Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream | Lex Fridman Podcast #237
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 support it please check out our sponsors 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 years run away yeah hard question to ask in that context but what's the best what was the best part of being a truck driver was there moments uh that you truly enjoyed on the road oh absolutely there was um there's definitely a pride and mastery of you know even basic confidence 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 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 um and i think we're all much more aware of them now after covet and supply chain mess that we have i don't know if we'll talk about that but you know you get to see those places you know you get to see those ports you get to see the the place where they make the cardboard boxes that the huggy diapers go in huggies diapers going or the warehouse full of bud light i moved bud light from like upstate new york and the first load like went to atlanta you know and then a couple months later i circled back through that same brewery and i brought a load of bud light out to michigan and i was like holy all the bud light like you know 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 um and i think all everybody kind of appreciates that like kind of it's almost like a behind-the-scenes tour um that wears off after a few months you know 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 um you know it's one loading dock after another so you lose the magic of being on the road yeah it's it's very rare the driver that doesn't you mentioned covet and supply chain while being this for a brief time this member of the supply chain what have you come to understand about our supply chain united states and global and its resilience against uh strategies catastrophes in the world like kovid for example yeah i mean we we have built really long really lean supply chains and and just by definition they're fragile um you know the the current mess that we have it's not going to clear by christmas it will be lucky if it clears by next christmas can you describe the current medicine supply chain that you're referring to yeah so we've got pileups of of ships off the the coast of california long beach and and la in particular and in bad shape um you know 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 the ships that are that are waiting and why aren't the why aren't the truckers picking it up partly because there's a long history of inefficiency and maybe making them wait but it's because the warehouses are full so and so we've had all these perverse you know outcomes that no one really expected like in the middle of all these shortages 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 percent extra capacity in warehouses you know we don't have 10 of them trucking capacity can fluctuate a bit but you know you don't have that kind of of slack and and now i mean we saw this right when people shifted consumption and i get a little i had a little mad when people talk about panic buying as kind of the you know the the reason that we had all these shortages and it really like it's preventing us from understanding you know the real problem there which is that that lean supply chain sure there was some panic buying you know no doubt about it but we had an enormous shift in people's behavior so i with uh with my sister and brother-in-law i own a couple of small businesses and we serve food right so we we get you know food from cisco um 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 uh 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 and our supply chains are based on historical data right so you know that stuff leaves asia you know months before you you want to have it on the shelves and you're predicting based on last year you know what you want on that that shelf um and so it's a it's a you know i guess at its best it's a beautiful symphony of lots of moving parts um but now everyone can't get on the same page of music but it's not resilient to changes in uh on mass human behavior so even like um i read somewhere maybe you can tell me if this true in relation to food it's just the change of human behavior between going out to restaurants versus eating at home as a as a species we consume a lot less food that way apparently what i read in restaurants like there's a lot of food just thrown out it's part of the business model yeah and so like you then have to move a lot more food through the whole supply chain and now because you're consuming you know there's leftovers at home you're consuming much more of the food you you're getting when you're eating at home that's creating these bottleneck situations problems as you're referring to too much in a certain place not enough in another place and it's just the supply chain is not robust those kind of dynamic shifts in who gets what where yeah yeah i mean so and i have worked in agriculture a bit on sort of the supply side um you know and there are product categories right where 30 of the crop raised does not get used right it just gets plowed under or or wasted but here's the importance of this in sort of getting this right you know like that not that like panic buying you know blame the irrational consumer you know look at the hard sort of truth of the way we've we've set up our economy and i'll i'll ask you this lex i know um you you're a hopeful optimistic person 100 yes yeah i am too i mean i write about problems all the time and so people think i'm sort of like a just a debbie downer you know pessimist but i'm a i'm a glass half full kind of guy like i want i want to identify problems so 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 you know um other institutional failures do those things seem you know potentially more likely in the future than they have been in say the last 20 years yeah it almost absolutely seems to be the case so you then have to ask the question of uh how do we change our supply chains whether it's making more resilient or make them less densely connected um you know building uh it's like a what is it you know the the tesla model for in the automotive sector of like trying to build every like trying to get the factory to do as much as possible with as little reliance on widely distributed uh sources of the supply chain as possible so maybe like rethinking how much we rely on the infrastructure of the supply chain yeah i mean you know there's some basic and i i assume right that 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 um maybe we need to think about reshoring right um at the very least one of the things that i'm hearing about anecdotally is that they're storing stuff up you know when they can right um which is that's not 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 the cost of that is like do we can we really justify that much longer to the shareholders right um we should we can back off and start you know back things are back to normal let's lean out what uh my hope is that there's a technology solution to a lot of aspects of this so one of them on the supply chain side is collecting a lot more data like having much uh more integrated and accurate representation of the inventory all over the place and the available transportation mechanisms the trucks the all kinds of freight and how in the different models of the possible catastrophic catastrophes that can happen what like how will the system respond so having a really solid model that you're operating under as opposed to just kind of being in in emergency response mode under poor incomplete information which is what seems like is more commonly the case except for things like you said walmart and amazon they're trying to internally get their stuff together on that front but that doesn't help the rest of the economy so um another exciting technological development as you write about as you think about is autonomous trucks so these are often brought up in different contexts as the examples of ai and robots taking our jobs how true is this should we be concerned i think they've really come to epitomize this anxiety over automation right just it's such a simple idea right truck that drives itself you know classic blue-collar job that pays well you know um guy maybe with not a lot of other good options right um to sort of make that same income easily right and you build a robot to take his job away right um so i think 2016 or so that was that was the sort of big question out there and that 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 otto 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 and you know at that time 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 in these engineering teams who thought okay you know if we've got an individual owner operator you know and 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 mm-hmm right sort of sort of perfect right um and at that time you know there were a bunch of reports that came out and so basically what people did was they they took the category of truck driver you know 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 and others took the heavy duty truck driver category which was at the time about 1.8 million or so and they you know picked a start date and a slope and said you know let's assume that all these jobs are just going to disappear and um really smart researcher annetta bernhardt at the labor center at uc berkeley was sort of looking around um for people who were sort of deeply into industries to complicate those analyses right yeah and reached out to me and was like what do you think of this and i said the industry's super diverse you know this is just i haven't given a ton of thought but it can't be that you know it's not that simple you know it never is um and so she was like well you you know will you do this and i i was like ready to move on to another topic you know i had like been in trucking for 10 years um and that that's how it i started looking at it and it is it's a lot more complicated and the the initial impacts and here's the challenge i think and it's not just a research challenge it's 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 for some communities and some kinds of drivers they're going to be hard and there and there are a significant number of them nowhere near what people thought you know i i estimate like around 300 000 but that's a static picture of the existing industry and here's the the key with this is at least in my my conclusion is this is a transformative technology we are not going to swap in self-driving trucks for human-driven trucks and 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 do you think it's possible to predict the future of the kind of opportunities it will create how it will change the world so like when you have the internet you can start saying like all the kind of ways that office work all jobs will be lost because it's easy to network and then software engineering allows you to automate a lot of the tasks that microsoft excel does you know but it opened up so many opportunities even with things that are difficult to imagine like with the internet i don't know wikipedia which is widely making accessible information and that uh increased the general education globally by a lot all those kinds of things like and then the the ripple effects of that in terms of your ability to find other jobs is probably immeasurable so is it is it just a hopeless pursuit to try to predict uh if uh you talk about these six different uh trajectories that we might take in automating trucks but like as a result of taking those trajectories is it a hopeless pursuit to predict what the future will result in yeah it is it absolutely is because it's the wrong question yeah the question is what do we want the future to be and let's shape it right um and and i think this is you know and this is the only point that i really want to make in my work you know for the foreseeable future is that you know 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 back side and and and we've got to recognize that one that's not what we do right um you know 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 right and this was before aerial unmanned vehicles had really sort of proven their worth they would come to be incredibly like you know just blow people out of the blow people's minds in terms of their additional capabilities the lower cost you know keeping you know uh soldiers out of harm's way now of course they raised other problems and considerations that i think we're 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 so they already had that vision actually i didn't know about that so for people who don't know the upper challenges is the the events that were just kind of like these seemingly small scale challenges that brought together some of the smartest roboticists in the world and that somehow created enough of a magic where uh ideas flourished both engineering and scientific that eventually then uh was the catalyst for creating all these different companies that took on the challenge some failed some succeeded some are still fighting the good fight that somehow just that little bit of challenge was the was the essential spark of uh progress that now resulted in this beautiful up and down wave of hype and and uh profit and all this kind of weird dance where the b word billions of dollars have been thrown being thrown around and we still don't know and the t word trillions of dollars in terms of transformative effects of autonomous vehicles and all that started from darp and those initial that initial vision of i guess as you're saying of automating part of the military uh supply chain yeah i did not know that that's interesting so they had the same kind of vision for the military as we're not talking about a vision for the civilian whether it's trucking whether it's autonomous vehicle sort of ride-sharing kind of application yeah i mean what an incredible spark right um and and it just the story of what it produced right i mean um your own work on self-driving right i mean you 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 it's what makes us human in my opinion right is that you you conceive of something in your mind and then you bring it into reality right i mean that that's what is so great about it um sometimes you're too dumb to realize how difficult it right is then eventually you're you're too uh you're in too deep you might as well solve the problem well and maybe we're in that situation right now with self-driving but you know and so let me throw this out there i i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it but uh the truck drivers always always ask me like is this for real like is this really do like it's harder than they think like right and they're they can't really do this and you know at first i was like look you know this is like the defense department and like basically the top computer science and real robotics departments in the world um 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 you know a gigantic market right and what i tell them is like if the if 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 talking about gm right and these are not you know these are not tech companies right these are industrial giants right what 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 it's fascinating to think about i've never thought of it that way i there was a mass hysteria oh on a level in terms of excitement and hype on a level that's probably unparalleled in technology space like i've seen that kind of hysteria just studying history when you talk about military conflict so we often wage war with a dream of making a better world and then realize it cost trillions of dollars and then we step back and like and go wait a minute what do we actually get for this but in the space of technology it seems like all these kind of large efforts have paid off this you're right it seems like um it seems like giving gm and ford and all these companies now are a little bit like hey um or toyota and uh even tesla like are we uh are we sure about this yeah and it's fascinating to think about when you tell the story of this this could be one of the big the first perhaps but by far the biggest failures of the dream in the space of technology that's really interesting to think about i was a skeptic for a long time because of the human factor because for business to work in the space you have to work with humans and you have to work with humans at ever at every level so in the truck driving space you have to work with the truck driver but you also have to work with a society that has a certain conception of what driving means and also have to have work with businesses that are not used to this extreme level of technology you know in um in the basic operation of their business so i thought it would be really difficult to uh to move to autonomous vehicles in that way but then i realized that there's certain companies that are just willing to take big risks and really innovate i think uh the first impressive company to me was waymo or what was used to be the google self-driving car and and i saw okay here's a company that's willing to really think long term and really try to solve this problem hire great engineers uh then i saw tesla with mobile eye when they first had i thought would actually mobilize the thing that impressed me when i sat down i thought because i'm a computer vision person i thought there's no way a system could keep me in lane long enough for it to be a pleasant experience for me so from a computer vision perspective i thought there'd be too many failures it'd be really annoying it'd be a gimmick a toy it wouldn't actually create a pleasant experience and when i first was gotten the tesla with mobileye the initial mobilize system it actually held to lane for quite a long time to where i could relax a little bit and it was a really pleasant experience i couldn't exactly explain why it's pleasant because it's not like i still have to really pay attention but i can relax my shoulders a little bit i'm i'm i can be i can look around a little bit more and for some reason i was really reducing the stress and then over time tesla with uh with a lot of the revolutionary stuff they're doing on the machine learning space made me believe that there's uh opportunities here to innovate to come up with totally new ideas another very sad story that i was really excited about is cadillac super crew system it is a sad story because i think i vaguely read in the news they just said they're discontinuing super cruise but it's a nice innovative way of doing driver attention monitoring and also doing lane keeping and it's just innovation could solve this in ways we don't predict the same with the in the trucking space it might not be as simple as like journalist and vision a few years ago where everything's just automated it might be gradually helping out the truck drive in some ways that make their life more efficient more effective more pleasant make the like remove some of the inefficiencies that we've been talking about in totally innovative ways and that i still have that dream that uh i believe to solve the fully autonomous driving problem we're still many years away but on the way to solving that problem it feels like there could be if there's bold risk takers and innovators in the space there's an opportunity to come up with uh like subtle technologies that make all the difference that's that's actually just what i realized is sometimes little design decisions make all the difference it's the blackberry versus the iphone you know why is it that you have a glass and you're using your finger for all of the work versus the buttons makes all the difference this idea that now you have a giant screen so that every part of the experience is now a digital experience so you can have things like apps that change everything like you can't you know when you're first thinking about do i want a keyboard or not on a smartphone you think it's just the keyboard decision but then you later realize by removing the keyboard you're enabling a whole ecosystem of technologies that are inside the phone and now you're making the smartphone into a computer and that same way who knows how you can transform trucks right by like automating some parts of it maybe uh adding some uh displays maybe it allows you to maybe giving the the truck driver some control in the supply chain to make decisions all those kinds of things yeah uh so i don't know so what's where where are you on the spectrum of hope for uh the role of automation in trucking i i think automation is is inevitable and again i think the this is really going to be transformative and it's going to be i i've studied the history of trucking technology as much as i can there you know there's not a lot a lot of great stuff written and you kind of have to you know uh there's a lot of data and places to know sort of volumes of stuff and how they're changing etc but the big revolutionary changes in in trucking are because of constellations of factors it's it's not just one thing right so daimler builds you know a motorized truck and i think it's 1896. right um intercities trucking that so basically what they use that truck for is just to swap out horses right they basically do the same thing the service doesn't really change you know um and then world war one really spurs the development of bigger larger trucks like spreads you know air 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 right 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 i guess we we credit jeff bezos the idea is you know um okay so sam walton if we can do it like a slight tangent on sort of the importance of trucking to business strategy and sort of how it has transformed our 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 and having people sleep overnight and sort of making the trucking service fit where they had stores he designed the layout of the stores right to fit what trucks could do and so transportation and logistics right become walmart's you know edge right and allows them to to dominate the space that's the challenge that amazon has now they've they've mastered the digital part of it right and now they got to figure out like how do we you know dominate the actual physical movement that complements that um others are obviously going to follow but the capabilities of these trucks is completely different than the capability of a human-driven truck so if you're smith-packing right and you've got you know uh a bunch of meat in a warehouse and it's going to grocery distribution centers you know you have that trucker probably come in the night before and you make him wait so that he has you know 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 right so he can drive his full 11 hours and and bring that meat so it doesn't have to sit overnight in that refrigerated trailer right 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 meat 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 you know how do you then get it to two people at their door right and you know the big box supply chain it moves very few items in really large quantities to very few locations pretty slowly right um ecommerce aspires you know to do something completely different right move huge varieties of things in small quantities virtually everywhere as fast as possible right and so that is like that inter-city trucking under the you know in the um era of of railroad monopolies right the demand for that is potentially enormous right and and that so there's there's such a so right now i think a lot of the the business plans for sort of automated trucks right and sort of the way that the journalistic accounts portray it is like okay if we swap out a human for a computer what are the labor costs per mile and like oh here's the profitability of self-driving trucks like this is transformative technology we're going to change the way we get stuff so we could actually get a lot more trucks period with like with autonomous trucks because they would enable if a very different kind of transportation networks you think yeah here's and this is where it's like uh oh like yeah so wait we really thought we were gonna be electrifying trucks if they're going twice as far if they're moving three times as much if they're going three times as far right what does that mean for how far we are behind on batteries right we've got sort of these you know ideas about like man we you know here's how far how close we could get to meet this demand that demand is going to radically change right these trucks are you know so then we've got to think about all right if it's not battery you know how how are we powering these things and how many of them are they're going to be like right now we've got five million containers that move from la and long beach to chicago on rail rail is three or four times at least more efficient than trucks in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and on that lane it varies a lot depending on demand but maybe rail has a 20 advantage in cost maybe 25 but it's a couple days slower so now you cut the cost of that truck transportation per mile by 30 percent now it's cheaper than rail and it gets the stuff there five days faster than rail how many millions of containers are going to leave la and long beach on self-driving trucks and go to chicago and it might look very much like a train if if we go with the platooning solution you have just these rows of like imagine like rows of like 10 like dozens of trucks or like hundreds of trucks like some absurd situation just going from la to chicago yeah just this train but taking up a highway i mean uh this is probably a good place to talk about various scenarios but before we get there can i can i just make one one interesting observation that i made as a driver um when you're in a truck you're up higher you know so you can you can see further and you can see the traffic patterns and um cars move them packs i'm sure there's academic research on this right but they move in packs they kind of bunch up behind a slower car and then a bunch of them break free and this is sort of on almost free-flowing highways they kind of move in packs and you can kind of see them in the truck so you know rather than platoons we might have like hives you know of trucks right so you have like 20 trucks moving in some coordinated fashion right and then maybe the self-driving cars are you know because people don't like to be around them or whatever it is right you might have a pod of you know 20 self-driving cars sort of moving in a packet behind them you know this is what if the aliens came down or were just observing cars which is one of the uh sort of prevalent characteristics of human civilization is there seems to be these cars like moving around that would do this kind of analysis of like huh what's the interesting clustering of situations here especially with autonomous vehicles i like this okay so what technologically speaking do you see are the different scenarios of increasing automation in in trucks what are some ideas that you think about for the most part i have no i i have no influence on sort of what these ideas were so what the what the project was that i did was um i said technology is created by people they they solve for x and they have some conception of what they want to do and that's where we should start in sort of thinking about what the you know impacts might be so i went and i talked to everybody i could find who was you know thinking about developing a self-driving truck and the question was essentially you know what do you what are you trying to build like what do you envision this thing doing it turned out that that for a lot of them was an afterthought they knew the the sort of technological capabilities that a self-driving vehicle would have and those were the problems that they were tackling you know they were engineers and computer scientists and oh robotics people i love you so much this is i i i could i could talk forever about this but yes there's a technology problem let's focus on that we'll figure out the actual uh impact on society how it's actually going to be applied how it's actually going to be integrated from a policy and from a human perspective from a business perspective later first let's solve the technology problem that's not how life works friends but okay i'm sorry yeah yeah so i mean i mean i'm sure you know the division of labor in these companies right there's sort of a business development side you know and then there's the engineering side right and the engineers are like oh my god what are these business development people you know why are they involved in this process so i ended up sort of coming up with a few different ideas that people seem to be batting around and then really try to zero in on a layman's understanding of the limitations right and it it turns out that's really obvious and and quite simple highway driving's a lot simpler right um so you know the the plan is simplify the problem right um and focus on highways because city driving is is so um so much more complicated so from that i i came up with basically six scenarios actually i came up with five that the developers were talking about and then one that i thought was a good idea that i had read about um i think in like 2013 or 2014 which was actually something that the us military was looking at i actually first heard about the idea of this kind of automation at least in in um in sketched-out form in like 2011 i guess it was with peloton which was this sort of early technology entrant into the trucking industry which was working on platooning platooning trucks and and all they were doing was you know a cooperative adaptive cruise control as they they came to call it um and we ended up on a panel together and it's it's kind of interesting because i was on that panel because i was thinking about how we got the best return on investment for fuel efficient technologies and if it's cool i'll sort of set set this up because it does it comes into sort of the story of some of these scenarios so when i studied the drivers you had this like complete difference in the driving tasks like we were talking about before with long haul and city right and you're not paid in the city you've got congestion the turns are tight um there's lots of you know pedestrians you know all the things that self-driving trucks don't like truckers don't like right and they're not paid there's lots of waiting time and then in the highway they get to cruise they're getting paid they have control they go at their own pace they're making money they're happy well it turned out i guess it was around 2010 this is still when we were thinking about regenerative braking you know and hybrid trucks being sort of like the solution um the problems with them sort of and the advantages you know also split on what i was thinking of kind of the rural urban divide at that time right so like you got the regenerative braking right um you can make the truck lighter you can keep it local right um you don't get any benefit from that you know hybrid electric in the uh on the rural highway you want aerodynamics right there you want low rolling resistance tires and these super aerodynamic sleek trucks right where we know with off-the-shelf technology today we could double the fuel economy more than double the fuel economy of the typical truck in that highway segment if we segmented the duty cycle right and so in the urban environment you want a clean burning truck so you're not giving kids asthma you want it lighter so it's not destroying those those less strong pavements right um you're not you can make tighter turns you don't need a sleeper cab because the driver you know hopefully is getting home at night right in the long haul you want that super aerodynamic stuff now that doesn't get you anything in the city and in fact it causes all kinds of problems because you turn too tight you crunch up all the aerodynamics that connect the the tractor and the trailer so the idea that i had was like okay what if we deliberately segmented it like what if we created these drop lots outside cities where you know a local city driver who's paid by the hour kind of runs these trailers out once they're loaded you know it doesn't sit there and wait while it's being loaded they drop off a trailer they go pick up one that's loaded they run it out when it's loaded they call them and they just run them out there and stage them it's like an uber driver but for uh truckloads yeah we have like intermodal we have like we have basically this would be the equivalent of like rail to truck inner motor right so you put it on the rail and then you know a truck trucker picks it up and delivers it right so instead of having the rail you'd have these super aerodynamic hopefully platoons or or what was at the time was called long combination vehicles which is basically two trailers connected together right because this is like a huge productivity gain right um and then instead of that driver like me i would pick up something in upstate new york drive to michigan drive to alabama you know drive to wisconsin drive to florida you know i get home every two weeks if i'm just running that you know um that double trailer i might be able to go back and forth from chicago to detroit right take two trailers there pick up two trailers going back right and be home every night now the problem with that at the time or one of them was you know bridge weights so you can't not all bridges can handle that that much weight on them they can't handle these doubles right and some places can some places can't so this platooning idea was happening at the same time and we ended up on the same panel and the founders were like hey so what's it like to follow really close behind another truck which was kind of the the stage that they were at was like you know what's that experience gonna be like and i was like it truckers aren't gonna like it you know i mean that that's just like the cardinal rule is following distance like that's the one you really shouldn't violate right um and and when you're out on the road like you have that trucker like right on your ass you know people remember that they don't remember the 99.9 of truckers that are not on their ass you know like they they they're very careful about that but when you're when the trucks are really close together there's benefits in terms of aerodynamics so that's the the idea so like if you want to get some benefits of uh a platoon you want that to be close together but you're saying that's very uncomfortable for truckers yeah so i mean i think that ended up at the i mean peloton i think is is sort of winding down um their their work on this um and i think that ended up being still an open question like and i had a chance to interview a couple drivers who um at least one maybe two of which had actually driven in their platoons um and i got completely different experiences some of them were like it's really cool you know i'm like in communication with that other driver um you know i can see on a screen what what's out out you know the front of his truck um and then somewhere like it's too close um and it might be one of those things that's just you know takes an adjustment to to sort of get there so you get the aerodynamic advantage which which you know saves fuel um there's some problems though right so you know you're getting that aerodynamic advantage because there's a low pressure system in front of that following truck but the the engine is designed with higher pressure um feeding that engine right so there are sort of adjustments that you need to make and you know still the benefits are are there that's one scenario and that's just the automation of that acceleration and braking starsky which um you know probably a lot of your listeners heard heard about um was working on another scenario which was you know to solve that local problem was going to do tele operation right sort of remote piloting um i had a chance to you know sort of watch watch them do that it was you know they they drove a truck in florida from um from san francisco in in one of their office offices uh that was that was really interesting and then in case it's not clear tele operation means you're controlling the truck remotely like it's a video game so uh you got the chance to witness it does it actually work yeah i mean so it's uh what are the pros and cons you know one of the problems with with doing research like this with all these with all these silicon valley folks are the ndas all right right so so i don't you know i don't know what i'm able to say uh about sort of watching it but obviously the their public statements about sort of what the challenges are right and it's about the the latency and the ability to sort of in real time there's challenges that let me say one thing uh so i'm talking to the the you know i've talked to the waymo cto i'm in conversations with them talking to the the head of trucking boris uh sofman in next month actually i'm a huge fan of his because he was uh i think the founder of anki which is a toy robotics company uh so i love cute i love human robot interaction and he created one of the most uh effective and beautiful toy robots um anyway i keep complaining to them on email privately that uh there's way too much marketing in these conversations and not enough showing off the both the challenge and the beauty of the engineering efforts and that seems to be the case for a lot of these silicon valley tech companies they they put up this uh you talk about ndas they they've i for some reason rightfully wrongfully because there's been so much hype and so much money being made they don't see the um the upside in being transparent and educating the public about how difficult the problem is it's much more effective for them to say we have everything solved this will change everything this will change society as we know and just kind of wave their hands as opposed to exploring together like these different scenarios what are the pros and cons why is it really difficult you know what are the what are the gray areas of where it works and doesn't uh what's the role of the human in this picture of the both the sort of the operators and the other humans on the road all of that which are fascinating human problems fascinating engineering problems that i wish we could have a conversation about as opposed to uh always feeling like it's just marketing talk because a lot of what we're talking about now even you with having private conversations under nda you still don't have the full picture of everything of how difficult this problem is one of the big questions i've had still have is how difficult is driving i've disagreed with you know elon musk and jim keller on this point i have a sense that driving is really difficult you know the task of driving just broadly this is like philosophy talk how how much intelligence is required to drive a car so from uh like a jim keller who used to be the head of autopilot the idea is that it's just a collision avoidance problem it's like billiard balls it's like you have to convert the drive you have to do some basic perception a computer vision to convert driving into a game of pool and then you just have to get everything into a pocket yeah to me there seems to be some game theoretic dance uh combined with the fact that people's life is at stake and then when people die at the hands of a robot the reaction is going to be much more complicated so all of that but that's still an open question and the cool thing is all of these companies are struggling with this question of how difficult is it to solve this problem sufficiently such that we can build the business on top of it and have a product that's going to make a huge amount of money and compete with the manually driven uh vehicles and so their tele operation from starsky's is a really interesting idea how much can uh i mean there's a few autonomous vehicle companies that tried to integrate tele operation in the picture can we reduce some of the costs while still having reliability like uh catch when the vehicle fails by having tele operation it's an open question so that's that's for you scenario number two is to uh use teleoperation as part of the picture yeah let me let me follow up on that question of how hard driving is because this this becomes a big question for researchers who are thinking about labor market impacts right because we start from a perspective of what's hard or easy for humans right um and so you know if you were to look at truck driving prior to a lot i mean there's been a lot of thinking and debate in um in academic you know research circles around sort of how you estimate labor impacts right what these models look like and a lot of it is about how automatable is a job object recognition really easy for people right really hard for computers and so there's a whole bunch of things that you know truck drivers do that we see as you know super easy and as it would have been characterized 10 years ago routine and it's not for a computer right it's a it's it turns out to be something that we do naturally that is that is you know sort of cutting edge right um computer science so on the tele operation question i think this is um this is a more interesting one than than people would like to sort of let on i think publicly um they're going to be problems right um and this is one of the complexities of sort of putting these things out in the world and if you see the real world of trucking you realize wow it's rough you know there are dirt lots there's gravel there's salt and ice and cold weather and there's equipment that just gets left out in the middle of nowhere and the brakes don't get maintained and somebody was supposed to service something and they didn't you know and so you imagine okay we've got this vehicle that can drive itself which is going to require a whole lot of sensors to tell it that like the doors are still closed and the trailer's still hooked up and each of the tires has adequate pressure and you know any number of you know probably hundreds of sensors that are going to be sort of relaying information and one of them you know after 500 000 miles or whatever goes out now you know do we have some fleet of technicians sort of continually cruising the highways and sort of servicing these things as they do what pull themselves off to the side of the road and say i've got a sensor fault i'm pulling over you know or maybe there's some level of like critical safety critical faults or or whatever um it might be so you know that suggests that there might be a role for tele operation even with self-driving and when i push people on it in in the conversations they all are like yeah we kind of have that on the like bottom of the list figure out how to rescue truck you know it gets on the to-do list right after solving the self-driving you know question is like yeah what do we do with the problems right i mean now we could we can imagine like all right we have some you know protocol that the truck is not you know realizes the system says not safe for operation pull to the side good you have a crash but now you got a truck stranded on the side of the road you're gonna send out somebody to like calibrate things and check out what's going on or that sounds like expensive labor it sounds like downtime it sounds like the kind of things that shippers don't like to happen to their freight you know in a in a just-in-time world and so wouldn't it be great if you could just sort of you know loop your way into the controls of that truck and say all right we've got a sensor out says me that says that the tire is bad but i can see visually from the camera looks fine i'm going to drive it to our next depot you know maybe the next rider or penske location right sort of all these service locations around and have a tech nation technician take a look at it so tally operation often gets this you know um dismissive um you know commentary from from other folks working on other other scenarios but i think it's it's potentially more relevant than than than we hear publicly but it's a hard problem and uh you know for me i've gotten a chance to interact with people that take on hard problems and solve them and they're rare what tesla has done with their data engine so i thought autonomous driving cannot be solved without collecting a huge amount of data and organizing the wall not just collecting but organizing it and exactly what tesla is doing now is what i thought it would be like i couldn't see car companies doing that including tesla and now that they're doing that it's like oh okay so it's possible to take on this huge effort seriously to me teleoperation is another huge effort like that it's like taking seriously what happens when it fails what's the in the case of waymo for um for the consumer like ride sharing what's the customer experience like there's a bunch of videos online now where people are like the car fails and it pulls off to the side and you call like customer service and you're basically sitting there for a long time and there's confusion and then there's a rescue that comes and they start to i mean just the whole experience is a mess that has a ripple effect to how you trust in in the entirety of the experience but like actually taking on the problem of that failure case and revolutionizing that experience both for trucking and for ride sharing that's an amazing opportunity there because that feels like it would change everything if you can reliably know when the failures happen which they will you have a clear plan that doesn't significantly affect the efficiency of the whole process that that could be the game changer and if tele operation is part of that it could be just like you're saying it could be tele operation or it could be like a fleet of rescuers that can come in which is a similar idea but tell the operation obviously that allows you to to just have a network of monitors of people monitoring this giant fleet of trucks and taking over when needed it's a beautiful vision of the future where there's millions of robots and only thousands of humans monitoring those millions of robots that seems like that seems like a perfect dance of allowing humans to do what they do best and allowing robots to do what they do best yeah yeah so i mean i think there are um and we just applied for an nsf we didn't get anybody's watching but with some folks from wisconsin who do teleoperation right and and you know some of this is used for like rovers and you know i mean really you know high stakes difficult problems but one of the things we wanted to study were these mines in these rio tinto mines in australia where they remotely pilot the trucks and there's some autonomy i guess and then some but it's overseen by um a remote operator and they you know it's a it's a it's near perth it's quite remote and um they retrained the truck drivers to be the remote operators right um there's autonomy in in the port of rotterdam and places like that where there are jobs there and so there i think you know maybe we'll get to this later but you know there's a real policy question about sort of who's gonna lose and what we do about it and you know whether or not we there are opportunities there that you know maybe we need to put our thumb on the scale a little bit to to make sure that you know there there's some give back to the community that's that's taking the hit you know um so for instance if there were tally operation centers you know maybe they go in these communities that we disproportionately source truck drivers from today now i mean what does that mean it may not be the cheapest place to do it if they don't have great connectivity and it may not be where the upper level managers want to be and you know places like that you know issues like that right so um i do think it's an interesting question you know both from sort of a practical uh scenario situation of how it's going to work but also from a policy perspective so there's platoons there's tele operation and this is taking care of some of the highway driving that we're talking about is there other ideas like um is there other ideas scenarios that you have for autonomous trucks yeah so i mean the the most obvious one actually is is just you know uh facility to facility right the sort of you know um it can't go everywhere but a lot of logistics facilities are very close to interstates and they're and they're on big commercial roads without you know bikes and parked cars and all that stuff and some of the jobs that i think are really first on the chopping block are these ltl that less than truckload what's called line haul right so these are the drivers who go from terminal to terminal with those full trailers and those facilities are often located strategically to avoid congestion right and to be in big you know industrial facilities so you could imagine that being you know the first place you see a waymo self-driving you know truck roll out might be you know um sort of direct facility to facility for ups or fedex or less than truckload care and the idea there is fully driverless so potentially not even a driver in the truck it's just going from facility to facility empty zero occupancy yeah and those because that labor is expensive uh you know they don't keep those drivers out overnight those drivers do do a run back and forth typically um or in a team go back and forth in in one day so from the people you've spoken with uh so far what's your sense how far are we away from which scenarios closest and how far away are we from that scenario of autonomy being a big part of our trucking fleet most folks are are focused on another scenario which is the exit to exit right um which looks like that urban truck ports um thing that i laid out earlier you know so you have a human driven truck that comes out to um a drop lot it meets up with an autonomous truck the that truck then you know drives it on the interstate to another lot and then a human driver you know picks it up there are a couple variations maybe on that um so or let me just run through the last two scenarios sure the other thing you could do right is to say all right i've got a truck that can drive itself um and i i refer to this one as autopilot but um you know you have a human drive it out to the interstate but rather than have that transaction where where the human driven truck detaches the trailer and it gets coupled up to a self-driving truck they just that human driver just hops on the interstate with that truck and goes in back and goes off duty while the truck drives itself and and so you have a self-driving truck that's not driverless right um and just to clarify because tesla uses the term autopilot so the airplanes and so everybody uses the word autopilot we're referring to essentially full autonomy but because it's exit to exit the truck driver is on board the truck but they're sleeping in the back or whatever yeah and this this gets to the really weedy policy questions right so basically for the department of transportation for you to be off duty for safety reasons you have to be completely relieved of all responsibility so that truck has to not you know encounter a construction site or what inclement weather or whatever it might be and and call to you and say hey you know or i mean obviously right we're imagining connected vehicles as well right so you're in a self-driving truck you're in the back and trucks 20 miles ahead experience some problem right um that may require tele operation or whatever it is right and it signals to your truck hey you know tell the driver 20 miles ahead he's he's got to hop in the seat that would mean that they're on duty according to the way that the current rules are written they have some responsibility and part of that is you know we need we need them get rest right um they need to have uninterrupted sleep so that's what i call autopilot the the final scenario is one that i i thought was actually the one scenario that was good for labor um you know uh which i which i i i proposed because i'm like well here's here's an idea you know that would be like actually good for workers um and just another brief aside here um the history of trucking over the last you know 40 years there's been a lot of technological change so when i learned to drive the truck i had to learn to manually shift it like i was describing you had to read these fairly complicated you know big sets of laminated maps to figure out where the truck can go and where it couldn't which is a big deal you know when you take these trucks on the wrong road and you're destroying a bridge or you're doing a can opener which is where you try to drive it under about too low you've probably seen that on on youtube if not you know check it out you know truck can opener um you know there's some bridges that are famous for it right and there's one i think called the can opener you can find on youtube um and you know you had to log those hours like manually and sort of do do the math and and plan your work routine and i would do this every day i'd say like okay i'm going to get up at 5. i got to think about buffalo and there's traffic there so i want to be through buffalo by 6 30 you know and then that'll put me you know in in cleveland at you know 9 30 which means i'll miss that rush hour right which is going to put me in chicago you know and and so you do this and now today you know 15 years later truck drivers don't have to do any of that um you know you don't have to shift the truck you don't have to map um you know you can figure out the least congested route to go on and your hours of service are recorded or a good portion of them are reported automatically all of that has been a substantial de-skilling that has you know put downward pressure on rage wages and allowed companies to kind of speed up monitor and direct i mean the the key technology you know that i did work under is satellite linked computers so before you could kind of go out and plan your own work and the boss really couldn't see what you were doing and push you and say you know you've been on break for 10 hours why aren't you moving you know um and you might tell them you know because i'm tired you know like i didn't sleep well i've got to get a couple more hours you know they're only going to accept that so many times or at least some of those dispatchers are so all this technology has has made the job sort of you know de-skilled the job you know hurt drivers in the labor market made the work worse so i think the burden is really on the technologists who are like oh this will make truck driver jobs better and sort of envision ways that it would it's like the burden's really a proof is really on you to sort of really clearly lay out what that is going to look like because it's 30 or 40 years of history suggests that that technology into labor markets where workers are really weak and cheap is what wins that new technology doesn't help workers or raise their wages so lowers the bar of entry in terms of skill yeah so that's that's really interest that's um that's tough that's tough to know to do with because yeah from a technology perspective you want to make the life of the people doing the job today easier is it is that what you want no but that like when you think about like what exactly because the reality is you will make the their life potentially a little bit easier but that will allow the companies to then hire people that are less skilled it will get those people that are previously working there fired or lower wages and so the result of this easier is a lower quality of life yeah that's dark actually i know i'm sorry but you're you were saying that was for you initially the hopeful oh no so i'll i'll get to that but one more thing because this this is not stopping right and this is another interesting question about the sort of automation and i think uber right is is a is an interesting example here right where it's like okay if we had self-driving trucks or self-driving cars right we could we could automate you know what what used to be taxi service there's a whole bunch of stuff that's already been automated like the dispatching so the dispatchers are already out of work in in rideshare and the payment is already automated right so so you have to automate steps like this so you have to have you know that initial link to dispatch the truck you have to have the you know the automated mapping and all so we've sort of done all this you know incremental automation right that could make the truck um completely driverless there's some important things happening right now with the remaining good jobs so what you're really paying for when you get a good truck driver is you know like i said you get those kind of local skills of like backing and congested traffic those it's really impressive to watch and there's some value on it certainly but it's relatively low value um in in the actual driving technique right so you bump something you know back into the dock it's you know it might be a couple thousand dollars because you ruin a canopy or something over a dock or tear up a trailer what you really want those those highly skilled conscientious drivers and that's really what it what it is and that's what computers are really good at is about being conscientious right in the sense of like they pay attention continually right and and how it was describing those those long-haul segments where the driver you know just keeps out of the the situations that could become problematic right and just they don't look at their phone and they take the job seriously and they're safe and you can give somebody a skills test right in in you know as a cdl examiner you could take them out and say all right i need you to go around these cones and like drive safely through this school zone but what really proves that you're a safe driver is two years without an accident right because that means that day after day hour after hour mile after mile you did the right thing right um and not when it was like oh some situation's emerging but just consistently over time kept yourself out of accident situations and you can see this with drivers who are you know a million or two million safe miles the value of those drivers for walmart is they don't run over minivans the company i ran i worked for they ran over minivans on a regular basis so you know when i when i was trained they said we kill 20 people a year we send someone to the funeral there's a big check involved um don't be that you know we don't want to go to your funeral and you don't want to be the person who who caused that funeral okay so they they just write that off okay that's just part of the business model now um forward collision avoidance can you know basically eliminate the vast majority of those accidents that's what the value of a really expensive conscientious driver is based on they don't run over minivans so as soon as you have that forward collision avoidance what's going to happen to the wages of those drivers by way of a therapy session help me understand it is a collision avoidance um automated collision avoidance systems are they good or bad for society yeah i mean you know this this is they're good right they're good but in uh what do we do about the pain of a workforce in the short term because their their wages are going to go down because the job starts requiring less and less skill is is it is there a hopeful message here where other jobs are created so i'm you know i'm a sociologist right so you know so i'm going to think about what's what's the structure behind that that creates that pain right and it's ownership right um you know we don't call it capitalism for nothing you know what capitalists do is they figure out cheaper more efficient ways to do stuff and they use technology to do that oftentimes right this is the remarkable history of the last couple centuries and and all the productivity gains is you know people who are in a competitive market saying if i have to do it right i don't have a choice because like my competitor over there is going to eat my lunch if i'm not on my game um i don't have a choice i've got to invest in this technology to you know make it more more efficient to make it cheaper and what do you look for you look for oftentimes you look for labor costs right you look for high value labor if i can take a hundred and you know these a lot of these truck drivers make good money hundred thousand dollars good benefits vacation you know retirement if i can replace them with a 35 000 worker when i'm competing with maybe a low-wage retail employer rather than some other more expensive employers for you know skilled blue collar workers i'm gonna do that um and that's just that's what we do and so i think those those are the bigger questions around this technology right is like you know are workers gonna get screwed by this like yeah most likely like that's that's what we do so one of the things you say is i mean first of all the numbers of workers that will be that will feel this pain is not perhaps as large as the journalists kind of articulate but nevertheless the pain is real and i guess my question here is um do you have an optimistic vision about the transformative effects of autonomous trucks on society like if you look 20 years from now and perhaps see maybe 30 years from now perhaps see these autonomous trucks doing the various parts of the scenarios you listed and there's just hundreds of thousands of them just uh like uh like veins like blood throwing through flowing through veins on the interstate system um what kind of world do you see that's a better world than today that involves his trucks yeah um can i defend myself first because i can i'm reading the comments right now yes of people you know of the economists who are telling you're a commenter dear phd economics yes um yes d dear phd in economics i know that that higher skilled jobs are created you know by by technological advancement right i mean there are big questions about how many of them right so the idea that we would create more um ex you know expensive labor positions right with a new technology right you better check your business plan if your idea is to take you know a bunch of low um low wage labor and replace it with the same amount of high wage labor right so we there's a question about how many of those jobs and there's the really important social and political question of are they the same people right and do they live in the same places and i think that kind of you know geography is a huge issue here with the impacts right lots of rural workers um interesting politically lots of red state workers right lots of blue state maybe union folks who are going to try to slow autonomy and lots of red state you know representatives in the house maybe who want to you know stand up for their for their trucker constituents um so just just to defend myself yeah and to elaborate i think economics as a field is not good at measuring the landscape of human pain and suffering so you know sometimes you can forget in the numbers as real lives that are at stake that's what i suppose sociology is better at doing uh so you try sometimes sometimes well the problem with i mean i'm somebody who loves psychology and psychiatry and a little bit i guess of sociology i realized how little how tragically flawed the field is not because of lack of trying but just how difficult the problems are you had to do really thorough studies that understand the fundamentals of human behavior and this yes landscape of human suffering it's just it's almost an impossible task without the data and we currently don't you know not everybody's richly integrated to where they're fully connected and all their information is being uh like recorded for sociologists to study so you have to make a lot of inferences you have to talk to people you have to do the interviews as you're doing and through that like really difficult work try to understand like uh hear the music that nobody else is hearing the music of like what people are feeling their hopes their dreams and their the crushing of their dreams due to some kind of economic forces yeah i mean we've just lived that for four and a half years of of probably you know elites let me just go out on a limb and say not understanding the sort of emotional and psychological currents of a large portion of the population right and just being stunned by it and and confused right um wasn't confusing for me after having talked to truckers again who trucking is the job of last resort these are people who've already lost that manufacturing job oftentimes already lost that construction job to just aging right so what you know what can we do right what's sort of the positive vision because like we've got tons of highway deaths we've got um and just to you know the big picture is and this is the opportunity i guess for investors um it's a hugely inefficient system so we buy this truck there's this low-wage worker in it oftentimes and again i'm setting aside those really good line haul jobs in ltl those are those are a different case um that low-wage worker is driving a truck that they they might the wheels might roll seven to eight hours a day that's what the truck is designed to do and that's what makes the money for the company in other seven eight hours a day the driver's doing other kinds of work that you know is not driving and then the rest of the day they're basically living out of the truck like you really can't find a more inefficient use of an asset than than that right now a big part of that is we pay for the roads and we pay for the rest areas and all that all this other stuff so so the way that i work and the way that you know i think about these problems is i try to find analogies right sort of labor processes and things that that make economic sense you know that that seem you know in in this in the same area of of the economy but have some some different characteristics for for workers right and and sort of try to figure out why does the economics work there right and so if you look at those really good jobs the mo the most likely way that you as a as a passenger car driver would know that it's one of those drivers is that they're multiple trailers right so you see these like maybe maybe it's three small trailers maybe it's two sort of medium-sized trailers some places you might even see two really big trailers together you do that because labor's expensive right and it's highly skilled and so you use it efficiently and you say all right you know rather than having you you know haul that little trailer out of the ports you know that sort of half size container we're going to wait till we get three or we're gonna coordinate the movement so that they're three ready you go do what truckers call make a set you put them together right and you and you go um that's a massive productivity gain right because you know you're hauling two three times as much freight so the the positive scenario that i threw out in in 2018 was why not have a human-driven truck with a self-driving truck that follows it right just a drone unit um and it was you know to me this seemed as a you know non-computer scientist as a sociologist right this made a lot of sense because when i got done talking to the you know the computer scientists and and the engineers they were like well you know it's like object recognition decision making algorithm all this stuff it's like all right so why don't you leave the human brain in the lead vehicle right you got all that processing and then all that following now again this is sort of me being a um a lay person you know i said why don't you know then that following truck right takes direction from the front it uses the rear of the trailer as a reference point it maintains the lane you've got cooperative adaptive cruise control and that you double the productivity of that driver you solved that problem that i that i i hated in in my you know urban truck ports thing about the bridge weight because when you get to the bridges you know the the two trucks can just spread out just enough to make the bridge weight right and you can just program that in and you know they're 50 feet further apart 100 feet further further apart um so interesting sort of i think uh story about this that that leads to kind of i think the policy questions in i guess 2017 jack reed and susan collins and you know requested from the senate the senate requested research on what the impacts of self-driving trucks would be and the first stage of that was for the gao to um do a report sort of looking at the lay of the land talking to some experts and i was working on my 2018 report um helped contribute to that gao report and you know i had the six scenarios right i'm like okay you know here's here's what starsky's doing you know here's what embark and and uber are doing you know here's what waymo might be doing no nobody really knows right um here's what peloton's doing um you know here's the autopilot scenario and then here's this one that i think actually could be good for drivers so now you've got that driver who's got two you know two times the freight um their decisions are more important they're managing a more complex system right they're probably gonna have to have some global understanding of how to you know the environments in which you can operate safely right now we're talking upskilling right and so you know that um the gao you know sort of writes up these different scenarios and and the idea is that it's going to prepare for this department of transportation department of labor set of processes to engage stakeholders and um and sort of get you know get industry perspectives and then do a study on the labor impacts so you know that dot dol process starts to happen and you know i get to the workshop and a friend was sitting at the table next to me and he holds up the the scenarios that that they're going to have us discuss at this workshop and he's like hey these look really familiar right because they were the you know scenarios from from the report but there were only five instead of six interesting the sixth scenario which was the upskilling labor good for good for worker scenario wasn't wasn't discussed so to clarify that the integral piece of technology there is platooning yeah i mean in a sense it's it's platooning but and i and in fairness right the as i pitched that idea or sort of ran that idea by the computer scientists and engineers that i would and product managers that i would talk to they would say you know you know we thought about that but that following truck it's not that simple you know that thing basically we had to engineer that to be capable of independent self-driving because what if there was a cut in or you know any number of scenarios in which it lost that connection to the lead truck for whatever reason now i mean i don't platooning is hard there's edge cases i guarantee the number of edge cases and platooning is orders of magnitude lower than the number of edge cases in the general solo full self drive you do not need to solve the full self-driving problem i mean if you're talking about uh probability of dangerous events yeah it just seems with platooning then like you can deal with cut-ins yeah so this is you know this is beyond uh this is one of the challenges obviously of being a researcher who you know uh doesn't doesn't really have any background in in the technology right um so i can i can dream this up i don't you know no idea if it's feasible um well let me speak you spoke to the phds in economics let me speak to the pgs of computer science if you think platooning is as hard as the full self-driving problem um well we need to talk because i think that's ridiculous i think platooning and in fact i think platooning is an interesting idea for ride sharing as well for the general autonomous driving problem not just trucking but obviously trucking is the big big benefit because the number of a to b points in trucking is much much lower than the general ride sharing problem but anyway i think it's a great idea but you're saying it was removed yeah and and so you you can go you know and you know listeners could go to these reports they're they're they're publicly available and they explain why in the in the footnote and you know they they note that there was this other scenario um suggested by at least me and i remember if they said someone else did too but they said you know we didn't include it because no developers were working on it interesting full disclosure that was the approach that i took in my research right which was to go to the developers and say what's your vision right what are you trying to develop that's what i was trying to do and maybe you know and then i tried to think outside the box at the end by adding that one right like here's one that i have you know people aren't talking about that could be cool now again it had been proposed like 2014 for like fuel convoys um so you could just have like one super armored lead fuel truck right in a you know bringing fuel to forward operating bases in afghanistan and then you wouldn't need you know the the super heavy you know you wouldn't have to protect the human life in the following trials so that's interesting you're saying like when you talk to waymo when you talk to these kinds of companies they weren't at least openly saying they're working on this so then it doesn't make sense to um to include in the list yeah and so but here's the thing right this is the department of transportation right and the department of labor maybe they could consider some scenarios like maybe we could say you know this we this technology's got a lot of potential here's what we'd like it to do you know we'd like it to reduce highway deaths help us fight climate change reduce congestion you know all these other other things but that's not how our policy conversation our own technology is happening we're not and people don't think that we should and i think that's the fundamental shift that we need to have right i've been involved with this a little bit like nitsa and d.o.t the approach they took is saying we don't know what the heck we're doing so we're going to just let the innovators do their thing and not regulate it for a while just to see you don't you think that's um you think dot should provide ideas themselves well so this is the um this is the great trick in policy of um of private actors is you you get narrow mandates for government agencies right so you know this the safety case will be handled by organizations whose mandate is safety so the federal motor carrier safety administration who is you know going to be a key player i i argue in an article that i wrote you know they're going to be a key player in actually determining which scenario is most profitable by setting the rules for truck drivers their mandate is safety right now they have lots of good people there who want you know who care about truck drivers and who wish truck drivers jobs were better but they don't have the authority to say hey we're going to write this rule because it's good for truck drivers right and so when you you know we need to say you know as a society we need to not restrict technology not stand in the way of things we need to harness it towards the goals that matter right not whatever comes out the end of the pipeline because it's the easiest thing to develop or whatever is most profitable for the first actor or whatever but you know and we do the thing is we do that right i mean like when we when we sent people to the moon you know we we did that we you know and there were tremendous benefits that that followed from it right and and we do this all the time in you know trying to cure cancer or whatever it is right i mean we can do this right now the interesting sort of uh epilogue to that story is you know uh six months or so i don't know how long it was after those those meetings in which that sixth scenario was not considered um a company called location you know ends up using that essentially that basic scenario with it with a slight variation so they they leave the human driver in both trucks and then that following driver goes off duty and then um uh you know i i've been trying to think of what the term is they kind of i i think of it as like slingshotting they sort of when one runs out of hours you know the one who's off duty goes up front and you know um cool and so you know if only they had been uh you know around six six months earlier that would it might have been considered by d.o.t but it just says you know who has the authority to propose what these visions of the future are well some of it is also just the company stepping up and just doing it screw the authority and showing that it's possible and then the authority follows so that's why i really love innovators in the space the the criticism i have the very sort of real i don't know harsh criticism i have towards autonomous vehicle companies in the space is they've gotten culturally they've it's been it's become acceptable somehow to do demos and videos as opposed to the old-school american way of solving problems there's there's a culture in silicon valley where you're talking to vcs that have lost that kind of love of um solving problem they kind of like envision if the story you told me in your powerpoint presentation it's true how many trillions of dollars might i be able to make there's something lost in that conversation where you're not really taking on like the problem in a real way so these autonomous vehicle companies realize we don't need to we just need to make nice powerpoint presentations and not actually deliver products that like everybody looks outside and says holy  this is this is life-changing that's where i have to give props to waymo is they put driverless cars on the road and like forget powerpoint slide presentations actual cars in the world then you can criticize like is that actually going to work who knows but the thing is they have cars on the road that's why i have to give props to tesla they have whatever you want to say about risk and all those kinds of things they have cars on the road that have some level of automation and soon they have trucks on the road as well and that kind of that component i think is important part of the policy conversation because you get you start getting data of these from these companies that are willing to take the big risks as opposed to making slide decks they're actually putting cars on the road and like real lives are at stake they could be lost and they could bankrupt the company if they make the wrong decisions and that that's deeply admirable to me speaking of which i have to ask way more trucks i think it's called waymo via so i'm talking to the head of trucking at waymo i don't know if you've gotten a chance to interact with them what's a good question to ask the guy what's the good question of waymo because they seem to be one of the leaders in the space they have the zen-like calm of like being willing to stick with it for the long term in order to solve the problem yeah they and i guess they have that luxury right um which i don't think i if i had another life as a researcher i would love to just study the business strategies of startups and and silicon valley um sort of structure would you consider waymo startup no no no right i mean it's at least not in the things that seem to matter in the self-driving space so you mentioned the demos um you know and i don't i don't have enough data as a sociologist to really say like oh this is why they do what they do um but you know my hypothesis is you know there's a real scarcity of talent and money um for this and there certainly was a scarcity of like partnerships with oems and you know the big trucking companies and there was a race for it right and the way that if you don't have you know the backing of alphabet um you you do a demo right and and you get a few more good engineers who say hey look they did that cool thing yeah like anthony lewandowski did with otto and that would resulted in the uber purchase of that that program um so what would i what would i ask i mean i think i would ask a lot of questions but well there's also on record and off record conversations which unfortunately i'm asking for an on-racket conversation and that i don't know if if um these companies are willing to have interesting unreacted conversations yeah i mean i assume that i like there are questions that i don't think you'd have to ask like i assume they're gonna be actually driverless right they're not gonna like keep the driver in there yeah um so i mean for the industry i think it would be interesting to know where they where they see that first adopter right oh you mean from like the scenarios that laid out which one are they going to take on yeah i mean because that's gonna again it's those really expensive good jobs right so those ltl jobs the like ups jobs now that's going to be that's where labor is too right that's where the teamsters are that's the only place they are left right um so that's that's going to be the big fight on the hill and public if if labor can muster it right i don't know um there's a really cool like um one thing i would recommend to to you and your listeners if you really want to see some like a remarkable page in sort of the history of labor and automation there's a a report that harry bridges who was um the socialist leader of the the longshoremen on the west coast and just you know galvanized that union and they they still control the ports today because of this vision that he laid down in the 1960s he put out a photojournal report called men and machines and basically what it was was it was an internal education campaign to convince the membership that they had to go along with automation machines were coming for their jobs and what the photo journal it's almost like 100 pages or something like that is like here's how we used to do it some of you old-timers remember it like we used to take the barrels olive oil and we'd stack them in the hold and we'd roll them by hand and we'd put the timber in and we you know stack the crates tight you know and and that was the pride of the longshoremen was a was a tight stow and now you all know you know their cranes that come down and there's no longer any you know rope slings and we're loading bulldozers into the hole to push the ore up into piles and then clamshells are coming down and and he made this case to them and he said this is why we're signing this agreement to basically allow the employer to automate and we're going to lose jobs but we're going to get a share of the benefits and so our wages are going to go up we're going to continue to control the hiring and training of workers our numbers are gonna go down but you know basically that last son of a who's working at the ports he's gonna be one one really well paid son of a you know it may just be one standing but he's gonna love his job um you should check out that report that's an interesting vision of a future that probably still holds that is i mean there is some level to which you have to embrace the automation yeah i mean who gets you know the benefits right it's like i mean think of the public dollars that went into developing self-driving vehicles in the early days right not just the vision of it right which was a public vision to to you know take soldiers out of harm's way um but you know uh a lot of money and there's some way if you are a business that's leveraging that technology from a broad historical ethical perspective you do owe it to the bigger community to pay back like for all the investment that was paid to to make that technology a reality in some sense i don't i don't know how to make that right right on one there's this pure capitalism and then there's uh communism and i'm not sure uh i'm not sure how how to get that balance right you know i don't i don't have all the answers in here you know and i don't i wouldn't expect you know um individual private companies to to kind of kick back right that's capitalism doesn't allow that right unless you have a huge monopoly right um and then you can on the back side create music halls and libraries and things like that but you know here's what i think you know the the the basic obligation is is you know come to the table like and and have an honest conversation with the policy makers with the truck drivers you know with the communities that are are at risk like at least let's talk about these things you know in a way that doesn't look like the way lobbying works right now where where you send a well-paid lobbyist to the hill to you know convince some representative or senator to stick a sentence or two in that favors you into like let's have a real conversation real human can we just do that yeah don't play games real real human conversation let me ask you um mention autopilot gotta ask you about tesla this renegade little company that seems to be from my perspective revolutionizing autonomous driving or semi-autonomous driving or at least the problem of perception and control they've got a semi on the way they got a truck on the way what are your thoughts about tesla semi you know i um and i did have some very preliminary conversations with um with uh you know policy folks there um you know nothing really in in the tech or business side of it too much um and here's why i think because electrification and autonomy run in opposite directions right um and i just you know um i don't see the application the value in self-driving for the truck that tesla's going to produce in the near term you know they're just you're not going to have the battery um now you could have wonderful safety systems and you know reinforcing you know the auto you know self-driving features supporting a skilled driver um but you're not going to be able to pull that driver out for long stretches the way that you are with driverless trucks so do you think i mean the reason so yeah the electrification is not obviously coupled with the automation [Music] they have a very interesting approach to semi-autonomous pushing towards autonomous driving right it's very unique no lidar now no radar it's computer vision alone from a large they're collecting huge amounts of data from a large fleet it's an interesting unique approach bold and fearless in this direction if i were to guess whether this approach would work i would say no it started one you would need way a lot of data and two because you have actual cars deployed on the road using a beta version of this product you're going to have a system that's far less safe you're going to run into trouble it's horrible pr like it just seems like a nightmare uh but it seems to not be the case at least up to this point it seems to be uh not you know on par if not safer and it seems to work really well and human the human factor somehow um manages like drivers still pay attention now there's a selection of who is inside the tesla autopilot user base right there could be a self-selection mechanism there but however it works these things are not running off the road all the time so it's very interesting whether that can sort of creep into the trucking space yes at first the long-haul problem is not solved they need to charge but maybe you can solve you know a lot of your scenarios involved small distances and you know that last mile aspect which is exactly what tesla is trying to solve for the hum uh for the for the regular uh passenger vehicle uh space is the city driving it's possible that you have these trucks it's it's almost like yeah you you solve the uh the last mile delivery part of some of the scenarios that you mentioned in autonomous driving space is that do you think that's from the people you've spoken with too difficult of a problem the the thing that you know keeps me so interested in this space and thinking that it's so important you know is is again that that efficiency question that safety question and the and the way that these economics can push us potentially you know toward a more efficient system so i want to see those tesla electric trucks running out to those truck ports where you're where you've got those two you know um two trucks with a human driver in front yeah right um you know i think that's now what's powering those is that hydrogen you know i mean i don't you know again it's very interesting as a researcher who does not have a background in technology it doesn't have a have a horse you know in this in this race i mean you know for all i know self-driving trucks will ultimately be achieved by some biomechanical sensor that uses echolocation because we took stem cells of bats right you know i mean i know you know i i don't i am completely um unable to assess who's you know who's that or who's behind her who makes sense but but i think one key component there and this is what i see with tesla often and it's it's quite sad to me that other companies don't do this enough is is that first principles thinking like wait wait okay it's looking at the inefficiencies as opposed to i worked with quite a few car companies and they basically have a lot of meetings there's a lot of meetings and uh the discussion is like how can we make this cheaper this cheaper this cheaper this component cheaper this cheaper the cheapification of everything just like you said as opposed to saying wait a minute let's step back let's look at the entirety of the inefficiencies in the system like why have we been doing this like this for the last few decades like start from scratch can this be 10x 100x cheaper like if we not just decrease the the cost of one component here or this component here or this component here but like let's like redesign everything let's uh infrastructure let's have special lanes or in terms of truck ports as opposed to having regular human control truck ports have some kind of weird like like sensors like where everything about the truck uh connecting at that final destination is automated fully from the ground up you build the facility from the ground up for the autonomous truck um all all those kinds of sort of questions or platooning let's say wait a minute okay i know we think platooning is hard but can we think through exactly why it's hard and can we actually solve it like if we collect a huge amount of data can we solve it and then tell teleoperation like okay yeah yeah it's difficult to have good signal but can we actually can we have can we consider the the the probability of those edge cases and what to do in the edge cases when the tail operation fails like how difficult is this what are the costs how do we actually construct a uh teleoperation center full of humans that are able to pay attention to a large fleet where the average number of vehicles per human is like 10 or 100. you know like having that conversation as opposed to kind of having you know you show up to work and say all right it seems like uh you know because of kovid we you know are not making as much money can we have a cheaper can we give less salary to the trucker and can we uh uh build like uh um decrease the cost or decrease the frequency at which we buy new trucks and when we do buy new trucks make them cheaper by making them crappier like this kind of discussion this is why to me it's like tesla is like rare on this and so there's some sectors in which innovation is part of the culture in the automotive sector for some reason it's not as much um this is obviously the problem that ford and gm are struggling with it's like they're really good at making cars at scale cheap and they're like legit good like toyota at this they're some of the greatest manufacturing people in the world right that's incredible but then when it comes to hiring software people they're horrible so it's it's culture and then it's such a difficult thing for them to sort of embrace but greatness requires that they embrace this embrace whatever is required to remove the inefficiency from the system and that may require you to do things very differently that you've done in the past yeah i mean there are certain things that the market can do well in my you know this is how i see the world right um is you know and there that's the best way to to to organize certain kinds of activities is the market and and private interest but i i think we go too far in in some areas transportation is if we can't have a public debate about the roads that we all pay for um you forget about it private factories and know all these other you know healthcare and other places it's going to be way harder um there healthcare i guess has some you know some some uh some direct contact with the consumer where we're probably gonna have lots of um sort of hands-on public policy about you know concerns around patient rights and things like that but if we can't figure out how to have a public policy conversation around how technology is going to reform our public you know roadways and our transportation system like we're you know we're really leaving way too much to private companies it's just it's not it's not in there i get asked this question like what should companies do and i'm like you know just go about doing what you're doing you know i mean please come to the table and talk about it but it's not their role i mean i appreciate you know uh elon's you know attempts to sort of you know have species level goals you know like oh you know we're gonna go to mars i mean that's amazing and that's incredible that that someone can realize you know that you know have a chance at realizing that vision it's amazing right but when it comes to so many areas of our economy you know we can't wait for a hero um you know we we have to have and they're way too many interests involved you know it's who builds the roads who you know i mean the the money that sloshes around on capitol hill to decide what happens in in these infrastructure bills and the transportation bill is just obscene right see i think so it's an interesting view of markets correct me if i'm wrong let me let me propose a theory to you that progress in the world is made by heroes and the markets removed the inefficiencies from the work the heroes did so going to mars from the perspective of marcus probably has no value maybe you can argue it's good for hiring to have a vision or something like that but like those big projects don't seem to have an obvious value but the world our world progresses by those big leaps and then as after the leaps are taken then the markets are very good at uh removing sort of inefficiencies but it just feels like the autonomous vehicle space and the autonomous trucking space requires leaps it doesn't feel like we can sneak up into a good solution that is ultimately good for labor like for human beings in the system it feels like some like uh probably a bad example but like a henry four type of character steps in and say like we need to do stuff completely differently um yeah and i you said we can't hope for a hero but it's like no but we can say we need a hero we need more heroes so if you're a young kid right now listening to this we need you to be a hero it's not like we need you to start a company that makes a lot of money no you need to start a company that makes a lot of money so that you can uh feed your family as you become a hero and take huge risks and potentially go bankrupt those risks is how we move society forward i think maybe there's a romantic view i don't know i totally disagree you disagree god damn it i mean i and the two of us you're the knowledgeable one no no um no no i i think it's a it's a matter of like do we need those heroes absolutely i mean i i i saw the you know um the boosters come down from spacex's rockets and you know land nearly simultaneously with my kids um you know after school one day and i thought oh my god like this is like science fiction has been made real it's incredible and it's a pinnacle of human achievement right it's like this is what we're capable of but we need to have that those heroes oriented we need to allow them right to orient toward the right um toward the goals right we got it climate change you know i mean all the heroes out there right i mean it's time it's time the clock is ticking it's pat it's it's past time i've been working on climate change issues since you know the mid 90s like i i still remember um the first time in 2010 when i got a grant to that was completely focused on adaptation rather than prevention and just when it when it hit me that like wow like so adaptation versus prevention is like acceptance that yeah there's going to be catastrophic impact we just need we need to figure out how do we at least live with that yeah and you know the grant was like okay our agriculture system is going to move our bread basket is no longer going to be california it's going to be illinois what does that mean for truck transportation so it's like uh so in terms of a big philosophical societal level that's kind of like giving up yeah in terms of the big heroic actions yeah you know failures in human history yeah that's going to be let's hope not the biggest but could be do you so so let me see why i disagree right um henry ford amazing right to sort of produce cars right daimler to put that first truck on the road without the roads right so there's like we need that innovation there's no doubt about it and there's r there are rules for that but there's big public stuff um that that that sets the stage that's critical and and you know and what it really is it's a it's a sociological problem it's a political problem it's a social problem we have to say and we have these screwed up ideas right so we have this politics right now where like everybody feels like they're getting screwed and someone undeserving is you know is benefiting when in fact like you know at least in the middle right they're huge i i used to teach this course in rich and poor you know in economic inequality and i would go through you know public housing subsidies in philadelphia um you know section 8 subsidies um you know and then i would go through my housing subsidies for my mortgage interest deduction and it worked out to basically the average payment for a section 8 housing voucher in my neighborhood i'm not a welfare recipient according to the dominant discourse and so we have this completely screwed up sense of like where our dollars go and you know where the who benefits from the investment and you know we need to you know we i don't know that we can do it but you know if we're gonna survive we need to figure out how to have honest conversations where private interest is where we need it to be in fostering innovation and and you know and rewarding the people who do incredible things please you know we we don't want to squash that but we need to harness that power to solve what i think are some pretty big you know existential problems so you think there's a like government level national level collaboration required for infrastructure projects like there's we should really have large moonshot projects that uh are funded by our governments at least guided by i mean i think there are ways to finance them and you know other things but we got to be careful right because that that's where you get all these sort of perverse you know unintended consequences and whatnot but if you look at transportation in the united states and it is the foundation of of the the you know manifest destiny economic growth right that that built the united states into the the world superpower that it became and the industrial power that it became it rested on transportation right it was like you know the erie canal i i grew up a few miles from where they dug the first shovel full of the erie canal and everyone thought it was you know crazy right um but those public infrastructure projects the the canals right the railroads yeah they were privately built but they wouldn't have been privately built without you know lincoln funding them essentially and giving you know the railroads you know land um in exchange for building them um the highway system the the eisenhower the the payback that the u.s economy got from the dwight d eisenhower interstate system is phenomenal right um no private entity was going to do that electrification dams water you know we we need to do this infrastructure yeah infrastructure and now more than ever it's been really upsetting to me on the covet front um there's one of the solutions to kovit which seems obvious to me from the very beginning that nobody is supposed to it's one of the only bipartisan things is at home testing rapid home testing there's no reason why at the government level we couldn't manufacture hundreds of millions of tests a month there's no reason starting in may 2020 and that gives power to a country that values freedom that gives power information to each individual to know whether they have covert or not so it's possible to manufacture them for under a dollar it's like an obvious thing it's kind of like the roads it's like everybody's invested let's put countless tests in the hands of every single american citizen maybe every citizen of the world the fact that we haven't done that today and there's some regulation stuff with the fda all the kind of drag in a feet but there's not actually a good explanation except our leaders and culturally we've lost the sort of uh uh not lost but it's a little bit dormant the will to do these big projects that better the world i still have the hope that when faced with uh catastrophic events the the more dramatic the more damaging the more painful they are the higher we will rise to meet those and that's where the infrastructure style projects are really important but it's certainly um a little bit challenging to remain an optimist in the times of covid because the response of our leaders has not been as great and as historic as i would have hoped i i would hope that the actions of leaders in the past few years in response to kovid would be ones that are written in the history books and we talk about it as we talk about fdr but sadly i don't know i think the history books will forget this the actions of our leaders um let me just to wrap up autonomy when you look into the future are you excited about automation in the space of trucking is it you know when you go to bed at night do you see a beautiful world in your vision that involves autonomous trucks like all the truckers you've become close with you've talked to do you see a better world for them because of autonomous drugs damn you lex you know why because i mean i i want to be an optimist you know and and i i want to think of myself i guess as a half glass bowl kind of person but you know when you ask it like that and and i think about you know like that when i when i look at the challenges to harnessing that for you know just let's take let's take just you know labor and and climate right there there are other issues congestion etc infrastructure that that are going to be affected by this you know again those big transformat transformational issues i think it's going to take the best of us like it's going to take the best of our our policy approaches it's going to take you know we need to start investing in building those in rebuilding those institutions i mean that's what we've seen in the last four years right and and that the erosion of that was so clear in among these truck drivers like you know when trump you know came in and said like you know free trades good for workers like yeah right you know um i grew up in the rust belt you know i watched factory after factory clothes all of my ancestors worked at the same factory it's still holding on by a thread like you know the the democratic party told you know blue collar workers for years i don't worry about you know free trade it's not it's not bad for you and i know the economist will probably get in the comment box now um you know about how we look forward to your comments we look forward to your comments about how free trade benefits everybody um but you know immigration you know you you go and i'm you know i think immigration is great the united the united states benefits from it tremendously right but there are costs right go down to south philadelphia and find a dry waller and tell him that immigration hasn't hurt him right you know go go to these places where there's competition right um and and yes we benefit overall but we have a system that that allows some people to pay really high costs um and and trump trump tapped into that you know and and there was no there was no you know there's more than that too obviously and there's there's lots of really dark stuff that goes along with it that you know you know the sort of racialization of others and things like that but but he hit on those core you know issues that you know if you were to go back over my trucking interviews for 15 years you would have heard those stories over and over and over again that sense of voicelessness that sense of powerlessness that sense that there's no difference between the democrats and the republicans because they're all going to screw us over yeah and that was there you know and you could just ignore it as long as you want and tell people don't worry trade's good for you don't worry immigration is good for you as their communities lose factories and i mean a lot of them were lost to the south before they were lost to overseas whatever but um tapped into that you know we and and it's there's a fundamental distrust of you know you look at these like pew polls on like you know whether people trust the media right but whether or not they trust higher education you know um you know these institutions that i find magical right i mean you look at the the the vaccine research and stuff that you know just you know brilliant you know people doing incredible things for humanity like you know the idea that like you know we can we can take these viruses that you know used to ravage through the human population and that we had to be terrified of and you know we've we've you know we've suffered but you know we have such power now to to to defend ourselves right behind these programs right and and to see those people be like hey i'm not sure if higher education is good for the country or not you know it's like where where are we you know so we need to rebuild the faith and trust in those institutions and have these but we we need to have honest conversations before people are gonna poor people are gonna buy it you know you have ideas for rebuilding the trust and giving a voice to the voices so is is the many of the things we've been talking about is so sort of deeply integrated you think like this is the trouble i have with people that work on ai and autonomous vehicles and so on it's not just a technology problem it's it's this um human pain problem it's the uh the robot essentially silencing the voice of a human being because it's lowering their wage making themselves more and giving them no tools of how to escape that suffering is there something um i mean it even gets into the question of meaning you know so money is one thing but it's also what makes us happy in life you know a lot of those uh truckers the set of jobs they've had in their life were defining to them as human beings and so and the question with automation is is not just how do we have a a job that uh gives you money to feed your family but also a job that gives you meaning it gives you pride yeah and for me the hope the hope is that ai and automation will provide other jobs will be that will be a source of meaning um but coupled with that hope is that there will not be too much suffering in the transition and that's not obvious from as from the people you've spoken with i mean i think we need to differentiate between the effects of technology and the effects of capitalism right and and they are you know um the the fact that workers don't have a lot of power right um in this system matters now we had a system right and that's why i would say you know go to that you know harry bridger's report bridges report and you know those were workers who who had a sense of power they said you know what we can we can demand some of the benefits like yeah automate our jobs away but you know kick a little down to us right and and we had in the golden era of american industrialism in post-world war ii that was the that was the contract the contract was employers can do what they want in automation and all these things yeah sure there's some union rules that that make things a little you know less efficient in places but the key compromise is tie wages to productivity that's what we did we tied that's what unions did they tied wages to productivity kept demand up right it was good for the economy some economists think right um and and that's what you know we need to i think we need to acknowledge that we we need to acknowledge the the fact that it's not just technology it's technology in a social context in which some people have a lot of power to determine what what happens for me i don't have all the answers but i know what my answer is and my answer is i i think i started with this you know i can learn from every single person you know uh did i have to talk to the 200th truck driver in my opinion yes because i was going to learn something from that 200th truck driver now people with more power might talk to none or they might talk to five and say okay i got it you know i people are amazing and every one of them has a life experience and concerns and you know um can teach us something and they're not in the conversation with him you know and i know this because i'm the expert you know so i get pulled in to these conversations and people want to know you know what's going to happen to labor you know it's like well i try so i try to be a sounding board and i feel i feel a tremendous weight of responsibility um you know for that um but i'm not those workers you know and and they may they may listen to this or you know walk in the door sometimes it's about me like that guy's full of that's not what i think about you know um and they don't get heard over and over and over but in a small way you are providing a voice to them and that's kind of the the if at scale we apply that empathy and listening then we could provide the voice to the voiceless through our votes through our money through i mean that's one way to make capitalism work at not making the the powerless more powerless is by all of us being a community that listens to the pain of others and tries to minimize that to try to give a voice to the voiceless give power to the powerless i have to ask you on by way of advice in young people high school students college students entering this world full of automation full of these complex labor markets markets period what would you uh what kind of advice would you give to that person about how to have a career how to have a life they can be proud of yeah i think you know this is such a great question i don't um [Music] it's okay to quote steve jobs right always yeah i mean so and i just heard this recently it was a commencement speech that he gave and i can't remember where it was um and he was talking about you know he you know he had famously dropped out of school but continued to take classes right um and and he took a calligraphy class and it influenced the design of the mac and and sort of fonts and you know just was was something that he had no you know sense of what it was going to be useful for and his lesson was you know you you can't connect the dots looking forward you know looking back you can see all the pieces that sort of led you to where you ended up and for me studying truck driving like i mean i literally went to graduate school because i was worried about climate change and like you know i had a whole other dissertation plan and then was like driving home and like i had read about all this management literature and sort of like how you get workers to work hard for my qualifying exams and then read a popular article on on satellite linked computers and the story in the literature was just a sense of autonomy and and i was like well that monitoring must affect the sense of autonomy and it's just this question that i found interesting and it never in a million years that i ever thought i was gonna like study you know spend 15 years of my life studying truck driving um and it was like if you were to map out a career path in academia or research like you know you would you would do none of the things that i that i did that many people advise me against where like you can't like go spend a year working as a truck driver you know like that's crazy or you know you can't you know spend all this time trying to write like one huge book and you know um if i could just interrupt what what was the fire that got you to take the leap and go and work as a truck driver and go interview truck drivers this is what a lot of people would be incapable of doing just took took that leap what the heck what the heck is up with your mind that allows you to take that big leap so i think it's probably like tolkien and you know i mean i think as a teenager you know i yeah i sort of uh adopted some sense of needing to you know heroically go out in the world and and you know um which i've done at various points in my life and like looking back in absolutely stupid ways um that you know where i could have completely ended up dead and traumatized my my family including like i took a couple week trip in the pacific um like solo trip and a kayak and basically my kayaking experience up till that you know point had been you know on a fairly calm lake and like class one solo trip on a kayak in the pacific yeah yeah so i was working i was working on forestry issues and we were starting a campaign up in really remote british columbia and i i was like okay if i'm going to work on this i've got to actually go there myself and see what this is all about and see whether it's worth like devoting my sort of you know life right now to and just drove up there with this kayak and you know put into the pacific and um it was insane you know like the tides are huge and you know there was one point in which i was going down a fjord and two fjords kind of came up and there was a cross channel and i had hit the timing completely wrong and the tide was sort of rushing up like you know rivers in these you know two fjords and then coming through this cross channel and met and created this giant standing wave that i had to paddle through um and now actually very recently i've gone out on white water with some people who know what the hell they're doing and i realized like just how absolutely stupid and and you know ill-fit i was but that's just that i think i've always had that were you afraid when you had that wave before that wave scared the out of me yeah okay what about taking a leap and becoming a trucker yeah there was some nervousness for sure i mean and you know i guess my advantage as an ethnographer is i i grew up in a a blue collar environment you know again all my um ancestors were factory workers so i can move through spaces um i i'm really i feel conf i can become comfortable in lots and lots of places you know not everywhere but you know along class lines for sort of white you know even white ethnic workers like that's you know i can move in those spaces fairly easily i mean not entirely there was one there was one time where i was like okay you know and i grew up around people worked on cars i've been to drag races in nascar and um and i've been to you know colgate university and that's why and i think that was probably my initial training was you know being this just working class kid who ends up in this you know sort of blue blood small liberal arts college and just feeling like you know both having the entire world opened up to me like philosophy and buddhism and things that i had never heard of you know and just became totally obsessed with and just like you know just following my interest but also culturally perhaps didn't feel like you fit in feeling like just a fish out of water and just you know but and at the same time that you know sort of drove me in the sense that it drove an opening of my mind because i couldn't understand it you know i was like i didn't know that this world existed i don't understand and i think maybe that's where my real first step in trying to understand other people because they were my friends you know i mean they were my teammates i played lacrosse in college like you know i was close to people who came from such different backgrounds than i did and i just i was so confused you know and so i think i i learned to learn um and then you know sort of went from there and then developed your fascination with people and the funny thing is you went from trucking now to autonomous trucks i mean just speaking of not being able to connect the dots and you know your life in the next 10 years could take very interesting directions that's very difficult to first of all us meeting is a funny little thing given the things i'm working on with robots currently but you know it may not relate to trucks at all there's uh at a certain point autonomous trucks are just robots and then it starts getting into a conversation about the roles of robots in society yeah and uh and the roles of humans and robots and that interplay is right up your alley yeah as somebody who deeply cares about humans and have somehow found themselves studying robots yeah no it's crazy i mean even four four or five years ago i i would if you had asked me if i was going to be studying trucking still i would have said no and so my advice is i think if i was gonna give advice you know um is you know you can't connect the dots looking forward you just gotta follow what interests you you know and and i think we we we downplay right that when we when we talk to you know kids especially you know if you have some bright gifted kid that gets identified as like oh you could go somewhere then we're like we feed them stuff and like we'll learn the piano and learn another language right to learn robotics um and then we tell other kids like oh learn a trade you know like figure out what's going to pay well and not that there's anything against traits i think everyone should learn like manual skills to make things i think it's incredibly satisfying and and wonderful and we need more of that but also you know tell you know all kids it's okay to like take a class in something random that you don't think you're going to get any economic return on well because maybe you will end up going into a trade but that class that you took in studio art is going to mean that you know you you look at buildings differently right or you end up sort of putting your own stamp on you know woodworking you know and just i think that's the key is like follow you know it's cheesy because everybody says follow your passion but you know if we we say that and then we just you know the the 90 of what people hear is you know what's the return on investment for that you know it's like you're a human being like things interest you music interests you literature interests you video games interests you like follow it you know go grab a kayak and go into the go do something real no don't do that go do something stupid and uh something you'll regret a lot later my foremother thank god she didn't know well let me ask because uh for a lot of people work for me it is quote unquote work is a source of meaning and at the core of something we've been talking about with jobs is is meaning so the big ridiculous question what do you think is the meaning of life do you think work for us humans modern society is as core to that meaning is that's and is that something you think about in in your work sort of the deeper question of meaning not just financial well-being and the quality of life but the deeper search for meaning yeah um the meaning of life is love and you can find love in your work um now and i i don't think everybody can there are a lot of jobs out there that just you know you do it for a paycheck and i think we do have to be you know honest about that there are a lot of people who you know don't love their jobs and you know we don't have jobs that they're going to love um you know and and maybe that's not a sort of realistic you know that's a utopia right um but for those of us that have the the luxury i mean i think you you love what you do um that people say that i i think the key you know for real happiness um is to love what you're trying to achieve and maybe you love trying to build a company and make a lot of money just for the sake of doing that but i think the people who you know are really happy and have great impacts you know they they love what they do because it has an impact on the world that they think is it expresses that love right um and that could be you know at a counseling center that that could be you know um in your community that could be sending people to mars you know well i also think it doesn't necessarily the expression of love isn't necessarily about helping other people directly there's something about craftsmanship and skills we've talked about that's almost like you're celebrating humanity by like searching for mastery in the task in the simple like especially tasks that people outside me uh see as menial as is not important nevertheless searching for mastery for excellence in that task there's something deeply human to that and also fulfilling that just like driving a truck and getting damn good at it like you know the best who's ever lived and driving the truck and taking pride in that that that's uh deeply meaningful and also like a real celebration of humanity and a real show of love i think for for humanity yeah yeah i just had my floors redone and the guy who did it was a he's an artist you know he sanded these old hundred-year-old floors and made him look gorgeous and yeah this is craft that's love right there yeah i mean he showed us some love the the you know the product was just like since his enriching our lives steve this was an amazing conversation we've covered a lot of ground your work just like you said impossible to connect the dots but i'm i'm glad you did all the amazing work you did you're you're exploring human nature at the core of what of what america is the the blue collar america so thank you for your work thank you for the care and the love you put in your work and thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me i appreciate it lex i i'm a big fan so it's just been great to be on thanks for listening to this conversation with steve vaseli to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from napoleon hill if you cannot do great things do small things in a great way thank you for listening and hope to see you next time