Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, we're coming to your town, so you better
Speaker 1: get ready, put on your best duds and come out
Speaker 1: and see us. But first buy some tickets.
Speaker 2: That's right, we are finishing up. These are the last
Speaker 2: shows of our twenty twenty three tour. We're gonna be
Speaker 2: in Orlando, Florida on August twelfth, Nashville, Tennessee on September sixth,
Speaker 2: and wind it all up here in Atlanta on September ninth.
Speaker 1: Yes, and you can get all the info you need
Speaker 1: and links to tickets which are on sale now at
Speaker 1: our website Stuff youshould Know dot com on our tour page,
Speaker 1: or you can go to linktree slash sysk.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast Good Buddy. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here too,
Speaker 1: so that makes us a route tune an episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know?
Speaker 2: Was there anything more thrilling as a child being on
Speaker 2: the highway and getting that trucker to pull that horn change?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was very thrilling. You felt drunk with power,
Speaker 1: didn't you?
Speaker 4: Sort of that as a kid it was.
Speaker 2: It was like, wow, like they paid attention to me
Speaker 2: sort of, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And the only time I ever tried that,
Speaker 1: though the trucker flipped me off.
Speaker 4: No really kidding. I totally bought that.
Speaker 1: That would be a Josh Clark childhood story though for
Speaker 1: sure it fit. Yeah, for sure. So was that it?
Speaker 1: Is that all you wanted to talk about with truckers?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I know, I don't know if this
Speaker 2: came specifically from a specific trucker as an idea, but
Speaker 2: I know that we've gotten a few emails here and
Speaker 2: there from long haul and regional shorthaul truckers that say
Speaker 2: they listen to us, and you know that they're out
Speaker 2: there and they'd love to hear something about it.
Speaker 1: So to that, we say ten to four, ten to four.
Speaker 4: Good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, apparently stuff you should know is the greatest thing
Speaker 1: that's ever happened to the trucking industry in the history
Speaker 1: of the trucking industry. As far as the truckers who
Speaker 1: listen to us, they're concerned. So hello out there, everybody
Speaker 1: driving trucks listening to us. We appreciate you. In fact,
Speaker 1: we appreciate you so much. We're doing a whole episode
Speaker 1: on your industry. And it's one of those things, Chuck,
Speaker 1: that I mean, you drive alongside truckers, you tell them
Speaker 1: to get the heck out of the middle lane. You
Speaker 1: see them unloading shipments and just doing their thing. They're
Speaker 1: just a part of life. But it's definitely one of
Speaker 1: those things that if it goes wrong, it becomes apparent
Speaker 1: very quickly. Because truckers and trucking is the way that
Speaker 1: America runs, not just America, we're talking Eurasia. Basically, the
Speaker 1: whole world runs on commercial trucking. That's how stuff gets
Speaker 1: moved around. Yes, we move stuff by sea, that's true,
Speaker 1: move stuff by rail, that's true too. We even fly
Speaker 1: stuff somewhere once in a while. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of stuff that goes from a factory
Speaker 1: to a store in most countries, it's it's carried by trucks.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think the Grabster helped us with this, and I
Speaker 2: think he found a stat that said that long haul
Speaker 2: trucking carries about seventy percent by weight of everything that
Speaker 2: we ship in the United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah, eleven billion tons of freight in a year. I
Speaker 1: saw that maybe about six hundred billion dollars. That's how
Speaker 1: much the industry makes gross of course, But the I
Speaker 1: think the key here is that trucking has created that
Speaker 1: the world that we live in today. Like the grocery
Speaker 1: storees you know it today, you can thank trucking for that.
Speaker 1: Box stores for better or worse, thank trucking for that.
Speaker 1: They they've allowed it. Like as trucking is advanced, it's
Speaker 1: allowed the United States economy to advance as well, and
Speaker 1: it's just created all sorts of new things that you
Speaker 1: probably couldn't have predicted along the way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why, even though it can be frustrating,
Speaker 2: you should try and be very patient and understanding when
Speaker 2: that semi truck gets over in the left lane to
Speaker 2: pass somebody, and which they have to do sometimes, and
Speaker 2: they find themselves all of a sudden going on a
Speaker 2: long uphill stretch right and they just don't have the
Speaker 2: engine power to go as fast as you want to go.
Speaker 2: I used to get pretty frustrated with that stuff, but
Speaker 2: I try to understand now, they didn't mean to do that.
Speaker 2: They don't want to be on that uphill, stuck in
Speaker 2: that left lane, and they're trying to get you your
Speaker 2: dumb package or oranges or whatever.
Speaker 1: I have respect for truckers in the trucking industry, but
Speaker 1: I think being asked to be patient about that is
Speaker 1: a bit of a stretch.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, we should probably go back in time
Speaker 2: some to the early nineteen hundreds, specifically the nineteen tens,
Speaker 2: when what we think of as the modern tractor trailer
Speaker 2: was basically invented by a guy from Detroit named August Fruhuf.
Speaker 2: Something tells me he's German, I think so. And he
Speaker 2: built a trailer to move lumber around. Called it a
Speaker 2: semi trailer.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you don't call it a semi.
Speaker 4: Well, a semi trailer. I call it a semi.
Speaker 2: You call it a semi No, I call it a
Speaker 2: semi okay?
Speaker 4: Was that just a gas lid?
Speaker 1: Maybe?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 2: And then about a year after that he licensed this
Speaker 2: fifth wheel design, which is which was kind of changed everything.
Speaker 2: It made a uniform method for very quickly and easily
Speaker 2: attaching a trailer to a truck. And back then it
Speaker 2: was called the fifth wheel because I looked up old
Speaker 2: pictures of these things. It looked like a wagon wheel.
Speaker 2: It looks a lot different now, but that was where
Speaker 2: it got its name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you've ever seen a naked semi driving along
Speaker 1: without a trailer, there's a big round steel plate on
Speaker 1: the back and that's the fifth wheel. And like you said,
Speaker 1: I mean it revolutionized everything because it allowed trailers to
Speaker 1: be swapped out very quickly. And also it came up
Speaker 1: it might come up again later. It it underscores the
Speaker 1: whole point of everything is that all you need now
Speaker 1: is the tractor, the semi, the trunk, and you can
Speaker 1: interchange that with all variety and manner of different trailers.
Speaker 1: You can pull all sorts of different things. So because
Speaker 1: it's modular and swappable and you can collect all fifty
Speaker 1: that that also allowed that the whole industry to grow too,
Speaker 1: just in that one little invention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and do I understand in this correctly that.
Speaker 2: A tractor trailer is the name of you know, the
Speaker 2: front part in the back part, and it's called a
Speaker 2: semi truck and a semi trailer because it's like part
Speaker 2: of that like semi.
Speaker 1: Literally that's my understanding, all.
Speaker 2: Right, if we got that wrong, and I feel really dumb,
Speaker 2: but I think that's the deal. And like you said,
Speaker 2: now people will generally just call them semis.
Speaker 4: A lot of times like a shorthand.
Speaker 2: But there's you know, there's been a lot of developments
Speaker 2: since that fifth wheel, Yeah, to come along.
Speaker 4: To make these sort of the go to.
Speaker 2: The first big one was just you know, air tires
Speaker 2: rather than rubber wrapped around a steel wheel, right, that
Speaker 2: was a big deal. And then refrigerated trucks, which came
Speaker 2: along in the nineteen thirties courtesy of a very successful
Speaker 2: and prolific inventor on an African American Army veteran named
Speaker 2: Fred Jones, who developed the refrigerated truck. And prior to this,
Speaker 2: it was like how much ice can we fit in there?
Speaker 4: Kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they would take like barrels of brine along I
Speaker 1: guess to lower the melting point for the ice, and
Speaker 1: that stuff would just drip out of it and onto
Speaker 1: the truck and it would rust the truck quickly. Even
Speaker 1: if you did have a very successful run, it was
Speaker 1: a very short run. All that stuff was any perishable
Speaker 1: stuff was very local. Like if you bought something, yeah,
Speaker 1: fish especially they did not have fish in Georgia at
Speaker 1: the time, certainly not saltwater fish. But if you bought
Speaker 1: something like at the store that was produced, it was
Speaker 1: probably grown within twenty miles of where you were, probably
Speaker 1: even closer than that, in large part because they just
Speaker 1: couldn't ship it further than that. And then if you
Speaker 1: have a truck breakdown, you're in big trouble because that
Speaker 1: whole shipman was just just a wash.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, if you ate like a swordfish steak
Speaker 4: in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the nineteen sixties, you're lucky to
Speaker 4: be alive. Yeah, exactly, Actually, not the sixties. I should
Speaker 4: have said that the eighteenth sixties. Let me try that again.
Speaker 2: If you ate swordfish Until's Oklahoma in the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 2: you're lucky to be alive.
Speaker 4: You're lucky to be alive. Anyway, If you're alive, then.
Speaker 1: I think Swordfish in Tulsa is a great album.
Speaker 4: Now, Oh yes.
Speaker 1: I can see a guy with a pencil thin mustache
Speaker 1: seated at a table, an intimate little table with the candle.
Speaker 1: He's wearing an ascot and sunglasses even though it's indoors,
Speaker 1: and he's toasting you the viewer of the album cover.
Speaker 4: Oh man, Aaron Cooper get busy.
Speaker 1: So I guess we're trying to say here is that
Speaker 1: it's really difficult to overstate the impact that the refrigerated
Speaker 1: trailer had on not just the trucking industry, but just
Speaker 1: the economy and the way that we consume food. Now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, truck farming started a couple of
Speaker 2: decades before, which was the idea that you could now
Speaker 2: put fruits and vegetables on trucks that didn't necessarily need
Speaker 2: to be refrigerated.
Speaker 1: It does not mean growing trucks from c.
Speaker 2: That started a while before, which meant all of a
Speaker 2: sudden farming went you know, regional and then national. But
Speaker 2: then you know, a couple of less than a couple
Speaker 2: of decades later, when these reefer trucks is what they're called,
Speaker 2: came along, then you could have cold goods shipped more easily,
Speaker 2: and then basically everything was on the table as far
Speaker 2: as getting it from here to there.
Speaker 1: Right, And that's another example, like you can haul a
Speaker 1: dry load and a regular trailer one day and the
Speaker 1: next day you could be hauling a reefer truck thanks
Speaker 1: to that fifth wheel, like I was saying earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another big, one, huge, huge change not just in trucking
Speaker 1: but in shipping in the global economy in general, was
Speaker 1: when the standardized shipping container came along. We have to
Speaker 1: do an episode on that. I can't believe we haven't yet.
Speaker 4: Yeah we should.
Speaker 1: The closest we came to was the floaty friendly floaties,
Speaker 1: the rubber ducks that went overboard once.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: That's the coast we came. But so when the shipping
Speaker 1: container container became standardized, that meant that when you shipped something, uh,
Speaker 1: you packed it and sent it off and it was
Speaker 1: lifted on a crane to a ship, it was lifted
Speaker 1: off the ship by another crane on the other end
Speaker 1: onto a tractor trailer, and then it was just taken
Speaker 1: straight to the store. No one needed to touch it
Speaker 1: after you packed it, which really cut down on theft
Speaker 1: damage that kind of stuff. It also put the long
Speaker 1: shortman profession essentially out of business forever. But it also
Speaker 1: it allowed trucking to expand. I guess in in kind
Speaker 1: starting around the seventies, I think is when they really
Speaker 1: caught on.
Speaker 4: Aren't there still long shoremen?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: I thought they were.
Speaker 2: They just like now, they just managed the loading and
Speaker 2: the loading of containers.
Speaker 1: Yes, of the containers. So yes, there are still long shoremen.
Speaker 1: There's still Steve Doors, but they the number of them. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, I mean decimated times nine.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 2: I was just imagining a long shoreman working right now
Speaker 2: listening to this, going what I.
Speaker 1: Don't exist, and he just pops right out of existence
Speaker 1: because he stopped believing.
Speaker 2: Another big thing that made trucking possible, obviously, was the
Speaker 2: Federal Highway Act I'm sorry, Federal Highway Aid Act of
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six, which you know we've talked about it before,
Speaker 2: created the highway system, very big boon and then getting
Speaker 2: rid of way stations. It didn't increase trucking, but it
Speaker 2: really ramped up efficiency because back in the day, every
Speaker 2: state had their own weight restrictions for trucks or you know,
Speaker 2: they weren't literally all different, but they all had their
Speaker 2: own and you had to stop at every state line
Speaker 2: at a way station and sometimes sit in a long
Speaker 2: line and get weighed, and you could be delayed hours
Speaker 2: and hours, especially well if you were overweight like you would,
Speaker 2: they'd say, sorry, you got to pull over there probably
Speaker 2: and we'll handle this.
Speaker 1: But vomit.
Speaker 2: The Surface Surface Transportation Act, well, I guess in the
Speaker 2: fifties they made it. They had a federal limit imposed,
Speaker 2: but states could still have their own individual limits if
Speaker 2: they if they wanted to, they were allowed to keep those.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't until nineteen eighty two of the Surface
Speaker 2: Transportation Assistance Act that they made it completely uniform. There
Speaker 2: were still way stations because I remember them when I
Speaker 2: was a kid. It wasn't until the nineties that they
Speaker 2: got that. They became smart essentially, when they got these
Speaker 2: weaight in motion scales and radio frequency ID transponders, and
Speaker 2: truckers didn't even you know, they didn't have to stop anymore.
Speaker 1: I was alive for that too, that transition in it
Speaker 1: took me a while to catch on. I didn't understand
Speaker 1: what had happened. I thought that they'd just done away
Speaker 1: with playing all together.
Speaker 4: No, I didn't. I had no idea until like yesterday.
Speaker 1: But that was like a familiar scene from when we
Speaker 1: were young. Just trucks lined up at the way station,
Speaker 1: you know, just idling and releasing tons of greenhouse gas
Speaker 1: into the air, and you just try to pass and
Speaker 1: make that pull down motion, and they'd just be like,
Speaker 1: leave us alone. This is not the place for that.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to come down off of an eight hour
Speaker 2: cocaine binge.
Speaker 1: Right So one of the other things though, in addition
Speaker 1: to RFIDs, is like that's a really good example of
Speaker 1: how just technological trucking has gotten. And another example of
Speaker 1: it is that they used to up until like not
Speaker 1: very long ago, last few years, I think truckers kept
Speaker 1: logs like they actual They kept like actual, like like
Speaker 1: written logs of their their time on the road and
Speaker 1: how many miles they drove and all that, and to
Speaker 1: get around like laws and regulations, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: in a minute. They would they would some of them
Speaker 1: keep two books, and they called the one that they
Speaker 1: showed an inspector, which was a doctor. They called it
Speaker 1: a comic book. But they'd also keep a real one,
Speaker 1: which I didn't understand why they would keep a real one,
Speaker 1: but they maybe get paid, I guess, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you wouldn't mess around with the truck company owner
Speaker 1: like that. That's true, great idea, but they they can't
Speaker 1: do that anymore.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: It's all very much tracked and kept on tabs, and
Speaker 1: it's just because of that a much different industry. It's
Speaker 1: also much safer, but it also has had an effect
Speaker 1: on their ability to make money. And I just touched
Speaker 1: upon like ten things that we're going to talk about soon.
Speaker 1: So I say we should catch our breath and take
Speaker 1: a break.
Speaker 3: Let's do it.
Speaker 5: Well, now we're on the road in your truck. I
Speaker 5: want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck.
Speaker 5: It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 2: All right, Hey, real quick, before we dive in, we
Speaker 2: were talking about technology and people logging things. I had
Speaker 2: a recent I'm gonna tell the quick version, but a
Speaker 2: recent dispute with Federal Express. Oh yeah, because they had
Speaker 2: a freight shipment delivery delivered to my house and that
Speaker 2: was you know, prepaid by the shipper, and then they
Speaker 2: sent me a bill for a few hundred bucks after and.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, is this They do that a lot. Well,
Speaker 1: that's happened to us multiple times.
Speaker 2: Well did they tell you what they told me, which was, hey,
Speaker 2: the trucker was there for like an hour and twenty minutes,
Speaker 2: and that's like long. They said, that's the longer charge,
Speaker 2: or you get charge extra or whatever if it's over
Speaker 2: a certain amount of minutes for a certain amount of weight.
Speaker 4: And I was like, no, he wasn't.
Speaker 2: And we went back and found like video doorbell camera
Speaker 2: stuff and text messages that like the guy was in
Speaker 2: and out of there, or at least delivered in like
Speaker 2: seven or eight minutes. I was like, I don't know
Speaker 2: if your trucker was sitting out in the road for
Speaker 2: an extra thirty minutes.
Speaker 4: I don't remember that part.
Speaker 2: But you know, here are the text messages that say, hey,
Speaker 2: the truck's here, the truck's gone. Yeah, and as of now,
Speaker 2: I don't even know if it's been resolved.
Speaker 4: They just sort of ignored me after that.
Speaker 1: That's also apparently so that's what's called detention time pay
Speaker 1: right where if you are a trucker and you're sitting
Speaker 1: around or you're doing the actual unloading, you're very often
Speaker 1: not paid for that time. You're paid for the time
Speaker 1: you're actually driving. That's it. Usually some companies pay detention time,
Speaker 1: but it's at a lower rate than you're driving rate.
Speaker 1: But if there is like a built in detention rate
Speaker 1: into like a shipping contract, it's usually on the shipper
Speaker 1: to pay it, the person sending the thing. It's part
Speaker 1: of the contract that if there's if you go over
Speaker 1: this great period, it's off in two hours where the
Speaker 1: trucker is just sitting there not driving, and it's your fault.
Speaker 1: Because your dock or your warehouse is backed up after
Speaker 1: two hours, you have to pay this this detention time rate.
Speaker 1: It sounds like FedEx tried to pass their detention time
Speaker 1: rate onto you even though they shouldn't have even been
Speaker 1: paying it. So because you brought that up, I wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna say this. We like, we have a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff like delivered, and FedEx has become awful as a company,
Speaker 1: not as the drivers, nothing like that. We've not had
Speaker 1: any problem with drivers or any delivery guys or anything
Speaker 1: like that, but as a company doing stuff like that,
Speaker 1: being impossible to get in touch with, just being they've
Speaker 1: really gone downhill from the FedEx that that you know,
Speaker 1: we we were brought up with like they exactly and
Speaker 1: then he gets lost and looked what happened?
Speaker 2: Well, and just to put a button on this, I
Speaker 2: don't want to go on and on about it, but
Speaker 2: the initial charge was for like an hour and fifteen
Speaker 2: or twenty minutes or something.
Speaker 4: It was like three or four hundred bucks.
Speaker 2: And then they came back and said, oh, well, we
Speaker 2: checked the closer in the logs and it was actually
Speaker 2: like a seventeen minutes.
Speaker 4: So it's really just eighty dollars.
Speaker 2: I was like, I'm like, you know what, I'm not
Speaker 2: paying that even because that's not true. Yeah, but if
Speaker 2: I would have paid that to begin with, you would
Speaker 2: have ripped me off for four hundred.
Speaker 1: Bucks, right, Yeah, No, it's rible. So how did it end?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 2: They've ignored me since I sent in these text messages
Speaker 2: as proof, so for all I know, they're turning me
Speaker 2: over to like a creditor.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's really terrible.
Speaker 4: But okay, I'm flush in the face. I'm coming down there.
Speaker 1: Man. You need to keep everybody posted on your ongoing
Speaker 1: saga with FedEx.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, so let's get back to this. I
Speaker 2: guess we can talk about the trucks like themselves, because
Speaker 2: they used to be, I guess, prior to World War Two,
Speaker 2: mostly short haul trucks and fairly spartan and basically of
Speaker 2: the same design. Thank you Mac Truck and Peter Built
Speaker 2: and Kinworth trucks that really kind of figured out that
Speaker 2: early design and shape. But these days, as we all know,
Speaker 2: and for a while now, you can get a pretty
Speaker 2: sweet sleeper cab situation going on. And I know I've
Speaker 2: mentioned this before on some episode, but I was obsessed
Speaker 2: with those when I was a kid. Yeah, me too,
Speaker 2: because I love tiny, small spaces, and I could just
Speaker 2: I didn't know what was in there.
Speaker 4: I'd never been able to look in the What you did?
Speaker 1: You're like, WHOA?
Speaker 4: I was like, what is it?
Speaker 2: Well? I finally did because our buddy John Pindell, my
Speaker 2: friend that always sees us in Brooklyn, he was a
Speaker 2: regional trucker for a while, and he showed me his
Speaker 2: little sleeper cab. Nice would you in bed in TVNBCR.
Speaker 2: His was, you know, not like super lux, but I
Speaker 2: could see where they could get, you know, pretty gussied up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, some of them are. Basically they cut the mid
Speaker 1: section out of a very nice RV and then put
Speaker 1: it onto the back of a tractor, a semi truck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like it can get that nice. But I think by
Speaker 1: and large, not just because those are expensive, but because
Speaker 1: it also takes up space so you can carry less
Speaker 1: of a load, and it's heapier so that you spend
Speaker 1: more in fuel. Most people have that bunk, and it
Speaker 1: might be a nicer bunk than the one that Johnny had.
Speaker 1: I'm not throwing shade here, I'm just saying there are
Speaker 1: some really nice bunks out there. Yeah, but I think
Speaker 1: that's you know, more often the sleeper integrated sleeper is
Speaker 1: what they call it. Where you're sleep you're laying down
Speaker 1: right behind the chair the seat.
Speaker 4: You know, what's comfy is that seat?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it looks like it.
Speaker 2: I had never been in one, and John, let me say,
Speaker 2: in it of course, and it was. They are very
Speaker 2: comfortable and supportive and springy.
Speaker 4: It was. It was awesome.
Speaker 1: They're very supportive. They whisper things like.
Speaker 4: You're doing great, driving great.
Speaker 1: So yes, as far as I'm concerned, just from the outside,
Speaker 1: the sleeper cab is the most fascinating thing of the truck,
Speaker 1: but there are some other cool things about them. Something
Speaker 1: you wouldn't think about is when you have a truck,
Speaker 1: it can only be a certain size and a certain
Speaker 1: weight depending on the type of brakes you're using. So
Speaker 1: they had to invent like a completely new type of brakes.
Speaker 1: Actually I should say they stole it from trains, but
Speaker 1: for the same reason. They took air brakes so that
Speaker 1: you could make the truck larger and allow it to
Speaker 1: carry heavier loads and still slow down very quickly aka
Speaker 1: brake using compressed air. Essentially.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's also something called jake brakes and exhaust braking,
Speaker 2: and it's slightly confusing, and we're not going to break
Speaker 2: it all down, but it basically means that you can
Speaker 2: slow that engine down without even using the brakes, so
Speaker 2: less were on the brake pads, less wear on the tires.
Speaker 2: And speaking of size, generally they're about forty eight to
Speaker 2: fifty three feet long, about eight and a half feet wide,
Speaker 2: thirteen and a half feet tall without a load out
Speaker 2: ten thousand pounds and I believe the upper limit in
Speaker 2: the United States loaded is eighty thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: That's four hundred tons. And I looked it up. There
Speaker 1: were four generators moved separately via truck from California to
Speaker 1: Utah that weighed four hundred tons apiece. That's so big,
Speaker 1: that's enormous.
Speaker 4: That's is that.
Speaker 1: It's seventeen trillion billion ounces.
Speaker 2: If you and we'll get into the you know, whether
Speaker 2: or not you work for a company that gives you
Speaker 2: a truck, or whether or not you're a freelance you know,
Speaker 2: Devil may care independent, I don't need any friends anyway.
Speaker 4: What do you call them? Just an independent trucker.
Speaker 1: There's another name for him, no, I think they're owner operators,
Speaker 1: is yeah, owner operators. Okay, yeah, that's what I was
Speaker 1: looking for.
Speaker 2: But if you are throwing down cash on just that
Speaker 2: that you know, tractor part, that front part, you can
Speaker 2: pay a couple of hundred grand. You could pay more
Speaker 2: than that if you get the you know, the deluxe ones,
Speaker 2: if you get amused you know, twenty thirty fifty up
Speaker 2: to one hundred and fifty. But these things are an
Speaker 2: investment because it's not like a car.
Speaker 4: These these trucks are meant.
Speaker 2: To go for you know, eight nine hundred to over
Speaker 2: a million miles sometimes and they say, at about seven
Speaker 2: hundred thousand miles, maybe you should get that engine rebuilt.
Speaker 1: One of the other things about those engines is they've
Speaker 1: they've are diesel engines, like diesel is just they're bigger engines,
Speaker 1: and they can haul more, they can accelerate using heavy
Speaker 1: loads faster. They're just better for that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But the problem is diesel is so dirty that if
Speaker 1: you have a diesel car or truck in a state
Speaker 1: that requires emissions checks, they don't even bother with you
Speaker 1: because you have diesel, because you're going to fail the
Speaker 1: emissions inspection In two thousand and six, the EPA said
Speaker 1: enough is enough. We're going to try to do what
Speaker 1: we can with diesel, and they basically force the industry
Speaker 1: to come up with ultra low sulfur diesel, which really
Speaker 1: helps cut down on the greenhouse gas. And yet despite that,
Speaker 1: between twoenty twenty and nineteen ninety the amount of CO
Speaker 1: two released by the trucking industry increased by eighty percent.
Speaker 1: Despite those gains in efficiency, they still there's so many
Speaker 1: trucks out there now that they added an extra eighty
Speaker 1: percent of CO two. So electric semis just cannot come
Speaker 1: fast enough.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, it will happen.
Speaker 1: It probably will, or it certainly will someday, but who
Speaker 1: knows exactly when is the question?
Speaker 2: Speaking of electric and kind of cool stuff, I went
Speaker 2: back in January. I went to the boat show, yeah,
Speaker 2: which I had never been to a boat show. I've
Speaker 2: been to one car show in my life.
Speaker 1: Oh, jump, indell, you've never been to a boat show.
Speaker 1: Aren't they fascinating? It's like this sleep was awesome cab
Speaker 1: in a semi, but in a boat it.
Speaker 4: Was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It's fun to look, you know, walk around on those
Speaker 2: like enormous boats that you would never get to, you know,
Speaker 2: ride on much less buy. But there's one company that
Speaker 2: was making there's a lot of companies making some electric
Speaker 2: boats now, but there was one that made these like
Speaker 2: super duper like old school Chrisscraft looking boats but long,
Speaker 2: like twenty five footers that are all electric. That are
Speaker 2: it was like three hundred and fifty grand. It was
Speaker 2: one of the most beautiful machines I've ever seen. And
Speaker 2: I asked the guy, I was like, what what does
Speaker 2: it sound like out there? And he went, all you
Speaker 2: hear is the water.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that's cool.
Speaker 2: He said, you can hear like, you know, some sound,
Speaker 2: but he said it's it's basically like the sounds of water,
Speaker 2: because that's one of the problems with those big boats is.
Speaker 1: Just like, oh that's all you here. You can't talk
Speaker 1: or anything anyway like that.
Speaker 4: Go go go electric.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty much the trucks, Like we said, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of different types of trailers, flatbeds, refrigerator like
Speaker 1: low boys I think is one. Because you have all
Speaker 1: sorts of height regulations, weight restrictions, there's a lot that
Speaker 1: that is kind of laid over the trucking industry for
Speaker 1: good reason, because you don't want a truck taking out
Speaker 1: a bridge when it drives under it. No, but the
Speaker 1: business as a whole, it's kind of fascinating in its
Speaker 1: own right too, if you ask me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like we mentioned before just a minute ago, sometimes
Speaker 2: you work for a company that we'll say, here's your truck,
Speaker 2: here's your keys, we got our own fleet that we'll maintain,
Speaker 2: and we'll pay forward and all that stuff. Very rarely
Speaker 2: you will be earning a base salary. It's exceedingly rare
Speaker 2: from what we found it. It's generally a pay by
Speaker 2: the mile gig, whether or not you work for a
Speaker 2: company or if you're an independent owner operator.
Speaker 4: But that is the other method.
Speaker 2: You can say, all right, I'm going to go buy
Speaker 2: my own thing, or at least my own tractor. But
Speaker 2: then you know, I'm my own business. I gotta get
Speaker 2: these jobs. I gotta track them down. I gotta, you know,
Speaker 2: figure out the scheduling of make making sure that I
Speaker 2: can get another job on the heels for this one,
Speaker 2: or ideally a return trip from where I just drop
Speaker 2: something off. There's a lot of figuring out to do.
Speaker 2: You got to pay your own expenses, you have to
Speaker 2: I mean, you are a business that all comes out
Speaker 2: of your pocket, and you got to figure out how
Speaker 2: to make that all work. And there are it's not
Speaker 2: like the old days, like where you were just on
Speaker 2: the telephone trying to call and get routes or as
Speaker 2: we'll see, actually purchase routes from people, which is happening
Speaker 2: in the seventies. Now they have like websites and apps
Speaker 2: and things where you can get hooked up with routes,
Speaker 2: and it's a lot easier now, but I imagine there's
Speaker 2: still quite a bit of work that goes into your
Speaker 2: scheduling and your planning and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and depending on how often you're willing to drive,
Speaker 1: how far you're willing to drive, how long you're willing
Speaker 1: to stay out, a trucker will typically stay away from
Speaker 1: home for four to six weeks. Yeah, two at a minimum.
Speaker 1: From what I can understand, it's basically not worth going
Speaker 1: out for anything less than two. For over the road truckers.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if we said at the outset
Speaker 1: specifically over the road truckers or long haul truckers. That's
Speaker 1: the one in the same term that describes truckers who
Speaker 1: drive a minimum two hundred and fifty miles below that
Speaker 1: is regional and short haul trucking. That includes less than
Speaker 1: truckload trucking, which is like a delivery truck or delivery
Speaker 1: van like FedEx.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my old across the street neighbor was an OTR
Speaker 2: trucker and very nice guy, but we would you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes that tractor was parked in his kind of front yard, right,
Speaker 2: and many times most times it wasn't, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, for sure. That's a huge part of it
Speaker 1: is you're away from your family, and you have to
Speaker 1: have a very patient, understanding family that is willing to
Speaker 1: be like, okay, see in a month and a half
Speaker 1: while you're out on the road, you know, making money,
Speaker 1: especially if you're an owner operator. That just sounds so
Speaker 1: stressful to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's like any freelance gig. I imagine it's
Speaker 2: pretty stressful. But while I don't know this for sure,
Speaker 2: I imagine that you get like a lot of freelance gigs,
Speaker 2: you get hooked into a sort of a regular thing
Speaker 2: and it's not like, boy, I don't know if I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have a route on next week, you know, like
Speaker 2: you probably get these sort of regular routes and regular
Speaker 2: jobs as long as they last, of course, But that's.
Speaker 4: Just me sort of speculating, But I bet that's the case.
Speaker 1: Well, they also now today they've taken basically dating apps
Speaker 1: and turned them into apps that connect truckers to loads
Speaker 1: that need to be hauled one so one way or
Speaker 1: the other. Exactly. One app is called one two three
Speaker 1: load Board, and there's a bunch of other ones. So
Speaker 1: it's not it's gotten exponentially easier to find a load
Speaker 1: exactly where you, you know, are dropping one off. Because
Speaker 1: anytime you're driving around, like you said, you're dead heading
Speaker 1: without it, without a load, you're just you're just wasting money,
Speaker 1: like you're you're not only wasting money, you're also wasting
Speaker 1: time away from your family too. I'm sure that just hurts,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm just I'm sorry. I'm still thinking of the
Speaker 2: thirteen different jokes I came up for trucking app names.
Speaker 2: What can we hear any none of them? Oh okay,
Speaker 2: they're all dirty, every single one.
Speaker 1: Text to me then okay, okay, sure. So one of
Speaker 1: the other things, too, is all the unpaid hours that
Speaker 1: they have to deal with. Yeah, there's like we said,
Speaker 1: there's that detention time, which is downtime, whether it's government
Speaker 1: enforced downtime because there's regulations about how how much you
Speaker 1: can drive over how much time period. There's downtime where
Speaker 1: you know you're just going to pick up or deliver
Speaker 1: the load and they're backed up, so you have to
Speaker 1: sit there and wait. Sometimes I saw a day and
Speaker 1: a half once where you're just sitting there not getting paid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's times where you know, if you want to stop
Speaker 1: and eat, that's downtime too, and a lot of times
Speaker 1: you just not paid for that at all. Apparently the
Speaker 1: Biden administration made getting better treatment for truckers like a priority,
Speaker 1: and one of those things was getting like basically getting
Speaker 1: rid of unpaid detention time. It's just so on its
Speaker 1: face unfair. That's it's just a flaw of the industry
Speaker 1: that's actually keeping a lot of people from making a
Speaker 1: career of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, And like you said, there are a
Speaker 2: lot of reasons why you might be waiting around and
Speaker 2: even though you may not be required to like help
Speaker 2: even load and unload, sometimes you're doing that just because
Speaker 2: you want to get on the road quicker, because you
Speaker 2: know you earn more money and you're you know, you're
Speaker 2: away from home.
Speaker 4: You just want to get done.
Speaker 2: Speaking of the regulations for hours, the Federal Motor Carrier
Speaker 2: Safety Administration, these days, the limit is eleven hours behind
Speaker 2: the wheel ten hours off and because of that, and
Speaker 2: we heard I remember emails from trucker couples.
Speaker 4: A lot of people pair up.
Speaker 2: To do their truck in so they can kind of
Speaker 2: just go NonStop or you know, almost NonStop and switch
Speaker 2: off driving. And a lot of these are like actual couples,
Speaker 2: like you know, people that have gotten together and said
Speaker 2: I would I love you and you love me. Let's
Speaker 2: make a life together, and let's drive this truck together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, unless you're married. I don't think it makes much
Speaker 1: sense economically because you're sharing whatever rate you're getting for
Speaker 1: the for the hall, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you can drive twice as much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you're still so you're driving twice as much,
Speaker 1: but you get half of that. So it's the same
Speaker 1: I would think as driving alone now.
Speaker 2: Because it's basically like if you're driving eleven hours and
Speaker 2: your wife's in another truck driving eleven hours, you're doubling
Speaker 2: your money, and that's essentially what you're doing because instead
Speaker 2: of having to wait that eleven hours someone else is driving,
Speaker 2: So I don't like to you're earning two wages in
Speaker 2: one truck.
Speaker 1: Yes, but okay, So to keep this from devolving into
Speaker 1: a crossword esque conversation, I'm just gonna stay like totally,
Speaker 1: I gotcha. But back on the regulations. You said that
Speaker 1: you can't drive for more than eleven hours before you
Speaker 1: need a ten hour off, like mandatory ten hours off
Speaker 1: to rest that also takes place within a certain time.
Speaker 1: You can't stretch those ten hours beyond fourteen hours, So
Speaker 1: you can't go fourteen hours without taking ten hours to rest.
Speaker 1: And then you can't drive more than seventy hours in
Speaker 1: a seven day week or eighty hours an eight day week,
Speaker 1: and you can't go beyond eight consecutive days of driving
Speaker 1: unless you take thirty four hours off afterward, which resets everything.
Speaker 1: Did you get all that?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 1: But I mean you have to keep up with all
Speaker 1: of that. And not only not only do you have
Speaker 1: to plan like where you're you're taking your load and
Speaker 1: picking up your next load and try to figure out
Speaker 1: the best place to get fuel for the cheapest and
Speaker 1: YadA YadA, you also have to figure out exactly when
Speaker 1: you're going to sleep, strategically, you don't want to just
Speaker 1: be like, oh man, I ran up against my wall.
Speaker 1: I've got to pull over here on the side of
Speaker 1: the road and sleep for ten hours. You have to
Speaker 1: plan that kind of stuff. So not only are you
Speaker 1: working with logistitions, you have to be a certain amount
Speaker 1: of a logistition yourself to drive a semi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you got to map out all those roadside
Speaker 2: attractions you gotta see.
Speaker 1: You want to see the biggest ball of aluminum foil.
Speaker 1: You gotta plan that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: All right, let's take our second break, and uh, we
Speaker 2: got a lot more to talk about, which is a
Speaker 2: lot to do with trucking, and we'll start again in
Speaker 2: two minutes.
Speaker 5: Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Speaker 5: Want to learn a thing two from Josh Chuck.
Speaker 1: It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 4: All right, all right, let's talk about CBS.
Speaker 2: Okay, we talked about them on our Ham Radio podcast,
Speaker 2: and we'll get into the sort of the seventies CBE
Speaker 2: craze here in a little bit. But truckers still sometimes
Speaker 2: communicate by CBE. There's a lot better technologies out there
Speaker 2: now and a lot of truckers apparently say that the
Speaker 2: CBE band has become you know, pretty toxic, a lot
Speaker 2: of road ragers and people just sort of spouting off
Speaker 2: on their soapbox about things.
Speaker 4: But apparently about a third of truckers still.
Speaker 2: Do use them to check out like highway conditions and
Speaker 2: stuff like that, or if they're on a like a
Speaker 2: team with other drivers, you know, for a company like Oversize. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: to communicate with them. But I imagine, you know, cell
Speaker 2: phones and stuff and apps have replaced a lot of that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it sounds like to the tune of about seventy percent.
Speaker 2: And then we need to talk about truck stops because
Speaker 2: these used to be ubiquitous and it was a you know,
Speaker 2: it was more than just a place to park and sleep.
Speaker 2: It was a respite, a place to socialize sometimes and
Speaker 2: get a shower, maybe play a little video poker, or
Speaker 2: backcammon and backcammon and get a meal. But apparently the
Speaker 2: a lot of big chains have bought up a lot
Speaker 2: of these independent truck stops, and you know, when that happens,
Speaker 2: a lot of times they will be closed because maybe
Speaker 2: they aren't as busy as they should be, or the
Speaker 2: amenities are just not kept up like they should be
Speaker 2: because they're not taking individual pride is like their own
Speaker 2: little business.
Speaker 1: Or they shave awful lot of the amenities to and
Speaker 1: pair them down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: So not only can you not get free overnight parking
Speaker 2: as much anymore, but you know, shipping lots and grocery
Speaker 2: store parking lots you can't park there, so you're having
Speaker 2: to park, pay to park and sleep at a lot
Speaker 2: of these now. And like you said, a lot of
Speaker 2: them now like don't even have the showers and stuff
Speaker 2: like that, but there are some. I think the Travel
Speaker 2: Centers of America is one company that still is trying
Speaker 2: to promote like not only like hygiene and having good
Speaker 2: showers and stuff, but fitness as well. Yeah, with their
Speaker 2: Stay Fit program, which has like medical clinics and fitness
Speaker 2: centers and stuff, which is a huge deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the reason why you would want a fitness
Speaker 1: center is because of something the rest of us who
Speaker 1: don't drive trucks probably overlook. If you're in a semi
Speaker 1: and you're on a hall, say across country, you're stuck
Speaker 1: to the highway, you're not allowed to get off the
Speaker 1: highway and go drive to the grocery store, or go
Speaker 1: drive to the gym, or go drive to get your
Speaker 1: rotten tooth fixed, because it's driving you crazy, Like you
Speaker 1: have to find a specific designated place to park, usually
Speaker 1: either a rest stop or a truck stop, and say
Speaker 1: like take an uber if you want, or a lyft
Speaker 1: less sinisterly that. Yes, that adds up very quickly too,
Speaker 1: so you don't normally do that. So you really do
Speaker 1: depend on truck stops to have all the stuff you
Speaker 1: need laundry, showers, and then nicer things like a place
Speaker 1: to kind of like get some fitness or get some exercise,
Speaker 1: or get a decent sit down meal. And another problem
Speaker 1: that they're running into is that these truck stops are
Speaker 1: having fewer and fewer sit down diners and replacing them
Speaker 1: more and more with fast food. So you have really
Speaker 1: limited choices and trying to take care of yourself. It's
Speaker 1: really hard to stay fit and healthy as a trucker.
Speaker 1: You can do it, but you have to really try
Speaker 1: hard to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is obviously if you're an owner operator.
Speaker 2: It's on you to figure this out by either you know,
Speaker 2: hopefully planning stops near like public parks maybe or walking
Speaker 2: trails or somewhere where you can get a little bit
Speaker 2: of exercise. There are companies that have their own fleets
Speaker 2: that are some are doing more than others. In this
Speaker 2: one article you sent, there's a company called Schneider that
Speaker 2: has i think right now forty Schneider operating centers in
Speaker 2: the US that have you know, they're like twenty four seven,
Speaker 2: three sixty five. They have showers and laundry and cafes
Speaker 2: and fitness rooms and stuff like that. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 2: that's a smart thing because if you're even if it
Speaker 2: just comes down to financials, and we've talked about this
Speaker 2: stuff before, like the cost of healthcare to a company.
Speaker 2: If they let their employees you know, you know, get
Speaker 2: diabetes in their forties or whatever, that costs a company
Speaker 2: a lot of money and insurance. So it really behooves
Speaker 2: them to keep their truckers a little more fit and
Speaker 2: healthy and happy.
Speaker 1: Right, But if you're an owner operator, independent, they couldn't
Speaker 1: care less. So just go ahead and meet whatever you want.
Speaker 1: And you don't need these fitness centers if you don't
Speaker 1: want them kind of things. So there's one other thing
Speaker 1: that we overlook that's a big part of a truck
Speaker 1: stop and that's a restroom, a bathroom. Yeah, you might think, well,
Speaker 1: like the other's bathroom everywhere. If you're a truck driver,
Speaker 1: you're usually not allowed to use the bathroom at the
Speaker 1: place where you pick up whatever you're hauling and drop
Speaker 1: off whatever you're hauling, Like they just won't let you
Speaker 1: use the bathroom. And that's a huge issue too. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's an enormous issue. And like you might be sitting
Speaker 1: there for hours waiting to get loaded or unloaded and
Speaker 1: they're just like, sorry, there's no bathroom here for you.
Speaker 1: And again, you can't go drive somewhere to the bathroom.
Speaker 1: So that's another thing again that the Biden administration is
Speaker 1: taking on to make bathrooms like to basically force through
Speaker 1: federal law, like grocery stores and distribution centers to let
Speaker 1: truckers use their bathroom if they want to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well and not to get to you know, like
Speaker 2: drilled down on this. But if if you can't go
Speaker 2: to the bathroom as readily as you should, you're probably
Speaker 2: not hydrating like you should.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a big and again this all leads to
Speaker 4: poor health. I'm I'm glad that something's being done about
Speaker 4: some of the stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because we're we not really we, but we allow
Speaker 1: the people who are keeping the lifeblood of the economy
Speaker 1: going to be mistreated widely in their industry, like their
Speaker 1: companies mistreat them, like in the whole industry as a
Speaker 1: whole is generally slanted toward squeezing as much as you
Speaker 1: can out of the trucker and giving as little as
Speaker 1: you can and return.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know what, next time I get any
Speaker 2: kind of freight delivery or anything, I'm gonna say, you.
Speaker 4: Got a pee?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's very nice.
Speaker 2: You're welcome to come in my house in only p
Speaker 2: P please no number two. What I don't want that
Speaker 2: taco bell laden number two.
Speaker 1: I think it's a fair line to draw, for sure.
Speaker 2: All right, well here comes sort of some more fun
Speaker 2: stuff because now we get to talk about the trucker
Speaker 2: chic craze of the nineteen seventies and a lot of
Speaker 2: this is a great blog post from a guy named
Speaker 2: Travis D.
Speaker 4: In this blog travel Lanche.
Speaker 2: And I even let me look up the picture I
Speaker 2: took of Travis D's claim to fame. Because Travis D
Speaker 2: says that he is an author, comedian, critic, director, humorous journalist, MC,
Speaker 2: performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speakers, songwriter, and variety booker.
Speaker 1: He put that in alphabetical.
Speaker 4: Order, Traves was it really trave SD So great job
Speaker 4: whoever you are.
Speaker 2: Great jobs, Yeah, great jobs because he wrote this great
Speaker 2: blog post about you know, stuff that you and I
Speaker 2: remember from when we were kids, which was there was
Speaker 2: a fascination with truckers among kids. For sure, we all
Speaker 2: wanted that horn honked and we wanted to know what
Speaker 2: was in that little thing. But I also remember, very
Speaker 2: distinctly as a kid, like the playground talk, which is like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know, you're a trucker. You can make like one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars a year, which that still a really
Speaker 2: good salary, but in nineteen seventy seven, that was a
Speaker 2: ton of money, and I remember trying to reconcile that,
Speaker 2: like really, like this doesn't seem like, you know, a
Speaker 2: high paying six figure job, and that's amazing that you
Speaker 2: can make that money.
Speaker 4: And it was true.
Speaker 2: And we'll talk about how that's changed over the years,
Speaker 2: but I think the salary back then in the seventies
Speaker 2: was like ninety eight grand a year for the median salary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's called way down.
Speaker 2: But you know, they hit hard times starting in the
Speaker 2: early seventies with the nineteen seventy three gas crisis when
Speaker 2: Congress said nobody can drive over fifty five, even you,
Speaker 2: Sammy Hagar. Yeah, and he said, but I can't.
Speaker 4: And they said, I'm sorry, You're gonna have to.
Speaker 2: And he says, well, just you know, every coup that
Speaker 2: pulls me over is going to love me and not
Speaker 2: care anyway.
Speaker 1: You know who's gonna love that joke?
Speaker 4: Aaron Aaron Agar.
Speaker 2: I texted him yesterday actually because I was listening to
Speaker 2: twenty one fifty while I was doing a big building project.
Speaker 1: Such a great album.
Speaker 2: Anyway, they passed that that took. That put a big
Speaker 2: hit on long distance truckers obviously, because their whole bag
Speaker 2: was getting place as fast, And that was sort of
Speaker 2: what started the It was just in the news a lot,
Speaker 2: so people were aware of it more and their protests
Speaker 2: about it, and all of a sudden, it was in
Speaker 2: songs and TV shows and movies that we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about in a second, and it just became more
Speaker 2: part of the popular culture than it had ever been
Speaker 2: before in the history of the United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don't think anybody whose job or pursued
Speaker 1: it was to forecast trends projected this. I think it
Speaker 1: was one of the more surprising trends that ever happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even CBE radios became part of like mainstream culture
Speaker 2: for you know, and I talked about this on hand radio.
Speaker 4: My dad had one. It became a thing that suburban
Speaker 4: families got.
Speaker 2: And this Travis d guy that I think he's probably right,
Speaker 2: speculates it was for a couple of reasons. One is
Speaker 2: that it was a wireless communication, which was you know,
Speaker 2: even though it wasn't a cell phone, people were like, wow, crazy, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: But the thing with CBS is it was a pretty
Speaker 2: short lived fascination with people like our parents because you
Speaker 2: were sharing channels with other people, so it wasn't like
Speaker 2: having a cell phone, and so they quickly realized like,
Speaker 2: you couldn't just get on there and talk to your
Speaker 2: your partner or spouse about you know, day to day
Speaker 2: stuff and aarons you needed run. It wasn't for that.
Speaker 2: And then also all the all the CB speak. I
Speaker 2: think it was kind of fun for a minute for
Speaker 2: Normi's civilians, and then pretty soon they were kind of like, eh,
Speaker 2: you know this, I've done it for like six months
Speaker 2: and now kind of tired of it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, everybody kind of scuttled CBS. But the the
Speaker 1: trucker crazy, I mean, like I said, it was in fashion.
Speaker 1: It like entire movies written about it, and the whole
Speaker 1: thing is really crazy. But if you dig into the
Speaker 1: origin of it, it's just like what Because the whole
Speaker 1: thing was rooted in a Omaha, Nebraska based bread company's
Speaker 1: commercial jingle. That's where the trucker sheet craze started.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean explain that bears explanation because it's a
Speaker 2: pretty cool story.
Speaker 1: So there was Old House or Old Humps are Old
Speaker 1: Home bread company and they hired an advertising executive named
Speaker 1: Bill Freeze, and he wrote a jingle for an ad,
Speaker 1: like basically a minute long song for this ad. The
Speaker 1: whole ad was just this trucker singing and a waitress singing,
Speaker 1: and it was like a super trucker centric ad song.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was.
Speaker 1: It just became dynamite in that area, so much so
Speaker 1: that I saw that the local TV stations listed when
Speaker 1: the ad was going to play.
Speaker 4: That's so weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is weird, but that's how crazy people were
Speaker 1: for the ad, and the jingle made it onto the
Speaker 1: Billboard charts, the top one hundred, not just country, the
Speaker 1: actual Billboard chart, so that kicked off the country craze
Speaker 1: and Bill Freese was so successful with it that Nashville
Speaker 1: actually came calling and said, hey, you want to cut
Speaker 1: an album, So he basically adopted a persona c W. McCall.
Speaker 1: C W McCall was basically the center of the Trucker
Speaker 1: Sheet Craze wrote the song Convoy, which was the most
Speaker 1: popular song in the Trucker Sheet Craze and he was
Speaker 1: just some advertising exec pretending to be a country Western
Speaker 1: trucker lover.
Speaker 2: It's amazing the song Convoy. The song was from nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five, number one of the pop and country charts.
Speaker 2: And a convoy is, you know, like a line of
Speaker 2: trucks that was taken from the Navy when chips would
Speaker 2: line up, but the idea was a bunch of trucks
Speaker 2: would line up like in a big long line, and
Speaker 2: the cops like they can do whatever they want because
Speaker 2: the cops can't pull over thirty trucks.
Speaker 4: Safety in numbers, Safety in numbers.
Speaker 2: And a big wave of movie and TV shows followed.
Speaker 2: I think the first one that Travis d mentions here
Speaker 2: is White Line Fever from nineteen seventy five. But then
Speaker 2: you know you had Smoking the Bandit. Henry Fonda was
Speaker 2: on one called The Great Smoky Roadblock.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Jonathan Dimmy, the first sort of non Roger Corman movie
Speaker 2: he directed was called Citizen's Band or Handle with Care
Speaker 2: had a couple of titles. Chuck Norris one of his
Speaker 2: first big movies, and it wasn't even a martial arts thing.
Speaker 4: Was a breaker breaker.
Speaker 1: He was like, can I kick? They're like, no, just stand.
Speaker 4: There, kick that accelerator Convoy.
Speaker 2: The movie based on the song, or at least you know,
Speaker 2: inspired by the song, came out a few years after
Speaker 2: in seventy eight.
Speaker 1: I don't want to let that walk by too easily.
Speaker 1: They made a movie based on the song that was
Speaker 1: recorded by C. W. McCall, who was actually an advertising executive.
Speaker 1: Just really want to make sure that it's driven home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that when I saw that when I was
Speaker 2: a kid on I think a few years later on HBO.
Speaker 2: But it was out of all these, you know, had
Speaker 2: a little bit of cred because it was a Sam
Speaker 2: peckin Paal movie. No, his biggest movie ever gross wise,
Speaker 2: and then yeah, biggest grossing. And then I had a
Speaker 2: great cast at Bert Young of course, Chris Christofferson in
Speaker 2: the lead, Seymour Cassell, ally McGraw, Academy Award winner, Ernest borgnine.
Speaker 2: So that actually I mean, of course, Henry Fonda and
Speaker 2: was legit, but this one actually was. Critically, I don't
Speaker 2: think it was great, but it was better than the
Speaker 2: rest of these. And then of course b J and
Speaker 2: the Bear we've talked about before, the short lived TV
Speaker 2: show where it was a trucker and his monkey and
Speaker 2: his chimp.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't forget every one which way but loose
Speaker 1: and every which way you can, the Clint Eastwood in his.
Speaker 4: Orangutang, Yeah, any which way you can.
Speaker 1: Oh, sorryry So. And then just like that, like Kaiser
Speaker 1: So say, just splitting the scene, the trucker sheet craze
Speaker 1: just disappeared. It just went away. That didn't fade out,
Speaker 1: It didn't do anything but just stop and truckers went
Speaker 1: back to just being truckers again.
Speaker 4: But yeah, oh he got his trucker hats now to
Speaker 4: show forth exactly.
Speaker 1: So that was a huge thing in the seventies. It's
Speaker 1: just still is mind boggling and kind of awesome. But
Speaker 1: I think we should fast forward now to present day
Speaker 1: because trucking in the seventies and trucking today are essentially
Speaker 1: the same job, but the industry's changed so much that
Speaker 1: there it's unrecognizable how truckers are treated and respected. And
Speaker 1: what's really interesting is the best we could find it
Speaker 1: all is rooted in a nineteen eighty passed by Jimmy
Speaker 1: Carter or his administration that deregulated. Jimmy Carter deregulated the
Speaker 1: trucking industry in order to take some of the freight
Speaker 1: rate off of the American consumer to bring inflation down,
Speaker 1: and it worked. But what he did was he opened
Speaker 1: trucking up to competition, like just anybody who wants to
Speaker 1: start a trucking company, come start one. And it led
Speaker 1: to a what I saw described as a race to
Speaker 1: the bottom to cut trucker's wages to stay competitive.
Speaker 4: Yeah. What was what article was that from?
Speaker 1: I think it was a Business Insider article.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was really good.
Speaker 2: You know, they do a lot of statistics, and from
Speaker 2: seventy seven to eighty seven, the mean truck driver average
Speaker 2: earnings or I guess the mean, not the average, declined
Speaker 2: twenty four percent, and then from nineteen eighty to today,
Speaker 2: I believe another almost thirty six percent. And like you said,
Speaker 2: it was it was a out that act because from
Speaker 2: the nineteen thirties till nineteen eighty there was not a
Speaker 2: lot of laws passed in regard to trucking at all.
Speaker 2: It was, like we said, you could make a lot
Speaker 2: of money. Union membership, the Teamsters union was very stocked
Speaker 2: up in influential and in nineteen seventy four there were
Speaker 2: more than two million truckers in the Teamsters. Now they're
Speaker 2: seventy five thousand, so that's a huge, huge drop. And
Speaker 2: so they didn't have as much sway when Carter came
Speaker 2: along to deregulate. And you know, there's too much to
Speaker 2: get into on what was going on before nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: but let's just say it was it was a lot
Speaker 2: harder to get licenses, It was a lot harder for
Speaker 2: companies to start, like a new trucking company. All those
Speaker 2: routes were way more locked down before deregulation, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: pre nineteen eighty, and since then it's just it's almost
Speaker 2: the way the Business Insider. They interviewed a bunch of people.
Speaker 2: The way they described it was it was it was
Speaker 2: almost a what word do they use? Some kind of competition,
Speaker 2: like free competition, but like toxic or something. I can't
Speaker 2: remember the word they use, but basically the competitive atmosphere was.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was ultimately good for the consumer because
Speaker 2: prices did go down, but it just devastated the truckers themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don't think anybody, including the truckers, predicted
Speaker 1: that this was going to happen it certainly, I don't
Speaker 1: think the Carter administration meant to do that to truckers,
Speaker 1: but that was definitely the outcome of it. And that's
Speaker 1: I mean, that's largely where we are today. The trucking
Speaker 1: industry is kind of settled into this, you know, just
Speaker 1: pinch every single penny you possibly can. And one of
Speaker 1: the ways that they do it is by treating their
Speaker 1: drivers not so great. So that's a that's not a
Speaker 1: great state to be in because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: turnover today. I saw one year. In one year, there's
Speaker 1: like three hundred thousand truckers that just stopped trucking. They
Speaker 1: just went off and did something else, and we actually
Speaker 1: have a trucker shortage right now in part because of
Speaker 1: the low wages, bad treatment, The services and amenities are
Speaker 1: drying up. And but there's enough people out there with
Speaker 1: valid commercial driver's licenses to make up for the trucker shortage.
Speaker 1: And then some it's just that's how bad the industry
Speaker 1: treats them and how bad their prospects are. They're just like,
Speaker 1: forget that. I'm gonna I'm not gonna use this commercial
Speaker 1: driver's license any longer. I'm gonna go do something else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh, here I found it.
Speaker 2: Actually, they you called it destructive competition, and this is
Speaker 2: a quote. He's a competition so severe that it undermines
Speaker 2: profitability to the point that it causes under investment by firms,
Speaker 2: industry wide inefficiency, market instability, and poor surface quality.
Speaker 1: Right. And then the other thing is like, well, just
Speaker 1: organize if you've got I saw anywhere from one and
Speaker 1: a half million into five hundred thousand to two million
Speaker 1: to three million truckers. I'm not quite sure. It's hard
Speaker 1: to drill down because there's so many different kinds of
Speaker 1: truckers to find just how many over the road truckers
Speaker 1: there are. But it's not the same thing as like
Speaker 1: getting the band back together. There's like a whole new
Speaker 1: generation of truckers that were not raised to be union members,
Speaker 1: and truckers in general are very independent, very right leaning
Speaker 1: typically and are not necessarily prone to organize. I saw
Speaker 1: one trucker describe it as trying to organize anarchists. It's
Speaker 1: about as easy as that. So that's yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: the state that things are in right now, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people are like, well, is this, you know,
Speaker 1: like the death rattle of human trucking because coming down
Speaker 1: the pike literally coming down the turnpike depending on where
Speaker 1: you're standing. There are driverless trucks semis that are now
Speaker 1: being tested on public roads and they're actually some of
Speaker 1: them are coming back with pretty promising results.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly not calling for this, but
Speaker 2: it makes more sense in this industry more than it
Speaker 2: does driving around a city street because the roads are
Speaker 2: very uniform. They're you know, have stop signs and pedestrians
Speaker 2: and cross streets and you know, it's it's it's one
Speaker 2: where it's it's probably way easier to get a successful
Speaker 2: test run with an electric or I'm sorry, a self
Speaker 2: driving well and electric truck on the highway than one
Speaker 2: driving around San Francisco, which I've seen, And so they're
Speaker 2: kind of saying like if not, it's not an if
Speaker 2: but win situation. And they may have just like trains
Speaker 2: of these trucks with a real driver at the front,
Speaker 2: sort of leading a convoy almost at a pack, a
Speaker 2: convoy of driverless trucks.
Speaker 1: Kind of like Steve Doors today, like there's still some
Speaker 1: of them, but they're just basically controlling the automation.
Speaker 4: Now, yeah, what you what were you saying?
Speaker 1: Kind of like, who's Steve Doors?
Speaker 4: What is that?
Speaker 1: It's the boss of the long shoreman, the actual workers,
Speaker 1: the one who's like the head the foreman, is a
Speaker 1: Steve Door.
Speaker 4: Okay, you said that earlier and I pretended like I
Speaker 4: knew what you meant.
Speaker 1: So it's it's spelled exactly like it's pronounced too.
Speaker 4: And it's a word. Yeah, it's not a guy named
Speaker 4: Steve Dor.
Speaker 1: No, it's it's s T E v E d O
Speaker 1: r E. And it is a specific type of long shortman.
Speaker 2: Okay, because I thought, see this is a good lesson everyone.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't just act like you know what someone's talking about.
Speaker 2: Because you don't want to look done.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great lesson.
Speaker 4: Look dumb and ask a question because I thought you
Speaker 4: were talking about a character from the Wire. That's what they.
Speaker 1: Call themselves in the Wire, Steve Doors.
Speaker 4: It's been a long time since I saw that season.
Speaker 1: That's where I learned how to pronounce it correctly.
Speaker 2: Actually instead, but you have to do it with the
Speaker 2: Baltimore accent, which I don't even know what that is.
Speaker 1: So I guess the long and short of all this
Speaker 1: is no one's quite sure where the tucking industries going,
Speaker 1: although there's some pretty good bets about the future. But
Speaker 1: in the meantime, regardless, if you see a trucker out
Speaker 1: there on the road, be extra nice to him, give
Speaker 1: them one of those honk your horned kind of signs,
Speaker 1: or a wave or anything like that, or maybe buy
Speaker 1: them a sit down dinner at a diner a truck stop
Speaker 1: you're at.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and if someone in one of those trucks delivers
Speaker 4: something to your house, open your steep door for them
Speaker 4: and let them pee.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Yes, since Chuck made a hilarious joke, everybody that is
Speaker 1: obviously triggered listener mail.
Speaker 4: Uh, this one's short, and sweet.
Speaker 2: This is from Aubrey rode In because she says, during
Speaker 2: the recent Selects episode, you were covering terosaurs and Josh
Speaker 2: used the phrase batching it as in.
Speaker 4: Like being a bachelor.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, you know, like like you me went out
Speaker 2: of town so on batching it for the weekend or whatever.
Speaker 1: I think I was saying we were batching it because
Speaker 1: Jerry wasn't around.
Speaker 2: Probably, yeah, that sounds about right. Chuck ponders whether the
Speaker 2: phrase was new or not. And this phrase jogged a
Speaker 2: memory that I had in my Bookshelf. I've attached a
Speaker 2: photo from Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, published in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty, and she describes how her future husband and
Speaker 2: his brother in law were living in the back of
Speaker 2: their feed store in town with the word batching. So
Speaker 2: in the very least the phrase was around in the
Speaker 2: thirties when she was writing the manuscripts and just thought
Speaker 2: i'd share. I looked it up, or I didn't look
Speaker 2: it up. She included the photo and it said you know,
Speaker 2: who are busy or no, who were batching it?
Speaker 4: And it said they were batching in the rear room
Speaker 4: or something.
Speaker 2: But the way I needed more context because I couldn't
Speaker 2: tell if because batching is also a verb, like you
Speaker 2: would batch for a business.
Speaker 1: You know, you'd make a bunch of differens together once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I couldn't tell if it was used
Speaker 2: in that context or not.
Speaker 4: But I believe Aubrey. So that's what I'm not even
Speaker 4: gonna look for that.
Speaker 1: Have you ever even met? No, but Aubrey seems.
Speaker 2: Great because she goes on to say this, love your show.
Speaker 2: Life has been pretty hectic for me lately. Chasing my
Speaker 2: two year old twins around me and listening to Stuff
Speaker 2: you Should Know reduces my perceived stress. Somehow, you guys
Speaker 2: managed to be informative and calming simultaneously.
Speaker 4: So I believe Aubrey.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Yeah, I'll believe you to Aubrey, And just
Speaker 1: the phrase two year old twins made my neck muscles tense.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, me too.
Speaker 1: If you want to be like Aubrey and write in
Speaker 1: to let us know something that we were wondering about,
Speaker 1: we love that kind of stuff. Thanks again, Aubrey. You
Speaker 1: can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: dot com.
Speaker 5: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 5: more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 5: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.