Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream | Lex Fridman Podcast #237

The following is a conversation with Steve Vascelli, formerly a truck driver and now a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies freight transportation. His first book, the Big Trucking and 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 Vascelli. You wrote a book about trucking called the Big 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, same thing that he asked the trucker. You worked as a trucker for six months and now while working on the previous book, what's it like to be a truck driver?

I think that captures really does.

Can you take me through the whole experience, what it takes to 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, I live with people, I work with people, I talk to them, try to understand, you know, their world.

Ethnographer, by the way, what is that? The science and art of capturing a, 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 as a, as a society, maybe as a subculture. Right. What kind of 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 put that individual biography into the long historical sweep of humanity, if at all possible. My goals are typically more modest than C. Wright Mills's, and to then put that biography in the larger social structure to try to understand that person's life and the way they see the world, their decisions in. 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 capture 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. 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 I don't know if it's more art or science, but what does it take to be great at this?

I do think my first book was a success relative to my goals of trying to really get at the heart of sort of the central issues and the lives being led by people. If I have a resource, a talent, it's that I'm a good listener. I can talk with anybody. My wife loves to remark on this, that I can sort of sit down with anyone. I think I learned that from my dad, who worked at a factory and actually had a lot of truckers go through the gate that he operated. And he always had a story, you know, a joke for everybody. Kind of got to know everyone individually. And he just kind of 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 got to ask you. I'm sorry to interrupt, because I'm clearly, of the two of us, the poorer listener.

I think you're a great listener. I've been listening to the podcast. I think you're a great listener.

I really appreciate that you've done a large number of interviews, like you said, of truckers, for this book. I'm just curious, what are some lessons you've learned about what it takes to listen to a person again, the ethnographer goal to get to the core.

Yeah, I'm a ruminator. You know, I just sit with the data, you know, for years, I sat with the trucking data for almost 10 full years and just thought about the problems and the questions, using everything that I possibly could. And so in the moment, 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 keep telling me the things that I'm interested in. Now it never works out that way because they don't know what you're interested in. Right. And so it's. A lot of it is the. As you know, as a. I think you're a great interviewer, you know, prep, right? So you try to get to know a little bit about the person and sort of understand, you know, kind of the central questions you're interested in that they can help you explore. And so I've done hundreds of interviews with truck drivers at this point. And 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 recorder, 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 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 was interested in, they have to stop and get fuel and get services at truck stops. So I picked a truck stop at the juncture of a couple major interstates, went into the lounge that drivers have to walk through, you know, with my clipboard and everybody who came through and I said, hey, you know, are you on break? You know, that was sort of the first criteria was, do you have time? Right. And if they said yes, I said, you know, I'd say I'm a graduate student at Indiana University. I'm doing a study trying to understand more about truck drivers. You know, will you sit down with me? And I think the first. I think I probably asked like 104 or 103 people to get the first hundred interviews.

That's pretty good odds.

It's amazing, right, for, you know, any response rate like that for interviewing. 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, a lot of struggles, you know, and it's. They take different forms. You know, one of the things that they talk about is the impact on their families. They. 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 a wash.

So, you know, I had this experience. I met another person, and he recognized me from a podcast, and he said, you know, I'm. I'm a fan of yours and a fan of Joe Rogan, but you guys never talk. You always talk to people. Nobel Prizes. You always talk to these kind of people. You never talk to us regular folk. And 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, you know, that really stuck with me because I set that as a goal for myself, to make sure I talk to regular folk. And you did just this talking. Again, regular folk, it's human beings. All of them have experiences. If you were to recommend, to talk to. To talk some of these folks with stories, how would you find them?

Yeah, so 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, 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, bunch of huge truck stops, tons of trucks, and really nothing else out there. You know, it's in the middle of corn country. And, you know, again, truckers 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 in ways that maybe we're seeing in other parts of our social world. But truckers are generally real, open, friendly folks. Some of them ultimately like to work alone and be alone. That's a relatively small subset, I think. But all of them are Generally kind of open, trusting, willing to have a conversation. And so 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 and willing to strike up a conversation. You should try that.

You should. 100. We'll try this just. Again, we're just going from tangent to tangent. We'll return to the main question, but what do they listen to? Do they listen to talk radio? Did they listen to podcasts, audiobooks? 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. They'll call it the original Internet citizens band. You know, they, they, back in the 70s, they thought it was going to be the, the medium of democracy. And they love to just get on there and, you know, cruise along one truck after the other and chat away. Usually, you know, 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, you know, and that's. It's probably one of the stereotypes and it's. I think it was more true in the past, you know, about the sort of heterogeneity of truck drivers. 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, what does 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 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. It's super intimidating. I say in the book, you know, pretty handy guy, you know, familiar with tools, machines, like, you know, comfortable operating stuff. Like from. From the time I was a kid, the truck was just Like a whole nother 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 70ft long. It can weigh 80,000 pounds. You know, it does not stop like a car. It does not turn like a car. But at least when I started and this. This has changed. And it's part of the technology story of trucking. The first thing you had to do was learn how to shift it. And it doesn't shift like a manual car. The clutch isn't synchronized, so you have to. What's called double clutch. And it's. 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. So it's. 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 company 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, 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. 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, they get too old to do construction any longer. Right. The knees can no longer handle it. They get replaced by a machine. Their job gets, 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 $8,000 by the company that you have to pay back if you don't get hired. And so the stakes are high and this machine is huge and it's intimidating and so it's super stressful. I mean, I watched, you know, men, grown men break down crying about like how they couldn't go home and tell their son that they had been telling they were going to, you know, go become a long haul truck driver, that they'd failed. And it's kind of this super high stress system. And it's designed that way partly because as one of my trainers 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, knows to the grindstone. Because when you're a new truck driver, you're unsupervised, you know, and, and that's what they're really looking for, is that kind of quality of, 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. 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 saw people freeze up, you know, in that intersection. As, you know, horns are blaring and the truck's grinding, you know, gears and you just can't, you know, and they, and they just shut down. They're like, this isn't for me, I can't do it. You're right. It takes years if, you know, trucking is not considered a skilled occupation. But, you know, my six months there and I was a pretty good rookie. But when I finished, I was 20, I was still a rookie. Even shifting, definitely backing 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 was it was a giant gulf between us and between that and the really skilled drivers who've been doing it for 20 years, you know, is still another step beyond that. So it is highly skilled.

Would it be fair to break trucking into two? The task of truck, of driving a truck, the 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 emphasized the first one. What about the actual, like long haul highway driving?

Yeah. So, I mean, and they are very different. Right. And the key with the long haul driving is really a set of the way I came to understand it was a set of habits. Right. We have a sense of driving. Particularly men, I think, have a sense of driving as like being really skilled is like the goal. And you can kind of maneuver yourself out of, in and out of tight spaces with great speed and braking and acceleration. You know, 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 and 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, you know, what are you going to do in that situation? And what really good truck drivers do on the highway is they just keep themselves out of those situations entirely. They see it, they slow down, they, you know, they avoid it. And then the local driving is really something that takes just practice and routine to learn. You know, this quarter turn, it feels like the back of the truck sometimes is on delay when you're backing it up. So it's like, all right, I'm going to do a quarter turn of the wheel now to get the effect that I want, like five seconds from now in where that tail of that trailer is going to be. And there's just no. I mean, some people have a natural talent for that, you know, spatial visualization and kind of calculating those angles and everything. But there's really no escaping the fact that you've got to just do it over and over again before you're going to learn how to do it.

Well, do you mind sharing how much you were 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, and then I got bumped up to 26 cents a mile. So we had a minimum pay, which was sort of a new pay scheme that the industry had started to introduce to, you know, because there's, 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. 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 bill the 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, twelve hundred dollars. And I mean, I was a poor graduate student, so this was real, real money to me. And so I had this sort of natural incentive to earn a lot or to maximize my pay. Some weeks were that minimum, 500, very few. And then some I'd get 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, 30s, you know, cents per mile, 30 to 35.

So can we, can we try to reverse engineer that math, how that maps to 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 will then continue when we start talking about autonomous trucking. But, you know, you're saying all these cents per mile kind of thing. How does that map to, like, 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. 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. But increasingly over time, 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 congestion. Congestion. And the other one is that drivers are pretty cheap and they're, they're almost always the, the low people on the totem pole in some segments. And so their time is used really inefficiently. So I might go to that brewery to pick up that load of, of Bud Light and their dock staff may be busy loading up five other trucks. And they'll say, go over there and sit and wait. We'll call you on the CB when the dock's ready. So you wait there a couple hours, they bring you in. You never know what's happening in the truck. Sometimes they're loading it with a forklift. Maybe they're throwing 14 pallets on there full of kegs, but sometimes it'll take them hours. And you're sitting in that truck and you're, you're essentially unpaid. Then you pull out. You've got control over what you're going to get paid based on how you drive that load. And then on the other end you got a similar situation of kind of waiting.

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, to utilize truck labor more efficiently.

Absolutely.

And so that's the technology problem that one of several technology problems that could be addressed. I mean, what, so what did. If we just linger on it, what are we talking about in terms of dollars per hour? Is it close to minimum wage? Is it, you know, there's something you talk about. There was a conception or a misconception that truckers get paid a lot for their work. Do they get paid a lot for their work?

Some do, and I think that's part of the complexity. So you know, what interested me as an ethnographer about this was, you know, I'm interested in the kind of economic conceptions that people have in their heads and how they lead to certain decisions in labor markets. You know, why some people become an entrepreneur 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 the book. And the fact that drivers can hear, or potential drivers can hear about these, you know, workers who make $100,000 plus which, which happens regularly in the trucking industry. There are many truck drivers who make more than $100,000 a year, you know, is an attraction. But the industry is highly segmented and so the entry level segment and we can probably get into this, but you know, the industry is dominated by, you know, 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 in some states is, you know, what should truck drivers get paid for? 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 company.