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 mean, and again, going back to what we were talking about before, getting that license is not something that you just walk down to the DMV and take the test. Like, this is somebody who probably quit another job, was unemployed, and took months to go to a training school, right? paid for that training school oftentimes, left their family for months, right, invested in what they thought was going to be a long-term career, and then said, you know what, forget it. I can't do 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
“About 145,000 jobs in California that require of a class A CDL, which would be that commercial driver's license that you need for the big trucks, about 145,000 jobs. The industry in their regular promotion of the idea that there's a shortage is always projecting forward and says, we're going to need 165,000 or so in the next 10 years. They're currently like 435,000 people licensed in the state of California to drive one of these big trucks. So it is not at all an absence of people who”
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 the way that you just put that is right. We don't have a shortage of people who are currently licensed to do the jobs. So I'm working on a project for the state of California to look at the shortage of agricultural drivers. And the first thing that the DMV commissioner of the state wanted to look at was, you know, is there actually a shortage of licensed drivers? He's like, I've got a database here of all the people who have a commercial driver's license who could potentially who have the credential to do this.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's what now we have drivers who start in the 30s. Wow. But yeah. And I mean, so we're talking two, three jobs, really, when you look at the total hours that people are working, 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. And there's a whole nother set of rules that the Department of Labor has, which basically say that a truck driver who's dispatched away from home for more than a day should get minimum wage 24 hours a day. And that could be a state minimum wage. But typically what it would work out to for most drivers is that the minimum wage for a truck driver should be 50s of thousands, 55, $60,000 should be the minimum wage of a truck driver. And you've probably heard about the truck driver shortage. Which I hope we can talk about, if the minimum wage for truck drivers is as it should be on the books at around $60,000, we wouldn't have a shortage of truck drivers.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so, what happens is the companies say, well, that guy, you know, he only said he logged 45 hours of work that week or 50 hours of work. That's all we have to pay him minimum wage for. When in fact typical truck driver in these jobs will work according to most people, would sort of define it as like, okay, I'm at the customer location. I'm waiting to load. I'm doing some paperwork, you know, inspecting the truck. I'm fueling it, just waiting to get put in the dock. 80 to 90 hours would be sort of a typical work week for one of these drivers.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this leads to one of the sort of central issues that has been in the courts and in the legislature in some states is what should truck drivers get paid for? The industry for the last 30 years or so has said essentially it's the hours that they log for safety reasons for the Department of Transportation. Now, since the drivers are paid by the mile, they try to minimize those because those hours are limited by the federal government. So the federal government says you can't drive more than 60 hours in a week as a long-haul truck driver. And so you want to drive as many miles as you can in those 60 hours. And so you under report them.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many truck drivers who make more than $100,000 a year is an attraction. But the industry is highly segmented. And so the entry level segment, and we can probably get into this, but the industry is dominated by a few dozen really large companies that are self-insured and can train new drivers. So if you want those good jobs, you've got to have several years up until recently now labor markets becoming tighter, but you had to have several years of accident-free, perfectly clean record driving to get into them. The other part of the segment, you know, those drivers often don't make minimum wage.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some do. And I think that's part of the complexity. So, you know, what interested me as an ethnographer about this was, you know, I'm interested in the kind of economic conceptions that people have in their heads and how they lead to certain decisions in labor markets. Why some people become an entrepreneur and other people become a wage laborer or why some people want to be doctors and other people want to be truck drivers? conception is getting shaped in these labor markets is the argument of the book and the fact that drivers can hear or potential drivers can hear about these workers who make a hundred thousand dollars plus which which happens regularly in the trucking industry there are”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Congestion. And the other one 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 five other trucks. And they'll say, you know, go over there and sit and wait and we'll call you on the CB when the dock'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. And you're sitting in that truck and you're essentially unpaid. Then you pull out, you've got control over what you're going to get paid based on how you drive that load. And then on the other end.”
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, 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. And so you'd say, you know, here's the load. Let's go in from, you know, 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. We're going to pay you by the mile, right? If you 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. There's lots of reasons for that. One of which is railroads have captured a lot of freight that goes long distances now. Another one is traffic congestion.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you might get a bunch of those bills that kind of bunch up in one week. So, you know, I might get a paycheck for $1,200. And I mean, I was a poor graduate student. So this was real, real money to me. 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. And then some I'd get $1,200, $1,300. Pay has gone up 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 lots of unpaid work and time. And so we had a minimum pay of $500 a week that 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 are 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is on delay when you're backing it up. So it's like, all right, I'm going to do a quarter turn of the wheel now to get the effect that I want like five seconds from now in where that tail of that trailer is going to 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 got to just do it over and over again before you're going to learn how to do it well.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, 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. They see it. They slow down. They avoid it. 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 sometimes.”
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, 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, is like the goal. You can kind of maneuver yourself out of in and out of tight spaces with great speed and breaking and acceleration.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. Again, I saw people freeze up in that intersection as, you know, horns are blaring and the truck's grinding gears and you just can't, you know, and they just shut down. They're like, this isn't for me. I can't do it. You're right. It takes years. If trucking is not considered a skilled occupation. But my six 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 two, three 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. So it is highly skilled.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Told me. It's basically a two week job interview. Like they're testing you, they're seeing how's this person going to respond when it's tough, you know, when they have to do the right thing and it's slow and they need to learn something. Are they going to rush or are they going to kind of stay home, 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 going to carry through to the job.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing, they get too old to do construction any longer, right? The knees can no longer handle it. 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. And so it's super high stress. They've left their family behind. Maybe they quit another job. They're typically being charged a lot of money. So that first couple weeks, like you might get charged $8,000 by the company that you have to pay back if you don't get hired. And so the stakes are high. And this machine is huge and it's intimidating. And so it's super stressful. I mean, I watched, you know, men, grown men, break down crying about like how they couldn't go home and tell their son that they'd been telling they were going to, you know, go become a long-haul truck driver that they'd failed. And it's kind of this super high stress system. And it's designed that way partly because as one of my trainers,”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if you do manage to get it into gear, but the engine's lugging, I mean, it can throw you right out of the seat, right? So it's this, it's like, you know, this bull you're trying 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. And so they lose a job.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get this horrible grinding sound as you coast, you know, 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 companies, CDL schools, what happens is it's kind of like a boot camp. They ship me three states away from home, send you a bus ticket, and say, hey, we'll put you up for two weeks. You sit in a classroom. You sort of learn the theory of shifting the theory of kind of how you fill out your logbook, rules of the road. You do that maybe half the day. And then the other half, you're in this giant parking lot with one of these old trucks and just like, you know, destroying what's left of the thing. And it's lurching and belching smoke and just making horrible noises and like rattling. I mean, in these things, like, there's a lot of torque.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it does not stop like a car. It does not turn like a car. But at least when I started, and this is changing, it's part of the technology story of trucking, the first thing you had to do was learn how to shift it. And it doesn't shift like a manual car. The clutch isn't synchronized. So you have to what's called double clutch. And it's basically the foundational skill that a truck driver used to have to learn. So you would, you know, accelerate, say, you're in first gear, you push in the clutch, you pull the shifter out of first gear, you let the clutch out, and then you let the RPMs of the engine drop an exact amount. Then you put 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. And so if you're in an intersection, you're just going 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 this is, I mean, this is a central part of the story that I uncovered. And the good part was that I went in without knowing what was going to happen. So I was able to experience it as a new truck driver would is one 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. It's super intimidating. I say in the book, you know, pretty handy guy, you know, familiar with tools, machines like, you know, comfortable operating stuff, like from time I was a kid. The truck was just like a whole nother experience. I mean, as I think most people think about it, it's this big, huge vehicle, right? It's really long. It's 70 feet long. It can weigh 80,000 pounds.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was more true in the past about the sort of heterogeneity of truck drivers. There are really diverse group now. 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything. And some still listen to the CB, which it's an ever-dwindling group. They'll call it the original internet Citizens Band. Back in the 70s, they thought it was going to be the medium of democracy. And they love to just get on there and cruise along one truck after the other and chat away. Usually 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 it's probably one of the stereotypes.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. You should try that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do do this sometimes for journalists who will come and they want to write about sort of what's happening right now in trucking. And I send them to truck stops. I say, you know, Yeah, there's a town called Effingham, Illinois. And it's just this place where a 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, sadly, I think 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 maybe we're seeing in other parts of our social world. But truckers are generally real open sort of friendly folks. 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of reflection, a lot of struggles. And they take different forms. One 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. And so it ends up being a wash.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing, right? For any response rate like that, for interview, I mean, these are people who sat down and gave me. An hour sometimes more of their time just randomly at a truck stop. And it just tells you something about like truckers have something to say. They're alone a lot. And so I had to figure out how to kind of turn the spigot on, you know. And I got pretty good at it, I think.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, audio recorder and social scientists always have to struggle with sampling, right? Like who do you interview? Where do you find them? How do you recruit them? 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 major interstates. went into the lounge that drivers have to walk through, you know, with my clipboard. And everybody who came through, I said, hey, are you on brake? That was sort of the first criteria was, do you have time? And if they said yes, I said, you know, I'd say I'm a graduate student at Indiana University. I'm doing a study, trying to understand more about truck drivers. Will you sit down with me? And I think.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a, I think you're a great interviewer, prep, right? So you try to get to know a little bit about the person and sort of understand 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. I should really go back and read the original ones. They were probably terrible.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it doesn't happen in the moment, right? So I'm a ruminator. I just sit with the data 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.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I can talk with anybody. My wife loves to remark on this, that 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, you know, a joke for everybody, kind of got to know everyone individually. And he just taught me that like essentially everyone has something to teach you. And I try to embody that. Like that's the rule is. Me is every single person I interact with can teach me something.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? And it 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 one component of it. That's sort of the basic essential. And then for me, I want to exercise what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, which is to put that individual biography into the long historical sweep of humanity, if at all possible. My goals are typically more modest than C-Wright Mills'. And to then put that biography in the larger social structure, right, to try to understand that person's life and the way they see the world, their decisions in light of their”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, their world.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source