Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream

Lex Fridman (01:13.520)

It goes, I asked them if those trucking songs

Steve Viscelli (01:17.240)

tell about a life like his.

Lex Fridman (01:19.240)

He said, if you want to know the truth about it,

Steve Viscelli (01:22.320)

here's the way it is.

Lex Fridman (01:24.160)

All I do is drive, drive, drive,

Steve Viscelli (01:27.160)

try to stay alive, that's the chorus,

Lex Fridman (01:29.440)

and keep my mind on my load,

Steve Viscelli (01:30.880)

keep my eye upon the road.

Lex Fridman (01:32.260)

I got nothing in common with any man

Steve Viscelli (01:34.760)

who's home every day at five.

Lex Fridman (01:36.360)

All I do is drive, drive, drive,

Steve Viscelli (01:39.360)

drive, drive, drive, drive.

Lex Fridman (01:41.960)

So I got to ask you,

Steve Viscelli (01:43.600)

same thing that he asked the trucker.

Lex Fridman (01:45.760)

You worked as a trucker for six months

Steve Viscelli (01:48.680)

while working on the previous book.

Lex Fridman (01:50.440)

What's it like to be a truck driver?

Steve Viscelli (01:54.980)

I think that captures it.

Lex Fridman (01:57.940)

It really does.

Lex Fridman (01:59.660)

Can you take me through the whole experience,

Lex Fridman (02:01.620)

what it takes to become a trucker,

Lex Fridman (02:03.960)

what actual day to day life was on day one,

Lex Fridman (02:06.580)

week one, and then over time how that changed?

Steve Viscelli (02:09.340)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (02:10.660)

Well, the book is really about how that changed over time.

Lex Fridman (02:14.880)

So my experience, and I'm an ethnographer, right?

Lex Fridman (02:17.980)

So I go in, I live with people,

Steve Viscelli (02:21.060)

I work with people, I talk to them,

Lex Fridman (02:23.500)

try to understand their world.

Lex Fridman (02:26.860)

Ethnographer, by the way, what is that?

Lex Fridman (02:29.380)

The science and art of capturing the spirit of a people?

Steve Viscelli (02:35.140)

Yeah, life ways.

Lex Fridman (02:36.540)

I think that would be a good way to capture it,

Steve Viscelli (02:38.580)

try to understand what makes them unique as a society,

Lex Fridman (02:43.580)

maybe as a subculture, what kind of makes them tick,

Steve Viscelli (02:47.420)

that might be different than the way you and I are wired.

Lex Fridman (02:52.420)

And really sort of thickly describe it

Steve Viscelli (02:54.900)

would be at least one component of it.

Lex Fridman (02:56.980)

That's sort of the basic essential.

Lex Fridman (02:59.020)

And then for me, I want to exercise what C. Wright Mills

Lex Fridman (03:04.740)

called the sociological imagination,

Steve Viscelli (03:07.340)

which is to put that individual biography

Lex Fridman (03:11.140)

into the long historical sweep of humanity,

Steve Viscelli (03:15.580)

if at all possible.

Lex Fridman (03:17.540)

My goals are typically more modest than C. Wright Mills's.

Lex Fridman (03:21.020)

And to then put that biography in the larger social structure

Lex Fridman (03:26.820)

to try to understand that person's life

Lex Fridman (03:29.580)

and the way they see the world,

Lex Fridman (03:31.900)

their decisions in light of their interests

Steve Viscelli (03:34.340)

relative to others and conflict and power

Lex Fridman (03:36.740)

and all these things that I find interesting.

Lex Fridman (03:38.700)

And conflict and power.

Lex Fridman (03:40.180)

And interesting.

Steve Viscelli (03:41.020)

In the context of society and in the context of history.

Lex Fridman (03:43.860)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (03:44.700)

And the small tangent, what does it take to do that,

Lex Fridman (03:47.940)

to capture this particular group, the spirit, the music,

Steve Viscelli (03:54.500)

the full landscape of experiences

Lex Fridman (03:56.340)

that a particular group goes through

Lex Fridman (03:58.900)

in the context of everything else?

Lex Fridman (04:00.780)

You only have a limited amount of time

Lex Fridman (04:02.500)

and you come to the table probably with preconceived notions

Lex Fridman (04:06.060)

that are then quickly destroyed, all that whole process.

Lex Fridman (04:08.820)

So I don't know if it's more art or science,

Lex Fridman (04:11.500)

but what does it take to be great at this?

Steve Viscelli (04:14.500)

I do think my first book was a success

Lex Fridman (04:18.580)

relative to my goals of trying to really get at the heart

Steve Viscelli (04:22.740)

of sort of the central issues

Lex Fridman (04:25.140)

and the lives being led by people.

Steve Viscelli (04:28.100)

If I have a resource, a talent,

Lex Fridman (04:32.580)

it's that I'm a good listener.

Steve Viscelli (04:34.220)

I can talk with anybody.

Lex Fridman (04:38.900)

My wife loves to remark on this

Steve Viscelli (04:41.860)

that I can sort of sit down with anyone.

Lex Fridman (04:45.460)

I think I learned that from my dad who worked at a factory

Lex Fridman (04:49.020)

and actually had a lot of truckers go through

Lex Fridman (04:51.660)

the gate that he operated.

Lex Fridman (04:53.740)

And he always had a story, a joke for everybody,

Lex Fridman (04:57.100)

kind of got to know everyone individually.

Lex Fridman (04:59.420)

And he just taught me that essentially

Lex Fridman (05:02.460)

everyone has something to teach you.

Lex Fridman (05:04.740)

And I try to embody that.

Lex Fridman (05:06.500)

Like that's the rule is for me is every single person

Steve Viscelli (05:11.700)

I interact with can teach me something.

Lex Fridman (05:14.740)

I gotta ask you, I'm sorry to interrupt

Steve Viscelli (05:16.780)

because I'm clearly of the two of us, the poorer listener.

Lex Fridman (05:19.660)

I think you're a great listener.

Steve Viscelli (05:23.060)

Thank you.

Lex Fridman (05:23.900)

I've been listening to the podcast.

Steve Viscelli (05:24.940)

I think you're a great listener.

Lex Fridman (05:26.300)

I really appreciate that.

Steve Viscelli (05:28.420)

You've done a large number of interviews,

Lex Fridman (05:30.380)

like you said, of truckers for this book.

Steve Viscelli (05:33.860)

I'm just curious, what are some lessons you've learned

Lex Fridman (05:38.460)

about what it takes to listen to a person enough,

Steve Viscelli (05:43.220)

maybe guide the conversation enough

Lex Fridman (05:46.380)

to get to the core of the person, the idea,

Lex Fridman (05:49.220)

again, the ethnographer goal to get to the core?

Lex Fridman (05:54.020)

Yeah, I think it doesn't happen in the moment, right?

Lex Fridman (05:58.540)

So I'm a ruminator.

Lex Fridman (06:01.900)

I just sit with the data for years.

Steve Viscelli (06:05.780)

I sat with the trucking data for almost 10 full years

Lex Fridman (06:10.300)

and just thought about the problems and the questions

Steve Viscelli (06:13.860)

using everything that I possibly could.

Lex Fridman (06:16.900)

And so in the moment, my ideal interview is I open up

Lex Fridman (06:22.100)

and I say, tell me about your life as a trucker.

Lex Fridman (06:24.820)

And they never shut up.

Lex Fridman (06:26.900)

And they keep telling me the things that I'm interested in.

Lex Fridman (06:29.740)

Now, it never works out that way

Lex Fridman (06:32.100)

because they don't know what you're interested in, right?

Lex Fridman (06:34.500)

And so a lot of it is the, as you know,

Lex Fridman (06:38.620)

I think you're a great interviewer, prep, right?

Lex Fridman (06:41.620)

So you try to get to know a little bit about the person

Lex Fridman (06:45.060)

and sort of understand kind of the central questions

Lex Fridman (06:48.580)

you're interested in that they can help you explore.

Lex Fridman (06:52.820)

And so I've done hundreds of interviews with truck drivers

Lex Fridman (06:56.820)

at this point and I should really go back

Lex Fridman (06:59.940)

and read the original ones.

Lex Fridman (07:01.220)

They were probably terrible.

Lex Fridman (07:02.460)

What's the process like?

Lex Fridman (07:03.380)

You're sitting down, do you have an audio recorder

Lex Fridman (07:05.460)

and also taking notes or do you do no audio, just notes or?

Lex Fridman (07:08.900)

Yeah, audio recorder and social scientists

Lex Fridman (07:11.980)

always have to struggle with sampling, right?

Lex Fridman (07:13.980)

Like who do you interview?

Lex Fridman (07:15.140)

Where do you find them?

Lex Fridman (07:15.980)

How do you recruit them?

Steve Viscelli (07:17.540)

I just happened to have a sort of natural place to go

Lex Fridman (07:21.020)

that gave me essentially the population

Steve Viscelli (07:23.140)

that I was interested in.

Lex Fridman (07:24.900)

So all these long haul truck drivers that I was interested in

Steve Viscelli (07:27.660)

they have to stop and get fuel

Lex Fridman (07:29.380)

and get services at truck stops.

Lex Fridman (07:31.900)

So I picked a truck stop at the juncture

Lex Fridman (07:35.100)

of a couple of major interstates,

Steve Viscelli (07:36.980)

went into the lounge that drivers have to walk through

Lex Fridman (07:40.460)

with my clipboard and everybody who came through,

Lex Fridman (07:44.140)

I said, hey, are you on break?

Lex Fridman (07:46.660)

And that was sort of the first criteria was,

Lex Fridman (07:49.540)

do you have time, right?

Lex Fridman (07:51.740)

And if they said, yes, I said,

Steve Viscelli (07:53.460)

I'd say, I'm a graduate student at Indiana University.

Lex Fridman (07:57.580)

I'm doing a study,

Steve Viscelli (07:59.260)

trying to understand more about truck drivers.

Lex Fridman (08:01.460)

Will you sit down with me?

Lex Fridman (08:02.460)

And I think the first,

Lex Fridman (08:04.940)

I think I probably asked like 104 or 103 people

Steve Viscelli (08:08.380)

to get the first 100 interviews.

Lex Fridman (08:10.820)

That's pretty good odds.

Lex Fridman (08:11.860)

It's amazing, right?

Lex Fridman (08:13.660)

For any response rate like that for interviewing,

Steve Viscelli (08:16.700)

these are people who sat down and gave me an hour

Lex Fridman (08:19.580)

or sometimes more of their time,

Steve Viscelli (08:21.580)

just randomly at a truck stop.

Lex Fridman (08:23.100)

And it just tells you something about like,

Steve Viscelli (08:26.300)

truckers have something to say.

Lex Fridman (08:28.140)

They're alone a lot.

Lex Fridman (08:30.220)

And so I had to figure out how to kind of

Lex Fridman (08:33.020)

turn the spigot on, you know?

Lex Fridman (08:35.260)

And I got pretty good at it, I think, yeah.

Lex Fridman (08:38.540)

So they have good stories to tell

Lex Fridman (08:40.180)

and they have an active life in the mind

Lex Fridman (08:41.860)

because they spend so much time on the road

Steve Viscelli (08:43.660)

just basically thinking.

Lex Fridman (08:45.300)

Yeah, there's a lot of reflection,

Lex Fridman (08:49.140)

a lot of struggles, you know?

Lex Fridman (08:50.540)

And they take different forms.

Steve Viscelli (08:53.860)

One of the things that they talk about

Lex Fridman (08:55.100)

is the impact on their families.

Steve Viscelli (08:56.860)

They say truckers have the same rate of divorce

Lex Fridman (08:59.220)

as everybody else.

Lex Fridman (09:00.380)

And that's because trucking saves so many marriages

Lex Fridman (09:03.060)

because you're not around and ruins so many.

Lex Fridman (09:05.220)

And so it ends up being a wash.

Lex Fridman (09:08.900)

So I had this experience.

Steve Viscelli (09:12.820)

I met another person and he recognized me from a podcast.

Lex Fridman (09:16.420)

And he said, you know, I'm a fan of yours

Lex Fridman (09:18.980)

and a fan of Joe Rogan, but you guys never talk.

Lex Fridman (09:22.660)

You always talk to people with Nobel Prizes.

Steve Viscelli (09:24.980)

You always talk to these kinds of people.

Lex Fridman (09:27.140)

You never talk to us regular folk.

Lex Fridman (09:31.100)

And that guy really stuck with me.

Lex Fridman (09:33.500)

First of all, the idea of regular folk is a silly notion.

Steve Viscelli (09:36.620)

I think people that win Nobel Prizes

Lex Fridman (09:39.260)

are often more boring than the people, these regular folks

Steve Viscelli (09:42.260)

in terms of stories, in terms of richness of experience,

Lex Fridman (09:45.780)

in terms of the ups and downs of life.

Steve Viscelli (09:48.020)

And, you know, that really stuck with me

Lex Fridman (09:51.460)

because I set that as a goal for myself

Steve Viscelli (09:53.700)

to make sure I talked to regular folk.

Lex Fridman (09:57.900)

And you did just this talking, again, regular folk.

Steve Viscelli (10:03.140)

It's human beings.

Lex Fridman (10:05.940)

All of them have experiences.

Steve Viscelli (10:08.700)

If you were to recommend to talk some of these folks

Lex Fridman (10:14.340)

with stories, how would you find them?

Steve Viscelli (10:16.900)

Yeah, so I do do this sometimes for journalists

Lex Fridman (10:19.620)

who will come and they want to write about

Steve Viscelli (10:21.660)

sort of what's happening right now in trucking, you know.

Lex Fridman (10:25.020)

And I send them to truck stops.

Steve Viscelli (10:26.660)

I say, you know, yeah, there's a town

Lex Fridman (10:29.140)

called Effingham, Illinois.

Lex Fridman (10:31.460)

And it's just this place where, you know,

Lex Fridman (10:34.060)

bunch of huge truck stops, tons of trucks

Lex Fridman (10:36.460)

and really nothing else out there.

Lex Fridman (10:38.740)

You know, it's in the middle of corn country.

Steve Viscelli (10:41.740)

And, you know, again, truckers in this, you know,

Lex Fridman (10:44.660)

sadly, I think, you know, the politics of the day,

Steve Viscelli (10:48.100)

it's changing a little bit.

Lex Fridman (10:50.300)

I think there's a little, the polarization is getting

Steve Viscelli (10:54.060)

to the trucking industry in ways that, you know,

Lex Fridman (10:57.660)

maybe we're seeing in other parts of our social world.

Lex Fridman (11:02.420)

But truckers are generally, you know,

Lex Fridman (11:04.420)

real open sort of friendly folks.

Steve Viscelli (11:07.700)

Some of them ultimately like to work alone and be alone.

Lex Fridman (11:11.380)

That's a relatively small subset, I think.

Lex Fridman (11:15.400)

But all of them are generally, you know,

Lex Fridman (11:17.500)

kind of open, you know, trusting,

Steve Viscelli (11:20.140)

willing to have a conversation.

Lex Fridman (11:21.500)

And so, you know, you go to the truck stop

Lex Fridman (11:23.820)

and you go in the lounge and they're usually,

Lex Fridman (11:26.340)

there's usually a booth down there

Lex Fridman (11:27.460)

and somebody is sitting at their laptop

Lex Fridman (11:28.900)

or on their phone and willing to strike up a conversation.

Steve Viscelli (11:32.140)

You should try that.

Lex Fridman (11:32.980)

You should, you know.

Steve Viscelli (11:33.800)

That 100% will try this.

Lex Fridman (11:35.060)

Yeah.

Steve Viscelli (11:36.340)

Just again, we're just going from tangent to tangent.

Lex Fridman (11:38.700)

We'll return to the main question,

Lex Fridman (11:40.720)

but what do they listen to?

Lex Fridman (11:43.220)

Do they listen to talk radio?

Lex Fridman (11:45.700)

Do they listen to podcasts, audio books?

Lex Fridman (11:47.700)

Do they listen to music?

Lex Fridman (11:48.820)

Do they listen to silence?

Lex Fridman (11:50.940)

Everything.

Steve Viscelli (11:51.780)

Everything.

Lex Fridman (11:52.600)

Everything.

Steve Viscelli (11:53.440)

Some, I mean, and some still listen to the CB,

Lex Fridman (11:55.440)

which, you know, it's a ever dwindling group.

Steve Viscelli (11:59.420)

They'll call it the Original Internet Citizens Band.

Lex Fridman (12:02.200)

You know, back in the 70s,

Steve Viscelli (12:03.860)

they thought it was going to be the medium of democracy.

Lex Fridman (12:07.300)

And they love to just get on there

Steve Viscelli (12:08.980)

and, you know, cruise along one truck after the other

Lex Fridman (12:13.060)

and chat away.

Steve Viscelli (12:13.900)

Usually, you know, it's guys who know each other

Lex Fridman (12:15.580)

from the same company or happen to run into each other.

Lex Fridman (12:18.620)

But other than that, it's everything under the sun.

Lex Fridman (12:21.860)

You know, and that's, it's probably one of the stereotypes

Lex Fridman (12:24.620)

and it's, I think it was more true in the past, you know,

Lex Fridman (12:28.140)

about the sort of heterogeneity of truck drivers.

Steve Viscelli (12:32.260)

They're a really diverse group now.

Lex Fridman (12:33.860)

You know, there's definitely a large,

Steve Viscelli (12:37.060)

still a large component of rural white guys

Lex Fridman (12:40.140)

who work in the industry,

Lex Fridman (12:42.420)

but there's a huge growing chunk of the industry

Lex Fridman (12:45.580)

that's immigrants, people of color, and even some women.

Steve Viscelli (12:50.120)

Still huge barriers to women entering it,

Lex Fridman (12:52.700)

but it's a much more diverse place than most people think.

Lex Fridman (12:57.060)

So let's return to your journey as a truck driver.

Lex Fridman (13:00.140)

What did it take to become a truck driver?

Lex Fridman (13:03.500)

What were the early days like?

Lex Fridman (13:05.100)

Yeah, so this is, I mean, this is a central part

Steve Viscelli (13:07.140)

of the story, right, that I uncovered.

Lex Fridman (13:09.900)

And the good part was that I went in

Steve Viscelli (13:12.000)

without knowing what was gonna happen.

Lex Fridman (13:14.300)

So I was able to experience it as a new truck driver would.

Steve Viscelli (13:19.120)

It's one of the important stories in the book

Lex Fridman (13:20.880)

is how that experience is constructed by employers

Steve Viscelli (13:24.620)

to sort of, you know, help you think the way

Lex Fridman (13:28.060)

that they would like you to think about the job

Lex Fridman (13:29.900)

and about the industry and about the social relations of it.

Lex Fridman (13:32.980)

So it's super intimidating.

Steve Viscelli (13:37.280)

I say in the book, you know, pretty handy guy,

Lex Fridman (13:40.080)

you know, familiar with tools, machines,

Steve Viscelli (13:41.840)

like, you know, comfortable operating stuff,

Lex Fridman (13:44.000)

like from time I was a kid.

Steve Viscelli (13:46.780)

The truck was just like a whole nother experience.

Lex Fridman (13:50.560)

I mean, as I think most people think about it,

Lex Fridman (13:52.840)

it's this big, huge vehicle, right?

Lex Fridman (13:55.320)

It's really long, it's 70 feet long,

Steve Viscelli (13:58.120)

it can weigh 80,000 pounds.

Lex Fridman (14:00.520)

You know, it does not stop like a car.

Steve Viscelli (14:02.640)

It does not turn like a car.

Lex Fridman (14:05.920)

But at least when I started, and this has changed

Lex Fridman (14:10.520)

and it's part of the technology story of trucking,

Lex Fridman (14:13.120)

the first thing you had to do was learn how to shift it.

Lex Fridman (14:15.840)

And it doesn't shift like a manual car.

Lex Fridman (14:19.560)

The clutch isn't synchronized.

Lex Fridman (14:21.080)

So you have to do what's called double clutch.

Lex Fridman (14:24.040)

And it's basically the foundational skill

Steve Viscelli (14:26.920)

that a truck driver used to have to learn.

Lex Fridman (14:29.560)

So you would, you know, accelerate, say you're in first gear,

Steve Viscelli (14:33.640)

you push in the clutch,

Lex Fridman (14:35.040)

you pull the shifter out of first gear,

Steve Viscelli (14:37.640)

you let the clutch out,

Lex Fridman (14:39.080)

and then you let the RPMs of the engine drop an exact amount.

Steve Viscelli (14:44.480)

Then you push the clutch back in

Lex Fridman (14:46.480)

and you put it in second gear.

Steve Viscelli (14:48.360)

If your timing is off,

Lex Fridman (14:50.380)

those gears aren't gonna go together.

Lex Fridman (14:52.600)

So if you're in an intersection,

Lex Fridman (14:54.800)

you're just gonna get this horrible grinding sound

Steve Viscelli (14:57.280)

as you coast, you know, to a dead stop in the,

Lex Fridman (15:00.720)

you know, underneath the stoplight or whatever it is.

Lex Fridman (15:03.200)

So the first thing you have to do is learn to shift it.

Lex Fridman (15:06.240)

And so at least for me and a lot of drivers

Steve Viscelli (15:09.600)

who are going to private company CDL schools,

Lex Fridman (15:12.260)

what happens is it's kind of like a bootcamp.

Steve Viscelli (15:14.640)

They ship me three states away from home,

Lex Fridman (15:17.600)

send you a bus ticket and say,

Steve Viscelli (15:19.240)

''Hey, we'll put you up for two weeks.''

Lex Fridman (15:21.580)

You sit in a classroom,

Steve Viscelli (15:22.860)

you sort of learn the theory of shifting,

Lex Fridman (15:25.280)

the theory of kind of how you fill out your log book,

Steve Viscelli (15:29.400)

rules of the road, you know, you do that maybe half the day.

Lex Fridman (15:32.680)

And then the other half you're in this giant parking lot

Steve Viscelli (15:35.500)

with one of these old trucks and just like, you know,

Lex Fridman (15:38.220)

destroying what's left of the thing, you know,

Lex Fridman (15:41.140)

and it's lurching and belching smoke

Lex Fridman (15:43.420)

and just making horrible noises and like rattling.

Steve Viscelli (15:45.960)

I mean, in these things, like there's a lot of torque.

Lex Fridman (15:48.400)

And so if you do manage to get it into gear,

Lex Fridman (15:51.000)

but the engine's lugging,

Lex Fridman (15:52.240)

I mean, it can throw you right out of the seat, right?

Lex Fridman (15:54.520)

So it's this, it's like, you know, it's bull,

Lex Fridman (15:56.560)

you're trying to ride and it's super intimidating.

Lex Fridman (16:00.540)

And the thing about it is that for everybody there,

Lex Fridman (16:04.100)

it's almost everybody there, it's super high stakes.

Lex Fridman (16:07.680)

So trucking has become a job of last resort

Lex Fridman (16:11.080)

for a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (16:12.820)

And so they, you know, they lose a job in manufacturing,

Lex Fridman (16:16.840)

they get too old to do construction any longer, right?

Steve Viscelli (16:20.480)

The knees can no longer handle it.

Lex Fridman (16:22.320)

And they get replaced by a machine,

Steve Viscelli (16:25.200)

their job gets, you know, offshored

Lex Fridman (16:27.480)

and they end up going to trucking because it's a place

Steve Viscelli (16:30.080)

where they can maintain their income.

Lex Fridman (16:31.600)

And so it's super high stress.

Steve Viscelli (16:34.540)

Like they've left their family behind,

Lex Fridman (16:36.360)

maybe they quit another job.

Steve Viscelli (16:38.200)

They're typically being charged a lot of money.

Lex Fridman (16:40.160)

So that first couple of weeks,

Steve Viscelli (16:41.920)

like you might get charged $8,000 by the company

Lex Fridman (16:45.080)

that you have to pay back if you don't get hired.

Lex Fridman (16:47.740)

And so the stakes are high and this machine is huge

Lex Fridman (16:50.580)

and it's intimidating.

Lex Fridman (16:52.460)

And so it's super stressful.

Lex Fridman (16:53.840)

I mean, I watched, you know, grown men break down crying

Steve Viscelli (16:57.660)

about like how they couldn't go home and tell their son

Lex Fridman (17:00.660)

that they had been telling they were gonna, you know,

Steve Viscelli (17:02.520)

go become a long haul truck driver that they'd failed.

Lex Fridman (17:05.200)

And it's kind of this super high stress system.

Lex Fridman (17:08.240)

And it's designed that way partly

Lex Fridman (17:09.580)

because as one of my trainers later told me,

Steve Viscelli (17:11.960)

it's basically a two week job interview.

Lex Fridman (17:14.440)

Like they're testing you, they're seeing like, you know,

Steve Viscelli (17:16.520)

how's this person gonna respond when it's tough, you know,

Lex Fridman (17:19.960)

when they have to do the right thing and it's slow

Steve Viscelli (17:22.760)

and, you know, they need to learn something,

Lex Fridman (17:24.580)

are they gonna rush, you know,

Steve Viscelli (17:26.640)

or are they gonna kind of stay calm, figure it out,

Lex Fridman (17:29.740)

you know, nose to the grindstone.

Steve Viscelli (17:31.560)

Cause when you're a new truck driver, you're unsupervised,

Lex Fridman (17:34.020)

you know, and that's what they're really looking for

Steve Viscelli (17:35.780)

is that kind of quality of conscientious work

Lex Fridman (17:39.600)

that's gonna carry through to the job.

Steve Viscelli (17:41.160)

Well, so the truck is such an imposing part

Lex Fridman (17:43.700)

of a traffic scenario.

Lex Fridman (17:45.880)

So you said like turning, it stresses me out every time

Lex Fridman (17:49.320)

I look at a truck cause they, I mean,

Steve Viscelli (17:51.000)

the geometry of the problem is so tricky.

Lex Fridman (17:53.840)

And so if you combine the fact that they have to,

Steve Viscelli (17:56.280)

like everybody, basically all the cars in the scene

Lex Fridman (17:58.240)

are staring at the truck and they're waiting,

Steve Viscelli (17:59.960)

often in frustration.

Lex Fridman (18:02.080)

And in that mode, you have to then shift gears perfectly

Lex Fridman (18:06.920)

and move perfectly.

Lex Fridman (18:08.420)

And if, when you're new, especially,

Steve Viscelli (18:11.080)

like you'll probably, for somebody like me,

Lex Fridman (18:12.700)

it feels like it would take years to become calm

Lex Fridman (18:15.580)

and comfortable in that situation

Lex Fridman (18:17.360)

as opposed to be exceptionally stressed under the eyes

Steve Viscelli (18:20.600)

of the road, everybody looking at you, waiting for you.

Lex Fridman (18:24.360)

Is that the psychological pressure of that?

Lex Fridman (18:27.280)

Is that something that was really difficult?

Lex Fridman (18:28.960)

Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Viscelli (18:30.080)

Again, just, I saw people freeze up, you know,

Lex Fridman (18:33.200)

in that intersection as, you know, horns are blaring

Lex Fridman (18:36.380)

and the truck's grinding, you know, gears

Lex Fridman (18:38.800)

and you just can't, you know, and they just shut down.

Steve Viscelli (18:40.720)

They're like, this isn't for me, I can't do it.

Lex Fridman (18:42.980)

You're right, it takes years.

Steve Viscelli (18:45.160)

If, you know, trucking is not considered

Lex Fridman (18:47.920)

a skilled occupation, but, you know, my six months there,

Lex Fridman (18:52.360)

and I was a pretty good rookie, but when I finished,

Lex Fridman (18:54.920)

I was still a rookie, even shifting, definitely backing,

Steve Viscelli (18:59.800)

tight corners and situations, you know,

Lex Fridman (19:02.120)

I could drive competently, but the difference between me

Lex Fridman (19:05.480)

and someone who had, you know, two, three years

Lex Fridman (19:08.000)

of experience was, it was a giant gulf between us.

Lex Fridman (19:13.000)

And between that and the really skilled drivers

Lex Fridman (19:16.780)

who've been doing it for 20 years, you know,

Steve Viscelli (19:19.540)

it's still another step beyond that.

Lex Fridman (19:21.180)

So it is highly skilled.

Steve Viscelli (19:22.660)

Would it be fair to break trucking into the task

Lex Fridman (19:25.580)

of driving a truck into two categories?

Steve Viscelli (19:28.420)

One is like the local stuff, getting out of the parking lot,

Lex Fridman (19:31.320)

getting into, you know, driving down local streets

Lex Fridman (19:35.060)

and then highway driving, those two tasks.

Lex Fridman (19:38.780)

What are the challenges associated with each task?

Steve Viscelli (19:41.640)

You kind of emphasized the first one.

Lex Fridman (19:43.900)

What about the actual like long haul highway driving?

Lex Fridman (19:48.040)

Yeah, so, I mean, and they are very different, right?

Lex Fridman (19:51.540)

And the key with the long haul driving is really a set of,

Lex Fridman (19:58.340)

the way I came to understand it was a set of habits, right?

Lex Fridman (1:00:03.400)

maybe you can tell me if it's true in relation to food,

Steve Viscelli (1:00:06.400)

it's just the change of human behavior

Lex Fridman (1:00:08.280)

between going out to restaurants versus eating at home.

Steve Viscelli (1:00:11.880)

As a species, we consume a lot less food that way.

Lex Fridman (1:00:15.520)

Apparently what I read in restaurants,

Steve Viscelli (1:00:18.440)

like there's a lot of food just thrown out.

Lex Fridman (1:00:20.600)

It's part of the business model.

Lex Fridman (1:00:23.080)

And so like you then have to move a lot more food

Lex Fridman (1:00:26.200)

through the whole supply chain.

Lex Fridman (1:00:28.040)

And now because you're consuming, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:00:31.560)

there's leftovers at home,

Steve Viscelli (1:00:32.900)

you're consuming much more of the food you're getting

Lex Fridman (1:00:37.160)

when you're eating at home,

Steve Viscelli (1:00:38.620)

that's creating these bottleneck situations,

Lex Fridman (1:00:41.000)

problems as you're referring to,

Steve Viscelli (1:00:42.540)

too much in a certain place, not enough in another place.

Lex Fridman (1:00:45.240)

And it's just the supply chain is not robust

Steve Viscelli (1:00:47.880)

those kinds of dynamic shifts in who gets what where.

Lex Fridman (1:00:53.120)

Yeah.

Steve Viscelli (1:00:54.140)

Yeah, I mean, so, and I have worked in agriculture a bit

Lex Fridman (1:00:57.440)

on sort of the supply side, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:01:01.200)

and there are product categories, right?

Lex Fridman (1:01:03.120)

Where 30% of the crop raised does not get used, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:01:07.440)

Just gets plowed under or wasted.

Lex Fridman (1:01:09.960)

But here's the importance of this

Steve Viscelli (1:01:12.200)

in sort of getting this right, you know, like that,

Lex Fridman (1:01:14.440)

not that like panic buying, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:01:16.540)

blame the irrational consumer, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:01:18.960)

look at the hard sort of truth

Steve Viscelli (1:01:21.240)

of the way we've set up our economy.

Lex Fridman (1:01:24.240)

And I'll ask you this, Lex, I know you're a hopeful,

Steve Viscelli (1:01:29.680)

optimistic person.

Lex Fridman (1:01:30.600)

100%, yes.

Steve Viscelli (1:01:31.940)

Yeah, I am too.

Lex Fridman (1:01:32.960)

I mean, I write about problems all the time.

Lex Fridman (1:01:34.800)

And so people think I'm sort of like a,

Lex Fridman (1:01:36.560)

just a Debbie Downer, you know, pessimist,

Lex Fridman (1:01:39.960)

but I'm a glass half full kind of guy.

Lex Fridman (1:01:43.080)

Like I want to identify problems so we can solve them.

Lex Fridman (1:01:47.360)

So let me ask you this,

Lex Fridman (1:01:48.340)

we've got these long lean supply chains.

Steve Viscelli (1:01:52.020)

In the future, do you see more environmental problems

Lex Fridman (1:01:57.020)

that could disrupt them,

Steve Viscelli (1:02:00.480)

more geopolitical problems that could disrupt trade

Lex Fridman (1:02:05.560)

from Asia, you know, other institutional failures?

Steve Viscelli (1:02:10.920)

Do those things seem, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:02:13.840)

potentially more likely in the future

Lex Fridman (1:02:16.280)

than they have been in say the last 20 years?

Lex Fridman (1:02:18.640)

Yeah, it almost absolutely seems to be the case.

Lex Fridman (1:02:21.860)

So you then have to ask the question of

Lex Fridman (1:02:24.400)

how do we change our supply chains?

Steve Viscelli (1:02:28.960)

Whether it's making more resilient

Lex Fridman (1:02:31.040)

or make them less densely connected,

Lex Fridman (1:02:35.840)

you know, building a, it's like a, what is it?

Lex Fridman (1:02:38.760)

You know, the Tesla model for in the automotive sector

Steve Viscelli (1:02:43.400)

of like trying to build everything,

Lex Fridman (1:02:45.040)

like trying to get the factory to do as much as possible

Steve Viscelli (1:02:48.600)

with as little reliance on widely distributed sources

Lex Fridman (1:02:53.480)

of the supply chain as possible.

Lex Fridman (1:02:55.000)

So maybe like rethinking how much we rely

Lex Fridman (1:02:58.640)

on the infrastructure of the supply chain.

Steve Viscelli (1:03:01.920)

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's some basic,

Lex Fridman (1:03:03.760)

and I assume, right, that there are a lot of folks

Steve Viscelli (1:03:08.160)

in corporate boardrooms looking at risk

Lex Fridman (1:03:10.600)

and saying that didn't go well,

Lex Fridman (1:03:13.080)

and maybe it could have even gone worse.

Lex Fridman (1:03:16.500)

Maybe we need to think about reshoring, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:03:20.680)

At the very least, one of the things

Lex Fridman (1:03:22.760)

that I'm hearing about anecdotally

Steve Viscelli (1:03:24.120)

is that they're starting stuff up, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:03:26.320)

when they can, right?

Lex Fridman (1:03:28.080)

Which is, that's probably not sustainable, right?

Lex Fridman (1:03:31.360)

I mean, at some point, somebody in that corporate boardroom

Steve Viscelli (1:03:34.080)

is gonna say, you know, guys, inventory is getting

Lex Fridman (1:03:36.660)

kind of heavy and the cost of that is like,

Steve Viscelli (1:03:38.160)

do we, can we really justify that much longer

Lex Fridman (1:03:40.040)

to the shareholders, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:03:41.780)

We can back off and start, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:03:43.560)

back, things are back to normal, let's lean out.

Steve Viscelli (1:03:45.520)

Well, my hope is that there's a technology solution

Lex Fridman (1:03:48.400)

to a lot of aspects of this.

Lex Fridman (1:03:49.600)

So one of them on the supply chain side

Lex Fridman (1:03:51.440)

is collecting a lot more data,

Steve Viscelli (1:03:53.960)

like having much more integrated

Lex Fridman (1:03:57.040)

and accurate representation of the inventory

Steve Viscelli (1:03:59.380)

all over the place,

Lex Fridman (1:04:00.680)

and the available transportation mechanisms,

Steve Viscelli (1:04:03.400)

the trucks, the all kinds of freight,

Lex Fridman (1:04:06.080)

and how in the different models

Steve Viscelli (1:04:08.660)

of the possible catastrophes that can happen,

Lex Fridman (1:04:14.660)

like how will the system respond?

Lex Fridman (1:04:15.960)

So having a really solid model that you're operating under

Lex Fridman (1:04:19.300)

as opposed to just kind of being in emergency response mode

Steve Viscelli (1:04:23.500)

under poor, incomplete information,

Lex Fridman (1:04:26.160)

which is what seems like is more commonly the case,

Steve Viscelli (1:04:30.480)

except for things like you said, Walmart and Amazon,

Lex Fridman (1:04:34.100)

they're trying to internally get their stuff together

Steve Viscelli (1:04:36.740)

on that front, but that doesn't help

Lex Fridman (1:04:38.640)

the rest of the economy.

Lex Fridman (1:04:40.240)

So another exciting technological development

Lex Fridman (1:04:44.920)

as you write about, as you think about is autonomous trucks.

Lex Fridman (1:04:48.080)

So these are often brought up in different contexts

Lex Fridman (1:04:52.320)

as the examples of AI and robots taking our jobs.

Lex Fridman (1:04:57.440)

How true is this?

Lex Fridman (1:04:58.720)

Should we be concerned?

Steve Viscelli (1:05:01.680)

I think they've really come to epitomize

Lex Fridman (1:05:03.760)

this anxiety over automation, right?

Lex Fridman (1:05:06.400)

It's such a simple idea, right?

Lex Fridman (1:05:09.560)

Truck that drives itself,

Steve Viscelli (1:05:11.800)

classic blue collar job that pays well,

Lex Fridman (1:05:15.240)

guy maybe with not a lot of other good options, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:05:20.440)

To sort of make that same income easily,

Lex Fridman (1:05:23.720)

and you build a robot to take his job away, right?

Lex Fridman (1:05:28.700)

So I think 2016 or so,

Lex Fridman (1:05:32.420)

that was the sort of big question out there,

Lex Fridman (1:05:35.280)

and that's actually how I started studying it, right?

Lex Fridman (1:05:38.380)

I just wrapped up the book,

Steve Viscelli (1:05:40.080)

just so happened that somebody was working at Uber,

Lex Fridman (1:05:43.200)

Uber had just bought auto, saw the book and was like,

Steve Viscelli (1:05:45.760)

hey, can you come out and talk to our engineering teams

Lex Fridman (1:05:48.840)

about what life is like for truck drivers

Lex Fridman (1:05:51.760)

and maybe how our technology could make it better.

Lex Fridman (1:05:54.700)

And at that time, there were a lot of different ideas

Lex Fridman (1:05:58.620)

about how they were gonna play out, right?

Lex Fridman (1:06:00.220)

So while the press was saying,

Steve Viscelli (1:06:03.400)

all truckers are gonna lose their jobs,

Lex Fridman (1:06:05.280)

there were a lot of people in these engineering teams

Steve Viscelli (1:06:08.120)

who thought, okay, if we've got an individual owner operator

Lex Fridman (1:06:11.240)

and they can only drive eight or 10 hours a day,

Steve Viscelli (1:06:17.040)

they hop in the back, they get their rest,

Lex Fridman (1:06:19.880)

and the asset that they own works for them, right?

Lex Fridman (1:06:23.000)

Sort of perfect, right?

Lex Fridman (1:06:25.800)

And at that time, there were a bunch of reports

Steve Viscelli (1:06:28.620)

that came out and sort of basically what people did

Lex Fridman (1:06:30.480)

was they took the category of truck driver.

Steve Viscelli (1:06:33.080)

Some people took a larger category from BLS

Lex Fridman (1:06:35.840)

of sales and delivery workers

Steve Viscelli (1:06:37.640)

that was about three and a half million workers

Lex Fridman (1:06:40.180)

and others took the heavy duty truck driver category,

Steve Viscelli (1:06:43.560)

which was at the time about 1.8 million or so.

Lex Fridman (1:06:46.720)

And they picked a start date and a slope

Lex Fridman (1:06:49.400)

and said, let's assume that all these jobs

Lex Fridman (1:06:52.280)

are just gonna disappear.

Lex Fridman (1:06:53.480)

And really smart researcher, Annette Bernhardt

Lex Fridman (1:06:57.560)

at the Labor Center at UC Berkeley

Steve Viscelli (1:07:00.680)

was sort of looking around for people

Lex Fridman (1:07:03.720)

who were sort of deeply into industries

Lex Fridman (1:07:06.600)

to complicate those analyses, right?

Lex Fridman (1:07:10.240)

And reached out to me and was like,

Lex Fridman (1:07:11.660)

what do you think of this?

Lex Fridman (1:07:12.540)

And I said, the industry is super diverse.

Steve Viscelli (1:07:15.240)

I haven't given a ton of thought, but it can't be that.

Lex Fridman (1:07:17.920)

It's not that simple, it never is.

Lex Fridman (1:07:21.200)

And so she was like, will you do this?

Lex Fridman (1:07:23.800)

And I was like ready to move on to another topic.

Steve Viscelli (1:07:26.280)

I had like been in trucking for 10 years

Lex Fridman (1:07:28.720)

and that's how I started looking at it.

Lex Fridman (1:07:31.000)

And it is, it's a lot more complicated.

Lex Fridman (1:07:33.640)

And the initial impacts, and here's the challenge I think,

Lex Fridman (1:07:38.560)

and it's not just a research challenge,

Lex Fridman (1:07:40.640)

it's the fundamental public policy challenge

Steve Viscelli (1:07:43.600)

is we look at the existing industry

Lex Fridman (1:07:46.920)

and the impacts, the potential impacts,

Steve Viscelli (1:07:50.040)

they're not, you know, nothing.

Lex Fridman (1:07:53.040)

For some communities and some kinds of drivers,

Steve Viscelli (1:07:56.240)

they're gonna be hard.

Lex Fridman (1:07:57.200)

And there are a significant number of them.

Steve Viscelli (1:07:59.280)

Nowhere near what people thought.

Lex Fridman (1:08:00.920)

You know, I estimate it's like around 300,000,

Lex Fridman (1:08:04.280)

but that's a static picture of the existing industry.

Lex Fridman (1:08:08.060)

And here's the key with this is, at least in my conclusion

Steve Viscelli (1:08:13.640)

is this is a transformative technology.

Lex Fridman (1:08:17.060)

We are not going to swap in self driving trucks

Steve Viscelli (1:08:20.860)

for human driven trucks and all else stays the same.

Lex Fridman (1:08:24.200)

This is gonna reshape our supply chains.

Steve Viscelli (1:08:27.420)

It's gonna reshape landscapes.

Lex Fridman (1:08:29.360)

It's gonna affect our ability to fight climate change.

Steve Viscelli (1:08:33.440)

This is a really important technology in this space.

Lex Fridman (1:08:37.680)

Do you think it's possible to predict the future

Steve Viscelli (1:08:41.320)

of the kind of opportunities it will create,

Lex Fridman (1:08:44.400)

how it will change the world?

Lex Fridman (1:08:46.720)

So like when you have the internet,

Lex Fridman (1:08:50.160)

you can start saying like all the kinds of ways

Steve Viscelli (1:08:53.120)

that office work, all jobs will be lost

Lex Fridman (1:08:55.420)

because it's easy to network.

Lex Fridman (1:08:57.040)

And then software engineering allows you to automate

Lex Fridman (1:08:59.760)

a lot of the tasks like Microsoft Excel does, you know.

Lex Fridman (1:09:04.800)

But it opened up so many opportunities,

Lex Fridman (1:09:08.040)

even with things that are difficult to imagine,

Steve Viscelli (1:09:10.220)

like with the internet, I don't know, Wikipedia,

Lex Fridman (1:09:12.680)

which is widely making accessible information.

Lex Fridman (1:09:15.920)

And that increased the general education globally by a lot,

Lex Fridman (1:09:21.600)

all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (1:09:22.760)

And then the ripple effects of that

Lex Fridman (1:09:25.400)

in terms of your ability to find other jobs

Steve Viscelli (1:09:29.080)

is probably immeasurable.

Lex Fridman (1:09:31.000)

So is it just a hopeless pursuit to try to predict

Steve Viscelli (1:09:37.000)

if you talk about these six different trajectories

Lex Fridman (1:09:40.480)

that we might take in automating trucks,

Lex Fridman (1:09:44.360)

but like as a result of taking those trajectories,

Lex Fridman (1:09:47.660)

is it a hopeless pursuit to predict

Lex Fridman (1:09:49.180)

what the future will result in?

Lex Fridman (1:09:50.840)

Yeah, it is.

Steve Viscelli (1:09:52.160)

It absolutely is.

Lex Fridman (1:09:54.680)

Because it's the wrong question.

Steve Viscelli (1:09:56.900)

The question is, what do we want the future to be

Lex Fridman (1:09:59.280)

and let's shape it, right?

Lex Fridman (1:10:01.960)

And I think this is, and this is the only point

Lex Fridman (1:10:06.000)

that I really wanna make in my work

Steve Viscelli (1:10:08.360)

for the foreseeable future,

Lex Fridman (1:10:10.240)

is that we have got to get out of this mindset

Steve Viscelli (1:10:16.500)

that we're just gonna let technology kind of go

Lex Fridman (1:10:20.400)

and it's a natural process and whatever pops out

Steve Viscelli (1:10:22.520)

will fix the problems on the backside.

Lex Fridman (1:10:24.360)

And we've got to recognize that one,

Lex Fridman (1:10:28.160)

that's not what we do, right?

Lex Fridman (1:10:30.920)

You know, and self driving vehicles

Lex Fridman (1:10:33.320)

is just such a perfect example, right?

Lex Fridman (1:10:35.120)

We would not be sitting here today

Lex Fridman (1:10:37.200)

if the Defense Department, right?

Lex Fridman (1:10:38.520)

If Congress in 2000 had not written into legislation

Steve Viscelli (1:10:44.240)

funding for the DARPA challenges,

Lex Fridman (1:10:46.760)

which followed, actually I think the funding came

Steve Viscelli (1:10:49.080)

a couple of years later,

Lex Fridman (1:10:50.060)

but the priority that they wrote in 2000

Steve Viscelli (1:10:52.040)

was let's get a third of all ground vehicles

Lex Fridman (1:10:55.540)

in our military forces unmanned, right?

Lex Fridman (1:10:58.440)

And this was before aerial unmanned vehicles

Lex Fridman (1:11:01.440)

had really sort of proven their worth.

Steve Viscelli (1:11:02.840)

They would come to be incredibly,

Lex Fridman (1:11:04.480)

like, you know, just blow people's minds

Steve Viscelli (1:11:07.880)

in terms of their additional capabilities,

Lex Fridman (1:11:09.760)

the lower costs, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:11:10.880)

keeping soldiers out of harm's way.

Lex Fridman (1:11:13.680)

Now, of course they raised other problems

Lex Fridman (1:11:15.480)

and considerations that I think we're still wrestling with,

Lex Fridman (1:11:17.640)

but that was even before that they had this priority.

Steve Viscelli (1:11:21.140)

We would not be sitting here today

Lex Fridman (1:11:22.720)

if Congress in 2000 had not said, let's bring this about.

Lex Fridman (1:11:27.360)

So they already had that vision, actually.

Lex Fridman (1:11:29.080)

I didn't know about that.

Lex Fridman (1:11:30.020)

So for people who don't know the DARPA challenges

Lex Fridman (1:11:32.700)

is the events that were just kind of like

Steve Viscelli (1:11:36.320)

these seemingly small scale challenges

Lex Fridman (1:11:39.640)

that brought together some of the smartest roboticists

Steve Viscelli (1:11:41.800)

in the world, and that somehow created enough of a magic

Lex Fridman (1:11:45.480)

where ideas flourished,

Steve Viscelli (1:11:49.000)

both engineering and scientific,

Lex Fridman (1:11:51.600)

that eventually then was the catalyst

Steve Viscelli (1:11:54.700)

for creating all these different companies

Lex Fridman (1:11:56.320)

that took on the challenge.

Steve Viscelli (1:11:57.200)

Some failed, some succeeded,

Lex Fridman (1:11:58.800)

some are still fighting the good fight.

Lex Fridman (1:12:01.040)

And that somehow just that little bit of challenge

Lex Fridman (1:12:03.440)

was the essential spark of progress

Steve Viscelli (1:12:07.420)

that now resulted in this beautiful up and down wave

Lex Fridman (1:12:10.840)

of hype and profit and all this kind of weird dance

Steve Viscelli (1:12:15.180)

where the B word, billions of dollars

Lex Fridman (1:12:18.080)

have been thrown around and we still don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:12:21.120)

And the T word, trillions of dollars

Lex Fridman (1:12:23.380)

in terms of transformative effects of autonomous vehicles.

Lex Fridman (1:12:25.700)

And all that started from DARPA

Lex Fridman (1:12:27.360)

and that initial vision of, I guess, as you're saying,

Steve Viscelli (1:12:31.320)

of automating part of the military supply chain.

Lex Fridman (1:12:35.320)

I did not know that.

Steve Viscelli (1:12:36.240)

That's interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:12:37.080)

So they had the same kind of vision for the military

Steve Viscelli (1:12:39.940)

as we're not talking about a vision for the civilian,

Lex Fridman (1:12:43.340)

whether it's trucking or whether it's autonomous vehicle,

Steve Viscelli (1:12:45.740)

sort of a ride sharing kind of application.

Lex Fridman (1:12:48.400)

Yeah, I mean, what an incredible spark, right?

Lex Fridman (1:12:53.100)

And just the story of what it produced, right?

Lex Fridman (1:12:57.760)

I mean, your own work on self driving, right?

Lex Fridman (1:13:01.260)

I mean, you've studied it as an academic, right?

Lex Fridman (1:13:04.120)

How many great researchers and minds have been harnessed

Lex Fridman (1:13:08.460)

by this outcome of that spark, right?

Lex Fridman (1:13:11.340)

And I think this is sort of theoretically about technology,

Steve Viscelli (1:13:14.200)

right, this is what makes it sort of so great

Lex Fridman (1:13:15.920)

is that this is what makes us human, in my opinion, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:13:18.480)

Is that you conceive of something in your mind

Lex Fridman (1:13:21.360)

and then you bring it into reality, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:13:23.580)

I mean, that's what is so great about it.

Lex Fridman (1:13:27.600)

Sometimes you're too dumb to realize how difficult it is

Lex Fridman (1:13:29.880)

so you take it.

Lex Fridman (1:13:30.720)

Right.

Lex Fridman (1:13:31.960)

And then eventually you're in too deep.

Lex Fridman (1:13:36.760)

You might as well solve the problem.

Steve Viscelli (1:13:38.760)

Well, and maybe we're in that situation right now

Lex Fridman (1:13:41.360)

with self driving.

Steve Viscelli (1:13:42.320)

But, you know, and so let me throw this out there.

Lex Fridman (1:13:44.320)

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.

Lex Fridman (1:13:46.340)

But truck drivers always ask me, like, is this for real?

Lex Fridman (1:13:50.160)

Like, is this really, like, it's harder than they think,

Steve Viscelli (1:13:52.840)

like, right, and they can't really do this.

Lex Fridman (1:13:55.760)

And, you know, at first I was like, look, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:13:59.320)

this is like the defense department

Lex Fridman (1:14:01.560)

and like basically the top computer science

Lex Fridman (1:14:04.320)

and robotics departments in the world.

Lex Fridman (1:14:07.740)

And now Silicon Valley with billions of dollars in funding

Lex Fridman (1:14:14.000)

and just, you know, some of the smartest, hardest working,

Lex Fridman (1:14:17.380)

most visionary people focused on what is clearly,

Lex Fridman (1:14:21.200)

you know, a gigantic market, right?

Lex Fridman (1:14:24.660)

And what I tell them is like,

Steve Viscelli (1:14:26.780)

if self driving vehicles don't happen,

Lex Fridman (1:14:31.200)

I think this will be the biggest technology failure story

Steve Viscelli (1:14:34.640)

in human history.

Lex Fridman (1:14:35.680)

I don't know of anything else that is just galvanized.

Steve Viscelli (1:14:39.880)

I mean, you've had people in garages or weird inventors

Lex Fridman (1:14:42.800)

work on things their whole lives and come really close

Lex Fridman (1:14:44.960)

and it never happens and it's a great failure story, right?

Lex Fridman (1:14:48.140)

But never have we had like whole,

Lex Fridman (1:14:50.320)

I mean, we're talking about GM, right?

Lex Fridman (1:14:53.040)

And these are not, you know, these are not tech companies,

Lex Fridman (1:14:55.840)

right, these are industrial giants, right?

Lex Fridman (1:14:58.200)

What were in the 20th century,

Steve Viscelli (1:15:00.440)

the pinnacle of industrial production in the world

Lex Fridman (1:15:03.240)

in human history, right?

Lex Fridman (1:15:05.280)

And they're focused on it now.

Lex Fridman (1:15:07.280)

So if we don't pull this off, it's like, wow.

Steve Viscelli (1:15:11.320)

It's fascinating to think about.

Lex Fridman (1:15:12.560)

I've never thought of it that way.

Steve Viscelli (1:15:14.500)

There was a mass hysteria on a level

Lex Fridman (1:15:18.400)

in terms of excitement and hype

Steve Viscelli (1:15:20.640)

on a level that's probably unparalleled in technology space.

Lex Fridman (1:15:23.640)

Like I've seen that kind of hysteria just studying history

Steve Viscelli (1:15:26.400)

when you talk about military conflict.

Lex Fridman (1:15:28.740)

So we often wage war with a dream of making a better world

Lex Fridman (1:15:32.680)

and then realize it costs trillions of dollars

Lex Fridman (1:15:34.800)

and then we step back and like, and go, wait a minute,

Lex Fridman (1:15:37.800)

what do we actually get for this?

Lex Fridman (1:15:40.120)

But in the space of technology,

Steve Viscelli (1:15:41.600)

it seems like all these kinds of large efforts

Lex Fridman (1:15:44.080)

have paid off.

Steve Viscelli (1:15:45.620)

This, you're right.

Lex Fridman (1:15:47.100)

It seems like, it seems like even GM and Ford

Lex Fridman (1:15:51.360)

and all these companies now are a little bit like,

Lex Fridman (1:15:54.520)

hey, or Toyota and even Tesla,

Lex Fridman (1:15:58.720)

like, are we sure about this?

Lex Fridman (1:16:01.800)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:16:02.640)

And it's fascinating to think about

Lex Fridman (1:16:04.320)

when you tell the story of this,

Steve Viscelli (1:16:06.100)

this could be one of the big first, perhaps,

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.120)

but by far the biggest failures of the dream

Steve Viscelli (1:16:14.120)

in the space of technology.

Lex Fridman (1:16:16.200)

That's really interesting to think about.

Steve Viscelli (1:16:17.880)

I was a skeptic for a long time

Lex Fridman (1:16:20.880)

because of the human factor.

Steve Viscelli (1:16:22.880)

Because for business to work in the space,

Lex Fridman (1:16:25.160)

you have to work with humans

Lex Fridman (1:16:26.320)

and you have to work with humans at every level.

Lex Fridman (1:16:29.240)

So in the truck driving space,

Steve Viscelli (1:16:30.520)

you have to work with the truck driver,

Lex Fridman (1:16:32.480)

but you also have to work with the society

Steve Viscelli (1:16:34.320)

that has a certain conception of what driving means.

Lex Fridman (1:16:37.000)

And also you have to have work with businesses

Steve Viscelli (1:16:38.760)

that are not used to this extreme level of technology,

Lex Fridman (1:16:44.240)

you know, in the basic operation of their business.

Lex Fridman (1:16:48.620)

So I thought it would be really difficult

Lex Fridman (1:16:50.120)

to move to autonomous vehicles in that way.

Lex Fridman (1:16:53.160)

But then I realized that there's certain companies

Lex Fridman (1:16:56.200)

that are just willing to take big risks

Lex Fridman (1:16:58.960)

and really innovate.

Lex Fridman (1:17:00.280)

I think the first impressive company to me was Waymo

Steve Viscelli (1:17:04.320)

or what was used to be the Google self driving car.

Lex Fridman (1:17:07.840)

And I saw, okay, here's a company

Steve Viscelli (1:17:11.080)

that's willing to really think longterm

Lex Fridman (1:17:13.480)

and really try to solve this problem, hire great engineers.

Steve Viscelli (1:17:18.240)

Then I saw Tesla with Mobileye when they first had.

Lex Fridman (1:17:22.640)

I thought, actually Mobileye is the thing that impressed me.

Steve Viscelli (1:17:25.760)

When I sat down, I thought,

Lex Fridman (1:17:27.160)

because I'm a computer vision person,

Steve Viscelli (1:17:28.400)

I thought there's no way a system could keep me in lane

Lex Fridman (1:17:33.480)

long enough for it to be a pleasant experience for me.

Lex Fridman (1:17:36.680)

So from a computer vision perspective,

Lex Fridman (1:17:38.120)

I thought there'd be too many failures.

Steve Viscelli (1:17:39.520)

It'd be really annoying.

Lex Fridman (1:17:40.640)

It'd be a gimmick, a toy.

Steve Viscelli (1:17:42.280)

It wouldn't actually create a pleasant experience.

Lex Fridman (1:17:44.840)

And when I first was gotten Tesla with Mobileye,

Steve Viscelli (1:17:47.520)

the initial Mobileye system,

Lex Fridman (1:17:49.080)

it actually held to lane for quite a long time

Steve Viscelli (1:17:52.560)

to where I could relax a little bit.

Lex Fridman (1:17:54.560)

And it was a really pleasant experience.

Steve Viscelli (1:17:56.080)

I couldn't exactly explain why it's pleasant

Lex Fridman (1:17:58.600)

because it's not like I still have to really pay attention,

Lex Fridman (1:18:01.080)

but I can relax my shoulders a little bit.

Lex Fridman (1:18:05.440)

I can look around a little bit more.

Lex Fridman (1:18:07.000)

And for some reason that was really reducing the stress.

Lex Fridman (1:18:10.600)

And then over time, Tesla with a lot of the revolutionary

Steve Viscelli (1:18:15.000)

stuff they're doing on the machine learning space

Lex Fridman (1:18:17.400)

made me believe that there's opportunities here to innovate,

Steve Viscelli (1:18:22.000)

to come up with totally new ideas.

Lex Fridman (1:18:23.840)

Another very sad story that I was really excited about

Steve Viscelli (1:18:27.720)

is Cadillac SuperCruise system.

Lex Fridman (1:18:29.520)

It is a sad story because I think I vaguely read in the news

Steve Viscelli (1:18:32.880)

they just said they're discontinuing SuperCruise,

Lex Fridman (1:18:36.120)

but it's a nice innovative way

Steve Viscelli (1:18:39.040)

of doing driver attention monitoring

Lex Fridman (1:18:41.320)

and also doing lane keeping.

Lex Fridman (1:18:43.280)

And it just innovation could solve this

Lex Fridman (1:18:45.680)

in ways we don't predict.

Lex Fridman (1:18:47.360)

And same with in the trucking space,

Lex Fridman (1:18:49.600)

it might not be as simple as like journalists envision

Steve Viscelli (1:18:52.760)

a few years ago, where everything's just automated.

Lex Fridman (1:18:55.680)

It might be gradually helping out the truck driver

Steve Viscelli (1:19:00.120)

in some ways that make their life more efficient,

Lex Fridman (1:19:03.360)

more effective, more pleasant,

Steve Viscelli (1:19:07.720)

remove some of the inefficiencies

Lex Fridman (1:19:09.240)

that we've been talking about in totally innovative ways.

Lex Fridman (1:19:12.520)

And that I still have that dream

Lex Fridman (1:19:14.840)

that I believe to solve the fully autonomous driving problem

Steve Viscelli (1:19:18.680)

we're still many years away,

Lex Fridman (1:19:20.400)

but on the way to solving that problem,

Steve Viscelli (1:19:22.880)

it feels like there could be,

Lex Fridman (1:19:25.040)

if there's bold risk takers and innovators in this space,

Steve Viscelli (1:19:29.400)

there's an opportunity to come up

Lex Fridman (1:19:30.760)

with like subtle technologies that make all the difference.

Steve Viscelli (1:19:36.560)

That's actually just what I realized

Lex Fridman (1:19:38.840)

is sometimes little design decisions

Steve Viscelli (1:19:41.400)

make all the difference.

Lex Fridman (1:19:42.920)

It's the Blackberry versus the iPhone.

Lex Fridman (1:19:45.080)

Why is it that you have a glass and you're using your finger

Lex Fridman (1:19:50.760)

for all of the work versus the buttons

Steve Viscelli (1:19:52.800)

makes all the difference.

Lex Fridman (1:19:54.280)

This idea that now that you have a giant screen

Lex Fridman (1:19:57.200)

so that every part of the experience

Lex Fridman (1:20:00.120)

is now a digital experience.

Lex Fridman (1:20:01.960)

So you can have things like apps that change everything.

Lex Fridman (1:20:05.040)

You can't, when you first thinking about

Steve Viscelli (1:20:07.600)

do I want a keyboard or not on a smartphone,

Lex Fridman (1:20:10.120)

you think it's just the keyboard decision.

Lex Fridman (1:20:13.360)

But then you later realize by removing the keyboard,

Lex Fridman (1:20:17.840)

you're enabling a whole ecosystem of technologies

Steve Viscelli (1:20:21.920)

that are inside the phone.

Lex Fridman (1:20:23.120)

And now you're making the smartphone into a computer.

Lex Fridman (1:20:25.480)

And that same way,

Lex Fridman (1:20:27.360)

who knows how you can transform trucks, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:20:30.480)

By like automating some parts of it,

Lex Fridman (1:20:32.520)

maybe adding some displays,

Steve Viscelli (1:20:36.480)

maybe allows you to,

Lex Fridman (1:20:37.640)

maybe giving the truck driver some control

Steve Viscelli (1:20:40.840)

in the supply chain to make decisions

Lex Fridman (1:20:43.160)

all those kinds of things.

Steve Viscelli (1:20:44.440)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:20:45.800)

So, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:20:46.960)

So where are you on the spectrum of hope

Lex Fridman (1:20:51.640)

for the role of automation in trucking?

Steve Viscelli (1:20:56.960)

I think automation is inevitable.

Lex Fridman (1:20:59.520)

And again, I think this is really going to be transformative

Lex Fridman (1:21:04.640)

and it's gonna be,

Lex Fridman (1:21:06.160)

I've studied the history of trucking technology

Steve Viscelli (1:21:09.680)

as much as I can.

Lex Fridman (1:21:11.000)

There's not a lot of great stuff written

Lex Fridman (1:21:12.960)

and you kind of have to,

Lex Fridman (1:21:14.960)

there isn't a lot of data and places to know

Steve Viscelli (1:21:16.880)

sort of volumes of stuff and how they're changing, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (1:21:19.240)

But the big revolutionary changes in trucking

Steve Viscelli (1:21:24.480)

are because of constellations of factors.

Lex Fridman (1:21:27.960)

It's not just one thing, right?

Lex Fridman (1:21:29.640)

So Daimler builds a motorized truck

Lex Fridman (1:21:32.040)

and I think it's 1896, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:21:35.320)

Intercity trucking.

Lex Fridman (1:21:37.560)

So basically what they use that truck for

Lex Fridman (1:21:39.080)

is just to swap out horses, right?

Lex Fridman (1:21:41.800)

They basically do the same thing.

Lex Fridman (1:21:42.960)

The service doesn't really change, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:21:45.960)

And then World War I really spurs the development

Steve Viscelli (1:21:48.760)

of sort of bigger, larger trucks,

Lex Fridman (1:21:50.720)

like spreads air filled tires.

Lex Fridman (1:21:54.600)

And then we start paving roads, right?

Lex Fridman (1:21:57.880)

And paved roads, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:22:00.440)

Air filled tires and the internal combustion engine.

Lex Fridman (1:22:04.440)

Now you got a winning mix.

Steve Viscelli (1:22:05.720)

Now it met with demand for people who wanted to get out

Lex Fridman (1:22:09.360)

from under the thumb of the railroads, right?

Lex Fridman (1:22:12.160)

So there was all of this pent up demand

Lex Fridman (1:22:14.680)

to get cheaper freight from the countryside

Steve Viscelli (1:22:18.360)

into cities and between cities

Lex Fridman (1:22:20.760)

that typically had to go by rail.

Lex Fridman (1:22:22.800)

And so now, you know, 40 years

Lex Fridman (1:22:25.840)

after that internal combustion engine,

Lex Fridman (1:22:28.320)

it becomes this absolutely essential, right?

Lex Fridman (1:22:30.960)

This necessary but not sufficient piece of technology

Steve Viscelli (1:22:34.320)

to create the modern trucking industry in the 1930s.

Lex Fridman (1:22:38.840)

And I think self driving is gonna be,

Steve Viscelli (1:22:41.600)

self driving trucks are gonna be part of that.

Lex Fridman (1:22:43.600)

And the idea, I guess we credit Jeff Bezos.

Steve Viscelli (1:22:47.640)

The idea is, you know, okay, so Sam Walton,

Lex Fridman (1:22:52.240)

if we can do it like a slight tangent

Steve Viscelli (1:22:54.000)

on sort of the importance of trucking to business strategy

Lex Fridman (1:22:57.000)

and sort of how it has transformed our world.

Steve Viscelli (1:23:00.760)

The central insight that Sam Walton had

Lex Fridman (1:23:03.440)

that made him the giant that he was

Steve Viscelli (1:23:06.120)

in influencing the way that so many people get stuff

Lex Fridman (1:23:10.440)

was a trucking insight.

Lex Fridman (1:23:12.560)

And so if you look at the way that he developed his system,

Lex Fridman (1:23:17.840)

you build a distribution center

Lex Fridman (1:23:19.600)

and then you ring it with stores.

Lex Fridman (1:23:22.360)

Those stores are never further out

Steve Viscelli (1:23:24.960)

from that distribution center

Lex Fridman (1:23:26.200)

than a human driven truck

Steve Viscelli (1:23:28.040)

can drive back and forth in one day.

Lex Fridman (1:23:31.760)

And so rather than the way all of his competitors

Steve Viscelli (1:23:34.880)

were doing it with sending trucks all over the place

Lex Fridman (1:23:37.920)

and having people sleep overnight

Lex Fridman (1:23:39.480)

and sort of making the trucking service fit

Lex Fridman (1:23:43.240)

where they had stores,

Steve Viscelli (1:23:45.200)

he designed the layout of the stores

Lex Fridman (1:23:49.320)

to fit what trucks could do.

Lex Fridman (1:23:51.360)

And so transportation and logistics

Lex Fridman (1:23:53.920)

become Walmart's edge

Lex Fridman (1:23:57.320)

and allows them to dominate the space.

Lex Fridman (1:23:59.360)

That's the challenge that Amazon has now.

Steve Viscelli (1:24:02.040)

They've mastered the digital part of it.

Lex Fridman (1:24:05.720)

And now they got to figure out

Lex Fridman (1:24:07.480)

how do we dominate the actual physical movement

Lex Fridman (1:24:11.600)

that complements that.

Steve Viscelli (1:24:14.240)

Others are obviously gonna follow.

Lex Fridman (1:24:16.680)

But the capabilities of these trucks

Steve Viscelli (1:24:18.800)

is completely different

Lex Fridman (1:24:20.440)

than the capability of a human driven truck.

Lex Fridman (1:24:22.840)

So if you're Smith packing

Lex Fridman (1:24:25.760)

and you've got a bunch of meat in a warehouse

Lex Fridman (1:24:30.240)

and it's going to grocery distribution centers,

Lex Fridman (1:24:33.800)

you have that trucker probably come in the night before

Lex Fridman (1:24:37.280)

and you make him wait

Lex Fridman (1:24:38.360)

so that he has a full 10 hour break,

Steve Viscelli (1:24:41.440)

which is what the law requires

Lex Fridman (1:24:42.680)

so that he can get to the furthest reaches

Steve Viscelli (1:24:45.680)

that he can of one of those stores.

Lex Fridman (1:24:48.240)

So he can drive his full 11 hours

Lex Fridman (1:24:50.440)

and bring that meat

Lex Fridman (1:24:51.600)

so it doesn't have to sit overnight

Steve Viscelli (1:24:53.280)

in that refrigerated trailer.

Lex Fridman (1:24:55.480)

And so their system is based on that.

Steve Viscelli (1:24:57.440)

Now, what happens when that truck

Lex Fridman (1:25:00.680)

can now travel two times as far, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:25:04.120)

Three times as far.

Lex Fridman (1:25:05.840)

Now you don't need the warehouses where they were.

Steve Viscelli (1:25:08.800)

Now you can go super lean with your inventory.

Lex Fridman (1:25:11.680)

Instead of having meat here, meat there, meat there,

Steve Viscelli (1:25:14.440)

you can put it all right here.

Lex Fridman (1:25:16.200)

And if it's cheap enough,

Steve Viscelli (1:25:18.120)

substitute those transportation costs

Lex Fridman (1:25:20.360)

for all that warehousing costs, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:22.400)

So this is gonna remake landscapes

Lex Fridman (1:25:24.680)

in the same way that big box supply chains did, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:29.240)

And then of course, the further compliment of that is,

Lex Fridman (1:25:32.920)

how do you then get it to two people at their door, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:37.600)

And the big box supply chain,

Lex Fridman (1:25:39.480)

it moves very few items in really large quantities

Lex Fridman (1:25:44.280)

to very few locations pretty slowly, right?

Lex Fridman (1:25:49.440)

Ecommerce aspires to do something completely different,

Steve Viscelli (1:25:53.640)

move huge varieties of things in small quantities,

Lex Fridman (1:25:57.720)

virtually everywhere as fast as possible, right?

Lex Fridman (1:26:01.080)

And so that is like that intercity trucking

Lex Fridman (1:26:05.560)

under the, in the era of railroad monopolies, right?

Lex Fridman (1:26:10.360)

The demand for that is potentially enormous, right?

Lex Fridman (1:26:14.240)

And so there's such a,

Lex Fridman (1:26:16.840)

so right now I think a lot of the business plans

Lex Fridman (1:26:20.400)

for sort of automated trucks, right?

Lex Fridman (1:26:22.200)

And sort of the way that the journalistic accounts portray it

Lex Fridman (1:26:24.920)

is like, okay, if we swap out a human for a computer,

Lex Fridman (1:26:28.720)

what are the labor costs per mile?

Lex Fridman (1:26:30.280)

And like, oh, here's the profitability

Steve Viscelli (1:26:31.800)

of self driving trucks, uh uh.

Lex Fridman (1:26:34.200)

Like this is transformative technology.

Steve Viscelli (1:26:36.320)

We're gonna change the way we get stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:26:39.040)

So we could actually get a lot more trucks period

Steve Viscelli (1:26:41.920)

with like with autonomous trucks

Lex Fridman (1:26:43.160)

because they would enable a very different kind

Steve Viscelli (1:26:45.840)

of transportation networks you think.

Lex Fridman (1:26:47.560)

Yeah, here's, and this is where it's like, uh oh.

Steve Viscelli (1:26:50.240)

Like, yeah, so we really thought

Lex Fridman (1:26:54.640)

we were gonna be electrifying trucks.

Steve Viscelli (1:26:57.400)

If they're going twice as far,

Lex Fridman (1:26:59.040)

if they're moving three times as much,

Lex Fridman (1:27:01.480)

if they're going three times as far, right?

Lex Fridman (1:27:03.320)

What does that mean for how far we are

Lex Fridman (1:27:05.480)

behind on batteries, right?

Lex Fridman (1:27:06.800)

We've got sort of these, you know, ideas about like, man,

Steve Viscelli (1:27:09.360)

we, you know, here's how far,

Lex Fridman (1:27:10.360)

how close we could get to meet this demand.

Lex Fridman (1:27:12.800)

That demand is gonna radically change, right?

Lex Fridman (1:27:15.040)

These trucks are, you know, so then we've got to think

Steve Viscelli (1:27:17.720)

about, all right, if it's not batteries, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:27:20.720)

how are we powering these things?

Lex Fridman (1:27:22.600)

And how many of them are they're gonna be?

Lex Fridman (1:27:25.280)

Like right now we've got 5 million containers

Steve Viscelli (1:27:28.440)

that move from LA and Long Beach to Chicago on rail.

Lex Fridman (1:27:34.120)

Rail is three or four times at least more efficient

Steve Viscelli (1:27:38.520)

than trucks in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

Lex Fridman (1:27:42.600)

And on that lane, it varies a lot depending on demand,

Lex Fridman (1:27:45.720)

but maybe rail has a 20% advantage in cost, maybe 25%,

Lex Fridman (1:27:50.040)

but it's a couple of days slower.

Lex Fridman (1:27:52.120)

So now you cut the cost of that truck,

Lex Fridman (1:27:54.600)

transportation per mile by 30%.

Steve Viscelli (1:27:57.480)

Now it's cheaper than rail and it gets the stuff there

Lex Fridman (1:28:00.640)

five days faster than rail.

Lex Fridman (1:28:02.520)

How many millions of containers are gonna leave LA

Lex Fridman (1:28:05.640)

and Long Beach on self driving trucks and go to Chicago?

Lex Fridman (1:28:08.840)

And it might look very much like a train

Lex Fridman (1:28:10.920)

if we go with the platooning solution,

Steve Viscelli (1:28:14.060)

where you have these rows of like,

Lex Fridman (1:28:18.540)

imagine like rows of like 10, like dozens of trucks

Steve Viscelli (1:28:21.660)

or like hundreds of trucks, like some absurd situation.

Lex Fridman (1:28:25.180)

Just going from LA to Chicago, just this train,

Lex Fridman (1:28:29.620)

but taking up a highway.

Lex Fridman (1:28:31.780)

I mean, this is probably a good place

Steve Viscelli (1:28:34.780)

to talk about various scenarios.

Lex Fridman (1:28:37.980)

Well, before we get there,

Steve Viscelli (1:28:39.300)

can I just make one interesting observation

Lex Fridman (1:28:41.740)

that I made as a driver?

Steve Viscelli (1:28:44.820)

When you're in a truck, you're up higher.

Lex Fridman (1:28:46.620)

So you can see further and you can see the traffic patterns

Lex Fridman (1:28:50.020)

and cars move in packs.

Lex Fridman (1:28:54.140)

I'm sure there's academic research on this, right?

Lex Fridman (1:28:56.460)

But they move in packs.

Lex Fridman (1:28:57.340)

They kind of bunch up behind a slower car

Lex Fridman (1:28:59.620)

and then a bunch of them break free.

Lex Fridman (1:29:01.200)

And this is sort of on almost free flowing highways.

Steve Viscelli (1:29:03.880)

They kind of move in packs

Lex Fridman (1:29:05.160)

and you can kind of see them in the truck.

Steve Viscelli (1:29:07.540)

So, rather than platoons,

Lex Fridman (1:29:09.220)

we might have like hives of trucks, right?

Lex Fridman (1:29:11.940)

So you have like 20 trucks moving

Lex Fridman (1:29:13.940)

in some coordinated fashion, right?

Lex Fridman (1:29:15.900)

And then maybe the self driving cars are,

Lex Fridman (1:29:18.440)

cause people don't like to be around them

Lex Fridman (1:29:19.980)

or whatever it is, right?

Lex Fridman (1:29:21.340)

You might have a pod of 20 self driving cars

Steve Viscelli (1:29:24.080)

sort of moving in a packet behind them.

Lex Fridman (1:29:26.540)

This is what, if the aliens came down

Steve Viscelli (1:29:28.840)

or we're just observing cars,

Lex Fridman (1:29:30.900)

which is one of the sort of prevalent characteristics

Steve Viscelli (1:29:34.620)

of human civilization is there seems to be these cars

Lex Fridman (1:29:37.340)

like moving around that would do this kind of analysis

Steve Viscelli (1:29:40.260)

of like, huh, what's the interesting clustering

Lex Fridman (1:29:42.480)

of situations here,

Steve Viscelli (1:29:46.020)

especially with autonomous vehicles, I like this.

Lex Fridman (1:29:48.660)

Okay, so what technologically speaking

Lex Fridman (1:29:52.180)

do you see are the different scenarios

Lex Fridman (1:29:55.200)

of increasing automation in trucks?

Lex Fridman (1:29:58.120)

What are some ideas that you think about?

Lex Fridman (1:30:00.860)

For the most part, I have no influence

Steve Viscelli (1:30:04.840)

on sort of what these ideas were.

Lex Fridman (1:30:06.360)

So what the project was that I did was I said,

Steve Viscelli (1:30:11.220)

technology is created by people, they solve for X

Lex Fridman (1:30:14.380)

and they have some conception of what they wanna do.

Lex Fridman (1:30:17.660)

And that's where we should start in sort of thinking

Lex Fridman (1:30:19.940)

about what the impacts might be.

Lex Fridman (1:30:22.160)

So I went and I talked to everybody I could find

Lex Fridman (1:30:25.200)

who was thinking about developing a self driving truck.

Lex Fridman (1:30:28.620)

And the question was essentially,

Lex Fridman (1:30:31.280)

what are you trying to build?

Lex Fridman (1:30:32.780)

Like, what do you envision this thing doing?

Lex Fridman (1:30:35.700)

It turned out that that for a lot of them

Steve Viscelli (1:30:39.140)

was an afterthought.

Lex Fridman (1:30:40.440)

They knew the sort of technological capabilities

Steve Viscelli (1:30:43.780)

that a self driving vehicle would have.

Lex Fridman (1:30:45.380)

And those were the problems that they were tackling.

Steve Viscelli (1:30:48.220)

They were engineers and computer scientists and...

Lex Fridman (1:30:50.300)

Oh, robotics people, I love you so much.

Steve Viscelli (1:30:53.580)

This is, I could talk forever about this,

Lex Fridman (1:30:56.700)

but yes, there's a technology problem,

Steve Viscelli (1:30:58.300)

let's focus on that and we'll figure out

Lex Fridman (1:30:59.700)

the actual impact on society,

Lex Fridman (1:31:02.380)

how it's actually going to be applied,

Lex Fridman (1:31:03.780)

how it's actually going to be integrated

Steve Viscelli (1:31:05.600)

from a policy and from a human perspective,

Lex Fridman (1:31:08.300)

from a business perspective later.

Steve Viscelli (1:31:09.820)

First, let's solve the technology problem.

Lex Fridman (1:31:11.540)

That's not how life works, friends, but okay, I'm sorry.

Steve Viscelli (1:31:14.380)

Yeah, yeah, so I mean,

Lex Fridman (1:31:16.180)

I'm sure you know the division of labor

Lex Fridman (1:31:18.060)

in these companies, right?

Lex Fridman (1:31:18.980)

There's sort of a business development side,

Lex Fridman (1:31:21.060)

you know, and then there's the engineering side, right?

Lex Fridman (1:31:22.900)

And the engineers are like, oh my God,

Lex Fridman (1:31:24.420)

what are these business development people, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:31:26.340)

why are they involved in this process?

Lex Fridman (1:31:30.100)

So I ended up sort of coming up with a few different ideas

Lex Fridman (1:31:34.420)

that people seem to be batting around

Lex Fridman (1:31:36.980)

and then really tried to zero in

Lex Fridman (1:31:39.580)

on a layman's understanding of the limitations, right?

Lex Fridman (1:31:42.700)

And it turns out that's really obvious and quite simple.

Lex Fridman (1:31:47.500)

Highway driving's a lot simpler, right?

Lex Fridman (1:31:49.940)

So, you know, the plan is simplify the problem, right?

Lex Fridman (1:31:53.580)

And focus on highways because city driving

Steve Viscelli (1:31:56.180)

is so much more complicated.

Lex Fridman (1:31:59.820)

So from that, I came up with basically six scenarios,

Steve Viscelli (1:32:04.260)

actually I came up with five

Lex Fridman (1:32:06.620)

that the developers were talking about.

Lex Fridman (1:32:08.620)

And then one that I thought was a good idea

Lex Fridman (1:32:11.380)

that I had read about, I think in like 2013 or 2014,

Steve Viscelli (1:32:16.820)

which was actually something

Lex Fridman (1:32:18.260)

that the US military was looking at.

Steve Viscelli (1:32:20.500)

I actually first heard about the idea

Lex Fridman (1:32:23.140)

of this kind of automation, at least in sketched out form

Steve Viscelli (1:32:27.620)

in like 2011, I guess it was with Peloton,

Lex Fridman (1:32:30.780)

which was this sort of early technology entrant

Steve Viscelli (1:32:33.940)

into the trucking industry,

Lex Fridman (1:32:35.940)

which was working on platooning trucks.

Lex Fridman (1:32:39.220)

And all they were doing was, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:32:41.220)

a cooperative adaptive cruise control

Steve Viscelli (1:32:43.100)

as they came to call it.

Lex Fridman (1:32:45.740)

And we ended up on a panel together.

Lex Fridman (1:32:48.240)

And it's kind of interesting because I was on that panel

Lex Fridman (1:32:52.020)

because I was thinking about how we got the best return

Steve Viscelli (1:32:55.660)

on investment for fuel efficient technologies.

Lex Fridman (1:32:58.380)

And if it's cool, I'll sort of set this up

Steve Viscelli (1:33:01.180)

because it does, it comes into sort of the story

Lex Fridman (1:33:03.500)

of some of these scenarios.

Lex Fridman (1:33:05.700)

So when I studied the drivers,

Lex Fridman (1:33:09.260)

you had this like complete difference in the driving tasks,

Steve Viscelli (1:33:15.160)

like we were talking about before

Lex Fridman (1:33:16.260)

with long haul and city, right?

Lex Fridman (1:33:18.860)

And you're not paid in the city,

Lex Fridman (1:33:21.500)

you've got congestion, the turns are tight.

Steve Viscelli (1:33:25.540)

There's lots of, you know, pedestrians, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:33:27.900)

all the things that self driving trucks don't like,

Lex Fridman (1:33:29.900)

truckers don't like, right?

Lex Fridman (1:33:31.920)

And they're not paid, there's lots of waiting time.

Lex Fridman (1:33:35.700)

And then in the highway, they get to cruise,

Lex Fridman (1:33:37.900)

they're getting paid, they have control,

Steve Viscelli (1:33:39.780)

they go at their own pace,

Lex Fridman (1:33:41.180)

they're making money, they're happy.

Steve Viscelli (1:33:43.180)

Well, it turned out, I guess it was around 2010,

Lex Fridman (1:33:45.980)

this is still when we were thinking

Steve Viscelli (1:33:47.380)

about regenerative braking, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:33:48.980)

and hybrid trucks being sort of like the solution.

Steve Viscelli (1:33:53.260)

The problems with them sort of,

Lex Fridman (1:33:56.140)

and the advantages, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:33:57.660)

also split on what I was thinking of

Lex Fridman (1:33:59.380)

as kind of the rural urban divide at that time, right?

Lex Fridman (1:34:01.660)

So, like you got the regenerative braking, right?

Lex Fridman (1:34:05.140)

You can make the truck lighter,

Lex Fridman (1:34:06.540)

you can keep it local, right?

Lex Fridman (1:34:08.420)

You don't get any benefit from that, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:34:10.780)

hybrid electric on the rural highway,

Lex Fridman (1:34:15.700)

you want aerodynamics, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:34:17.940)

There, you want low rolling resistance tires

Lex Fridman (1:34:20.460)

and these super aerodynamic sleek trucks, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:34:23.140)

Where we know with off the shelf technology today,

Lex Fridman (1:34:26.220)

we could double the fuel economy,

Steve Viscelli (1:34:27.820)

more than double the fuel economy of the typical truck

Lex Fridman (1:34:30.380)

in that highway segment,

Lex Fridman (1:34:32.300)

if we segmented the duty cycle, right?

Lex Fridman (1:34:34.620)

And so in the urban environment,

Steve Viscelli (1:34:36.580)

you want a clean burning truck,

Lex Fridman (1:34:37.780)

so you're not giving kids asthma,

Steve Viscelli (1:34:39.460)

you want it lighter,

Lex Fridman (1:34:40.300)

so it's not destroying those less strong pavements, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:34:45.140)

You're not, you can make tighter turns,

Lex Fridman (1:34:47.020)

you don't need a sleeper cab,

Steve Viscelli (1:34:48.360)

because the driver, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:34:49.260)

hopefully is getting home at night, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:34:51.260)

In the long haul, you want that super aerodynamic stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:34:54.160)

Now that doesn't get you anything in the city,

Lex Fridman (1:34:55.760)

and in fact, it causes all kinds of problems,

Lex Fridman (1:34:57.360)

because you turn too tight,

Steve Viscelli (1:34:58.540)

you crunch up all the aerodynamics

Lex Fridman (1:35:00.060)

that connect the tractor and the trailer.

Lex Fridman (1:35:02.900)

So the idea that I had was like, okay,

Lex Fridman (1:35:05.820)

what if we deliberately segmented it?

Steve Viscelli (1:35:08.100)

Like, what if we created these droplets outside cities,

Lex Fridman (1:35:12.480)

where, you know, a local city driver who's paid by the hour

Steve Viscelli (1:35:16.580)

kind of runs these trailers out once they're loaded,

Lex Fridman (1:35:18.940)

you know, doesn't sit there and wait while it's being loaded,

Steve Viscelli (1:35:20.780)

they drop off a trailer, they go pick up one that's loaded,

Lex Fridman (1:35:23.080)

they run it out, when it's loaded, they call them,

Lex Fridman (1:35:25.140)

and they just run them out there and stage them.

Lex Fridman (1:35:27.260)

It's like an Uber driver, but for truckloads.

Steve Viscelli (1:35:30.180)

Yeah, and we have like intermodal.

Lex Fridman (1:35:32.020)

We have like, basically this would be the equivalent

Lex Fridman (1:35:34.660)

of like rail to truck intermodal, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:37.180)

So you put it on the rail, and then, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:35:38.780)

a trucker picks it up and delivers it, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:40.500)

So instead of having the rail,

Steve Viscelli (1:35:42.140)

you'd have these super aerodynamic, hopefully platoons,

Lex Fridman (1:35:44.900)

or what at the time was called long combination vehicles,

Lex Fridman (1:35:48.780)

which is basically two trailers connected together, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:51.020)

Because this is like a huge productivity gain, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:54.060)

And then instead of that driver like me,

Lex Fridman (1:35:56.220)

I would pick up something in upstate New York,

Steve Viscelli (1:35:57.740)

drive to Michigan, drive to Alabama, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:35:59.940)

drive to Wisconsin, drive to Florida, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:36:01.820)

I'd get home every two weeks.

Lex Fridman (1:36:03.180)

If I'm just running that, you know, that double trailer,

Steve Viscelli (1:36:08.020)

I might be able to go back and forth

Lex Fridman (1:36:09.540)

from Chicago to Detroit, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:36:11.680)

Take two trailers there, pick up two trailers going back,

Lex Fridman (1:36:14.340)

right, and be home every night.

Steve Viscelli (1:36:16.120)

Now, the problem with that at the time,

Lex Fridman (1:36:17.580)

or one of them was, you know, bridge weights.

Lex Fridman (1:36:20.360)

So you can't, not all bridges can handle

Lex Fridman (1:36:23.080)

that much weight on them.

Lex Fridman (1:36:25.320)

They can't handle these doubles, right?

Lex Fridman (1:36:26.620)

And some places can, some places can't.

Lex Fridman (1:36:28.560)

And so this platooning idea was happening at the same time,

Lex Fridman (1:36:31.660)

and we ended up on the same panel,

Lex Fridman (1:36:33.220)

and the founders were like,

Lex Fridman (1:36:35.180)

hey, so what's it like to follow

Lex Fridman (1:36:37.420)

really close behind another truck?

Lex Fridman (1:36:39.040)

Which was kind of the stage that they were at was like,

Lex Fridman (1:36:41.300)

you know, what's that experience gonna be like?

Lex Fridman (1:36:43.380)

And I was like, truckers aren't gonna like it, you know?

Steve Viscelli (1:36:46.360)

I mean, that's just like the cardinal rule

Lex Fridman (1:36:48.540)

is following distance.

Lex Fridman (1:36:49.760)

Like that's the one you really shouldn't violate, right?

Lex Fridman (1:36:52.940)

And when you're out on the road,

Steve Viscelli (1:36:54.060)

like you have that trucker like right on your ass,

Lex Fridman (1:36:56.220)

you know, people remember that.

Steve Viscelli (1:36:58.200)

They don't remember the 99.9% of truckers

Lex Fridman (1:37:01.280)

that are not on their ass, you know?

Steve Viscelli (1:37:03.200)

Like they're very careful about that.

Lex Fridman (1:37:05.360)

But when the trucks are really close together,

Steve Viscelli (1:37:07.560)

there's benefits in terms of aerodynamics.

Lex Fridman (1:37:10.120)

So that's the idea.

Lex Fridman (1:37:11.600)

So like if you want to get some benefits of a platoon,

Lex Fridman (1:37:16.520)

you want them to be close together,

Lex Fridman (1:37:17.800)

but you're saying that's very uncomfortable for truckers.

Lex Fridman (1:37:20.240)

Yeah, so I mean, I think that ended up at the,

Steve Viscelli (1:37:22.200)

I mean, Peloton I think is sort of winding down

Lex Fridman (1:37:25.260)

their work on this.

Lex Fridman (1:37:27.400)

And I think that ended up being still an open question.

Lex Fridman (1:37:31.000)

Like, and I had a chance to interview a couple drivers

Steve Viscelli (1:37:33.440)

who at least one, maybe two of which

Lex Fridman (1:37:36.040)

had actually driven in their platoons.

Lex Fridman (1:37:38.740)

And I got completely different experiences.

Lex Fridman (1:37:41.280)

Some of them were like, it's really cool.

Steve Viscelli (1:37:43.360)

You know, I'm like in communication with that other driver.

Lex Fridman (1:37:46.460)

You know, I can see on a screen what's out,

Steve Viscelli (1:37:49.680)

you know, the front of his truck.

Lex Fridman (1:37:51.400)

And then some were like, it's too close.

Lex Fridman (1:37:53.920)

And it might be one of those things that's just,

Lex Fridman (1:37:55.280)

you know, it takes an adjustment to sort of get there.

Lex Fridman (1:37:57.960)

So you get the aerodynamic advantage,

Lex Fridman (1:37:59.440)

which, you know, saves fuel.

Lex Fridman (1:38:01.940)

There's some problems though, right?

Lex Fridman (1:38:03.360)

So, you know, you're getting that aerodynamic advantage

Steve Viscelli (1:38:07.000)

because there's a low pressure system

Lex Fridman (1:38:08.360)

in front of that following truck.

Lex Fridman (1:38:10.400)

But the engine is designed with higher pressure

Lex Fridman (1:38:14.480)

feeding that engine, right?

Lex Fridman (1:38:15.960)

So there are sort of adjustments that you need to make

Lex Fridman (1:38:18.120)

and, you know, still the benefits are there.

Steve Viscelli (1:38:21.880)

That's one scenario.

Lex Fridman (1:38:22.960)

And that's just the automation

Steve Viscelli (1:38:24.120)

of that acceleration and braking.

Lex Fridman (1:38:26.920)

Starsky, which, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:38:29.620)

probably a lot of your listeners heard about,

Lex Fridman (1:38:33.280)

was working on another scenario,

Steve Viscelli (1:38:34.820)

which was, you know, to solve that local problem

Lex Fridman (1:38:38.200)

was gonna do teleoperation, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:38:40.480)

Sort of remote piloting.

Lex Fridman (1:38:42.840)

I had the chance to, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:38:44.280)

sort of watch them do that.

Lex Fridman (1:38:46.320)

You know, they drove a truck in Florida

Steve Viscelli (1:38:49.640)

from San Francisco in one of their offices.

Lex Fridman (1:38:53.640)

That was really interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:38:54.840)

And then...

Lex Fridman (1:38:55.680)

In case it's not clear,

Steve Viscelli (1:38:56.500)

teleoperation means you're controlling the truck remotely,

Lex Fridman (1:38:59.480)

like it's a video game.

Lex Fridman (1:39:01.840)

So you've gotten the chance to witness it.

Lex Fridman (1:39:05.020)

Does it actually work?

Steve Viscelli (1:39:06.840)

Yeah, I mean, so it's a...

Lex Fridman (1:39:08.840)

What are the pros and cons?

Steve Viscelli (1:39:10.200)

You know, one of the problems with doing research like this

Lex Fridman (1:39:12.680)

with all these Silicon Valley folks is the NDAs.

Steve Viscelli (1:39:16.560)

Oh, right.

Lex Fridman (1:39:17.760)

So, you know, I don't know what I'm able to say

Steve Viscelli (1:39:20.560)

about sort of watching it,

Lex Fridman (1:39:21.960)

but obviously they're public statements

Lex Fridman (1:39:24.160)

about sort of what the challenges are, right?

Lex Fridman (1:39:25.520)

And it's about the latency

Lex Fridman (1:39:27.680)

and the ability to sort of in real time.

Lex Fridman (1:39:31.200)

There's challenges there.

Steve Viscelli (1:39:32.140)

Let me say one thing.

Lex Fridman (1:39:33.640)

So I'm talking to the...

Steve Viscelli (1:39:36.200)

You know, I've talked to the Waymo CTO.

Lex Fridman (1:39:38.440)

I'm in conversations with them.

Steve Viscelli (1:39:39.720)

I'm talking to the head of trucking, Boris Softman,

Lex Fridman (1:39:43.920)

in next month, actually.

Steve Viscelli (1:39:45.540)

I'm a huge fan of his because he was,

Lex Fridman (1:39:48.120)

I think the founder of Anki,

Steve Viscelli (1:39:49.320)

which is a toy robotics company.

Lex Fridman (1:39:52.300)

So I love human robot interaction.

Lex Fridman (1:39:55.640)

And he created one of the most effective

Lex Fridman (1:39:58.840)

and beautiful toy robots.

Steve Viscelli (1:40:03.080)

Anyway, I keep complaining to them on email privately

Lex Fridman (1:40:07.320)

that there's way too much marketing in these conversations

Lex Fridman (1:40:11.960)

and not enough showing off both the challenge

Lex Fridman (1:40:14.960)

and the beauty of the engineering efforts.

Lex Fridman (1:40:16.840)

And that seems to be the case

Lex Fridman (1:40:18.160)

for a lot of these Silicon Valley tech companies.

Steve Viscelli (1:40:21.300)

They put up this, you're talking about NDAs.

Lex Fridman (1:40:26.800)

For some reason, rightfully or wrongfully,

Steve Viscelli (1:40:29.640)

because there's been so much hype

Lex Fridman (1:40:31.040)

and so much money being made,

Steve Viscelli (1:40:33.120)

they don't see the upside in being transparent

Lex Fridman (1:40:39.760)

and educating the public about how difficult the problem is.

Steve Viscelli (1:40:43.300)

It's much more effective for them to say,

Lex Fridman (1:40:45.520)

we have everything solved.

Steve Viscelli (1:40:46.720)

This will change everything.

Lex Fridman (1:40:47.840)

This will change society as we know it.

Lex Fridman (1:40:49.440)

And just kind of wave their hands

Lex Fridman (1:40:51.120)

as opposed to exploring together

Steve Viscelli (1:40:53.040)

like these different scenarios.

Lex Fridman (1:40:54.340)

What are the pros and cons?

Lex Fridman (1:40:55.880)

Why is it really difficult?

Lex Fridman (1:40:57.700)

You know, what are the gray areas

Lex Fridman (1:41:00.000)

of where it works and doesn't?

Lex Fridman (1:41:01.760)

What's the role of the human in this picture

Steve Viscelli (1:41:03.880)

of the both sort of the operators

Lex Fridman (1:41:06.480)

and the other humans on the road?

Steve Viscelli (1:41:08.000)

All of that, which are fascinating human problems,

Lex Fridman (1:41:11.520)

fascinating engineering problems

Steve Viscelli (1:41:12.960)

that I wish we could have a conversation about

Lex Fridman (1:41:15.320)

as opposed to always feeling like it's just marketing talk.

Steve Viscelli (1:41:19.160)

Because a lot of what we're talking about now,

Lex Fridman (1:41:22.480)

even you with having private conversations under NDA,

Steve Viscelli (1:41:26.700)

you still don't have the full picture of everything,

Lex Fridman (1:41:29.520)

of how difficult this problem is.

Steve Viscelli (1:41:31.240)

One of the big questions I've had,

Lex Fridman (1:41:34.400)

still have is how difficult is driving?

Steve Viscelli (1:41:37.000)

I disagree with Elon Musk and Jim Keller on this point.

Lex Fridman (1:41:41.020)

I have a sense that driving is really difficult.

Steve Viscelli (1:41:45.440)

You know, the task of driving, just broadly.

Lex Fridman (1:41:47.680)

This is like philosophy talk.

Lex Fridman (1:41:49.400)

How much intelligence is required to drive a car?

Lex Fridman (1:41:55.360)

So from like a Jim Keller,

Steve Viscelli (1:41:58.000)

who used to be the head of autopilot,

Lex Fridman (1:42:00.340)

the idea is that it's just a collision avoidance problem.

Steve Viscelli (1:42:03.080)

It's like billiard balls.

Lex Fridman (1:42:05.280)

It's like you have to convert the drive.

Steve Viscelli (1:42:06.960)

You have to do some basic perception,

Lex Fridman (1:42:08.600)

a computer vision to convert driving into a game of pool.

Lex Fridman (1:42:13.080)

And then you just have to get everything into a pocket.

Lex Fridman (1:42:15.880)

To me, there just seems to be some game theoretic dance

Steve Viscelli (1:42:19.160)

combined with the fact that people's life is at stake.

Lex Fridman (1:42:21.820)

And then when people die at the hands of a robot,

Steve Viscelli (1:42:24.480)

the reaction is going to be much more complicated.

Lex Fridman (1:42:26.500)

So all of that, but that's still an open question.

Lex Fridman (1:42:28.880)

And the cool thing is all of these companies

Lex Fridman (1:42:31.920)

are struggling with this question

Steve Viscelli (1:42:34.160)

of how difficult is it to solve this problem sufficiently

Lex Fridman (1:42:38.000)

such that we can build a business on top of it

Lex Fridman (1:42:39.880)

and have a product that's going to make

Lex Fridman (1:42:41.720)

a huge amount of money

Lex Fridman (1:42:42.880)

and compete with the manually driven vehicles.

Lex Fridman (1:42:46.680)

And so their teleoperation from Starsky's

Steve Viscelli (1:42:49.680)

is really interesting idea.

Lex Fridman (1:42:50.800)

How much can, I mean,

Steve Viscelli (1:42:53.560)

there's a few autonomous vehicle companies

Lex Fridman (1:42:55.320)

that tried to integrate teleoperation in the picture.

Steve Viscelli (1:42:59.000)

Can we reduce some of the costs

Lex Fridman (1:43:02.220)

while still having reliability,

Steve Viscelli (1:43:04.640)

like catch when the vehicle fails

Lex Fridman (1:43:10.360)

by having teleoperation?

Steve Viscelli (1:43:11.680)

It's an open question.

Lex Fridman (1:43:13.800)

So that's for you scenario number two

Steve Viscelli (1:43:17.020)

is to use teleoperation as part of the picture.

Lex Fridman (1:43:20.080)

Yeah, let me follow up on that question

Steve Viscelli (1:43:22.240)

of how hard driving is,

Lex Fridman (1:43:23.380)

because this becomes a big question for researchers

Steve Viscelli (1:43:26.560)

who are thinking about labor market impacts,

Lex Fridman (1:43:28.520)

because we start from a perspective

Steve Viscelli (1:43:31.520)

of what's hard or easy for humans.

Lex Fridman (1:43:34.840)

And so if you were to look at truck driving prior to a lot,

Steve Viscelli (1:43:39.840)

I mean, there's been a lot of thinking and debate

Lex Fridman (1:43:41.920)

in academic research circles

Steve Viscelli (1:43:45.040)

around sort of how you estimate labor impacts,

Lex Fridman (1:43:47.760)

what these models look like.

Lex Fridman (1:43:49.000)

And a lot of it is about how automatable is a job,

Lex Fridman (1:43:52.120)

object recognition, really easy for people, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:43:54.960)

Really hard for computers.

Lex Fridman (1:43:56.400)

And so there's a whole bunch of things

Steve Viscelli (1:43:58.440)

that truck drivers do that we see as super easy

Lex Fridman (1:44:03.840)

and as it would have been characterized 10 years ago,

Lex Fridman (1:44:07.040)

routine, and it's not for a computer, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:10.520)

It turns out to be something that we do naturally

Lex Fridman (1:44:13.560)

that is sort of cutting edge, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:16.480)

Computer science.

Lex Fridman (1:44:17.920)

So on the teleoperation question,

Lex Fridman (1:44:20.160)

I think this is a more interesting one

Steve Viscelli (1:44:23.960)

than people would like to sort of let on, I think, publicly.

Lex Fridman (1:44:29.860)

There are gonna be problems, right?

Lex Fridman (1:44:32.160)

And this is one of the complexities

Lex Fridman (1:44:33.680)

of sort of putting these things out in the world.

Lex Fridman (1:44:35.480)

And if you see the real world of trucking,

Lex Fridman (1:44:37.880)

you realize, wow, it's rough.

Steve Viscelli (1:44:40.900)

There are dirt lots, there's gravel,

Lex Fridman (1:44:42.480)

there's salt and ice and cold weather,

Lex Fridman (1:44:44.720)

and there's equipment that just gets left out

Lex Fridman (1:44:46.720)

in the middle of nowhere,

Lex Fridman (1:44:47.680)

and the brakes don't get maintained,

Lex Fridman (1:44:49.580)

and somebody was supposed to service something

Lex Fridman (1:44:51.560)

and they didn't, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:44:53.200)

And so you imagine, okay, we've got this vehicle

Steve Viscelli (1:44:56.000)

that can drive itself,

Lex Fridman (1:44:57.140)

which is gonna require a whole lot of sensors

Steve Viscelli (1:44:59.040)

to tell it that the doors are still closed

Lex Fridman (1:45:02.120)

and the trailer's still hooked up

Lex Fridman (1:45:03.600)

and each of the tires has adequate pressure,

Lex Fridman (1:45:05.760)

and any number of, probably hundreds of sensors

Steve Viscelli (1:45:09.100)

that are gonna be sort of relaying information.

Lex Fridman (1:45:11.880)

And one of them, after 500,000 miles or whatever,

Steve Viscelli (1:45:15.800)

it goes out.

Lex Fridman (1:45:17.060)

Now, do we have some fleet of technicians

Steve Viscelli (1:45:20.280)

sort of continually cruising the highways

Lex Fridman (1:45:22.460)

and sort of servicing these things as they do what?

Steve Viscelli (1:45:25.120)

Pull themselves off to the side of the road

Lex Fridman (1:45:27.240)

and say, I've got a sensor fault, I'm pulling over,

Steve Viscelli (1:45:30.120)

or maybe there's some level of safety critical faults

Lex Fridman (1:45:32.960)

or whatever it might be.

Lex Fridman (1:45:36.280)

So that suggests that there might be a role

Lex Fridman (1:45:40.640)

for teleoperation even with self driving.

Lex Fridman (1:45:43.760)

And when I push people on it in the conversations,

Lex Fridman (1:45:47.920)

they all are like, yeah, we kind of have that

Steve Viscelli (1:45:50.240)

on the bottom of the list,

Lex Fridman (1:45:52.000)

figure out how to rescue truck, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:45:54.440)

I guess on the to do list, right?

Lex Fridman (1:45:56.760)

After solving the self driving question is like,

Lex Fridman (1:46:00.100)

yeah, what do we do with the problems, right?

Lex Fridman (1:46:02.600)

I mean, no, we could imagine like, all right,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:04.920)

we have some protocol that the truck is not,

Lex Fridman (1:46:08.440)

realizes the system says not safe for operation,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:11.540)

pull to the side.

Lex Fridman (1:46:13.160)

Good, you have a crash, but now you got a truck stranded

Steve Viscelli (1:46:15.720)

on the side of the road.

Lex Fridman (1:46:17.020)

You're gonna send out somebody to like calibrate things

Lex Fridman (1:46:19.920)

and check out what's going on,

Lex Fridman (1:46:21.240)

or that sounds like expensive labor,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:23.200)

it sounds like downtime, it sounds like the kind of things

Lex Fridman (1:46:26.280)

that shippers don't like to happen to their freight,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:28.840)

you know, in a just in time world.

Lex Fridman (1:46:30.920)

And so wouldn't it be great if you could just sort of,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:33.660)

you know, loop your way into the controls of that truck

Lex Fridman (1:46:36.960)

and say, all right, we've got a sensor out,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:38.920)

says that the tire is bad,

Lex Fridman (1:46:40.600)

but I can see visually from the camera, looks fine,

Steve Viscelli (1:46:43.280)

I'm gonna drive it to our next depot,

Lex Fridman (1:46:45.560)

you know, maybe the next rider or Penske location, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:46:48.560)

Sort of all these service locations around

Lex Fridman (1:46:50.480)

and have a technician take a look at it.

Lex Fridman (1:46:52.680)

So teleoperation often gets this, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:46:57.000)

so dismissive, you know, commentary from other folks

Steve Viscelli (1:47:02.040)

working on other scenarios.

Lex Fridman (1:47:04.040)

But I think it's potentially more relevant

Steve Viscelli (1:47:07.000)

than we hear publicly.

Lex Fridman (1:47:09.880)

But it's a hard problem.

Steve Viscelli (1:47:11.800)

And, you know, for me, I've gotten a chance

Lex Fridman (1:47:17.640)

to interact with people that take on hard problems

Lex Fridman (1:47:19.680)

and solve them and they're rare.

Lex Fridman (1:47:21.520)

What Tesla has done with their data engine.

Lex Fridman (1:47:25.600)

So I thought autonomous driving cannot be solved

Lex Fridman (1:47:29.440)

without collecting a huge amount of data

Lex Fridman (1:47:31.320)

and organizing it well,

Lex Fridman (1:47:32.280)

not just collecting, but organizing it.

Lex Fridman (1:47:34.800)

And exactly what Tesla is doing now

Lex Fridman (1:47:37.300)

is what I thought it would be,

Steve Viscelli (1:47:38.640)

like I couldn't see car companies doing that,

Lex Fridman (1:47:40.600)

including Tesla.

Lex Fridman (1:47:42.200)

And now that they're doing that, it's like, oh, okay.

Lex Fridman (1:47:44.640)

So it's possible to take on this huge effort seriously.

Steve Viscelli (1:47:48.160)

To me, teleoperation is another huge effort like that.

Lex Fridman (1:47:51.880)

It's like taking seriously what happens when it fails.

Steve Viscelli (1:47:56.960)

What's the, in the case of Waymo for the consumer,

Lex Fridman (1:48:00.840)

like ride sharing, what's the customer experience like?

Steve Viscelli (1:48:04.320)

There's a bunch of videos online now

Lex Fridman (1:48:06.000)

where people are like the car fails and it pulls off

Steve Viscelli (1:48:09.200)

to the side and you call like customer service

Lex Fridman (1:48:11.600)

and you're basically sitting there for a long time

Lex Fridman (1:48:13.880)

and there's confusion.

Lex Fridman (1:48:15.000)

And then there's a rescue that comes

Lex Fridman (1:48:17.000)

and they start to drive.

Lex Fridman (1:48:17.840)

I mean, just the whole experience is a mess

Steve Viscelli (1:48:19.760)

that has a ripple effect to how you trust

Lex Fridman (1:48:23.360)

in the entirety of the experience.

Lex Fridman (1:48:25.400)

But like actually taking on the problem

Lex Fridman (1:48:27.560)

of that failure case and revolutionizing that experience,

Steve Viscelli (1:48:32.080)

both for trucking and for ride sharing,

Lex Fridman (1:48:34.400)

that's an amazing opportunity there

Steve Viscelli (1:48:35.920)

because that feels like it would change everything.

Lex Fridman (1:48:40.080)

If you can reliably know when the failures happen,

Steve Viscelli (1:48:42.720)

which they will, you have a clear plan

Lex Fridman (1:48:45.120)

that doesn't significantly affect the efficiency

Steve Viscelli (1:48:47.800)

of the whole process, that could be the game changer.

Lex Fridman (1:48:51.720)

And if teleoperation is part of that,

Steve Viscelli (1:48:53.200)

it could be just like you're saying,

Lex Fridman (1:48:54.880)

it could be teleoperation or it could be like a fleet

Steve Viscelli (1:48:57.920)

of rescuers that can come in, which is a similar idea.

Lex Fridman (1:49:01.400)

But teleoperation, obviously that allows you

Steve Viscelli (1:49:04.360)

to just have a network of monitors

Lex Fridman (1:49:07.360)

of people monitoring this giant fleet of trucks

Lex Fridman (1:49:10.680)

and taking over when needed.

Lex Fridman (1:49:12.760)

And it's a beautiful vision of the future

Steve Viscelli (1:49:14.720)

where there's millions of robots

Lex Fridman (1:49:18.160)

and only thousands of humans monitoring

Steve Viscelli (1:49:20.920)

those millions of robots.

Lex Fridman (1:49:22.720)

That seems like a perfect dance

Steve Viscelli (1:49:27.360)

of allowing humans to do what they do best

Lex Fridman (1:49:29.560)

and allowing robots to do what they do best.

Steve Viscelli (1:49:31.960)

Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I think there are,

Lex Fridman (1:49:34.760)

and we just applied for an NSF we didn't get,

Steve Viscelli (1:49:37.840)

anybody's watching, but with some folks from Wisconsin

Lex Fridman (1:49:41.560)

who do teleoperation, right?

Lex Fridman (1:49:43.640)

And some of this is used for like rovers

Lex Fridman (1:49:46.000)

and I mean, really high stakes, difficult problems.

Lex Fridman (1:49:50.480)

But one of the things we wanted to study

Lex Fridman (1:49:52.120)

were these mines, these Rio Tinto mines in Australia

Steve Viscelli (1:49:55.480)

where they remotely pilot the trucks.

Lex Fridman (1:49:59.520)

And there's some autonomy, I guess,

Lex Fridman (1:50:01.600)

but it's overseen by a remote operator

Lex Fridman (1:50:05.160)

and it's near Perth and it's quite remote

Lex Fridman (1:50:09.360)

and they retrained the truck drivers

Lex Fridman (1:50:13.400)

to be the remote operators, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:50:15.800)

There's autonomy in the port of Rotterdam

Lex Fridman (1:50:18.320)

and places like that where there are jobs there.

Lex Fridman (1:50:21.040)

And so I think, and maybe we'll get to this later,

Lex Fridman (1:50:24.000)

but there's a real policy question

Steve Viscelli (1:50:25.400)

about sort of who's gonna lose and what we do about it

Lex Fridman (1:50:28.760)

and whether or not there are opportunities there

Steve Viscelli (1:50:31.280)

that maybe we need to put our thumb on the scale

Lex Fridman (1:50:33.760)

a little bit to make sure that there's some give back

Steve Viscelli (1:50:38.640)

to the community that's taking the hit.

Lex Fridman (1:50:41.720)

So for instance, if there were teleoperation centers,

Steve Viscelli (1:50:45.120)

maybe they go in these communities

Lex Fridman (1:50:46.800)

that we disproportionately source truck drivers from today.

Lex Fridman (1:50:50.480)

Now, I mean, what does that mean?

Lex Fridman (1:50:52.000)

It may not be the cheapest place to do it

Steve Viscelli (1:50:53.560)

if they don't have great connectivity

Lex Fridman (1:50:55.160)

and it may not be where the upper level managers wanna be

Lex Fridman (1:50:58.520)

and places like that, issues like that, right?

Lex Fridman (1:51:01.080)

So I do think it's an interesting question,

Steve Viscelli (1:51:04.880)

both from sort of a practical scenario situation

Lex Fridman (1:51:09.760)

of how it's gonna work, but also from a policy perspective.

Lex Fridman (1:51:13.960)

So there's platoons, there's teleoperation,

Lex Fridman (1:51:16.960)

and this is taking care of some of the highway driving

Steve Viscelli (1:51:20.040)

that we're talking about.

Lex Fridman (1:51:21.160)

Is there other ideas like,

Steve Viscelli (1:51:24.960)

is there other ideas, scenarios

Lex Fridman (1:51:26.880)

that you have for autonomous trucks?

Steve Viscelli (1:51:28.840)

Yeah, so I mean, the most obvious one actually

Lex Fridman (1:51:31.560)

is just facility to facility, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:51:34.760)

The sort of, it can't go everywhere,

Lex Fridman (1:51:37.640)

but a lot of logistics facilities

Steve Viscelli (1:51:40.480)

are very close to interstates

Lex Fridman (1:51:42.120)

and they're on big commercial roads

Steve Viscelli (1:51:45.140)

without bikes and parked cars and all that stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:51:48.900)

And some of the jobs that I think are really first

Steve Viscelli (1:51:51.740)

on the chopping block are these LTL,

Lex Fridman (1:51:54.520)

that less than truckload, what's called line haul, right?

Lex Fridman (1:51:57.180)

So these are the drivers who go from terminal to terminal

Lex Fridman (1:51:59.880)

with those full trailers.

Lex Fridman (1:52:02.360)

And those facilities are often located strategically

Lex Fridman (1:52:05.000)

to avoid congestion, right?

Lex Fridman (1:52:07.080)

And to be in big industrial facilities.

Lex Fridman (1:52:10.120)

So you could imagine that being the first place

Steve Viscelli (1:52:14.200)

you see a Waymo self driving truck rollout

Lex Fridman (1:52:17.640)

might be sort of direct facility to facility

Steve Viscelli (1:52:21.800)

for UPS or FedEx or less than truckload care.

Lex Fridman (1:52:25.640)

And the idea there is fully driverless,

Lex Fridman (1:52:27.320)

so potentially not even a driver in the truck,

Lex Fridman (1:52:30.120)

it's just going from facility to facility empty,

Steve Viscelli (1:52:33.360)

zero occupancy.

Lex Fridman (1:52:34.900)

Yeah, and those, because that labor is expensive,

Steve Viscelli (1:52:38.020)

they don't keep those drivers out overnight,

Lex Fridman (1:52:39.520)

those drivers do a run back and forth typically,

Steve Viscelli (1:52:42.520)

or in a team go back and forth in one day.

Lex Fridman (1:52:47.020)

So from the people you've spoken with so far,

Lex Fridman (1:52:49.840)

what's your sense?

Lex Fridman (1:52:50.660)

How far are we away from, which scenario is closest

Lex Fridman (1:52:53.920)

and how far away are we from that scenario

Lex Fridman (1:52:56.960)

of autonomy being a big part of our trucking fleet?

Steve Viscelli (1:53:02.120)

Most folks are focused on another scenario,

Lex Fridman (1:53:05.680)

which is the exit to exit, right?

Steve Viscelli (1:53:07.740)

Which looks like that urban truck ports thing

Lex Fridman (1:53:10.920)

that I laid out earlier.

Lex Fridman (1:53:12.820)

So you have a human driven truck

Lex Fridman (1:53:14.280)

that comes out to a drop lot,

Steve Viscelli (1:53:16.940)

it meets up with an autonomous truck,

Lex Fridman (1:53:19.820)

that truck then drives it on the interstate to another lot,

Lex Fridman (1:53:23.880)

and then a human driver picks it up.

Lex Fridman (1:53:27.920)

There are a couple variations maybe on that.

Steve Viscelli (1:53:32.420)

So, or let me just run through the last two scenarios.

Lex Fridman (1:53:36.040)

Sure.

Steve Viscelli (1:53:37.740)

The other thing you could do, right,

Lex Fridman (1:53:39.920)

is to say, all right, I've got a truck that can drive itself,

Lex Fridman (1:53:43.880)

and I refer to this one as autopilot,

Lex Fridman (1:53:46.200)

but you have a human drive it out to the interstate,

Lex Fridman (1:53:49.900)

but rather than have that transaction

Lex Fridman (1:53:52.640)

where the human driven truck detaches the trailer

Lex Fridman (1:53:55.920)

and it gets coupled up to a self driving truck,

Lex Fridman (1:53:58.760)

they just, that human driver just hops on the interstate

Steve Viscelli (1:54:01.840)

with that truck and goes in back and goes off duty

Lex Fridman (1:54:05.560)

while the truck drives itself.

Lex Fridman (1:54:07.200)

And so you have a self driving truck

Lex Fridman (1:54:09.120)

that's not driverless, right?

Lex Fridman (1:54:11.360)

And just to clarify,

Lex Fridman (1:54:12.360)

because Tesla uses the term autopilot instead of airplanes,

Lex Fridman (1:54:15.480)

and so everybody uses the word autopilot,

Lex Fridman (1:54:17.720)

we're referring to essentially full autonomy,

Lex Fridman (1:54:20.620)

but because it's exit to exit,

Lex Fridman (1:54:22.100)

the truck driver is onboard the truck,

Lex Fridman (1:54:24.640)

but they're sleeping in the back or whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:54:26.800)

Yeah, and this gets to the really weedy policy questions,

Lex Fridman (1:54:30.720)

right?

Lex Fridman (1:54:31.560)

So basically for the Department of Transportation,

Steve Viscelli (1:54:34.160)

for you to be off duty for safety reasons,

Lex Fridman (1:54:36.360)

you have to be completely relieved of all responsibility.

Lex Fridman (1:54:39.340)

So that truck has to not encounter a construction site

Lex Fridman (1:54:44.340)

or inclement weather or whatever it might be,

Lex Fridman (1:54:47.820)

and call to you and say, hey, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:54:49.980)

or I mean, obviously, right,

Lex Fridman (1:54:51.140)

we're imagining connected vehicles as well, right?

Lex Fridman (1:54:53.460)

So you're in a self driving truck,

Steve Viscelli (1:54:55.700)

you're in the back and trucks 20 miles ahead

Lex Fridman (1:54:58.980)

experience some problem, right?

Lex Fridman (1:55:01.740)

That may require teleoperation or whatever it is, right?

Lex Fridman (1:55:04.380)

And it signals to your truck,

Steve Viscelli (1:55:05.680)

hey, you know, tell the driver 20 miles ahead,

Lex Fridman (1:55:08.620)

he's got to hop in the seat.

Steve Viscelli (1:55:10.660)

That would mean that they're on duty

Lex Fridman (1:55:12.140)

according to the way that the current rules are written,

Steve Viscelli (1:55:14.220)

they have some responsibility.

Lex Fridman (1:55:15.700)

And part of that is, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:55:17.140)

we need them to get rest, right?

Lex Fridman (1:55:19.300)

They need to have uninterrupted sleep.

Lex Fridman (1:55:22.540)

So that's what I call autopilot.

Lex Fridman (1:55:25.420)

The final scenario is one that I thought was actually

Steve Viscelli (1:55:30.540)

the one scenario that was good for labor, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:55:34.500)

which I proposed is I was like, well, here's an idea,

Steve Viscelli (1:55:38.260)

you know, that would be like, actually good for workers.

Lex Fridman (1:55:41.460)

And just another brief aside here.

Steve Viscelli (1:55:46.940)

The history of trucking over the last, you know, 40 years,

Lex Fridman (1:55:51.300)

there's been a lot of technological change.

Lex Fridman (1:55:53.100)

So when I learned to drive the truck,

Lex Fridman (1:55:55.700)

I had to learn to manually shift it like I was describing,

Steve Viscelli (1:55:57.900)

you had to read these fairly complicated, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:56:00.620)

big sets of laminated maps to figure out

Steve Viscelli (1:56:02.940)

where the truck can go and where it couldn't,

Lex Fridman (1:56:04.820)

which is a big deal, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:56:06.180)

I mean, you take these trucks on the wrong road

Lex Fridman (1:56:07.820)

and you're destroying a bridge

Steve Viscelli (1:56:09.380)

or you're doing a can opener,

Lex Fridman (1:56:10.460)

which is where you try to drive it under a bridge too low.

Steve Viscelli (1:56:12.820)

You've probably seen that on YouTube,

Lex Fridman (1:56:14.420)

if not, you know, check it out, you know, truck can opener.

Steve Viscelli (1:56:18.660)

You know, there's some bridges that are famous for it,

Lex Fridman (1:56:20.660)

right, and there's one I think called the can opener

Lex Fridman (1:56:23.180)

and you can find on YouTube.

Lex Fridman (1:56:26.580)

And, you know, you had to log those hours like manually

Lex Fridman (1:56:30.180)

and sort of do the math and plan your work routine.

Lex Fridman (1:56:34.260)

And I would do this every day.

Steve Viscelli (1:56:35.300)

I'd say like, okay, I'm gonna get up at five.

Lex Fridman (1:56:37.340)

I've got to think about Buffalo and there's traffic there.

Lex Fridman (1:56:40.020)

So I wanna be through Buffalo by 6.30, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:56:43.420)

and then that'll put me, you know, in Cleveland at,

Steve Viscelli (1:56:47.300)

you know, 9.30, which means I'll miss that rush hour, right,

Lex Fridman (1:56:51.820)

which is gonna put me in Chicago, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:56:53.580)

and so you do this and now today, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:56:57.420)

15 years later, truck drivers don't have to do any of that.

Steve Viscelli (1:57:01.620)

You know, you don't have to shift the truck,

Lex Fridman (1:57:03.780)

you don't have to map, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:57:05.940)

you can figure out the least congested route

Lex Fridman (1:57:09.460)

to go on and your hours of service are recorded

Steve Viscelli (1:57:12.660)

or a good portion of them are reported automatically.

Lex Fridman (1:57:17.060)

All of that has been a substantial de skilling

Steve Viscelli (1:57:19.860)

that has, you know, put downward pressure on wages

Lex Fridman (1:57:23.300)

and allowed companies to kind of speed up, monitor

Lex Fridman (1:57:26.220)

and direct, I mean, the key technology, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:57:29.820)

that I did work under is satellite linked computers.

Lex Fridman (1:57:32.500)

So before you could kind of go out and plan your own work

Lex Fridman (1:57:34.820)

and the boss really couldn't see what you were doing

Lex Fridman (1:57:36.860)

and push you and say, you know, you've been on break

Lex Fridman (1:57:39.460)

for 10 hours, why aren't you moving?

Steve Viscelli (1:57:41.260)

You know, and you might tell them, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:57:43.860)

cause I'm tired, you know, like I didn't sleep well,

Steve Viscelli (1:57:45.940)

I've got to get a couple more hours, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:57:48.380)

they're only gonna accept that so many times

Steve Viscelli (1:57:50.380)

or at least some of those dispatchers are.

Lex Fridman (1:57:51.980)

So all this technology has made the job sort of, you know,

Steve Viscelli (1:57:56.060)

de skilled the job, you know, hurt drivers

Lex Fridman (1:57:58.740)

in the labor market, made the work worse.

Lex Fridman (1:58:01.740)

So I think the burden it's really on the technologists

Lex Fridman (1:58:07.100)

who are like, oh, this will make truck driver jobs better

Lex Fridman (1:58:09.940)

and sort of envision ways that it would.

Lex Fridman (1:58:11.500)

It's like, the burden's really, a proof is really on you

Steve Viscelli (1:58:14.780)

to sort of really clearly lay out what that

Lex Fridman (1:58:17.540)

is gonna look like because it's 30 or 40 years of history

Steve Viscelli (1:58:21.820)

suggests that that technology into labor markets

Lex Fridman (1:58:25.180)

where workers are really weak and cheap is what wins

Steve Viscelli (1:58:29.580)

that new technology doesn't help workers

Lex Fridman (1:58:31.700)

or raise their wages.

Lex Fridman (1:58:33.940)

So it lowers the bar of entry in terms of skill.

Lex Fridman (1:58:36.620)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:58:38.140)

So that's really, that's tough.

Lex Fridman (1:58:43.860)

That's tough to know what to do with because yeah,

Steve Viscelli (1:58:46.420)

from a technology perspective, you wanna make the life

Lex Fridman (1:58:48.980)

of the people doing the job today easier.

Lex Fridman (1:58:51.700)

Is it?

Lex Fridman (1:58:52.740)

Is that what you want?

Steve Viscelli (1:58:54.020)

No, but that like, when you think about like what exactly,

Lex Fridman (1:58:58.660)

because the reality is you will make their life

Steve Viscelli (1:59:01.940)

potentially a little bit easier,

Lex Fridman (1:59:04.100)

but that will allow the companies to then hire people

Steve Viscelli (1:59:07.340)

that are less skilled, get those people

Lex Fridman (1:59:10.060)

that were previously working there fired or lower wages.

Lex Fridman (1:59:13.740)

And so the result of this easier is a lower quality of life.

Lex Fridman (1:59:19.620)

Yeah.

Steve Viscelli (1:59:20.460)

That's dark actually.

Lex Fridman (1:59:21.460)

I know, I'm sorry.

Lex Fridman (1:59:23.260)

But you were saying that was for you initially the hopeful.

Lex Fridman (1:59:27.140)

Oh no, so I'll get to that.

Lex Fridman (1:59:28.860)

But one more thing, cause this is not stopping.

Lex Fridman (1:59:31.220)

And this is another interesting question

Steve Viscelli (1:59:32.900)

about the sort of automation.

Lex Fridman (1:59:34.020)

And I think Uber is an interesting example here

Steve Viscelli (1:59:38.460)

where it's like, okay, if we had self driving trucks

Lex Fridman (1:59:40.900)

or self driving cars, we could automate

Lex Fridman (1:59:43.780)

what used to be taxi service.

Lex Fridman (1:59:46.060)

There's a whole bunch of stuff

Steve Viscelli (1:59:46.980)

that's already been automated, like the dispatching.

Lex Fridman (1:59:49.540)

So the dispatchers are already out of work in rideshare

Lex Fridman (1:59:52.980)

and the payment is already automated.

Lex Fridman (1:59:55.180)

So you have to automate steps like this.

Lex Fridman (1:59:57.460)

So you have to have that initial link to dispatch the truck.

Lex Fridman (20:03.260)

We have a sense of driving, particularly men, I think,

Steve Viscelli (20:07.080)

have a sense of driving as like being really skilled,

Lex Fridman (20:10.180)

is like the goal and you can kind of maneuver yourself

Steve Viscelli (20:13.260)

out of in and out of tight spaces with great speed

Lex Fridman (20:16.540)

and breaking and acceleration, you know.

Steve Viscelli (20:20.080)

For a really good truck driver,

Lex Fridman (20:22.240)

it's about understanding traffic and traffic patterns

Lex Fridman (20:26.860)

and making good decisions

Lex Fridman (20:28.100)

so you never have to use those skills.

Lex Fridman (20:30.380)

And the really good drivers, you know,

Lex Fridman (20:33.740)

the mantra is always leave yourself an out, right?

Lex Fridman (20:37.600)

So always have that safe place that you can put that truck

Lex Fridman (20:40.980)

in case that four wheeler in front of you

Steve Viscelli (20:43.740)

who's texting loses control.

Lex Fridman (20:46.620)

You know, what are you gonna do in that situation?

Lex Fridman (20:50.140)

And what really good truck drivers do on the highway

Lex Fridman (20:54.740)

is they just keep themselves

Steve Viscelli (20:56.800)

out of those situations entirely.

Lex Fridman (20:59.500)

They see it, they slow down, you know, they avoid it.

Lex Fridman (21:04.440)

And then the local driving is really something

Lex Fridman (21:06.940)

that takes just practice and routine to learn.

Steve Viscelli (21:10.540)

You know, this quarter turn,

Lex Fridman (21:12.260)

it feels like the back of the truck sometimes is on delay

Steve Viscelli (21:15.900)

when you're backing it up.

Lex Fridman (21:16.740)

So it's like, all right, I'm gonna do a quarter turn

Steve Viscelli (21:18.480)

of the wheel now to get the effect that I want

Lex Fridman (21:22.060)

like five seconds from now

Steve Viscelli (21:24.060)

in where that tail of that trailer is gonna be.

Lex Fridman (21:26.780)

And there's just no,

Steve Viscelli (21:28.260)

I mean, some people have a natural talent for that,

Lex Fridman (21:30.520)

you know, spatial visualization

Lex Fridman (21:32.440)

and kind of calculating those angles and everything,

Lex Fridman (21:35.060)

but there's really no escaping the fact

Steve Viscelli (21:37.900)

that you've gotta just do it over and over again

Lex Fridman (21:40.500)

before you're gonna learn how to do it well.

Lex Fridman (21:42.900)

Do you mind sharing how much you were getting paid,

Lex Fridman (21:46.500)

how much you were making as a truck driver

Lex Fridman (21:48.740)

in your time as a truck driver?

Lex Fridman (21:50.580)

Yeah, I started out at 25 cents a mile

Lex Fridman (21:54.140)

and then I got bumped up to 26 cents a mile.

Lex Fridman (21:56.780)

So we had a minimum pay,

Steve Viscelli (22:01.340)

which was sort of a new pay scheme

Lex Fridman (22:03.580)

that the industry had started to introduce to, you know,

Steve Viscelli (22:07.060)

because there's lots of unpaid work and time.

Lex Fridman (22:10.180)

And so we had a minimum pay of $500 a week

Steve Viscelli (22:12.660)

that you would get

Lex Fridman (22:13.940)

if you didn't drive enough miles to exceed that.

Steve Viscelli (22:17.300)

You get paid in sort of,

Lex Fridman (22:19.540)

so you get paid when you turn the bills in,

Steve Viscelli (22:21.740)

which is the paperwork that goes with the load.

Lex Fridman (22:24.340)

So, you know, you have to get that back to your company

Lex Fridman (22:28.480)

and then that's how they bill the customer.

Lex Fridman (22:30.340)

And so you might get a bunch of those bills

Steve Viscelli (22:32.460)

that kind of bunch up in one week.

Lex Fridman (22:34.420)

So, you know, I might get a paycheck for, you know, $1,200.

Lex Fridman (22:38.300)

And I mean, I was a poor graduate student.

Lex Fridman (22:40.980)

So this was real, real money to me.

Lex Fridman (22:44.020)

And so I had this sort of natural incentive to,

Lex Fridman (22:47.780)

you know, earn a lot or to maximize my pay.

Steve Viscelli (22:51.420)

Some weeks were that minimum, 500, very few.

Lex Fridman (22:54.660)

And then some I'd get 1200, 1300 bucks.

Steve Viscelli (22:58.220)

Pay has gone up, you know,

Lex Fridman (23:00.660)

typical drivers now starting in the 30s, you know,

Steve Viscelli (23:03.420)

in the kind of job that I was in.

Lex Fridman (23:05.420)

30 cents per mile, 30 to 35.

Lex Fridman (23:09.020)

So can we try to reverse engineer that math,

Lex Fridman (23:12.020)

how that maps to the actual hours?

Lex Fridman (23:14.540)

So the hours connected to driving are so widely dispersed,

Lex Fridman (23:19.020)

as you said, some of them don't count as actual work,

Steve Viscelli (23:21.540)

some of it does.

Lex Fridman (23:22.780)

That's a very interesting discussion

Steve Viscelli (23:24.220)

that we'll then continue

Lex Fridman (23:25.660)

when we start talking about autonomous trucking.

Steve Viscelli (23:28.020)

But, you know, you're saying all these cents per mile

Lex Fridman (23:31.140)

kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (23:31.980)

What, how does that map to like average hourly wage?

Lex Fridman (23:38.060)

Yeah, so, I mean, and this is kind of the,

Steve Viscelli (23:41.100)

this is also an interesting technology story in the end.

Lex Fridman (23:44.020)

And it's the technology story that didn't happen.

Lex Fridman (23:46.980)

So pay per mile was, you know,

Lex Fridman (23:49.420)

invented by companies when you couldn't surveil drivers,

Lex Fridman (23:52.500)

you didn't know what they were doing, right?

Lex Fridman (23:53.660)

And you wanted them to have some skin in the game.

Lex Fridman (23:56.020)

And so you'd say, you know, here's the load,

Lex Fridman (23:58.460)

it's going from, you know, for me,

Steve Viscelli (24:00.780)

I might start in, you know, the Northeast,

Lex Fridman (24:03.340)

maybe in upstate New York with a load of beer,

Lex Fridman (24:05.700)

and say, here's this load of beer,

Lex Fridman (24:07.540)

bring it to this address in Michigan,

Lex Fridman (24:09.420)

we're gonna pay you by the mile, right?

Lex Fridman (24:11.420)

If I was being paid by the hour,

Steve Viscelli (24:12.900)

I might just pull over at the diner and have breakfast.

Lex Fridman (24:16.420)

So you're paid by the mile,

Lex Fridman (24:19.060)

but increasingly over time,

Lex Fridman (24:22.500)

the typical driver is spending more and more time

Steve Viscelli (24:26.860)

doing non driving tasks.

Lex Fridman (24:28.300)

There's lots of reasons for that.

Steve Viscelli (24:30.260)

One of which is railroads captured a lot of freight

Lex Fridman (24:32.980)

that goes long distances now.

Steve Viscelli (24:34.540)

Another one is traffic congestion.

Lex Fridman (24:37.380)

And the other one is that drivers are pretty cheap.

Lex Fridman (24:39.620)

And they're almost always the low people

Lex Fridman (24:41.860)

on the totem pole in some segments.

Lex Fridman (24:44.380)

And so their time is used really inefficiently.

Lex Fridman (24:48.420)

So I might go to that brewery

Steve Viscelli (24:51.260)

to pick up that load of Bud Light.

Lex Fridman (24:54.700)

And, you know, their dock staff may be busy

Steve Viscelli (24:58.700)

loading up five other trucks.

Lex Fridman (25:00.860)

And they'll say, you know, go over there and sit and wait,

Lex Fridman (25:03.420)

and we'll call you on the CB when the dock's ready.

Lex Fridman (25:05.780)

So you wait there a couple hours, they bring you in,

Steve Viscelli (25:08.900)

you know, you never know what's happening in the truck.

Lex Fridman (25:10.780)

Sometimes they're loading it with a forklift,

Steve Viscelli (25:12.660)

maybe they're throwing 14 pallets on there full of kegs.

Lex Fridman (25:16.260)

But sometimes it'll take them hours, you know,

Lex Fridman (25:18.420)

and you're sitting in that truck.

Lex Fridman (25:19.860)

And you're essentially unpaid.

Steve Viscelli (25:22.700)

You know, then you pull out, you've got control

Lex Fridman (25:26.140)

over what you're gonna get paid

Steve Viscelli (25:27.820)

based on how you drive that load.

Lex Fridman (25:29.500)

And then on the other end,

Steve Viscelli (25:31.500)

you got a similar situation of kind of waiting, so.

Lex Fridman (25:34.260)

So if that's the way truck drivers are paid,

Steve Viscelli (25:37.220)

then there's a low incentive for the optimization

Lex Fridman (25:40.500)

of the supply chain to make them more efficient, right?

Steve Viscelli (25:43.380)

To utilize truck labor more efficiently.

Lex Fridman (25:46.980)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (25:48.420)

So that's a technology problem that,

Lex Fridman (25:51.660)

one of several technology problems that could be addressed.

Steve Viscelli (25:57.300)

I mean, so what did, if we just linger on it,

Lex Fridman (26:01.940)

what are we talking about in terms of dollars per hour?

Lex Fridman (26:06.580)

Is it close to minimum wage?

Lex Fridman (26:08.260)

Is it, you know, there's something you talk about,

Steve Viscelli (26:10.660)

there was a conception or a misconception

Lex Fridman (26:15.660)

that truckers get paid a lot for their work.

Lex Fridman (26:19.780)

Do they get paid a lot for their work?

Lex Fridman (26:21.760)

Some do.

Lex Fridman (26:23.300)

And I think that's part of the complexity.

Lex Fridman (26:26.020)

So, you know, what interested me as an ethnographer

Steve Viscelli (26:28.900)

about this was, you know, I'm interested

Lex Fridman (26:31.020)

in the kind of economic conceptions

Steve Viscelli (26:32.780)

that people have in their heads

Lex Fridman (26:34.300)

and how they lead to certain decisions in labor markets.

Steve Viscelli (26:38.380)

You know, why some people become an entrepreneur

Lex Fridman (26:40.540)

and other people become a wage laborer,

Steve Viscelli (26:43.120)

or, you know, why some people wanna be doctors

Lex Fridman (26:45.700)

and other people wanna be truck drivers.

Steve Viscelli (26:47.540)

That conception, right, is getting shaped

Lex Fridman (26:50.620)

in these labor markets is the argument of the book.

Lex Fridman (26:53.820)

And the fact that drivers can hear,

Lex Fridman (26:57.420)

or potential drivers can hear about these, you know,

Steve Viscelli (26:59.780)

workers who make $100,000 plus,

Lex Fridman (27:01.940)

which happens regularly in the trucking industry.

Steve Viscelli (27:04.420)

There are many truck drivers who make more

Lex Fridman (27:06.700)

than $100,000 a year, you know, is an attraction.

Lex Fridman (27:10.900)

But the industry is highly segmented.

Lex Fridman (27:13.780)

And so the entry level segment,

Lex Fridman (27:16.380)

and we can probably get into this,

Lex Fridman (27:18.500)

but, you know, the industry is dominated

Steve Viscelli (27:20.860)

by a few dozen really large companies

Lex Fridman (27:24.940)

that are self insured and can train new drivers.

Lex Fridman (27:28.580)

So if you want those good jobs,

Lex Fridman (27:30.200)

you've gotta have several years,

Steve Viscelli (27:32.740)

up until recently, now the labor market's becoming tighter,

Lex Fridman (27:35.020)

but you had to have several years of accident free,

Steve Viscelli (27:38.060)

you know, perfectly clean record driving

Lex Fridman (27:40.620)

to get into them.

Steve Viscelli (27:42.660)

The other part of the segment, you know,

Lex Fridman (27:44.480)

those drivers often don't make minimum wage.

Lex Fridman (27:47.820)

But this leads to one of the sort of central issues

Lex Fridman (27:50.340)

that has been in the courts,

Lex Fridman (27:52.020)

and in the legislature, in some states,

Lex Fridman (27:56.340)

is, you know, what should truck drivers get paid for?

Steve Viscelli (27:59.260)

Right, the industry, you know,

Lex Fridman (28:01.100)

for the last 30 years or so has said, essentially,

Steve Viscelli (28:04.300)

it's the hours that they log for safety reasons

Lex Fridman (28:07.540)

for the Department of Transportation, right?

Steve Viscelli (28:11.220)

Now, since the drivers are paid by the mile,

Lex Fridman (28:14.500)

they try to minimize those,

Steve Viscelli (28:15.920)

because those hours are limited by the federal government.

Lex Fridman (28:19.020)

So the federal government says,

Steve Viscelli (28:19.940)

you can't drive more than 60 hours in a week

Lex Fridman (28:22.580)

as a long haul truck driver.

Lex Fridman (28:24.180)

And so you wanna drive as many miles as you can

Lex Fridman (28:26.520)

in those 60 hours, and so you under report them, right?

Lex Fridman (28:31.460)

And so what happens is the companies say,

Lex Fridman (28:34.460)

well, that guy, you know, he only said he logged 45 hours

Steve Viscelli (28:38.100)

of work that week, or 50 hours of work.

Lex Fridman (28:40.580)

That's all we have to pay him minimum wage for.

Steve Viscelli (28:43.620)

When in fact, typical truck driver in these jobs will work,

Lex Fridman (28:47.140)

according to most people, would sort of define it as like,

Steve Viscelli (28:49.500)

okay, I'm at the customer location, I'm waiting to load,

Lex Fridman (28:51.580)

I'm doing some paperwork, you know,

Steve Viscelli (28:53.500)

inspecting the truck, I'm fueling it,

Lex Fridman (28:55.820)

just waiting to, you know, get put in the dock,

Steve Viscelli (28:58.160)

80 to 90 hours would be sort of a typical work week

Lex Fridman (29:01.980)

for one of these drivers.

Lex Fridman (29:04.620)

And just when you look at that,

Lex Fridman (29:05.900)

they don't make minimum wage oftentimes.

Steve Viscelli (29:07.340)

Right, just to be clear, what we're dancing around here

Lex Fridman (29:10.420)

is that a little bit over, a little bit under minimum wage

Steve Viscelli (29:14.180)

is nevertheless most truck drivers seem to be making

Lex Fridman (29:17.500)

close to minimum wage.

Steve Viscelli (29:19.380)

Like this is the, so like we maybe haven't made that clear.

Lex Fridman (29:23.980)

There's a few that make quite a bit of money,

Lex Fridman (29:27.180)

but like you're as an entry and for years,

Lex Fridman (29:31.220)

you're operating essentially minimum wage

Lex Fridman (29:35.500)

and potentially far less than minimum wage

Lex Fridman (29:37.820)

if you actually count the number of hours

Steve Viscelli (29:40.900)

that are taken out of your life

Lex Fridman (29:42.780)

due to your dedication to trucking.

Steve Viscelli (29:45.780)

Well, if you count like the hours taken out of your life,

Lex Fridman (29:49.420)

then you gotta go, you know, maybe a full 24.

Steve Viscelli (29:52.780)

That's right, yeah, from family,

Lex Fridman (29:54.340)

from the high quality of life parts of your life.

Steve Viscelli (29:59.340)

Yeah, and there's a whole nother set of rules

Lex Fridman (2:00:00.820)

You have to have the automated mapping.

Lex Fridman (2:00:04.140)

So we're sort of done all this incremental automation

Lex Fridman (2:00:07.780)

that could make the truck completely driverless.

Steve Viscelli (2:00:11.460)

There's some important things happening right now

Lex Fridman (2:00:13.980)

with the remaining good jobs.

Lex Fridman (2:00:15.260)

So what you're really paying for

Lex Fridman (2:00:17.340)

when you get a good truck driver is, like I said,

Steve Viscelli (2:00:20.340)

you get those kind of local skills

Lex Fridman (2:00:22.580)

of like backing and congested traffic.

Steve Viscelli (2:00:26.300)

Those, it's really impressive to watch

Lex Fridman (2:00:28.660)

and there's some value on it certainly,

Lex Fridman (2:00:30.340)

but it's relatively low value

Lex Fridman (2:00:33.580)

in the actual driving technique, right?

Lex Fridman (2:00:35.940)

So you bump something backing into the dock,

Lex Fridman (2:00:39.100)

it might be a couple of thousand dollars

Steve Viscelli (2:00:41.300)

because you ruin a canopy or something over a dock

Lex Fridman (2:00:43.500)

or tear up a trailer.

Lex Fridman (2:00:45.380)

What you really want,

Lex Fridman (2:00:46.460)

those highly skilled conscientious drivers,

Lex Fridman (2:00:50.500)

and that's really what it is.

Lex Fridman (2:00:52.060)

And that's what computers are really good at

Lex Fridman (2:00:53.900)

is about being conscientious, right?

Lex Fridman (2:00:55.780)

In the sense of like, they pay attention continually, right?

Lex Fridman (2:00:59.140)

And how I was describing those long haul segments

Lex Fridman (2:01:02.220)

where the driver just keeps out of the situations

Steve Viscelli (2:01:06.540)

that could become problematic

Lex Fridman (2:01:08.820)

and just, they don't look at their phone.

Steve Viscelli (2:01:10.780)

I mean, they take the job seriously and they're safe

Lex Fridman (2:01:13.300)

and you can give somebody a skills test, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:01:16.820)

As a CDL examiner, you could take them out and say,

Lex Fridman (2:01:19.100)

all right, I need you to go around these cones

Lex Fridman (2:01:20.580)

and drive safely through this school zone.

Lex Fridman (2:01:24.180)

But what really proves that you're a safe driver

Lex Fridman (2:01:27.020)

is two years without an accident, right?

Lex Fridman (2:01:29.580)

Because that means that day after day,

Steve Viscelli (2:01:31.740)

hour after hour, mile after mile,

Lex Fridman (2:01:34.180)

you did the right thing, right?

Lex Fridman (2:01:36.580)

And not when it was like, oh, some situations emerging,

Lex Fridman (2:01:39.340)

but just consistently over time

Steve Viscelli (2:01:41.340)

kept yourself out of accident situations.

Lex Fridman (2:01:43.660)

And you can see this with drivers who are a million

Steve Viscelli (2:01:46.180)

or 2 million safe miles.

Lex Fridman (2:01:47.980)

The value of those drivers for Walmart

Steve Viscelli (2:01:50.300)

is they don't run over minivans.

Lex Fridman (2:01:52.780)

The company I worked for,

Steve Viscelli (2:01:54.780)

they ran over minivans on a regular basis.

Lex Fridman (2:01:57.180)

So when I was trained, they said, we kill 20 people a year.

Steve Viscelli (2:02:03.100)

We send someone to the funeral,

Lex Fridman (2:02:04.780)

there's a big check involved, don't be that.

Steve Viscelli (2:02:08.700)

We don't wanna go to your funeral

Lex Fridman (2:02:10.460)

and you don't wanna be the person who caused that funeral.

Steve Viscelli (2:02:15.220)

Okay, so they just write that off.

Lex Fridman (2:02:18.340)

Okay, that's just part of the business model.

Steve Viscelli (2:02:20.780)

Now, forward collision avoidance

Lex Fridman (2:02:25.340)

can basically eliminate the vast majority

Steve Viscelli (2:02:29.500)

of those accidents.

Lex Fridman (2:02:30.980)

That's what the value of a really expensive

Steve Viscelli (2:02:33.260)

conscientious driver is based on.

Lex Fridman (2:02:35.020)

They don't run over minivans.

Lex Fridman (2:02:37.060)

So as soon as you have that forward collision avoidance,

Lex Fridman (2:02:40.340)

what's gonna happen to the wages of those drivers?

Steve Viscelli (2:02:43.460)

By way of a therapy session, help me understand,

Lex Fridman (2:02:48.500)

is a collision avoidance,

Steve Viscelli (2:02:52.660)

automated collision avoidance systems,

Lex Fridman (2:02:55.300)

are they good or bad for society?

Steve Viscelli (2:02:57.820)

Yeah, I mean, this is, they're good.

Lex Fridman (2:03:02.220)

Right. They're good.

Lex Fridman (2:03:03.540)

But what do we do about the pain of a workforce

Lex Fridman (2:03:08.540)

in the short term because their wages are gonna go down

Lex Fridman (2:03:13.740)

because the job starts requiring less and less skill?

Lex Fridman (2:03:18.140)

Is there a hopeful message here

Lex Fridman (2:03:20.340)

where other jobs are created?

Lex Fridman (2:03:22.660)

So I'm a sociologist, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:24.660)

So I'm gonna think about what's the structure behind that

Lex Fridman (2:03:28.380)

that creates that pain, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:30.140)

And it's ownership, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:32.860)

We don't call it capitalism for nothing.

Lex Fridman (2:03:35.660)

What capitalists do is they figure out cheaper,

Lex Fridman (2:03:39.100)

more efficient ways to do stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:03:40.700)

And they use technology to do that oftentimes, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:43.260)

This is the remarkable history of the last couple centuries

Lex Fridman (2:03:47.620)

and all the productivity gains is,

Lex Fridman (2:03:50.620)

people who were in a competitive market saying,

Lex Fridman (2:03:54.460)

if I have to do it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:03:56.500)

I don't have a choice.

Steve Viscelli (2:03:57.460)

Cause like my competitor over there is gonna eat my lunch

Lex Fridman (2:04:00.420)

if I'm not on my game.

Steve Viscelli (2:04:03.540)

I don't have a choice.

Lex Fridman (2:04:04.500)

I've got to invest in this technology

Steve Viscelli (2:04:06.780)

to make it more efficient, to make it cheaper.

Lex Fridman (2:04:10.860)

And what do you look for?

Lex Fridman (2:04:12.300)

You look for oftentimes, you look for labor costs, right?

Lex Fridman (2:04:16.060)

You look for high value labor.

Steve Viscelli (2:04:17.460)

If I can take a hundred and,

Lex Fridman (2:04:19.740)

a lot of these truck drivers make good money,

Steve Viscelli (2:04:21.060)

a hundred thousand dollars, good benefits,

Lex Fridman (2:04:22.660)

vacation, retirement.

Steve Viscelli (2:04:25.340)

If I can replace them with a $35,000 worker

Lex Fridman (2:04:28.460)

when I'm competing with maybe a low wage retail employer

Steve Viscelli (2:04:32.340)

rather than some other more expensive employers

Lex Fridman (2:04:34.700)

for skilled blue collar workers, I'm gonna do that.

Lex Fridman (2:04:39.020)

And that's just, that's what we do.

Lex Fridman (2:04:41.700)

And so I think those are the bigger questions

Lex Fridman (2:04:45.620)

around this technology, right?

Lex Fridman (2:04:46.820)

Is like, are workers gonna get screwed by this?

Steve Viscelli (2:04:50.140)

Like, yeah, most likely.

Lex Fridman (2:04:51.580)

Like that's what we do.

Lex Fridman (2:04:54.060)

So one of the things you say is,

Lex Fridman (2:04:55.180)

I mean, first of all, the numbers of workers

Steve Viscelli (2:04:56.860)

that will feel this pain is not perhaps as large

Lex Fridman (2:05:00.020)

as the journalists kind of articulate,

Lex Fridman (2:05:02.780)

but nevertheless, the pain is real.

Lex Fridman (2:05:05.260)

And I guess my question here is,

Lex Fridman (2:05:11.500)

do you have an optimistic vision

Lex Fridman (2:05:12.860)

about the transformative effects

Lex Fridman (2:05:14.380)

of autonomous trucks on society?

Lex Fridman (2:05:17.420)

Like if you look 20 years from now

Lex Fridman (2:05:21.380)

and perhaps see maybe 30 years from now,

Lex Fridman (2:05:24.500)

perhaps see these autonomous trucks

Steve Viscelli (2:05:26.580)

doing the various parts of the scenarios you listed.

Lex Fridman (2:05:30.260)

And there's just hundreds of thousands of them,

Steve Viscelli (2:05:33.380)

just like veins, like blood flowing through veins

Lex Fridman (2:05:38.380)

on the interstate system.

Lex Fridman (2:05:43.580)

What kind of world do you see that's a better world

Lex Fridman (2:05:46.300)

than today that involves such trucks?

Lex Fridman (2:05:48.460)

Yeah, can I defend myself first?

Lex Fridman (2:05:51.020)

Because I'm reading the comments right now

Steve Viscelli (2:05:53.740)

of people, of the economists who are telling me.

Lex Fridman (2:05:56.020)

Another commenter, dear PhD in economics.

Steve Viscelli (2:05:59.500)

Yes, yes, dear PhD in economics,

Lex Fridman (2:06:02.540)

I know that higher skilled jobs

Lex Fridman (2:06:05.300)

are created by technological advancement, right?

Lex Fridman (2:06:09.060)

I mean, there are big questions about how many of them,

Steve Viscelli (2:06:11.580)

right, so the idea that we would create

Lex Fridman (2:06:14.060)

more expensive labor positions, right,

Lex Fridman (2:06:19.500)

with a new technology, right?

Lex Fridman (2:06:20.660)

You better check your business plan

Steve Viscelli (2:06:22.540)

if your idea is to take a bunch of low wage labor

Lex Fridman (2:06:26.300)

and replace it with the same amount of high wage labor,

Steve Viscelli (2:06:28.700)

right, so there's a question about how many of those jobs.

Lex Fridman (2:06:31.740)

And there's the really important social

Lex Fridman (2:06:34.060)

and political question of are they the same people, right?

Lex Fridman (2:06:38.140)

And do they live in the same places?

Lex Fridman (2:06:39.700)

And I think that kind of geography

Lex Fridman (2:06:42.460)

is a huge issue here with the impacts, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:06:45.380)

Lots of rural workers.

Lex Fridman (2:06:47.540)

Interesting politically, lots of red state workers, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:06:50.020)

Lots of blue state, maybe union folks

Lex Fridman (2:06:51.940)

who are gonna try to slow autonomy

Lex Fridman (2:06:53.980)

and lots of red state representatives in the house maybe

Lex Fridman (2:06:57.260)

who wanna stand up for their trucker constituents.

Lex Fridman (2:07:01.460)

So just to defend myself.

Lex Fridman (2:07:03.220)

Yeah, and to elaborate, I think economics as a field

Steve Viscelli (2:07:06.620)

is not good at measuring the landscape

Lex Fridman (2:07:08.300)

of human pain and suffering.

Lex Fridman (2:07:10.220)

So sometimes you can forget in the numbers

Lex Fridman (2:07:13.780)

that it's real lives that are at stake.

Steve Viscelli (2:07:15.380)

That's what I suppose sociology is better at doing.

Lex Fridman (2:07:18.460)

So we try sometimes, sometimes.

Steve Viscelli (2:07:20.660)

Well, the problem with, I mean,

Lex Fridman (2:07:22.140)

I'm somebody who loves psychology and psychiatry

Lex Fridman (2:07:25.940)

and a little bit, I guess, of sociology.

Lex Fridman (2:07:28.820)

I realize how little, how tragically flawed the field is,

Steve Viscelli (2:07:33.260)

not because of lack of trying,

Lex Fridman (2:07:34.740)

but just how difficult the problems are.

Steve Viscelli (2:07:37.420)

To do really thorough studies

Lex Fridman (2:07:39.740)

that understand the fundamentals of human behavior

Lex Fridman (2:07:42.380)

and this, yes, landscape of human suffering,

Lex Fridman (2:07:45.740)

it's almost an impossible task without the data.

Lex Fridman (2:07:48.700)

And we currently don't, not everybody's richly integrated

Lex Fridman (2:07:53.540)

to where they're fully connected

Lex Fridman (2:07:54.900)

and all their information is being recorded

Lex Fridman (2:07:58.700)

for sociologists to study.

Lex Fridman (2:08:00.580)

So you have to make a lot of inferences.

Lex Fridman (2:08:02.260)

You have to talk to people.

Steve Viscelli (2:08:03.460)

You have to do the interviews as you're doing.

Lex Fridman (2:08:05.140)

And through that really difficult work,

Steve Viscelli (2:08:07.860)

try to understand, hear the music

Lex Fridman (2:08:11.660)

that nobody else is hearing,

Steve Viscelli (2:08:13.420)

the music of what people are feeling,

Lex Fridman (2:08:15.820)

their hopes, their dreams, and the crushing of their dreams

Steve Viscelli (2:08:19.780)

due to some kind of economic forces.

Lex Fridman (2:08:22.300)

Yeah, I mean, we've just lived that

Steve Viscelli (2:08:24.660)

for four and a half years of probably elites,

Lex Fridman (2:08:28.620)

let me just go out on a limb and say,

Steve Viscelli (2:08:30.820)

not understanding the sort of emotional

Lex Fridman (2:08:33.740)

and psychological currents

Lex Fridman (2:08:35.020)

of a large portion of the population, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:37.780)

And just being stunned by it and confused, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:08:41.180)

It wasn't confusing for me after having talked to truckers.

Lex Fridman (2:08:46.180)

Again, trucking is a job of last resort.

Steve Viscelli (2:08:48.860)

These are people who've already lost

Lex Fridman (2:08:50.540)

that manufacturing job oftentimes,

Lex Fridman (2:08:52.380)

already lost that construction job to just aging, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:57.380)

So what can we do, right?

Lex Fridman (2:08:59.500)

What's sort of the positive vision?

Lex Fridman (2:09:01.100)

Because like, we've got tons of highway deaths.

Steve Viscelli (2:09:04.140)

We've got, and just the big picture is,

Lex Fridman (2:09:09.140)

and this is the opportunity, I guess, for investors,

Steve Viscelli (2:09:13.060)

it's a hugely inefficient system.

Lex Fridman (2:09:15.660)

So we buy this truck,

Steve Viscelli (2:09:17.340)

there's this low wage worker in it oftentimes.

Lex Fridman (2:09:19.660)

And again, I'm setting aside those really good

Steve Viscelli (2:09:21.900)

line haul jobs in LTL, those are a different case.

Lex Fridman (2:09:26.140)

That low wage worker is driving a truck that they might,

Steve Viscelli (2:09:30.540)

the wheels might roll seven to eight hours a day.

Lex Fridman (2:09:32.460)

That's what the truck is designed to do

Lex Fridman (2:09:33.940)

and that's what makes the money for the company.

Lex Fridman (2:09:36.300)

In other seven, eight hours a day,

Steve Viscelli (2:09:37.980)

the driver's doing other kinds of work

Lex Fridman (2:09:39.860)

that is not driving.

Lex Fridman (2:09:41.940)

And then the rest of the day,

Lex Fridman (2:09:42.820)

they're basically living out of the truck.

Steve Viscelli (2:09:45.540)

You really can't find a more inefficient use of an asset

Lex Fridman (2:09:49.020)

than that, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:09:51.140)

Now, a big part of that is we pay for the roads

Lex Fridman (2:09:53.020)

and we pay for the rest areas and all this other stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:09:55.660)

So the way that I work and the way that I think

Lex Fridman (2:09:59.100)

about these problems is I try to find analogies, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:10:01.380)

Sort of labor processes and things that make economic sense

Lex Fridman (2:10:04.620)

that seem in the same area of the economy,

Lex Fridman (2:10:11.580)

but have some different characteristics for workers, right?

Lex Fridman (2:10:15.420)

And sort of try to figure out

Lex Fridman (2:10:17.020)

why does the economics work there, right?

Lex Fridman (2:10:19.540)

And so if you look at those really good jobs,

Steve Viscelli (2:10:24.460)

the most likely way that you as a passenger car driver

Lex Fridman (2:10:29.100)

would know that it's one of those drivers

Lex Fridman (2:10:30.820)

is that there are multiple trailers, right?

Lex Fridman (2:10:33.060)

So you see these, like maybe it's three small trailers,

Steve Viscelli (2:10:35.580)

maybe it's two sort of medium sized trailers.

Lex Fridman (2:10:37.860)

Some places you might even see

Steve Viscelli (2:10:39.020)

two really big trailers together.

Lex Fridman (2:10:42.260)

You do that because labor is expensive, right?

Lex Fridman (2:10:44.500)

And it's highly skilled.

Lex Fridman (2:10:45.660)

And so you use it efficiently and you say, all right,

Steve Viscelli (2:10:48.740)

rather than having you haul that little trailer

Lex Fridman (2:10:51.340)

out of the ports, that sort of half size container,

Steve Viscelli (2:10:54.020)

we're gonna wait till we get three

Lex Fridman (2:10:55.100)

or we're gonna coordinate the movement

Lex Fridman (2:10:56.540)

so that they're three ready.

Lex Fridman (2:10:57.780)

You go do what truckers call make a set,

Steve Viscelli (2:11:00.580)

put them together, right, and you go.

Lex Fridman (2:11:04.020)

That's a massive productivity gain, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:11:06.060)

Because you're hauling two, three times as much freight.

Lex Fridman (2:11:09.860)

So the positive scenario that I threw out in 2018

Steve Viscelli (2:11:13.820)

was why not have a human driven truck

Lex Fridman (2:11:18.740)

with a self driving truck that follows it, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:11:20.660)

Just a drone unit.

Lex Fridman (2:11:23.180)

And to me, this seemed as a non computer scientist,

Lex Fridman (2:11:28.180)

a non computer scientist, a sociologist, right?

Lex Fridman (2:11:31.180)

This made a lot of sense because when I got done talking

Steve Viscelli (2:11:33.620)

to the computer scientists and the engineers,

Lex Fridman (2:11:36.740)

they were like, well, it's like object recognition,

Steve Viscelli (2:11:38.940)

decision making algorithm, all this stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:11:40.740)

It's like, all right, so why don't you leave

Lex Fridman (2:11:43.460)

the human brain in the lead vehicle, right?

Lex Fridman (2:11:46.820)

You got all that processing and then all that following.

Steve Viscelli (2:11:50.620)

Now, again, this is sort of me being a lay person.

Lex Fridman (2:11:54.620)

I said, why don't, then that following truck, right,

Steve Viscelli (2:11:57.140)

makes direction from the front.

Lex Fridman (2:11:58.380)

It uses the rear of the trailer as a reference point.

Steve Viscelli (2:12:01.140)

It maintains the lane.

Lex Fridman (2:12:02.220)

You've got cooperative adaptive cruise control

Lex Fridman (2:12:04.740)

and that you double the productivity of that driver.

Lex Fridman (2:12:08.700)

You solve that problem that I hated

Steve Viscelli (2:12:11.620)

in my urban truck ports thing about the bridge weight.

Lex Fridman (2:12:15.700)

Cause when you get to the bridges,

Steve Viscelli (2:12:17.500)

the two trucks can just spread out just enough

Lex Fridman (2:12:20.380)

to make the bridge weight, right?

Lex Fridman (2:12:21.500)

And you can just program that in

Lex Fridman (2:12:22.740)

and they're 50 feet further apart,

Steve Viscelli (2:12:24.580)

100 feet further apart.

Lex Fridman (2:12:28.420)

So interesting sort of, I think, story about this

Steve Viscelli (2:12:32.500)

that leads to kind of, I think, the policy questions.

Lex Fridman (2:12:36.700)

In, I guess, 2017, Jack Reed and Susan Collins

Lex Fridman (2:12:42.260)

and requested from the Senate,

Lex Fridman (2:12:44.580)

the Senate requested research on what the impacts

Steve Viscelli (2:12:47.180)

of self driving trucks would be.

Lex Fridman (2:12:48.820)

And the first stage of that was for the GAO

Steve Viscelli (2:12:51.780)

to do a report, sort of looking at the lay of the land,

Lex Fridman (2:12:56.940)

talking to some experts.

Lex Fridman (2:12:59.420)

And I was working on my 2018 report,

Lex Fridman (2:13:03.180)

help contribute to that GAO report.

Lex Fridman (2:13:06.260)

And I had the six scenarios, right?

Lex Fridman (2:13:08.940)

I'm like, okay, here's what Starsky's doing.

Steve Viscelli (2:13:12.180)

Here's what Embark and Uber are doing.

Lex Fridman (2:13:16.060)

Here's what Waymo might be doing.

Lex Fridman (2:13:18.580)

Nobody really knows, right?

Lex Fridman (2:13:20.700)

Here's what Peloton's doing.

Steve Viscelli (2:13:23.340)

Here's the autopilot scenario.

Lex Fridman (2:13:25.300)

And then here's this one that I think

Steve Viscelli (2:13:27.180)

actually could be good for drivers.

Lex Fridman (2:13:29.500)

So now you've got that driver who's got

Steve Viscelli (2:13:31.900)

two times the freight.

Lex Fridman (2:13:34.460)

Their decisions are more important.

Lex Fridman (2:13:35.700)

They're managing a more complex system, right?

Lex Fridman (2:13:37.660)

They're probably gonna have to have

Steve Viscelli (2:13:38.620)

some global understanding of how to,

Lex Fridman (2:13:40.620)

the environments in which it can operate safely, right?

Lex Fridman (2:13:42.540)

Now we're talking upskilling, right?

Lex Fridman (2:13:44.580)

And so the GAO sort of writes up these different scenarios

Lex Fridman (2:13:52.260)

and the idea is that it's gonna prepare

Lex Fridman (2:13:54.340)

for this Department of Transportation,

Steve Viscelli (2:13:56.020)

Department of Labor set of processes

Lex Fridman (2:13:58.780)

to engage stakeholders and sort of get industry perspectives

Lex Fridman (2:14:05.300)

and then do a study on the labor impacts.

Lex Fridman (2:14:07.700)

So that DOT, DOL process starts to happen

Lex Fridman (2:14:12.700)

and I get to the workshop and a friend was sitting

Lex Fridman (2:14:18.180)

at the table next to me and he holds up the scenarios

Steve Viscelli (2:14:22.460)

that they're gonna have us discuss at this workshop.

Lex Fridman (2:14:24.980)

And he's like, hey, these look really familiar, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:14:27.900)

They were the scenarios from the report,

Lex Fridman (2:14:30.740)

but there were only five instead of six.

Steve Viscelli (2:14:33.740)

Interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:14:34.860)

The sixth scenario, which was the upskilling labor,

Steve Viscelli (2:14:37.900)

good for workers scenario, wasn't discussed.

Lex Fridman (2:14:42.180)

So to clarify that the integral piece of technology

Steve Viscelli (2:14:45.700)

there is platooning.

Lex Fridman (2:14:47.420)

Yeah, I mean, in a sense it's platooning,

Steve Viscelli (2:14:50.020)

but, and in fairness, right, as I pitched that idea

Lex Fridman (2:14:54.940)

or sort of ran that idea by the computer scientists

Lex Fridman (2:14:58.660)

and engineers and product managers that I would talk to,

Lex Fridman (2:15:01.540)

they would say, we thought about that,

Lex Fridman (2:15:05.340)

but that following truck, it's not that simple.

Lex Fridman (2:15:09.660)

That thing, basically we had to engineer that

Steve Viscelli (2:15:12.620)

to be capable of independent self driving,

Lex Fridman (2:15:15.980)

because what if there was a cut in

Steve Viscelli (2:15:17.660)

or any number of scenarios in which it lost

Lex Fridman (2:15:21.660)

that connection to the lead truck for whatever reason.

Steve Viscelli (2:15:25.260)

Now, I mean, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (2:15:26.340)

Boo hoo, platooning is hard.

Steve Viscelli (2:15:29.700)

There's edge cases.

Lex Fridman (2:15:30.700)

I guarantee the number of edge cases in platooning

Steve Viscelli (2:15:33.740)

is orders of magnitude lower than the number of edge cases

Lex Fridman (2:15:37.380)

in the general solo full self drive.

Steve Viscelli (2:15:40.660)

You do not need to solve the full self driving problem.

Lex Fridman (2:15:43.860)

I mean, if you're talking about

Steve Viscelli (2:15:46.300)

probability of dangerous events,

Lex Fridman (2:15:49.340)

it just seems with platooning,

Steve Viscelli (2:15:50.860)

then like you can deal with cut ins.

Lex Fridman (2:15:54.780)

Yeah, so this is beyond,

Steve Viscelli (2:15:56.820)

this is one of the challenge obviously of being a researcher

Lex Fridman (2:15:59.180)

who doesn't really have any background

Lex Fridman (2:16:02.140)

in the technology, right?

Lex Fridman (2:16:04.500)

So I can dream this up.

Steve Viscelli (2:16:05.780)

I don't, you know, I have no idea if it's feasible.

Lex Fridman (2:16:08.140)

Well, let me speak, you spoke to the PhDs in economics.

Steve Viscelli (2:16:10.700)

Let me speak to the PhDs in computer science.

Lex Fridman (2:16:12.940)

If you think platooning is as hard

Steve Viscelli (2:16:14.580)

as the full self driving problem,

Lex Fridman (2:16:17.940)

we need to talk, because I think that's ridiculous.

Steve Viscelli (2:16:20.380)

I think platooning, and in fact,

Lex Fridman (2:16:22.820)

I think platooning is an interesting idea

Steve Viscelli (2:16:24.500)

for ride sharing as well,

Lex Fridman (2:16:26.700)

for the general autonomous driving problem,

Steve Viscelli (2:16:28.420)

not just trucking, but obviously trucking

Lex Fridman (2:16:30.380)

is the big, big benefit,

Steve Viscelli (2:16:32.140)

because the number of A to B points in trucking

Lex Fridman (2:16:35.380)

is much, much lower than the general ride sharing problem.

Lex Fridman (2:16:38.100)

But anyway, I think that's a great idea,

Lex Fridman (2:16:40.460)

but you're saying it was removed.

Steve Viscelli (2:16:42.660)

Yeah, and so you can go, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:16:44.980)

and listeners could go to these reports.

Steve Viscelli (2:16:47.180)

They're publicly available.

Lex Fridman (2:16:48.700)

And they explain why in the footnote.

Lex Fridman (2:16:51.540)

And they note that there was this other scenario

Lex Fridman (2:16:54.980)

suggested by at least me,

Lex Fridman (2:16:56.140)

and I can't remember if they said someone else did too.

Lex Fridman (2:16:58.980)

But they said, you know, we didn't include it

Steve Viscelli (2:17:01.920)

because no developers were working on it.

Lex Fridman (2:17:04.980)

Interesting.

Steve Viscelli (2:17:05.860)

Full disclosure,

Lex Fridman (2:17:07.460)

that was the approach that I took in my research, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:17:11.100)

Which was to go to the developers and say,

Lex Fridman (2:17:13.380)

what's your vision, right?

Lex Fridman (2:17:14.860)

What are you trying to develop?

Lex Fridman (2:17:17.820)

That's what I was trying to do.

Lex Fridman (2:17:19.020)

And maybe, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:17:20.140)

and then I tried to think outside the box at the end

Lex Fridman (2:17:22.220)

by adding that one, right?

Lex Fridman (2:17:23.300)

Like, here's one that I have, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:17:24.460)

people aren't talking about that could be cool.

Lex Fridman (2:17:25.960)

Now, again, it had been proposed in like 2014

Steve Viscelli (2:17:29.100)

for like fuel convoys.

Lex Fridman (2:17:31.340)

So you could just have like one super armored lead fuel

Lex Fridman (2:17:35.060)

truck, right?

Lex Fridman (2:17:35.900)

In a, you know, bringing fuel to forward operating bases

Steve Viscelli (2:17:38.180)

in Afghanistan.

Lex Fridman (2:17:39.140)

And then you wouldn't need, you know, the super heavy,

Steve Viscelli (2:17:41.980)

you know, you wouldn't have to protect the human life

Lex Fridman (2:17:43.280)

in the following truck.

Lex Fridman (2:17:44.120)

So that's interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:17:44.960)

You're saying like, when you talk to Waymo,

Steve Viscelli (2:17:46.540)

when you talk to these kinds of companies,

Lex Fridman (2:17:48.540)

they weren't at least openly saying they're working on this.

Lex Fridman (2:17:52.100)

So then it doesn't make sense to include in the list.

Lex Fridman (2:17:56.100)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:17:56.940)

And so, but here's the thing, right?

Lex Fridman (2:17:58.620)

This is the Department of Transportation, right?

Lex Fridman (2:18:01.060)

And the Department of Labor.

Lex Fridman (2:18:03.100)

Maybe they could consider some scenarios.

Steve Viscelli (2:18:04.740)

Like maybe we could say, you know, this, we,

Lex Fridman (2:18:07.560)

this technology has got a lot of potential.

Steve Viscelli (2:18:08.960)

Here's what we'd like it to do.

Lex Fridman (2:18:10.580)

You know, we'd like it to reduce highway deaths,

Steve Viscelli (2:18:12.700)

help us fight climate change, reduce congestion,

Lex Fridman (2:18:14.880)

you know, all these other, other things.

Lex Fridman (2:18:16.740)

But that's not how our policy conversation

Lex Fridman (2:18:19.100)

around technology is happening.

Steve Viscelli (2:18:20.520)

We're not, and people don't think that we should.

Lex Fridman (2:18:24.660)

And I think that's the fundamental shift

Lex Fridman (2:18:26.420)

that we need to have, right?

Lex Fridman (2:18:27.820)

I've been involved with this a little bit like NHTSA and DOT.

Steve Viscelli (2:18:31.740)

The approach they took is saying,

Lex Fridman (2:18:33.340)

we don't know what the heck we're doing.

Lex Fridman (2:18:34.900)

So we're going to just let the innovators do their thing

Lex Fridman (2:18:38.300)

and not regulate it for a while, just to see.

Steve Viscelli (2:18:41.360)

You don't, you think that's,

Lex Fridman (2:18:43.680)

you think DOT should provide ideas themselves.

Steve Viscelli (2:18:46.500)

Well, so this is the, this is the great trick

Lex Fridman (2:18:49.900)

in policy of private actors,

Lex Fridman (2:18:53.660)

is you get narrow mandates for government agencies, right?

Lex Fridman (2:18:58.680)

So, you know, the safety case will be handled

Steve Viscelli (2:19:01.900)

by organizations whose mandate is safety.

Lex Fridman (2:19:04.780)

So the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration,

Steve Viscelli (2:19:07.780)

who is, you know, going to be a key player,

Lex Fridman (2:19:11.180)

I argue in an article that I wrote, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:19:13.540)

they're going to be a key player in actually determining

Lex Fridman (2:19:15.620)

which scenario is most profitable

Steve Viscelli (2:19:17.980)

by setting the rules for truck drivers.

Lex Fridman (2:19:20.140)

Their mandate is safety, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:19:22.380)

Now they have lots of good people there who want,

Lex Fridman (2:19:25.060)

you know, who care about truck drivers

Lex Fridman (2:19:26.460)

and who wish truck drivers jobs were better,

Lex Fridman (2:19:29.340)

but they don't have the authority to say,

Steve Viscelli (2:19:32.860)

hey, we're going to write this rule

Lex Fridman (2:19:34.020)

because it's good for truck drivers, right?

Lex Fridman (2:19:35.580)

And so when you, you know, we need to say,

Lex Fridman (2:19:40.300)

you know, as a society, we need to not restrict technology,

Steve Viscelli (2:19:44.020)

not stand in the way of things.

Lex Fridman (2:19:45.620)

We need to harness it towards the goals that matter, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:19:48.860)

Not whatever comes out the end of the pipeline

Lex Fridman (2:19:52.060)

because it's the easiest thing to develop

Steve Viscelli (2:19:53.780)

or whatever is most profitable for the first actor

Lex Fridman (2:19:57.060)

or whatever, but, you know, and we do,

Lex Fridman (2:19:58.740)

the thing is we do that, right?

Lex Fridman (2:20:00.740)

I mean, like when we sent people to the moon,

Steve Viscelli (2:20:04.220)

you know, we did that,

Lex Fridman (2:20:06.140)

and there were tremendous benefits

Lex Fridman (2:20:07.820)

that followed from it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:20:09.380)

And we do this all the time in, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:20:11.420)

trying to cure cancer or whatever it is, right?

Lex Fridman (2:20:13.580)

I mean, we can do this, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:20:17.220)

Now the interesting sort of epilogue to that story is,

Lex Fridman (2:20:21.940)

you know, six months or so, I don't know how long it was,

Steve Viscelli (2:20:25.180)

after those meetings in which that sixth scenario

Lex Fridman (2:20:28.220)

was not considered, a company called Locomation,

Steve Viscelli (2:20:33.780)

you know, ends up using that,

Lex Fridman (2:20:36.660)

essentially that basic scenario with a slight variation.

Lex Fridman (2:20:39.940)

So they leave the human driver in both trucks

Lex Fridman (2:20:43.780)

and then that following driver goes off duty.

Lex Fridman (2:20:46.100)

And then, you know, I've been trying to think

Lex Fridman (2:20:50.020)

of what the term is, they kind of,

Steve Viscelli (2:20:50.940)

I think of it as like slingshotting,

Lex Fridman (2:20:52.860)

they sort of, when one runs out of hours,

Steve Viscelli (2:20:54.460)

you know, the one who's off duty goes in front and,

Lex Fridman (2:20:56.500)

you know, and so, you know, if only they had been,

Steve Viscelli (2:21:01.380)

you know, around six months earlier,

Lex Fridman (2:21:04.380)

that might've been considered by the OT,

Lex Fridman (2:21:06.460)

but it just says, you know, who has the authority

Lex Fridman (2:21:08.620)

to propose what these visions of the future are?

Steve Viscelli (2:21:10.820)

Well, some of it is also just the company stepping up

Lex Fridman (2:21:13.740)

and just doing it, screw the authority,

Lex Fridman (2:21:16.300)

and showing that it's possible,

Lex Fridman (2:21:18.020)

and then the authority follows.

Lex Fridman (2:21:19.660)

So that's why I really love innovators in the space.

Lex Fridman (2:21:24.740)

The criticism I have, the very sort of real,

Steve Viscelli (2:21:29.460)

I don't know, harsh criticism I have

Lex Fridman (2:21:31.020)

towards autonomous vehicle companies in the space

Steve Viscelli (2:21:34.380)

is they've gotten culturally,

Lex Fridman (2:21:38.140)

they've, it's become acceptable somehow

Steve Viscelli (2:21:42.780)

to do demos and videos,

Lex Fridman (2:21:46.260)

as opposed to the old school American way

Steve Viscelli (2:21:48.740)

of solving problems.

Lex Fridman (2:21:50.580)

There's a culture in Silicon Valley

Steve Viscelli (2:21:53.220)

where you're talking to VCs

Lex Fridman (2:21:56.100)

that have lost that kind of love of solving problems.

Steve Viscelli (2:22:01.860)

They kind of like envision,

Lex Fridman (2:22:03.700)

if the story you told me in your PowerPoint presentation

Steve Viscelli (2:22:07.340)

is true, how many trillions of dollars

Lex Fridman (2:22:09.380)

might I be able to make?

Steve Viscelli (2:22:10.700)

There's something lost in that conversation

Lex Fridman (2:22:13.220)

where you're not really taking on like the problem

Steve Viscelli (2:22:16.900)

in a real way, so these autonomous vehicle companies

Lex Fridman (2:22:19.660)

realize we don't need to,

Steve Viscelli (2:22:21.020)

we just need to make nice PowerPoint presentations

Lex Fridman (2:22:24.140)

and not actually deliver products

Steve Viscelli (2:22:26.020)

that like everybody looks outside and says,

Lex Fridman (2:22:29.380)

holy shit, this is life changing.

Steve Viscelli (2:22:31.980)

This is where I have to give props to Waymo

Lex Fridman (2:22:34.180)

is they put driverless cars on the road

Lex Fridman (2:22:37.980)

and like forget PowerPoint slide presentations,

Lex Fridman (2:22:41.500)

actual cars on the road.

Steve Viscelli (2:22:42.540)

Then you can criticize like,

Lex Fridman (2:22:43.980)

is that actually going to work?

Steve Viscelli (2:22:45.580)

Who knows, but the thing is they have cars on the road

Lex Fridman (2:22:48.300)

and that's why I have to give props to Tesla.

Steve Viscelli (2:22:49.780)

They have whatever you want to say about risk

Lex Fridman (2:22:52.940)

and all those kinds of things,

Steve Viscelli (2:22:54.180)

they have cars on the road

Lex Fridman (2:22:55.700)

that have some level of automation

Lex Fridman (2:22:57.380)

and soon they have trucks on the road as well.

Lex Fridman (2:23:00.260)

And that kind of, that component,

Steve Viscelli (2:23:03.900)

I think is important part of the policy conversation

Lex Fridman (2:23:06.780)

because you start getting data from these companies

Steve Viscelli (2:23:10.300)

that are willing to take the big risks

Lex Fridman (2:23:12.140)

as opposed to making slide decks,

Steve Viscelli (2:23:14.380)

they're actually putting cars on the road

Lex Fridman (2:23:16.620)

and like real lives are at stake.

Steve Viscelli (2:23:19.340)

They could be lost and they could bankrupt the company

Lex Fridman (2:23:21.980)

if they make the wrong decisions.

Lex Fridman (2:23:23.500)

And that's deeply admirable to me.

Lex Fridman (2:23:25.900)

Speaking of which I have to ask Waymo trucks,

Steve Viscelli (2:23:28.940)

I think it's called Waymo Via.

Lex Fridman (2:23:31.980)

So I'm talking to the head of trucking at Waymo.

Steve Viscelli (2:23:34.660)

I don't know if you've gotten a chance

Lex Fridman (2:23:35.620)

to interact with them.

Lex Fridman (2:23:37.380)

What's a good question to ask the guy?

Lex Fridman (2:23:39.500)

What's a good question of Waymo?

Steve Viscelli (2:23:41.340)

Because they seem to be one of the leaders in the space.

Lex Fridman (2:23:45.060)

They have the zen like calm

Steve Viscelli (2:23:47.700)

of like being willing to stick with it for the longterm

Lex Fridman (2:23:51.540)

in order to solve the problem.

Lex Fridman (2:23:53.340)

Yeah, and I guess they have that luxury, right?

Lex Fridman (2:23:56.860)

Which I don't think I,

Steve Viscelli (2:23:59.380)

if I had another life as a researcher,

Lex Fridman (2:24:01.860)

I would love to just study the business strategies

Steve Viscelli (2:24:05.380)

of startups and Silicon Valley sort of structure.

Lex Fridman (2:24:10.020)

Would you consider Waymo a startup?

Steve Viscelli (2:24:12.180)

No.

Lex Fridman (2:24:13.020)

No.

Lex Fridman (2:24:13.860)

No, right?

Lex Fridman (2:24:14.700)

I mean, it's at least not in the things

Steve Viscelli (2:24:16.260)

that seem to matter in this self driving space.

Lex Fridman (2:24:18.940)

So you mentioned the demos,

Lex Fridman (2:24:21.980)

and I don't have enough data as a sociologist

Lex Fridman (2:24:24.340)

to really say like, oh, this is why they do what they do.

Lex Fridman (2:24:27.260)

But my hypothesis is,

Lex Fridman (2:24:30.020)

there's a real scarcity of talent and money for this.

Lex Fridman (2:24:33.500)

And there certainly was a scarcity of like partnerships

Lex Fridman (2:24:36.260)

with OEMs and the big trucking companies.

Lex Fridman (2:24:39.940)

And there was a race for it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:24:42.020)

And the way that if you don't have the backing of Alphabet,

Lex Fridman (2:24:47.900)

you do a demo, right?

Lex Fridman (2:24:49.820)

And you get a few more good engineers who say,

Steve Viscelli (2:24:52.060)

hey, look, they did that cool thing.

Lex Fridman (2:24:54.060)

Like Anthony Levandowski did with Otto

Lex Fridman (2:24:56.700)

and that resulted in the Uber purchase of that program.

Lex Fridman (2:25:01.700)

So what would I ask?

Steve Viscelli (2:25:03.220)

I mean, I think I would ask a lot of questions,

Lex Fridman (2:25:06.580)

but I think the markets.

Steve Viscelli (2:25:07.420)

Well, there's also on record and off record conversations

Lex Fridman (2:25:09.780)

which unfortunately,

Steve Viscelli (2:25:11.420)

I'm asking for an on record conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:25:14.300)

And that I don't know if these companies

Steve Viscelli (2:25:18.700)

are willing to have interesting on record conversations.

Lex Fridman (2:25:21.780)

Yeah, I mean, I assume that like there are questions

Steve Viscelli (2:25:24.780)

that I don't think you'd have to ask.

Lex Fridman (2:25:26.180)

Like I assume they're gonna be actually driverless, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:25:28.620)

They're not gonna like keep the driver in there.

Lex Fridman (2:25:31.220)

So I mean, for the industry,

Steve Viscelli (2:25:33.460)

I think it would be interesting to know

Lex Fridman (2:25:36.580)

where they see that first adopter, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:25:39.380)

Oh, you mean from like the scenarios that laid out

Lex Fridman (2:25:42.020)

which one are they going to take on?

Steve Viscelli (2:25:44.060)

Yeah, I mean, cause that's gonna,

Lex Fridman (2:25:45.820)

again, it's those really expensive good jobs, right?

Lex Fridman (2:25:48.500)

So those LTL jobs, the like UPS jobs.

Lex Fridman (2:25:51.380)

Now that's gonna be, that's where labor is too, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:25:54.060)

That's where the teamsters are.

Lex Fridman (2:25:54.980)

That's the only place they are left, right?

Lex Fridman (2:25:57.220)

So that's gonna be the big fight on the hill

Lex Fridman (2:26:00.460)

and if labor can muster it, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:26:03.300)

I don't know.

Lex Fridman (2:26:04.940)

There's a really cool,

Steve Viscelli (2:26:06.460)

like one thing I would recommend to you and your listeners,

Lex Fridman (2:26:10.340)

if you really wanna see some like a remarkable page

Steve Viscelli (2:26:13.180)

in sort of the history of labor and automation,

Lex Fridman (2:26:15.860)

there's a report that Harry Bridges,

Steve Viscelli (2:26:18.780)

who was the socialist leader of the Longshoremen

Lex Fridman (2:26:23.620)

on the West Coast and just, you know, galvanize that union

Lex Fridman (2:26:26.300)

and they still control the ports today

Lex Fridman (2:26:28.340)

because of the sort of vision that he laid down.

Steve Viscelli (2:26:31.860)

In the 1960s, he put out a photo journal report

Lex Fridman (2:26:35.780)

called Men and Machines and basically what it was,

Steve Viscelli (2:26:39.220)

was it was an internal education campaign

Lex Fridman (2:26:42.060)

to convince the membership

Steve Viscelli (2:26:44.020)

that they had to go along with automation.

Lex Fridman (2:26:46.700)

Machines were coming for their jobs

Lex Fridman (2:26:48.260)

and what the photo journal,

Lex Fridman (2:26:49.900)

it's almost like a hundred pages or something like that

Steve Viscelli (2:26:51.900)

is like, here's how we used to do it.

Lex Fridman (2:26:54.100)

Some of you old timers remember it.

Steve Viscelli (2:26:56.140)

Like we used to take the barrels of olive oil

Lex Fridman (2:26:58.620)

and we'd stack them in the hold and we'd roll them by hand

Lex Fridman (2:27:01.500)

and we'd put the timber in and we'd, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:27:03.340)

stack the crates tight, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:27:05.620)

and that was the pride of the Longshoremen,

Lex Fridman (2:27:07.620)

was a tight stow.

Lex Fridman (2:27:09.980)

And now you all know, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:27:12.020)

there are cranes that come down

Lex Fridman (2:27:13.300)

and there's no longer any, you know, rope slings

Lex Fridman (2:27:15.540)

and we're loading bulldozers into the hold

Steve Viscelli (2:27:17.740)

to push the ore up into piles

Lex Fridman (2:27:19.660)

and then clamshells are coming down

Lex Fridman (2:27:21.180)

and he made this case to them and he said,

Lex Fridman (2:27:25.140)

this is why we're signing this agreement

Steve Viscelli (2:27:27.820)

to basically allow the employer to automate

Lex Fridman (2:27:33.140)

and we're gonna lose jobs,

Lex Fridman (2:27:34.740)

but we're gonna get a share of the benefits.

Lex Fridman (2:27:37.660)

And so our wages are gonna go up.

Steve Viscelli (2:27:39.300)

We're gonna continue to control the hiring

Lex Fridman (2:27:41.100)

and training of workers.

Steve Viscelli (2:27:42.620)

Our numbers are gonna go down,

Lex Fridman (2:27:44.060)

but you know, basically that last son of a bitch

Steve Viscelli (2:27:46.500)

who's working at the ports,

Lex Fridman (2:27:48.060)

he's gonna be one really well paid son of a bitch,

Steve Viscelli (2:27:51.500)

you know, he may just be one standing,

Lex Fridman (2:27:53.900)

but he's gonna love his job.

Steve Viscelli (2:27:56.660)

You should check out that report.

Lex Fridman (2:27:57.860)

That's an interesting vision of a future

Steve Viscelli (2:27:59.700)

that probably still holds.

Lex Fridman (2:28:01.940)

That is, I mean, there is some level

Steve Viscelli (2:28:04.140)

to which you have to embrace the automation.

Lex Fridman (2:28:07.100)

Yeah, I mean, and who gets, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:28:08.540)

it's the benefits, right?

Lex Fridman (2:28:09.500)

It's like, I mean, think of the public dollars

Steve Viscelli (2:28:12.060)

that went into developing self driving vehicles

Lex Fridman (2:28:14.020)

in the early days, right?

Lex Fridman (2:28:14.900)

Not just the vision of it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:28:16.260)

Which was a public vision to, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:28:18.860)

take soldiers out of harm's way,

Lex Fridman (2:28:21.580)

but you know, a lot of money.

Lex Fridman (2:28:24.780)

And there's some way if you are a business

Lex Fridman (2:28:27.340)

that's leveraging the technology

Steve Viscelli (2:28:29.660)

from a broad historical ethical perspective,

Lex Fridman (2:28:33.780)

you do owe it to the bigger community to pay back,

Steve Viscelli (2:28:41.260)

like for all the investment that was paid

Lex Fridman (2:28:44.940)

to make that technology a reality.

Lex Fridman (2:28:47.180)

In some sense, I don't know how to make that right, right?

Lex Fridman (2:28:50.940)

On one, there's this pure capitalism

Lex Fridman (2:28:54.300)

and then there's communism and I'm not sure,

Lex Fridman (2:28:57.300)

I'm not sure how to get that balance right.

Steve Viscelli (2:29:04.380)

You know, I don't have all the answers in here,

Lex Fridman (2:29:06.260)

you know, and I wouldn't expect, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:29:09.100)

individual private companies to kind of kick back, right?

Lex Fridman (2:29:11.940)

That's, capitalism doesn't allow that, right?

Lex Fridman (2:29:14.060)

Unless you have a huge monopoly, right?

Lex Fridman (2:29:15.820)

And then you can on the backside,

Steve Viscelli (2:29:17.540)

create music halls and libraries and things like that.

Lex Fridman (2:29:21.260)

But you know, here's what I think, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:29:23.500)

the basic obligation is, is, you know, come to the table,

Lex Fridman (2:29:28.860)

like, and have an honest conversation

Steve Viscelli (2:29:31.820)

with the policymakers, with the truck drivers, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:29:35.820)

with the communities that are at risk.

Steve Viscelli (2:29:37.940)

Like, at least let's talk about these things, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:29:41.860)

in a way that doesn't look like

Steve Viscelli (2:29:43.500)

the way lobbying works right now.

Lex Fridman (2:29:45.340)

Where you send a well paid lobbyist to the Hill

Steve Viscelli (2:29:49.140)

to, you know, convince some representative or Senator

Lex Fridman (2:29:52.580)

to stick a sentence or two in that favors you into the,

Steve Viscelli (2:29:55.300)

like, let's have a real conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:29:57.780)

Real human conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:29:58.620)

Can we just do that?

Lex Fridman (2:29:59.460)

Yeah, don't play games.

Steve Viscelli (2:30:01.420)

Real, real human conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:30:03.220)

Let me ask you, mention Autopilot.

Steve Viscelli (2:30:06.500)

Gotta ask you about Tesla, this renegade little company

Lex Fridman (2:30:10.100)

that seems to be, from my perspective,

Steve Viscelli (2:30:12.220)

revolutionizing autonomous driving

Lex Fridman (2:30:13.820)

or semi autonomous driving,

Steve Viscelli (2:30:15.020)

or at least the problem of perception and control.

Lex Fridman (2:30:19.820)

They've got a semi on the way.

Steve Viscelli (2:30:22.140)

They got a truck on the way.

Lex Fridman (2:30:24.300)

What are your thoughts about Tesla Semi?

Steve Viscelli (2:30:26.580)

You know, I, and I did have

Lex Fridman (2:30:29.140)

some very preliminary conversations

Steve Viscelli (2:30:31.180)

with, you know, policy folks there.

Lex Fridman (2:30:35.020)

You know, nothing really in the tech

Steve Viscelli (2:30:37.260)

or business side of it too much.

Lex Fridman (2:30:39.980)

And here's why.

Steve Viscelli (2:30:40.980)

I think because electrification and autonomy

Lex Fridman (2:30:43.900)

run in opposite directions.

Lex Fridman (2:30:46.140)

And I just, you know, I don't see the application,

Lex Fridman (2:30:49.980)

the value in self driving for the truck

Steve Viscelli (2:30:52.580)

that Tesla's gonna produce in the near term.

Lex Fridman (2:30:55.500)

You know, they're just, you're not gonna have the battery.

Lex Fridman (2:30:58.820)

And now you could have wonderful safety systems

Lex Fridman (2:31:01.220)

and, you know, reinforcing, you know, the auto,

Steve Viscelli (2:31:03.900)

you know, self driving features supporting a skilled driver,

Lex Fridman (2:31:08.900)

but you're not gonna be able to pull that driver out

Steve Viscelli (2:31:11.140)

for long stretches the way that you are

Lex Fridman (2:31:12.940)

with driverless trucks.

Lex Fridman (2:31:14.260)

So do you think, I mean, the reason,

Lex Fridman (2:31:18.460)

so yeah, the electrification

Steve Viscelli (2:31:22.380)

is not obviously coupled with the automation.

Lex Fridman (2:31:27.780)

They have a very interesting approach

Steve Viscelli (2:31:29.860)

to semi autonomous pushing towards autonomous driving.

Lex Fridman (2:31:35.060)

All right, it's very unique.

Steve Viscelli (2:31:37.900)

No LIDAR, now no radar.

Lex Fridman (2:31:41.260)

It's computer vision alone from a large,

Steve Viscelli (2:31:44.260)

they're collecting huge amounts of data from a large fleet.

Lex Fridman (2:31:47.100)

It's an interesting, unique approach,

Steve Viscelli (2:31:49.460)

bold and fearless in this direction.

Lex Fridman (2:31:51.740)

If I were to guess whether this approach would work,

Steve Viscelli (2:31:55.260)

I would say, no, it started.

Lex Fridman (2:31:59.380)

One, you would need a lot of data

Lex Fridman (2:32:01.500)

and two, because you have actual cars deployed on the road

Lex Fridman (2:32:05.100)

using a beta version of this product,

Steve Viscelli (2:32:07.940)

you're going to have a system that's far less safe

Lex Fridman (2:32:11.980)

and you're going to run into trouble.

Steve Viscelli (2:32:13.380)

It's horrible PR, like it just seems like a nightmare,

Lex Fridman (2:32:17.580)

but it seems to not be the case, at least up to this point.

Steve Viscelli (2:32:20.620)

It seems to be not, you know, on par, if not safer

Lex Fridman (2:32:26.420)

and it seems to work really well

Lex Fridman (2:32:27.740)

and the human factor somehow manages,

Lex Fridman (2:32:32.020)

like drivers still pay attention.

Steve Viscelli (2:32:33.820)

Now there's a selection of who is inside

Lex Fridman (2:32:36.660)

the Tesla autopilot user base, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:32:39.820)

There could be a self selection mechanism there,

Lex Fridman (2:32:42.140)

but however it works,

Steve Viscelli (2:32:43.820)

these things are not running off the road all the time.

Lex Fridman (2:32:47.300)

So it's very interesting whether that can sort of creep

Steve Viscelli (2:32:50.580)

into the trucking space.

Lex Fridman (2:32:52.940)

Yes, at first the long haul problem is not solved.

Steve Viscelli (2:32:57.980)

They need to charge, but maybe you can solve, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:33:01.260)

a lot of your scenarios involved small distances

Lex Fridman (2:33:06.940)

and you know, that last mile aspect,

Lex Fridman (2:33:10.220)

which is exactly what Tesla is trying to solve

Steve Viscelli (2:33:12.140)

for the regular passenger vehicle space

Lex Fridman (2:33:18.620)

is the city driving.

Steve Viscelli (2:33:20.420)

It's possible that you have these trucks.

Lex Fridman (2:33:22.620)

It's almost like, yeah, you solved the last mile delivery

Steve Viscelli (2:33:28.220)

part of some of the scenarios that you mentioned

Lex Fridman (2:33:31.300)

in autonomous driving space.

Steve Viscelli (2:33:32.780)

Is that, do you think that's from the people you've spoken

Lex Fridman (2:33:35.940)

with too difficult of a problem?

Steve Viscelli (2:33:37.580)

The thing that, you know, keeps me so interested

Lex Fridman (2:33:41.540)

in this space and thinking that it's so important,

Steve Viscelli (2:33:43.580)

you know, is again, that efficiency question,

Lex Fridman (2:33:46.900)

that safety question and the way that these economics

Steve Viscelli (2:33:50.940)

can push us potentially, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:33:53.180)

toward a more efficient system.

Lex Fridman (2:33:54.780)

So I wanna see those Tesla electric trucks running out

Lex Fridman (2:33:58.140)

to those truck ports where you've got those two,

Lex Fridman (2:34:01.380)

you know, two trucks with a human driver in front, right?

Lex Fridman (2:34:05.620)

You know, I think that's now what's powering those

Steve Viscelli (2:34:08.500)

is that hydrogen, you know, I mean, I don't, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:34:11.300)

again, it's very interesting as a researcher

Steve Viscelli (2:34:13.100)

who does not have a background in technology

Lex Fridman (2:34:14.620)

and doesn't have a horse, you know, in this race.

Steve Viscelli (2:34:18.500)

I mean, you know, for all I know,

Lex Fridman (2:34:20.620)

self driving trucks will ultimately be achieved

Steve Viscelli (2:34:22.780)

by some biomechanical sensor that uses echolocation

Lex Fridman (2:34:26.580)

because we took stem cells of bats.

Lex Fridman (2:34:28.460)

And you know, I mean, I don't, I don't,

Lex Fridman (2:34:30.980)

I am completely unable to assess who's, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:34:35.540)

who's the head or who's behind or who makes sense.

Lex Fridman (2:34:37.820)

But I think one key component there,

Lex Fridman (2:34:39.940)

and this is what I see with Tesla often,

Lex Fridman (2:34:42.580)

and it's quite sad to me that other companies

Steve Viscelli (2:34:45.600)

don't do this enough, is that first principles thinking,

Lex Fridman (2:34:49.580)

like, wait, wait, wait, okay.

Steve Viscelli (2:34:51.180)

It's looking at the inefficiencies as opposed to,

Lex Fridman (2:34:54.140)

I've worked with quite a few car companies

Lex Fridman (2:34:57.060)

and they basically have a lot of meetings.

Lex Fridman (2:35:00.300)

There's a lot of meetings.

Lex Fridman (2:35:01.820)

And the discussion is like,

Lex Fridman (2:35:03.300)

how can we make this cheaper, this cheaper, this cheaper,

Steve Viscelli (2:35:05.580)

this component cheaper, this cheaper,

Lex Fridman (2:35:07.420)

the cheapification of everything, just like you said,

Steve Viscelli (2:35:10.260)

as opposed to saying, wait a minute, let's step back.

Lex Fridman (2:35:13.180)

Let's look at the entirety of the inefficiencies

Steve Viscelli (2:35:15.780)

in the system.

Lex Fridman (2:35:17.260)

Like, why have we been doing this like this

Lex Fridman (2:35:19.220)

for the last few decades?

Lex Fridman (2:35:20.940)

Like, start from scratch.

Lex Fridman (2:35:22.620)

Can this be 10X, 100X cheaper?

Lex Fridman (2:35:25.420)

Like, if we not just decrease the cost

Steve Viscelli (2:35:29.780)

of one component here or this component here

Lex Fridman (2:35:32.260)

or this component here,

Lex Fridman (2:35:33.620)

but like, let's like redesign everything.

Lex Fridman (2:35:37.900)

Let's infrastructure, let's have special lanes

Steve Viscelli (2:35:42.900)

or in terms of truck ports,

Lex Fridman (2:35:45.180)

as opposed to having regular human control truck ports,

Steve Viscelli (2:35:47.540)

have some kind of weird like sensors,

Lex Fridman (2:35:51.700)

like where everything about the truck connecting

Steve Viscelli (2:35:56.020)

at that final destination is automated fully

Lex Fridman (2:35:58.780)

from the ground up.

Steve Viscelli (2:35:59.780)

You build the facility from the ground up

Lex Fridman (2:36:01.620)

for the autonomous truck.

Steve Viscelli (2:36:03.460)

All those kinds of sort of questions are platooning.

Lex Fridman (2:36:06.820)

Let's say, wait a minute.

Steve Viscelli (2:36:08.140)

Okay, I know we think platooning is hard,

Lex Fridman (2:36:11.260)

but can we think through exactly why it's hard

Lex Fridman (2:36:14.380)

and can we actually solve it?

Lex Fridman (2:36:15.980)

Like if we collect a huge amount of data, can we solve it?

Lex Fridman (2:36:20.460)

And then teleoperation, like, okay, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:36:23.380)

It's difficult to have good signal,

Lex Fridman (2:36:25.460)

but can we actually, can we have,

Lex Fridman (2:36:27.740)

can we consider the probability of those edge cases

Lex Fridman (2:36:31.300)

and what to do in the edge cases

Lex Fridman (2:36:32.420)

when the teleoperation fails?

Lex Fridman (2:36:34.220)

Like how difficult is this?

Lex Fridman (2:36:35.300)

What are the costs?

Lex Fridman (2:36:36.300)

How do we actually construct a teleoperation center

Lex Fridman (2:36:39.580)

full of humans that are able to pay attention

Steve Viscelli (2:36:41.740)

to a large fleet where the average number of vehicles

Lex Fridman (2:36:44.700)

per human is like 10 or a hundred?

Steve Viscelli (2:36:47.700)

Like having that conversation as opposed to kind of having,

Lex Fridman (2:36:52.100)

you show up to work and say, all right,

Steve Viscelli (2:36:55.820)

it seems like because of COVID,

Lex Fridman (2:36:58.580)

we are not making as much money.

Steve Viscelli (2:37:00.540)

Can we have a cheaper,

Lex Fridman (2:37:02.220)

can we give less salary to the trucker?

Lex Fridman (2:37:04.660)

And can we build like decrease the cost

Lex Fridman (2:37:11.020)

or decrease the frequency at which we buy new trucks?

Lex Fridman (2:37:14.580)

And when we do buy new trucks,

Lex Fridman (2:37:16.300)

make them cheaper by making them crappier,

Steve Viscelli (2:37:18.540)

like this kind of discussion.

Lex Fridman (2:37:20.140)

This is why, to me, it's like Tesla is like rare on this.

Lex Fridman (2:37:23.220)

And there's some sectors in which innovation

Lex Fridman (2:37:26.180)

is part of the culture.

Steve Viscelli (2:37:27.580)

In the automotive sector, for some reason,

Lex Fridman (2:37:29.260)

it's not as much.

Steve Viscelli (2:37:31.180)

This is obviously the problem that Ford and GM

Lex Fridman (2:37:33.780)

are struggling with.

Steve Viscelli (2:37:34.620)

It's like, they're really good at making cars at scale cheap.

Lex Fridman (2:37:39.300)

And they're like legit good.

Steve Viscelli (2:37:41.220)

Like Toyota at this,

Lex Fridman (2:37:42.580)

they're some of the greatest manufacturing people

Lex Fridman (2:37:44.500)

in the world, right?

Lex Fridman (2:37:45.340)

That's incredible.

Lex Fridman (2:37:46.180)

But then when it comes to hiring software people,

Lex Fridman (2:37:48.820)

they're horrible.

Lex Fridman (2:37:49.660)

So it's culture.

Lex Fridman (2:37:52.940)

And then it's such a difficult thing

Steve Viscelli (2:37:55.140)

for them to sort of embrace,

Lex Fridman (2:37:57.060)

but greatness requires that they embrace this,

Steve Viscelli (2:38:01.340)

embrace whatever is required

Lex Fridman (2:38:03.100)

to remove the inefficiencies in the system.

Lex Fridman (2:38:04.980)

And that may require you to do things very differently

Lex Fridman (2:38:07.620)

than you've done in the past.

Steve Viscelli (2:38:09.420)

Yeah, I mean, there are certain things

Lex Fridman (2:38:12.020)

that the market can do well.

Lex Fridman (2:38:13.260)

And this is how I see the world, right?

Lex Fridman (2:38:17.620)

That's the best way to organize certain kinds of activities

Steve Viscelli (2:38:21.460)

is the market and private interest.

Lex Fridman (2:38:24.260)

But I think we go too far in some areas.

Steve Viscelli (2:38:28.780)

Transportation is,

Lex Fridman (2:38:30.140)

if we can't have a public debate about the roads

Steve Viscelli (2:38:35.860)

that we all pay for,

Lex Fridman (2:38:39.100)

forget about it.

Steve Viscelli (2:38:39.940)

Private factories and all these other,

Lex Fridman (2:38:41.820)

healthcare and other places,

Steve Viscelli (2:38:43.060)

it's gonna be way harder there.

Lex Fridman (2:38:45.300)

Healthcare I guess has some direct contact

Steve Viscelli (2:38:49.620)

with the consumer where we're probably gonna have lots of

Lex Fridman (2:38:52.900)

sort of hands on public policy

Steve Viscelli (2:38:54.660)

about concerns around patient rights and things like that.

Lex Fridman (2:38:57.780)

But if we can't figure out

Lex Fridman (2:39:00.060)

how to have a public policy conversation

Lex Fridman (2:39:02.580)

around how technology is gonna reform our public roadways

Lex Fridman (2:39:06.980)

and our transportation system,

Lex Fridman (2:39:10.300)

we're really leaving way too much to private companies.

Lex Fridman (2:39:13.940)

And it's just, it's not in there.

Lex Fridman (2:39:17.380)

I get asked this question, like, what should companies do?

Lex Fridman (2:39:19.540)

And I'm like, just go about doing what you're doing.

Lex Fridman (2:39:22.340)

I mean, please come to the table and talk about it,

Lex Fridman (2:39:24.420)

but it's not their role.

Lex Fridman (2:39:26.420)

I mean, I appreciate Ilan's attempts

Steve Viscelli (2:39:29.940)

to have species level goals,

Lex Fridman (2:39:34.700)

like, we're gonna go to Mars.

Steve Viscelli (2:39:36.380)

I mean, that's amazing.

Lex Fridman (2:39:37.660)

And that's incredible that someone can realize that,

Steve Viscelli (2:39:42.940)

have a chance at realizing that vision.

Lex Fridman (2:39:44.620)

It's amazing.

Lex Fridman (2:39:46.020)

But when it comes to so many areas of our economy,

Lex Fridman (2:39:50.180)

we can't wait for a hero.

Steve Viscelli (2:39:52.540)

We have to have,

Lex Fridman (2:39:53.860)

and there are way too many interests involved.

Steve Viscelli (2:39:56.500)

It's who builds the roads.

Lex Fridman (2:39:58.420)

I mean, the money that sloshes around on Capitol Hill

Steve Viscelli (2:40:02.100)

to decide what happens in these infrastructure bills

Lex Fridman (2:40:05.420)

and the transportation bill is just obscene, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:40:09.060)

See, I think it's an interesting view of markets.

Lex Fridman (2:40:12.940)

Correct me if I'm wrong, let me propose a theory to you.

Steve Viscelli (2:40:16.980)

That progress in the world is made by heroes

Lex Fridman (2:40:22.020)

and the markets remove the inefficiencies

Steve Viscelli (2:40:24.020)

from the work the heroes did.

Lex Fridman (2:40:26.180)

So going to Mars from the perspective of markets

Steve Viscelli (2:40:30.420)

probably has no value.

Lex Fridman (2:40:32.220)

Maybe you can argue it's good for hiring

Steve Viscelli (2:40:34.060)

to have a vision or something like that,

Lex Fridman (2:40:35.860)

but like those big projects

Steve Viscelli (2:40:37.940)

don't seem to have an obvious value,

Lex Fridman (2:40:40.500)

but our world progresses by those big leaps.

Lex Fridman (2:40:45.500)

And then after the leaps are taken,

Lex Fridman (2:40:48.660)

then the markets are very good

Steve Viscelli (2:40:50.500)

at removing sort of inefficiencies.

Lex Fridman (2:40:52.980)

But it just feels like the autonomous vehicle space

Lex Fridman (2:40:55.940)

and the autonomous trucking space requires leaps.

Lex Fridman (2:40:59.300)

It doesn't feel like we can sneak up into a good solution

Steve Viscelli (2:41:03.860)

that is ultimately good for labor,

Lex Fridman (2:41:05.700)

like for human beings in the system.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:07.980)

It feels like some, like probably a bad example,

Lex Fridman (2:41:12.980)

but like a Henry Ford type of character steps in

Lex Fridman (2:41:15.660)

and say like, we need to do stuff completely differently.

Lex Fridman (2:41:20.260)

Yeah, and you said we can't hope for a hero,

Lex Fridman (2:41:24.140)

but it's like, no, but we can say we need a hero.

Lex Fridman (2:41:27.780)

We need more heroes.

Lex Fridman (2:41:29.260)

So if you're a young kid right now listening to this,

Lex Fridman (2:41:31.740)

we need you to be a hero.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:33.220)

It's not like we need you to start a company

Lex Fridman (2:41:34.980)

that makes a lot of money, no.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:36.700)

You need to start a company that makes a lot of money

Lex Fridman (2:41:38.900)

so that you can feed your family

Steve Viscelli (2:41:41.420)

as you become a hero and take huge risks

Lex Fridman (2:41:43.300)

and potentially go bankrupt.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:45.220)

Those risks is how we move society forward, I think.

Lex Fridman (2:41:49.180)

Maybe that's a romantic view, I don't know.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:51.340)

I totally disagree.

Lex Fridman (2:41:52.420)

You disagree, goddammit.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:53.940)

I mean, I...

Lex Fridman (2:41:54.780)

And out of the two of us, you're the knowledgeable one.

Steve Viscelli (2:41:57.620)

No, no.

Lex Fridman (2:41:58.860)

No, no, I think it's a matter of like,

Lex Fridman (2:42:01.940)

do we need those heroes?

Lex Fridman (2:42:02.940)

Absolutely.

Steve Viscelli (2:42:04.060)

I mean, I saw the boosters come down from space,

Lex Fridman (2:42:09.060)

boosters come down from SpaceX's rockets

Lex Fridman (2:42:12.900)

and land nearly simultaneously with my kids

Lex Fridman (2:42:18.020)

after school one day.

Lex Fridman (2:42:19.820)

And I thought, oh my god,

Lex Fridman (2:42:21.700)

like science fiction has been made real.

Steve Viscelli (2:42:25.580)

It's incredible.

Lex Fridman (2:42:26.620)

And it's a pinnacle of human achievement, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:42:29.740)

It's like, this is what we're capable of.

Lex Fridman (2:42:32.620)

But we need to have those heroes oriented.

Lex Fridman (2:42:37.140)

We need to allow them to orient toward the goals, right?

Lex Fridman (2:42:42.940)

We gotta...

Lex Fridman (2:42:43.780)

Climate change, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:42:45.700)

I mean, all the heroes out there, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:42:48.860)

I mean, it's time.

Lex Fridman (2:42:50.940)

The clock is ticking.

Steve Viscelli (2:42:52.140)

It's past time.

Lex Fridman (2:42:53.900)

I've been working on climate change issues

Steve Viscelli (2:42:55.780)

since the mid 90s.

Lex Fridman (2:42:59.500)

I still remember the first time in 2010

Steve Viscelli (2:43:04.300)

when I got a grant that was completely focused

Lex Fridman (2:43:08.580)

on adaptation rather than prevention.

Lex Fridman (2:43:12.060)

And just when it hit me, that like, wow.

Lex Fridman (2:43:18.580)

So adaptation versus prevention is like acceptance

Steve Viscelli (2:43:22.180)

that there's going to be catastrophic impact.

Lex Fridman (2:43:25.420)

We need to figure out how do we at least live with that.

Steve Viscelli (2:43:28.660)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:43:29.500)

And you know, the grant was like,

Steve Viscelli (2:43:30.340)

okay, our agriculture system is gonna move,

Lex Fridman (2:43:32.700)

our breadbasket is no longer gonna be California,

Steve Viscelli (2:43:34.900)

it's gonna be Illinois.

Lex Fridman (2:43:36.460)

What does that mean for truck transportation?

Lex Fridman (2:43:38.580)

So it's like, so in terms of a big philosophical

Lex Fridman (2:43:42.060)

societal level, that's kind of like giving up.

Steve Viscelli (2:43:44.660)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:43:45.500)

In terms of the big heroic actions.

Steve Viscelli (2:43:47.020)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:43:47.860)

You know, failures in human history, yeah.

Steve Viscelli (2:43:51.300)

That's gonna be, let's hope not the biggest, but could be.

Lex Fridman (2:43:56.180)

Do you...

Lex Fridman (2:43:57.020)

So let me say why I disagree, right?

Lex Fridman (2:43:59.540)

Henry Ford, amazing, right?

Lex Fridman (2:44:02.500)

To sort of mass produce cars, right?

Lex Fridman (2:44:04.500)

Daimler to put that first truck on the road

Lex Fridman (2:44:07.500)

without the roads, right?

Lex Fridman (2:44:09.220)

So there's like, we need that innovation.

Steve Viscelli (2:44:11.460)

There's no doubt about it.

Lex Fridman (2:44:12.500)

And there are rules for that,

Lex Fridman (2:44:14.220)

but there's big public stuff that sets the stage.

Lex Fridman (2:44:19.540)

It's critical.

Lex Fridman (2:44:20.380)

And you know, and what it really is,

Lex Fridman (2:44:22.420)

it's a sociological problem, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:44:25.060)

It's a political problem.

Lex Fridman (2:44:26.020)

It's a social problem.

Lex Fridman (2:44:26.860)

We have to say, and we have these screwed up ideas, right?

Lex Fridman (2:44:29.900)

So we have this politics right now

Steve Viscelli (2:44:31.900)

where like everybody feels like they're getting screwed

Lex Fridman (2:44:34.340)

and someone undeserving is benefiting.

Lex Fridman (2:44:37.980)

When in fact, like, you know, at least in the middle, right?

Lex Fridman (2:44:40.260)

They're huge.

Steve Viscelli (2:44:41.100)

I used to teach this course in rich and poor,

Lex Fridman (2:44:43.500)

you know, in economic inequality.

Lex Fridman (2:44:45.140)

And I would go through public housing subsidies

Lex Fridman (2:44:49.100)

in Philadelphia, you know, section eight subsidies,

Steve Viscelli (2:44:53.260)

you know, and then I would go through my housing subsidies

Lex Fridman (2:44:57.140)

for my mortgage interest deduction.

Lex Fridman (2:45:00.300)

And it worked out to basically the average payment

Lex Fridman (2:45:02.900)

for a section eight housing voucher in my neighborhood.

Steve Viscelli (2:45:06.780)

I'm not a welfare recipient

Lex Fridman (2:45:08.060)

according to the dominant discourse.

Lex Fridman (2:45:10.220)

And so we have this completely screwed up sense

Lex Fridman (2:45:13.180)

of like where our dollars go and you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:45:15.540)

who benefits from the investment.

Lex Fridman (2:45:17.620)

And you know, we need to, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:45:20.980)

I don't know that we can do it,

Lex Fridman (2:45:21.900)

but you know, if we're gonna survive,

Steve Viscelli (2:45:24.700)

we need to figure out how to have honest conversations

Lex Fridman (2:45:28.900)

where private interest is where we need it to be

Steve Viscelli (2:45:32.660)

in fostering innovation and, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:45:35.380)

and rewarding the people who do incredible things.

Steve Viscelli (2:45:37.620)

Please, you know, we don't wanna squash that,

Lex Fridman (2:45:41.100)

but we need to harness that power

Steve Viscelli (2:45:42.820)

to solve what I think are some pretty big,

Lex Fridman (2:45:45.340)

you know, existential problems.

Lex Fridman (2:45:47.500)

So you think there's a like government level,

Lex Fridman (2:45:50.660)

national level collaboration required

Steve Viscelli (2:45:53.180)

for infrastructure project.

Lex Fridman (2:45:54.460)

Like there's, we should really have large moonshot projects

Steve Viscelli (2:46:01.300)

that are funded by our governments.

Lex Fridman (2:46:04.860)

At least guided by, I mean,

Steve Viscelli (2:46:06.420)

I think there are ways to finance them

Lex Fridman (2:46:08.140)

and you know, other things,

Lex Fridman (2:46:08.980)

but we gotta be careful, right?

Lex Fridman (2:46:10.860)

Cause that's where you get all these sort of perverse,

Steve Viscelli (2:46:13.140)

you know, unintended consequences and whatnot.

Lex Fridman (2:46:15.220)

But if you look at transportation in the United States

Lex Fridman (2:46:18.380)

and it is the foundation of the, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:46:21.900)

manifest destiny, economic growth, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:46:24.900)

That built the United States into the world superpower

Lex Fridman (2:46:29.020)

that it became and the industrial power that it became.

Lex Fridman (2:46:30.980)

It rested on transportation, right?

Lex Fridman (2:46:33.540)

It was like, you know, the Erie Canal,

Steve Viscelli (2:46:35.580)

I grew up a few miles from where they dug

Lex Fridman (2:46:38.380)

the first shovel full of the Erie Canal

Lex Fridman (2:46:40.540)

and everyone thought it was, you know, crazy, right?

Lex Fridman (2:46:44.060)

But those public infrastructure projects,

Steve Viscelli (2:46:46.660)

the canals, right, the railroads, yeah,

Lex Fridman (2:46:49.020)

they were privately built,

Lex Fridman (2:46:50.100)

but they wouldn't have been privately built without,

Lex Fridman (2:46:52.500)

you know, Lincoln funding them essentially

Lex Fridman (2:46:55.020)

and giving, you know, the railroads, you know, land

Lex Fridman (2:46:59.060)

in exchange for building them.

Steve Viscelli (2:47:01.140)

The highway system, the Eisenhower,

Lex Fridman (2:47:03.500)

the payback that the US economy got

Steve Viscelli (2:47:06.740)

from the Dwight D. Eisenhower interstate system

Lex Fridman (2:47:09.700)

is phenomenal, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:47:12.140)

No private entity was gonna do that.

Lex Fridman (2:47:14.020)

Electrification, dams, water, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:47:17.060)

we need to do these infrastructure, infrastructure.

Lex Fridman (2:47:21.580)

And now more than ever, it's been really upsetting to me

Steve Viscelli (2:47:24.340)

on the COVID front.

Lex Fridman (2:47:27.220)

There's one of the solutions to COVID,

Steve Viscelli (2:47:29.660)

which seems obvious to me from the very beginning

Lex Fridman (2:47:32.500)

that nobody's opposed to.

Steve Viscelli (2:47:34.940)

It's one of the only bipartisan things is at home testing,

Lex Fridman (2:47:39.820)

rapid at home testing.

Steve Viscelli (2:47:41.540)

There's no reason why at the government level,

Lex Fridman (2:47:45.260)

we couldn't manufacture hundreds of millions of tests

Steve Viscelli (2:47:47.860)

a month.

Lex Fridman (2:47:48.820)

There's no reason starting in May, 2020.

Lex Fridman (2:47:51.300)

And that gives power to a country that values freedom,

Lex Fridman (2:47:55.220)

that gives power information to each individual

Steve Viscelli (2:47:57.140)

to know whether they have COVID or not.

Lex Fridman (2:47:59.260)

So it's possible to manufacture them for under a dollar.

Steve Viscelli (2:48:04.260)

It's like an obvious thing.

Lex Fridman (2:48:05.820)

It's kind of like the roads.

Steve Viscelli (2:48:07.140)

It's like, everybody's invested.

Lex Fridman (2:48:08.980)

Let's put countless tests in the hands

Steve Viscelli (2:48:11.580)

of every single American citizen,

Lex Fridman (2:48:13.500)

maybe every citizen of the world.

Steve Viscelli (2:48:16.580)

The fact that we haven't done that today

Lex Fridman (2:48:19.500)

and there's some regulation stuff with the FDA,

Steve Viscelli (2:48:21.860)

all the kind of dragging of feet,

Lex Fridman (2:48:24.380)

but there's not actually a good explanation

Steve Viscelli (2:48:26.060)

except our leaders and culturally,

Lex Fridman (2:48:31.460)

we've lost the sort of, not lost,

Lex Fridman (2:48:35.940)

but it's a little bit dormant.

Lex Fridman (2:48:38.020)

The will to do these big projects that better the world.

Steve Viscelli (2:48:43.140)

I still have the hope that when faced

Lex Fridman (2:48:45.980)

with catastrophic events, the more dramatic,

Steve Viscelli (2:48:51.980)

the more damaging, the more painful they are,

Lex Fridman (2:48:53.860)

the higher we will rise to meet those.

Lex Fridman (2:48:56.700)

And that's where the infrastructure style projects

Lex Fridman (2:48:58.900)

are really important.

Lex Fridman (2:48:59.740)

But it's certainly a little bit challenging

Lex Fridman (2:49:03.860)

to remain an optimist in the times of COVID

Steve Viscelli (2:49:06.620)

because the response of our leaders has not been as great

Lex Fridman (2:49:10.420)

and as historic as I would have hoped.

Steve Viscelli (2:49:14.300)

I would hope that the actions of leaders

Lex Fridman (2:49:17.420)

in the past few years in response to COVID

Steve Viscelli (2:49:20.700)

would be ones that are written in the history books.

Lex Fridman (2:49:23.180)

And we talk about it as we talk about FDR,

Lex Fridman (2:49:25.820)

but sadly, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (2:49:27.580)

I think the history books will forget

Steve Viscelli (2:49:30.780)

the actions of our leaders.

Lex Fridman (2:49:32.300)

So let me just, to wrap up autonomy,

Steve Viscelli (2:49:42.020)

when you look into the future,

Lex Fridman (2:49:45.780)

are you excited about automation in the space of trucking?

Steve Viscelli (2:49:52.020)

Is it, when you go to bed at night,

Lex Fridman (2:49:57.580)

do you see a beautiful world in your vision

Lex Fridman (2:50:01.740)

that involves autonomous trucks?

Lex Fridman (2:50:03.220)

Like all of the truckers you've become close with,

Steve Viscelli (2:50:07.020)

you've talked to, do you see a better world for them

Lex Fridman (2:50:10.340)

because of autonomous trucks?

Steve Viscelli (2:50:13.140)

Damn you, Alex.

Lex Fridman (2:50:15.140)

You know why?

Steve Viscelli (2:50:15.980)

Because I mean, I want to be an optimist,

Lex Fridman (2:50:19.140)

and I want to think of myself, I guess,

Steve Viscelli (2:50:21.380)

as a half glass bowl kind of person.

Lex Fridman (2:50:23.780)

But when you ask it like that,

Lex Fridman (2:50:25.580)

and I think about like,

Lex Fridman (2:50:27.820)

when I look at the challenges to harnessing that for,

Lex Fridman (2:50:36.820)

just let's take just labor and climate, right?

Lex Fridman (2:50:40.660)

There are other issues,

Steve Viscelli (2:50:41.580)

congestion, et cetera, infrastructure,

Lex Fridman (2:50:43.420)

that are gonna be affected by this,

Steve Viscelli (2:50:45.500)

again, those big transformational issues.

Lex Fridman (2:50:50.100)

I think it's gonna take the best of us.

Steve Viscelli (2:50:53.300)

Like it's gonna take the best of our policy approaches.

Lex Fridman (2:50:59.660)

We need to start investing in building those,

Steve Viscelli (2:51:03.660)

rebuilding those institutions.

Lex Fridman (2:51:05.180)

I mean, that's what we've seen in the last four years, right?

Lex Fridman (2:51:07.700)

And the erosion of that was so clear

Lex Fridman (2:51:11.420)

among these truck drivers.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:12.460)

Like when Trump came in and said like,

Lex Fridman (2:51:17.420)

free trades, good for workers, like, yeah, right.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:20.060)

I grew up in the Rust Belt.

Lex Fridman (2:51:23.420)

I watched factory after factory close.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:25.540)

All of my ancestors worked at the same factory.

Lex Fridman (2:51:28.300)

It's still holding on by a thread.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:30.020)

Like, the Democratic Party told blue collar workers

Lex Fridman (2:51:35.780)

for years, I don't worry about free trade.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:38.300)

It's not bad for you.

Lex Fridman (2:51:39.460)

And I know the economists will probably

Steve Viscelli (2:51:40.860)

get in the comment box now.

Lex Fridman (2:51:44.020)

We'll look forward to your comments.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:45.620)

Look forward to your comments

Lex Fridman (2:51:46.580)

about how free trade benefits everybody.

Steve Viscelli (2:51:48.580)

But, you know, immigration, you know, you go,

Lex Fridman (2:51:54.020)

and I think immigration is great.

Lex Fridman (2:51:56.060)

The United States benefits from it tremendously, right?

Lex Fridman (2:51:59.820)

But there are costs, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:52:01.700)

Go down to South Philadelphia and find a drywaller

Lex Fridman (2:52:05.860)

and tell him that immigration hasn't hurt him, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:52:08.740)

You know, go to these places where there's competition,

Lex Fridman (2:52:12.500)

right?

Lex Fridman (2:52:13.340)

And yes, we benefit overall,

Lex Fridman (2:52:15.540)

but we have a system that allows some people

Steve Viscelli (2:52:19.300)

to pay really high costs.

Lex Fridman (2:52:21.980)

And Trump tapped into that, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:52:24.180)

And there was no, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:52:26.540)

there's more than that too, obviously.

Lex Fridman (2:52:28.540)

And there's lots of really dark stuff

Lex Fridman (2:52:30.900)

that goes along with it, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:52:32.820)

the sort of racialization of others and things like that.

Lex Fridman (2:52:35.540)

But he hit on those core, you know, issues that, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:52:40.220)

if you were to go back over my trucking interviews

Lex Fridman (2:52:42.380)

for 15 years, you would have heard those stories

Steve Viscelli (2:52:44.740)

over and over and over again, that sense of voicelessness,

Lex Fridman (2:52:47.660)

that sense of powerlessness,

Steve Viscelli (2:52:49.020)

that sense that there's no difference

Lex Fridman (2:52:50.780)

between the Democrats and the Republicans

Steve Viscelli (2:52:52.300)

because they're all gonna screw us over.

Lex Fridman (2:52:54.780)

And that was there, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:52:56.380)

And you just ignore it as long as you want

Lex Fridman (2:52:58.220)

and tell people, don't worry, trade's good for you.

Steve Viscelli (2:53:00.220)

Don't worry, immigration's good for you.

Lex Fridman (2:53:01.860)

As their communities lose factories.

Lex Fridman (2:53:04.060)

And I mean, a lot of them were lost to the South

Lex Fridman (2:53:05.900)

before they were lost to overseas, whatever,

Lex Fridman (2:53:07.940)

but tapped into that, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:53:10.660)

And there's a fundamental distrust of,

Steve Viscelli (2:53:13.580)

you know, you look at these like pupils on like,

Lex Fridman (2:53:16.300)

you know, whether people trust the media, right?

Lex Fridman (2:53:17.740)

But whether or not they trust higher education, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:53:21.180)

these institutions that I find magical, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:53:24.180)

I mean, you look at the vaccine research and stuff,

Lex Fridman (2:53:27.940)

that, you know, just, you know, brilliant, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:53:30.820)

people doing incredible things for humanity.

Lex Fridman (2:53:33.740)

Like, you know, the idea that like, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:53:36.260)

we can take these viruses that, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:53:39.420)

used to ravage through the human population

Steve Viscelli (2:53:42.100)

that we had to be terrified of.

Lex Fridman (2:53:44.180)

And, you know, we've suffered, but, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:53:47.660)

we have such power now to defend ourselves, right?

Lex Fridman (2:53:52.500)

Behind these programs, right?

Lex Fridman (2:53:54.580)

And to see those, people would be like,

Lex Fridman (2:53:56.740)

eh, I'm not sure if higher education's good

Steve Viscelli (2:53:58.300)

for the country or not, you know, it's like,

Lex Fridman (2:54:00.980)

where are we, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:54:02.140)

So we need to rebuild the faith and trust

Lex Fridman (2:54:04.140)

in those institutions and have these,

Lex Fridman (2:54:05.580)

but we need to have honest conversations

Lex Fridman (2:54:07.340)

before people are gonna buy it, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:54:09.900)

Do you have ideas for rebuilding the trust

Lex Fridman (2:54:11.980)

and giving a voice to the voices?

Lex Fridman (2:54:13.460)

So is the, many of the things we've been talking about

Lex Fridman (2:54:18.060)

is so sort of deeply integrated.

Steve Viscelli (2:54:21.460)

You think like, this is the trouble I have

Lex Fridman (2:54:24.380)

with people that work on AI and autonomous vehicles

Lex Fridman (2:54:27.020)

and so on, it's not just a technology problem.

Lex Fridman (2:54:30.980)

It's this human pain problem.

Steve Viscelli (2:54:36.100)

It's the robot essentially silencing the voice

Lex Fridman (2:54:39.780)

of a human being because it's lowering their wage,

Steve Viscelli (2:54:43.100)

making them suffer more and giving them no tools

Lex Fridman (2:54:46.020)

of how to escape that suffering.

Steve Viscelli (2:54:48.820)

Is there something, I mean, it even gets

Lex Fridman (2:54:53.460)

into the question of meaning, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:54:55.540)

So if money is one thing, but it's also

Lex Fridman (2:54:59.800)

what makes us happy in life.

Steve Viscelli (2:55:01.260)

You know, a lot of those truckers,

Lex Fridman (2:55:06.340)

the set of jobs they've had in their life

Steve Viscelli (2:55:08.300)

were defining to them as human beings.

Lex Fridman (2:55:12.460)

And so, and the question with automation

Steve Viscelli (2:55:14.740)

is not just how do we have a job that gives you money

Lex Fridman (2:55:21.020)

to feed your family, but also a job that gives you meaning,

Steve Viscelli (2:55:24.740)

that gives you pride.

Lex Fridman (2:55:26.020)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:55:27.780)

And for me, the hope is that AI and automation

Lex Fridman (2:55:32.780)

will provide other jobs that will be a source of meaning.

Lex Fridman (2:55:43.980)

But coupled with that hope is that there will not

Lex Fridman (2:55:47.020)

be too much suffering in the transition.

Lex Fridman (2:55:49.380)

And that's not obvious from the people you've spoken with.

Lex Fridman (2:55:53.500)

I mean, I think we need to differentiate

Steve Viscelli (2:55:55.580)

between the effects of technology

Lex Fridman (2:55:57.020)

and the effects of capitalism, right?

Lex Fridman (2:55:58.560)

And they are, you know, the fact that workers

Lex Fridman (2:56:02.740)

don't have a lot of power, right, in the system matters.

Lex Fridman (2:56:06.740)

Now, we had a system, right?

Lex Fridman (2:56:08.140)

And that's why I would say, you know,

Steve Viscelli (2:56:09.380)

go to that, you know, Harry Bridges report.

Lex Fridman (2:56:12.940)

And, you know, those were workers who had a sense of power.

Steve Viscelli (2:56:16.740)

They said, you know what, we can demand

Lex Fridman (2:56:18.560)

some of the benefits, like, yeah, automate our jobs away,

Lex Fridman (2:56:21.180)

but, you know, kick a little down to us, right?

Lex Fridman (2:56:24.300)

And we had, in the golden era of American industrialism

Steve Viscelli (2:56:28.860)

in post World War II, that was the contract.

Lex Fridman (2:56:32.340)

The contract was employers can do what they want

Steve Viscelli (2:56:35.200)

in automation and all these things.

Lex Fridman (2:56:37.020)

Yeah, sure, there's some union rules

Steve Viscelli (2:56:38.440)

that make things less efficient in places,

Lex Fridman (2:56:40.980)

but the key compromise is tie wages to productivity.

Steve Viscelli (2:56:45.460)

That's what we did.

Lex Fridman (2:56:46.300)

We tied, that's what unions did.

Lex Fridman (2:56:47.780)

They tied wages to productivity, kept demand up, right?

Lex Fridman (2:56:50.700)

It was good for the economy, some economists think, right?

Lex Fridman (2:56:54.220)

And that's what, you know, we need to,

Lex Fridman (2:56:57.540)

I think we need to acknowledge that.

Steve Viscelli (2:56:59.820)

We need to acknowledge the fact

Lex Fridman (2:57:02.740)

that it's not just technology,

Steve Viscelli (2:57:04.560)

it's technology in a social context

Lex Fridman (2:57:08.900)

in which some people have a lot of power

Steve Viscelli (2:57:10.540)

to determine what happens.

Lex Fridman (2:57:12.620)

For me, I don't have all the answers,

Lex Fridman (2:57:14.420)

but I know what my answer is.

Lex Fridman (2:57:15.940)

And my answer is, and I think I started with this, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:57:19.220)

I can learn from every single person, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:57:24.280)

Did I have to talk to the 200th truck driver?

Steve Viscelli (2:57:27.560)

In my opinion, yes, because I was gonna learn something

Lex Fridman (2:57:31.680)

from that 200th truck driver.

Steve Viscelli (2:57:33.920)

Now, people with more power might talk to none,

Lex Fridman (2:57:39.680)

or they might talk to five and say, okay, I got it.

Steve Viscelli (2:57:41.720)

You know, people are amazing

Lex Fridman (2:57:47.000)

and every one of them has a life experience

Lex Fridman (2:57:49.100)

and concerns and, you know, can teach us something.

Lex Fridman (2:57:53.920)

And they're not in the conversation, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:57:57.180)

And I know this because I'm the expert, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:58:00.720)

So I get pulled in to these conversations

Lex Fridman (2:58:02.720)

and people wanna know, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:58:04.260)

what's gonna happen to labor, you know?

Steve Viscelli (2:58:06.040)

It's like, well, so I try to be a sounding board

Lex Fridman (2:58:10.200)

and I feel a tremendous weight of responsibility,

Steve Viscelli (2:58:14.960)

you know, for that.

Lex Fridman (2:58:16.240)

So, but I'm not those workers, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:58:21.640)

And they may listen to this or, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:58:24.920)

walk in the door sometime, it's about to be like,

Steve Viscelli (2:58:27.120)

that guy's full of shit, that's not what I think at all.

Lex Fridman (2:58:29.600)

You know?

Lex Fridman (2:58:31.440)

And they don't get heard over and over and over.

Lex Fridman (2:58:34.680)

But in a small way, you are providing a voice to them

Lex Fridman (2:58:36.920)

and that's kind of the, if at scale,

Lex Fridman (2:58:40.600)

we apply that empathy and listening,

Steve Viscelli (2:58:43.980)

that we could provide the voice to the voiceless

Lex Fridman (2:58:46.120)

through our votes, through our money, through,

Steve Viscelli (2:58:47.980)

I mean, that's one way to make capitalism work

Lex Fridman (2:58:50.920)

at not making the powerless more powerless,

Steve Viscelli (2:58:56.000)

is by all of us being a community

Lex Fridman (2:58:58.440)

that listens to the pain of others

Lex Fridman (2:58:59.880)

and tries to minimize that,

Lex Fridman (2:59:01.160)

to try to give a voice to the voiceless,

Steve Viscelli (2:59:03.320)

to give power to the powerless.

Lex Fridman (2:59:05.480)

I have to ask you on, by way of advice,

Steve Viscelli (2:59:09.640)

young people, high school students, college students,

Lex Fridman (2:59:12.080)

entering this world full of automation,

Steve Viscelli (2:59:17.400)

full of these complex labor markets and markets period,

Lex Fridman (2:59:23.540)

what would you, what kind of advice would you give

Lex Fridman (2:59:25.600)

to that person about how to have a career?

Lex Fridman (2:59:28.960)

How to have a life they can be proud of?

Steve Viscelli (2:59:32.520)

Yeah, I think, you know, this is such a great question.

Lex Fridman (2:59:35.280)

I don't, it's okay to quote Steve Jobs, right?

Steve Viscelli (2:59:42.280)

Always.

Lex Fridman (2:59:45.600)

Yeah, I mean, so, and I just heard this recently.

Steve Viscelli (2:59:49.520)

It was a commencement speech that he gave

Lex Fridman (2:59:51.600)

and I can't remember where it was.

Lex Fridman (2:59:53.080)

And he was talking about, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:59:55.240)

he had famously dropped out of school,

Lex Fridman (2:59:56.660)

but continued to take classes, right?

Lex Fridman (2:59:59.840)

And he took a calligraphy class

Steve Viscelli (30:01.940)

that the Department of Labor has,

Lex Fridman (30:03.820)

which basically say that a truck driver

Steve Viscelli (30:06.460)

who's dispatched away from home for more than a day

Lex Fridman (30:09.780)

should get minimum wage 24 hours a day.

Lex Fridman (30:13.300)

And that could be a state minimum wage,

Lex Fridman (30:16.460)

but typically what it would work out to for most drivers

Steve Viscelli (30:19.620)

is that, you know, the minimum wage for a truck driver

Lex Fridman (30:22.940)

should be 50s of thousands, you know, 55, $60,000

Steve Viscelli (30:26.900)

should be the minimum wage of a truck driver.

Lex Fridman (30:28.860)

And you've probably heard about the truck driver shortage.

Steve Viscelli (30:31.500)

If, you know, which I hope we can talk about,

Lex Fridman (30:35.740)

if the minimum wage for truck drivers

Steve Viscelli (30:37.660)

is as it should be on the books at, you know,

Lex Fridman (30:40.260)

around $60,000, we wouldn't have a shortage of truck drivers.

Steve Viscelli (30:44.220)

Oh, wow.

Lex Fridman (30:46.340)

And to me, 60,000 is not a lot of money

Steve Viscelli (30:49.300)

for this kind of job.

Lex Fridman (30:51.340)

Cause you're, this isn't, this is essentially two jobs

Lex Fridman (30:56.500)

and two jobs where you don't get to sleep

Lex Fridman (30:58.620)

with your wife or see your kids at night.

Steve Viscelli (31:03.420)

That's 60,000 is a very little money for that.

Lex Fridman (31:06.500)

But you're saying if it was 60,000,

Steve Viscelli (31:09.540)

you wouldn't even have the shortage.

Lex Fridman (31:11.300)

If that was the minimum.

Steve Viscelli (31:12.540)

If that was the minimum.

Lex Fridman (31:13.460)

And I think that's what,

Steve Viscelli (31:14.780)

now we have drivers who start in the 30s.

Lex Fridman (31:18.180)

Wow, but yeah.

Lex Fridman (31:19.580)

And I mean, so we're talking two, three jobs really,

Lex Fridman (31:22.100)

when you look at the total hours

Steve Viscelli (31:23.340)

that people are working at, you know,

Lex Fridman (31:25.540)

they can work over a hundred.

Steve Viscelli (31:26.700)

If they're a trainer, you know,

Lex Fridman (31:28.540)

training other truck drivers,

Steve Viscelli (31:29.660)

well over a hundred hours a week.

Lex Fridman (31:31.780)

So a job of last resort.

Steve Viscelli (31:34.260)

Maybe you can jump around from tangent to tangent.

Lex Fridman (31:37.500)

This is such a fascinating and difficult topic.

Steve Viscelli (31:41.540)

I heard that there's a shortage of truck drivers.

Lex Fridman (31:46.420)

So there's more jobs than truck drivers

Steve Viscelli (31:48.300)

willing to take on the job.

Lex Fridman (31:49.780)

Is that the state of affairs currently?

Steve Viscelli (31:53.260)

I mean, I think the way that you just put that is right.

Lex Fridman (31:57.460)

We don't have a shortage of people

Steve Viscelli (31:59.820)

who are currently licensed to do the jobs.

Lex Fridman (32:02.860)

So I'm working on a project for the state of California

Steve Viscelli (32:05.220)

to look at the shortage of agricultural drivers.

Lex Fridman (32:07.100)

And the first thing that the DMV commissioner of the state

Steve Viscelli (32:11.420)

wanted to look at was, you know,

Lex Fridman (32:13.660)

is there actually a shortage of licensed drivers?

Steve Viscelli (32:15.700)

He's like, I've got a database here

Lex Fridman (32:17.740)

of all the people who have a commercial driver's license

Steve Viscelli (32:20.020)

who could potentially have the credential to do this.

Lex Fridman (32:24.180)

There are about 145,000 jobs in California

Steve Viscelli (32:28.380)

that require a class A CDL,

Lex Fridman (32:31.460)

which would be that commercial driver's license

Steve Viscelli (32:33.580)

that you need for the big trucks.

Lex Fridman (32:36.340)

About 145,000 jobs.

Steve Viscelli (32:37.940)

The industry in their, you know,

Lex Fridman (32:39.940)

regular promotion of the idea that there's a shortage

Steve Viscelli (32:43.820)

is always projecting forward and says,

Lex Fridman (32:45.900)

you know, we're gonna need 165,000 or so

Steve Viscelli (32:48.540)

in the next 10 years.

Lex Fridman (32:50.500)

They're currently like 435,000 people licensed

Steve Viscelli (32:53.820)

in the state of California to drive one of these big trucks.

Lex Fridman (32:57.260)

So it is not at all an absence of people who,

Steve Viscelli (33:01.780)

I mean, and again, going back

Lex Fridman (33:03.340)

to what we were talking about before,

Steve Viscelli (33:05.300)

getting that license is not something

Lex Fridman (33:07.180)

that you just walk down to the DMV and take the test.

Steve Viscelli (33:10.460)

Like this is somebody who probably quit another job,

Lex Fridman (33:13.940)

was unemployed, and took months to go to a training school,

Steve Viscelli (33:19.700)

paid for that training school oftentimes,

Lex Fridman (33:22.060)

left their family for months,

Steve Viscelli (33:24.140)

invested in what they thought was gonna be

Lex Fridman (33:26.540)

a long term career, and then said,

Steve Viscelli (33:28.780)

you know what, forget it, I can't, I can't do it.

Lex Fridman (33:33.540)

So yeah, so it's not just skill,

Steve Viscelli (33:35.460)

it's like they were psychologically invested

Lex Fridman (33:37.540)

potentially for months, if not years,

Steve Viscelli (33:39.340)

into this kinds of position as perhaps a position

Lex Fridman (33:42.660)

that if they lose their current job, they could fall too.

Steve Viscelli (33:46.220)

Okay, so that's an indication

Lex Fridman (33:47.940)

that there's something deeply wrong with the job,

Steve Viscelli (33:50.420)

if so many licensed people are not willing to take it.

Lex Fridman (33:53.300)

What are the biggest problems

Lex Fridman (33:55.300)

of the job of truck driver currently?

Lex Fridman (33:59.180)

Yeah, the job, the problems with the job

Lex Fridman (34:01.540)

and the labor market, right?

Lex Fridman (34:02.700)

But let's start with the job, which is, you know, again,

Steve Viscelli (34:07.420)

just so much time that's not compensated directly

Lex Fridman (34:11.020)

for the amount of time.

Lex Fridman (34:12.980)

And that's just psychologically,

Lex Fridman (34:15.140)

and this was a big part of what I studied

Steve Viscelli (34:17.980)

for the first book was, you know,

Lex Fridman (34:20.420)

that conception of like, what's my time worth, right?

Lex Fridman (34:24.460)

And like, what truck drivers love is oftentimes,

Lex Fridman (34:28.720)

is that tangible outcome based compensation.

Lex Fridman (34:32.980)

So they say, you know what, you know, honest days work,

Lex Fridman (34:37.020)

I work hard, I get paid for what I do,

Steve Viscelli (34:38.820)

I drive 500 miles today,

Lex Fridman (34:40.540)

that's what I'm gonna get paid for.

Lex Fridman (34:42.580)

And then you get to that dock,

Lex Fridman (34:44.060)

and they tell you, sorry, the load's not ready,

Steve Viscelli (34:46.940)

go sit over there, and you stew.

Lex Fridman (34:49.700)

And that weight can break you psychologically

Steve Viscelli (34:51.580)

because your time every second becomes more worthless.

Lex Fridman (34:57.860)

Yeah.

Steve Viscelli (34:58.700)

Or worth less.

Lex Fridman (35:00.060)

Yeah, and again, the industry is gonna say, for instance,

Lex Fridman (35:04.500)

okay, well, you know, they've got skin in the game, right?

Lex Fridman (35:06.300)

That argument about sort of compensation

Lex Fridman (35:08.060)

based on sort of output, right?

Lex Fridman (35:10.700)

But that's a holdover from when you couldn't

Steve Viscelli (35:12.180)

observe truckers.

Lex Fridman (35:13.020)

Now they all have, you know, satellite linked computers

Steve Viscelli (35:15.740)

in the trucks that tell these large companies,

Lex Fridman (35:18.580)

this driver was, you know, at this GPS location

Lex Fridman (35:21.120)

for four and a half hours, right?

Lex Fridman (35:22.780)

So if you wanted to compensate them for that time directly,

Lex Fridman (35:25.900)

and the trucker can't control what's happening

Lex Fridman (35:28.060)

on that customer location, you know,

Steve Viscelli (35:29.740)

they're waiting for that, you know, firm,

Lex Fridman (35:31.860)

that customer to tell them, hey, pull in there.

Lex Fridman (35:35.100)

And so what it becomes is just a way to shift

Lex Fridman (35:38.260)

the inefficiencies and the cost of that onto that driver.

Steve Viscelli (35:43.580)

Now it's competitive for customers.

Lex Fridman (35:45.580)

So if you're Walmart, you might have your choice

Steve Viscelli (35:48.500)

of a dozen different trucking companies

Lex Fridman (35:50.620)

that could move your stuff.

Lex Fridman (35:52.140)

And if one of them tells you, hey, you're not moving

Lex Fridman (35:54.500)

our trucks in and out of your docks fast enough,

Steve Viscelli (35:57.660)

we're gonna charge you for how long our truck

Lex Fridman (35:59.660)

is sitting on your lot.

Steve Viscelli (36:01.220)

If you're Walmart, you're gonna say,

Lex Fridman (36:02.220)

I'll go see what the other guy says, right?

Lex Fridman (36:04.580)

And so companies are gonna allow that customer

Lex Fridman (36:08.160)

to essentially waste that driver's time, you know,

Steve Viscelli (36:11.540)

in order to keep that business.

Lex Fridman (36:14.700)

Can you try to describe the economics,

Lex Fridman (36:16.820)

the labor market of the situation?

Lex Fridman (36:18.420)

You mentioned freight and railroad.

Lex Fridman (36:20.940)

What is the sort of the dynamic financials,

Lex Fridman (36:27.180)

the economics of this that allow for such low salaries

Lex Fridman (36:32.180)

to be paid to truckers?

Lex Fridman (36:35.520)

Like what's the competition?

Lex Fridman (36:37.340)

What's the alternative to transporting goods via trucks?

Lex Fridman (36:41.780)

Like what seems to be broken here

Lex Fridman (36:43.340)

from an economics perspective?

Lex Fridman (36:44.860)

Yeah, so it's, well, nothing.

Lex Fridman (36:47.280)

It's a perfect market, right?

Lex Fridman (36:50.560)

I mean, so for economists, this is how it should work, right?

Lex Fridman (36:53.400)

But the inefficiencies, like you said,

Lex Fridman (36:55.080)

sorry to interrupt, are pushed to the truck driver.

Steve Viscelli (36:59.200)

Doesn't that like spiral, doesn't that lead to

Lex Fridman (37:02.280)

a poor performance on the part of the truck driver

Lex Fridman (37:04.480)

and just like make the whole thing more and more inefficient

Lex Fridman (37:08.000)

and it results in lower payment

Steve Viscelli (37:10.840)

to the truck driver and so on.

Lex Fridman (37:12.760)

It just feels like in capitalism,

Steve Viscelli (37:17.000)

you should have a competing solution

Lex Fridman (37:19.720)

in terms of truck drivers.

Steve Viscelli (37:21.680)

Like another company that provides transportation via trucks

Lex Fridman (37:25.840)

that creates a much better experience for truck drivers,

Steve Viscelli (37:28.640)

making them more efficient, all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (37:32.320)

How is the competition being suppressed here?

Steve Viscelli (37:34.800)

Yeah, so it is, the competition is based on who's cheaper.

Lex Fridman (37:39.320)

And this is the cheapest way to move the freight.

Lex Fridman (37:42.040)

Now, there are externalities, right?

Lex Fridman (37:44.320)

I mean, so this is the explanation

Lex Fridman (37:46.800)

that I think is obvious for this, right?

Lex Fridman (37:49.620)

There are lots of costs that,

Steve Viscelli (37:53.820)

whether it's that driver's time,

Lex Fridman (37:55.000)

whether it's the time without their family,

Steve Viscelli (37:57.880)

whether it's the fact that they drive through congestion

Lex Fridman (38:02.640)

and spew lots of diesel particulates into cities

Steve Viscelli (38:06.940)

where kids have asthma and make our commutes longer

Lex Fridman (38:09.760)

rather than more efficiently use their time

Steve Viscelli (38:11.960)

by sort of routing them around congestion

Lex Fridman (38:14.800)

and rush hour and things like that.

Steve Viscelli (38:17.320)

This is the cheapest way to move freight.

Lex Fridman (38:21.080)

And so it's the most competitive.

Steve Viscelli (38:23.600)

A big part of this is public subsidy of training.

Lex Fridman (38:26.720)

So when those workers are not paying for the training,

Steve Viscelli (38:31.240)

you and I often are.

Lex Fridman (38:32.840)

So if you lose your job because of foreign trade

Steve Viscelli (38:38.480)

or you're a veteran using your GI benefits,

Lex Fridman (38:44.200)

you may very well be offered training,

Steve Viscelli (38:48.360)

publicly subsidized training to become a truck driver.

Lex Fridman (38:50.640)

And so all of these are externalities

Steve Viscelli (38:53.200)

that the companies don't have to pay for.

Lex Fridman (38:55.920)

And so this makes it the most profitable way to move freight.

Lex Fridman (38:58.680)

So trucks is way cheaper than trains?

Lex Fridman (39:02.960)

Well, over the long,

Lex Fridman (39:03.920)

so one of the big stories for these companies

Lex Fridman (39:07.720)

is that the average length of haul,

Steve Viscelli (39:10.040)

which becomes very important for self driving trucks,

Lex Fridman (39:12.960)

the average length of haul has been steadily declining.

Steve Viscelli (39:17.200)

Over the last 15 years or so,

Lex Fridman (39:19.400)

and this is industry collected data

Steve Viscelli (39:21.080)

from sort of the big firms that report it,

Lex Fridman (39:23.200)

but roughly been cut in half from typically

Steve Viscelli (39:26.640)

about a thousand miles to under 500.

Lex Fridman (39:30.560)

And under 500 is what a driver can move in a day, right?

Lex Fridman (39:36.200)

So you can get loaded, drive and unload,

Lex Fridman (39:40.960)

around 400 miles or something like that.

Steve Viscelli (39:44.520)

I wanna steal a good question from the Penn Gazette

Lex Fridman (39:48.000)

interview you did, which people should read.

Steve Viscelli (39:49.960)

It's a great interview.

Lex Fridman (39:51.480)

Was there a golden age for long haul truckers in America?

Lex Fridman (39:55.320)

And if so, this is just a journalistic question.

Lex Fridman (39:58.280)

And if so, what enabled it and what brought it to an end?

Steve Viscelli (3:00:02.100)

that influenced the design of the Mac and sort of fonts.

Lex Fridman (3:00:06.040)

And, you know, just was something that he had no,

Steve Viscelli (3:00:09.520)

you know, sense of what it was gonna be useful for.

Lex Fridman (3:00:11.400)

And his lesson was, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:00:13.600)

you can't connect the dots looking forward.

Lex Fridman (3:00:16.760)

You know, looking back, you can see all the pieces

Steve Viscelli (3:00:19.920)

that sort of led you to where you ended up.

Lex Fridman (3:00:22.500)

And for me, studying truck driving,

Steve Viscelli (3:00:24.900)

like, I mean, I literally went to graduate school

Lex Fridman (3:00:27.120)

because I was worried about climate change.

Lex Fridman (3:00:28.880)

And like, you know, I had a whole other dissertation plan

Lex Fridman (3:00:31.240)

and then was like driving home.

Lex Fridman (3:00:32.520)

And like, I had read about all this management literature

Lex Fridman (3:00:35.800)

and sort of like how you get workers to work hard

Steve Viscelli (3:00:37.680)

for my qualifying exams.

Lex Fridman (3:00:39.000)

And then read a popular article

Steve Viscelli (3:00:41.000)

on satellite linked computers.

Lex Fridman (3:00:44.000)

And the story in the literature was,

Steve Viscelli (3:00:45.880)

you know, a sense of autonomy.

Lex Fridman (3:00:47.160)

And I was like, well,

Steve Viscelli (3:00:48.640)

that monitoring must affect the sense of autonomy.

Lex Fridman (3:00:51.300)

And it's just this question that I found interesting.

Lex Fridman (3:00:54.160)

And it never in a million years

Lex Fridman (3:00:55.480)

that I ever thought I was gonna like study, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:00:57.160)

spend 15 years of my life studying truck driving.

Lex Fridman (3:01:02.640)

And it was like, if you were to map out a career path

Steve Viscelli (3:01:07.080)

in academia or research, like, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:01:10.440)

you would do none of the things that I did

Steve Viscelli (3:01:14.160)

that many people advise me against.

Lex Fridman (3:01:15.940)

Where like, you can't like go spend a year

Steve Viscelli (3:01:17.720)

working as a truck driver, you know, like that's crazy.

Lex Fridman (3:01:20.880)

Or, you know, you can't, you know, spend all this time

Steve Viscelli (3:01:23.000)

trying to write like one huge book and, you know.

Lex Fridman (3:01:26.160)

But by the way, if I could just interrupt,

Lex Fridman (3:01:28.120)

what was the fire that got you to take the leap

Lex Fridman (3:01:32.600)

and go and work as a truck driver

Lex Fridman (3:01:34.560)

and go interview truck drivers?

Lex Fridman (3:01:36.840)

This is what a lot of people would be incapable of doing,

Steve Viscelli (3:01:39.720)

just took that leap.

Lex Fridman (3:01:41.320)

What the heck is up with your mind

Lex Fridman (3:01:43.800)

that allowed you to take that big leap?

Lex Fridman (3:01:46.080)

So I think it's probably like Tolkien.

Lex Fridman (3:01:50.080)

And Lord of the Rings, you know.

Lex Fridman (3:01:51.320)

I mean, I think as a teenager, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:01:54.120)

I sort of adopted some sense of needing to, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:01:58.400)

heroically go out in the world and, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:02:01.960)

which I've done at various points in my life

Lex Fridman (3:02:03.640)

and like looking back in absolutely stupid ways

Steve Viscelli (3:02:07.200)

that, you know, where I could have completely,

Lex Fridman (3:02:08.880)

I ended up dead and traumatized my family,

Steve Viscelli (3:02:11.200)

including like, I took a couple week trip in the Pacific,

Lex Fridman (3:02:14.720)

like a solo trip on a kayak.

Lex Fridman (3:02:16.280)

And basically my kayak experience up till that, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:02:19.280)

point had been, you know, on a fairly calm lake

Lex Fridman (3:02:21.480)

and like class one rapids on a river.

Lex Fridman (3:02:22.320)

Solo trip on a kayak in the Pacific.

Steve Viscelli (3:02:24.560)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (3:02:25.400)

So I was working on forestry issues

Lex Fridman (3:02:28.560)

and we were starting a campaign

Lex Fridman (3:02:30.520)

up in really remote British Columbia.

Lex Fridman (3:02:33.080)

And I was like, okay, if I'm gonna work on this,

Lex Fridman (3:02:35.280)

I've got to actually go there myself

Lex Fridman (3:02:36.720)

and see what this is all about

Lex Fridman (3:02:38.120)

and see whether it's worth like devoting my sort of,

Steve Viscelli (3:02:40.720)

you know, life right now too.

Lex Fridman (3:02:42.480)

And just drove up there with this kayak

Steve Viscelli (3:02:45.240)

and, you know, put into the Pacific and it was insane.

Lex Fridman (3:02:49.400)

You know, like the tides are huge

Steve Viscelli (3:02:52.080)

and, you know, there was one point

Lex Fridman (3:02:54.160)

in which I was going down a fjord

Lex Fridman (3:02:56.400)

and two fjords kind of came up and there was a cross channel

Lex Fridman (3:03:00.480)

and I had hit the timing completely wrong

Lex Fridman (3:03:03.360)

and the tide was sort of rushing up like, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:03:05.800)

rivers in these, you know, two fjords

Lex Fridman (3:03:08.600)

and then coming through this cross channel and met

Lex Fridman (3:03:11.560)

and created this giant standing wave

Steve Viscelli (3:03:14.320)

that I had to paddle through.

Lex Fridman (3:03:16.320)

And now actually very recently,

Steve Viscelli (3:03:18.440)

I've gone out on whitewater with some people

Lex Fridman (3:03:20.200)

who know what the hell they're doing

Lex Fridman (3:03:21.760)

and I realized like just how absolutely stupid

Lex Fridman (3:03:26.240)

and, you know, ill fit I was,

Lex Fridman (3:03:28.320)

but that's just, I think I've always had that.

Lex Fridman (3:03:31.120)

Were you afraid when you had that wave before you?

Steve Viscelli (3:03:33.480)

That wave scared the shit out of me, yeah.

Lex Fridman (3:03:35.120)

Okay, what about taking a leap and becoming a trucker?

Steve Viscelli (3:03:39.080)

Yeah, there was some nervousness for sure.

Lex Fridman (3:03:41.040)

I mean, and, you know, I guess my advantage

Steve Viscelli (3:03:44.080)

as an ethnographer is I grew up in a blue collar environment.

Lex Fridman (3:03:48.920)

You know, again, all my ancestors were factory workers.

Lex Fridman (3:03:52.840)

So I can move through spaces.

Lex Fridman (3:03:56.600)

I'm really, I feel, I can become comfortable

Steve Viscelli (3:04:01.480)

in lots and lots of places, you know, not everywhere,

Lex Fridman (3:04:03.880)

but, you know, along class lines for sort of white,

Steve Viscelli (3:04:07.080)

you know, even white ethnic workers,

Lex Fridman (3:04:09.200)

like that's, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:04:10.720)

I can move in those spaces fairly easily.

Lex Fridman (3:04:13.080)

I mean, not entirely, there was one time

Steve Viscelli (3:04:16.200)

where I was like, okay, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:04:17.440)

and I grew up around people who worked on cars.

Steve Viscelli (3:04:19.360)

I'd been to drag races in NASCAR

Lex Fridman (3:04:21.120)

and I'd been to, you know, Colgate University.

Lex Fridman (3:04:24.520)

And so I'd, and I think that was probably

Lex Fridman (3:04:26.720)

my initial training was, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:04:28.360)

being this just working class kid who ends up in this,

Lex Fridman (3:04:32.480)

you know, sort of blue blood, small liberal arts college

Lex Fridman (3:04:36.160)

and just feeling like, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:04:39.600)

both having the entire world opened up to me,

Steve Viscelli (3:04:41.960)

like philosophy and Buddhism

Lex Fridman (3:04:43.840)

and things that I had never heard of, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:04:46.720)

and just became totally obsessed with

Lex Fridman (3:04:48.920)

and just like, you know, just following my interests.

Lex Fridman (3:04:52.400)

But also culturally perhaps didn't feel like you fit in.

Lex Fridman (3:04:55.400)

Feeling like just a fish out of water.

Steve Viscelli (3:04:57.800)

I just, you know, but, and at the same time

Lex Fridman (3:04:59.840)

that sort of drove me in the sense

Steve Viscelli (3:05:02.120)

that it drove an opening of my mind

Lex Fridman (3:05:04.320)

because I couldn't understand it.

Steve Viscelli (3:05:06.080)

You know, I was like, I didn't know that this world existed.

Lex Fridman (3:05:09.800)

I don't understand.

Lex Fridman (3:05:11.720)

And I think maybe that's where my real first step

Lex Fridman (3:05:14.640)

in trying to understand other people

Lex Fridman (3:05:17.120)

because they were my friends, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:05:18.560)

I mean, they were my teammates.

Steve Viscelli (3:05:19.880)

I played lacrosse in college.

Lex Fridman (3:05:21.240)

So like, you know, I was close to people

Steve Viscelli (3:05:22.760)

who came from such different backgrounds than I did.

Lex Fridman (3:05:25.840)

And I just, I was so confused, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:05:29.320)

And so I think I learned to learn

Lex Fridman (3:05:31.960)

and then, you know, sort of went from there.

Lex Fridman (3:05:34.160)

And then develop your fascination with people.

Lex Fridman (3:05:36.000)

And the funny thing is you went from trucking now

Steve Viscelli (3:05:38.960)

to autonomous trucks.

Lex Fridman (3:05:40.240)

I mean, this is speaking of not being able

Steve Viscelli (3:05:41.720)

to connect the dots and, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:05:44.000)

your life in the next 10 years

Steve Viscelli (3:05:46.560)

could take very interesting directions

Lex Fridman (3:05:48.920)

that are very difficult to,

Steve Viscelli (3:05:50.200)

first of all, us meeting is a funny little thing

Lex Fridman (3:05:53.320)

given the things I'm working on with robots currently.

Steve Viscelli (3:05:57.280)

But, you know, it may not relate to trucks at all.

Lex Fridman (3:06:00.720)

There's a, at a certain point,

Steve Viscelli (3:06:03.280)

autonomous trucks are just robots.

Lex Fridman (3:06:06.600)

And then it starts getting into a conversation

Steve Viscelli (3:06:08.680)

about the roles of robots in society.

Lex Fridman (3:06:11.600)

Yeah, and the roles of humans and robots.

Lex Fridman (3:06:15.560)

And that interplay is right up your alley.

Lex Fridman (3:06:19.240)

Yeah.

Steve Viscelli (3:06:20.080)

As somebody who deeply cares about humans

Lex Fridman (3:06:21.960)

and have somehow found themselves studying robots.

Steve Viscelli (3:06:25.080)

Yeah, no, it's crazy.

Lex Fridman (3:06:26.160)

I mean, even four or five years ago,

Steve Viscelli (3:06:28.680)

I would, if you had asked me

Lex Fridman (3:06:30.440)

if I was gonna be studying trucking still,

Steve Viscelli (3:06:32.120)

I would have said no.

Lex Fridman (3:06:33.560)

And so my advice is, I think if I was gonna give advice,

Steve Viscelli (3:06:36.840)

you know, is, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:06:38.520)

you can't connect the dots looking forward.

Lex Fridman (3:06:40.560)

You just gotta follow what interests you, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:06:43.440)

And I think we downplay, right,

Steve Viscelli (3:06:47.480)

that when we talk to, you know, kids,

Lex Fridman (3:06:50.600)

especially, you know, if you have some bright gifted kid

Steve Viscelli (3:06:52.360)

that gets identified as like, oh, you could go somewhere.

Lex Fridman (3:06:54.560)

Then we're like, we feed them stuff.

Steve Viscelli (3:06:55.960)

You're like, we'll learn the piano

Lex Fridman (3:06:57.080)

and learn another language, right?

Steve Viscelli (3:06:58.640)

Or learn robotics.

Lex Fridman (3:07:00.880)

And then we tell other kids like,

Steve Viscelli (3:07:02.840)

oh, learn a trade, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:07:04.080)

like figure out what's gonna pay well.

Lex Fridman (3:07:05.320)

And not that there's anything against trades.

Lex Fridman (3:07:06.800)

I think everyone should learn like manual skills

Steve Viscelli (3:07:10.040)

to make things.

Lex Fridman (3:07:10.880)

I think it's incredibly satisfying and wonderful,

Lex Fridman (3:07:13.720)

and we need more of that.

Lex Fridman (3:07:15.080)

But also, you know, tell, you know, all kids,

Steve Viscelli (3:07:18.200)

it's okay to like take a class in something random

Lex Fridman (3:07:20.720)

that you don't think you're gonna get

Steve Viscelli (3:07:22.040)

any economic return on.

Lex Fridman (3:07:23.920)

Well, because maybe you will end up going into a trade,

Lex Fridman (3:07:26.440)

but that class that you took in studio art

Lex Fridman (3:07:30.040)

is gonna mean that, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:07:31.960)

you look at buildings differently, right?

Lex Fridman (3:07:33.640)

Or you end up sort of putting your own stamp on,

Lex Fridman (3:07:36.440)

you know, woodworking, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:07:38.160)

It just, I think that's the key is like,

Steve Viscelli (3:07:40.760)

follow, you know, it's cheesy

Lex Fridman (3:07:43.040)

because everybody says, follow your passion.

Lex Fridman (3:07:44.520)

But you know, we say that, and then we just, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:07:48.680)

the 90% of what people hear is, you know,

Lex Fridman (3:07:51.440)

what's the return on investment for that, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:07:54.160)

It's like, you're a human being.

Steve Viscelli (3:07:55.880)

Like things interest you, music interests you,

Lex Fridman (3:07:58.360)

literature interests you, video games interests you,

Lex Fridman (3:08:00.800)

like follow it, you know?

Lex Fridman (3:08:02.360)

Go grab a kayak and go into the pool.

Steve Viscelli (3:08:04.680)

Go do something really, no, don't do that.

Lex Fridman (3:08:07.240)

Go do something stupid and something you'll regret

Steve Viscelli (3:08:10.960)

a lot later.

Lex Fridman (3:08:11.800)

My poor mother, thank God she didn't know.

Steve Viscelli (3:08:13.760)

Well, let me ask, because for a lot of people work,

Lex Fridman (3:08:16.760)

for me it is, quote unquote, work is a source of meaning.

Lex Fridman (3:08:20.360)

And at the core of something we've been talking about

Lex Fridman (3:08:24.400)

with jobs is meaning.

Lex Fridman (3:08:27.200)

So the big ridiculous question,

Lex Fridman (3:08:28.640)

what do you think is the meaning of life?

Lex Fridman (3:08:31.400)

Do you think work for us humans in modern society

Lex Fridman (3:08:36.240)

is as core to that meaning?

Lex Fridman (3:08:38.760)

Is that something you think about in your work?

Lex Fridman (3:08:42.200)

So the deeper question of meaning,

Steve Viscelli (3:08:43.760)

not just financial wellbeing and the quality of life,

Lex Fridman (3:08:46.680)

but the deeper search for meaning.

Steve Viscelli (3:08:50.120)

Yeah, the meaning of life is love

Lex Fridman (3:08:53.680)

and you can find love in your work.

Steve Viscelli (3:08:57.720)

Now, and I don't think everybody can.

Lex Fridman (3:09:00.280)

There are a lot of jobs out there that just, you know,

Steve Viscelli (3:09:02.880)

you do it for a paycheck.

Lex Fridman (3:09:04.120)

And I think we do have to be honest about that.

Steve Viscelli (3:09:08.480)

There are a lot of people who don't love their jobs

Lex Fridman (3:09:11.200)

and we don't have jobs that they're gonna love.

Lex Fridman (3:09:15.880)

And maybe that's not a sort of realistic,

Lex Fridman (3:09:18.440)

that's a utopia, right?

Lex Fridman (3:09:20.520)

But for those of us that have the luxury,

Lex Fridman (3:09:23.600)

I mean, I think you love what you do that people say that.

Steve Viscelli (3:09:28.600)

I think the key for real happiness

Lex Fridman (3:09:34.280)

is to love what you're trying to achieve

Lex Fridman (3:09:36.920)

and maybe love trying to build a company

Lex Fridman (3:09:39.280)

and make a lot of money just for the sake of doing that.

Lex Fridman (3:09:41.800)

But I think the people who are really happy

Lex Fridman (3:09:44.400)

and have great impacts, they love what they do

Steve Viscelli (3:09:47.600)

because it has an impact on the world

Lex Fridman (3:09:49.160)

that they think is, it expresses that love, right?

Lex Fridman (3:09:52.920)

And that could be at a counseling center,

Lex Fridman (3:09:56.600)

that could be in your community,

Steve Viscelli (3:09:59.480)

that could be sending people to Mars, you know.

Lex Fridman (3:10:03.160)

Well, I also think it doesn't necessarily,

Steve Viscelli (3:10:05.120)

the expression of love isn't necessary

Lex Fridman (3:10:06.960)

about helping other people directly.

Steve Viscelli (3:10:09.400)

There's something about craftsmanship and skill

Lex Fridman (3:10:11.400)

as we've talked about,

Steve Viscelli (3:10:12.920)

that's almost like you're celebrating humanity

Lex Fridman (3:10:15.720)

by like searching for mastery in the task,

Steve Viscelli (3:10:21.400)

in the simple, like, especially tasks that people outside me

Lex Fridman (3:10:25.600)

see as menial, as not important.

Steve Viscelli (3:10:30.000)

Nevertheless, searching for mastery,

Lex Fridman (3:10:33.160)

for excellence in that task.

Steve Viscelli (3:10:34.760)

There's something deeply human to that

Lex Fridman (3:10:36.320)

and also fulfilling that just like driving a truck

Lex Fridman (3:10:40.520)

and getting damn good at it.

Lex Fridman (3:10:42.840)

Like, you know, the best who's ever lived

Lex Fridman (3:10:45.440)

and driving the truck and taking pride in that,

Lex Fridman (3:10:48.400)

that's deeply meaningful.

Lex Fridman (3:10:50.760)

And also like a real celebration of humanity

Lex Fridman (3:10:55.320)

and a real show of love, I think, for humanity.

Steve Viscelli (3:10:59.120)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (3:11:00.640)

Yeah, I just had my floors redone

Lex Fridman (3:11:01.960)

and the guy who did it was an artist.

Lex Fridman (3:11:04.160)

You know, he sanded these old 100 year old floors

Lex Fridman (3:11:06.120)

and made them look gorgeous and this is craft.

Lex Fridman (3:11:08.760)

That's love right there.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:10.360)

Yeah, I mean, he showed us some love.

Lex Fridman (3:11:12.560)

The product was just like, is enriching our lives.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:17.320)

Steve, this was an amazing conversation.

Lex Fridman (3:11:19.440)

We've covered a lot of ground, your work,

Steve Viscelli (3:11:21.840)

just like you said, impossible to connect the dots,

Lex Fridman (3:11:24.760)

but I'm glad you did all the amazing work you did.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:28.240)

You're exploring human nature at the core

Lex Fridman (3:11:31.240)

of what America is, the blue collar America.

Lex Fridman (3:11:35.000)

So thank you for your work.

Lex Fridman (3:11:36.360)

Thank you for the care and the love you put in your work.

Lex Fridman (3:11:38.720)

And thank you so much for spending

Lex Fridman (3:11:40.240)

your valuable time with me.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:42.320)

I appreciate it, Lex.

Lex Fridman (3:11:43.440)

I'm a big fan, so it's just been great to be on.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:47.120)

Thanks for listening to this conversation

Lex Fridman (3:11:49.000)

with Steve Vasile.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:50.560)

To support this podcast,

Lex Fridman (3:11:52.000)

please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (3:11:54.760)

And now let me leave you with some words

Lex Fridman (3:11:56.720)

from Napoleon Hill.

Steve Viscelli (3:11:58.440)

If you cannot do great things,

Lex Fridman (3:12:00.800)

do small things in a great way.

Steve Viscelli (3:12:03.760)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman (40:02.560)

Wow, I might have to have you read my answer to that.

Steve Viscelli (40:05.320)

That was a few years ago,

Lex Fridman (40:07.600)

be interesting to compare what I'll say, but.

Steve Viscelli (40:10.800)

I mean, one bigger question to ask, I guess,

Lex Fridman (40:12.880)

is like Johnny Cash wrote a lot of songs about truckers.

Steve Viscelli (40:17.880)

There used to be a time when perhaps falsely,

Lex Fridman (40:22.120)

perhaps it's part of the kind of perception

Steve Viscelli (40:24.320)

that you study with the labor markets and so on.

Lex Fridman (40:26.480)

There was a perception of truckers being,

Steve Viscelli (40:28.960)

first of all, a lucrative job

Lex Fridman (40:30.320)

and second of all, a job to be desired.

Steve Viscelli (40:34.440)

Yeah, so I mean, this is,

Lex Fridman (40:37.560)

the trucking industry to me is fascinating,

Lex Fridman (40:40.280)

but I think it should be fascinating to a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (40:43.600)

So the golden age was really two different kinds

Lex Fridman (40:47.800)

of markets as well, right?

Lex Fridman (40:51.080)

Today we have really good jobs and some really bad jobs.

Steve Viscelli (40:54.520)

We had the Teamsters Union

Lex Fridman (40:55.760)

that controlled the vast majority of employee jobs.

Lex Fridman (41:01.000)

And even where they had something called

Lex Fridman (41:03.360)

the National Master Freight Agreement.

Lex Fridman (41:05.480)

And this was Jimmy Hoffa who led the union

Lex Fridman (41:10.400)

through its sort of critical period by the mid 60s

Steve Viscelli (41:15.400)

had unified essentially the entire nation's

Lex Fridman (41:19.000)

trucking labor force under one contract.

Steve Viscelli (41:22.080)

Now you were either covered by that contract

Lex Fridman (41:26.000)

or your employer paid a lot of attention to it.

Lex Fridman (41:29.040)

And so by the end of the 1970s,

Lex Fridman (41:32.920)

the typical truck driver was making

Steve Viscelli (41:34.720)

well more than $100,000,

Lex Fridman (41:36.360)

typical truck driver was making more than $100,000

Steve Viscelli (41:39.080)

in today's dollars and was home every night.

Lex Fridman (41:41.840)

That was without a doubt and even more

Steve Viscelli (41:46.480)

than unionized auto workers, steel workers,

Lex Fridman (41:49.600)

10, 20% more than those workers made.

Steve Viscelli (41:53.800)

That was the golden age for sort of job quality,

Lex Fridman (41:56.360)

wages, teamster power.

Steve Viscelli (41:57.680)

They were without a doubt the most powerful union

Lex Fridman (42:00.360)

in the United States at that time.

Steve Viscelli (42:03.160)

At the same time in the 1970s,

Lex Fridman (42:05.240)

you had the mythic long haul trucker.

Lex Fridman (42:09.160)

And these were the guys who were kind of on the margins

Lex Fridman (42:13.240)

of the regulated market,

Steve Viscelli (42:15.000)

which is what the teamsters controlled.

Lex Fridman (42:16.720)

A lot of them were in agriculture,

Steve Viscelli (42:17.960)

which was never regulated.

Lex Fridman (42:19.560)

So in the new deal, when they decided to regulate trucking,

Steve Viscelli (42:22.360)

they didn't regulate agriculture

Lex Fridman (42:23.760)

because they didn't wanna drive up food prices,

Steve Viscelli (42:25.960)

which would hurt workers in urban areas.

Lex Fridman (42:28.240)

So they essentially left agricultural truckers out of it.

Lex Fridman (42:32.280)

And that's where a lot of the kind of outlaw,

Lex Fridman (42:34.480)

you know, asphalt cowboy imagery that we get.

Lex Fridman (42:40.440)

And I grew up, I know you didn't grow up in the US

Lex Fridman (42:44.320)

at this sort of, you know, as a young child.

Lex Fridman (42:47.280)

And I'm a bit older than you, but in the late 70s,

Lex Fridman (42:51.120)

there were movies and TV shows and CBs were a craze.

Lex Fridman (42:54.920)

And it was all these kind of outlaw truckers

Lex Fridman (42:57.600)

who were out there hauling some unregulated freight.

Steve Viscelli (43:00.360)

They weren't supposed to be trying to avoid the bears,

Lex Fridman (43:02.600)

you know, who are the cops.

Steve Viscelli (43:03.760)

And, you know, with all this salty language

Lex Fridman (43:07.080)

and these like, you know, terms that only they understood

Steve Viscelli (43:10.560)

and, you know, the partying at diners and popping pills,

Lex Fridman (43:13.480)

you know, the California turnarounds.

Lex Fridman (43:15.600)

So asphalt cowboys, truly.

Lex Fridman (43:17.960)

So it's like another form of cowboy movies.

Steve Viscelli (43:20.960)

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Lex Fridman (43:22.520)

And I think that sort of masculine ethos of like,

Steve Viscelli (43:27.920)

you got 40,000 pounds of something you care about,

Lex Fridman (43:30.080)

I'm your guy, you know,

Steve Viscelli (43:31.280)

you needed to go from New York to California,

Lex Fridman (43:33.360)

don't worry about it, I got it.

Lex Fridman (43:34.920)

That's appealing and it's tangible, right?

Lex Fridman (43:37.000)

And you think about people who don't wanna be paper pusher

Lex Fridman (43:39.600)

and sit in the, I deal with office politics,

Lex Fridman (43:41.360)

like just give me what you care about

Lex Fridman (43:42.840)

and I'll take care of it, you know, just pay me fair,

Lex Fridman (43:44.800)

you know, and that appeals.

Steve Viscelli (43:46.760)

You mentioned unions, Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa.

Lex Fridman (43:51.040)

Big question, maybe difficult question.

Lex Fridman (43:53.320)

What are some pros and cons of unions historically

Lex Fridman (43:56.200)

and today in the trucking space?

Steve Viscelli (43:58.600)

Yeah, well, if you're a worker, there are a lot of pros.

Lex Fridman (44:03.600)

And I don't, you know,

Lex Fridman (44:04.760)

and this was one of the things I talked to truckers about

Lex Fridman (44:06.680)

a lot.

Steve Viscelli (44:07.520)

Yeah, what's their perception of Jimmy Hoffa,

Lex Fridman (44:09.400)

for example, of unions?

Steve Viscelli (44:11.600)

Yeah, so, and this was probably one of the central

Lex Fridman (44:15.200)

hypotheses that I had going in there.

Lex Fridman (44:16.840)

And it may sound, you know,

Lex Fridman (44:19.280)

someone who does hard science, right?

Steve Viscelli (44:21.040)

You may hear a social scientist, you know,

Lex Fridman (44:23.640)

sort of use that terminology,

Steve Viscelli (44:24.840)

even other social scientists.

Lex Fridman (44:26.040)

Hypothesis?

Steve Viscelli (44:26.880)

Yeah, you know, they don't like it,

Lex Fridman (44:28.360)

but I do like to think that way.

Lex Fridman (44:31.040)

And my initial hypothesis was that, you know,

Lex Fridman (44:33.720)

and it's very simple,

Steve Viscelli (44:35.120)

that, you know, the tenure of the driver in the industry

Lex Fridman (44:39.400)

would have a strong effect on how they viewed unions.

Steve Viscelli (44:43.040)

That, you know, somebody who had experienced unions

Lex Fridman (44:45.920)

would be more favorable

Lex Fridman (44:48.040)

and someone who had not would not be, right?

Lex Fridman (44:51.880)

And that turned out to be the case without a doubt.

Lex Fridman (44:55.440)

But in an interesting way,

Lex Fridman (44:57.720)

which was that even the drivers

Steve Viscelli (44:59.680)

who were not part of the union,

Lex Fridman (45:02.760)

who in the kind of public debate of deregulation

Steve Viscelli (45:09.640)

were portrayed as these kind of small business truckers

Lex Fridman (45:12.600)

who were getting shut out by the big regulated monopolies

Lex Fridman (45:16.120)

and the Teamsters Union, you know,

Lex Fridman (45:17.520)

the corrupt Teamsters Union.

Steve Viscelli (45:19.400)

Even those drivers longed for the days of the Teamsters

Lex Fridman (45:22.680)

because they recognized the overall market impact

Steve Viscelli (45:27.040)

that they had.

Lex Fridman (45:27.880)

That trucking just naturally

Steve Viscelli (45:31.040)

tended toward excessive competition

Lex Fridman (45:33.680)

that meant that there was no profit to be made

Lex Fridman (45:36.800)

and oftentimes you'd be operating at a loss.

Lex Fridman (45:39.160)

And so even these, you know,

Steve Viscelli (45:41.480)

the asphalt cowboy owner operators from back in the day

Lex Fridman (45:44.480)

would tell me when the Teamsters were in power,

Steve Viscelli (45:47.640)

I made a lot more money.

Lex Fridman (45:48.960)

And, you know, this is, you know, unions,

Steve Viscelli (45:51.800)

at least those kinds of unions, like the Teamsters,

Lex Fridman (45:55.360)

you know, there's, I think a lot of misconceptions today

Steve Viscelli (45:58.720)

sort of popularly about what unions did back then.

Lex Fridman (46:01.960)

They tied wages to productivity.

Steve Viscelli (46:04.240)

Like that was the central thing that the Teamsters Union did.

Lex Fridman (46:08.920)

And, you know, there were great accounts

Steve Viscelli (46:11.320)

of sort of Jimmy Hoffa's perspective

Lex Fridman (46:13.960)

for all his portrayal as sort of corrupt

Lex Fridman (46:17.000)

and criminal, and there's, you know, I'm not disputing that.

Lex Fridman (46:19.720)

He broke a lot of laws.

Steve Viscelli (46:22.600)

He was remarkably open about who he was and what he did.

Lex Fridman (46:27.600)

He actually invited a pair, a husband and wife team

Steve Viscelli (46:30.400)

of Harvard economists to follow him around

Lex Fridman (46:34.000)

and like opened up the Teamsters books to them

Lex Fridman (46:37.200)

so that they could see how he was, you know,

Lex Fridman (46:40.240)

thinking about negotiating with the employers.

Lex Fridman (46:43.520)

And the Teamsters, and this goes back to the beginning,

Lex Fridman (46:46.440)

and this goes back well before Hoffa,

Steve Viscelli (46:48.760)

back to the, you know, 1800s,

Lex Fridman (46:52.840)

they understood that workers did better

Steve Viscelli (46:55.840)

if their employers did better.

Lex Fridman (46:57.440)

And the only way the employers would do better

Steve Viscelli (46:59.400)

was if they controlled the market.

Lex Fridman (47:01.800)

And so oftentimes the corruption in trucking

Steve Viscelli (47:04.520)

was initiated by employers who wanted to limit competition

Lex Fridman (47:07.720)

and they knew they couldn't limit competition

Steve Viscelli (47:09.560)

without the support of labor.

Lex Fridman (47:10.880)

And so you'd get these collusive arrangements

Steve Viscelli (47:12.920)

between employers and labor to say no new trucking companies.

Lex Fridman (47:17.280)

There are 10 of us, that's enough.

Steve Viscelli (47:19.000)

We control Seattle, we're gonna set the price

Lex Fridman (47:21.960)

and we're not gonna be undercut.

Steve Viscelli (47:24.720)

When there's a shortage of trucks around, it's great,

Lex Fridman (47:27.200)

rates go up, but you get too many trucks.

Steve Viscelli (47:30.160)

It's very often that you end up operating at a loss

Lex Fridman (47:33.200)

just to keep the doors open.

Steve Viscelli (47:35.400)

You know, you don't have any choice.

Lex Fridman (47:36.520)

You can't, it's what economists called derived demand.

Steve Viscelli (47:39.520)

You can't like make up a bunch of trucking services

Lex Fridman (47:41.720)

and store it in a warehouse, right?

Steve Viscelli (47:43.040)

You gotta keep those trucks moving to pay the bills.

Lex Fridman (47:47.000)

Can we also lay out the kind of jobs that are in trucking?

Lex Fridman (47:50.400)

What are the best jobs in trucking?

Lex Fridman (47:52.200)

What are the worst jobs in trucking?

Lex Fridman (47:53.760)

What are we, how many jobs are we talking about today?

Lex Fridman (47:56.880)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (47:57.720)

And what kind of jobs are there?

Lex Fridman (48:00.880)

So there are a number of different segments

Lex Fridman (48:04.200)

and the first part would be, you know, are you offering,

Lex Fridman (48:08.080)

the first question would be,

Steve Viscelli (48:08.920)

are you offering services to the public

Lex Fridman (48:11.280)

or are you moving your own freight, right?

Lex Fridman (48:13.080)

So are you a retailer, say Walmart or, you know,

Lex Fridman (48:17.680)

a paper company or something like that

Lex Fridman (48:19.160)

that's operating your own fleet of trucks?

Lex Fridman (48:22.080)

That's private trucking.

Steve Viscelli (48:25.760)

For hire are the folks who, you know,

Lex Fridman (48:28.600)

offer their services out to other customers.

Lex Fridman (48:31.080)

So you have private and for hire.

Lex Fridman (48:33.000)

In general, for hire pays less.

Steve Viscelli (48:37.920)

Is that because of the, something you talk about

Lex Fridman (48:40.400)

with employee versus contractor situation

Lex Fridman (48:43.720)

or are they all tricked or led to become contractors?

Lex Fridman (48:48.840)

That can become a part of it as a strategy,

Lex Fridman (48:52.040)

but the fundamental reason is competition.

Lex Fridman (48:54.840)

So those private carriers aren't in competition

Lex Fridman (48:58.800)

with other trucking fleets, right?

Lex Fridman (49:00.320)

For their own in house services.

Steve Viscelli (49:02.160)

So, you know, they tend to, and this, you know,

Lex Fridman (49:05.440)

the question of why private versus for hire

Lex Fridman (49:07.920)

because for hire is cheaper, right?

Lex Fridman (49:09.840)

And so if you need that, if that trucking service

Steve Viscelli (49:14.000)

is central to what you do and you cannot afford disruptions

Lex Fridman (49:17.200)

or volatility in the price of it, you keep it in house.

Steve Viscelli (49:19.840)

You should be willing to pay more for that

Lex Fridman (49:21.440)

because it's more valuable too

Lex Fridman (49:22.560)

and you keep it in house and that.

Lex Fridman (49:23.840)

So that's an interesting distinction.

Lex Fridman (49:25.480)

What about, and this is kind of moving towards

Lex Fridman (49:27.400)

our conversation of what can and can't be automated.

Lex Fridman (49:31.840)

How else does it divide the different trucking jobs?

Lex Fridman (49:36.160)

So the next big chunk is kind of

Lex Fridman (49:38.160)

how much stuff are you moving, right?

Lex Fridman (49:40.320)

And so we have what's called truckload

Lex Fridman (49:43.520)

and truckload means, you know, you can fill up a trailer

Lex Fridman (49:45.960)

either by volume or by weight and then less than truckload.

Steve Viscelli (49:50.400)

Less than truckload, the official definition

Lex Fridman (49:52.560)

is like less than 10,000 pounds.

Steve Viscelli (49:55.600)

You know, this is gonna be a couple of pallets of this,

Lex Fridman (49:57.360)

a couple of pallets of that.

Lex Fridman (49:58.720)

The process looks really different, right?

Lex Fridman (50:00.960)

So that truckload is, you know, point A to point B,

Steve Viscelli (50:04.160)

I'm buying, you know, a truckload of bounty paper towels,

Lex Fridman (50:08.480)

I'm bringing it into, you know, my distribution center,

Steve Viscelli (50:11.720)

go pick it up at the bounty plant,

Lex Fridman (50:13.880)

bring it to my distribution center, right?

Steve Viscelli (50:15.640)

Nowhere in between do you stop.

Lex Fridman (50:18.000)

At least process that freight.

Steve Viscelli (50:19.520)

Less than truckload, what you've got is terminal systems.

Lex Fridman (50:22.800)

And this is what you had under regulation too.

Lex Fridman (50:26.080)

And so these terminal systems, what you do is you do

Lex Fridman (50:27.880)

a bunch of local pickup and delivery,

Steve Viscelli (50:29.600)

maybe with smaller trucks,

Lex Fridman (50:32.000)

and you pick up two pallets of this here,

Steve Viscelli (50:33.560)

four pallets of this there, you bring it to the terminal,

Lex Fridman (50:36.200)

you combine it based on the destination,

Steve Viscelli (50:38.360)

you then create a full truckload, you know, trailer,

Lex Fridman (50:43.040)

and you send it to another terminal

Steve Viscelli (50:44.560)

where it gets broken back down,

Lex Fridman (50:46.000)

and then out for local delivery.

Steve Viscelli (50:47.960)

That's gonna look a lot like if you send a package by UPS,

Lex Fridman (50:52.240)

right, they pick all these parcels, right,

Steve Viscelli (50:54.640)

figure out where they're all going,

Lex Fridman (50:55.800)

put them on planes or in trailers

Steve Viscelli (50:57.640)

going to the same destination,

Lex Fridman (50:58.720)

then break them out to put them

Steve Viscelli (50:59.720)

in what they call package cars.

Lex Fridman (51:01.440)

So, before I ask you about autonomous trucks,

Steve Viscelli (51:06.240)

let's just pause for your experience as a trucker.

Lex Fridman (51:11.080)

Did it get lonely?

Steve Viscelli (51:12.480)

Like, can you talk about some of your experiences

Lex Fridman (51:15.080)

of what it was actually like?

Lex Fridman (51:16.760)

Did it get lonely?

Lex Fridman (51:17.920)

Yeah, no, I mean, it was, I didn't have kids at the time.

Steve Viscelli (51:21.280)

Now I have kids, I can't even imagine it.

Lex Fridman (51:25.640)

You know, I've been married for five years at the time.

Steve Viscelli (51:29.600)

My wife hated it, I hated it.

Lex Fridman (51:31.800)

You know, I describe in the book

Steve Viscelli (51:34.520)

the experience of being stuck,

Lex Fridman (51:37.080)

if I remember correctly, it was like Ohio

Steve Viscelli (51:40.280)

at this truck stop in the middle of nowhere

Lex Fridman (51:42.520)

and like, you know, sitting on this concrete barrier

Lex Fridman (51:46.320)

and just watching fireworks in the distance

Lex Fridman (51:48.720)

and like eating Chinese food on the 4th of July.

Lex Fridman (51:51.960)

And you know, my wife calls me from like the family barbecue

Lex Fridman (51:55.480)

and our anniversary is July 8th.

Lex Fridman (51:57.400)

And she's like, are you gonna be home?

Lex Fridman (51:59.080)

And I'm like, I don't know, you know.

Steve Viscelli (52:03.200)

I have a cousin whose husband drove truck

Lex Fridman (52:09.400)

as a truck driver would say, drove truck for a while.

Lex Fridman (52:13.520)

And he told me before I went into it,

Lex Fridman (52:15.360)

he was like, the advantage you have is that you know

Steve Viscelli (52:18.600)

that you're not gonna be doing this long term.

Lex Fridman (52:21.000)

Like, and Lex, I can't even like,

Steve Viscelli (52:24.480)

the emotional content of some of these interviews,

Lex Fridman (52:27.800)

I mean, I would sit down at a truck stop with somebody

Steve Viscelli (52:30.440)

I had never met before and you know, you open the spicket

Lex Fridman (52:33.920)

and the last question I would ask drivers

Steve Viscelli (52:37.560)

was that by the time I really sort of figured out

Lex Fridman (52:40.720)

how to do it, the last question I would ask them is,

Steve Viscelli (52:43.160)

you know, what advice would you give to somebody,

Lex Fridman (52:45.800)

like your nephew, you know, a family friend asks you

Lex Fridman (52:50.200)

about what it's like to be a driver and should they do it?

Lex Fridman (52:52.200)

What advice would you give them?

Lex Fridman (52:54.120)

And this question, some of these, you know,

Lex Fridman (52:57.120)

grizzled old drivers, you know, tough, tough guys,

Steve Viscelli (53:00.800)

would that question would like, some of them would break down

Lex Fridman (53:04.400)

and they would say, I would say to them,

Steve Viscelli (53:06.920)

you better have everything

Lex Fridman (53:08.680)

that you ever wanted in life already.

Steve Viscelli (53:11.680)

Because I've had a car that I've had for 10 years,

Lex Fridman (53:15.280)

it's got 7,000 miles on it.

Steve Viscelli (53:17.080)

I own a boat that hasn't seen the water in five years.

Lex Fridman (53:21.800)

My kids, I didn't raise them.

Steve Viscelli (53:24.200)

Like I'd be out for two weeks at a time,

Lex Fridman (53:27.360)

I'd come home, my wife would give me two kids to punish,

Steve Viscelli (53:31.480)

a list of things to do, you know, on Saturday night

Lex Fridman (53:34.560)

and I might leave out Sunday night or Monday morning.

Steve Viscelli (53:37.400)

You know, I come home dead tired,

Lex Fridman (53:39.480)

my kids don't know who I am.

Lex Fridman (53:41.840)

And you know, it was just like,

Lex Fridman (53:44.720)

it was heartbreaking to hear those stories.

Lex Fridman (53:46.920)

And then before you know it, you know,

Lex Fridman (53:49.400)

life is short and just the years run away.

Steve Viscelli (53:52.520)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (53:54.840)

Hard question to ask in that context,

Lex Fridman (53:56.600)

but what's the best,

Lex Fridman (53:58.440)

what was the best part of being a truck driver?

Lex Fridman (54:04.120)

Was there moments that you truly enjoyed on the road?

Lex Fridman (54:08.160)

Oh, absolutely.

Steve Viscelli (54:09.000)

There was, there's definitely a pride and mastery of,

Lex Fridman (54:13.120)

you know, even basic competence

Steve Viscelli (54:14.600)

of sort of piloting this thing safely.

Lex Fridman (54:17.080)

There's a lot of responsibility to it.

Steve Viscelli (54:18.600)

That thing's dangerous and you know it.

Lex Fridman (54:21.320)

So there's some pride there.

Steve Viscelli (54:23.280)

For me personally, and I know for a lot of other drivers,

Lex Fridman (54:26.320)

it's just like seeing these behind the scenes places

Steve Viscelli (54:29.320)

that you know exist in our economy.

Lex Fridman (54:32.280)

And I think we're all much more aware of them now

Steve Viscelli (54:35.840)

after COVID and supply chain mess that we have.

Lex Fridman (54:38.960)

I don't know if we'll talk about that,

Lex Fridman (54:40.360)

but you know, you get to see those places.

Lex Fridman (54:42.800)

You know, you get to see those ports.

Steve Viscelli (54:44.320)

You get to see the place where they make the cardboard boxes

Lex Fridman (54:47.840)

that the Huggies diapers go in.

Steve Viscelli (54:49.600)

Or the warehouse full of Bud Light.

Lex Fridman (54:52.320)

I moved Bud Light from like upstate New York

Lex Fridman (54:55.400)

and the first load like went to Atlanta, you know?

Lex Fridman (54:58.680)

And then a couple months later,

Steve Viscelli (55:00.240)

I circled back through that same brewery

Lex Fridman (55:02.360)

and I brought a load of Bud Light out to Michigan.

Lex Fridman (55:07.040)

And I was like, holy shit, all the Bud Light,

Lex Fridman (55:09.720)

like, you know, for this whole giant swath

Steve Viscelli (55:12.280)

of the United States comes from this one plant,

Lex Fridman (55:14.320)

this cavernous plant with like kegs of beer.

Lex Fridman (55:16.560)

And you see that part of the economy

Lex Fridman (55:18.760)

and it's like, you're almost like you're an economic tourist.

Lex Fridman (55:22.680)

And I think all, everybody kind of appreciates that.

Lex Fridman (55:25.760)

Like kind of, it's almost like a behind the scenes tour.

Lex Fridman (55:29.440)

That wears off after a few months, you know?

Lex Fridman (55:31.240)

You start to see new things less and less frequently.

Steve Viscelli (55:34.320)

At first, everything's novel and sort of life on the road.

Lex Fridman (55:37.240)

And then it becomes just endless miles of white lines

Lex Fridman (55:40.600)

and yellow lines and truck stops.

Lex Fridman (55:43.000)

And the days just blur together.

Steve Viscelli (55:46.280)

You know, it's one loading dock.

Lex Fridman (55:47.760)

It's one loading dock after another.

Lex Fridman (55:49.640)

So you lose the magic of being on the road.

Lex Fridman (55:52.440)

Yeah, it's very rare the driver that doesn't.

Steve Viscelli (55:58.320)

You mentioned COVID and supply chain.

Lex Fridman (56:01.320)

While being this, for a brief time,

Steve Viscelli (56:04.880)

this member of the supply chain,

Lex Fridman (56:06.960)

what have you come to understand about our supply chain,

Steve Viscelli (56:11.320)

United States and global and its resilience

Lex Fridman (56:14.800)

against strategies, catastrophic in the world?

Steve Viscelli (56:18.680)

Like COVID, for example.

Lex Fridman (56:20.240)

Yeah, I mean, we have built really long,

Steve Viscelli (56:24.360)

really lean supply chains.

Lex Fridman (56:26.840)

And just by definition, they're fragile.

Steve Viscelli (56:31.520)

You know, the current mess that we have,

Lex Fridman (56:34.320)

it's not gonna clear by Christmas.

Steve Viscelli (56:37.240)

It will be lucky if it clears by next Christmas.

Lex Fridman (56:39.960)

Can you describe the current mess in supply chain

Lex Fridman (56:42.000)

that you're referring to?

Lex Fridman (56:43.080)

Yeah, so we've got pile ups of ships

Steve Viscelli (56:46.960)

off the coast of California, Long Beach,

Lex Fridman (56:50.240)

and LA in particular, in bad shape.

Steve Viscelli (56:54.840)

You know, last I checked, it was around 60 ships,

Lex Fridman (56:56.880)

all of which are holding thousands of containers

Steve Viscelli (57:00.560)

full of stuff that retailers were hoping

Lex Fridman (57:02.720)

was gonna be on shelves for the holiday season.

Steve Viscelli (57:07.380)

Meanwhile, the port itself has stacks and stacks

Lex Fridman (57:10.460)

of containers that they can't get rid of.

Steve Viscelli (57:12.760)

The truckers aren't showing up to pick up

Lex Fridman (57:15.760)

the containers that are there,

Lex Fridman (57:17.560)

so they can't offload the ships that are waiting.

Lex Fridman (57:22.820)

And why aren't the truckers picking it up?

Steve Viscelli (57:26.240)

Partly because there's a long history of inefficiency

Lex Fridman (57:28.280)

in making them wait,

Lex Fridman (57:29.600)

but it's because the warehouses are full.

Lex Fridman (57:31.940)

So we've had all these perverse outcomes

Steve Viscelli (57:36.500)

that no one really expected.

Lex Fridman (57:38.040)

Like in the middle of all these shortages,

Steve Viscelli (57:40.360)

people are stockpiling stuff.

Lex Fridman (57:43.320)

So there are suppliers who used to keep two months

Steve Viscelli (57:47.240)

of supply of bottled water on hand.

Lex Fridman (57:50.640)

And after going through COVID and not having supply

Steve Viscelli (57:53.600)

to send to their customers,

Lex Fridman (57:55.520)

they're like, we need three months.

Steve Viscelli (57:58.280)

Well, our system is not designed for major storage of goods

Lex Fridman (58:02.520)

to go up 50% in a category.

Steve Viscelli (58:04.680)

It's lean.

Lex Fridman (58:05.720)

If you're a warehouse operator,

Steve Viscelli (58:07.040)

you know, you wanna be 90% plus.

Lex Fridman (58:08.660)

You don't want a lot of open bays sitting around.

Lex Fridman (58:10.740)

So we don't have 10% extra capacity in warehouses.

Lex Fridman (58:16.280)

We don't have 10% of them.

Steve Viscelli (58:18.080)

Trucking capacity can fluctuate a bit,

Lex Fridman (58:19.780)

but you don't have that kind of slack.

Lex Fridman (58:23.600)

And now, I mean, and we saw this

Lex Fridman (58:26.000)

right when people shifted consumption.

Lex Fridman (58:28.280)

And I get a little mad when people talk about panic buying

Lex Fridman (58:32.760)

as kind of the reason that we had all these shortages.

Steve Viscelli (58:36.680)

It really, like it's preventing us from understanding,

Lex Fridman (58:40.320)

you know, the real problem there,

Steve Viscelli (58:42.360)

which is that lean supply chain.

Lex Fridman (58:44.940)

Sure, there was some panic buying, you know,

Steve Viscelli (58:46.800)

no doubt about it,

Lex Fridman (58:47.920)

but we had an enormous shift in people's behavior.

Lex Fridman (58:51.840)

So with my sister and brother in law,

Lex Fridman (58:55.320)

I own a couple of small businesses and we serve food, right?

Lex Fridman (58:58.560)

So we get, you know, food from Cisco.

Lex Fridman (59:02.760)

Cisco couldn't get rid of food, right?

Steve Viscelli (59:04.720)

Because nobody's eating out.

Lex Fridman (59:05.960)

So they've got, you know, 50 pounds sacks of flour,

Steve Viscelli (59:09.520)

you know, sitting in their warehouse

Lex Fridman (59:11.080)

that they can't get rid of.

Steve Viscelli (59:11.920)

They've got cases of lettuce and meat and everything else

Lex Fridman (59:14.960)

that's just gonna go bad.

Lex Fridman (59:17.360)

So that panic buying certainly exacerbated some things

Lex Fridman (59:20.800)

like toilet paper and whatever,

Lex Fridman (59:22.000)

but we saw just a massive change in demand.

Lex Fridman (59:25.640)

And our supply chains are based on historical data, right?

Steve Viscelli (59:28.760)

So, you know, that stuff leaves Asia,

Lex Fridman (59:31.440)

you know, months before you wanna have it on the shelves

Lex Fridman (59:34.480)

and you're predicting based on last year, you know,

Lex Fridman (59:37.000)

what you want on that shelf.

Lex Fridman (59:39.820)

And so it's a, you know, I guess at its best,

Lex Fridman (59:43.280)

it's a beautiful symphony of lots of moving parts,

Lex Fridman (59:48.520)

but now everyone can't get on the same page of music.

Lex Fridman (59:52.760)

But it's not resilient to changes

Steve Viscelli (59:54.440)

in on mass human behavior.

Lex Fridman (59:59.520)

So even like I read somewhere,