The FMCSA Data Crisis (with Danielle Chaffin) | Episode 312

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome to this week's episode of Freight 360. Nate is not going to be joining us. He is actually at the TIA policy forum on Capitol Hill, hopefully meeting with some FMCSA folks in Congress about what we're going to jump into immediately. Apparently, most of the FMCSA data feeds just vanished yesterday with no guidance, no explanation, no reason, and the industry was left to just try to figure things out without any information that we're supposed to be able to use to verify carriers, verify safety, verify registrations, verify contact information. So, rather than jumping into sports, we have Daniel with us again and we are going to jump right into what was there, what is normally there and what just apparently vanished as of like yesterday morning or somewhere. I think it was like very early morning, after midnight and between like 6 am is when this kind of vanished and then it reappeared inexplicably like somewhere around this morning. I think is like the most recent update. So catch us up on like what actually just happened yesterday and then we'll just segue from there.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Yeah Well, first, thanks for having me back. I'm excited to be here. The FMCSA data there's one data set that I use on a weekly basis. It's all of the new registrations for USDOTs. It doesn't have to be or that data set includes all USDOTs, so electric companies, towing companies, it's not only like all the road freight yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Yeah, and so that is the data set that has two million plus rows, but it's updated on a daily basis and so I can see all of the registrations that come through, whether they get approved or not. What I do with it, that's kind of irrelevant, but yesterday we got a chat in our freight fraud with Stephen and Garrett and Justin Martin and I that the data was gone, and so I went to the link where that data set is supposed to be, and it was a 404 page.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Literally tumbleweeds, like it literally said that on the 404 page right, it did.

Speaker 2: 2:38

And so I don't know. It was something overnight, because that's when the data is refreshed overnight. And Garrett found it, of course, because of search carriers realizing that a bunch of the jobs didn't actually run or they failed last night. And then it came back online sometime this morning because the jobs didn't run last night. So I don't know what happened. It was gone. I know that.

Speaker 1: 3:05

Yeah, just vanished. Nobody had any idea. And again, what I want you to explain for everybody is what is in here. And again let's go like, as Nate would say, like Barney style 101 level, like why is this information important? Why is it important that it is updated daily and what does the industry do with it? Like just break it down for anybody out there that isn't familiar exactly with what categories are in there, what that tells the industry and how we use that to make decisions on who is doing what.

Speaker 2: 3:39

There are zero data sets in the FMCSA that actually are linked together or consolidated in any way, shape or form. I think there's probably 12 of them that are incredibly relevant to what we do on the brokerage, the 3PL side, and those have to be consolidated and presented in a way that makes sense. None of us really see that, because we're using the carrier vetting tools like RMIS, SaferWatch, Highway search carriers and others, and so they are the ones consolidating all of that data and making sense of it. For us, Every piece of carrier vetting is built on top of the FMCSA databases. So that's my issue in and of itself is because everything that we're doing is a reaction to those, however many data sets.

Speaker 2: 4:39

12 may not be an accurate number, but it's somewhere in the 10 to 12 area. Everything that we do as far as carrier vetting depends on those data sets, depends on the FMCSA. We can't do anything without that data and so not having an up-to-date set or even a set that is completely missing. The data set that I look at includes the primary officer or the contact, the physical address, the mailing address Of course there's a USDOT number in there, the email address, and that's the one that just went missing.

Speaker 1: 5:14

OK. So for everyone out there, I want to reiterate to what you just said. Right is that the FMCSA does not present or is viewable like, I would say, actionable information from what is there. It is like raw data, and what raw data means is just like literally lines. If you just think of a giant spreadsheet with individual lines that have columns and then it just spits out all of these things, it's like, hey, this is all the information we have.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Then what we do in the industry, almost every broker pays for a service that takes or ingests all of those raw numbers in spreadsheets and then turns it into a category that we can use to make a decision as to whether or not we want to work with a carrier or, more importantly, whether that carrier is still the carrier we might've hired last week, right?

Speaker 1: 6:06

So, like I think, a really easy one to start with is just like the MCS 150s and what that means, right, because I'm going to set a little bit of the like, the stage for you to dig into some of these, but for anyone out there, like one of the biggest ways that carriers are being defrauded, because it's not just carriers defrauding brokers or shippers Like these are criminals that are impersonating legitimate trucking companies, then stealing load information, then using that to either steal the load themselves with one of their trucks or to then take that information of their trucks, or to then take that information and then, secondly, impersonate a freight broker, book a legitimate carrier, send them to a warehouse they manage and then steal the freight and of which nobody is aware of until it's gone.

Speaker 1: 6:53

These are the things that are like, really, really, I would say the most obvious, glaring ways that people are having freight stolen, right. So the MCS-150, and correct me if I'm wrong with any of this, because you spend more time on this, but it is the form that you fill out and file with the FMCSA when you change your name at your trucking company or any of the contact information the address the email address the phone number, the truck count or the name.

Speaker 1: 7:21

So one of the big phishing scams that has been around is like criminals will send an email that is a fake email, that pretends to be the FMCSA and a trucking company owner employee clicks it and logs into what they think is the FMCSA. They steal their login info, go back to the FMCSA and then update that trucking company with their email address.

Speaker 2: 7:41

Yep.

Speaker 1: 7:42

And then I might've worked with that carrier last week, I might've worked with them every week all year with no issue, and if I don't know that happened, I think I am still emailing the same trucking company or calling and all of a sudden that email is now going to a criminal because nobody can see that that was changed Right. So I want you to go through maybe just like kind of that one and some of the other really critical ones that we rely on that are huge vulnerabilities for theft and fraud in the industry.

Speaker 2: 8:13

Yeah, so the MCS-150, if anything, if you're changing anything on your USDOT record, just like you said, name, contact information, address, phone number, truck count, driver count, what have you All of that goes through the MCS-150. That is also the every two year update that a trucking company has to do. So, yes, they have to update it every two years. They're required to do that, and then if anything needs changing, they also use MCS-150.

Speaker 2: 8:45

What I found with the email address issues is that previously the fraudulent people criminals I will call them. Actually they're not just fraudulent people, they're criminals. What the criminals have done is they're just emailing back and forth and that email doesn't necessarily match what is on the USDOT record. With the FMCSA, we once had a high trust society that could just email carriers and everything was fine, and now we don't. So no one was checking those emails.

Speaker 2: 9:18

Well, they've taken it one step further and somehow whether it's through an email, a phishing link, just guessing they are actually logging into the FMCSA account. I believe allegedly they're logging into the FMCSA account and they're changing the email address on the FMCSA account. I've worked with several carriers that this has happened to and help them prepare the questions and the documentation to send to the FMCSA and the only response that we've gotten is that the FMCSA support rep says that they can't see a change on the account and they can't see that change because it doesn't go through the MCS-150. And so that change isn't logged. And then if your carrier vetting software matches an email address to the email on the USDOT record, those are the same now because they've went into the FMCSA and changed the email.

Speaker 1: 10:16

Why is there no record of that? Because I have. We have a client, like I just did this with a client of ours last week and they got a new phone system and they needed to update their phone number and I walked them through how to change this and the two ways you can do it are to fill a paper form out and I'm sure I'm sure you can mail it, probably fax it or email it. But if there's a paper form, that takes the longer way. Or you can log in with your pin to the FMCSA and you can update it. But what you're saying is when that occurs, the FMCSA does not have a record of that name change occurring.

Speaker 2: 10:50

That's what I've been told.

Speaker 1: 10:52

So the systems that will tell you when those things changed to your point. So just take like CARE 411, right, for example, has a little section and if you go to it it will show you contact information. Fmcsa changes the date. What was changed. It will show you the previous value and the new value. And the reason, like carrier 411 has this is because they are ingesting that data every day and when it doesn't match then they flag their system that, oh, as of September 17th, it was this yesterday, it is this now, so the change must have happened between yesterday and today, which is why having this updated every day really matters.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Yes, because the FMCSA doesn't know that it was changed. It just is changed and they don't record the record of the change, correct?

Speaker 2: 11:42

Yeah, yeah, and it's. I mean that small change in an email address, the ones that I was working on. They had changed one letter, so it was like abctruckscom or at whatevercom and they had changed it and just dropped the S.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Yeah, it'll be like plural or they'll make it singular like ABCtruckscom. That'll now be ABCtruckcom and like, if you're not really paying attention, you just don't notice that, like to the naked eye, it is almost impossible to see.

Speaker 2: 12:13

Yeah, and it can be devastating for a small carrier. I mean if that load is actually booked through their USDOT and then the claim is filed against their insurance. Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Speaker 1: 12:29

Hundreds Like I've seen three instances this year that I've worked through where this has occurred. One was the criminal created a new domain that was one character different. So like they went and bought a website domain and this is one of the honestly one of the better ones that I've seen and I still don't exactly know how they did this. But like the eye was not an English eye, it was an eye from another dialect that had a little bit of, instead of a dot for an eye, it was like an end tilt, like it wasn't Spanish and wasn't French, but it had just like a little bit of a different slant to the dot. And this happened. It was a client of ours reached out, this load was stolen and when I looked at the domain, I'm like this looks like the domain and highway and in 411 and safer. I'm like that's strange. How I found it was I copy and pasted after the at sign for the domain and search for the website and it came up as an unhosted site. And I'm like, wait a minute, I know that because it was a large trucking company. They had like three, four hundred trucks. I'm like I know they have a website. So I looked again and then I Googled that and I found the legitimate one and looked at them next to each other and I'm like, oh my Lord, I'm like it is this little dot above the I that they changed. And then they change it to your point in the FMCSA. So every system linked to the FMCSA goes this email is good. So they tendered the load the way everyone has All the systems said it was good.

Speaker 1: 13:59

None of them like literally not one of them caught that. Like, not one of those systems when I backtracked had that info flagged at the time that that fraud occurred. Okay, so name changes, phone number changes huge area to be paying attention to and to do this Like the one thing that I want to point out for everybody is, like I don't want to just point out the issues. I'm going to point out, like what people can do to solve it. I don't want to just point out the issues. I'm going to point out like what people can do to solve it. So, like just that one, because that is probably the most common one that I've seen over the past few years what are some ways that you suggest folks verify that info and this is really important before you send the rate con and the delivery address and the pickup number.

Speaker 2: 14:40

I think that I think we have moved too much to be automated too quickly.

Speaker 1: 14:49

I agree.

Speaker 2: 14:49

We have automated. If you, if you export and I would love to send an example file to anyone that wants it, please let me know If you export this data from the FMCSA in a CSV file and you just doom scroll, which is what I did for months, you will realize that everything that we do past this point is built on a broken foundation. That in itself is frightening. I can't do anything without this data being real, being verified, being confirmed by someone, and it's not looking at the carrier. And I'm saying that we've automated based on what we get from the FMCSA and the USDOT records. So if you take the CSV file, the raw file, and you start scrolling through it, you will quickly realize that we have automated something that should not be automated as far as it is today.

Speaker 1: 15:52

Yes. So two points on that. The first I want to point out is like this is a huge vulnerability with AI automation, because if your underlying data set is not both two things secure, consistent, sorry, three and accurate, then the automation makes more mistakes because it is going to do things without human intelligence to look to see if it is correct. It just will act across every one of those and do the same action, which means every error in the underlying information gets exaggerated and then happens more. And on top of that, right like as the industry has moved to efficiency, rates are down. We've talked about the CDL, cdl mills, why and what is going on the care side, but, like as rates are depressed, companies are trying to stay in business by doing things more efficiently, which means a lot of times less people and more emails. That's what criminals rely on.

Speaker 1: 16:52

They know these people are booking loads fast without making phone calls, without actually looking at this information, without paying attention to it. Phone calls without actually looking at this information, without paying attention to it. They are taking advantage of this of automation, of companies moving fast without doing things that we traditionally would spend even 30, 45 seconds to do before you sent this information. Companies are just doing less and less of this and the carriers are like it's Christmas because nobody's looking at any of our information and we can just get everybody to send us whatever we want Like to me, like address and things, physical IDs. Imagine if the entire banking system was not accurate. This is the equivalent. It would be like I could just go to your bank and just pretend to be you and just change the name at your bank account to mine, and it doesn't make, make any difference and they'll just give me your money. That is literally what is happening with our system.

Speaker 1: 18:56

And we are trying to automate it to do this more efficiently, but the whole thing that we rely on, all of this information that is supposedly verified and accurate, is just broken, inaccurate and inconsistent.

Speaker 2: 19:10

Yeah, absolutely, and I continually say, and I will continually post that a five minute phone call would mitigate much of the fraud that we're seeing today. It's not foolproof, it's not going to be, it's not going to stop everything a hundred percent. But calling on that carrier at the number that the FMCSA has provided you or they have provided you, pick up the phone and call them.

Speaker 1: 19:35

I would say this. I want to add one little caveat. I've probably been involved or helped with at least 15 to 25 of these stolen load situations in the past, probably year and a half right. Either clients, colleagues, somebody whether it's through work with Genlogs, with you guys or somebody goes hey, can you help with this? Every single one of them? I have been able to determine they were fraud inside of 45 seconds by doing what you just said, with.

Speaker 1: 20:03

One little caveat is like I go to the FMCSA name changes in the sites that we pay for the verified ones, because they can interpret this data, give it to me usability. I don't call the new one. I always go directly to phone number. Name changes and I call the previous one is the first thing I do when somebody goes. I got a load stolen. This is the carrier I booked. I go to the MC, call the previous phone number and in every instance the guy who's picked up the phone it just happened to be guys, but like they've all answered the phone and went. That's not me. I reported this. No one did anything about it. Don't book that carrier Every single one.

Speaker 1: 20:41

I'm like it's taking me less than a minute to find out that the load was actually stolen with one phone call. And like we talk about this in our brokerage, nate, and I talk about this at the TIA, the classes we teach. Like we talk about this in our brokerage, nate, and I talk about this at the TIA, the classes we teach. I understand that everybody's trying to do more in less time, but I can promise you that just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't happen today or tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 21:02

It inevitably will probably happen to you if you are booking even 20 to 30 loads a week, and the one thing that I would say is the biggest preventative measure is what we were trained to do 10, 15 years ago in the industry of like, before you book the carrier, if they email you or even if they call you when you hang up the phone, go find the real phone number and call them back and see if one the dispatcher you booked a load with works there and just talk to the person, because normally they'll just tell you oh yeah, that's my dispatcher, leo, or yeah, that's Jimmy, that load's all good, or they're gonna be like no man, I sold my trucking company or, in some I've heard, I was going to sell my trucking company. I gave them my logins and they changed everything, and the FMCSA hasn't helped me fix this yet in every single instance.

Speaker 2: 21:56

Yep, and I will say too, on top of that, as humans and in this industry, all humans we have intuition. When something feels off about a carrier, we're going to take a pause and look deeper. Ai doesn't do that. Ai doesn't have that spiritual element and that intuition inside of it to say this doesn't feel right. And so AI sees checkboxes like spreadsheet brain and AI says everything matches up. This looks good Book. This carrier Human says everything does look correct, but something feels off.

Speaker 1: 22:29

Yes.

Speaker 2: 22:30

I'm not going to book this carrier yet. Give me 15 more minutes.

Speaker 1: 22:34

Two things I want to add to this right, the way we teach this, that Nate and I in the TIA classes we're like listen, just because it feels off does not mean it is black or white, yes or no. What it should tell you is now you dig a little deeper and then, if it feels a little more off, dig a little deeper, go maybe four or five steps down the road, like you don't have to make them black or white decisions because something feels off. But it should give you pause to ask a few more questions, right? Okay, I booked like here's another. This is literally another theft occurrence that happened three months ago when I looked at the carrier. I'm like that theft occurrence that happened three months ago. When I looked at the carrier, I'm like that looks a little off. It was the email address. And then I went okay, let me go and look at the assets they have listed. They have one dry van. This broker booked a flatbed. I'm like, well, that's another off. And I'm like, oh, wait a minute. They booked two loads with this carrier in the same day. Oh, wait a minute. They have one power unit and one trailer. That seems a little more off.

Speaker 1: 23:33

Then you go a little deeper and you go FMCSA name changes and contact info changes. The email and the phone number were changed 48 hours ago. Now we've got like five red flags. Now I won't go to that level of detail in every load you book but, like you said, if it sounds off, if it feels off, if somebody's offering you a crazy cheap rate, then like maybe just look a little better, like the old saying is, like if it doesn't pass the sniff test, right, like look a little longer.

Speaker 1: 24:02

And the other thing too I want to point out is like we're talking from the broker perspective, but in every one of these examples almost there was a carrier that was equally harmed and as much of a victim as the broker as was the shipper.

Speaker 1: 24:17

And if there's one thing that I would say, in every instance where I've seen a carrier harmed, where they've reached out to help, that one phone call would have done the exact same thing for the carrier, meaning like if you book a load with a broker that you don't know, that just posted a load and it's a load you want, and especially if it pays above market, you're expecting two grand on the load and a broker gives you a load, no question asked for $3,500. At least go and call or go to the FMCSA at least at the very bare minimum is free and call the phone number listed for the brokerage and say, hey, I booked this load with this broker with this email address and this load number. I just want to verify this before we go and pick up the load. That 30 to 45 second phone call would prevent 99% of these situations for both the carrier and the broker.

Speaker 2: 25:08

Absolutely, absolutely, and I don't know. I mean there's talk all over all over the Internet and social media about the, the younger generations, and their hesitancy or resistance to making a phone call, doesn't? I mean, it takes out the need for making a phone call, so I get it in a sense. I think there are a lot of things on the brokerage and the carrier side where AI is incredibly useful and it's phenomenal. I know at Revenova we have like load building and sending out notifications. If something happens it's not supposed to happen. I think load building is one of the best uses for AI or tracking updates. I would much rather put my time and effort into bettering something on that end than on the load tender.

Speaker 2: 26:06

It scares me when I see a product that is fully automated and load tendering.

Speaker 1: 26:12

Well, here's a few things right. The few things to that point right is there is a lot more in the news recently articles, lectures, whatever. Wherever you're looking, wherever you get your information. People are talking about the fact that many of the companies that jumped in AI both feet first and just said automate everything, are having two things of feedback. One, we did not get the return on the investment we thought we would and secondly, it was a lot harder and it actually created more work and more expenses. So not only did it not make us money, it didn't even save us money, it cost us money and took more time. And like. The big takeaway is like, just because AI can do something doesn't mean it should, and you really should think about your processes before you implement it within any company and where you implement it, because it can save a ton of money in invoicing procedures, in reading PDFs, in load building.

Speaker 1: 27:15

But even in load building, and we have that fully automated, we still have a human being overlooking them because it will still make errors. And one of the biggest reasons it still makes errors is I have not seen any system not any TMS, not any tracking system, not any carrier vetting system and not any factoring system that has 100% accurate data sets underneath it that are consistent and accurate at 100%. Two, that their APIs communicate at 100% with 100% accuracy, because the underlying data set isn't correct and how they communicate. They were designed to provide value to a human being that can make decisions and, to your point, has intuition and experience to go. That doesn't look right. Let me look deeper.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Like even the best ones out there, when we've automated, I'm like it will blow up this issue so much that you can't see it or you can't miss it, and like I'll give you the one is like I automated a tracking AI to see if it could call drivers if they were late, to just basically say, hey, is there anything wrong? Do you need to speak to somebody? And it would put a person on the phone or just say, hey, like if you're having an issue, just let us know. We didn't want to take up too much time. Or maybe just send a text like, hey, it looks like you're running behind. If you need to let us know about an issue, you know either text us or call us right.

Speaker 1: 28:38

But what I did was, instead of connecting it to like driver phone numbers, first I connected it to my phone and I was like I want to see how this will work and if it picks up the right ones or the wrong ones. It called my phone over and over again for 35 minutes on. Probably 40% of the phone calls I got were things that weren't wrong, because the APIs weren't 100% accurate. Where and how it made those decisions weren't correct. And I'm like, oh my Lord, if we would have just unleashed this on all of the trucks over the road, it would have just called every driver over and over again until the driver was just like this is really, and that's what we're hearing from drivers. They're like we don't want any more phone calls from your AI brokerage, because I don't need that load.

Speaker 1: 29:16

I already have a load and that load doesn't even match up with what I'm running. Can you please stop bothering me while I'm driving with things that aren't helpful and I don't need right?

Speaker 2: 29:25

Yeah, and I said that from the beginning of hearing that these things were coming out is again. I am pro-AI on a lot of things, Knowing as many truck drivers as I do and growing up with truck drivers. They do not want to talk to AI, and if you're having to call a carrier about something, generally it's something going wrong or you need something from them. They don't want to talk to AI to do that.

Speaker 1: 29:56

Well, here let me reframe that for you. Anybody that has called about an issue they have with any company. When you get an automated system, how frustrating is that. Oh my goodness, if you're calling your electric company and it goes hey, tell me what's wrong, I can help you with this. And you press the prompts 15 times.

Speaker 2: 30:13

Nobody picks up the phone Over and over again, yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:16

Or like it does that, it does that at the pharmacy, it does that at doctor's offices, it does with your health insurance company. They're all like oh, this is super helpful. And I'm like my dad was and had a medical situation and I had to call, like the nurse going to his house. She left me a voicemail and said call me back. I spent 15 minutes trying to get through the AI voice system just to talk to the person that left me a message and gave me the phone number until I eventually just called someone else and went I use Zoom info and I was like I'm just trying to find this person's cell phone because I literally can't get through main phone numbers anymore because the AI won't even get you to the person you want to help. And it's like to your point. Imagine if you're a driver and you have an issue and you need to talk to somebody and they're just going five, five, can I speak to Ben? Over and over and it goes sorry, didn't understand that. Can you please repeat that? Like that's mind numbingly insane.

Speaker 2: 31:08

Yeah, yeah, and that the whole my frustrations and really everyone that I've ever talked to that's where my opinion on all of this came from is just the automated menus. I have not talked to one person that loves them. I don't know anybody so we're moving from that, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're moving from that, and even I have control over that. They're telling me what to do and where to go, and I still hate it. Yes, much less talking to a robot where I have zero control. Yep, just trying to tell them something.

Speaker 1: 31:44

And here's the funny thing, right, like those are all the things that we see are issues with it. I'm going to point out a very useful use case for these where I've read that they've worked. I don't work in the side of the industry, but like doctor's offices that have to call insurance companies to just tell them information so that they have it on record, and back and forth. I've heard AI works really well to talk to other AI because the person doesn't want to talk to it but, like, if the insurance company has AI and the doctor's office, it can call and read the patient records, let them know what occurred, so it updates their file and, like I've heard those have saved a lot of time because, like, who wants to be on the phone at a doctor's office just reading details to somebody typing them in a computer?

Speaker 1: 32:25

Oh, my goodness there are use cases where it's applicable and helpful, and then there's other ones that create so much more work, so many more headaches and so many more issues that, like they, really I just don't. I don't think the tech is there to be doing that yet. Maybe it does get there Everyone believes it will but now, like there are things you can use this for that save money and time Like this isn't one of them.

Speaker 1: 32:50

I want to circle back to a thing, too on like the FMCSA. What are some of the other categories that you use, that you've researched? That one either aren't accurate or, when they disappeared, created like huge vulnerabilities just in yesterday.

Speaker 2: 33:05

So the daily data sets. Of course I use the census file, which is everyone two million rows weekly, multiple times per week. Another one was the daily any of the data sets that are updated on a daily basis versus their monthly upload. Those daily data sets were the ones that went down. One of those was the inspections data sets were the ones that went down. One of those was the inspections. So any of the inspections that were uploaded within the past 24 hours, which really two days, since it didn't refresh last night so any of the inspections entered in the past 48 hours, those aren't uploaded. So if I have one carrier and this does happen, I know of one carrier If I have one carrier that gets five out of service violations in one day, I won't see those until sometime this evening.

Speaker 1: 33:59

Oh, so that's helpful.

Speaker 2: 34:00

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:01

Yeah, I mean. The other thing too that really hit me was this was in Freak Caviar this morning. I think I sent this to Stephen and Nate was like, in the same article talking about the DOT and FMCSA outage, is the article about broker liability and attorneys suing brokers saying they need to do a better job vetting and verifying carriers, because when people get hurt over the road, we want to hold freight brokers responsible. And I'm like the irony of the fact that there's a case possibly going to the Supreme Court to make us more responsible for verifying and vetting trucking companies At the same time. The system we use to do that very job is both inadequate, ineffective, insufficient and flat out, not online yesterday, Like just wasn't there, Like just no information at all all day While a court is hearing a case going. Yeah, we should make them do a better job at verifying carriers with information they don't have that the government doesn't provide, doesn't update and doesn't distribute.

Speaker 2: 35:11

Yeah, and this is I am. I usually play a very neutral role between carrier and broker because I've been a freight broker. I grew up with truck drivers, as my dad and grandpa, so I can see from both sides. I'm very, usually very neutral. This one is where I'm. I'm still pro carrier, but it's not always 100% the broker's fault and all of the carriers there's a huge group of them that will 100% blame the broker for booking this carrier. That is a downstream symptom of the true issue. And if we continue running in that circle, chasing our tails over, blaming a broker for doing something that they thought was correct and true based on the data that they're given, I don't have to be careful with what I'm saying, you don't?

Speaker 1: 36:10

You can say it and, like I'll help you walk it back and we can always edit if we need to.

Speaker 2: 36:15

Brokers can only make their best decision based on the information that they're given. And so, just like, even if I'm automating nothing except for getting the information from the FMCSA and making sense from it, from Safer, I see that the carrier is good. I call the carrier, I call the previous phone number, everything still looks good. I book that carrier, something happens, and then now it's my fault because I did my job.

Speaker 1: 36:43

Correct and I want to walk through exactly what can occur and why it occurs in that example.

Speaker 1: 36:49

Right, so, as a freight broker, right, my shipper pays me to hire a truck based on their criteria. My shipper pays me to hire a truck based on their criteria safety, insurance, equipment, driver safety, equipment, reliability across the board. Right, okay, then the information I have access to and is only available is to the company level, so I can reach a company and I can see what is that company safety record, I can see if the company has the correct license and the correct insurance, and then I can call the driver and ask for his VIN and then hopefully get as close as I can to that driver's safety, equipment reliability or out of service, which you can't see, equipment reliability or out of service which you can't see. You can see at the company level but you cannot see the out of service records for that specific driver power unit or trailer. And then, if you call the FMCSA and want information related to a driver's information, like their track record, their safety, they will not give it to you because it's an employment record.

Speaker 2: 37:55

No, it's under the Driver Privacy Act.

Speaker 1: 37:56

Correct. So like the information for us to actually verify driver level, safety, equipment and reliability we are not even legally allowed to access, cannot get, is not provided. Then if a company makes a decision to hire somebody shady, with two weeks of training, out of a CDL mill, who has no over-the-road experience but the rest of that company's drivers were good that guy happens to move my load, an accident happens, and then I'm held liable for a decision the company made that I can't see, can't verify, can't get information on, but yet I'm held accountable to it and like to me that's like the equivalent of like hey, I hire a company to cut my lawn and they've been great all year, but like last week they hired a bunch of people they shouldn't, that had criminal records for crazy crimes. And then when they come to my house a neighbor gets robbed and then they come after me and go well, you hired the lawn care company. I'm like, yeah, but I didn't hire the guy they sent and I don't know who that was and I'm not legally allowed to see it and nobody was going to tell me.

Speaker 1: 40:23

And like there's no visibility into any, not, it's not just a freight broker, get rid of freight brokers altogether. A shipper hiring a trucking company cannot do that Like. All they can see is the company info. They cannot see driver info. So not only is the information about the company not even accurate, all up to date, we can't even see down to the driver level, nor a shipper, nor a freight broker, but yet if something bad happens, we get looped into a lawsuit as if we're negligent at doing a job we don't have the information to perform.

Speaker 2: 41:00

And the moment which brings up a point that I've been asking over and over and to this date, no one has answered me the moment that a freight broker has more information on a driver than they should, I'm going to make an assumption that I wouldn't have known how to vet a particular individual. I didn't do this in 2016-17 because the industry was not where it is today, but if I asked for a driver's a copy of his CDL, all I'm really going to be able to tell from that, from my perspective, without like deep intelligence training, is that his CDL is not expired and he's a real person. That's all I have.

Speaker 1: 41:44

We rely on the Department of Transportation state level that issues that card that they did their job Right. Issues that card that they did their job Right, which I want to go into for a second because, like the thing that Steven put in the chat is like the broker transparency, or like it is the best misdirection the industry has ever seen, where they're like, get all of the carriers mad at brokers instead of the state governments issuing crazy amounts of CDOs to people that are unqualified, which actually drive rates down. Like you could have twice the number of freight brokers. You could have a hundred thousand freight brokers active right now. It does not move rates up or down because a freight broker can't pick up a load and deliver it. The only thing that changes rates are the number of loads that need moved and the number of actual power units that can move it. If there are more power units than there are loads to move, rates go down. It doesn't matter how many people are in the middle because we don't move freight. So the fact that carriers are being led to believe that brokers are somehow responsible for rates one is economically not even possible. Like does not, cannot happen, doesn't have anything to do with anything and it's this giant misdirection from the actual problem of your individual state where you got your CDL, is just handing them out like candy to anybody that has one from wherever in the world because their state decided, hey, we've got a driver shortage.

Speaker 1: 43:13

Because of a great segue into what we were going to talk about in the green room, which is some things you dug in related to the ATA, and I think that's a good segue into again what we've been talking about over the past few episodes what is actually causing more fraud, more issues in a system that we can't even verify anyway? What is making that even worse and why is that happening?

Speaker 2: 43:38

On the. You mentioned broker transparency, which is funny. I wrote an article when everyone was arguing over this on X that broker transparency is a decoy, and I think it is. I don't think brokers and carriers should be fighting over issues that are deeper it is. I don't think brokers and carriers should be fighting over issues that are deeper. A lot of the rabbit holes I've went down as far as the CDL mills, where the money's coming from, where the money's going to. I can't release all of that publicly for multiple reasons. For multiple reasons, but it is very interesting. There's a lot going on right now in the political realm with the immigration and the NGOs and who's getting paid, who's paying for what. I continue to reiterate that this is directly linked and associated with trucking. The driver shortage If we have a shortage of something, we need more of something. We have a driver shortage, we need more drivers. We have, I don't know, not going past driver shortage.

Speaker 1: 44:48

That would be selling If there is a shortage of anything, just supply and demand. The price goes up, does not go down. So if there's not enough of something, capitalism will force the wages to that job to go up until those jobs are filled. And it doesn't matter what job that is, doesn't matter what product it is. You can go back thousands of years and look at any business. That is supply and demand. When there's less of something, the price goes up until it reaches a point where there's enough of it. Then the price stables out. So you can't have a shortage of drivers.

Speaker 1: 45:25

At the same time, drivers rates are the lowest inflation inflation adjusted, because that's this little caveat that the ATA plays of. Driver salaries have gone up. Yeah, Also, they've gone up at less of a percentage than inflation has, at one of the highest inflationary periods in the past 40 years. So, yeah, they went up, but everything that they also pay for went up even higher. So they didn't actually make any more money. They're actually making less money when you look at the inflation adjusted numbers, but somehow there's not enough of them. So why the line? I know we've been talking about it over and over again, but you really dug into what these folks are saying to Congress, to the people that should be addressing these issues, and what are they saying to them and why do they believe this?

Speaker 2: 46:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 46:14

Economically unfound bullshit.

Speaker 2: 46:17

Yeah, when I started really digging into this and I'm glad that I started writing about it and really talking about it when I did, because it was prior to all of this coming to the public, the public light, especially before the wreck in Florida recently and when I started digging into it, I wanted to figure out what language and how is that language, those words, how is this message being communicated in such a way that is incredibly convincing? And what I found was it is plain language and it is numbers. People hear what they can understand. Everyone can understand numbers, everyone can understand plain language.

Speaker 2: 47:02

And so an issue that we have in the industry and those that have went to Capitol Hill and I haven't went for transportation, I went when I was a social worker, especially my graduate program, but what I realized there is they're not in the industry, working day in and day out with carriers, with brokers on the road in all these transactions, like we are.

Speaker 2: 47:25

They don't understand the acronyms, they don't understand our jargon, and so you have to present this information in a way that's going to make sense to anyone that reads it, anyone that is a politician, anyone in Congress, anyone outside of there that could be an advocate for the industry that were going through the subcommittees in Congress, I realized that the losing side on all of these issues does not present numbers, does not speak in plain language. The other side, the winning side, in every single document it is full of statistics and numbers, again, which people hear, and it is plain language. It is not incredibly intelligent huge words and industry jargon. It is easy for someone to understand, easy for someone to get the issue and then also be presented a solution.

Speaker 1: 48:27

So and I want to go back to some of my notes from this right Because it says during the July 22nd Senate subcommittee hearing, chris Spears, who is the head of the American Truckers Association on the driver shortage, says he referred to the driver shortage simply as a gap between the current workforce and what's needed to meet demand. Here's that number 60,000 shortfall reported as of last October. So there's your number, there's 60,000 less than we need. Okay, now what I would say is there's 60,000 less than you need because they're not paid enough to go and take the jobs. There's not a shortage of 60,000 licensed CDL holders in the United States. It's that they won't take those jobs because they're not paid enough. Then he said, framed the shortage in general terms, pointing out that if it didn't exist, driver pay wouldn't have increased by 19% during a freight downturn, but did not attribute the shortage to any particular subsector right Now, meanwhile, sean O'Brien of the Teamsters identified a pronounced contrast and said yes, because turnover rates are 90% in truckload versus 10 to 15% in LTL.

Speaker 1: 49:55

So he's like yeah, there's not a shortage of them, it's just that they're turning them over because nobody stays in the job longer than a year, because they're not getting paid well. So, like Sean O'Brien's like comment clarifies the fact that the shortage of 60,000 isn't that there aren't 60,000 licensed CDL drivers that would take the job, it's that the companies don't pay them enough so that they can earn a living and they don't stay more than a year. So, like the fact that it's just like this, what's it lying by omission? Yeah, we have a shortage of 60,000 that these companies need to hire Well, there's plenty of them out there. You just don't want to pay them. Need to hire Well, there's plenty of them out there, you just don't want to pay them enough to take the job. Right, like that's not, we need more CDLs to fix it. You actually need less CDLs so that the companies wouldn't be forced to pay enough to keep these folks that are trained to stay on the job.

Speaker 2: 50:51

Yeah, I think we have. Unfortunately, trucking in America has went from an incredibly respected professional position and a career my grandfather drove his entire life. That's all he did. He was only a truck driver. But it has went from that type of respected and professional career into something that is low paying and tree level type work. Anyone can go get a CDL at this point. Anyone can get on the road.

Speaker 1: 51:25

They've lowered the bar so much, based on this false narrative, that they've flooded the entire industry with untrained and, a lot of cases, not responsible folks. That they've flooded the entire industry with untrained in a lot of cases, not responsible folks that they've just put behind the wheel, which has diluted the ability for trained, respected professionals to earn a real living doing the thing that they've been doing for in some cases like, oh, 28 years, right, and they're just to the point where companies are like, yeah, we can just pay somebody half what we pay you and let them drive for a year, and then we have an endless funnel of folks coming in that'll take that job when they quit.

Speaker 2: 52:02

Yeah, and it's like this the safety issue, the unqualified driver issue, fraudulent CDLs or CDLs traded in for cash, that doesn't just affect our industry and the rates, that is a national safety issue. These drivers, the unqualified drivers that are just handed a CDL and expected.

Speaker 1: 52:24

The whole country shares the road with them.

Speaker 2: 52:26

Exactly.

Speaker 1: 52:27

Yeah, to me. That's the part that scares me the most. Me too, and again, like everybody kind of knows politicians for the most part, and I'll make a sweeping general statement I'm more self-interested than Me. Too hard for me to wrap my head around, right that, like people can go and stand there and push a narrative that, like this person is very well-educated, with a very stellar resume, when you look at what he's done in his career, like this is not somebody that doesn't, in my opinion, isn't aware of what his statements are being interpreted as and how and what he's doing to sway folks to that point of view. Right, this was we.

Speaker 1: 53:19

It was Justin and I were talking with somebody on LinkedIn and I think it was one of the state's DOT officials that was saying like oh, this is a great thing that the ATA is doing to solve driver shortage. And they were going back and forth and Justin was like listen, like there's not a shortage, there's hundreds of thousands of CDLs and unemployed drivers that won't take these jobs. It's not that they're not there, they just aren't getting paid enough to provide for their family to do that work, so they're not filling the jobs. Then the government goes oh well, we'll just bring in cheaper labor to fill those jobs. Problem solved, everybody's happy. Except that that doesn't take into account the safety aspect, the training requirements, and that you're driving 80,000 pounds down a road. I mean, think about the highways we drive on. Like there are not New Jersey barriers. On most highways where you're driving 60 miles an hour there is a painted yellow line. You are two yards away from a vehicle that weighs 80,000 pounds driving 60 miles an hour in the other direction. Right, like you talk about the margin of error for something fatal to happen. It is so slim and we have so much trust that these things are doing what they should be and they just absolutely aren't right.

Speaker 1: 54:30

And like the one comment this is the one that I put in there because they were going back and forth and I was like, even if you split the difference between an oversupply of CDLs and the truckload market or we kind of operate and shortages in certain niches, because they said you know they can't hire local drivers for like cement and some of these other things, they're not able to get enough of them.

Speaker 1: 54:52

I said the ATA didn't do the industry any favors with broad, sweeping statements about a driver shortage. I said during the Senate subcommittee testimony this summer. He made no clarification and offered no specifics about which sectors were truly facing shortages and why those shortages may exist, whether it was a supply of drivers or whether it was a shortage of pay. And I said whether it was a supply of drivers or whether it was a shortage of pay. And I said whether it was intentional or not. The head of one of the largest advocacy groups for trucking had to know that those remarks would be applied writ large across the industry, and that's exactly what happened. His statements became the justification for efforts to weaken CDL and safety standards in order to solve a problem that only affected a narrow slice of the entire carrier market. Right, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 55:42

And I have my dad does bulk cement and fly ash. He doesn't see any of the problems that we're dealing with. There's no fraud. There's no. I mean sometimes it's hard to find a driver during certain seasons, especially their off season, but the fraud, the FMCSA issues and the data nothing Totally oblivious to those things being a problem. It's really drive-in reefer, drive-in and reefer. I think it's trickled a little bit into flatbed but flatbed does require um you to know how to secure your load. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 56:19

Like there's more risk and like that's the thing we talked about with Gordon and like I've again, it's anecdotal and it's one person's view of this, but like I don't see this at all. I don't see the fraud and I don't see the like I don't want to say like ineptitude, but like I that require like very stringent, like SDS safety data sheets where, like if there's a spillage, like somebody's going to die because it's very, very toxic chemicals. And the interesting thing was and I think I talked about this in that episode like I had Garrett and I worked on this and I worked on this with Genlogs. I pulled a list of every, basically every open deck piece of equipment you could use to ship heavy haul from like double drops through RGNs, and I started with a list of like 32,000. Then I got that down to like 8,000.

Speaker 1: 57:26

And then I spoke to hundreds of carriers to get rates for some large projects and I can tell you that in speaking to them I could tell you exactly which ones hired those drivers and which ones didn't, because they would tell me they're like yeah, my drivers don't have enough experience to take that. We have an RGN, but we are not going to take anything that requires a permit. We're not going to take anything over height and we're not going to take anything overweight because, like my, drivers just aren't confident running those types of loads.

Speaker 2: 57:54

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 57:56

And like they're honest and I'm like my list that was enormous ended up being like a couple dozen carriers where they're like, yeah, we'll do this all day long. And like, when you look at the rates per mile, carriers are arguing van rates are like two bucks a mile. I think national average was like 220 or 230, which I still find hard to believe. But regardless, these over-dimensional loads, they're $11 a mile. Some of them are $16 a mile, $9 a mile, Tanker loads that are $8 and $9 a mile. You're not seeing the same rate depression, oversupply and underskilled drivers. When, if something goes really wrong, something could happen to the driver, the driver's like, dude, I don't have could happen to the driver, the driver's like dude, I don't have enough terrain to do that. Don't put me behind the wheel of that thing. I'll yank a van down the road that someone else loads that I don't got to pay attention to. But like, hey, if you're going to put me on something where I'm responsible, I'll take a pass on that one. Find me an easier load.

Speaker 2: 58:58

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, thankfully we do have those niche parts of our industry, those sectors, and we can see that that's not a new thing. That's how the entire industry at one time used to be. It was a very high trust industry. We had drivers that we didn't have to call every 15 minutes or track them from their cell phones or ELDs. My grandpa I actually did a podcast with him once and I asked him how he would have felt if I called him every 15 minutes and he told me he would turn his phone off. He would have let me know when he got there and I was like I wish and I desire so much for an industry that is high trust again.

Speaker 1: 59:39

And it wasn't even that long ago I mean like 2018, 2019, it still was pretty close to operating that way. I mean we didn't really use tracking on any loads back then.

Speaker 2: 59:50

Oh no, I think maybe 20% of my loads got tracking yeah.

Speaker 1: 59:54

And it was only because the customers required it and they wanted it, because they needed a plan for when the guy arrived, mostly or just to be able to know what was going on in their supply chain for, like overall visibility. It wasn't a trust thing, it was more just the customer wanted to be able to time when their inventory was getting to where and even then, like we had requirements to like check all your drivers, like at least once a day. But like most of my loads were carriers that like I'd run with I knew like they would call me when there was an issue. I rarely would worry about those things and like it was back when like you could just call carriers and be like, yeah, you got a guy out there.

Speaker 1: 1:00:31

Yeah, hey, like you, kind of you had such less worry and energy to do the job back then because of the trust and as that's eroded, the job's gotten riskier, there's more liability, there's more fraud and, to be honest, like I am always a huge advocate of taking personal responsibility, even when other things change. But like you can only do so much when you need to rely on a centralized system of one, like just driver's licenses, like if states are just handing them out. How are we supposed to know which guy was qualified when he got it and which one wasn't, when they're just handing them out? There's no oversight. There was that news article where they were showing drivers going in with like a hole cut in their shirt and a microphone in their ear, yeah, and Jacksonville, and they're just like.

Speaker 1: 1:01:24

there's just such rampant fraud and ineptitude and state level DOTs handing out CDLs and then you have state officials going out and saying we're going to bring more people into the country to fix this driver shortage. And you're like what kind of bizarro world are we living in, that like that is the answer to this giant problem. That just makes it even worse.

Speaker 2: 1:01:49

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of terrifying to be honest. Yeah, it's kind of terrifying, to be honest, it is. It certainly is. Yeah, I don't. Since I started this and really digging into the issues, we can't. Throughout the course of my time in the industry the market, we brokers, shippers, carriers we've always been able to just like self-correct and fix things. This issue is so large and so rampant and so deeply funded we're not going to be able to fix it by ourselves.

Speaker 1: 1:02:24

I think that's pretty accurate, like I've been working with quite a few companies that are coming up with some, I think, really good solutions that will help mitigate these problems and help reduce the risk and get us closer to it. But I don't think any one solution is going to solve this without the government at the very least making sure the people that are authorized to drive a truck should be authorized to drive a truck, right, I mean? And to me like that's just like the bare minimum, that like we should be able to expect from like taxpayer funded roads that we put our family and children on every day. Like every single child in the entire country is required to go to school, most of which get on a public school bus and share the roads with these same vehicles every single day. Right, like every single thing in our entire country is dependent on the safety over the roads, and yet they've just, pun intended, fell asleep at the wheel at making sure the other folks driving these vehicles pass some bare minimum of safety standards and training right.

Speaker 2: 1:03:33

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:03:34

Yeah, the thing, the last thing too, that I just was like. I think also and we talked about this too are the basketball episodes, but like I think the ELDs, like there was that great article in overdrive that made a lot of this worse, the accidents, the safety has gone down because now drivers are trying to rush and drive less safe.

Speaker 2: 1:03:53

Oh my goodness yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:03:55

But the other thing too is that, like we talked about phone calls, well, since nobody's certifying any of the ELDs, like I genuinely don't even know that if that driver I talked to last week, if I get a phone call and that same phone number shows up, I don't know that that's that driver, because it literally could be someone that hacked into the back of the ELD and just called me on behalf of that driver and asked me for information. So, like, even bare minimum of phone information isn't even verifiable.

Speaker 2: 1:04:25

Yeah, and the documents. Everyone keeps pointing to email inboxes getting hacked and being able to get the documents. But if you have an ELD where the driver has a mobile app and can take a picture of a bill of lading, of a proof of delivery receipt or a rate con and it's going through that ELD, that data center now has that document. They don't even have to get into an email.

Speaker 1: 1:04:50

No, it's just totally accessible.

Speaker 1: 1:04:53

Yeah, wow, well, appreciate you coming back on.

Speaker 1: 1:04:56

I mean, I know it seems kind of like super depressing, but I do think it's super important.

Speaker 1: 1:05:00

There is hope. There is, and I think the more of us that talk about it and the more of us that bring up what's actually happening, yeah, hopefully more of this information gets to people out there because, honestly, like everyone out there, if you're a truck driver and you can't get a job or pay your bills, you should call your local congressman, you should send an email, because if they don't hear from us, they're not going to care and they're not going to do anything. I mean, we're at Capitol Hill this week trying to do some of these things. The more of us that are reaching out to local congressmen sending emails, making phone calls, congressmen sending emails, making phone calls, getting on Twitter, following folks like you, stephen, us, out there the more you can share this and get out the information that everyone and you guys are doing so much work to uncover, the closer we're going to get to solving it, because if they keep pretending like the problem's over here and no one's looking at it.

Speaker 2: 1:05:50

There's no chance it gets solved? Yeah, and we've done that for a very, very, very long time.

Speaker 1: 1:05:54

Correct. Well, appreciate you having on Any final thoughts before we wrap. I don't think I have any. Actually that was a lot.

Speaker 2: 1:06:03

God, we got it. Where do you want people to follow you at? Yeah, I am on all social media LinkedIn and the others. My handle is maybe Danielle, with three E's at the end, and don't be afraid to talk about the issues in the industry Just because it's something negative, something that happened to you. We've hidden it. We've brushed a lot of things under the rug for so long, and that's part of the reason why we are where we are today.

Speaker 1: 1:06:29

I couldn't agree with you more, and whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.