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

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. 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?

I think that captures it. (laughs)

(laughs)

It really does, um-

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.

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.

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

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.