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