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

“To sit overnight in that refrigerated trailer. And so their system is based on that. Now, what happens when that truck can now travel two times as far, right? Three times as far. Now you don't need the warehouses where they were. Now you can go super lean with your inventory. Instead of having meet here, meet there, meet there. You can put it all right here. And if it's cheap enough, substitute those transportation costs for all that warehousing costs, right? So this is going to remake landscapes in the same way that big box supply chains did, right? And then, of course, the further complement of that is how do you then get it to people at their door? And, you know, the big box supply chain, it moves very few items in really large quantities to very few locations.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And allows them to dominate the space. That's the challenge that Amazon has now. They've mastered the digital part of it. And now they got to figure out how do we dominate the actual physical movement that complements that. Others are obviously going to follow. But the capabilities of these trucks is completely different than the capability of human-driven truck. If your Smith packing, right, and you've got a bunch of meat in a warehouse and it's going to grocery distribution centers, you have that trucker probably come in the night before and you make him wait so that he has a full 10 hour break, which is what the law requires so that he can get to the furthest reaches that he can of one of those stores. So he can drive his full 11 hours and bring that meat so it doesn't have”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea is, okay, so Sam Walton, if we can do a slight tangent on sort of the importance of trucking to business strategy and sort of how it has transformed our world. The central insight that Sam Walton had that made him the giant that he was in influencing the way that so many people get stuff was a trucking insight. And so if you look at the way that He developed his system. You build a distribution center and then you ring it with stores. Those stores are never further out from that distribution center than a human-driven truck can drive back and forth in one day. And so rather than the way all of his competitors were doing it with sending trucks all over the place. Where they had stores, he designed the layout of the stores, right, to fit what trucks could do. And so transportation and logistics become Walmart's edge.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Air filled tires. And then we start paving roads, right? And paved roads, right, air-filled tires and the internal combustion engine. Now you got a winning mix. Now it met with demand for people who wanted to get out from under the thumb of the railroads. So there was all of this pent up demand to get cheaper freight from the countryside into cities and between cities that typically had to go by rail. And so now, you know, 40 years after that internal combustion engine, it becomes this absolutely essential, right? This necessary but not sufficient piece of technology to create the modern trucking industry in the 1930s. And I think self-driving is going to be self-driving trucks are going to be part of that. And the idea, I don't know, I guess we credit Jeff Bezos.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think automation is inevitable. And again, I think this is really going to be transformative. And it's going to be, I've studied the history of trucking technology as much as I can. There's not a lot of great stuff written and you kind of have to, there isn't a lot of data and places to know sort of volumes of stuff and how they're changing, et cetera. The big revolutionary changes in trucking are because of constellations of factors. It's not just one thing, right? So Daimler builds a motorized truck in, I think it's 1896, right? Intercity trucking, so basically what they use that truck for is just to swap out horses, right? And they basically do the same thing. The service doesn't really change, you know. And then World War I really spurs the development of bigger, larger trucks, like spreads.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about GM, right? I mean, these are not, you know, these are not tech companies, right? These are industrial giants, right? 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 don't pull this off, it's like, wow.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at first, I was like, look, this is like the defense department and like basically the top computer science and robotics departments in the world. 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 a gigantic market, right? And what I tell them is like if self-driving vehicles don't happen, I think this will be the biggest technology failure story in human history. I don't know of anything else that is 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and maybe we're in that situation right now with self-driving. But so let me throw this out there. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it. But truck drivers always ask me, like, is this for real? It's harder than they think, like, right? And they can't really do this.”
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, what an incredible spark, right? And just the story of what it produced, right? I mean, your own work on self-driving, right? I mean, 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 sort of theoretically about technology, right? This is what makes it so great is that this is what makes us human, in my opinion, right? Is that you conceive of something in your mind and then you bring it into reality, right? I mean, that's what is. So great about it.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was before Ariel unmanned vehicles had really sort of proven their worth, they would come to be incredibly like, you know, just blow people out of minds in terms of their additional capabilities, the lower cost, you know, keeping soldiers out of harm's way. Now, of course, they raised other problems and considerations that I think were 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question is what do we want the future to be and let's shape it? And I think this is the only point that I really want to make in my work for the foreseeable future is that we have got to get out of this mindset that we're just going to let technology kind of go and it's a natural process and whatever pops out will fix the problems on the backside. And we've got to recognize that one, that's not what we do. And self-driving vehicles 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, 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”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My conclusion is this is a transformative technology. We are not going to swap in self-driving trucks for human-driven trucks. All else stays the same. This is going to reshape our supply chains. It's going to reshape landscapes. It's going to affect our ability to fight climate change. This is a really important technology in this space.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that simple, you know. I mean, it never is. And so she was like, Will you, you know, will you do this? And I was like ready to move on to another topic. I had like been in trucking for 10 years. And that's how I started looking at it. And it is. It's a lot more complicated. And the initial impacts, and here's the challenge, I think, and it's not just a research challenge, 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 for some communities and some kinds of drivers. They're going to be hard. And there are a significant number of them. Nowhere near what people thought. I estimate like around 300,000. But that's a static picture of the existing industry. And here's the key with this is, at least in my...”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So perfect, right? And at that time, there were a bunch of reports that came out and sort of basically what people did was they took the category of truck driver. Some people took a larger category from BLS of, you know, sales and delivery workers that was about three and a half million workers and others took the heavy-duty truck driver category, which was at the time about 1.8 million or so. And they picked the start date and a slope and said, let's assume that all these jobs are just going to disappear. And really smart researcher, Anetta Bernhardt at the labor center at UC Berkeley was sort of looking around for people who were sort of deeply into industries to complicate those analyses, right? And reached out to me and was like, what do you think of this? And I said, the industry's super diverse. I haven't given a ton of thought, but can't be that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were a lot of different ideas about how they were going to play out, right? So while the press was saying, you know, all truckers are going to lose their jobs. There were a lot of people in these engineering teams who thought, okay, you know, if we've got an individual owner operator and they can only drive eight or ten hours a day, you know, they hop in the back, they get their rest. And the asset that they own works for them.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they've really come to epitomize this anxiety over automation, right? It's such a simple idea, right? Truck that drives itself, you know, classic blue-collar job that pays well. Guy maybe with not a lot of other good options to sort of make that same income easily. And you build a robot to take his job away. I think 2016 or so, that was the sort of big question out there. And that's actually how I started studying it, right? I just wrapped up the book, just so happened that somebody was working at Uber. Uber had just bought Auto, saw the book, and was like, hey, can you come out and talk to our engineering teams about what life is like for truck drivers? And maybe how our technology could make it better. At that time,”
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, you know, there's some basic, and I assume that there are a lot of folks in corporate boardrooms looking at risk and saying that didn't go well. And maybe it could have even gone worse. Maybe we need to think about reshoring, right? At the very least, one of the things that I'm hearing about anecdotally is that they're storing stuff up when they can, right? That's probably not sustainable, right? I mean, at some point, somebody in that corporate boardroom is going to say, you know, guys, inventory is getting kind of heavy and the cost of that is like, can we really justify that much longer to the shareholders, right? We can back off and start, you know, back things are back to normal. Let's lean out.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yeah. I am too. I mean, I write about problems all the time, and so people think I'm sort of like just a Debbie Downer, you know, pessimist. But I'm a glass half full kind of guy. I want to identify problems 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? Other institutional failures? Do those things seem potentially more likely in the future than they have been in, say, the last 20 years?”
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 I have worked in agriculture a bit on sort of the supply side. And there are product categories, right, where 30% of the crop raised does not get used, right? It just gets plowed.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And our supply chains are based on historical data. So, you know, that stuff leaves Asia months before you want to have it on the shelves. And you're predicting based on last year what you want on that shelf. And so I guess at its best, it's a beautiful symphony of lots of moving parts. But now everyone can't get on the same page of music.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a little mad when people talk about panic buying as kind of the reason that we had all these shortages. It really, like it's preventing us from understanding, you know, the real problem there, which is that lean supply chain. Sure, there was some panic buying, no doubt about it, but we had an enormous shift in people's behavior. So with my sister and brother-in-law, I own a couple of small businesses and we serve food, right? So we get food from Cisco. Cisco 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, 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 going to go bad. So that panic buying certainly exacerbated some things like toilet paper and whatever, but we saw just a massive change in demand.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to be 90% plus. You don't want a lot of open bays sitting around. So we don't have, you know, 10% extra capacity in warehouses. We don't have 10% of them trucking capacity can fluctuate a bit, but you don't have that kind of slack. And now, I mean, and we saw this when people shifted consumption. And I get a little.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we've got pile ups of ships off the coast of California, Long Beach and LA in particular and in bad shape. Last I checked, it was around 60 ships, all of which are holding thousands of containers full of stuff that retailers were hoping was going to be on shelves for the holiday season. 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 containers that are there, so they can't offload the ships that are waiting. And why aren't the truckers picking it up? Partly because there's a long history of inefficiency in making them wait, but it's because the warehouses are full. So we've had all these perverse outcomes that no one really expected. In the middle of all these shortages.”
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, we have built really long, really lean supply chains and just by definition, they're fragile. The current mess that we have, it's not going to clear by Christmas. It will be lucky if it clears by next Christmas.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I brought a load of Bud Light out to Michigan. And I was like, holy shit, all the Bud Light for 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 an economic tourist. And I think all everybody kind of appreciates that, like, kind of, it's almost like a behind the scenes tour. That wears off after a few months. 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. You know, it's one loading dock after another.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. There's definitely a pride in mastery of 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 some pride there. For me personally, 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. And I think we're all much more aware of them now after COVID and supply chain mess that we have. I don't know if we'll talk about that, but you get to see those places. You know, you get to see those ports. You get to see the place where they make the cardboard boxes that the huggy diapers go in. Huggies diapers go in or the warehouse full of Bud Light. I moved Bud Light from like upstate New York and the first load went to Atlanta, you know, and then a couple months later I circled back through that same brew.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's got 7,000 miles on it. I own a boat that hasn't seen the water in five years. My kids, I didn't raise them. I'd be out for two weeks at a time. I'd come home. My wife would give me two kids to punish a list of things to do on Saturday night. And I might leave out Sunday night or Monday morning. And it was just like. It was heartbreaking to hear those stories”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Lex, I can't even, 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 last question I would ask drivers was that by the time I really sort of figured out how to do it, the last question I would ask them is, you know, what advice would you give to somebody, your nephew, you know, 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 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I mean, I didn't have kids at the time. Now I have kids. I can't even imagine it. You know, I've been married for five years at the time. My wife hated it. I hated it. You know, I describe in the book the experience of being stuck, if I remember correctly, it was like Ohio, 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 my wife calls me from like the family barbecue and our anniversary is July 8th. And she's like, are you going to be home? And I'm like, I don't know, you know. I have a cousin whose husband drove truck as a truck driver would say, drove truck for a while. And he told me before I went into it, he was like, the advantage you have is that you know that you're not going to be doing this long term.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You bring it to the terminal, you combine it based on the destination, you then create a full truckload trailer, and you send it to another terminal where it gets broken back down and then out for local delivery. That's going to look a lot like if you send a package by UPS, right? They pick all these parcels, figure out where they're all going, put them on planes or in trailers going to the same destination, then break them out to put them in what they call package cars.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the next big chunk is kind of how much stuff are you moving And so we have what's called truckload. And truckload means you can fill up a trailer, either by volume or by weight, and then less than truckload. Less than truckload, the official definition is like less than 10,000 pounds. You know, this is going to be a couple pallets of this, a couple pallets of that. The process looks really different. So that truckload is point A to point B, I'm buying a truckload of bounty paper towels. I'm bringing it into my distribution center. Go pick it up at the bounty plant, bring it to my distribution center, right? Nowhere in between. Do you stop, at least process that freight. Less than truckload, what you've got is terminal systems. And this is what you had under regulation too. And so these terminal systems, what you do is you do a bunch of local pickup and delivery, maybe with smaller trucks, and you pick up two pallets of this here, four pallets of this there.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can become a part of it as a strategy, but the fundamental reason is competition. So those private carriers don't aren't in competition with other trucking fleets, right, for their own in-house services. So, you know, they tend to, and this, you know, the question of why private versus four hire, because four hire is cheaper, right? 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are a number of different segments, and the first part would be, are you offering, the first question would be, are you offering services to the public or are you moving your own freight? So are you a retailer, say, Walmart or a paper company or something like that that's operating your own fleet of trucks? That's private. Trucking for hire are the folks who offer their services out to other customers. So you have private and for higher. In general, for hires less.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often that you end up operating at a loss just to keep the doors open. You don't have any choice. It's what economists call derived demand. You can't make up a bunching services and store it in a warehouse. You got to keep those trucks moving to pay the bills.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And opened up the Teamsters books to them so that they could see how he was thinking about negotiating with the employers. And the Teamsters, and this goes back well before Hoffa, back to the 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 and trucking was initiated by employers who wanted to limit competition. And they knew they couldn't limit 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 going to set the price. And we're not going to be undercut. When there's a shortage of trucks around, it's great. Rates go up. But you get too many trucks. It's very...”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they recognized the overall market impact that they had, that trucking just naturally tended toward excessive competition that meant that there was no profit to be made. And oftentimes you'd be operating at a loss. 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. And this is unions, at least those kinds of unions like the Teamsters. 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 center. 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”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That somebody who had experienced unions would be more favorable and someone who had not would not be, right? And that turned out to be the case. Without a doubt. But in an interesting way, which was that even the drivers who were not part of the union, who in the kind of public debate of deregulation were portrayed as these kind of small business truckers who were getting shut out by the big regulated monopolies and the Teamsters Union, the Corrupt Teamsters Union, even those drivers longed for the days of the Teamsters.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. They don't like it, but I do like to think that way. And my initial hypothesis was that, you know, and it's very simple, that the tenure of the driver in the industry would have a strong effect on how they viewed unions.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And this was probably one of the central hypotheses that I had going in there. And it may sound someone who does hard science, right? If you hear a social scientist sort of use that terminology, even other social scientists”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely Absolutely. And 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. Yeah. That's appealing and it's tangible, right? And you think about people who don't want to be paper pusher and they deal with office politics. Give me what you care about, and I'll take care of it. You just pay me fair, and that appeals.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, asphalt cowboy. Imagery that we get. And I grew up, I know you didn't grow up in the US at this sort of, you know, as a young child. And I'm a bit older than you, but in the late 70s, there were movies and TV shows and CBs were craze. 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, you know, with all this salty language and these terms that only they understood and the party and the diners and popping pills, you know, the California turned arounds.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, and even more than unionized autoworkers, steel workers, 10, 20% more than those workers made. That was the golden age for sort of job quality, wages, teamster power. Without a doubt, the most powerful union in the United States at that time. At the same time in the 1970s, you had the mythic long-haul trucker. These were the guys who were 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 in the New Deal, when they decided to regulate trucking, they didn't regulate agriculture because they didn't want to.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I mean, this is the trucking industry to me is fascinating, but I think it should be fascinating to a lot of people. So the golden age was really two different kinds of markets as well, right? Today we have really good jobs and some really bad jobs. We had the Teamsters Union that controlled the vast majority of employee jobs. And even where they had something called the National Master Freight Agreement. And this was Jimmy Hoffa, who led the union through its sort of critical period by the mid-60s had unified essentially the entire nation's trucking labor force under one contract. Now, you were either covered by that contract or your employer paid a lot of attention to it.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, I might have to have you read my answer to that. That was a few years ago. It'll be interesting to compare what I'll say.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the big stories for these companies is that the average length of haul, which becomes very important for self-driving trucks, the average length of haul has been steadily declining. Over the last 15 years or so, you know, this is industry collected data from sort of the big firms that report it, but roughly been cut in half from typically about a thousand miles to under 500. And under 500 is what a driver can move in a day, right? So you can get loaded, drive, and unload around 400 miles or something like that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Publicly subsidized training to become a truck driver. And so all these are externalities that the companies don't have to pay for. And so this makes it the most profitable way to move freight.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So it is the competition is based on who's cheaper. And this is the cheapest way to move the freight. Their externalities, right? I mean, so this is the explanation that I think is obvious for this, right? There are lots of costs that, you know, whether it's that driver's time, whether it's time without their family, whether it's the fact that they drive through congestion 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. This is the cheapest way to move freight. And so it's the most competitive. A big part of this is public subsidy of training. So when those workers are not paying for The training you and I often are. So, if you lose your job because of foreign”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In and out of your docks fast enough, we're going to charge you for how long our truck is sitting on your lot. If you're at Walmart, you're going to say, I'll go see what the other guy says, right? And so companies are going to allow that customer to essentially waste that driver's time in order to keep that business.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and again, the industry is going to 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? But that's a holdover from when you couldn't observe truckers. Now they all have satellite-linked computers in the trucks that tell these large companies this driver was 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, they're waiting for that customer to tell them, hey, pull in there. And so what it becomes is just a way to shift the inefficiencies and the cost of that onto that driver. Now, it's competitive for customers. So 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the job, the problems with the job and the labor market, right? But let's start with the job, which is, you know, again, just so much time that's not compensated directly for the amount of time. And that's just psychologically, and this was a big part of what I studied for the first book was that conception of like, what's my time worth? And like what truck drivers love is oftentimes is that tangible outcome based compensation. So they say, you know what? You know, honest day's work. I work hard. I get paid for what I do. I drive 500 miles today. That's what I'm going to get paid for. And then you get to that doc. And they tell you, sorry, the load's not ready. Go sit over there and you stew.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source