving car. And- and I saw, okay, here's a company that's willing to really think long term and really try to s- solve this problem, hire great engineers. Uh, then I saw Tesla, uh, with Mobileye when they first had. I thought w- actually, Mobileye is the thing that impressed me. When I sat down I thought fr- 'cause I'm a computer vision person, I thought there's no way a system could keep me in lane long enough for it to be a pleasant experience for me. So from a computer vision perspective, I thought there'd be too many failures, it'd be really annoying, it'd be a gimmick, a toy, it wouldn't actually create a pleasant experience. And when I first was, got in a Tesla with the Mobileye, the initial Mobileye system, it actually held to lane for quite a long time to where I could relax a little bit, and it was a really pleasant experience. I couldn't exactly explain why it's pleasant 'cause it's not like I still have to really pay attention, but I can relax my shoulders a little bit. I'm- I'm- I can be... I can look around a little bit more. And for some reason, that was really, um, re- re- reducing the stress. And then over time, Tesla with, uh, with a lot of the revolutionary stuff they're doing on the machine learning space made me believe that there's o- opp- opportunities here to innovate, to come up with totally new ideas. Another very sad story, uh, that I was really excited about is Cadillac's Super Cruise system. It is a sad story because I think, I vaguely read in the news they just said they're discontinuing Super Cruise. But it's an, it's a nice innovative way of doing driver attention monitoring and also doing lane keeping. And it, just innovation could solve this in ways we don't predict. And same with the, in the trucking space, it might not be as simple as like journalists envisioned a few years ago where everything's just automated. It might be gradually, uh, helping out the truck driver in some ways that make their life...... more efficient, more effective, more pleasant. Uh, make the, like th- remove some of the inefficiencies that we've been talking about in totally innovative ways. And that, I, I still have that dream that, uh, I s- I believe to solve the fully autonomous driving problem, we're still many years away. But on the way to solving that problem, it feels like there could be... if there's bold risk-takers and innovators in this space, there's an opportunity to come up with, uh, like subtle technologies that make all the difference. That's, that's actually just what I realized, is sometimes little design decisions make all the difference. It's the Blackberry versus the iPhone. You know, w- why is it that you have a glass and you're using your finger for all of the work versus the buttons makes all the difference. This idea that now that you have a giant screen, so that every part of the experience is now a digital experience, so you can have things like apps that change everything. Like, y- you can't... you know, when you're first thinking about, "Do I want a keyboard or not on a smartphone?" you think it's just a keyboard decision. But then you later realize by removing the keyboard, you're enabling a whole ecosystem of technologies that are inside the phone, and now you're making the smartphone into a computer. In that same way, who knows how you could transform trucks? Right? By, like, automating some parts of it, maybe, uh, adding s- s- some, uh, displays, maybe allows you to... maybe giving the, the truck driver some control in the supply chain to make decisions, all those kinds of things.

Steve Viscelli 1:20:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:20:45 Uh, so, I don't know, d- so what's, where a- y- where are you on the spectrum of hope for, uh, the role of automation in trucking?

Steve Viscelli 1:20:57 I, I think automation is, is inevitable. And, uh, again, I think the... this is really going to be transformative. And it's gonna be... uh, I've, I've studied the history of trucking technology as much as I, I can. There, you know, there's not a lot, (laughs) a lot of great stuff written and you kind of have to, you know, uh... there isn't a lot of data and places to know sort of volumes of stuff and how they're changing, et cetera. But i- i- the big revolutionary changes