Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
steve vaseli formerly a truck driver and
now a sociologist at the university of
pennsylvania who studies freight
transportation
his first book the big rig
trucking in the decline of the american
dream explains how long-haul trucking
went from being one of the best blue
collar jobs to one of the toughest
his current ongoing book project
driverless autonomous trucks and the
future of the american trucker explores
self-driving trucks and their potential
impacts on labor and on society
this is the lex friedman podcast to
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in the description and now
here's my conversation with steve
leselli
you wrote a book about trucking called
the big rig trucking and the decline of
the american dream and
you're currently working on a book about
autonomous trucking called driverless
autonomous trucks and the future of the
american trucker
i have to bring up some johnny cash to
you because i was just listening to this
song he has a ton of songs about
trucking but one of them i was just
listening to
it's called all i do is drive
where he's talking to an old truck
driver it goes
i asked him if those trucking songs tell
about a life like his
he said
if you want to know the truth about it
here's the way it is
all i do is drive drive drive
try to stay alive that's the course
and keep my mind on my load keep my eye
upon the road i got nothing in common
with any man
who's home every day at five all i do is
drive drive drive
drive drive drive drive so i got to ask
you uh same thing that he asked the
trucker
you worked as a trucker for six months
in in uh while working on the previous
book
um
what's it like to be a truck driver
i think that captures it
it really does
um can you take me through the whole
experience
what it takes to uh become a trucker
what actual day-to-day life was on day
one week one and then over time how that
changed
yeah
well the book is really about how that
changed over time
so my experience and i'm an ethnographer
right so i go in
uh i live with people i work with people
i talk to them i try to understand
you know their world
ethnographer by the way
what is that the science and art of
capturing a uh
the spirit of a people
yeah life ways you know i think that
would be a good way to capture it you
know try to understand
what makes them unique um
as a as a society maybe as a subculture
right what
makes them tick that might be different
than the way you and i are
sort of wired
and to really sort of thickly describe
it would be at least one component of it
that's sort of the basic essential and
then
for me i want to you know exercise what
c wright mills called the sociological
imagination
which is to you know put that individual
biography
into the long historical sweep of
humanity if at all possible
my goals are typically more modest than
sea right mills is and to you know then
put that biography in
the larger social structure right to try
to understand
that person's life and the way they see
the world um their decisions in light of
their interests relative to others and
conflict and power and all these things
that i find interesting in the context
of society and in the context of history
yeah and a small tangent what does it
take to do that
to uh capture
the uh this particular group the spirit
the music
the full landscape of experiences that a
particular group
goes through in the context of
everything else you only have limited
amount of time and you come to the table
probably with
preconceived notions that are then
quickly destroyed all that whole process
so it's i don't know if it's more art or
science but what does it take to be
great at this
i do think the my first book was
a success as you know relative to my
goals
of trying to really you know get at the
heart of of sort of the central issues
and and the lives being led by people if
i
have a a resource a talent it's that i'm
a good listener um
i can
you know
talk with anybody
you know my wife's you know loves to
remark on this that you know i can i can
sort of sit down with anyone
uh i think i learned that from my dad
who uh worked at a factory and actually
had a lot of truckers go through the
gate that he operated
and he always had a story you know a
joke for everybody kind of got to know
everyone individually and he just you
know taught me that like
essentially everyone has something to
teach you
and i try to embody that like that's
that's the rule is for me is
every single person i interact with can
teach me something
i gotta ask you i'm sorry to interrupt
because i'm clearly of the two of us the
poorer listener
uh you i think you're a great listener
i've i've been listening to the podcast
i think you're a great listener i really
appreciate that
um you've done a large number of
interviews like you said of truckers for
this book
so i'm just curious um
what are some lessons you've learned
about what it takes to
listen to a person
enough maybe guide you know the
conversation enough to get to the core
of the person the idea again the
ethnographer
goal to get to the get to the core
yeah
i i think
it's it doesn't happen in the moment
right so
i
i'm a ruminator you know i i just sit
with the data
you know for years i i sat with the
trucking data for almost 10 full years
and just thought it thought about the
problems and the questions
using everything that i possibly could
and so in the moment you know my ideal
interview is
you know
i open up and i say tell me about your
life as a trucker and they never shut up
and they and they keep telling me the
things that i'm interested in no it
never
works out that way because they don't
know what you're interested in right and
so it's um a lot of it is the
as you know as a i think you're a great
interviewer you know prep right i mean
so you try to get to know a little bit
about the person and sort of understand
you know kind of the the central
questions you're interested in that that
they can help you explore
um and so
i've done hundreds of interviews with
truck drivers um at this point and
i i should really go back and read the
original ones they're probably terrible
what's the process like you're sitting
down do you have an audio recorder and
also taking notes or do you do no audio
records just notes or yeah audio
recorder and you know social scientists
always have to struggle with sampling
right like who do you interview where do
you find them how do you recruit them
i just happen to have a sort of
natural place to go that gave me
essentially the population that i was
interested in you know so all these
long-haul truck drivers that i i was
interested in they have to stop and get
fuel and get services at truck stops
so i picked a you know truck stop
at the juncture of a couple major
interstates
went into the lounge that drivers have
to walk through you know with my
clipboard
and everybody who came through and i
said hey you know are you on break
and that was sort of the first
you know criteria was do you have time
right um and if they said yes i said you
know i'd say i'm a graduate student you
know at indiana university i'm doing a
study i'm trying to understand more
about truck drivers you know will you
sit down with me and i think the first i
think i probably asked like 104 103
people
to get the first 100 interviews
that's pretty good odds it's amazing
right
for you know any response rate like that
for inter i mean these are people who
sat down and gave me
an hour sometimes more of their time
just randomly at a truck stop and it
just tells you something about like
truckers have something to say
they're alone a lot
and so
i had to figure out how to kind of turn
the spigot on you know
and
i got pretty good at it i think yeah
so they have good stories to tell and
they have an active life of the mind
because they spend so much time on the
road just basically thinking
yeah there's a there's a lot of
reflection
um a lot of struggles you know and it's
they take different forms you know uh
one of the things that they talk about
is the impact on their families
they say truckers have the same rate of
divorce as everybody else and that's
because trucking saves so many marriages
because you're not around and ruins so
many and so yeah it ends up being awash
so
you know i had this experience um i met
another person he recognized me from a
podcast
and he said you know i'm a fan of yours
and a fan of joe rogan
but you guys never talk you always talk
to people know about prizes you always
talk to these kind of people you never
talk to
us regular folk
and uh that guy really stuck with me
first of all the idea of regular folk is
a silly notion i think people that win
nobel prizes are often more boring than
the people these regular folks in terms
of stories in terms of richness of
experience in terms of the ups and downs
of life
and uh
you know that really stuck with me
because i i set that as a goal for
myself to make sure i
i talk to regular folk
and you did just this talking again
regular folk
it's human beings
um
all of them have experiences
if you were to recommend
uh to talk to uh to talk some of these
folks with stories how would you find
them yeah so i i do do this sometimes
for journalists who you know will come
and they want to write about sort of
what's happening right now in trucking
you know um
and i send them to truck stops you know
i say you know
yeah there's a town called effingham
illinois
and it's just this place where you know
a bunch of huge truck stops tons of
trucks and really nothing else
out there you know it's in the middle of
corn country um and you know again
truckers in this
you know sadly i think you know the
politics of the day
it's changing a little bit
i think there's a little the
polarization is getting
to the trucking industry and in ways
that um you know maybe we're seeing in
other parts of of our
social world
but truckers are generally you know real
open sort of friendly folks
some of them ultimately like to work
alone and be alone that's a relatively
small subset i think um but all of them
are generally you know kind of open you
know trusting
willing to have a conversation and so
you go to the truck stop and
you go in the lounge and and they're
usually there's usually a booth down
there and somebody's sitting at their
laptop or on their phone
um and willing to strike up a
conversation you should try that you
should
100 we'll try this uh
just again we're just going from tangent
to tangent we've returned to the main
question but
what do they listen to
do they listen to talk radio
did they listen to podcast audio books
do they listen to music do they listen
to silence
everything everything everything some i
mean
and some still listen to the cb which
you know it's a it's an ever-dwindling
group um they'll call it the original
internet citizen's band you know they
they back in the 70s they thought it was
going to be the
the medium of democracy um and they love
to just get on there and you know cruise
along uh one truck after the other and
chat away usually it's guys who know
each other from the same company or
happen to run into each other but other
than that it's everything under the sun
um you know and and that's it's probably
one of the stereotypes and it's i think
it was more true in the past um you know
about the sort of heterogeneity of truck
drivers
um they're a really diverse group now
you know there's definitely
a large
still a large component of rural white
guys who work in the industry
but there's a huge growing
chunk of the industry that's that's
immigrants
people of color
and even some women still huge barriers
to women women entering it but it's a
much more diverse place than than most
people think
so let's return to your journey as a
truck driver
what uh what did it take to become a
truck driver what were the early days
like yeah so this is i mean this is a
central part of the story right that i
uncovered
and the the good part was that i went in
without knowing what was going to happen
so i i was able to experience it
as a new truck driver would is one of
the important stories in the book is how
that experience is constructed by
employers to sort of you know help you
think the way that they would like you
to think about the job and about the
industry and about the social relations
of it
um it's super intimidating uh
i say in the book you know pretty handy
guy you know familiar with tools
machines like you know comfortable
operating stuff like from from time i
was a kid
the truck was just like a whole other
experience i mean as as i think most
people think about it it's this big huge
vehicle right it's it's really long it's
70 feet long it can weigh 80 000 pounds
you know it does not stop like a car it
does not turn like a car um
but at least when i
started um and this this is changing
it's part of the technology story of
trucking
the first thing you had to do was learn
how to shift it
and
it doesn't shift
like a manual car the clutch isn't
synchronized so you have to do what's
called double clutch
and it's it's basically the foundational
skill that a truck driver used to have
to learn
so you would you know accelerate say
you're in first gear
you push in the clutch you pull the
shifter out of first gear you let the
clutch out and then you let the rpms of
the engine drop
an exact amount then you put push the
clutch back in and you put it in second
gear
if your timing is off those gears aren't
going to go together and so
if you're in an intersection you're just
going to get this horrible grinding
sound as you coast you know to a dead
stop in the you know underneath the
stoplight or whatever it is so the first
thing you have to do is learn to shift
it and so
at least for me and a lot of drivers who
are going to
private companies cdl schools what
happens is it's kind of like a boot camp
they ship me three states away from home
send you a bus ticket and say hey we'll
put you up for two weeks you sit in a
classroom you sort of learn the theory
of shifting
the you know theory of kind of how you
fill out your logbook
rules of the road
you know you do that maybe half the day
and then the other half you're in this
giant parking lot with one of these old
trucks and just like you know destroying
what's left of the thing you know just
and it's lurching and belching smoke and
just making horrible noises and like
rattling i mean in these things like
there's a lot of torque
and so if you do manage to get it into
gear but the engine's lugging i mean it
can throw you right out of the seat
right so it's this it's like you know
this bull you're trying to ride and it's
super intimidating um and the thing
about it is that for everybody there
it's
almost everybody there it's super high
stakes
so trucking has become a job of last
resort for a lot of people
and so they you know they lose a job
in manufacturing they
they get too old to do construction any
longer right the knees can no longer
handle it um
they get replaced by a machine their job
gets you know offshored and they end up
going to trucking because
it's a place where they can maintain
their income and so
it's super high stress like they've left
their family behind maybe they quit
another job
they're typically being charged a lot of
money so that first couple weeks like
you might get charged eight thousand
dollars by the company that you have to
pay back if you don't get hired
and so the stakes are high and this
machine is huge and it's intimidating
and so it's super stressful i mean i
watched you know men grown men break
down crying about like how they couldn't
go home and
tell their son that they'd been telling
they were gonna you know go become a
long-haul truck driver that they'd
failed and it's kind of this super high
stress system it's designed that way
partly because as one of my trainers
later told me it's basically a two-week
job interview
like they're testing you they're seeing
like you know how's this person going to
respond when it's tough you know when
they have to do the right thing and it's
slow
and you know they need to learn
something are they going to rush
you know or are they going to kind of
stay calm figure it out you know nose to
the grindstone because when you're in
your truck driver you're unsupervised
you know and that's what they're really
looking for is that kind of
quality of conscientious work
that's going to carry through to the job
the truck is such an imposing part of a
traffic scenario yeah so you said like
like turning it it stresses me out every
time i look at a truck because they i
mean the geometry of the problem is so
tricky
and so if you combine the fact that they
have to like everybody basically all the
cars in the scene are staring at the
truck and they're waiting often in
frustration
yeah and in that mode you have to then
shift gears
perfectly and move perfectly and if when
you're new especially
like you'll probably for somebody like
me it feels like it would take years to
become calm and comfortable in that
situation as opposed to be exceptionally
stressed under under the eyes of the
the road everybody looking at you
waiting for you is that the
psychological
pressure of that is that something that
was really difficult yeah absolutely
again just i i saw people freeze up you
know in that intersection as you know
horns are blaring and the trucks
grinding you know gears and you just
can't you know and they just shut down
they're like this isn't for me i can't
do it um you're right it takes years
if you know trucking is not considered a
skilled occupation
but you know my six months there and i i
was a pretty good rookie but when i
finished i was i was still a rookie even
shifting definitely backing
um tight corners and situations you know
i could drive competently
but the difference between me and
someone who had you know two three years
of experience um was
a it was a giant gulf between us and
between that and the really skilled
drivers who've been doing it for 20
years um you know is still another step
beyond that so it is highly skilled
would it be fair to break trucking into
the task of truck of driving a truck to
two categories one is like the local
stuff getting out of the parking lot
getting into getting into you know
driving down local streets and then
highway driving those two
those two tasks
what are the challenges associated with
each task you kind of emphasize the
first one uh what about the actual like
long haul
highway driving yeah so i mean they are
very different right um and and the the
key with the long-haul driving is really
a set of um the way i i came to
understand it was
a set of habits right um we have a sense
of driving particularly men i think have
a sense of driving as like
being really skilled is like the goal
and you you can kind of maneuver
yourself out of in and out of tight
spaces with great speed and breaking and
acceleration you know um for a really
good truck driver it's about
understanding traffic
and traffic patterns and making good
decisions so you never have to use those
skills
and the really good drivers
you know the the mantra is always leave
yourself an out
right so always have that safe place
that you can put that truck in case that
four-wheeler in front of you who's
texting loses control
um you know what are you going to do
in that in that situation and
what
really good truck drivers do on the
highway
is they just keep themselves out of
those situations entirely
they see it they slow down they you know
they avoid it
um and then the local driving is is
really something that takes just
practice and routine to learn you know
this quarter turn it feels like the back
of the truck sometimes is on sometimes
it's on delay when you're backing it up
so it's like all right i'm going to do a
quarter turn of the wheel now
and to get the effect that i want like
five seconds from now and where that
tail of that trailer is going to be and
there's just no i mean some people have
a natural talent for that you know
spatial visualization and kind of
calculating those angles and everything
but there's really no escaping the fact
that you've gotta just do it over and
over again before you're gonna learn how
to do it well
do you mind sharing how much you were uh
getting paid how much you were making as
a truck driver in your time as a truck
driver yeah i started out at 25 cents a
mile
uh and then i got bumped up to 26 cents
a mile so um
we had a minimum
pay which was sort of a new
pay scheme that the industry had started
to introduce
to you know because there's there's lots
of unpaid work and time
and so we had a minimum pay of 500 a
week that you would you would get if you
didn't drive enough miles to exceed that
um you get paid in sort of
so you get paid when you turn the bills
in which are which is the paperwork that
goes with the load so you know you have
to get that back to your company and
then that's how they build a customer
and so you might get a bunch of those
bills that kind of bunch up in one week
so you know i might get a paycheck for
you know 1200 and i mean i was a poor
graduate student so this was real real
money to me um and so i i i had this
sort of natural incentive to you know
earn a lot uh or to maximize my pay
some weeks were that minimum 500 very
few
and then some i'd get 1200 1300 bucks
pay has gone up
you know typical drivers now starting in
the 30s you know in the kind of job that
i was in uh 30s you know cents per mile
30 to 35.
so can we can we try to reverse engineer
that math how that maps the actual hours
so there's the hours connected to
driving are so
widely dispersed as you said some of
them don't count as actual work some of
it does that's a very interesting
discussion that we'll then continue when
we start talking about autonomous
trucking
but uh
you know you're saying all these cents
per mile kind of thing what
uh how does that map to like hourly
average hourly wage
yeah so i mean and this is kind of the
this is also an interesting technology
story in the end and it's the technology
story that didn't happen um so pay per
mile was you know invented by companies
when you couldn't surveil drivers you
didn't know what they were doing right
and you wanted them to have some skin in
the game
and so you'd say you know here's the
load it's going from
you know for me i might start in you
know the northeast maybe in upstate new
york with a load of beer
and say here's this load of beer bring
it to this address in michigan we're
going to pay you by the mile right if i
was being paid by the hour i might just
pull over at the diner and have
breakfast
so
you're paid by the mile uh but
increasingly
over time
the
the typical driver is spending more and
more time doing non-driving tasks lots
of reasons for that
one of which is railroads captured a lot
of freight that goes long distances now
another one is traffic congest
congestion um and the other one is that
drivers are pretty cheap and they're
they're almost always the low people on
the totem pole in some segments
and so their time is used really
inefficiently um so i might go to that
brewery to pick up that load of of bud
light
and you know their doc staff may may be
busy
loading up five other trucks and they'll
say you know go over there and sit and
wait we'll we'll call you on the cb when
the dock's ready so you wait there a
couple hours
they bring you in you know you never
know what's happening in the truck
sometimes they're loading it with a
forklift maybe they're throwing 14
pallets on there full of kegs but
sometimes it'll take them hours
you know and you're sitting in that
truck and you're you're essentially
unpaid
you know
then you pull out you've got control
over what you're gonna get paid based on
how you drive that load um and then on
the other end
you got a similar situation of kind of
waiting so so if that's the way truck
drivers are paid then there's a low
incentive for the optimization of the
supply chain to make them more efficient
right to uh to utilize truck labor more
efficiently
absolutely
and so that's the technology uh problem
that uh one of several technology
problems that could be
addressed um
i mean
what so what did uh
if we just linger on it what are we
talking about in terms of
uh dollars per hour is it close to
minimum wage is it you know there's
something you talk about there was a
uh
a conception or a misconception
that uh truckers get paid a lot
for their work do they get paid a lot
for their work
some do
uh and i think that's
part of the complexity so you know what
interested me as an ethnographer about
this was you know i'm interested in the
kind of economic conceptions that people
have in their heads and and how they
lead to certain decisions in labor
markets you know why some people become
an entrepreneur and and other people
become a wage laborer or you know why
some people want to be doctors and other
people want to be truck drivers
that conception right is is getting
shaped in these labor markets is the
argument of of the book
and
the fact that drivers can hear or
potential drivers can hear about these
you know workers who make a hundred
thousand dollars plus which which
happens regularly in the trucking
industry there are
many truck drivers who make more than a
hundred thousand dollars a year um you
know is an attraction but the industry's
highly segmented um and and so
the entry level segment and and we can
probably get into this but you know the
industry is dominated by
uh you know a few dozen really large
companies that are self-insured and can
train new drivers so if you want those
good jobs you've got to have several
years
up until recently now the labor market's
becoming tighter but you had to have
several years of accident-free
you know
perfectly clean record driving to get
into them
the other part of the segment you know
those drivers often don't make minimum
wage
but this leads to one of the sort of
central issues that has been in the
courts and in the legislature
um in some states
is you know what should truck drivers
get paid for right the industry you know
for the last 30 years or so has said
essentially it's the hours that they log
for safety reasons for the department of
transportation
right
now since the drivers are paid by the
mile
they try to minimize those because those
hours are limited by the federal
government so the federal government
says you can't drive more than 60 hours
in a week as a long-haul truck driver
and so you want to drive as many miles
as you can in those 60 hours and so you
under report them
right
and so what happens is the companies say
well that guy you know he only said he
logged 45 hours of work that week or 50
hours of work that's all we have to pay
him minimum wage for
when in fact typical truck driver in
these in these jobs will work according
to most people would sort of define it
as like okay i'm at the customer
location i'm waiting to load i'm doing
some paperwork you know i'm inspecting
the truck i'm feeling it
um just waiting to you know get put in
the dock 80 to 90 hours would be sort of
a typical work week for one of these
these drivers um just when you look at
that does they don't make minimum wage
oftentimes right just to be clear what
we're dancing around here is that a
little bit over a little bit under
minimum wage is nevertheless most
truck drivers seem to be making close to
minimum wage
like this is this
so like we maybe haven't made that clear
there's a there's a few that make quite
a bit of money but like you're
as an entry and for years you're
operating essentially
uh minimum wage and potentially far less
than minimum wage if you actually count
the number of hours
that are taken out of your life due to
your dedication to trucking
well if you count like the hours taken
out of your life um then you got to go
you know maybe a full 24.
that's right yeah from family from yeah
from the high quality of life parts of
your life
yeah and there's a whole nother set of
rules that the department of labor has
which basically say that a truck driver
who's dispatched away from home
for more than a day should get minimum
wage 24 hours
a day and that could be a state minimum
wage but typically what it would work
out to for most drivers is that you know
a minimum the minimum wage for a truck
driver should be 50s to thousands you
know 55 60 000 should be the minimum
wage of a truck driver and you've
probably heard about the truck driver
shortage like if you know uh which i
hope we can talk about um
if the minimum wage for truck drivers is
as it should be on the books at you know
around sixty thousand dollars we
wouldn't have a shortage of truck
drivers
oh wow
and to me sixty thousand is not a lot of
money for this kind of job
because you're
this isn't
this is essentially two jobs
and two jobs where you don't get to
sleep with your wife or see your kids
at night
that's 60 000 is a very little money for
that but you're saying if it was 60 000
you wouldn't even have the shortage if
that was the minimum if that was the
minimum and i think that's what now we
have drivers who start in the 30s
um wow but yeah and i mean so we're
talking two three jobs really when you
look at the total hours that people are
working it you know
they can work over a hundred if they're
a trainer you know um training other
truck drivers well over a hundred hours
a week
so a job of last resort
maybe you can
jump around from tangent to tangent this
is such a fascinating
and difficult topic
i heard that there's a shortage of
truck drivers so there's more jobs than
truck drivers willing to take on the job
is that the state of
affairs currently
i mean i think the way that you you just
put that is is right
we don't have a shortage of people who
are currently licensed to do the jobs so
i'm working on a project for the state
of california to look at the shortage of
agricultural drivers and the the first
thing that
the dmv commissioner of the state wanted
to
look at was you know is there actually a
shortage of licensed drivers he's like
i've got a database here of all the
people who have a commercial driver's
license who could potentially have the
credential to do this um
there are about 145 000
jobs in california that require a
class a cdl which would be that that
commercial driver's license that you
need for the big trucks
um
about 145 000 jobs the industry in their
you know regular
promotion of the idea that there's a
shortage is always projecting forward
and says you know we're going to need
165 000 or so in the next 10 years
they're currently like 435 000 people
licensed in the state of california to
drive one of these big trucks so so it
is not at all an absence of people who
i mean and again going back to what we
were talking about before
getting that license is not something
that you just walk down to the dmv and
take the test like this is somebody who
probably quit another job
was unemployed
and took months
to go to a training school right paid
for that training school oftentimes left
their family for months right invested
in what they thought was going to be a
long-term career and then said you know
what forget it i can't i can't do it you
know
so yeah so it's not just skill it's like
they were psychologically invested
potentially from months if not years
into this kind of position as perhaps a
position that if they lose their current
job they could fall to
okay so that's an indication that
there's something deeply wrong with the
job
if so many licensed people are not
willing to take it what are the biggest
problems of
uh the job of truck driver currently
yeah the the job the problems with the
job and the labor market right but let's
um let's start with the job which is you
know again
just so much time that's that's not
compensated directly for the amount of
time
um and that's just psychologically and
this was a big part of what i you know
sort of i studied and for the first book
was
you know
that conception of like what's my time
worth
right and like
what truck drivers love is
oftentimes is that tangible
uh outcome-based compensation so they
say you know what you know honest days
work i work hard i get paid for what i
do i drive 500 miles today that's what
i'm gonna get paid for
and then you get to that dock and they
tell you sorry the load's not ready
go sit over there and you stew
and that weight can break you
psychologically because your
your uh your time
every second becomes more worthless yeah
or worth less
yeah and again the the industry's gonna
say
for instance
okay well you know they've got skin in
the game right that argument about sort
of compensation based on sort of output
right um but that's a holdover from when
you couldn't observe truckers now they
all have you know satellite-linked
computers in the trucks that tell these
large companies
this driver was you know at this gps
location for four and a half hours right
so if you wanted to compensate them for
that time directly and the trucker can't
control what's happening on that
customer location you know they're
waiting for that you know firm that
customer to tell them hey pull in there
and so
what it becomes is just a way to shift
the inefficiencies and the cost of that
onto that onto that driver
no it's competitive for customers so if
you're walmart you might have your
choice of a dozen different
trucking companies that could move your
stuff
and if one of them tells you hey you're
not moving our trucks in and out of your
docks fast enough we're going to charge
you for how long our truck is sitting on
your lot if you're walmart you're going
to say i'll go see what the other guy
says right
and so companies are going to allow that
customer to essentially waste that
driver's time
you know in order to to keep that
business
can you try to describe the economics
the labor market of the situation you
mentioned freight and railroad
what is the
sort of the
dynamic uh financials the economics of
this that allow for
such
low
low salaries to be paid to truckers like
what what's the competition what's the
alternative to
transporting goods via trucks like what
seems to be broken here from an
economics perspective yeah so it's uh
well nothing it's it's it's a perfect
market
okay right i mean so for economists this
is how it should work right um but the
inefficiencies like you said sorry to
interrupt are pushed to the truck driver
doesn't that like spiral doesn't that
lead to a poor performance on the part
of the truck driver and just like make
the whole thing more and more
inefficient in it and it results in
lower payment to the truck driver and so
on it just feels like
in capitalism
you should have a competing solution
in terms of uh truck drivers like
another company that provides
transportation via trucks that are that
creates a much better experience for
truck drivers making them more efficient
all those kinds of things
or how is the competition being
suppressed here yeah so it is the
competition is based on who's cheaper um
and this is this is the cheapest way to
move the freight now you know they're
externalities right i mean this so this
is the
explanation that i think is is obvious
for this right there there are lots of
um
there are lots of costs that you know
whether it's that driver's time whether
it's the you know um time without their
family whether it's the you know
the fact that they drive through
congestion and and spew lots of diesel
particulates into
cities where kids have asthma and make
our commutes longer rather than more
efficiently use their time by sort of
routing them around
congestion and rush hour and things like
that um it this is the cheapest way to
to move freight um and so it's it's the
most competitive a big part of this is
public subsidy
of training so when those workers are
not paying for
um the training you and i often are
so if you you know lose your job because
of um you know foreign trade or
um you're you're a veteran using your gi
benefits um you may very well be offered
you know training
publicly subsidized training to become a
truck driver and so all these are
externalities that you know the the
companies don't have to pay for and so
this makes it the most profitable way to
move freight
so trucks is
way cheaper than uh trains
well over the long so one of the big
stories for these for these companies is
that the average length of haul um which
which becomes very important for
self-driving trucks the average length
of haul has been steadily declining
um over the last 15 years or so you know
this industry collected data from sort
of the you know the big firms that
report it but you know roughly been cut
in half from typically about a thousand
miles to under 500. um and under 500 is
what a driver can move in a day right so
you can get
loaded
drive and unload you know around 400
miles or something like that
i'm gonna steal a good question from the
pen gazette
interview you did which people should
read it's a great interview
was there a golden age for long-haul
truckers in america and if so this is
just a journalistic question and if so
what enabled it and what brought it to
an end
wow i i might have to have you read my
answer to that
that was a few years ago be interesting
to compare
what i'll say but um i mean one bigger
question to ask i guess is like
uh you know johnny cash wrote a lot of
songs about truckers there used to be a
time
when um perhaps falsely perhaps it's
part of the kind of perception that you
study with the labor markets and so on
there was a perception of truckers being
first of all a lucrative job and second
of all a job
uh to be desired
yeah so i mean
this is a
the trucking industry to me is is
fascinating but i think it should be
fascinating to a lot of people um so the
the golden age was really two different
kinds of um
of markets as well right today we have
really good jobs and and some really bad
jobs uh we had the teamsters union that
that controlled the vast majority of
employee jobs and even where they had
they had something called the national
master freight agreement and this was um
you know jimmy hoffa who who led the
union through its its sort of critical
um period by
the mid 60s had unified essentially the
entire nations trucking labor force
under one contract now you were either
you know covered by that contract or
your employer paid a lot of attention to
it
and so by the end of the 1970s
the typical truck driver was making well
more than a hundred thousand dollar
typical truck driver was making more
than a hundred thousand dollars in
today's dollars and was home every night
that was without a doubt
and even more than unionized auto
workers steel workers um 10 20 more than
than those workers made
that was the golden age force of job
quality wages teamster power they were
without a doubt the most powerful union
in the united states at that time
at the same time in the 1970s you had
the um
the mythic long-haul trucker
and these were the guys who were you
know kind of on the margins of the
regulated market which is what the
teamsters controlled a lot of them were
in agriculture which was never regulated
so in the new deal when they decided to
regulate trucking they didn't regulate
agriculture because they didn't want to
drive up food prices which would hurt
workers in urban areas so they
essentially left agricultural
truckers out of it
and that's where a lot of the kind of
outlaw
you know uh
uh asphalt cowboy
um you know imagery that we get
and um you know i grew up i know you
didn't grow up in in the us at this sort
of you know as a young child
when and i'm a bit older than you but
you know in the late 70s you know there
were movies and tv shows and cbs were
crazed and and it was all these kind of
outlaw truckers who were out there
hauling some unregulated freight they
weren't supposed to be trying to avoid
the bears you know who are the cops and
um you know with all this salty language
and these like you know um terms that
only they understood and you know the
partying at diners and popping pills you
know the california turnarounds so
asphalt cowboys truly
so yeah it's like another form of cowboy
movies oh absolutely yeah absolutely and
i think
that sort of masculine ethos of like
you got 40 000 pounds of something you
care about i'm your guy you know you
need it to go from new york to
california don't worry about it i got it
yeah that's appealing and it's tangible
right you think about people who don't
want to be paper pusher and they deal
with office politics like just give me
what you care about and i'll take care
of it you know just pay me fair you know
uh and that that appeals you mentioned
unions teamsters jimmy hoffa
big question maybe difficult question
what are some pros and cons of unions
historically and today in the trucking
space
yeah um
well if you're you're a worker there
there are a lot of pros um and i don't
you know and this is one of the things i
talked to truckers about a lot yeah
what's their perception of jimmy hoffa
for example and of unions
yeah so and this was probably one of the
central
hypotheses that i had going in there and
it may sound you know um
someone who does hard science right you
mean if they hear a social scientist you
know sort of use that terminology even
other social scientists hypothesis yeah
you know they they don't like it but i i
do like to think that way and my initial
hypothesis was that you know and it's
very simple
that you know that the tenure of the
driver in the industry would have a
strong effect on how they viewed unions
that you know somebody who had
experienced unions would be more
favorable and someone who had not would
not be right
um and that turned out to be the the
case
without a doubt but in in an interesting
way
which was that even the drivers who were
not part of the union
um who in the in the kind of
public debate
of
deregulation
uh were portrayed as these kind of small
business truckers who were getting shut
out by the big regulated monopolies and
the teamsters union you know the corrupt
teamsters union
even those drivers longed for the days
of the teamsters
because they recognized the overall
market impact that they had that that
trucking just naturally
tended toward excessive competition that
meant that there was no profit to be
made and oftentimes you'd be operating
at a loss and so even these you know the
asphalt cowboy owner operators from back
in the day would tell me when the
teamsters were in power i made a lot
more money
um and you know this is
you know unions at least those kinds of
unions like like the teamsters
you know
there's i think a lot of misconceptions
today sort of popularly about what
unions did back then
they tied wages to productivity like
that was the central thing that the
teamsters union did and you know there
were great accounts of sort of jimmy
hoffa's perspective
for all his portrayal as sort of corrupt
and criminal and there's you know i'm
not disputing that he broke a lot of
laws um
he was remarkably open
about
who he was and what he did he actually
invited a pair a husband and wife team
of harvard economists
to follow him around
and like opened up the teamsters books
to them
so that they could see how he was you
know thinking about negotiating with the
employers
and the teamsters and this goes back
well before hoffa back to the you know
1800s
they understood that
workers did better if their employers
did better and the only way the
employers would do better was if they
controlled the market
and so oftentimes the corruption and
trucking was initiated by employers who
wanted to limit competition and they
knew they couldn't limit competition
without the support of labor and so
you'd get these collusive arrangements
between employers and labor to say no
new trucking companies
there are 10 of us that's enough we
control seattle we're going to set the
price and we're not going to be undercut
when there's a shortage of trucks around
it's great rates rates go up but you get
too many trucks it's very often that you
end up operating at a loss just to keep
the doors open you know you don't have
any choice you can't it's what
economists call derived demand you can't
like make up a bunch of trucking
services and store it in a warehouse
right you gotta you gotta keep those
trucks moving to pay the bills
can we also lay out the kind of jobs
that are in trucking what are the best
jobs in trucking what are the worst jobs
in trucking what are we how many jobs
we're talking about today
yeah uh and what kind of jobs are there
so
um there there are a number of different
segments and the the sir the first part
would be you know are you offering the
first question would be are you offering
services to the public or are you moving
your own freight right so are you
a retailer say walmart um or uh you know
a paper company or something like that
that's operating your own
uh fleet of trucks that's private
um
trucking for hire
are are the folks who you know offer
their services out to other other
customers so you have private and for
hire in general for hire uh pays pays
less
is that because of the something you
talk about what employee versus
contractor situation or are they all
tricked or led to become contractors
that can become a part of it um as a
strategy but the the fundamental reason
is competition so those private carriers
don't um aren't in competition with
other trucking fleets right for their
own in-house services yeah so you know
they tend to and and this you know if
the question of why private versus for
hire because for hire is cheaper right
um and so if you need that if that
trucking service is central to what you
do and you cannot afford disruptions or
volatility in the price of it you keep
it in-house you should be willing to pay
more for that because it's more valuable
too and you keep it in-house and that so
that's an interesting distinction what
about and this is kind of moving towards
our conversation what can and can't be
automated
um
how else does it divide
yeah the the different trucking jobs so
it's the next big chunk is kind of how
much stuff are you moving right
and so we have what's called truckload
and truckload means you know you can
fill up a trailer either by volume or by
weight and then less than truckload less
than truckload the official definition
is like less than ten thousand pounds
you know this is going to be a couple
pallets of this a couple pallets of that
the process looks really different right
so that truckload is you know point a to
point b
i'm buying you know a truckload of of
bounty paper towels i'm bringing it into
you know my distribution center go pick
it up at the at the bounty plant bring
it to my distribution center right
nowhere in between do you stop um at
least process that freight less than
truckload what you've got is terminal
systems and this is what you had under
under regulation too
and so these terminal systems what you
do is you do a bunch of local pickup and
delivery maybe with smaller trucks
and you pick up two pallets of this here
four pallets of this there you bring it
to the terminal you combine it based on
the destination you then create a full
truckload you know um uh trailer and you
send it to another terminal where it
gets broken back down and then and then
out for local delivery that's gonna look
a lot like if you send a package by
by ups right they pick all these parcels
right figure out where they're all going
put them on planes or or in trailers
going to the same destination then break
them out to put them in what what they
call package cars
before i ask you uh about autonomous
trucks it's just pause for um your
experience as a trucker
did it get lonely like can you talk
about some of your experiences of what
it was actually like did it get lonely
yeah no i mean it was um
i didn't have kids at the time now now i
have kids i can't even imagine it um
uh you know i've been married for
five years
at the time my wife hated it i hated it
uh you know i describe in the book
the experience of being stuck
if i remember correctly was like ohio
uh at this truck stop in the middle of
nowhere and like you know sitting on
this concrete barrier and just watching
fireworks in the distance and like
eating chinese food on the 4th of july
and you know my wife calls me from like
the family barbecue
and our anniversary is july 8th and
she's like are you gonna be home and i'm
like
i don't know you know
um
i have a
uh cousin
whose husband drove
drove truck as a truck driver would say
drove truck for a while
um
and he told me before i went into it he
was like the the advantage you have is
that you know that you're not going to
be doing this long term
like and lex i can't even like
the emotional content of some of these
interviews i mean i would sit down at a
truck stop with somebody i had never met
before and you know you open the spigot
and the the the last question i would
ask drivers was
that by the time i really sort of
figured out how to do it the last
question i i would ask them is you know
what advice would you give to somebody
your nephew you know a family friend
asks you about what it's like to be a
driver and should they do it what advice
would you give them
and this question
some of these you know grizzled old
drivers you know tough tough guys
would that question would like some of
them would break down and they would say
i would say to them
you better have everything that you ever
wanted in life already
because
i've had a car that i've had for 10
years it's got 7000 miles on it i own a
boat
that hasn't seen the water in five years
my kids i didn't raise them like i i'd
be out for two weeks at a time
i'd come home
my my wife would give me two kids to
punish a list of things to do you know
on saturday night
and i might leave out sunday night or
monday morning you know i come home dead
tired my kids don't know who i am
and you know it was just like
it was heartbreaking to hear those
stories and before you know it
uh you know life is short and just the
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
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
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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