"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..."

"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 a..."

"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 experie..."

"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 cont..."

"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 li..."

"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 rec..."

"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 ..."

"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 t..."

"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 ..."

"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 th..."

"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 tri..."

"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..."

"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 dow..."

"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 tex..."

"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 th..."

"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 ac..."

"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 po..."

"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 u..."

"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-insu..."

"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 paperwo..."

"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 mini..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 psycholo..."

"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 th..."

"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 o..."

"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 e..."

"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 kno..."

"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 ther..."

"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 th..."

"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 whi..."

"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..."

"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 gettin..."

"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 bett..."

"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 system..."

"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 actu..."

"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 yo..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 fro..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 f..."

"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 ..."

"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 landscape..."

"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 t..."

"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..."

"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 c..."

"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 wil..."

"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..."

"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 la..."

"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 ..."

"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 dr..."

"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..."

"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 su..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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 behin..."

"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 ..."

"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 developme..."

"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 l..."

"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'v..."

"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 tho..."

"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..."

"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 t..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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 h..."

"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 beco..."

"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 o..."

"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 an..."

"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..."

"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 affec..."

"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..."

"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 reall..."

"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 tha..."

"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 responsibilit..."

"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..."

"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 s..."

"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..."

"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 r..."

"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 t..."

"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 th..."

"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..."

"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 ar..."

"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 p..."

"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 rig..."

"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 th..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 compu..."

"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 a..."

"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 appr..."

"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 follo..."

"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 doi..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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 conversat..."

"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 ..."

"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 m..."

"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 i..."

"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 ci..."

"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 hor..."

"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..."

"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 truck..."

"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 ..."

"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 ta..."

"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 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 ho..."

"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 ..."

"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 ev..."

"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 ..."

"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 a..."

"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 watch..."

"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 factorie..."

"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..."

"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 kno..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 th..."

"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 conve..."