Steve Viscelli is a former truck driver and now an economic sociologist at University of Pennsylvania studying freight transportation, including autonomous trucks. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Steve's Website: https://www.steveviscelli.com/
Big Rig (book): https://amzn.to/3EbaofP
Will Robotic Trucks Be "Sweatshops on Wheels?" (article): https://bit.ly/3vGGgpO
Johnny Cash - All I Do Is Drive (song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEHoagHlqrE
Steve's Penn Gazette Interview: https://bit.ly/3nkRPyV
More Information on Automated Trucking: http://www.driverlessreport.org/

PODCAST INFO:
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Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:44 - Ethnography
12:57 - Challenges of driving a truck
31:36 - Trucking industry: State of affairs
1:04:41 - Future of autonomous trucks
1:30:57 - Solving the automated truck dilemma
2:02:52 - Role of society in automated trucking
2:30:01 - Tesla and revolutionizing the trucking industry
2:49:41 - Hope and final thoughts

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The following is a conversation with Steve Veselli, 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 1 of the best blue collar jobs to 1 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.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Steve Veselli.

You wrote a book about trucking called The Big Rig Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream.

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 because I was just listening to this song.

He has a ton of songs about trucking, but 1 of them I was just listening to, it's called All I Do is Drive, where he's talking to an old truck driver.

It goes, I asked them 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.

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 5.

All I do is drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive.

So I gotta ask you, same thing that he asked the trucker.

You worked as a trucker for 6 months while working on the previous book.

Can you take me through the whole experience, what it takes to become a trucker, what actual day-to-day life was on day 1, week 1, and then over time, how that changed.

Yeah, well, the book is really about how that changed over time.

So my experience, and I'm an ethnographer, right?

So I go in, I live with people, I work with people, I talk to them, try to understand their world.

The science and art of capturing 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 as a society, maybe as a subculture, right?

What makes them tick that might be different than the way you and I are sort of wired.

And to really sort of thickly describe it would be at least 1 component of it.

And then For me, I want to you know Exercise what see right mills called the sociological imagination which is to you know, put that individual biography into the long historical sweep of Humanity if at all possible My goals are typically more modest than C.

And to then put that biography in the larger social structure, to try to understand that person's life and the way they see the world, their decisions in light of their interests relative to others and conflict and power and all these things that I find interesting.

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

And the small tangent, what does it take to do that?

To capture 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 a limited amount of time and you come to the table probably with preconceived notions that are then quickly destroyed, all that whole process.

So I don't know if it's more art or science, but what does it take to be great at this?

I do think my first book was a success relative to my goals of trying to really get at the heart of sort of the central issues and the lives being led by people.

If I have a resource, a talent, it's that I'm a good listener.

You know, my wife, you know, loves to remark on this that, you know, I can I can sort of sit down with anyone?

I think I learned that from my dad who worked at a factory and actually had a lot of truckers go through the gate that he operated.

And he always had a story, a joke for everybody, kind of got to know everyone individually.

And he just taught me that essentially everyone has something to teach you, and I try to embody that.

Like that's the rule for me is every single person I interact with can teach me something.

I gotta ask you, I'm sorry to interrupt, because I'm clearly of the 2 of us, the poorer listener.

I've been listening to the podcast, I think you're a great listener.

You've done a large number of interviews, like you said, of truckers for this book.

I'm just curious, what are some lessons you've learned about what it takes to listen to a person enough, maybe guide the conversation enough to get to the core of the person, the idea, again, the ethnographer goal to get to the core.

So I'm a ruminator, you know, I just sit with the data, you know, for years.

I sat with the trucking data for almost 10 full years and just thought about the problems and the questions using everything that I possibly could.

And so in the moment, my ideal interview is, I open up and I say, tell me about your life as a trucker.

And they never shut up and they keep 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, a lot of it is the, as you know, as I think you're a great interviewer, you know, prep.

Right, so you try to get to know a little bit about the person and sort of understand, you know, kind of the central questions you're interested in that they can help you explore.

And so I've done hundreds of interviews with truck drivers at this point.

And I should really go back and read the original ones.

You're sitting down, do you have an audio recorder and also taking notes or do you do no audio recording, just notes or?

Yeah, audio recorder and social scientists always have to struggle with sampling, right?

I just happened to have a sort of natural place to go that gave me essentially the population that I was interested in.

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

So I picked a truck stop at the juncture of a couple of major interstates, went into the lounge that drivers have to walk through with my clipboard.

And everybody who came through, I said, hey, are you on break?

That was sort of the first criteria was, do you have time, right?

And if they said yes, I'd say, I'm a graduate student at Indiana University, I'm doing a study, I'm trying to understand more about truck drivers, 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.

For any response rate like that, 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.

And so I had to figure out how to kind of turn the spigot on, you know, and I got pretty good at it, I think, yeah.

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.

Yeah, there's a lot of reflection, a lot of struggles, you know, and it's, they take different forms, you know, 1 of the things that they talk about is the impact on their families.

They say truckers have the same rate of divorce as everybody else, And that's because trucking saves so many marriages because you're not around and ruins so many.

I met another person and he recognized me from a podcast.

And he said, you know, 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 kinds of people.

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 that really stuck with me because I set that as a goal for myself to make sure I talked to regular folk.

And you did just this, talking again, regular folk, it's human beings, All of them have experiences.

If you were to recommend to talk to, to talk to some of these folks with stories, How would you find them?

Yeah, so I do do this sometimes for journalists who will come and they wanna write about sort of what's happening right now in trucking.

Yeah, there's a town called Effingham, Illinois.

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 And you know again truckers in this, you know, sadly, I think you did the politics of the day It's changing a little bit I think there's a little the polarization is getting to the trucking industry in ways that, you know, maybe we're seeing in other parts of our social world.

But truckers are generally, you know, real open, sort of friendly folks.

Now some of them ultimately like to work alone and be alone, that's a relatively small subset I think, but all of them are generally kind of open, trusting, willing to have a conversation.

And so you go to the truck stop and you go in the lounge and there's usually a booth down there and somebody's sitting at their laptop or on their phone and willing to strike up a conversation.

Just again, we're just going from tangent to tangent.

We'll return to the main question, but what do they listen to?

Some, I mean, and some still listen to the CB, which, you know, it's a ever dwindling group.

They'll call it the original internet citizens band.

You know, back in the 70s, they thought it was gonna be the medium of democracy.

And they love to just get on there and, you know, cruise along 1 truck after the other and chat away.

Usually, you know, it's guys who know each other from the same company or happen to run into each other.

But other than that, it's everything under the sun.

And that's probably 1 of the stereotypes.

And I think it was more true in the past about the sort of heterogeneity of truck drivers.

There's definitely a large, still a large component of rural white guys who work in the industry.

But there's a huge growing chunk of the industry that's immigrants, people of color, and even some women.

Still huge barriers to women entering it, but it's a much more diverse place than most people think.

So let's return to your journey as a truck driver.

What did it take to become a truck driver?

Yeah, so this is, I mean, this is a central part of the story, right, that I uncovered.

And the good part was that I went in without knowing what was gonna happen.

So I was able to experience it as a new truck driver would.

It's 1 of the important stories in the book is how that experience is constructed by employers to sort of 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.

I say in the book, pretty handy guy, familiar with tools, machines, comfortable operating stuff from the time I was a kid.

The truck was just like a whole other experience.

I mean, as I think most people think about it, it's this big, huge vehicle, right?

It does not stop like a car, it does not turn like a car.

But at least when I started, and 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.

The clutch isn't synchronized, so you have to do what's called double clutch.

And it's basically the foundational skill that a truck driver used to have to learn.

So you would 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 an exact amount.

Then you push the clutch back in, and you put it in second gear.

If your timing is off, those gears aren't going to go together.

So if you're in an intersection, you're just going to get this horrible grinding sound as you coast to a dead stop underneath the stoplight or whatever it is.

So the first thing you have to do is learn to shift it.

And so at least for me and a lot of drivers who are going to private company CDL schools, what happens is it's kind of like a boot camp.

They ship me 3 states away from home, send you a bus ticket and say, hey, we'll put you up for 2 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 logbook, rules of the road, you know, you do that maybe half the day, and then the other half you're in this giant parking lot with 1 of these old trucks and just like, you know, destroying what's left of the thing.

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.

So it's like this bull you're trying to ride, and it's super intimidating.

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.

They get too old to do construction any longer, right?

They get replaced by a machine, their job gets offshored, and they end up going to trucking because it's a place where they can maintain their income.

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 of weeks, like you might get charged $8,000 by the company that you have to pay back if you don't get hired.

And this machine is huge, and it's intimidating.

I mean, I watched grown men break down crying about how they couldn't go home and tell their son that they had 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 because, as 1 of my trainers later told me, it's basically a two-week job interview.

They're seeing like, you know, how's this person gonna respond when it's tough, when they have to do the right thing and it's slow and they need to learn something, are they gonna rush or are they gonna kind of stay calm, figure it out, nose to the grindstone?

Because when you're a truck driver, you're unsupervised And that's what they're really looking for is that kind of quality of conscientious work that's gonna carry through to the job.

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

So you said like turning, it stresses me out every time I look at a truck, because 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.

And in that mode, you have to then shift gears perfectly and move perfectly.

And 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 as opposed to be exceptionally stressed under the eyes of the road, everybody looking at you, waiting for you.

Is that the psychological pressure of that?

Is that something that was really difficult?

Again, I saw people freeze up, you know, in that intersection as, you know, horns are blaring and the truck's grinding gears and you just can't, and they just shut down.

They're like, this isn't for me, I can't do it.

Trucking is not considered a skilled occupation, but, you know, my 6 months there, and I was a pretty good rookie.

But when I finished, I was still a rookie.

Even shifting, definitely backing tight corners and situations, I could drive competently, but the difference between me and someone who had 2, 3 years of experience was, it was a giant gulf between us.

And between that and the really skilled drivers who've been doing it for 20 years, you know, is still another step beyond that.

Would it be fair to break trucking into the task of truck, of driving a truck, the 2 categories.

1 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 2 tasks.

What are the challenges associated with each task?

What about the actual like long haul highway driving?

Yeah, so I mean, and they are very different, right?

And the key with the long haul driving is really a set of, the way I came to understand it was a set of habits, right?

We have a sense of driving, particularly men, I think, have a sense of driving as like being really skilled, as like the goal, and you can kind of maneuver yourself out of in and out of tight spaces with great speed and braking and acceleration.

For a really good truck driver, it's about understanding traffic and traffic patterns and making good decisions so you never have to use those skills.

And the really good drivers, the mantra is always leave yourself an out.

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.

What are you going to do in that situation?

And what really good truck drivers do on the highway is they just keep themselves out of those situations entirely.

And then the local driving is really something that takes just practice and routine to learn.

You know, this quarter turn, it feels like the back of the truck 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 to get the effect that I want like 5 seconds from now in where that tail of that trailer is 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.

Do you mind sharing how much you were getting paid?

How much you were making as a truck driver in your time as a truck driver?

Yeah, I started out at 25 cents a mile, and then I got bumped up to 26 cents a mile.

So we had a minimum pay, which was sort of a new pay scheme that the industry had started to introduce to, you know, because there's there's lots of unpaid work and time.

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.

You get paid in sort of, so you get paid when you turn the bills in, which is the paperwork that goes with the load.

So you have to get that back to your company, and then that's how they bill the customer.

And so you might get a bunch of those bills that kind of bunch up in 1 week.

And I mean, I was a poor graduate student.

And so I had this sort of natural incentive to earn a lot or to maximize my pay.

Some weeks were that minimum, 500, very few.

Typical drivers now starting in the 30s, you know, in the kind of job that I was in, 30s, you know, cents per mile, 30 to 35.

So can we try to reverse engineer that math, how that maps to the actual hours?

So 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 you're saying all these cents per mile kind of thing.

How does that map to like average hourly wage?

Yeah, so I mean, and this is kind of the, this is also an interesting technology story in the end.

And it's the technology story that didn't happen.

So pay per mile was invented by companies when you couldn't surveil drivers.

You didn't know what they were doing, right?

And you wanted them to have some skin in the game.

It's going from, for me, I might start in 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.

If I was being paid by the hour, I might just pull over at the diner and have breakfast.

So you're paid by the mile, but increasingly over time, the typical driver is spending more and more time doing non-driving tasks.

1 of which is railroads have captured a lot of freight that goes long distances now.

And the other 1 is that drivers are pretty cheap.

And they're almost always the low people on the totem pole in some segments.

And so their time is used really inefficiently.

So I might go to that brewery to pick up that load of Bud Light.

And their dock staff may be busy loading up 5 other trucks.

And they'll say, go over there and sit and wait.

And we'll, we'll call you on the CB when the doc's ready.

So you wait there a couple 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, you know, and you're sitting in that truck and you're essentially unpaid, you know, then you pull out, you've got control over what you're gonna get paid based on how you drive that load.

And then on the other end, you got a similar situation of kind of waiting.

So- 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?

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