0:04Thanks so much for doing this.
0:06Oh hey, thanks for having me!
0:07The reason I wanted to do this is because I think it fits.
0:10I'm going to give you my like one minute overlay of why I think this is important. And it's always important when people are hassled and destroyed for things they didn't do wrong. But I think the fate of truckers in the United States and Canada, it is part of a much larger trend.
0:29So like 10 years ago, I think, this is correct.
0:33I put it in a book I wrote that A driving for a living was the number one most common job for high school educated white men in the United States, which is to say the people displaced by deindustrialization.
0:45The factories died, the country went from making things to finance and real estate, and the people left behind weren't helped.
0:53They were destroyed by the Sacklers and drugs.
0:57And also by kind of relentless hounding and scolding by the ruling class I don't quite understand what that was, but I didn't just noticed it have noticed it still noticing it so driving trucking Was not only like a huge part of the working-class economy like at the center of the work in class economy in in the West but also Sort of symbol of like culture and autonomy like I'm behind the wheel.
1:22No one can control me The last American cowboy, as it were exactly.
1:26And it was celebrated, by the way, in the 70s and early 80s, you know.
1:30Oh, massive cultural output celebrating and venerating the American trucker.
1:34Exactly when, you know, Americans, ordinary Americans whose ancestors built this country were, you don't not considered criminals.
1:43So by virtue of being alive.
1:45But anyway, I think this is part of a much larger shift and, and attack on the best people in the country.
1:54So, and last thing I'll say is like, the other thing a lot of these guys do is go fight wars.
2:00Well, hey, my my grandfather Landed at Normandy D-Day plus three in a Sherman tank in a Canadian uniform fought Legitimate real Nazis not the ones that are the figments of people's imagination Exactly, and then came back to Canada and eventually got into the trucking business. I'm a third-generation trucker, man Okay, so there you go.
2:20I just want to get my theories out of the way My dad was in the reserves like we got both.
2:25We're on both bases, sir So tell me I'm not surprised at all suit Okay, you've written a book end of the road inside the war on truckers Most people are not aware there is a war on Truckers has been ongoing this war on trucks.
2:38Give us an overview What does that mean war on?
2:41Well, you know, it's sort of an analogy, right?
2:44There's wars on workers.
2:45You know, as you mentioned, de-industrialization, shipping manufacturing overseas.
2:50They couldn't get rid of truckers, right, like we're here, this is geography, right.
2:54You can't move things around America without being in America or Canada.
2:58And so I think what we've seen is that the results of a, they tried to, in 1980, open up the market, right in order to bring the same forces.
3:11To North America.
3:13So you can't ship the jobs away. So let's make it so that the jobs, you know, are more competitive in their speak.
3:19So Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes in. And the idea is that the previous regulatory framework for trucking, the old Motor Carriers Act, which had a regulated business, right?
3:30So like you had to publish your rates.
3:33It took a lot to actually get, you know, what you might call a taxi medallion, like you had to have.
3:38Um, authority to operate a trucking business that was controlled by the government.
3:42They did have an argument that this was like it made things too expensive. It was sort of a cartel, but the reforms went so far in the other direction that basically anybody with $300 in a pulse could sign up to become a truck trucking company, a truck and company and the effects of that, which were brought by people who wanted free market reforms.
4:02Free free market.
4:04Yeah.
4:05Well, hey man, who isn't the problem is this is that we didn't get free market No, we did not and since then they have asked the government to help them with the consequences of the reforms They asked for so after them Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes about, intense competition, lots of trucking companies go out of business, lots drivers quit, people move into other things because now the competition, you got your lower prices, not everybody's going to operate at that price, right?
4:33So now they start seeing that drivers are like a little harder to come by, right.
4:38Okay, maybe just pay them more, figure out your rate structure.
4:42Like you asked for a free market reform, it's up to you to fix this problem you To be created But instead of doing that, in 1987, this corporate lobby group who I have very low opinion of, the American Trucking Associations, come up with this study and claim that if we don't have an additional 600,000 truckers by 1990, the entire economy would collapse.
5:07The economy did not collapse.
5:08I don't know if they got their 600,00 extra truckers, but what they found is that this was a useful narrative.
5:14And for decades since, that narrative Has gone through the media everybody believes there's a shortage of truckers like we talked about this backstage last time I was on your show and it's never been true. There's all kinds of people with cdls There's, all kinds, of people like me around they just don't want to pay So what they have is a churn in a retention problem where the taxpayer subsidizes CDL mills to produce more truck drivers who discover that the job doesn't pay as good as they say it does. It has a whole lot of problems that nobody wants to solve and then they quit, right?
5:44So I think some carriers have like a 90 to 100 percent driver turnover rate every single year and we're paying for that.
5:52So they say, hey, we don't have enough drivers.
5:54They go to the government.
5:55The government subsidizes the driving schools or they subsidize the students in many ways.
6:00Not completely. Sometimes they make the students pay for it with these sort of debt arrangements.
6:04But in general, the American taxpayer has been financing this sort of bogus narrative basically since the late 1980s.
6:14At a certain point, it was inevitable, though not foreseen by me, that the people who regulate this stuff would try to replace the current population of truckers with foreigners, because truckers were white men and Christian white men, and that's the group, obviously, they Thank you.
6:34About 70 percentage, you know, there's a lot of black and Hispanic truckers from the United States too.
6:39I would say legacy Americans, you know, people have been here a while.
6:44And so there was an attempt, by the way, that's a higher percentage than the American population, so it's pretty high.
6:53There was an attempted in the United States to just like, just replace truckers with people from South Asia.
6:59It's a recent phenomenon and it's complex.
7:03I don't know if there was necessarily like a plan behind this.
7:07I think there's a lot of different factors that all came together in the last few years.
7:11And yeah, it's starting to look like a replacement operation because you look around on our highways.
7:17Most of the truck stops now are, you know, there's this chapter in my book called The Truck Stops of Babel, because you know everybody's speaking different languages, Washing their feet in the sinks.
7:28There's just lots of weird little cultural things going on out on the road.
7:32And then a lot of the problems that have come along with this operation, you know, the non-domiciled CDLs, all of this stuff is in the news, is a lot these people are incompetent because they were never truck drivers where they were back home.
7:45They just came here as, you knows, refugees, asylum seekers, illegal migrants, what have you.
7:50And there's these systems in place that already existed.
7:54To turn through American drivers. There's the lease operator scam, which sort of indentures drivers to the trucks.
8:00The company owns the truck, they lease it to you, you lease it back to them, but it's kind of like sharecropping.
8:05And it's meant to download the costs onto the driver.
8:08And as all these systems start losing customers because people got wise to this stuff, and then we have the sort of open borders policies of various administrations, which really went on steroids under Biden.
8:21The country's flooded with tens of millions of people.
8:23And many of them start going into the trucking industry.
8:27Some friends of mine have been studying the sort of issue of CDLs by various states.
8:33And this has been the sort of locus of Secretary Duffy's investigations into this stuff.
8:38You know, shout out to Shannon and his crew at American Truckers United for doing this.
8:42They've found that like, we're talking hundreds of thousands of CDLS have been issued in a suspicious or outright illegal manner. Many of them to people who do not qualify under federal regulations, right?
8:53So...
8:54There's an old federal regulation that's been on the books since 1937, which stipulates that to drive a commercial vehicle in the United States, you must have a certain command of the English language, right? You have to be able to communicate with law enforcement, the motoring public, read INFORMATION SIGNS Read construction signs.
9:12We know we have we have signs everywhere on our highways, you know, hey this lane is closing There's construction up ahead.
9:17You have to put your tire chains on to go over Donner Pass You know, the wind is too high in Wyoming and they're all in English America's for better or worse in English country This is a safety sensitive job where you can crash a truck and kill people.
9:31You should probably know English in 2016 the regulation of that or that should say the enforcement of that regulation was waived In the waiting days of the Obama administration, they just said we're not going to place trucks out of service anymore. We're not gonna place the driver out of the service, we'll just give them a fine and send them on their way.
9:48So this opened up a loophole where you could bring more people in to drive trucks who did not meet this federal requirement.
9:55And what was the effect?
9:57Well, I mean we're seeing it all around us, right?
10:00Like I think so far in 2025 we had over 30 people in America killed by people who are here illegally.
10:10The definition of illegal migrant and legal migrant and trucking is a little bit of a chimera, right, because a lot of these people showed up as fake asylum seekers, right.
10:19So they come to America, they say, hey, I'm from the Punjab, I am a devout Sikh.
10:27That means the government hates me because they accuse me of being a calistani. Can you please let me into the United States?
10:34And, you know, they get issued a work visa on the spot and employment authorization document, no vetting.
10:40Nobody knows what they did back home. Nobody knows anything about this person, but now they're given this employment authorization document and they can go to the DMV and.
10:49Here in Florida or Texas or California, a lot of people have tried to make this political, right?
10:53Like this is a blue team, red team thing there. Everyone's blaming Gavin Newsom. No one believes that anymore. Oh, I mean, you know, the number one state for issuing these non-domiciled CDLs is Texas.
11:02Of course. And one of the number ones states for, um, bribery at DMVs and corruption with issuing these CDL's is Florida.
11:10Right? So like, it's not, this is not just like Democrats doing this.
11:13Obviously.
11:15I mean, the governor and lieutenant governor of Texas are way more liberal than a lot of Democrats I know, and they're both Republicans.
11:21I mean, you know, these definitions are not very helpful, right?
11:24We're trying to solve an actual problem.
11:27And another thing that happens too is like, there's a term I use in my book I got from my friend Ashley called a spreadsheet brain.
11:35And there are people who will only acknowledge that there's problem if the problem has been certified by an authority and it's been quantitatively measured, and we have all the data, we have all the your anecdotal observations of reality are dismissed.
11:53The fact that the acquisition of that data is hampered in many ways is also dismissed, right?
11:58Because a lot of collisions that are not fatal.
12:02Maybe somebody just got really hurt, maybe nobody got hurt, but the trucks rolled over and all these cars are wrecked, they don't take the immigration status of the driver or where he's from or how he got his CDL. You only get this information if somebody died or if there's like a massive court case that takes place afterwards, right? So there's a whole lot of this stuff that does not show up in official statistics and so therefore it gets dismissed by people with spreadsheet brain.
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13:46Before we proceed on policy questions, you're a truck driver.
13:50Yeah, I've been my whole life.
13:52I mean, I'm not right now because I've been displaced out of my own industry by all this nonsense.
13:55I haven't turned a wheel in two and a half years.
13:59What's long haul trucking like?
14:00Describe the job.
14:01Oh man, well, the trucking industry is very diverse. And I mean, in the truest sense of the word, right?
14:08Like there's different types of freight, different lanes.
14:12Some truckers are regional.
14:13Some guys are long haul going coast to coast.
14:16Some guys work within specific industries. They only haul one product.
14:21I've kind of done quite a bit of things.
14:24I started out working for these guys. Shout out to my friends, the Paddocks, back home in Stony Creek, Ontario.
14:29Hauling steel coils, hauling heavy equipment, farm equipment, did all kinds of stuff for those guys.
14:37Where were you hauling it?
14:38When I first started, and this is gonna speak to the training stuff, at first when I was a teenager, I got my license when I 18, but I stayed very close to home.
14:46So I'm preloading trailers for long haul guys, chaining downloads, tarping loads, learning how to do things correctly.
14:53So for a couple of years, Hamilton, Toronto, Southern Ontario, then they let me go a little ways further, Montreal, Detroit.
14:59Then a little further away again, and then eventually, you know, I did the whole cross-country OTR thing.
15:05I've been to all 48 continental states.
15:08What's OTR mean?
15:09Over the road.
15:10That's the sort of industry slang for people who go far away and spend, you know, days and weeks away from home, hauling the really long haul stuff, long distance.
15:19What's that like?
15:20I mean, it's, it, it it's an interesting sort of lifestyle.
15:23It's not for everybody.
15:24Um, you know, you have to be.
15:27Psychologically in tune with yourself and happy in your own company because you spend an awful lot of time by yourself in the truck, but you also have to have a certain inner strength to deal with just all the problems you get.
15:39A big issue in trucking is detention time. You'll show up at places to get loaded or unloaded and they take two hours, four hours, six hours, an entire day.
15:49For many drivers, they don't get paid for that.
15:51And, um, that's, uh, That's sort of one of the sources of this claim that there's a driver shortage. It's actually a capacity utilization problem.
15:59And this was studied by a guy at MIT named David Carell, who told the Biden administration in 2021, by the way, that we don't need to import more drivers from overseas or expand, you know, issues of CDL.
16:12You just need to get the trucks moving. Right.
16:14So they dismissed that in favor of ATA propaganda about a shortage.
16:18But anyhow, yeah, you have weather problems. You have to be able to deal with. The truck breakdowns right like you have to be a little bit mechanically adept dealing with cold or really hot like you could be going anywhere in the continent so like you sort of have to you know be able to deal with adversity and just you just roll with the many punches that are thrown your way when you're out on the road Where do you spend the night?
16:41Do you sleep in the truck?
16:42Yep.
16:43What's that like?
16:44Pretty cozy, actually.
16:45At the end of a long day, most of my most comfortable, restful sleeps have been in the back of a Kenworth or a Peterbilt.
16:50What do you eat?
16:53Hopefully not truck stop food.
16:55No, I mean, guys, some guys have fridges and freezers in their trucks and, you know, some guy's cook on the road, some eat at restaurants, some guys eat too much fast food or junk from the, you, know, there's like another Another issue I think we have in the industry is the dwindling number of, like, you know... Old school sort of homestyle, home-cooked truck stops.
17:17That's sort of gone the way of the dodo in favor of fast truck stops and fast food places instead of sit-down restaurants.
17:23For the quality of the food is declined.
17:25Yeah, in many ways.
17:27There's a few. Again, there's always notable exceptions to these things, but in general, yes.
17:33What happens if you blow a tire?
17:36Oh, that's a good question.
17:37Um, back in the old days, you changed it yourself.
17:40And, um, when I was in Australia, I changed my own tires.
17:42They still do that sort of thing down there.
17:44Um, what's that like?
17:45I drove road trains for a company in Western Australia.
17:49And, uh, when you're.
17:50Road train.
17:51A road train is a truck with like two long trailers or three or four, depending on what part of the country you're in because- Oh, it's a road train. Yeah, exactly.
17:59It's a train on the road. The name describes it.
18:01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:02So that's something I've always wanted to do. I've been a trucker my whole life and that's kind of like one of the holy grails of trucking in our sort of culture and world is to go driving the outback and pull all these trailers.
18:13So it took me three different attempts at doing it, but I finally got a visa figure it out and I went and worked for these guys in Perth.
18:19And when you're, you know, 700 miles north of Perth in the middle of nowhere, you can't just call Bridgestone or whoever to come rescue you. Probably hauling ore, I would imagine. I never did the ore stuff. I hauled equipment for offshore drilling rigs because you went there, you went to Dampier, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:35When you were on tour in Australia, yeah so off that shore, off that coast there is one of the world's largest deposits of natural gas.
18:41Yep. And so I was hauling equipment and drilling mud and salt and all the different things they need on drilling rig. And there was also an onshore natural gas processing facility in a little place called Onslow.
18:54I hauled equipment and you know scrap and all kinds of stuff in and out of.
18:59I used to haul some things to Newman.
19:01So yeah but like you know on the question of changing tires and fixing your own equipment you know when you're in these remote areas you have to be able to sort of do that. You have to have a skill level and a competency level to look after your gear And that is something that, you know, has... At least here in America and Canada been slowly been attacked by they don't want you to change your entire, just call a tire guy.
19:23They don't you working on the truck. They're like, they've attacked the idea that you are a skilled, competent operator that knows what you're doing. Right. Because they want things done cheap.
19:36Get somebody that's just a steering wheel holder and, you know, does what they're told and looks into the driver facing camera and, you know submits to the electronic logging device that manages your hours.
19:47You know, don't even, just don't, you know, you don't have any choice.
19:51You don't any agency behind the wheel anymore. Right.
19:53That's what, that's what the industry is moving towards before they.
19:55You know nothing about the machine, you're just the guy holding the steering wheel.
20:00The system in place to train drivers in North America, for the most part, operates on that premise.
20:08So it's degraded the pride that people have in holding the job.
20:11Uh, in many ways, yes.
20:14Yeah, so it's turned men ever closer into machines.
20:19Right, of course.
20:19Yeah, you're the human robot.
20:22I get it.
20:22This is part of, again, of a larger trend. Oh, it's much larger, yeah.
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21:17That's ethos, E-T-H-O-S dot com slash Tucker, application times and rates may vary. Often when you're coming through passes in the West or even in the East through mountain passes, you see a runaway truck lane.
21:35Will you explain what that is and- So if you're going down a steep grid and you lose control of your truck or the brakes burn off because you're down the hill not knowing what you're doing, you weren't trained properly, you're supposed to go into one of these lanes and it slows you down so you don't wreck, right? You don't run off the road and crash.
21:53Right, it's like soft gravel or sand or something.
21:56Funny you bring that up.
21:57There's been a few incidents, one very recently in a place in Colorado called Wolf Creek Pass, which is the name of a song by a guy named C.W.
22:06McCall, or at least that was the stage name.
22:09He's the guy that wrote the song Convoy and you're very popular back in the 70s.
22:13So Wolf Creek pass has got a number of these runaway truck ramps because it's, I don't know how many thousands of feet up.
22:1911,000 or something.
22:20It's very high.
22:21It's wicked, yeah. And one of these in-source drivers from India, I went down that hill apparently had some kind of massive brake failure and don't couldn't read the signs about runaway truck ramp didn't know what it was and then went off the side of the road truck rolled over numerous times and he's now dead.
22:39You know there was a crash in Colorado very famously where I think the gentleman was from Cuba went down this hill on interstate 70 in Colorado and ended up crashing into bunch of people set off a giant inferno.
22:54Uh, you know, he survived a bunch of other people didn't same thing.
22:58Uh, didn't know what he was doing.
23:00Didn't you drove right by all these runaway truck ramps?
23:02Because if you can't read English, then you don't know what runaway, truck ramp means.
23:06How do you burn your brakes that you said if you don't know what you're doing, you can burn up your brakes?
23:09Well, when you're going down the hill, you're supposed to let, you know, your engine compression or an engine brake or, you, know, just driving down the hills slowly.
23:17Downshift.
23:18Yeah. And you have to be taught that. And a lot of these truck driving schools today, again, this process of de-skilling and making people less competent, less proud, which, you now, overlaps with the kind of people that won't fight back.
23:31Um That's just, they don't teach you that.
23:34You know, there's a few schools that do. I interviewed a guy that runs a truck driving school in British Columbia who specifically teaches people how to get through the mountains, very well regarded.
23:43But again, he's the edge case.
23:45He is the minority in the industry today.
23:48Amazing.
23:49What are the, before we even get to that, you alluded to it's too windy in Wyoming. What does that mean?
23:58Uh, so tracks, you know, it's a big wind sale.
24:00Imagine a van trailer, a 53 foot van trailer. Yeah.
24:03And it's eight feet high.
24:04So it's like, you know, f it's nearly 500 square feet of like wall.
24:09Right.
24:10And when you don't have anything in the trailer or you have a very light load, you get a 50, 60, 70 mile an hour wind.
24:16It just blows you over.
24:18Right. And that's, so they close the road all the time in Wyoming and other parts of the country where there's really high winds, Kansas, they get these crazy wind storms.
24:26And they just take you away.
24:27So you're supposed to park, right?
24:29And again, they have warning signs for this all along various interstates saying, hey, high profile vehicles must stop.
24:37You know, if you just showed up here from Somalia and you don't speak English and you just charge right on through and you get blown over by the wind, you know, the people that hire these folks not training them, which is part of the point, are setting them up for failure.
24:54You know, I mentioned this gentleman who crashed in Colorado on Wolf Creek Pass.
24:58There's this thing called the Dunkey Route, which is a human smuggling route that goes through Central America and they have agents in India.
25:06You know there's been a documentary about this, I'm not making it up.
25:09And these young guys in India who are, you know, they see videos of, you know, their co-ethnic friends here and cars and girls and houses and, oh I'm going to go to America and make it, but you know they can't get visas for whatever reason.
25:23So they go through this donkey route, they get to the Mexican border, they claim asylum.
25:28Oh, I'm seeking asylum from Narendra Modi, you know, he's going to attack me because I'm a calisthenic. He's not attacking your family who are still at home and who have leveraged everything they have to pay the human smugglers to get you here, and now you're in debt to them, right?
25:42And then you go work for some trucking company, usually, but not always, owned by your fellow Indians.
25:47And they don't teach you very much of anything. Just get in the truck and go make money. And if you don't like it, we'll just send you back home. And now you're $30,000 in debt to human smokers, right?
25:55So the exploitation going on here, this is not just a matter of like beating up on immigrants, right.
26:01We have a massive- The immigrants aren't the evil ones in this story.
26:05No, no, no not at all.
26:05No, no, no.
26:05No, I agree.
26:06No, and the exploitation, and they're the ones getting killed too, right?
26:12So all these crashes that have been in the news, there's usually also a guy driving the truck.
26:19You know, I went and searched GoFundMe the other day and punched in like truck drivers sing.
26:24I noticed this a few weeks ago and I was writing an article for my sub stack, 249 campaigns by Indian families trying to get their husband's uncle's father's Remains sent back to India because they came here got in a truck had no idea what they were doing got involved in a collision 250 yeah, that's just the one name saying I mean that's not any other nationality.
26:47That's not Any other just same just saying seeks yeah 250 of these guys with active campaigns run by their families either to pay medical bills or to have their bodies sent back to India That is shocking.
27:02It is and you know what's even more shocking is the fact that nobody wants to talk about this So i've been writing about the trucking industry now for a few years which sort of led to this book You know on the side right like i've written for newsweek and the american conservative a few other places your friend oren cass american compass and Um, I have tried to alert through my various media contacts, folks in the mainstream media or the left, right?
27:27Washington Post, New York Times, um, various smaller leftist places.
27:32Guys, we have a problem here in trucking. We're talking about it in the right wing media because, you know, apparently they're all anti-immigrant secret racists or whatever, but like you guys are not talking about it.
27:43There's a lot of racism here but it's not from truckers, it's from the people who run these countries who hate the native populations of these countries, our countries, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, UK. That's just a fact, that's where the racism is.
27:58Stop lecturing me about racism.
28:00Yeah, and I think it's also, like you say, it's so much exploitation, but these guys don't want to talk about it, you know, and when they do, it is these really terrible puff pieces, right?
28:12So there was one in The Guardian the other day, Trump is a meanie for enforcing English language rules.
28:19There was a couple written back before Christmas, one in the New York Times, one in the LA Times about, you know.
28:24California based Indian trucking companies that can't get drivers anymore because their drivers are afraid of ice or being abused out on the highway.
28:31The other truckers are racist to them at the truck stop or whatever.
28:35But in none of these pieces, do they investigate the safety records of the carriers involved?
28:39Do they investigate human smuggling?
28:41Do they the fact that this is kind of a program from Narendra Modi, right?
28:46We have this sort of, you know. A profit through immigration policy of sending his people everywhere.
28:53This is not just limited to H1Bs and tech, you know, like this is also in trucking.
28:58And India's GDP is now like, what, three or four percent built on remittances. And they're not the only country that does this, but like it's official policy from Narendra Modi, right?
29:07Send my guys over there, let them go. Now they're like less of a political problem to me.
29:12They send money home.
29:13That's not through, you know, the IMF or some financiers, there's no strings attached to remittances, right? They just come home and get spent, however, and it's like a pressure release valve for countries with like dysfunctional economies or dysfunctional governments to just like send all their people into the West.
29:32And the whole like, you know, Indians getting into trucking thing is not unique to the United States. It's a problem in Canada, New Zealand, Australia.
29:40And, you know, again.
29:41The problem is less that, you know, these people are from India, the problem is that the lack of training in Canada, there's this thing called Driver Incorporated, which is this sort of tax avoidance scam, kind of like, you know, hiring employees on a 1099, which would be misclassification.
29:56That's rampant in the Canadian trucking industry in Australia.
29:59They call it sham contracting.
30:01And it, you know, it gives the companies that employ these guys a business advantage because now their overheads are lower because they're not.
30:10Paying for Canada Pension Plan contributions or unemployment insurance or payroll taxes.
30:17They're just not paying any of that, right? And now the drivers are also precarious because the drivers are essentially being paid cash, right.
30:26And if you don't get paid, then what? There's been a number of stories in Canada of drivers who went to work on this sort of driver incorporated thing, and then they find themselves not being paid. The companies just don't pay them. And then what are you going to do about it?
30:39You know, like.
30:40It's just, it's just another form of it's exploiting the government.
30:43It's exploating the drivers, it exploiting everybody.
30:46And it introduces a whole lot of people onto our highways, which are a common space, right?
30:51They're our highways.
30:52The interstates are paid for by the taxpayer. They were built by our forefathers.
30:56The highways are public, and we are allowing people who are engaging in criminality to put untrained, unvetted, oftentimes illiterate people that have no idea what they're doing, who are being economically exploited to be this most critical link in the entire economy, right?
31:13Like truckers move everything, and have allowed the entire industry to just be parasitized by foreign gangsters.
31:20It's criminal.
31:21We praise- The war with Iran ends immediately, but the truth is it doesn't seem to be. If you're the head of households, you need to think through what this could mean for you and the people you're in charge of.
31:32Don't wait for disaster to strike to ensure that you have the basics covered.
31:36Food, water, light, energy. And that's exactly why we started a company called Last Country Supply.
31:43It's our store.
31:44It carries the same preparedness products that we have, well, in this barn, for example.
31:49The products that give any head of household peace of mind knowing that if something bad happened, you could take care of the people you're responsible for.
31:55So continue to pray for an end to war and violence, but also at the same time, make sure that your family is ready.
32:01Stock up on the products that we trust at lastcountrysupply.com slash Tucker.
32:07I know it's been a tragedy for you personally, but I'm glad you're not driving anymore because this is, I can't imagine a more informed, articulate wise.
32:17Observer of what's happening than you, um, I mean, if you're, if you're representative of the average American truck.
32:24We need to protect them at all costs.
32:27I appreciate the sentiment and the compliment, Tucker.
32:30I'm just a guy, man.
32:33I was approached to write the book.
32:35A friend of mine, my buddy Oliver Bateman, shout out Oliver, he encouraged me to start a substack and a podcast.
32:40And I just, I don't know, people said there's something going on here. Maybe you should look into it.
32:44And I said, yes.
32:45How dangerous is it as a job?
32:47I mean, it seems inherently.
32:48It's one of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America, actually, because of the risk of collision and falling off loading docks and getting in and out of trucks. There's other stuff going on here, but it's mostly all the collisions.
33:01You're just at risk of being hit by truckers.
33:03What's the most dangerous?
33:04So as someone who's done long haul trucking, what did you think were the most dangerous moments?
33:10Oh man, good question.
33:12I mean, there's managed danger, right? I hauled a lot of logs. I haul logs down volcanoes in New Zealand when I lived in New Zeeland.
33:21If you're trained correctly and you have good, well-maintained equipment and you're working for a competent company that cares about you, that pays you well, those dangers are mitigated.
33:33People used to ask me, because I did Four Seasons up on the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, Oh, isn't that crazy, you know when you're driving around the frozen lakes? Like it's boring.
33:42They plow the road a hundred feet wide. It's totally managed They have these guys driving around with like ground penetrating radar.
33:48They manage the ice.
33:49They flood the cracked parts You're doing 17 miles an hour There's no cars to interact with like it's actually the most safe road in the world per ton miles traveled The most unsafe thing you can do is drive up and down interstate 81 or across 40 or whatever. Yeah 95 of it Yeah, like it's yeah, the the the remote, seemingly dangerous things are actually very safe, and the unsafe stuff is to drive around on an American interstate right now.
34:16Did you spend four seasons ice trucking? Yes, sir.
34:20You ever seen anything weird?
34:23You're just so in the middle of nowhere. You're so.
34:25I've seen herds of caribou and arctic foxes and you know when you get north of the tree line on your way to the mine you sort of get out into subarctic tundra.
34:34It's all very beautiful.
34:36How cold is it? Aurora borealis and stuff at night.
34:41I've, yeah, it'll average, you know, anywhere during the season.
34:45You know, it's in the minus 20s, minus 30s most of the time.
34:48You'll get down below minus 40.
34:49I've been outside making a repair on my trailer at like 53 below.
34:54So it can get pretty cold.
34:56Wow.
34:57And you don't turn the truck off.
34:59No, no, no.
35:00I just set it on high idle when you're sleeping or unloading or whatever. Yep.
35:04What's it like driving through a crowded urban area in a big truck?
35:08Well, now see that that's fun.
35:10I used to do a lot of deliveries around Toronto when I was younger and that's where I sort of like, you know, cut my teeth at this sort of stuff, right? You're driving around places where everyone's driving like a maniac and there's lots of people around and that's the challenge.
35:24I think one of the more dangerous jobs I ever had was hauling fuel to gas stations. I did that for about a year or so in the greater Toronto area and people cutting you off and in and out of traffic and you see people doing really dumb things at gas stations, you know, smoking and...
35:39You know, just ignoring the fact that there's like a truck here with fuel coming out of the hoses into the ground tanks and there's a giant bomb next to getting too close to you.
35:49When you're driving a fuel truck, do you ever imagine what would happen if you had an accident?
35:54I mean, you're aware, you try to imagine not getting in one and you try and envision all of the...
36:03Factors at play.
36:05When you haul stuff that's considered dangerous like fuel or when you're going down a mountain with logs, you have to have full situational awareness.
36:14You have to be constantly thinking about, where's my out if somebody cuts me off?
36:18What's going on as I go around this corner? What is that guy doing over there?
36:23It keeps you awake and it's actually pretty mentally and physically draining because you're just always constantly aware.
36:30You know, I mean, this is why I've never been involved in a collision.
36:33Like I've ever hit anybody, you know, been doing this for almost 30 years.
36:38And it's just because you just have to be fully aware of what's going on.
36:41Are the trucks moving to automatic transmissions?
36:45Oh yeah, that's been going on for decades now.
36:47Okay, so you're not you don't have 16 gears and I mean, I don't I mean, I don't, I don't drive those trucks. They do have the, there's still sticks. There's, this is a bit of an interesting trucker culture debate, um, automatics versus sticks.
36:59And in the process, one of my main critiques, I mean you want to drive an automatic transmission, whatever, but like the, the development and the imposition of automatic transmissions into big trucks was done on purpose.
37:13Why?
37:14To de-skill the job and get more people behind the wheel.
37:17It may have the fringe benefit now that we've had big truck automatic transmissions for a couple of decades. Yes, in some cases they get better fuel mileage matched with certain types of engines and that's fine. And that's great.
37:29But the imposition of them was not for that.
37:31It was to reduce the barrier to entry into the job and get more people in it who are less skilled and less competent.
37:38And again, you see the results all around you.
37:41How are we, I don't mean this in a patriotic way, but like, how did you learn so much about the world? Were you, I mean, if you're driving all the time, you can't read while you drive.
37:50How do you listen to podcasts, listen to audio books?
37:53Is that is that common?
37:54Oh yeah, yeah, my book will be out on audiobook narrated by me.
37:59So, I mean, so if you do it right, like long haul trucking is like kind of a college course as well as a job.
38:06It can be, I mean, part of the reason I wrote this and I, you know, people say I'm passionate about it and I get worked up about it is that truck driving has been very good to me, right?
38:14It's been, it's critical to the economy. Everybody, everything we have here was all delivered by truck. The process, the industrial processes which make everything involve trucking.
38:24It's the same in every country.
38:25Like it's an important and critical job.
38:29And again, third generation trucker, my dad's a trucker.
38:32He's still out on the road.
38:32My uncle Chris drove truck for years, established a freight brokerage in Canada, an honest one.
38:37Unfortunately, they're not so honest anymore.
38:39My uncle Bruce hauled logs and heavy equipment in Northwestern Ontario, the kind of place you would love to go fishing.
38:45My grandpa drove truck across the Trans-Canada Highway when it was first built in like 1960 across Lake Superior, in a truck with no bunk, sleeping across the seats, no air conditioning, You know, that threat of the truck freezing up in the winter.
38:59You know, like my grandpa was a tough bastard and like truckers in general were that way, you know. I mean, the technology has improved and whatnot, but you know, I feel very strongly about this industry that served my family so well and so many other families so well, you know?
39:16And one of the things that's not talked about with this displacement problem as of late is that many multi-generational American trucking companies have gone out of business in the last few years.
39:28So since...
39:302022, the freight market has been in what some people call the Great Freight Recession.
39:34We're starting to come out of it here in the last few months, but, you know...
39:38There's a website called Freight Waves. I'm friends with the guy that runs it and a few of the people that write there. And they have a section of their website called Layoffs and Bankruptcies.
39:48And they people whose full-time job is to document American trucking companies going out of business or closing or drivers being laid off or having financial difficulties.
39:59And it's been humming for four years.
40:01Meanwhile, We get more and more people on our highways, from places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and India and Pakistan and all across Central America and sending their wages home and remittances or paying human smugglers to get them here and American trucking companies are closing.
40:20And that hasn't stopped under the current administration.
40:23Well, there's a bunch of stuff going on right now, you know, Trump, I think President Trump and Transportation Secretary Duffy are trying really hard to fix trucking. It's one of the sort of, you, know, I mean, President Trump's up to some interesting things here as of late, but we'll leave that to the side. But I think what they're trying to do to help American truckers is good.
40:42They reinforced this English language proficiency thing that was, you know, the enforcement of which was waived under the Obama administration.
40:51Interestingly enough, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Functionary, who sent out the memo saying don't put these guys out of service anymore, he's now in charge of the hazmat's division of FMCSA, so this guy that, like, helped open up the problem is still working there. So maybe Duffy could fire him or something, I don't know.
41:07What's his name?
41:08I can't remember and I don't want to be mean to the fella.
41:13On the question of the administration doing things, ELP was great, but it's only nibbling around the edges.
41:21This sort of parasitism of the industry, I think Duffy and the FMCSA and USDOT don't quite understand that we're dealing with people who don't view our safety-driven compliance culture in the same way we do, right?
41:38So. Okay.
41:40So for instance, cultural orientation matters.
41:44It certainly does.
41:45So let me give you an example.
41:47A few weeks ago, this was all over the news.
41:50These gentlemen in India were killed in a very tragic incident where a driver from Kyrgyzstan working for a company owned by a guy from Kyrgizstan operating out of Chicago.
42:00Uh, stop traffic instead of driving into the field to the right, the guy from Kyrgyzstan drove left into oncoming traffic, hit a van with a bunch of Amish guys and it killed four of them.
42:10Tragic incident.
42:11Okay.
42:12So he's been arrested.
42:13That's all happening.
42:14A week later on the same road in the same county in Indiana, another truck blew a stop sign, almost killed somebody else. The cops pull the truck over, owned by an Indian company.
42:27Driven by somebody who illegally immigrated here two years ago, no CDL.
42:33At all commercial driver's license.
42:35No, no commercial driver's license.
42:37The CVSA, Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which is this sort of like loose organization of enforcement authorities in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. They do these blitzes and then they compile statistics on, you know, what are the violations? What are truckers doing wrong every year, right? One of the number one driver violations is not having a CDL at all.
42:58Or a metaphor card, right?
43:00So what I'm trying to get at here is we have people operating in the American and Canadian trucking industry who do not share our compliance and safety culture.
43:09And because the money they're making is being sent back home to like prop up other countries' economies, they don't care, right.
43:16So like ice could arrest some guy at a truck stop and kick him out of the country. The guy that owns the truck is just gonna put another one of his co-ethnics in the truck, right, they have to start seizing trucks.
43:26The English language proficiency stuff is like it's all well and good, but the economic forces at play here either from the corporations that continue to hire these guys through brokers or the incentives for these guys from overseas to continue sending their people here to parasitize off of our trucking industry are too great. They are not just going to follow the rules.
43:49You can make all the new rules you want.
43:52A lot of these guys are just not going to follow them.
43:55You have to remove the people and then you have to seize the trucks.
43:58Has that happened?
44:00Well, you know, there's been some ICE stuff at a few, like, you know, inspection stations.
44:05Some states are cooperating.
44:06Oklahoma is a good example of this.
44:08There was one in Indiana, where you know ICE is working with DOT truck inspections, pulling guys out. That's fine.
44:17But, you know, again, these corporate lobbyists, so Arizona, they tried to propose a rule to seize the trucks, right? So if a truck is found to have an illegal immigrant or work authorization, the truck would be seized, right?
44:34And then the company would have to come and explain themselves.
44:36Like, why are you hiring these people to drive trucks?
44:38Why are you doing all this illegal business?
44:40And then maybe you'll get your truck back. Maybe you won't.
44:43The people who objected to that were the Arizona Trucking Association.
44:48Yeah, yeah.
44:49So what's going on here?
44:50Let me tell you a little bit of industry lingo.
44:53There's something called power only.
44:55So this was a model of trucking where The truck and the driving...
45:00Part of a business is subcontracted out. The trailer, the load, the service is still owned by another company, right?
45:06So the people who perfected this was Federal Express.
45:09Years and years and years ago, it used to be a good model, you know?
45:13You could have your own truck, you could be a subcontractor to FedEx, pull their trailers and make money and it was fine.
45:19That system has run into the sort of importation of in-source illegal migrants for lack of a better word.
45:27And now Amazon does it.
45:3190-Something percent of Amazon subcontractors are owned by these small carriers that are often headquartered overseas or headquarter in Chicago in ethnic enclaves like Elk Grove Village or Glendale, California with the Armenians, and they employ their co-ethnics or guys with suspicious work visas or no work visas, or no CDLs, and then they go haul all of Amazon's stuff through the Amazon Relay program.
45:56I think six of the executives of the Amazon Relay program are Indian guys or from India or live in India.
46:02I don't know. Anyway, that model, the big trucking companies who are represented by the American Trucking Associations have looked at Amazon and FedEx and said, why should we even bother owning trucks?
46:15We'll just have our trailer pools and our customers and we'll subcontract out the driving and the owning of the trucks to all of this cheap labor.
46:23J.B. Hunt does this, Knight-Swift, Werner.
46:28And they don't want to own trucks because hiring Americans and paying for trucks, there's business reasons for this to write too.
46:37The cost of compliance, the cost of insurance, the costs of dealing with all this, it's a very hostile business environment.
46:43So I sort of understand what they're doing, but the power only model right now mostly rides on insourced labor.
46:50Right? And what this does is it allows them to say, hey, we are still this American trucking company. Look at us.
46:57We're servicing our customers, but they're not actually employing.
47:00They're, they're trying to get away from employing people at all and moving to the power only model.
47:05It's a skin suit.
47:06It's not really an American company.
47:08Right. Yeah. There's a whole lot of that skin suit stuff going on.
47:11And I mean, there's this problem with chameleon carriers, right?
47:14So people ask us all the time, like, what's going on with the enforcement? These guys get in crashes, they kill all these people, but then they just pop up again somewhere else.
47:22And so we have a problem which, you know, I think Duffy and Derek Bars, the FMCSA are working towards solving, but a company will register under an I'll see and then I'll have what's called a motor carrier registration number.
47:37That motor carrier registration number is how all of their violations and inspections and whatnot are accumulated to and then the government is supposed to impose accountability on them. But what happens is when a company's motor carrier number gets too many violations, they get too much heat from the feds or whatever state, they just shut that company down.
47:58They move the equipment and the drivers to another one under a separate motor carrier number and there's an open market and buying and selling those, which They're supposed to be clamping down on, but I'm not sure how that works.
48:08And then they just keep operating, right?
48:11There was a very famous incident here where this Cuban migrant working for a company called Hope Trans crashed into a family, killed almost all of them in Texas.
48:20And Hope Trans has been on the feds' radar forever, you know, I think they're run by people from Moldova, you now, again, they have no skin in the game here in America, why would they? They don't care. And, you know, they hire migrants and people that don't know any better.
48:35You know, they back door into their electronic logging devices.
48:39Um, yeah, this is another, this was another honor thing.
48:42So in 2017, American truckers were forced to accept into their trucks, this thing called the electronic logging device, right?
48:50It's supposed to manage your hours and make it so that you can't cheat on your hours, and just keep working.
48:56The problem with that is...
48:57And the justification of safety.
48:58The justification was safety and it turns out that it has not improved safety. In fact, it has made it worse and because of the self-certification process with electronic logging device providers, you can just sort of sign off and say to the government, yep, we met all of your requirements.
49:14Meanwhile, there's a guy in an office in Serbia who you text on Telegram when you say, Hey man, I'm almost out of my hours.
49:21And they like back door into the ELD, rewrite everything.
49:23And then you just keep driving and roadside enforcement people have no way of catching that.
49:27So it's like electronic voting, it can be subverted.
49:30Yeah!
49:31Analogy.
49:32Well, anything digital can be subverted.
49:36Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. And I mean, even before we became wise to the fact it was being subverted by these foreign actors working in our trucking industry, the ELD mandate never accounted for the incentive structure for drivers, many of whom only get paid by the mile are constantly being delayed. And so, you know, if you hold them up and they only get to drive so many hours a day and they're only being paid by mile, they end up driving like maniacs, So, there was a study done by Overdrive Online, a trucking magazine.
50:06In conjunction with these other guys and it proved that after the ELD mandate, all of the safety concerns it was said to solve, you know, aggressive driving, guys driving tired, guys speeding, guys getting in crashes, all that stuff went up after the ELD mandate was imposed, right?
50:24And there was this lady who was in charge of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a while named Robin Hutchison, she was asked about reviewing that, hey, look, This is the numbers don't match.
50:35Well, we're not gonna change it, right? When the government has shown that a policy or regulation or mandate they impose on Americans doesn't work, like they're not going to change it.
50:47Like they have their thing now, right, and like whatever you say doesn't matter.
50:53You're describing a chaotic and corrupt system that's becoming more chaotic and more corrupt like a lot of systems um, and so it I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we just had a tractor trailer full of our nicotine pouches alp stolen And apparently somebody just walked in to the facility with a fake id got in the truck and drove it off And then it just somehow disappeared.
51:14So that sounded fantastical to me. Like I couldn't believe that happened Well, freight fraud and cargo theft is just astronomical.
51:21So that's my question.
51:22Yeah. This is not unusual.
51:23This is not unusual at all.
51:25And in fact, it's like a major, major concern. Like we're talking hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in it.
51:30It's not just the cargo theft, right? Like, so there's this thing called double brokering, which is illegal, where a load broker, which is one of these intermediaries that goes between shippers and trucking companies, well, a shipper will say, hey, load broker we need to move this load. The load broker will advertise it on some kind of board or an app and then trucking company will bid on it.
51:51Other brokers will get themselves involved and then.
51:53Broker it again, and then take their cut. And then sometimes, because there's all these intermediaries, and nobody's quite sure who's who, and a lot of them are located overseas, just the theft going on with that is incredible.
52:07And there's organized gangs, for lack of a better word, who abuse all of the sort of holes in the system that are presented with this sort of technological distance between all of the people involved.
52:18I'm sure that happened with your case, and I would Suggest to your friends at Al...
52:23Hire an American trucking company.
52:24Go talk to them in person.
52:25Don't use load brokers.
52:27Well, that's probably wise advice so but how did I I'm a little bit confused by how this works So I was aware of the electronic monitoring of truckers because I know some truckers and they resent it Yes, right. So I know that a truck is being followed at all times. It's find my phone on a big scale.
52:46Yeah So how could how could you say?
52:49If I take my truck, which is a Chevy Silverado 2017, and try and run away, the authorities can find me because GM will track my truck.
52:58Well, you have an old one too, though, right? You've got like a I have a 1987 also.
53:04Yeah, you should drive that one.
53:05Well, it constantly breaks.
53:08So if I was actually gonna run away.
53:09I know some good mechanics.
53:10I do too.
53:12I do too, it's just old and it's a bad climate, but it's not about me.
53:15My only point is Your truck that you have in your driveway that you put your kids in, you know Your pickup truck can be tracked period.
53:24All of our vehicles can be trapped by the government and are How can how can a thief steal a big rig and not be tracked? I don't what is going on?
53:35Well, I mean, the information doesn't necessarily go to the government right away.
53:42No, it doesn't.
53:43And then also, you know, they can spoof it.
53:46They can switch. So like, you can take a trailer, right?
53:49With a truck that's being tracked, meet another guy at a truck stop, drop the trailer on hook from it, hook it up to another truck and keep going. And that may have been what happened to your load.
53:58You know, I recommended my friend, uh, Ryan Joyce at GenLog.
54:02So you know how these flock camera things are around, like spying on everybody.
54:05There's a network in place like that for trucks of video cameras.
54:09And this, this company called GenLogg's manages it.
54:11I sent Lexi their contacts and maybe they can help you find your Alps, I don't know.
54:17But there are all these tracking systems.
54:20But again, they can be spoofed, you can switch trucks.
54:24When you're dealing with thieves who steal whole truckloads of things, they know this, they're not stupid.
54:29It gets unloaded right away, transferred to another rig, distributed to whoever's going to sell the stolen material.
54:35So there's got to be, I mean, there's obviously an entire network of what we used to call fences people.
54:40Many networks, yeah.
54:41There was a network of these people in California busted a little while ago, and they were called the Singh Organization because everybody involved had that Punjabi name, Singh.
54:53It's an appellation.
54:54It means lion.
54:55It means a devotee of Guru Nanak.
54:57It is not actually the last name.
55:00But there's tons of this.
55:01It has hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
55:05Between stealing the loads, moving them around, stealing the cargo, skimming off truckers.
55:10So like some of these load brokers that are scummy will hire a trucker and just not pay them.
55:14They'll get their payment.
55:16We're in Serbia. We shut down.
55:17Who cares? Right?
55:18Or some other country.
55:19It could be Serbia, Moldova, Colombia, Pakistan.
55:22The entire world is involved in the American transportation system.
55:27Another interesting development that's come up is that military freight.
55:31You know, my friend Danielle has been covering this, um...
55:34Very well. Everybody should go follow her. Her name is Danielle Chauvin. She writes this sub-step called Highway Veritas.
55:41Excellent researcher.
55:42She knows the whole thing top to bottom. And what we're seeing is that these guys who are here from whatever country, Moldova, Ukraine, India, Russia, are hauling US military freight.
55:54And that military- Actually?
55:56Yeah. They're hauling us- We're at war with half the world.
55:58I know. And they're haul our freight on our highways. The loads are being distributed illegally.
56:04What does that mean, distributed illegally?
56:06So basically, there's this regulation, and I can't remember the name of it right now, within the United States Military Procurement Department of War that says for certain types of military equipment moves, you may not use a broker or a third party logisticus provider.
56:24It has to be an approved carrier by the United State's military.
56:27That regulation is constantly being ignored.
56:31You're saying the same thing with the United states Postal Service.
56:33The United States Postal Service has a regulation that says Nobody but Americans may touch the mail or something like this and their entire freight contractor network of people who are pulling trailers full of US mail is using all of these carriers sometimes who are based overseas, many of them using these non-domiciled CDL drivers, don't speak English, dangerous, poor safety records, that's who's hauling our mail.
56:57They tried to stop doing that in October and the whole system almost seized up and they haven't figured out how to like get these guys out or hire back Americans to do the job.
57:10And back to the military thing.
57:13So on the point about data and these ELDs, all the information about bases, pictures of the loads being hauled, what they are, military documents about the military equipment being moved gets entered into these logging devices because they have interoperability.
57:30It's also like accounting and monitoring the trucks performance and sending communications back and forth between the dispatcher of the driver and the driver. So all of that data, all of the metadata about the location of bases and the stuff being moved, is being sent overseas and then to who?
57:48Who knows, right?
57:49Like it could end up at an office in the Ukraine somewhere.
57:52It could end in an office in Europe or South America or India, and then those guys could be selling it to Russia, to China, to who knows? Nobody knows.
58:01All of these military move metadata is leaving the country via technology that our government forced on us to make us more safe, which did not make us safe, and is facilitating our replacement by people from overseas.
58:16You got it? HAHAHAHA This is where we're bumping up against the point where this interview was bumming me out too much Well, dude, like, hey man, I want to be trucking.
58:28I don't want to be a writer.
58:29I'm not, I'm a little bit of a nerd, but I'm not that much of a nerdy.
58:32I would like to be out trucking and I'm that because the industry doesn't pay.
58:36They don't honor skill and competency and many actors within it would rather hire people from overseas who are exploited labor.
58:43End of story. That's all there is to it.
58:47It just does challenge the nature of our system because you can't run a country in the way that we're running it because you're just too vulnerable to exploitation and attack and subversion and destruction, especially if you're in conflict with other big countries.
59:09It's not gonna work.
59:11So that makes me sad on that level.
59:15It's all very silly and again, you know, it's not just like me losing my job.
59:20This is not some like, oh, woe is me or woe's my fellow truckers.
59:23This is a national security issue.
59:25Oh, well, that's very obvious.
59:27So, okay, I just, I never do this, but I think it's important.
59:32End of the Road, Inside the War on Truckers by Gord McGill is the book. I'm not a book seller, but this book is worth selling.
59:39I wish you know since since I finished writing it so much more has happened right like it I submitted the final manuscript in October and now you know again back to Duffy and President Trump there the government's trying to respond but it's in sometimes mealy-mouthed ways where everyone and their dog in Congress introduced a new law to deal with the English language stuff. I'm like, it's already a law, just enforce it.
60:03You're making a law for no reason.
60:05But then there's this other one called Delilah's Law, introduced in the Senate by Senator Jim Banks from Indiana, named after this little girl who President Trump alluded to in his State of the Union speech, who was hit by a driver, an illegal driver from India.
60:21You know, now she's got cerebral palsy. She was in hospital for months, had to have her brain reconstructed.
60:27Terrible, terrible, terrible story.
60:29You know I know her father, Marcus, and that's in front of Congress now.
60:35They just introduced some amendments to it yesterday to hopefully clamp down on this.
60:40There's a Supreme Court case right now that just finished hearing oral arguments.
60:46Montgomery versus Karibay.
60:48Which hinges on this question of freight brokers, right?
60:50Because one of the problems with the safety issue is this division between like the people that own and drive the trucks and the people farming out the loads.
60:57And right now all of the load brokers have been taking advantage of the fact that like they don't have to do any of the safety checks and they own no liability or accountability.
61:07And this Supreme Court case The all upside economic model that Americans love.
61:11Right. Yeah. No, it's all upside.
61:13Yeah, so there's another, there's another little piece of news here.
61:16I've been asked to relate to you by an anonymous source about another court case that's going to be filed here soon by some trucking companies in Oklahoma against JB Hunt against CH Robinson, TQL, all these big brokers, you know, that that's going to attack this problem and say like, you guys can't keep doing this.
61:35You can't keep using these unsafe carriers and saying it's not our problem. You can't come and take our work, right?
61:41Like these guys in Oklahoma are trying to show that we have these customers we haul for, and then the brokers come in, undercut us, don't even use their own trucks and farm the loads out to these operations that are all kind of illegals, right.
61:53So that's going to be entered in soon. And I think it's being, I think one of the lawyers involved are Nick Patterson, who are part of the opioid stuff and fighting the tobacco companies.
62:03So that that's news.
62:04That's just yesterday.
62:05I just got the document sent to me yesterday.
62:07This is such a minor question, but do truckers still smoke?
62:11I mean, some do, some pop Zyns, some eat Alp. I don't know, I'm not a nicotine guy.
62:17But yeah, I think there's a few guys.
62:18How did she make it so many years in the cab without nicotine?
62:22Uh, will power allowed music and coffee and staying healthy? I don't know.
62:27When you're driving up on the ice in the Northwest Territories and there's no radio reception, what do you do for music?
62:32Other satellite radio and, you know, back in the day, CDs, audio books, music on your phone, stuff like that.
62:40You know, I miss Canada.
62:42It's kind of a shame what's going on with it right now.
62:45We're going to do a very long segment as soon as I can find the right person to do it on what's happening in your native country, Canada.
62:53But I just want to end with your assessment of what is happening in Canada, because I Yeah.
62:59So, um, you know, last time I was on your show, I talked about these guys called the Kutz 4.
63:04And then you went to Alberta and talked about them when nobody else would. And thank you very much for that. I know all those guys, uh, they extend great gratitude towards, your highlighting of their situation.
63:13I love Canada, actually.
63:14Yeah, yeah.
63:15And the Canadian media just either lied about them or, you know, misinformed everybody about it.
63:19But they're all out of jail now.
63:21There's an appeal to the minor charges in their case because the original, the big thing that got everybody scared, this conspiracy to murder police officers was thrown out of court, not guilty.
63:33And it looks like that they were made into the Fall Guys by...
63:37The Crown Prosecutor involved in the case, and there was a number of charter breaches in how the case was prosecuted, warrants.
63:45The whole thing is very messy.
63:46And right now, the last two guys, so two guys got out almost two years to the day of their arrest on unrelated charges, which were bogus.
63:54They've been out for a while.
63:55The other two gentlemen, Chris Carbert and Tony Olienek, were recently released under something called bail on appeal.
64:01And those two, There was the minor charges that they were convicted of, which were also BS, are being appealed.
64:09And that appeal was, the ruling on that appeal is supposed to come down last month in February, but because it's so hot and the Canadian government is involved, it's going to be September of this year or maybe next year, I'm not 100% sure.
64:20But those guys are out, that's good.
64:23My friends Chris Barber and Tamara Leach, you know, they are on house arrest right now.
64:28They were the most pursued members of the Freedom Convoy.
64:31A Tenzin tens of millions of dollars were expended by the government to pursue peaceful protesters.
64:39Although that part of the story is coming to an end, this Mark Carney guy, man, one of the things Trudeau tried to do in the wake of the freedom convoy was clamp down on free speech, right? There was this bill, I think it was called C-63.
64:52Yeah, and human rights in Canada.
64:54Right, pretty much, and that died when they had the election, and now it's being resuscitated under this bill called C-9.
65:00They don't want you to notice that youth unemployment is through the roof in Canada. They don't want you notice that Chinese companies are buying up Canadian mines.
65:09They don't want you noticed that there's like 5 million extra people in the country on temporary work permits that the Carney government is talking about letting some of them stay.
65:18They don't want you to notice that your whole country is just sort of falling apart at the seams economically. They don t want you notice that the government just allows thievery to happen.
65:28There was this Stellantis, the guys that own Chrysler.
65:32The Canadian government gave them 15 billion dollars to invest in Canada.
65:37Stellantis ran away with the money and a couple of days later, they're in the White House with Donald Trump announcing 13 billion dollars of investment in the United States, right?
65:47They're just thieves and Mark Kearney and his cabinet, if they had any sense of honor, they would step down, right?
65:55Like there was another, the Supreme Court, not the Supreme court, there was a superior court ruling against Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act against the peaceful protesters from the freedom convoy, right. It was the Mosley decision.
66:06And it found that it was against the charter, unreasonable, unjustified.
66:10The government filed a appeal 14 minutes later, you know, thousands of pages of documents, but they were ready to go 14 minutes.
66:17And then that ruling on the appeal came down and said, no, you guys did wrong.
66:23And the parliamentary system, when you know members of a cabinet or a government are found to be involved in something so like breathtakingly anti-democratic, it's not the rule, but it's sort of accepted practice that you step down, at least from your cabinet position. Okay.
66:39No, you you put in prison people to criticize you.
66:41I think that's that's the rule Yeah. Carney and like nine of his cabinet ministers were all part of Trudeau.
66:47Carney like wrote op-eds in the Globe and Mail encouraging Trudeaux to freeze everyone's bank accounts and do the Emergencies Act.
66:53And he's still wandering around in power doing his thing, trying to sell Canada to China and the EU and getting in fights with Trump.
66:59And it's just all, it's pretty bleak up north right now.
67:04Do you feel safe going there?
67:06I mean, yeah, whatever, they haven't completely erased free speech yet.
67:10I mean I'm going home in a couple weeks, hopefully I don't get arrested, but so far so good.
67:15Where'd we go?
67:16Thank you for taking all this time to do this. I think this is, there's so much going on.
67:22We're trying to, you know, there was a lot going on, but what's happening here is always the most important thing and how, you know, our economy functions and we get food on the table is maybe the top thing.
67:31Yeah.
67:32Pretty important to have full grocery stores and gas stations and parts for everything and factories having their stuff delivered to and that entire system, we've just like sold off to the highest bidder to people from overseas who don't care about us.
67:47Amazing. Thank you for doing this.
67:48Thank you, sir.
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