Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
steve vaseli formerly a truck driver and
now a sociologist at the university of
pennsylvania who studies freight
transportation
his first book the big rig
trucking in the decline of the american
dream explains how long-haul trucking
went from being one of the best blue
collar jobs to one of the toughest
his current ongoing book project
driverless autonomous trucks and the
future of the american trucker explores
self-driving trucks and their potential
impacts on labor and on society
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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in the description and now
here's my conversation with steve
leselli
you wrote a book about trucking called
the big rig trucking and the decline of
the american dream and
you're currently working on a book about
autonomous trucking called driverless
autonomous trucks and the future of the
american trucker
i have to bring up some johnny cash to
you because i was just listening to this
song he has a ton of songs about
trucking but one of them i was just
listening to
it's called all i do is drive
where he's talking to an old truck
driver it goes
i asked him if those trucking songs tell
about a life like his
he said
if you want to know the truth about it
here's the way it is
all i do is drive drive drive
try to stay alive that's the course
and keep my mind on my load keep my eye
upon the road i got nothing in common
with any man
who's home every day at five all i do is
drive drive drive
drive drive drive drive so i got to ask
you uh same thing that he asked the
trucker
you worked as a trucker for six months
in in uh while working on the previous
book
um
what's it like to be a truck driver
i think that captures it
it really does
um can you take me through the whole
experience
what it takes to uh become a trucker
what actual day-to-day life was on day
one week one and then over time how that
changed
yeah
well the book is really about how that
changed over time
so my experience and i'm an ethnographer
right so i go in
uh i live with people i work with people
i talk to them i try to understand
you know their world
ethnographer by the way
what is that the science and art of
capturing a uh
the spirit of a people
yeah life ways you know i think that
would be a good way to capture it you
know try to understand
what makes them unique um
as a as a society maybe as a subculture
right what
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 you know exercise what
c wright mills called the sociological
imagination
which is to you know put that individual
biography
into the long historical sweep of
humanity if at all possible
my goals are typically more modest than
sea right mills is and to you know then
put that biography in
the larger social structure right to try
to understand
that person's life and the way they see
the world um their decisions in light of
their interests relative to others and
conflict and power and all these things
that i find interesting in the context
of society and in the context of history
yeah and a small tangent what does it
take to do that
to uh capture
the uh this particular group the spirit
the music
the full landscape of experiences that a
particular group
goes through in the context of
everything else you only have limited
amount of time and you come to the table
probably with
preconceived notions that are then
quickly destroyed all that whole process
so it's i don't know if it's more art or
science but what does it take to be
great at this
i do think the my first book was
a success as you know relative to my
goals
of trying to really you know get at the
heart of of sort of the central issues
and and the lives being led by people if
i
have a a resource a talent it's that i'm
a good listener um
i can
you know
talk with anybody
you know my wife's you know loves to
remark on this that you know i can i can
sort of sit down with anyone
uh i think i learned that from my dad
who uh 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 you
know taught me that like
essentially everyone has something to
teach you
and i try to embody that like that's
that's the rule is for me is
every single person i interact with can
teach me something
i gotta ask you i'm sorry to interrupt
because i'm clearly of the two of us the
poorer listener
uh you i think you're a great listener
i've i've been listening to the podcast
i think you're a great listener i really
appreciate that
um you've done a large number of
interviews like you said of truckers for
this book
so i'm just curious um
what are some lessons you've learned
about what it takes to
listen to a person
enough maybe guide you know the
conversation enough to get to the core
of the person the idea again the
ethnographer
goal to get to the get to the core
yeah
i i think
it's it doesn't happen in the moment
right so
i
i'm a ruminator you know i i just sit
with the data
you know for years i i sat with the
trucking data for almost 10 full years
and just thought it thought about the
problems and the questions
using everything that i possibly could
and so in the moment you know my ideal
interview is
you know
i open up and i say tell me about your
life as a trucker and they never shut up
and they and they keep telling me the
things that i'm interested in no it
never
works out that way because they don't
know what you're interested in right and
so it's um a lot of it is the
as you know as a i think you're a great
interviewer you know prep right i mean
so you try to get to know a little bit
about the person and sort of understand
you know kind of the the central
questions you're interested in that that
they can help you explore
um and so
i've done hundreds of interviews with
truck drivers um at this point and
i i should really go back and read the
original ones they're probably terrible
what's the process like you're sitting
down do you have an audio recorder and
also taking notes or do you do no audio
records just notes or yeah audio
recorder and you know 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 happen to have a sort of
natural place to go that gave me
essentially the population that i was
interested in you know so all these
long-haul truck drivers that i i was
interested in they have to stop and get
fuel and get services at truck stops
so i picked a you know 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 and i
said hey you know are you on break
and that was sort of the first
you know criteria was do you have time
right um and if they said yes i said you
know i'd say i'm a graduate student you
know at indiana university i'm doing a
study i'm trying to understand more
about truck drivers you know will you
sit down with me and i think the first i
think i probably asked like 104 103
people
to get the first 100 interviews
that's pretty good odds it's amazing
right
for you know any response rate like that
for inter 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 yeah
so they have good stories to tell and
they have an active life of the mind
because they spend so much time on the
road just basically thinking
yeah there's a there's a lot of
reflection
um a lot of struggles you know and it's
they take different forms you know uh
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 yeah it ends up being awash
so
you know i had this experience um i met
another person he recognized me from a
podcast
and he said you know i'm a fan of yours
and a fan of joe rogan
but you guys never talk you always talk
to people know about prizes you always
talk to these kind of people you never
talk to
us regular folk
and uh that guy really stuck with me
first of all the idea of regular folk is
a silly notion i think people that win
nobel prizes are often more boring than
the people these regular folks in terms
of stories in terms of richness of
experience in terms of the ups and downs
of life
and uh
you know that really stuck with me
because i i set that as a goal for
myself to make sure i
i talk to regular folk
and you did just this talking again
regular folk
it's human beings
um
all of them have experiences
if you were to recommend
uh to talk to uh to talk some of these
folks with stories how would you find
them yeah so i i do do this sometimes
for journalists who you know will come
and they want to write about sort of
what's happening right now in trucking
you know um
and i send them to truck stops you know
i say you know
yeah there's a town called effingham
illinois
and it's just this place where you know
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 um and you know again
truckers in this
you know sadly i think you know 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 and in ways
that um you know maybe we're seeing in
other parts of of our
social world
but truckers are generally you know 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 um but all of them
are generally you know kind of open you
know trusting
willing to have a conversation and so
you go to the truck stop and
you go in the lounge and and they're
usually there's usually a booth down
there and somebody's sitting at their
laptop or on their phone
um and willing to strike up a
conversation you should try that you
should
100 we'll try this uh
just again we're just going from tangent
to tangent we've returned to the main
question but
what do they listen to
do they listen to talk radio
did they listen to podcast audio books
do they listen to music do they listen
to silence
everything everything everything some i
mean
and some still listen to the cb which
you know it's a it's an ever-dwindling
group um they'll call it the original
internet citizen's band you know they
they back in the 70s they thought it was
going to be the
the medium of democracy um and they love
to just get on there and you know cruise
along uh 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
um you know and and that's it's probably
one of the stereotypes and it's i think
it was more true in the past um you know
about the sort of heterogeneity of truck
drivers
um they're a really diverse group now
you know 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 that's
immigrants
people of color
and even some women still huge barriers
to women women entering it but it's a
much more diverse place than than most
people think
so let's return to your journey as a
truck driver
what uh what did it take to become a
truck driver what were the early days
like yeah so this is i mean this is a
central part of the story right that i
uncovered
and the the good part was that i went in
without knowing what was going to happen
so i 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 you know 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
um it's super intimidating uh
i say in the book you know pretty handy
guy you know familiar with tools
machines like you know comfortable
operating stuff like from from time i
was a kid
the truck was just like a whole other
experience i mean as as i think most
people think about it it's this big huge
vehicle right it's it's really long it's
70 feet long it can weigh 80 000 pounds
you know it does not stop like a car it
does not turn like a car um
but at least when i
started um and this 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 do what's
called double clutch
and it's 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 get this horrible grinding
sound as you coast you know to a dead
stop in the you know 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 you know theory of kind of how you
fill out your logbook
rules of the road
you know you do that maybe half the day
and then the other half you're in this
giant parking lot with one of these old
trucks and just like you know destroying
what's left of the thing you know just
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
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 um 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 you know they lose a job
in manufacturing they
they get too old to do construction any
longer right the knees can no longer
handle it um
they get replaced by a machine their job
gets you know 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 like they've left
their family behind maybe they quit
another job
they're typically being charged a lot of
money so that first couple weeks like
you might get charged eight thousand
dollars 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 gonna you know go become a
long-haul truck driver that they'd
failed and it's kind of this super high
stress system it's designed that way
partly because as one of my trainers
later told me it's basically a two-week
job interview
like they're testing you they're seeing
like you know 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 you know they need to learn
something are they going to rush
you know or are they going to kind of
stay calm figure it out you know nose to
the grindstone because when you're in
your truck driver you're unsupervised
you know 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
the truck is such an imposing part of a
traffic scenario yeah so you said like
like turning it it stresses me out every
time i look at a truck because they i
mean the geometry of the problem is so
tricky
and so if you combine the fact that they
have to like everybody basically all the
cars in the scene are staring at the
truck and they're waiting often in
frustration
yeah and in that mode you have to then
shift gears
perfectly and move perfectly and if when
you're new especially
like you'll probably for somebody like
me it feels like it would take years to
become calm and comfortable in that
situation as opposed to be exceptionally
stressed under under the eyes of the
the road everybody looking at you
waiting for you is that the
psychological
pressure of that is that something that
was really difficult yeah absolutely
again just i i saw people freeze up you
know in that intersection as you know
horns are blaring and the trucks
grinding you know 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 um you're right it takes years
if you know trucking is not considered a
skilled occupation
but you know my six months there and i i
was a pretty good rookie but when i
finished i was i was still a rookie even
shifting definitely backing
um tight corners and situations you know
i could drive competently
but the difference between me and
someone who had you know two three years
of experience um was
a it was a giant gulf between us and
between that and the really skilled
drivers who've been doing it for 20
years um you know is still another step
beyond that so it is highly skilled
would it be fair to break trucking into
the task of truck of driving a truck to
two categories one is like the local
stuff getting out of the parking lot
getting into getting into you know
driving down local streets and then
highway driving those two
those two tasks
what are the challenges associated with
each task you kind of emphasize the
first one uh what about the actual like
long haul
highway driving yeah so i mean they are
very different right um and and the the
key with the long-haul driving is really
a set of um the way i i came to
understand it was
a set of habits right um we have a sense
of driving particularly men i think have
a sense of driving as like
being really skilled is like the goal
and you you can kind of maneuver
yourself out of in and out of tight
spaces with great speed and breaking and
acceleration you know um 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 the mantra is always leave
yourself an out
right 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
um you know what are you going to do
in that 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 you know
they avoid it
um and then the local driving is 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
it's 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
and to get the effect that i want like
five seconds from now and 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 gotta just do it over and
over again before you're gonna learn how
to do it well
do you mind sharing how much you were uh
getting paid how much you were making as
a truck driver in your time as a truck
driver yeah i started out at 25 cents a
mile
uh and then i got bumped up to 26 cents
a mile so um
we had a minimum
pay which was sort of a new
pay scheme that the industry had started
to introduce
to you know because there's there's lots
of unpaid work and time
and so we had a minimum pay of 500 a
week that you would you would get if you
didn't drive enough miles to exceed that
um 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 know you have
to get that back to your company and
then that's how they build a customer
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
you know 1200 and i mean i was a poor
graduate student so this was real real
money to me um and so i i i had this
sort of natural incentive to you know
earn a lot uh or to maximize my pay
some weeks were that minimum 500 very
few
and then some i'd get 1200 1300 bucks
pay has gone up
you know typical drivers now starting in
the 30s you know in the kind of job that
i was in uh 30s you know cents per mile
30 to 35.
so can we can we try to reverse engineer
that math how that maps the actual hours
so there's the hours connected to
driving are so
widely dispersed as you said some of
them don't count as actual work some of
it does that's a very interesting
discussion that we'll then continue when
we start talking about autonomous
trucking
but uh
you know you're saying all these cents
per mile kind of thing what
uh how does that map to like hourly
average hourly wage
yeah so i mean and this is kind of the
this is also an interesting technology
story in the end and it's the technology
story that didn't happen um so pay per
mile was you know 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 it's going from
you know for me i might start in you
know 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 i
was being paid by the hour i might just
pull over at the diner and have
breakfast
so
you're paid by the mile uh but
increasingly
over time
the
the typical driver is spending more and
more time doing non-driving tasks lots
of reasons for that
one of which is railroads captured a lot
of freight that goes long distances now
another one is traffic congest
congestion um and the other one is that
drivers are pretty cheap and they're
they're almost always the low people on
the totem pole in some segments
and so their time is used really
inefficiently um so i might go to that
brewery to pick up that load of of bud
light
and you know their doc staff may may be
busy
loading up five other trucks and they'll
say you know go over there and sit and
wait we'll 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
you know and you're sitting in that
truck and you're you're essentially
unpaid
you know
then you pull out you've got control
over what you're gonna get paid based on
how you drive that load um and then on
the other end
you got a similar situation of kind of
waiting so so if that's the way truck
drivers are paid then there's a low
incentive for the optimization of the
supply chain to make them more efficient
right to uh to utilize truck labor more
efficiently
absolutely
and so that's the technology uh problem
that uh one of several technology
problems that could be
addressed um
i mean
what so what did uh
if we just linger on it what are we
talking about in terms of
uh dollars per hour is it close to
minimum wage is it you know there's
something you talk about there was a
uh
a conception or a misconception
that uh truckers get paid a lot
for their work do they get paid a lot
for their work
some do
uh 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 and how they
lead to certain decisions in labor
markets you know why some people become
an entrepreneur and and other people
become a wage laborer or you know why
some people want to be doctors and other
people want to be truck drivers
that conception right is is getting
shaped in these labor markets is the
argument of of the book
and
the fact that drivers can hear or
potential drivers can hear about these
you know workers who make a hundred
thousand dollars plus which which
happens regularly in the trucking
industry there are
many truck drivers who make more than a
hundred thousand dollars a year um you
know is an attraction but the industry's
highly segmented um and and so
the entry level segment and and we can
probably get into this but you know the
industry is dominated by
uh you know 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 the labor market's
becoming tighter but you had to have
several years of accident-free
you know
perfectly clean record driving to get
into them
the other part of the segment you know
those drivers often don't make minimum
wage
but this leads to one of the sort of
central issues that has been in the
courts and in the legislature
um in some states
is you know what should truck drivers
get paid for right the industry you know
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
right
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
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 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 i'm inspecting
the truck i'm feeling it
um just waiting to you know get put in
the dock 80 to 90 hours would be sort of
a typical work week for one of these
these drivers um just when you look at
that does they don't make minimum wage
oftentimes right just to be clear what
we're dancing around here is that a
little bit over a little bit under
minimum wage is nevertheless most
truck drivers seem to be making close to
minimum wage
like this is this
so like we maybe haven't made that clear
there's a there's a few that make quite
a bit of money but like you're
as an entry and for years you're
operating essentially
uh minimum wage and potentially far less
than minimum wage if you actually count
the number of hours
that are taken out of your life due to
your dedication to trucking
well if you count like the hours taken
out of your life um then you got to go
you know maybe a full 24.
that's right yeah from family from yeah
from the high quality of life parts of
your life
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 you know
a minimum the minimum wage for a truck
driver should be 50s to thousands you
know 55 60 000 should be the minimum
wage of a truck driver and you've
probably heard about the truck driver
shortage like if you know uh which i
hope we can talk about um
if the minimum wage for truck drivers is
as it should be on the books at you know
around sixty thousand dollars we
wouldn't have a shortage of truck
drivers
oh wow
and to me sixty thousand is not a lot of
money for this kind of job
because you're
this isn't
this is essentially two jobs
and two jobs where you don't get to
sleep with your wife or see your kids
at night
that's 60 000 is a very little money for
that but you're saying if it was 60 000
you wouldn't even have the shortage if
that was the minimum if that was the
minimum and i think that's what now we
have drivers who start in the 30s
um 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 it you know
they can work over a hundred if they're
a trainer you know um training other
truck drivers well over a hundred hours
a week
so a job of last resort
maybe you can
jump around from tangent to tangent this
is such a fascinating
and difficult topic
i heard that there's a shortage of
truck drivers so there's more jobs than
truck drivers willing to take on the job
is that the state of
affairs currently
i mean i think the way that you you just
put that is 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 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 have the
credential to do this um
there are about 145 000
jobs in california that require a
class a cdl which would be that that
commercial driver's license that you
need for the big trucks
um
about 145 000 jobs the industry in their
you know regular
promotion of the idea that there's a
shortage is always projecting forward
and says you know 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 so it
is not at all an absence of people who
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 i can't do it you
know
so yeah so it's not just skill it's like
they were psychologically invested
potentially from months if not years
into this kind of position as perhaps a
position that if they lose their current
job they could fall to
okay so that's an indication that
there's something deeply wrong with the
job
if so many licensed people are not
willing to take it what are the biggest
problems of
uh the job of truck driver currently
yeah the the job the problems with the
job and the labor market right but let's
um let's start with the job which is you
know again
just so much time that's that's not
compensated directly for the amount of
time
um and that's just psychologically and
this was a big part of what i you know
sort of i studied and for the first book
was
you know
that conception of like what's my time
worth
right and like
what truck drivers love is
oftentimes is that tangible
uh outcome-based compensation so they
say you know what you know honest days
work i work hard i get paid for what i
do i drive 500 miles today that's what
i'm gonna get paid for
and then you get to that dock and they
tell you sorry the load's not ready
go sit over there and you stew
and that weight can break you
psychologically because your
your uh your time
every second becomes more worthless yeah
or worth less
yeah and again the the industry's gonna
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 um but that's a holdover from when
you couldn't observe truckers now they
all have you know satellite-linked
computers in the trucks that tell these
large companies
this driver was you know 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 you know they're
waiting for that you know firm 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 onto that driver
no 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 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 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
you know in order to to keep that
business
can you try to describe the economics
the labor market of the situation you
mentioned freight and railroad
what is the
sort of the
dynamic uh financials the economics of
this that allow for
such
low
low salaries to be paid to truckers like
what what's the competition what's the
alternative to
transporting goods via trucks like what
seems to be broken here from an
economics perspective yeah so it's uh
well nothing it's it's it's a perfect
market
okay right i mean so for economists this
is how it should work right um but the
inefficiencies like you said sorry to
interrupt are pushed to the truck driver
doesn't that like spiral doesn't that
lead to a poor performance on the part
of the truck driver and just like make
the whole thing more and more
inefficient in it and it results in
lower payment to the truck driver and so
on it just feels like
in capitalism
you should have a competing solution
in terms of uh truck drivers like
another company that provides
transportation via trucks that are that
creates a much better experience for
truck drivers making them more efficient
all those kinds of things
or how is the competition being
suppressed here yeah so it is the
competition is based on who's cheaper um
and this is this is the cheapest way to
move the freight now you know they're
externalities right i mean this so this
is the
explanation that i think is is obvious
for this right there there are lots of
um
there are lots of costs that you know
whether it's that driver's time whether
it's the you know um time without their
family whether it's the you know
the fact that they drive through
congestion and 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 um it this is the cheapest way to
to move freight um and so it's it's the
most competitive a big part of this is
public subsidy
of training so when those workers are
not paying for
um the training you and i often are
so if you you know lose your job because
of um you know foreign trade or
um you're you're a veteran using your gi
benefits um you may very well be offered
you know training
publicly subsidized training to become a
truck driver and so all these are
externalities that you know the the
companies don't have to pay for and so
this makes it the most profitable way to
move freight
so trucks is
way cheaper than uh trains
well over the long so one of the big
stories for these for these companies is
that the average length of haul um which
which becomes very important for
self-driving trucks the average length
of haul has been steadily declining
um over the last 15 years or so you know
this industry collected data from sort
of the you know the big firms that
report it but you know roughly been cut
in half from typically about a thousand
miles to under 500. um and under 500 is
what a driver can move in a day right so
you can get
loaded
drive and unload you know around 400
miles or something like that
i'm gonna steal a good question from the
pen gazette
interview you did which people should
read it's a great interview
was there a golden age for long-haul
truckers in america and if so this is
just a journalistic question and if so
what enabled it and what brought it to
an end
wow i i might have to have you read my
answer to that
that was a few years ago be interesting
to compare
what i'll say but um i mean one bigger
question to ask i guess is like
uh you know johnny cash wrote a lot of
songs about truckers there used to be a
time
when um perhaps falsely perhaps it's
part of the kind of perception that you
study with the labor markets and so on
there was a perception of truckers being
first of all a lucrative job and second
of all a job
uh to be desired
yeah so i mean
this is a
the trucking industry to me is is
fascinating but i think it should be
fascinating to a lot of people um so the
the golden age was really two different
kinds of um
of markets as well right today we have
really good jobs and and some really bad
jobs uh we had the teamsters union that
that controlled the vast majority of
employee jobs and even where they had
they had something called the national
master freight agreement and this was um
you know jimmy hoffa who who led the
union through its its sort of critical
um period by
the mid 60s had unified essentially the
entire nations trucking labor force
under one contract now you were either
you know covered by that contract or
your employer paid a lot of attention to
it
and so by the end of the 1970s
the typical truck driver was making well
more than a hundred thousand dollar
typical truck driver was making more
than a hundred thousand dollars in
today's dollars and was home every night
that was without a doubt
and even more than unionized auto
workers steel workers um 10 20 more than
than those workers made
that was the golden age force of job
quality wages teamster power they were
without a doubt the most powerful union
in the united states at that time
at the same time in the 1970s you had
the um
the mythic long-haul trucker
and these were the guys who were you
know 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
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
you know uh
uh asphalt cowboy
um you know imagery that we get
and um you know i grew up i know you
didn't grow up in in the us at this sort
of you know as a young child
when and i'm a bit older than you but
you know in the late 70s you know there
were movies and tv shows and cbs were
crazed and 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
um you know with all this salty language
and these like you know um terms that
only they understood and you know the
partying at diners and popping pills you
know the california turnarounds so
asphalt cowboys truly
so yeah it's like another form of cowboy
movies oh absolutely yeah 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 you think about people who don't
want to be paper pusher and they deal
with office politics like just give me
what you care about and i'll take care
of it you know just pay me fair you know
uh and that that appeals you mentioned
unions teamsters jimmy hoffa
big question maybe difficult question
what are some pros and cons of unions
historically and today in the trucking
space
yeah um
well if you're you're a worker there
there are a lot of pros um and i don't
you know and this is one of the things i
talked to truckers about a lot yeah
what's their perception of jimmy hoffa
for example and of unions
yeah so and this was probably one of the
central
hypotheses that i had going in there and
it may sound you know um
someone who does hard science right you
mean if they hear a social scientist you
know sort of use that terminology even
other social scientists hypothesis yeah
you know they they don't like it but i i
do like to think that way and my initial
hypothesis was that you know and it's
very simple
that you know that the tenure of the
driver in the industry would have a
strong effect on how they viewed unions
that you know somebody who had
experienced unions would be more
favorable and someone who had not would
not be right
um and that turned out to be the the
case
without a doubt but in in an interesting
way
which was that even the drivers who were
not part of the union
um who in the in the kind of
public debate
of
deregulation
uh were portrayed as these kind of small
business truckers who were getting shut
out by the big regulated monopolies and
the teamsters union you know the corrupt
teamsters union
even those drivers longed for the days
of the teamsters
because they recognized the overall
market impact that they had that 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
um and you know this is
you know unions at least those kinds of
unions like like the teamsters
you know
there's 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 central thing that the
teamsters union did and you know there
were great accounts of sort of jimmy
hoffa's perspective
for all his portrayal as sort of corrupt
and criminal and there's you know i'm
not disputing that he broke a lot of
laws um
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
and like opened up the teamsters books
to them
so that they could see how he was you
know thinking about negotiating with the
employers
and the teamsters and this goes back
well before hoffa back to the you know
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 rates go up but you get
too many trucks it's very often that you
end up operating at a loss just to keep
the doors open you know you don't have
any choice you can't it's what
economists call derived demand you can't
like make up a bunch of trucking
services and store it in a warehouse
right you gotta you gotta keep those
trucks moving to pay the bills
can we also lay out the kind of jobs
that are in trucking what are the best
jobs in trucking what are the worst jobs
in trucking what are we how many jobs
we're talking about today
yeah uh and what kind of jobs are there
so
um there there are a number of different
segments and the the sir the first part
would be you know are you offering the
first question would be are you offering
services to the public or are you moving
your own freight right so are you
a retailer say walmart um or uh you know
a paper company or something like that
that's operating your own
uh fleet of trucks that's private
um
trucking for hire
are are the folks who you know offer
their services out to other other
customers so you have private and for
hire in general for hire uh pays pays
less
is that because of the something you
talk about what employee versus
contractor situation or are they all
tricked or led to become contractors
that can become a part of it um as a
strategy but the the fundamental reason
is competition so those private carriers
don't um aren't in competition with
other trucking fleets right for their
own in-house services yeah so you know
they tend to and and this you know if
the question of why private versus for
hire because for hire is cheaper right
um 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 you should be willing to pay
more for that because it's more valuable
too and you keep it in-house and that so
that's an interesting distinction what
about and this is kind of moving towards
our conversation what can and can't be
automated
um
how else does it divide
yeah the the different trucking jobs so
it's the next big chunk is kind of how
much stuff are you moving right
and so we have what's called truckload
and truckload means you know 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 ten thousand pounds
you know this is going to be a couple
pallets of this a couple pallets of that
the process looks really different right
so that truckload is you know point a to
point b
i'm buying you know a truckload of of
bounty paper towels i'm bringing it into
you know my distribution center go pick
it up at the at the bounty plant bring
it to my distribution center right
nowhere in between do you stop um at
least process that freight less than
truckload what you've got is terminal
systems and this is what you had under
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 you bring it
to the terminal you combine it based on
the destination you then create a full
truckload you know um uh trailer and you
send it to another terminal where it
gets broken back down and then and then
out for local delivery that's gonna look
a lot like if you send a package by
by ups right they pick all these parcels
right figure out where they're all going
put them on planes or or in trailers
going to the same destination then break
them out to put them in what what they
call package cars
before i ask you uh about autonomous
trucks it's just pause for um your
experience as a trucker
did it get lonely like can you talk
about some of your experiences of what
it was actually like did it get lonely
yeah no i mean it was um
i didn't have kids at the time now now i
have kids i can't even imagine it um
uh you know i've been married for
five years
at the time my wife hated it i hated it
uh you know i describe in the book
the experience of being stuck
if i remember correctly was like ohio
uh 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 you know my wife calls me from like
the family barbecue
and our anniversary is july 8th and
she's like are you gonna be home and i'm
like
i don't know you know
um
i have a
uh cousin
whose husband drove
drove truck as a truck driver would say
drove truck for a while
um
and he told me before i went into it he
was like the the advantage you have is
that you know that you're not going to
be doing this long term
like and lex i can't even like
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 the 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 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 you know 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 it's got 7000 miles on it i own a
boat
that hasn't seen the water in five years
my kids i didn't raise them like i i'd
be out for two weeks at a time
i'd come home
my my wife would give me two kids to
punish a list of things to do you know
on saturday night
and i might leave out sunday night or
monday morning you know i come home dead
tired my kids don't know who i am
and you know it was just like
it was heartbreaking to hear those
stories and before you know it
uh you know life is short and just the
y