Stuff You Should Know - How Trucking Works

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

If 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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Look at Dora Radio on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. They say history is written by the victors, but you know what? They've left out a hell of a lot of juicy stuff. Ah, we all know who invented that, right? We'll think again. Truth is, Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea for the telephone and then claimed it as his own.

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wind it all up here in Atlanta on September 9th. Yes, and you can get all the info you need and links to tickets which are on sale now at our website, stuffyshino.com on our tour page or you can go to link tree slash sysk. 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 this a root-tune 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 chain. Yeah, it was very thrilling.

You felt drunk with power, didn't you? Sort of. And as a kid, 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? Oh, I totally tried that though the trucker flipped me off. No. Really?

I totally bought that. That would be a Josh Clark childhood story though for sure. It fit. Yeah, for sure. So is that it? Is that all you wanted to talk about with truckers? Yeah. 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 Hall and regional short haul truckers that say they listened to us and you know that they're out there and they'd love to hear something about it. So, to that we say 10-4. 10-4 good buddies. 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 Oh, yeah as far as the truckers who listen to us are 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 C, that's true. We move stuff by rail, that's true too. We even fly stuff somewhere, it runs 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 grabs are helped us with this and I think you found a stat that said that long haul trucking carries about 70% By weight of everything that we ship in the United States.

Yeah, 11 billion tons of freight in a year. I saw that maybe about $600 billion, that's how much the industry makes, gross, of course. But I think the key here is that trucking has created the world that we live in today. Like the grocery store, as you know it today, you can thank trucking for that. Sure. For box stores, for better or worse, thank trucking for that. 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's in my 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 Uh-huh, 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 1900s, specifically the 1910s, when what we think of as the modern tractor trailer was basically invented by a guy from Detroit name August Fruhalf, something tells me he's German. I think so. Uh, and he built a trailer to move lumber around, call that a semi trailer. Oh, yeah. You don't call it a semi? Well, uh, uh, a semi trailer. Uh, huh. I call it a semi.

You call it a semi? No, I call it a semi too. Oh, okay. Was I just, uh, a guess lead? Maybe a tad. Okay. And then about a year after that, he licensed this fifth wheel design, 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 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 50, that also allowed the whole industry to grow too. Just in that one little invention. Yeah. Do I understand this correctly?

That a tractor trailer is the name of the front part and 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 if you're really dumb, but I think that's the deal, and like you said, now people will generally just call them

semi's a lot of times like a shorthand. But there's been a lot of developments since that fifth wheel to come along to make these sort of the go-to. The first big one was just air tires rather than rubber wrapped around a steel wheel. That was a big deal. And then refrigerated trucks, which came along in the 1930s courtesy of a very successful and prolific inventor, an African-American army veteran named Fred Jones, who developed the refrigerated truck. 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.

But certainly not saltwater fish. But if you bought something like at the store that was produce, it was probably grown within 20 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 shipment was just a wash. Yeah, I mean, if you ate like a swordfish steak

in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1960s, you're lucky to be alive. Yeah, exactly. Actually not the 60s, I should have said the... The 1860s. Let me try that again. If you ate swordfish in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1920s, you're lucky to be alive. You're lucky to be alive anyway if you were alive then.

I think swordfish in Tulsa is a great album, no? Oh, yes. I can see a guy with a pencil thin mustache. Seated at a table, 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. Eric Cooper, get busy. So I guess what 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 sea. Right. That started a while before, which meant all of a sudden farming went, you know, regional and the national.

But then, you know, a couple of less than a couple of decades later, when these refer trucks is what they're called came along Then you could have cold-good 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 you can haul a dry load in a regular trailer one day and the next day You could be hauling a revert 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 and in the global economy in general, was when the standardized shipping container came along.

We had 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 cause 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. So when the shipping container became standardized,

that meant that when you ship something, 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, and onto a tractor trailer 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 Longshoreman profession essentially out of business forever, but it also allowed trucking to expand, I guess, in kind starting around the 70s, I think, is when they really caught on. Are there still longshoremen? No. Not quite so there are. I thought they were, they just like, now they just managed the loading and unloading of containers. Yes, of the containers. So, yes, there are still longshoremen, there's still Steve Doors, there are still long short of them and there's still Steve

Doors, but they the number of them has been cut. I mean, decimated times nine. All right, I was just imagining a longshoreman working right now listening to this going, what? I don't exist. He just popped 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 8 Act of 1956, which we've talked about it before, created the highway system, very big boon. And then getting rid of waystations,

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 they weren't literally all different, but they all had their own. And you had to stop at every state line at a waystation and sometimes sit in a long line and get weighed and you could be delayed hours

and hours. They might seem you for your weight. Well, if you were overweight, like you would, they'd say, sorry, you got to pull over there probably and we'll handle this. In vomit. The Surface Transportation Act, well, I guess in the 50s, they made it, they had a federal limit imposed but states could still have their own uh... individual limits if they if they wanted to they're allowed to keep those uh... it wasn't until nineteen eighty two of the surface transportation assistance act uh... that they made it completely uniform

there was still a stations because i remember him when i was a kid uh... it wasn't until the 90s that they became smart essentially when they got these way-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, and it took me a while to catch on. I didn't understand what had happened. I thought that they'd just done away with weighing all together. No, 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. You just try past and make that pull down motion and they'd just be like, leave a 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, that's a really good example of how just technological trucking has gotten. Another example of it is that they used to,

up until not very long ago, last few few years I think, truckers kept logs, like they actually, they kept like actual like written logs of 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 used to racers. They would, some of them would 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 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 a 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 touch upon like 10 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. Hello and welcome to Bad Manor's.

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why not learn a thing or two from Josh and 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 going to 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 prepaid by the shipper. And then they sent me a bill for a few hundred bucks after I was like, who is this? They do that a lot. 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 20 minutes.

And that's like, 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. Oh my goodness. And I was like, I was like, I don't know if your trucker was sitting out in the road for an extra 30 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 loading, you are 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 your 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's sending the thing. It's part of the contract that if there's, if you go over this grace period, it's often 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 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 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, you know, we were brought up with. Like they just be right. The Tom Hacks represented. 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 15 or 20 minutes or something. It was like 300 or 400 bucks. And then they came back and said, oh, well, we checked the closer and the logs and it was actually like 17 minutes. So it's really just $80. And I was like, I'm like, you know what? I'm not paying that even because that's not true.

But if I would have paid that to begin with, you would have ripped me off for 400 bucks. Right. Yeah, no, that's terrible. So how did it end? I don't know. They ignored me since I sent in these text messages as proof. me off for four hundred bucks. Right. Yeah, no, they're terrible. So how did it end? I don't know. They 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 I'm flush in the face, going down. I'm so curious. 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 II, mostly short haul trucks and fairly Spartan and basically of the same design. Thank you, Mack Truck and Peter built and Kenworth 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 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. I was like, what did you, 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 think the TV and VCR? His was not like super looks, but I could see where they could get pretty guccied up. Yeah, some of them are basically the midsection out of a very nice RV and then put it onto the back of a tractor, semi truck.

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 heavier so that you spend more on 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. But I think that's, you know, more often the sleeper, integrated sleepers, what they call it, where you're sleeping, 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 in John. Let me say it. And of course, and it was, they are very comfortable and supportive and springy. It was awesome. They're very supportive.

They whisper things like you're doing great, and traveling 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 break, using compressed air, essentially. Yeah, and there's also something called Jake Breaks and Exhaust Breaking, and it's slightly confusing, 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 wear on the brake pads, less wear on the tires.

And speaking of size, generally, there are about 48 to 53 feet long, about 8.5 feet wide, 13.5 feet tall, without a load, about 10,000 pounds. And I believe the upper limit in the united states uh... loaded is eighty thousand pounds that's four hundred tons and i looked it up there were four generators move separately via truck from california to you thought that way four hundred tons of peace that's so big that's enormous that's so i'm sure is that

it's seventeen trillion billion ounces That's so big. That's enormous. That's so- That's so big. That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so big. That's so- That's so- That's so-

That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so big. That's enormous. That's so- That's so- That's so-

That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- That's so- I don't need any friends anyway. What do you call them? Just an independent trucker? There's another name for them. No, I think they're owner operators. Is the owner operators?

Yeah, owner operators. Okay, yeah, that's what I was looking for. But if you are throwing down cash on just that tractor part, that front part, you can pay a couple hundred grand. You could pay more than that if you get the super deluxe ones. If you get them used, you know, 20, 30, 50, up to 150, but these things are an investment because it's not like a car. These trucks are meant to go for, you know, 800, 900 over a million miles sometimes. And they say at about 700,000

miles, maybe you should get that engine rebuilt. One of the other things about those engines is they 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, 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 2006, the EPA said enough is enough. We're going to try to do what we can with diesel and they basically forced the industry to come up with ultra low sulfur diesel, which really helps cut down on the greenhouse gases. And yet despite that between 2020 and 1990, the amount of CO2 released by the trucking industry increased by 80 percent. Despite those gains in efficiency, they still,

there's so many trucks out there now that they added an extra 80% of CO2. So electric semis just cannot come fast enough. Yeah, but yeah, it will happen. It probably will or it's certainly will someday, but who knows exactly when is the question? Speaking of electric and kind of cool stuff, I went back in January and went to the boat show. Yeah.

Which I'd never been to a boat show. Yeah. Which I'd never been to a boat show. I've been to one car show in my life, which I've been dealt. You've never been to a boat show, aren't they fascinating? It's like this slur cab in a semi, but in a boat. It was pretty cool. It's fun to walk around on those enormous boats that you would never get to ride on, much less by. 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 criss-craft looking boats,

but long, like 25 footers that are all electric, that are, it was like 350 grand, it was one of the most beautiful machines I've ever seen. And I asked the guy, I was like, what is it sound like out there and he went, all you hear is the water. I was like, oh, man. Oh, that's cool. He said, you can hear like, you know, some sound,

but he said it's basically like the sounds of water. And not, because that's one of the problems with those big boats is just like, oh, yeah, that's all you hear, you can't talk or anything like that. Go, go, go electric. Okay. So, that's pretty much the trucks. Like we said, there's a bunch of different types of trailers, flat beds, refrigerator,

like low boys, I think is one, because you have all sorts of height regulations, weight restrictions. There's a lot 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 the business as a whole it's kind of fascinating in its own right to if you ask me Yeah Like we mentioned before Just a minute ago

Sometimes you work for a company that we'll we'll say, here's your truck, here's your keys, we got our own fleet that will maintain and we'll pay for it and all that stuff. Very rarely you will be earning a base salary. It's exceedingly rare from what we found. 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 lease my own tractor. But then, you know, I'm my own business.

I got to get these jobs. I got to track them down. I got to, you know, figure out the scheduling of 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 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 70s. Now they have 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. 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, they, that describes truckers who drive a minimum 250 miles below that is regional and short haul trucking that includes less than truck load trucking, which is like a delivery trucker delivery van. Like the X. 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. It's your away from your family. And you have to have a very patient understanding family that is willing to be like, okay, see you 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 like any freelance gig I imagine is 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 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 a 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 way or the other? Exactly.

One app is called 123 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 are dropping one off. Because any time you're driving around like you said, you're deadheading without a load, you're just wasting money. Like 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 13 different jokes I came up for a trucking app names. What can we hear any? None of them. Okay. They're all dirty. Every single one of them. Texting 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. Like we said, there's that detention time, which is downtime, whether it's government enforced downtime, because there's regulations about how much you can drive over how much

time period. There's downtime where 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. There's times where if you want to stop and eat, that's downtime too.

And a lot of times you're 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 basically getting rid of unpaid detention time. It's just so honest face unfair that 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 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 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 11 hours behind the wheel, 10 hours off, and because of that, and we heard, I remember emails from trucker couples, A lot of people pair up to do their trucking so they can kind of just go nonstop, or almost nonstop, and switch off driving. And a lot of these are like actual couples, like people that have gotten together

and said, 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 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.

No, no. Because it's basically like, if you're driving 11 hours and your wife's in another truck driving 11 hours, you're doubling your money and that's essentially what you're doing because instead of having to wait that 11 hours, someone else is driving. So I don't- So I don't- 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 say like totally, I got you. But back on the on the regulations, you said that you can't drive for more than 11 hours before you need a 10 hour off like mandatory 10 hours off to rest. That's right. That also takes place within a certain time. You can't stretch those 10 hours off to rest. That's right. That also takes place within a certain time. You can't stretch those 10 hours beyond 14 hours. So you can't go 14 hours without taking 10 hours to rest. And then you can't drive more than 70 hours in a seven day week or 80 hours in an eight day week. And you can't go beyond eight consecutive days of driving

unless you take 34 hours off afterward, which resets everything. Did you get all that? Sure. But I mean, think about it. I like my quiz. You have to keep up with all of that. Not only do you have to plan where you're taking your load and picking up your next load

and trying 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 10 hours. You have to plan that kind of stuff. So not only are you working with load distitions, you have to be a certain amount of a load decision yourself to drive us at my. Yeah. And you got to map out all those roadside attractions you got to be a certain amount of a low decision yourself to drive a semi yeah and you got a map of all those roadside attractions you got to see

you want to see the biggest ball of aluminum foil you got to plan that kind of thing uh... alright let's take our second break and uh... we can a lot more to talk about which a lot to do with trucking and we'll start again in two minutes. Hi, this is Paris Hilton. Some of the best times of my life have been spent inside of nightclubs, singing, dancing, and being free to truly be myself.

And now, on the executive producer of a new show, the history of the world's greatest nightclubs, I wanted a show that represented freedom, joy, and hope. And there is no one better to host than someone who has inspired me for so many years with her musical talent. I'm alternate Ate, and I've been in the music industry for three decades.

I'm a singer, songwriter, and musician. And now I'm inviting you to join me on this global nightclub journey. We'll dive into the origins of genres that broke the industry and uncover the stories of legendary DJs all through the eyes of the people who partied at the height of club culture. Listen to the history of the world's greatest nightclubs on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Bad Manas. This is the podcast that takes you inside Britain's

Stately Homes and tells all the tales the guidebooks don't. My name is Tom Horton and I'll be your host. Britain is riddled with big houses from crumbling castles, massive mansions and Stately piles bigger than Buckingham Palace. As a comedian I'm not really bothered about the facts and figures, I just want the juicy stuff, so I want a mission to find out the frightening, filthy, and downright jaw-dropping stories of these stately homes and the people in them. This podcast ventures deep inside some of Britain's most incredible and outrageous buildings,

to spill the tea on the scandalous, scary, shocking, and hilarious tales. So if you want to get historically horrid, royally raucous and down to majority, look no further. Listen to bad manners on the I-Hunt radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Larsa Pipin from the Real Housewives of Miami. I'm Marcus Jordan, CEO of Trophy Room. We decided to launch this podcast, Separation Anxiety.

We can't live without each other. We can't. And I think we go through separation anxiety when we're not together. We kind of want to share our stories. We're going to talk about everything and be brutally honest as far as relationships, whether it's your boyfriend, kids, even at work. There's no subject that we won't tackle on this podcast. Telling you everything. Listen to separation anxiety with Larson Marcus on the i iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right let's talk about CB. Let's talk about CBs. We talked about them on our ham radio podcast, and we'll get into the sort of the 70s CB

craze here in a little bit. But truckers still sometimes communicate by CB. There's a lot better technologies out there now. And a lot of truckers apparently say that the CB 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 a oversized load? Yeah, to communicate with them. But I imagine cell phones and stuff and apps have replaced a lot of that. Yeah. It sounds like to the tune of about 70%. And then we need to talk about truck stops because these used to be ubiquitous and 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 back cammin. And back cammin and get a meal. But apparently a lot of big chains have bought up a lot of these independent truck stops. And 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 as like their own little business.

Or they shave off a lot of the amenities to and pair them down. Yeah, exactly. So not only can you not get tree 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 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's still, that's trying to promote, like, not only, like, hygiene and having good showers and stuff, but fitness as well, 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 fix 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 lift less sinisterly. And that adds up. 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 in 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 somewhere doing more than others. And this one article you sent, there's a company called Schneider that has, I think right now, 40 Schneider operating centers in the US that have, you know, they're like 24, 7, 365.

They have showers and laundry and cafes and fitness rooms and stuff like that. 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 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 eat whatever you want and you don't need these fitness centers if you don't want them kind of thing. 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. And you might think, well, like, there's bathrooms 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 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, 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 too, you know, like drill down on this, but 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 one. And again, this all leads to poor health. I'm glad that something's being done about some of this stuff. Yeah, because we're not really we, but we allow the people who are keeping the life blood 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 in return. Yeah, and you know what? Next time I get any kind of free delivery or anything, I'm gonna say, you got a pee? Oh yeah, that's very nice of you.

You're welcome to come in my house and only pee pee, please no number two. What? I don't want that Taco Bell, Leyton number two. No, I think that'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 1970s and a lot of this is a great blog post from a guy named Travis D in this blog travel anch and even let me look up the picture I took of Travis D's claim to fame because Travis D says that he's an author, comedian, critic, director, humorous, journalist, MC, performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speaker, songwriter,

and variety booker. He put that in alphabetical order. Travis S. Oh, was it really? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh Was it really? Trab S D so great job whoever you are. Great jobs.

Yeah, great jobs because here are this great blog post about 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 honk 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 $100,000 a year, which that's still

a really good salary, but in 1977, that was a ton of money. And I remember trying to reconcile it 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 what we'll talk about how that's changed over the years but I think the salary back then in the 70s was like 98 grand a year for the median salary. Yeah. That's gone way down but you know, they, they hit hard times starting in the early 70s with the 1973 gas crisis. When Congress said nobody can drive over 55, even you, Sammy Hagar. Yeah. And he said, but I can't. And they said, I'm sorry, you're going to have to. And he says, well,

just, you know, every cup that pulls me me over is gonna love me and not care anyway. You know who's gonna love that joke? Aaron. Aaron A. Gar. I texted him yesterday actually because I was listening to 5150 while I was doing a big building project. Such a great album. Anyway, they passed that that took a that put a big hit on long distance truckers obviously because our whole bag was getting places 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 pursuit it was to forecast trends projected this. I think it was one of the more surprising trends

that ever happened. Yeah. Even CB 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 the cell phone people were like, wow. Crazy. Yeah, totally. But the thing with CB's 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 partner or spouse about You know

day-to-day stuff and Aaron you needed to run it wasn't for that and then also all the CB speak I think it was kind of fun for a minute for for Normies civilians and then pretty soon they were kind of like you know this I've Done it for like six months and now I'm kind of tired of it. So yeah, everybody kind of scuttled C.B.'s, but the, the trucker craze, I mean, like I said, it was in fashion, it like entire movies were 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 companies 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 or 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 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 100. Not just country, the actual billboard charts. So that kicked off the country craze.

And Bill Freeze was so successful with it that Nashville actually gained calling and said, Hey, you want to cut an album? So he basically adopted a persona, CW McCall. CW 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 1975, 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 ships

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 30 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 1975, but then you know you had smoking the bandit. Henry Fonda was in one called the great smokey roadblock Jonathan Dimmie the first sort of non-rodger corpsman movie he directed was called citizens band or handle of care I had a couple of titles Chuck Norris is first 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. You can kick that accelerator. Convoy the movie based on this song,

or at least inspired by the song came out a few years after in 78. I don't want to let that walk by too easily. They made a movie based on the song that was recorded by CW McCall, who is actually an advertising executive. Just really want to make sure that's driven home. Yeah, and that one, 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 Peckon Paul movie. No. His biggest movie ever, Grosswise. Oh, it wasn't. Yeah, Biggest Grossing. And then then and a great cast at bird young of course christris offers in the lead

uh... c murk excel alley majral academy award winner urnest borgnein so that actually i mean of course Henry fonda and was legit but this one actually was critically uh... i don't think it was great but it was better than the rest of these. Then, of course, B.J. and the Bear, we've talked about before, the short live TV show

where it was a trucker and his monkey in his chimp. Yeah, I don't forget every which way but loose and every which way you can, the Clint Eastwood, and his orangutan. Yeah, any which way you can. Oh, sorry. So, and then, just like that, like Kaiser Sosei just split in the scene, the trucker's sheet craze just disappeared. It just went away. It didn't fade out, it didn't do anything but just stop.

And truckers went back to just being truckers again. But you know what? Yeah, all we got is trucker hats now to show for. Exactly. So, that was a huge thing in the 70s. 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 70s and trucking today

are essentially the same job, but the industry's changed so much that they're, 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 1980 act passed by Jimmy Carter as 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 wants to start a trucking company comes start one. And it led to a what I saw described as a race to the bottom to cut truckers 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 77 to 87, the mean truck driver average earnings, or I guess the mean, not the average, declined 24%. earnings, or I guess the mean, not the average, declined 24% and then from 1980 to today,

I believe another almost 36%. And like you said, it was about that act because from the 1930s till 1980, 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 1974 there were more than two million truckers in the Teamsters. Now there are 75,000, 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 1980, but let's just say 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-1980. Gotcha. 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 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's certainly, I don't think the Carter administration meant to do that to truckers, but that was definitely the outcome of it. That's largely where we are today. The trucking industries settled into this,

just pinch every single penny you possibly can. And one of the ways that they do it is by treating the drivers not so great. So that's a, it's not a great state to be in because there's a lot of turnover today. I saw one year and one year there's like 300,000 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. But there's enough people out there with valid commercial drivers licenses to make up for

the trucker shortage, and then some. That's how bad the industry treats them and how bad their prospects are. They're just like forget that I'm not gonna I'm not gonna use this commercial drivers license any longer. I'm gonna go do something else Yeah, oh here I found it actually the they he 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 underinvestment by firms industry-wide in efficiency market, 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 to 500,000 to 2 million to 3 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 as getting the band back together. There's like a whole new generation of truckers that 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 they're 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 turnike, depending on where you're standing, there are driverless trucks, semi-s that are now being tested on public roads, and there are 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, I've stopped signs and pedestrians and cross-street and, you know, it's one where 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. For sure. Which I've seen. And so they're kind of saying, like, if not, it's not an if but when situation. And they may have just like trains of these trucks with a real driver at the front,

sort of leading a conboy, almost at a pack, a conboy 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 are you saying, Kyle? Steve Doors? What is that? It's the boss of the longshoreman, the actual workers, the one who's like the head, the foreman as a Steve Doer.

Okay, you said that earlier and I pretended like a new achievement, so. It's spelled exactly like it's pronounced too. And it's a word? Yeah. It's not a guy named Steve Door. No, it's it's STVEDOR and it is a specific type of longshoreman. 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 down 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. I just been long time since I saw that season. That's where I learned how to pronounce it correctly actually instead of a Dory

to pronounce it correctly actually instead of a Dory. But you have to do 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 trucking industry is 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 him one of those honk your horn kind of signs or a wave or anything like that or maybe buy him a sit-down dinner or a diner to truck stop your at. Yeah and if someone in one of those trucks delivers something to your house open your steed door for them and let them pee. Right? Yes. This is Chuck made a hilarious joke everybody does obviously triggered listener mail This one's short and sweet. This is from Aubrey Aubrey wrote in because she says during the recent selects episode

You were covering And Josh used the phrase batch in it as in like being a bachelor Uh-huh You know like like you me went out of town so I'm batch in it. As in like being a bachelor. You know, like you me went out of town, so I'm 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 Ponder's 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 Wilders, the long winter, published in 1940 and she describes how her future husband and his brother-in-law were living in the back of their feed store in town with a word batching. So in the very least, the phrase was around in the 30s when she was writing the manuscripts. I 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 were busy or know who were batching it. No, it said they were batching in the rear room or something.

But the way I need a more context because I couldn't tell if, because batching is also a verb like, you would batch for a business, you know. We make a bunch of different stuff. That's what it wants. 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 going to look for.

Have you ever even met Aubrey? 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 too 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 stuffpodcast.com at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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