YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Viscelli

lines on the record: 185
first: 2021-11-03
most recent: 2021-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I just had my floors redone, and the guy who did it, he was an artist. He sanded these old 100 year old floors and made them look gorgeous. Is”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honest about that. There are a lot of people who don't love their jobs. And we don't have jobs that they're going to love, you know, and maybe that's not a sort of realistic, you know, that's a utopia, right? But for those of us that have the luxury, I mean, I think you love what you do that people say that. I think the key, you know, for real happiness is to love what you're trying to achieve. And maybe you love trying to build a company and make a lot of money just for the sake of doing that. But I think the people who, you know, are really happy and have great impacts, you know, they love what they do because it has an impact on the world that they think expresses that love, right? And that could be, you know, at a counseling center, that could be, you know, in your community, that could be sending people to market.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the meaning of life is love. And you can find love in your work. And I don't think everybody can. There are a lot of jobs out there that just, you know, you do it for a paycheck. And I think we do have to be”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Studio art is going to mean that you look at buildings differently, right? Or you end up sort of putting your own stamp on woodworking. I think that's the key is like follow-up cheesy because everybody says follow your passion. But, you know, we say that and then we just, 90% of what people hear is, you know, what's the return on investment for that? It's like you're a human being. Like things interest you, music interests you, literature interests you, video games interest you, like follow it, you know?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it's crazy. I mean, even four or five years ago, I would, if you had asked me if I was going to be studying trucking still, I would have said no. And so, my advice is I think if I was going to give advice, is you can't connect the dots looking forward. You just got to follow what interests you. And I think we downplay that when we talk to kids, especially if you have some bright gifted kid that gets identified as like, oh, you could go somewhere. Then we're like, we feed them stuff. You're like, well, learn the piano and learn another language, right? Learn robotics. And then we tell other kids like, oh, learn a trade, you know, like figure out what's going to pay well. And not that there's anything against trades. I think everyone should learn like manual skills to make things. I think it's incredibly satisfying and wonderful. And we need more of that. But also, you know, tell all kids, it's okay to like take a class in something random that you don't think you're going to get any economic return on. Well, because maybe you will end up going into a trade, but that class that you took in.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feeling like just a fish out of water and just, you know, but and at the same time, that sort of drove me in the sense that. It drove an opening of my mind because I couldn't understand it. I was like, I didn't know that this world existed. I don't understand. And I think maybe that's where my real first step in trying to understand other people because they were my friends. I mean, they were my teammates. I played lacrosse in college. I was close to people who came from such different backgrounds than I did. And I just, I was so confused, you know. And so I think I learned to learn and then, you know, sort of went from there.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All liberal arts college and just feeling like both having the entire world opened up to me, like philosophy and Buddhism and things that I had never heard of, you know, and just became totally obsessed with and just like, you know, just following my interest.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking a leap Yeah, there was some nervousness for sure. I mean, and I guess my advantage as an ethnographer is I grew up in a blue-collar environment. Again, all my ancestors for factory workers. So I can move through spaces. I feel I can become comfortable in lots and lots of places, you know, not everywhere. But along class lines for sort of white, you know, even white ethnic workers, like that's, you know, I can move in those spaces fairly easily. I mean, not entirely. There was one time where I was like, okay, you know, and I grew up around people worked on cars. I'd been to drag races and NASCAR. And I bend of, you know, Colgate University. And so I think that was probably my initial training was, you know, being this just working class kid who ends up in this sort of blue blood.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just drove up there with this kayak and put into the Pacific. And it was insane. The tides are huge. And there was one point in which I was going down a fjord and two fjords kind of came up and there was a cross channel. And I had hit the timing completely wrong. And the tide was sort of rushing up like, you know, rivers in these, you know, two fjords. And then coming through this cross channel and met and created this giant standing wave that I had to paddle through. And now, actually very recently, I've gone out on Whitewater with some people who know what the hell they're doing. And I realized like just how absolutely stupid and ill fit I was. But that's just that I think I've always had that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So I was working on forestry issues. And we were starting a campaign up in really remote British Columbia. And I was like, okay, if I'm going to work on this, I've got to actually go there myself and see what this is all about and see whether it's worth devoting my sort of life right now to”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's probably like Tolkien. As a teenager, I sort of adopted some sets of needing to heroically go out in the world, which I've done at various points in my life in looking back and absolutely stupid ways that where I could have completely ended up dead and traumatized my family, including a couple week trip in the Pacific, like a solo trip on a kayak. And basically my kayak experience up till that point had been on a fairly calm lake and like class one rapid solo trip.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Article on satellite linked computers. And the story in the literature was a sense of autonomy. And I was like, well That monitoring must affect the sense of autonomy. And it's just this question that I found interesting. And it never in a million years that I ever thought I was going to spend 15 years of my life studying truck driving. And it was like if you were to map out a career path in academia.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so, and I just heard this recently, it was a commencement speech that he gave, and I can't remember where it was. And he was talking about, you know, he had famously dropped out of school, but continued to take classes, right? And he took a calligraphy class and it influenced the design of the Mac and sort of fonts. And was something that he had no sense of what it was going to be useful for. And his lesson was you can't connect the dots looking forward. You know, looking back, you can see all the pieces that sort of led you to where you ended up. And for me, studying truck driving, like, I mean, I literally went to graduate school because I was worried about climate change and like, you know, I had a whole other dissertation planned and then was like driving home and like I had read about all this management literature and sort of like how you get workers to work hard for my qualifying exams and then read a popular article.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are amazing, and every one of them has a life experience and concerns and can teach us something. And they're not in the conversation. And I know this because I'm the expert, you know. So I get pulled into these conversations and people want to know what's going to happen to labor. You know, it's like, well, So I tried to be a sounding board and I feel a tremendous weight of responsibility for that. But I'm not those workers. And they may listen to this or walk in the door sometime. It's about me like that guy's full of shit. That's not what I think at all.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we need to acknowledge that. We need to acknowledge the fact that it's not just technology, it's technology in a social Context in which some people have a lot of power to determine what happens. For me, I don't have all the answers, but I know what my answer is. And my answer is, and I think I started with this, you know. I can learn from every single person. Did I have to talk to the 200th truck driver? In my opinion, yes, because I was going to learn something from that 200th truck driver. Now, people with more power might talk to none. Or they might talk to five and say, okay, I got it.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we need to differentiate between the effects of technology and the effects of capitalism, right? And they are the fact that Workers don't have a lot of power, right? In the system matters. Now, we had a system, right? And that's why I would say, you know, go to that Harry Bridgers report's report. And those were workers who had a sense of power. They said, you know what, we can demand some of the benefits. Like, yeah, automate our jobs away. But, you know, kick a little down to us, right? And we had in the golden era of American industrialism in post-World War II, that was the contract. The contract was employers can do what they want in automation and all these things. Yeah, sure, there's some union rules that make things less efficient in places. But the key compromise is tie wages to productivity. That's what we did. That's what unions did. They tied wages to productivity, kept demand up, right? It was good for the economy. Some economists think, right? And that's what we need to.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've suffered, but we have such power now to defend ourselves behind these programs, right? And to see those people be like, I'm not sure if higher education is good for the country or not. It's like. Where are we? You know, so we need to rebuild the faith and trust in those institutions and have these, but we need to have honest conversations before people are going to buy it.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was there, you know, and you could just ignore it as long as you want and tell people don't worry, trade's good for you, don't worry, immigration's good for you as their communities lose factories. I mean, a lot of them were lost to the South before they were lost to overseas, whatever. Tapped into that. And there's a fundamental distrust of, you know, you look at these pupils on whether people trust the media, right? But whether or not they trust higher education, these institutions that I find magical, right? I mean, you look at the vaccine research and stuff, just brilliant people doing incredible things for humanity. Like, you know, the idea that we can take these Used to ravage through the human population and that we had to be terrified of.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were to go back over my trucking interviews for 15 years, you would have heard those stories over and over and over again, that sense of voicelessness, that sense of powerlessness, that sense that there's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans because they're all going to screw us over.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look forward to your comments about how free trade benefits everybody. But, you know, immigration. You go, and I'm, you know, I think immigration is great. The United States benefits from it tremendously. But there are costs, right? Go down to South Philadelphia and find a drywaller and tell him that immigration hasn't hurt him, right? Go to these places where there's competition, right? And yes, we benefit overall, but we have a system that allows some people to pay really high costs. And Trump tapped into that, and there was no more than that too, obviously. And there's lots of really dark stuff that goes along with it, you know, the sort of racialization of others and things like that. But he hit on those core issues that, you know,”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Free trades good for workers like, yeah, right, you know, I grew up in the Rust Belt, you know, I watched factory after factory clothes, all of my ancestors worked at the same factory. It's still holding on by a thread. The Democratic Party told, you know, blue-collar workers for years, I don't worry about free trade. It's not bad for you. And I know the economists will probably get in the comment box now about how.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amulex, you know why? Because, I mean, I want to be an optimist, you know, and I want to think of myself, I guess, as a half-class full kind of person. But, you know, when you ask it like that, and I think about, you know, like, When I look at the challenges to harnessing that for just let's take just labor and climate, right? There are other issues, congestion, et cetera, infrastructure that are going to be affected by this, again, those big transformational issues. I think it's going to take the best of us. Like it's going to take the best of our policy approaches. It's going to take, you know, we need to start investing in building those, rebuilding those institutions. I mean, that's what we've seen in the last four years, right? And the erosion of that was so clear among these truck drivers. you know, came in and said, like, you know,”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private entity was going to do that. Electrification, dams, water, you know, we need to do this infrastructure. Infrastructure”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least guided by. I mean, I think there are ways to finance Unintended consequences and whatnot. But if you look at transportation. The United States, and it is the foundation of manifest destiny, economic growth, right, that built the United States into the world superpower that it became and the industrial power that it became. It rested on transportation, right? It was like, you know, the Erie Canal, I grew up a few miles from where they dug the first shovelful of the Erie Canal and everyone thought it was, you know, crazy, right? But those public infrastructure projects, the canals, right? The railroads. Yeah, they were privately built, but they wouldn't have been privately built without Lincoln funding them, essentially, and giving the railroads land in exchange for building them. The highway system, the Eisenhower, the payback that the U.S. economy got from the Dwight D. Eisenhower interstate system is phenomenal, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a Section 8 housing voucher in my neighborhood. I'm not a welfare recipient, according to the dominant discourse. And so we have this completely screwed up sense of like where our dollars go and who benefits from the investment. And we need to, I don't know that we can do it, but if we're going to survive, we need to figure out how to have honest conversations where private interest where we need it to be in fostering innovation and rewarding the people who do incredible things. Please, you know, we don't want to squash that, but we need to harness that power to solve what I think are some pretty big existential problems.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without the roads, right? So there's like we need that innovation. There's no doubt about it, and there are roles for that, but there's big public stuff that sets the stage that's critical. And what it really is, it's a sociological problem, right? It's a political problem. It's a social problem. We have to say, and we have these screwed up ideas, right? So we have this politics right now where like everybody feels like they're getting screwed and someone undeserving is benefiting when in fact at least in the middle, right? They're huge. I used to teach this course in rich and poor in economic inequality. And I would go through public housing subsidies in Philadelphia, Section 8 subsidies. And then I would go through my housing subsidies for my mortgage interest deduction. And it worked out to basically the average pay.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failures in human history. Yeah, that's going to be, let's hope not the biggest, but could be. But let me say why I disagree. Henry Ford, amazing, right? To sort of mass produce cars, right? Daimler to put that first truck on the road.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And, you know, the grant was like, okay, our agriculture system is going to move. Our bread basket is no longer going to be California. It's going to be Illinois. What does that mean for truck transportation?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's past time. I've been working on climate change issues since the mid 90s. I still remember the first time in 2010 when I got a grant that was completely focused on adaptation rather than prevention. And just when it hit me that like, wow, like.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. No, no, I think it's a matter of like, do we need those heroes? Absolutely. I mean, I saw the boosters come down from SpaceX's rockets and land nearly simultaneously with my kids after school one day. And I thought, oh my God, like this is like science fiction has been made real. It's incredible. And it's a pinnacle of human achievement, right? It's like this is what we're capable of. But we need to have that, those heroes oriented. We need to allow them, right? To orient toward the right toward the goals, right? We've got it. Climate change. You know, I mean, all the heroes out there. Right. I mean, it's time. The clock is ticking.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a chance at realizing that vision. It's amazing, right? But when it comes to so many areas of our economy, we can't wait for a hero. We have to have, and there are way too many interests involved. You know, it's who builds the roads. The money that sloshes around on Capitol Hill to decide what happens in these infrastructure bills and the transportation bill is just obscene, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some direct contact with the consumer where we're probably going to have lots of hands-on public policy about concerns around patient rights and things like that. But if we can't figure out how to have a public policy conversation around how technology is going to reform our public roadways and our transportation system, we're really leaving way too much to private companies. It's just, it's not It's not in there. I get asked this question like, what should companies do? And I'm like, you know, just go about doing what you're doing, you know. I mean, please come to the table and talk about it, but it's not their role. I mean, I appreciate, you know, Elon's, you know, attempts to have species level goals. We're going to go to Mars. I mean, that's amazing. And that's incredible that someone can realize that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there are certain That the market can do well. This is how I see the world, right? That's the best way to organize certain kinds of activities is the market and private interest. But I think we go too far in some areas. Transportation is, if we can't have a public debate about the roads that we all pay forget about it in private factories and all these other healthcare and other places, it's going to be way harder there. Healthcare, I guess, has some.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that keeps me So interested in this space and thinking that it's so important is again that efficiency question, that safety question and the way that these economics can push us potentially toward a more efficient system. So I want to see those Tesla electric trucks running out to those truck ports where you've got those two trucks with a human driver in front. I think that's now what's powering those is it hydrogen, it's very interesting as a researcher who does not have a background in technology and doesn't have a have a horse in this race. I mean, you know, for all I know self-driving trucks will ultimately be achieved by some biomechanical sensor that uses echolocation because we took stem cells of bats. I am completely. Unable to assess who's the header, who's behind or who makes sense.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and I did have some very preliminary conversations with policy folks there, nothing really in the tech or business side of it too much. And here's why I think because electrification and autonomy run in opposite directions. And I just don't see the application, the value in self-driving for the truck that Tesla is going to produce in the near term. You're not going to have the battery. Now you could have wonderful safety systems and reinforcing the auto. Self driving features supporting a skilled driver, but you're not going to be able to pull that driver out for long stretches the way that you are with driverless trucks.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't have all the answers in here. And I wouldn't expect individual private companies to kind of kick back, right? Capitalism doesn't allow that, right? Unless you have a huge monopoly, right? And then you can on the backside create music halls and libraries and things like that. But, you know, here's what I think the basic obligation is, is come to the table and have an honest conversation with the policymakers, with the truck drivers, you know, with the communities that are at risk. At least let's talk about these things in a way that doesn't look like the way lobbying works right now, where you send a well-paid lobbyist to the hill to convince some representative or senator to stick a sentence or two in that favors you into the, like, let's have a real conversation.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, and who gets, you know, it's the benefits, right? It's like, I mean, think of the public dollars that went into developing self-driving vehicles in the early days, right? Not just the vision of it, right? Which was a public vision to, you know, take soldiers out of harm's way. But, you know, a lot of money.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was the pride of the longshoreman was a tight stow. And now you all know their cranes that come down and there's no longer any rope slings and we're loading bulldozers into the hole to push the oar up into piles and then clamshells are coming down. And he made this case to them. And he said, this is why we're signing this agreement to basically allow the employer to automate. And we're going to lose jobs, but we're going to get a share of the benefits. And so our wages are going to go up. We're going to continue to control the hiring and training of workers. Our numbers are going to go down, but basically that last son of a bitch who's working at the ports is going to be one really well-paid son of a bitch. It may just be one standing, but he's going to love his job. You should check out that report”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it an internal education campaign to convince the membership that they had to go along with automation Machines were coming for their jobs. And what the photo journal, it's almost like 100 pages or something like that, is like, here's how we used to do it. Some of you old timers remember it. Like we used to take the barrels of olive oil and we'd stack them in the hold and we'd roll them by hand and we'd put the timber in and we'd stack the crates tight.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, because that's going to, again, it's those really expensive, good jobs, right? So those LTL jobs, the like UPS jobs. Now, that's going to be where labor is too, right? That's where the Teamsters are. That's the only place they are left, right? So that's going to be the big fight on the hill and public if labor can muster it, right? I don't know. There's a really cool one thing I would recommend to you and your listeners if you really want to see a remarkable page in sort of the history of labor and automation. There's a report that Harry Bridges, who was the socialist leader of the longshoremen on the West Coast and just galvanized that union and they still control the ports today because of the sort of vision that he laid down. In the 1960s, he put out a photo journal report called Men and Machines. And basically what it was”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I assume that there are questions that I don't think you'd have to ask. I assume they're going to be actually driverless, right? They're not going to keep the driver in there. So, I mean, for the industry, I think it would be interesting to know where they see that first adopter, right? Oh, you.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, you mentioned the demos. I don't have enough data as a sociologist to really say like, oh, this is why they do what they do. But my hypothesis is there's a real scarcity of talent and money for this. And there certainly was a scarcity of like partnerships with OEMs and the big trucking companies. And there was a race for it, right? And the way that if you don't have the backing of alphabet, you do a demo, right? And you get a few more good engineers who say, hey, look, they did that cool thing. Like Anthony Lewandowski did with Otto and that what resulted in the Uber purchase of that program. So what would I ask? I mean, I think. I would ask a lot of questions, but I think the market”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I guess they have that luxury, right? Which I don't think If I had another life as a researcher, I would love to just study the business strategies of startups and Silicon Valley sort of structure.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, that basic scenario with a slight variation, so they leave the human driver in both trucks, and then that following driver goes off duty. And then, you know, I've been trying to think of what the term is. I think of it as like slingshotting. They sort of, when one runs out of hours, you know, the one who's off duty goes in front and, you know. And so, you know, if only they had been around six months earlier that it might have been considered by DOT. But it just says, you know, who has the authority to propose what these visions of the future are?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to not restrict technology, not stand in the way of things. We need to harness it towards the goals that matter, right? Not whatever comes out the end of the pipeline because it's the easiest thing to develop or whatever is most profitable for the first actor or whatever. But the thing is we do that, right? I mean, like when we sent people to the moon, we did that. And there were tremendous benefits that followed from it, right? And we do this all the time in trying to cure cancer or whatever it is, right? I mean, we can do this. Now, the interesting sort of epilogue to that story is six months or so, I don't know how long it was, after those meetings in which that sixth scenario was not considered a company called Locomation ends up using that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so this is the great trick in policy of private actors is you get narrow mandates for government agencies, right? So the safety case will be handled by organizations whose mandate is safety. So the federal motor carrier safety administration who is going to be a key player, I argue in an article that I wrote, they're going to be a key player in actually determining which scenario is most profitable by setting the rules for truck drivers. Their mandate is safety. Right. Now they have lots of good people there who care about truck drivers and who wish truck drivers jobs were better, but they don't have the authority to say, hey, we're going to write this rule because it's good for truck drivers, right? And so when you need to say, you know, as a society.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so, but here's the thing, right? This is the Department of Transportation, right? And the Department of Labor. Maybe they could consider some scenarios. Like maybe we could say, you know, this technology has got a lot of potential. Here's what we'd like it to do. We'd like it to reduce highway deaths, help us fight climate change, reduce congestion, you know, all these other things. But that's not how our policy conversation around technology is happening. And people don't think that we should. And I think that's the fundamental shift that we need to have, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was trying to do, and maybe, and then I tried to think outside the box at the end by adding that one, right? Like, here's one that I have, you know, people aren't talking about that could be cool. Now, again, it had been proposed like 2014 for like fuel convoys. So you could just have like one super armored lead fuel truck, right? bringing fuel to forward operating bases in Afghanistan. And then you wouldn't need the super heavy, you know, you wouldn't have to protect the human life in the following trucks.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so you can go and listeners could go to these reports. They're publicly available. And they explain why. In the footnote. And they note that there was this other scenario suggested by at least me and I can't remember if they said someone else did too. But they said, you know, we didn't include it because no developers were working on it. Full disclosure was the approach that I took in my research, right? Which was to go to the developers and say, what's your vision? What are you trying to develop?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is beyond. This is one of the challenges, obviously, of being a researcher doesn't really have any background in the technology, right? So I can dream this up. I have no idea if it's feasible.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source