The Scam Economy of Freight (with Justin Martin) | Episode 310

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome back Another episode of the Freight 360 podcast. We're going to continue our discussion from last week with another guest this week. We'll introduce him in just a second and if you're brand new, definitely check out last week's episode with Danielle, where we started to dig into the ELD discussion and fraud and some of the animosity and just some of the negative, dark cloud topics that are happening and popping up in our industry lately. But there's also an entire website full of searchable content from prospecting carrier relationships, protecting yourself from fraud, getting started as a broker. You've even got the Freight Broker Basics course in there.

Speaker 1: 1:00

If you're looking for an educational option that we put together with DAT on how to start a brokerage or grow your team and educate them, share us like it. Comment all that good stuff. It helps get our content out to the folks that it's really designed for. So, without further ado, I want to give a quick intro to Justin Martin, who's joining us here, otherwise known as Super Trucker on X. So, justin, for those that maybe don't know you or just have seen you on X, quick little intro on yourself and we'll get into today's discussion.

Speaker 2: 1:34

Yeah, hi, thanks for having me guys. I was a truck driver for 15 years and was just kind of like an online shit poster and somehow stumbled into a job at Freightwaves. I was there for a little under two years and left when the Firecrown merger happened because their plan for me was to take me from trucks and move me to boats and I said I don't know anything about boats, so that's where I'm at today.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Fair enough, We'll get more into you and kind of your thoughts and opinions and all that good stuff in a little bit here. Ben, what's going on down in Florida? Gearing up for some football too, with your Steelers kicking off this weekend.

Speaker 3: 2:13

Kicking off this weekend. Us Open's wrapping up this weekend too. Been watching that for the past two weeks Down to the semifinals.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Now I did see Jess Pagula on the women's side man, I actually was able to catch most of her matches her games, Game set match.

Speaker 3: 2:31

What is it called? Honestly, I don't know. She's playing today at seven against the number one, sabalenka, and then the other semifinals tonight at eight, the finals tomorrow. So I would love to see her upset Sabalenka tonight. That would be really good. And then Djokovic is playing tomorrow night against Alcarez, which would be really cool, because Djokovic won in, I think, 23, and then Center won in 24. So it would be really cool to see an old head win against the number one and number two.

Speaker 1: 3:06

Yeah, nfl, we're back. We're recording on a Thursday today, so tonight is Thursday night football. As happens every year, the Super Bowl champs get to host the season opener for the league and the Dallas Cowboys will be playing Philly, so expecting nothing short of just a dominant game blowout. But we'll see, justin, what are you an NFL guy at all?

Speaker 2: 3:38

I had to become one when I moved to Philadelphia. My parents are Air Force. We moved around a lot so I really had no sport affiliation whatsoever. And then when I met my wife or girlfriend at the time not wife I had to get converted into that cult. It's funny that we're talking about this right now. I literally just got a text from somebody that sent me an. Nfl memes page link oh nice, Everyone's all excited.

Speaker 1: 4:00

In your household it's Go Birds, I assume 100, everyone's all excited In your household. It's go birds, I assume. 100% Okay, nice man. Well, I think you'll be pleasantly content with the outcome of tonight's game.

Speaker 2: 4:11

Hope so. Grease up those poles baby.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Yeah, ben, you guys are playing at the Jets, the Steelers are this weekend, and then I'm going to try and see if I can do this little media thing here Sunday night. And there goes the copyright infringement.

Speaker 2: 4:26

I was just going to say that.

Speaker 1: 4:27

That's why I kept it short. The Bills Sunday night football here in Orchard Park hosting the Baltimore Ravens. So no one in Buffalo is confident about that game, it's. You know. They got to go out there and play well to get a win. Even at home the Ravens are good. So, um, steven, you sent over your uh, you got you guys are playing. You call them the city up north, the browns. I feel like that's like an ohio state, michigan thing where they like that, you know that team up north or whatever. But what's your uh, what's going on with joe burrow and the bangles?

Speaker 4: 5:00

uh, well, so everyone is very optimistic. Can they win week one? God? I hope so. Probably not, but we'll see. You know, we have a long history of just not doing anything in the first three weeks. What's?

Speaker 3: 5:17

with the positive energy out there, man, what's with the pessimism?

Speaker 4: 5:21

I'm in Cincinnati, it's the city of New Zealand You're driving up there, it's because it's in the pessimism. I'm in Cincinnati, it's the city losing teams.

Speaker 1: 5:26

You're driving up there, it's because it's in Cleveland, right?

Speaker 4: 5:27

Yeah, so I take my customers out there. I got a customer up in Cleveland that are big Browns fans so we go to the game every year and week one is always fun, so we'll do some tailgating and take them out. Hopefully the Browns lose so I can shit talk for the next week and a half, but we'll see. It was cool. I don't know if you saw that picture on the history of the Browns and the Bengals.

Speaker 4: 5:51

It's one of those matchups that, regardless how good or how bad the other team is, it always is like a fight to the death between the teams and over the history Was it a bust.

Speaker 1: 6:02

Yeah, it's awesome. And so over the history F between the teams Division rival.

Speaker 4: 6:04

Those are the best. Yeah, it's awesome. Over the history between the two teams, the Bengals have scored 2,249 points to the Cleveland Browns 2,090, which is a lot closer than I thought it would be.

Speaker 1: 6:17

Wow, crazy, Vegas is calling that a five and a half point game. I actually heard for anyone that's into into like sports betting and whatnot like they used to say the home team gets three points and they said that now cause, and where that came from was like a mix of time zone changes, hotel conditions, like all of that.

Speaker 3: 6:40

It's that, but also like there was a big misconception and like my dad used to be booking like the seventies and like a couple of my buddies dad's friends were and stuff, and like they used to talk about all the time was the goal of the line Isn't to make it equivalent or a predictor. The goal of the line, especially back then, was to make sure the bookies had half the money on each side, so they just made the spread. The goal for a bookie is you get 10 grand on each side and you just take the 10%.

Speaker 1: 7:08

That's why the line will move as you get closer to a game right, Depending on who's putting money on what.

Speaker 3: 7:12

Correct and back then local betting most of your bets you took, all of the betting was on the home team that week, right.

Speaker 1: 7:18

So like they always tried to move the line based on how much money was actually bet on each side, not based on who they actually thought was going to win by how many points, so one of the guys and we had on local sports radio a few weeks ago was saying, like they used to, they used to throw three points at the home team based on things like time zone change, you know the conditions of the hotel.

Speaker 1: 7:43

And they said based on like, based on where things are now with like nice hotels and accommodations like that's more like one point five or one point six points that get factored in and someone and I mean someone- in Vegas is part of the me on this stuff too.

Speaker 3: 7:59

You say referees too, like if there is a 50, 50 call, call it tends to lean towards the home team um, anyway, there's uh sports.

Speaker 1: 8:09

I uh, I'll give my full take next week, um, once we're through week one. But uh, news I did see, um, we haven't had any like major hurricanes yet. That's going to impact the freight market. But ben, they are saying the second half of this month is where the Gulf, like Florida and the Gulf states, are expected to get like hammered. So anyone who's shipping out of the Gulf area or into the Gulf area, this is a time to have conversations with your customers, keep track of these as these storms develop in the Atlantic where they're supposed to hit and impact, and all that stuff developed in the Atlantic where they're supposed to hit and impact, and all that stuff.

Speaker 1: 8:45

What else in news? You see what the truck's got a new host named. Put that out in our newsletter this morning. It's always interesting, like when a show changes its host, like you know. Is it going to, is it going to catch on as well as it did in the past and whatnot. But we'll see. Steven, is there any new news on that whole drama? And, justin, you're huge on Twitter or X.

Speaker 1: 9:13

Yeah, I know the whole Booner and Craig Fuller thing.

Speaker 4: 9:17

Yeah, I know Darren over at Carrier4 and posted some screenshots of a text about shareholder stuff. It seems like there's a lot of things that are supposed to come down this week, but who knows? Because he's got a couple people that I think he's dragging.

Speaker 1: 9:35

I just lost interest. Drama's kind of fun at first. Then you're just like, eh, there's better stuff. I'm curious to see what FreightWaves does going forward, because it does seem like like kind of fun at first.

Speaker 4: 9:43

Then you're just like there's better, there's better stuff. Yeah, I'm just I'm curious to see what freight waves does going forward, because it does seem like there's a vacuum there. Um, but the guy that you just mentioned, that, um, I read a little bit of his history and he did like some sports broadcasting in chattanooga, so it seems like he's probably got the personality to fill that void, but I don't know it'll be interesting. Justin's probably got the personality to fill that void, but I don't know It'll be interesting. Justin's probably got more details than I do.

Speaker 1: 10:08

Justin, what do you got?

Speaker 2: 10:10

Well, I'm a former Freightways employee, so I got to be careful.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Yeah, that's true. Give us some tips.

Speaker 2: 10:15

I like Malcolm, so I went and auditioned for the show too. They were offering me the position for a little bit, but it would have been like a huge challenge for us. Malcolm is out of Knoxville, I believe, so it's not that far of a move for him. But for me, like if I was single and like 10 years younger, I'd have jumped on that in a heartbeat. But I'm 42. I got a kid that just entered kindergarten. My wife's family and friends are all up here in New Jersey. So I think I was a little too overexcited in the beginning because I was like I got to do this, I want to do this. And she just kept hammering me like you're asking a lot, you know I'd be like giving up everything up here. So after thinking on it for like a week or two I was like damn it, okay. Okay, I got to really reconsider this. But I like Malcolm. I watched him on his episode that he auditioned. I think he did a great job.

Speaker 1: 11:04

Um, it's really hard to find like the overlap of like content creator, somebody who's good on camera, um, and then also has like the freight background, like just that's a lot of niches to fill and there's probably not that many people out there, so I hope nobody does well yeah, I will say there's definitely and ben, we've seen this over the years there's people who are really good at freight and are knowledgeable in freight and have tried to enter like the media space of it and just kind of like didn't it didn't pan out because, for one reason or another, they didn't have the time, didn't have the right equipment or set up or they just weren't, they just didn't really click with being on camera and talking and stuff like that weren't, they just didn't really click with being on camera and talking and stuff like that. And then we I've seen the opposite too we're like someone's great on camera and talking, but like they just they don't have the necessary knowledge to speak the lingo of our industry. So, um, yeah, that's, that's a really good point.

Speaker 2: 11:55

I talked to so many people at like freight events and I'm like man, this guy's like super smart. And then you know, you invite them onto a podcast or do something on the side and then as soon as that camera's hit their face, they just freeze up or they're just really dry on camera. And it's even more so on set at Freightwaves. Like I don't know if you've ever been in the studio, but I mean you're at a big desk and there's three gigantic cameras in front of you and there's a gigantic monitor with, you know, four different positions of everything that's happening and teleprompter. So having all of that in front of you all at once. If you're not accustomed to that or given time to like really acclimate, it's a deer in the headlight moment for sure.

Speaker 3: 12:31

I would say that's a huge thing.

Speaker 3: 12:32

Like even when Nate and I recorded maybe it was like our first course or maybe it was the one for DAT but like when you're sitting in front of a green screen and even with a teleprompter and your own lights in your own room, right, like it is a different feeling that you have to get used to and like it takes a lot of effort. Like I remember being exhausted, recording for like an hour and a half when we were recording. Like all of that long content, like you'd record something over and over again and you're just like that takes a lot more energy. And I had a lot more respect for, I think, broadcasting in general, because, like you're not really talking to a person, a lot of these things, like you're literally just talking outwards as you're kind of reading something, but you then need to bring personality to something that isn't even your words and like for sure, like it is not something that I think just comes natural. You really do have to practice it, I think, to get and boom goes the dynamite.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Yeah, Like that, like that clip is like the uh, the perfect example of it.

Speaker 2: 13:29

So and then if you're, if you're editing, if you're editing the content, to getting comfortable like seeing yourself and being like, oh my God, that's what I sound like, holy crap. I did a podcast with Freightways while I was there. It was audio only, but I edited all the episodes and that was a really good exercise for me to just really get comfortable of like, okay, how I sound in my head is not how I sound in the microphone, so I just got to get used to that.

Speaker 1: 13:51

On a freight note of that. That's why I always recommend like call recording when someone's training in brokerage and sales.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Just like you hear themselves Like we used to do this all the time, like we would, uh, like all of our calls were recorded and then what? One of the things that we would do in a sales meeting is like, um, if you think you had a really good call, like, write down when it was and we can, you know, play it back as a team. If you think you had a really bad call, write it down, we'll, you know, review it as a team.

Speaker 2: 14:19

But hearing like, either where you fumbled, stumbled or, you know, sometimes people would think they had a great call, we'd listen back and we're like, we're like how much of a skill do you think is that a struggle for you guys on the brokerage side is finding people who are comfortable talking on the phone, because that's like the hardest thing to hire

Speaker 2: 14:37

for yeah, that's such a trope now, especially with the younger people, like they're too afraid to pick up a phone and order a pizza and it's like, okay, if you're too afraid to do that, how are you going to pick up a phone and figure out how to move millions of dollars of freight?

Speaker 1: 14:48

Yeah, there's a to answer your question. Yeah, it's a big struggle. So, like Ben and I have said it a lot like some of the best sales folks that we get don't have a freight background. They have a service industry background like you. They have a service industry background like you know restaurants, bars, things like that Waiters, bartenders because they have no problem just talking to a stranger and holding a conversation. There's, there's like I saw a stat, it was like a month ago the amount of like the generation now, like in in middle and high school, like there are an increasing amount of friendships where they are like best friends through digital, you know, like through text and Snapchat and Instagram, and they'll walk past each other in the hallway and not even not even look at each other or speak.

Speaker 2: 15:37

It definitely wasn't that bad. When I was growing up. I was like the tip of the spear millennial. I'm 42. So you know terminally online, lots of friends online, lots of friends in person. Um, many people that I know online I've met personally. Um, every time I go to Matt's it's like, oh, I'm meeting like 20 new people that I've met on, I've known on Twitter for years. Um, yeah, it's, it's fun to like merge those two together. But I feel like as time goes on, those two circles are becoming further and further apart for younger kids. I feel terrible for them.

Speaker 1: 16:02

Yeah, okay, well, let's, let's talk. Let's talk our content today. So did you listen, justin, to our conversation with Danielle last week?

Speaker 2: 16:13

Yeah, it was, man, she is absolutely cool. I'm so thrilled watching her like take off like a rocket because she's she's doing exactly. I gave her no tips at all. This is 100% all Danielle's doing, but everything she's doing is exactly. The kind of advice that I've given to people is like find your niche, figure out your topic that only you are good at versus everybody else online, and just hammer that drum as hard as you can. Stay on messaging and craft your posts in a way that somebody who has absolutely no background in this can follow along, because I feel like so much of what's happening, especially the trucking industry side, these people in these groups, they're so insular and all they do is talk with each other so they're literally just ranting back and forth with CFR 49, blah, blah, blah. It's like nobody knows what that is. You have to be able to speak to a broad, general audience.

Speaker 1: 17:05

Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, I gave the little uh the example of me sitting down with a Congressman last year and I used an acronym and he's like, yeah, we don't like, yeah, I have no idea.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Basically, I have no idea what you're talking about. Don't use acronyms like break it down, barney style for me. So, um, so, but I guess I kind of wanted to to share a little bit more about you and what you do now and cause we. You know we very intentionally like pick the people that we want to have this conversation with around what's going on in the industry. But so you mentioned you used to drive, um, what, what is uh? And you you kind of teased, you know you're, you're in philly now. Um, what, uh? You're not behind the wheel of a truck the way you used to be, but what, what is uh, what is justin martin doing these days? And and you know how did you get into this whole uh online x arena of, uh, you know the super trucker persona?

Speaker 2: 17:56

I just I just say yes to everything and then I get invited on stuff. So so my background I would say I had like the very typical, like my driving career is exactly what everyone should want. I was a company driver kind of. I don't know if we can. I already swore on this. I ate shit for like the first year and a half.

Speaker 2: 18:14

I worked as a mail carrier, made no money and then got out of that drove for an owner operator and that was just like a different flavor of shit sandwich. And then this like dream job landed in my lap. Absolutely, absolutely nothing I've done throughout my life is 100. What I know it's like 50 50. Who I know? And it was this kid I knew back in high school and his dad drove for a defense contractor hauling military freight. And uh, he said my dad needs a new co-driver. Um, are you interested? And I was like this doesn't sound real. So met up with his dad and we had a great time and I drove for them for four years on the military freight.

Speaker 2: 18:50

So all the like, insanity of like the fraud and e-logs and all this stuff. I was exempt from most of that stuff in my career because I was on military freight and we were exempt from everything, everything. But I feel like over time, especially today, that pipeline has kind of broken down because that's like what companies that hire experienced drivers want is. They want somebody to kind of go through an entry level company, not hit anything, for a year and a half and then come work for us. But that pipeline is completely broken down and that's kind of where I see my position now is like I have been through that system, I know what it's like being in that seat and I want to try and help people make it through their first year or two, because if you can do that and survive, you're hireable pretty much anywhere.

Speaker 1: 20:25

Let me ask you this because I remember one of the first episodes I ever did of this podcast was it started in 2019. And I remember talking about, like going into 2020, my like thoughts on the industry and what I was hoping for, and obviously 2020 brought us what nobody expected. But I said, I really thought that the animosity between brokers and carriers. I really hope that brokers and carriers would find a way to have more of a middle ground and a coexisting relationship that's of mutual respect, because we both need each other.

Speaker 1: 21:02

And as you fast forward through the preceding six years since 2019, we've had COVID, we've the well got shut off of freight and then it got fire hose blasted and rates went crazy and then we had a wild amount of fraud and you don't know who to trust. So the animosity has almost gotten worse and it's because of, you know, a select pool of bad actors and bad players in this, in this arena, and so you were kind of saying a few things off air beforehand. I'm curious to your perspective on like where is that? You know, because Ben and I see it through the broker's perspective. I'm curious, where do you see kind of the broker carrier relationship on the whole, like currently and you know any general thoughts on it.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Yeah, I think right now, today, it's like the worst it's ever been, and part of the problem is because none of these communities talk to each other. You know, as a carrier, you're like oh, these brokers, they're always ripping me off, and sure, there's definitely some bad actors out there, but what the carriers don't realize is that the good brokers hate those bad brokers too, and they're they're like why don't these brokers ever call out these bad guys? I'm like they do all the time, but they're in their own, you know, silo communities yeah, it's like most of your carriers are on facebook, tiktok, twitter etc.

Speaker 2: 22:30

And then all your brokers are on linkedin, because I don't know. I don't know why, but that me, that's just kind of like how I've seen it. There is a fairly medium-sized broker section on TikTok and they're fantastic because it's amazing what they'll do. They put their phone in front of them, hit record and they're just on calls all day long and you really get to see how the sausage is made. And I wish there was a way that the good carriers and the good brokers can all come together and just realize it's not like me versus you, it's us versus them. You know it's all of us in this together, trying to build good relationships and move some freight and make some money, versus everyone else who's just trying to rip both of us off.

Speaker 1: 23:09

It's a really good point, Ben. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker 3: 23:11

Yeah, I mean I think there's two things that determine what freight rates are right. It's a free market with very little barriers to entry, and then we can talk about what some of those are and the regulations that are meant to put the guardrails on the free market. But at the end of the day, it's the number of loads to be moved and the number of carriers that can move those loads. Right and post-COVID. Not only do we have way less freight to move, it's getting worse. Like the manufacturing index came out yesterday, it's retracting. Basically almost every good and service that we use in this country is shrinking. Like US manufacturing is shrinking because they can't get raw materials. People are spending less money at restaurants, less money going out to events, less money on travel. We have less people coming to the country to spend money in our country on food and things, even when they're traveling. We have, overall, just less things moving. Everything in the economy is shrinking outside of data centers and billions and billions of dollars going into, investing into those servers and giant data centers. Right Outside of that, the economy is shrinking. So there's less freight to move. Now on the carrier side, the carrier market hasn't shrunk and again I'll piggyback on.

Speaker 3: 24:22

What Dean has said on a few episodes and written a lot about is like outside of the pandemic, you had two carrier markets emerge. You had carriers that saved a lot of money right, that were able to run for less than profitable rates longer than normal, and you had carriers that were able to buy very cheap equipment pre-COVID and get some COVID funding, that were able to sustain lower rates longer than they ever have right. But he had made a point that like somewhere around this year or somewhere within the next six months, give or take, like all of those trucks that were bought around COVID pre-inflation, like they're going to need rebuilds, like you can't indefinitely run those, so like they're coming up with a large expense that most of them haven't had enough money saved away to be able to pay for. And the ones that bought equipment at the peak that was really expensive, they're running out of the savings that they were able to bank during the peak of the rate If they saved anything.

Speaker 1: 25:15

If they saved anything, right.

Speaker 3: 25:16

So, like you're still, it's not an indefinite run of hey. Rates can stay this low forever, but shippers will take advantage of anything they can. That's the way the free market works. The people paying for these things are going to try to drive costs down until they can't, and then service fails. Then rates go back up. That's the cycle that happens in every free market, the economic cycle.

Speaker 3: 25:39

But the thing that I wanted to segue into are the guardrails, because it's not a level playing field. If every driver is supposed to be able to legally drive for, say, 11 hours a day, with the resets and everything, right, some of them aren't playing by that rule, right? And then when you have carriers that are doing what they ethically should be doing not driving when they're tired, making sure their, their trucks are maintained they're the ones going out of business. Where the other carriers and you guys have uncovered a lot of evidence as to how some of these carriers are bringing the entire freight market down and keeping it there, to me is, I think, where drivers and ethical trucking company owners should be angry Like this is where they should be directing this frustration and anger, as opposed to companies that want to work with them, give them more business and help them maintain their equipment at better rates.

Speaker 2: 26:30

Yeah, freight has always gone through like that 11 year boom bust cycle. So you know carriers who, like, have been through three, four or five of these cycles. Those are the ones getting wiped out now and that's where, like, the alarm bells really need to start sounding, because what we're dealing with now is companies that knew. It's one thing if, like you, came in during, like 2019, 2020, bought some trucks, we're chasing super high rates and then the rates crash and then you get wiped out. Okay, I'm sorry, you know shit happens, but these are companies that know what they're doing and they're getting, and they're still getting wiped out and, like, that just does not happen. And I don't think enough investigation has been really done on the impact of these carriers that either came in during COVID or right before COVID and have been able to stick around, cause normally you would think that when rates crash, these guys get flushed out, but they're still sticking around.

Speaker 2: 27:20

So it's like what are these guys doing differently versus everybody else? And what we're finding is, you know, a lot of them are chameleon carriers. A lot of them will, and you find this stuff on Facebook. They're so brazen with it. You go on any Facebook group for CDL jobs and it's like hey, chicago-based hiring drivers for Amazon. And we will edit your logs Just stating it specifically. Then you get into the more ethnic enclaves.

Speaker 1: 27:46

Wait a second. Those are actually advertising that. Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:50

These aren't private telegram groups or anything. This is how brazen these guys are. They will post on a public Facebook group hey, we need drivers for Amazon. We will edit your logs, preferably if you don't speak English. That's the one thing that we're really hammering down now. Guy on TikTok goes on these Facebook groups and he pretends to be like an Indian driver to get hired there. Because if I pick up the phone and I'm speaking with an American accent, click they don to get hired there. Because if I pick up the phone and I'm speaking with an American accent click.

Speaker 2: 28:18

they don't want American drivers, they want guys that they know are comfortable driving, you know, illegally.

Speaker 3: 28:25

Why is that and why would a company do that? Just for anyone out there that doesn't understand why there's a motivation to edit logs, to hire carriers that aren't native English-making, why would a company do that?

Speaker 2: 28:33

Because so, like when I went through training, it's hammered into us that you are a professional. Anything that you do that screws up, it's going to be all 100% on you. It doesn't matter if the broker told you or your dispatcher told you X, y and Z. If you do something and you screw up and someone gets hurt or killed, that is on you. You are the captain of your ship. Everything is on your shoulders. And I think the attitude at these companies is we can't push guys like that around. If I tell someone, hey, I need you to go from A to B and it's 800 miles and I need you to be there the same day, a guy like me is going to tell them to get bent. I don't care. But anybody else that either is here on a work visa or they can hold their passport hostage, of course they're going to bend over backwards and do whatever they can to you know, keep their job and still be here legally in the country.

Speaker 3: 29:17

So what is that? What is the correlation, then, to rates like tie that into the market, right? If you're a company that is operating like that meaning like you're, you're forcing drivers to drive longer than an ethical, responsible driver would, driving farther, driving more hours and being bullied into just chasing money over safety, right? What does that mean if that carrier is competing against you?

Speaker 4: 30:58

if you own a trucking company, what are they able to do that you can't do?

Speaker 2: 31:01

What's the?

Speaker 3: 31:02

disadvantage or advantage.

Speaker 2: 31:05

Well, if I'm running that shady company it's a huge advantage because I can undercut literally anybody. You know shippers don't care If I can say, hey, I'll do it for cheaper, here's your freight. And we're seeing it with the post office now too. They've started switching from their highway contractor rate model to now where they just post postal loads on load boards and of course these loads are getting underbid and that's how we get that accident like we saw in I believe it wasorell, texas, where that gentleman from Hope Trans fell asleep at the wheel. In this particular case, with this company, they had a system at their company where a driver could text dispatch I need coffee and they would just add additional hours onto their log. And that was on a trip that was, I believe it was, 1,000 miles or 2,000 miles. So of course a guy like that, you know, driving solo on a team load, he's going to get tired, he's going to fall asleep and people are going to get killed.

Speaker 1: 31:57

Is that a cultural thing you think we're like it's just an easier target for a foreign driver versus someone who sounds American? I mean where? Yeah?

Speaker 2: 32:12

Because we see why you know it. It would be one thing if, if, if I, if I just did not care, like I needed a job and I wanted to get hired at these companies, they would hire me. But because, but because they hear the accent, they're like, oh no, no, we don't want this guy. Depending, it really depends on the company. There are carriers like chicago that are run by like eastern europeans. As long as you tell them like, yeah, sure, yeah sure, I'll run cowboy, I don't care, they'll hire you.

Speaker 2: 32:32

The catch is going to be they're going to run you like a slave and then as soon as you say, okay, I've been on the road for three months, I'd like two days off, the instant you're out of that truck, that truck is gone. They'll fly someone out there and snatch that truck from you and I've talked to drivers that did that for a bit, like they. They worked at a company for a while. Maybe they got into an accident. No one else will hire them. These are the only guys that are going to hire them and that's exactly what happens every single time.

Speaker 1: 32:55

If you had to guess what percentage of the driving forces is in that sector.

Speaker 2: 33:03

Yeah, I don't know 1% 5%. That is. That is a Danielle question, cause for me it's percent. That is a Danielle question because for me I never knew. You see the Facebook posts all the time and social media posts, but she's the one that's really been digging into the number of MCs registered and all that stuff. My guess would probably be about 20 percent. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1: 33:23

Here's the other way.

Speaker 2: 33:24

Because that's what it takes for the rates to be driven that low. If it's only one or two carriers rates to be driven that low.

Speaker 3: 33:33

If it's only one or two carriers, you know that's not going to impact the market much. So the thing that I wanted to back into is that same answer from like the economic perspective, because Dean was on the show like two years ago when Nate, you and I wrote the trucking course for that right, like ethics, driver hours, profitability, teaching trucking company owners how to look at rate per mile, you know, earnings per week and things, and like the number he came up with back then was like I think like a dollar ninety five was like break even or almost less than profitability, and at the time we're looking at like average rates that are falling below that. And then anecdotally in brokerages we're seeing loads covered at like $1.55 a mile, over and over again $1.65. And like the math just doesn't math right. There is no other explanation for how rates can fall so far below what it costs to run a trucking company legally, right within the regulations at 30% less than a guy doing it the way he can. And looking at as cheap as you can possibly run this, you still don't get below that number. And even when you factor in backhauls to your point, like if it was only a few, we wouldn't see rates depressed this long at this extent.

Speaker 3: 34:42

Like there is no other economic explanation for that other than there are companies literally operating outside of regulations and like the analogy we were talking about before and off air is like this is what happened a hundred years ago in every industry. Like if I had a farm and you had a farm and I could force my guys to work 16 hours a day and feed them once a day, but you only work your guys eight hours a day, five days a week, I can sell my whatever I grow a lot cheaper than you. No one's going to to buy whatever you grow because I can sell it cheaper and keep more money. That is, and I'm not pro regulation, but that is the reason the government puts guardrails on the free market, because if anybody can do whatever they want, safety is the first thing that's going to go out the window and we all use these roads.

Speaker 2: 35:23

Yeah, I think it was Craig that put out a tweet a few months ago saying that, like right before COVID you know, 2018, 2019, there were some mega carriers that were offering just to move the trucks for like 80 cents a mile and that was wiping out a lot of people. So you know, these low rates cannot be sustained for that long. And until we started digging into like this more criminal aspect side, my thinking was we need rates to drop even faster, as hard as they can, just to like rip the bandaid off the pain over it.

Speaker 1: 35:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah, to drop even faster as hard as they can, just to like rip the bandaid off the pain over it.

Speaker 2: 35:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the longer you stretch this out, because everyone's been looking for, like, different reasons why, you know, right after COVID it was like, why aren't these guys going bankrupt? Why aren't these guys going bankrupt? And the first thinking was, well, maybe they got really good loans on their banks, maybe the banks just aren't repoing the trucks. Then there was like a little bit of you know, the PPP loan fraud, that kind of stuff. But you know, that's all said and done. Most of those guys are like you know, anyone who did that kind of loan fraud. Some of them are doing time now.

Speaker 3: 36:16

They're already being prosecuted.

Speaker 2: 36:18

It's been so long GFace, our favorite Armenian double broker.

Speaker 1: 36:42

He and his wife are sitting in jail right now over PPP loans. I pulled up this is just national averages, right? But to month it was $1.61. And currently this month it's $1.66. So we've essentially flat.

Speaker 3: 36:55

You've got a little bit of fluctuation throughout the year.

Speaker 1: 36:58

We had a little bit of a peak towards the end of the year, which is fairly common, and then it just dropped right back down after New Year's and it is just. It's just stretched out like we Ben. I remember talking Two years ago okay, is this gonna be the year that everything kind of comes back? And then again last year, is this year to come back? And then I hear jason miller's like, uh, like last week or whatever is like, yeah, I don't expect much until at least a year from now. Still like um, but I'm curious, justin, like you, you're saying you wish they would just plummet so fast that it would essentially rip the bandaid off, force people to just stop driving and, you know, find a different career. What would it take for that to happen? Is it even possible?

Speaker 2: 37:44

That was my attitude before we started looking into this stuff. Now I'm realizing like if that, if that really happened, a lot more good companies would get wiped out. I had my timelines wrong earlier.

Speaker 2: 37:52

It wasn't 2018, 2019, it was the great financial crash oh during, during, like the 0809 crash, uh, mega carriers were taking freight at 80 cents a mile, um, so you know you adjust that for inflation today, um, but also your. So the number you threw up earlier that was the. That's not, that's not the median, that's the average. So that low rate, half the freight's moving for less than that.

Speaker 1: 38:14

Yeah, exactly, and interestingly, on that point I'm glad you mentioned that is, ben, when we talk about if someone's using a rating tool, like we'll just mention DAT, for example, they're a sponsor of the show, we're partnering with them in a lot of things. When we look at that 50th percentile and then rate view, is when they give you that upper and lower threshold that's your 25th to 75th percentile and we tell people like, yeah, if you want to be able to book a carrier for lower than that 50th percentile, you've got to have more lead time and better carrier relationships, and blah, blah, blah. And now you start to start to think like, well, when you get a carrier that's below that 50th percentile, it could be because they're doing some nefarious things and they're, they've got some shady practices. So, um, on top of I don't want to go sideways on this, but on top of like all the, the risks that we're thinking about now we're not only are we trying to control our costs, but now we're spending even more on like trying to balance.

Speaker 1: 39:14

Well, is this guy legit? I've got to pay all this extra money every month for, like, vetting software and additional tracking tools and these integrations and all this stuff. And it's like we're, we're, like it's like a race to like the bottom of profitability. It feels like and yeah, I mean it's. It's scary to think that, like the amount of times this year alone that in my brokerage we thought we've done everything like better than the accepted standard and we still get someone who's screwing us over, scamming us or stole someone's identity or, you know, had shady logs and all that stuff. So yeah, I don't have a moral to that story, but it's more of just a frustration and rant on where things are at.

Speaker 3: 39:54

I want to tie into that because I think it's a good segue into how and what is happening that allows carriers to undercut legitimate trucking companies.

Speaker 3: 40:03

Right, and like one, we definitely know insurance that we could talk about of hey, we're insuring one truck, but we're running dozens of trucks without insurance just to be able to get through a vetting system, and most vetting systems don't have VIN level insurance verification. So, like the old way of hey, this MC has insurance does not mean the truck you book does have insurance. Right, is one of the obvious ones. Driving way longer than legally allowed allows them to cover more miles at a lower rate per mile, which is the really obvious ones. Driving way longer than legally allowed allows them to cover more miles at a lower rate per mile, which is the really obvious one. Stephen uncovered one like two weeks ago, related to trailer stuff that you think is related to like ELD information being put out to anybody that needs access to it. You want to talk about how some of these companies are cutting costs by literally not even paying for trailers. So not only just not paying for insurance, like literally just not even paying for their own trailers.

Speaker 4: 40:54

Yeah, I was talking to a former driver of mine and he left two years ago. He's been at four different companies since then and he's coming back now and he said every single company he worked for was editing the logs, and the last two companies they didn't even have their own trailers. What they would do is they would tell the driver hey, here's this trailer in this lot, you got to go pick this up and then they would keep that trailer for 29 days. And the reason he's leaving is because it was. The last company was JB Hunt Trailers and JB Hunt had reached out to him personally because he had parked in his lot that he pays for.

Speaker 4: 41:32

They had called the lot and they noticed the trailer was there. They got a hold of him and he said, hey, just so you know, like that trailer you're hauling is stolen. I was like what do you mean? And so their company had a list of JB Hunt trailers with the numbers where they were at, and he said, yeah, they would send me to targets walmart's. You know there were some random drop lots. We'd go pick up a trailer for 29 days, go drop it off somewhere else, and we just thought it was ours and, to my knowledge, jb hunt doesn't let you haul anything except for their freight on their trailers, and when I asked him he said I've never hauled a jb hunt load.

Speaker 2: 42:06

So oh my gosh, we would see that on the postal side too. You got postal contractors that just steal each other's trailers all the time, and the smart ones at least they don't steal the postal trailers.

Speaker 2: 42:17

The government trailers do not even have license plates on them, so you get caught stealing one of those yeah, you're looking at major major time, but as far as like 10 roads stealing someone else's trailer or moving around with that pregame, they just you know. Oh, I need a trailer for this load. I don't have one in the lot. I'll take that, guys.

Speaker 4: 42:35

The other thing I was going to mention, going to the costs and kind of to some of the stuff that Justin's mentioned with CDL mills and stuff, there was an article that came out, I think it was this week. The Louisiana DOT had a scam. Six people were charged with handing out CDLs and they didn't have to pass a test to get the CDLs.

Speaker 3: 42:55

So two or three states? I saw that with right, Florida, California. Wasn't there a third one in the news that they—.

Speaker 4: 43:01

Washington.

Speaker 1: 43:02

There was a sting?

Speaker 4: 43:03

I don't know, I just know. So Jacksonville had a sting in Florida, and then California had that thing a couple of years ago with their CDL bribery, and then Louisiana just had six people arrested. And so I mean, Justin earlier was talking about being that professional, that's. You know, I'm not going to run this stuff illegally. But then you have people who are getting CDLs at no cost or not even passing a test. Like you can pay those guys pennies on the dollar and they're going to do whatever they want.

Speaker 3: 43:32

The other one I saw was so they were showing on the news network, right Like going DMV video of guys going to take their test with holes cut in their shirt, with a camera and a mic in their ear and the guy in the parking lot was reading them the answers. To answer the question, I saw that To cheat on the CDL test.

Speaker 2: 43:51

Yeah, and again, guys who are doing that they're not going to get hired at like JB Hunt or Swift or whatever. They're going to get hired at some small independent carrier who is probably friends or family with them back home in their home country, and that's just how they roll. They know how to game the system here and they're going to do everything they can to get around it. Before we were starting here, we kind of touched on low-trust society versus high-trust society and I feel like a lot of the rules and regulations and practices that have been put in place over time in trucking in the US was all based on the high-trust system.

Speaker 2: 44:24

If I'm working with a broker or a shipper or whatever, I'm a regular customer. They know me, they know my face, but because there's so much capacity and so many carriers out there, not everybody's a stranger. Um, there's all these new tools that have been have to put in place and not very cheap tools, mind you either. So all this um, you know this incentive to try and get as cheap a carrier as possible, hire as cheap a driver as possible, book as cheap a load as possible there's all these extra costs that pile up down the line If I hire a driver that doesn't know what the hell he's doing. I got to put a camera in the truck looking at him 24-7, not in case when he screws up. I can at least cover my ass on the insurance side If I'm a broker and I'm hiring these shady carriers to move freight for me.

Speaker 2: 45:07

I got to spend tens of thousand dollars a month in vetting software to you know. Hopefully, try and weed these guys out, and they know how to get around those systems too. So this idea of like, oh, we just need to get everything as cheap as possible no, there's always like. There is no such thing as like cheap at the end of the day. Like you're going to get what you pay for.

Speaker 3: 45:27

If it's too good to be true, it probably is Right. The other analogy I was thinking of we were talking about sports, like we did at the beginning of every episode, nate. It's like the reason you have rules is for a level playing field, right? Can you imagine if, like, the Ravens are allowed to use steroids and they're going to play the Bills this Sunday and the Bills don't, and they just nobody is going to check these things? Like, what's the likelihood one team has a chance against the other, right? Or that, like, one team just is allowed to do whatever they want and no one's going to call any foul or any penalty on them, and the other team gets every penalty called because they're following the guidelines?

Speaker 3: 46:01

Like it wouldn't be very interesting to watch as a sporting event, but this is what happens in business, specifically in our industry, but somehow we've been able to weed these things out and other major areas like manufacturing and well, maybe not even farming, because, like now, that's an issue with immigration but like there's just not a level playing field for legitimate, ethical companies to compete with companies that are doing everything they can to flout the law, and even to your point, justin, you guys uncovered a lot of this when they go out of business. They don't really go out of business, they just shuffle all of their assets under another motor carrier number and then restart the thing over again. And if they got to fire everybody, who cares? They're going to bring somebody on anyway. Because even if you've got a good driver for three months, if you're going to drop him in two days, that he wants to take off with his family, what is the chance that company has any loyalty or respect for the people that work for them in the first place?

Speaker 1: 46:49

Let me give you an example.

Speaker 1: 46:50

I'm going to give you an example. This is something that happened last week and then I want to talk about, like the chameleon care carrier thing after that. But we had a load that we booked, a carrier who agreed to a team. It was posted as a team on the load boards. It was agreed to as a team had to get to. It was it would have been physically impossible for one person to drive it themselves in the time frame and the distance it had to go. And the driver shows up solo five hours late and where you know a customer wants to deduct and the carrier is fighting it, saying like I couldn't have. You know, I couldn't have driven that far in that amount of time, you know and we're like, but you agreed to a team and um, then there's some question about whose story is true, about the timing.

Speaker 1: 47:40

So we asked for a download of his eld to show proof of when he showed up and very quickly, oh, I don't I, I can't do that. So clearly it was clear up front is that he was going to to uh drive with with a ghost driver on the logs right to make it look like a team, and the guy ended up getting getting tired and that's why he stopped and like. So luckily he, you know he did the safe thing and stopped and showed up. You know, slept and which caused him to show up late. But his intent all along was to drive their solo, pretend to be a team and as soon as we were like, hey, we want to get you paid. You know, the 500 or whatever was deducted for for this customer fee of being five hours late, we just didn't. You know, we need your story to be validated on your end, that you know you were in these places, like you said, you were at the right times and your logs can prove that to us.

Speaker 1: 48:33

But no, they, you know, keeping their keeping their practice intact versus you know, getting $500, that it wasn't a, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. So, but talk to me a little bit about, or talk to us a little bit about this, the chameleon carriers, because I know we kind of touched on it last week, but, danielle, but hot, what, what? How are they operating? What is this? You know, what should we be looking out for? And I guess what's? Yeah, what's their tactic there?

Speaker 2: 49:00

so a lot of them. Again, this goes back to facebook. Um, they just buy, sell and trade mc numbers on facebook. It's a huge open market. Um, you know, there is no. I'm sure there's private groups too, but most of these groups are publicly available. If you just go on Facebook, search MC numbers for sale. These are carriers that maybe got registered during COVID and then they just went inactive for a bit and now they want to make some money selling them. So people will buy multiple MCs and if they hire a driver and that driver screws up, get somebody killed or over time their safer score reaches a point where the FMCSA actually steps in and shuts them down, no problem, they just deactivate that one and reach into their pocket and pull up one of these inactive MCs and keep hauling freight.

Speaker 1: 49:46

Is that kind of what we saw with Hope Trans. Didn't they offload a bunch of their drivers or their equipment and move them over to different?

Speaker 2: 49:54

We've seen that with a ton of carriers. So going back a few years, there was that horrific crash in Colorado. A driver was coming down I-70 and killed, I think, 10 people. So the owner of that company, she was a Cuban immigrant. The driver was a Cuban immigrant. So there's a reason why she hired him. It's because she knew nothing about running a trucking company, but she needed somebody that she could talk to on a local level and, uh, you know, have them do whatever they wanted.

Speaker 2: 50:19

So he gets into an accident, kills a bunch of people. That company gets shut down. A week later, two weeks after that, she's got a brand new name, same address, just still running freight. That lasted for like another year or two before she finally shut it down. Now she runs. She's completely out of freight, thank God. But she's running a medical documents translation company oh great, Out of California. But with Hope Trans it's the same thing. I think we're I'm blanking on a number, but there's probably like five MCs that are still registered with them. So if and when Hope Trans gets shut down, they just open it up on another one and the FMCSA is giving them 60 days to clean up their act.

Speaker 3: 50:59

I saw that and I'm like.

Speaker 2: 51:00

So that's something I need to emphasize really hard to you guys on the brokerage side. The government is too slow. They're too slow and too inefficient. They're not going to protect you and your customer's freight from getting ripped off by these guys. Whether they get stolen, double brokered or the load gets lost because the guy gets into an accident, you're still going to be on the hook for this risk because they're just too slow and inefficient to flush these guys out.

Speaker 1: 51:31

You have to be really careful at vetting your carriers under as fine of a microscope as you can, because they're really good at this. So let me ask you this I know you said this and I agree with you that the government is too slow and inefficient to solve this problem for us, but if there's anything they could do, even on a minuscule level, I'll be in just over a week. I'll be in DC at the TIA Policy Forum, where we get to talk with members of Congress, with panel from the FMCSA and the S, and FMCSA is for safety. So, on this note, what are some of the things that we can be bringing to their attention or asking for? Is it should there be like what? What should trigger a red flag? Is it the principal place of business? Is it the registered owner? Is it what?

Speaker 2: 52:10

My, my. My steps are always run up the carrier, look at the address. If the address is a house, a PO box, apartment complex, that's red flag number one. Then run the address. If you find a bunch of carriers registered that address, that's a thousand red flags right there. Do absolutely, under no circumstances, do business with that person. If it's like one or two, fine, because that happens. You know, sometimes carriers might be. You know, one carrier is their truck load and the other ones are LTL or reefer or whatever. But if it's like six, seven, eight different carriers and they're all registered into one single address, that happens to be complex.

Speaker 3: 52:46

How does someone do this? Justin, Explain to somebody where the easiest way and place to go to do these quick vetting things.

Speaker 2: 52:53

Oh, 100%. Search carriers. Garrett has made this incredible website. You could also do it through Safer, but it's a lot clunkier, especially if you're trying to do it on your phone. But at least with search carriers it's so much easier to just type in a company name or the MC number or DOT number. It has like a what do you call it? A super search feature. You just type any of those numbers in there. Everything pops up. So if I'm on my desktop browser I keep two tabs open. I got search carrier in one and search carrier in the other, first tab. I'll run the trucking company, look at the address, copy and paste the address into the second tab and then, if it returns a bunch of results all in that same town, open up each of those results in a new tab and double check the address on them. And if all those addresses match, big red flag. It's even more fun when you look into the contact info and you see like they're all either similar or same names or the the phone numbers too. That's another big one.

Speaker 1: 53:52

They might have a different name or maybe even a slightly different address, but a lot of them they use the same phone number for multiple carriers yeah, I remember one of the things, um, like this didn't feel like a big ask, but one of the things we've lobbied for in the past is don't let a motor carrier register at a PO box, like require a physical address, and the the lack of like understanding why that was a red flag was alarming to me. Like they're like, well, what's what's wrong with it being a PO box, that being a PO box, and we're like, if they can't show a physical like location, that's like the lowest, lowest level of ask that I would say. But in addition, like you get the carriers that have you know they say they've got 12 or you know, oh, I've seen like 25 trucks and their address is a residence. And it's like, yeah, you don't have a shop or a facility or any kind of like small terminal where you you know where your trucks are parked. Like my brokerage is separate from our trucking company but our trucking company has a we don't even have a ton of trucks. But like we have a facility with a wash bay, with a maintenance, like a maintenance area, and we leave our, our unused equipment outside of that area. It's parked there in our secured location.

Speaker 1: 55:07

Like that is how a legitimate trucking company, even of a small to medium size, operates. So when you start to see like the ratio of, like how many, like we all started with, like you know, equipment size, equipment fleet size versus inspection ratio is like a red flag. But like when you don't even have a, you just have a po box like, and then if you look at that po box you've got you know 80 different dot numbers registered to it. It's like there's got to be some sort of either algorithm or like quick check, that like when someone goes to do a registration, like the fmcsa's registration, the urs should have like some sort of like flag where it's like no, you need to go through this additional step to be able to be authorized, because X, y and Z and again back to the government's talking about.

Speaker 2: 55:54

Like I said earlier, all these rules were built on a high trust system. It's all self-reporting you register your address and whatever. It is cool, we'll audit it later on and over time like staffing cuts and everything Because every new MC that gets registered or DOT that gets registered has to go through an auditing process and I think they've barely audited like 5% of these since they've started. Duffy is on national TV saying that he's going to be auditing all the non-domicile CDLs in the country. I'm like that does nothing. That does absolutely nothing, nothing.

Speaker 3: 56:24

Get the carriers audited, and I'm like that does nothing.

Speaker 2: 56:26

That does absolutely nothing.

Speaker 3: 56:26

Nothing. Get the carriers audited. And here's the other thing too, like I, if the FMCSA just required every trucking company to have up-to-date VINs at any given time that they're running a load for with the accompanying assurance, right, at least you'd have a centralized database to go and look at and see, hey, is the truck running my load Literally the truck, not the MC registered. And do they have insurance? Because not just BIPD insurance, but like, what insurance is associated with that at any given time? Because in every TMS and everybody in the country could just integrate with it and go, hey, this is the van, this is the truck on our load, are they associated with this MC? Oh, they've been seen with six MCs in the past nine days. Okay, like, it is not that big of a technical lift to have all of that in there, right Like all this, all this stuff is is publicly available, and forget that.

Speaker 2: 57:19

That's really how Garrett works with, with search carriers. You know he's got a couple of different paywall levels, whatever, but that's because you's because some of that stuff isn't quite as publicly available. So the VINs is an important one too If you want to really vet a carrier, having multiple MCs at an address and this, this and that those aren't guarantees. But if you want a 100% guaranteed full-on chameleon carrier, look, look up a carrier, scroll down to their equipment info and just pick a truck at random, copy paste the vin into a search carriers and just see you know if.

Speaker 2: 57:54

If it's a truck that's been bought and sold and bought and sold to like a couple couple companies over time, fine. But if it's like, oh, it's at 20 different companies and they're all at the same address, like oh, okay, we need the feds, like kicking in doors at this location ASAP.

Speaker 3: 58:09

Yeah, and like Genlogs I don't know if this is in the current one, but which will be out is like you'll be able to see like a timeline with little lines of where this MC, this VIN was showed up under this MC. And you see a legitimate company, right the VIN. When it leaves one MC, it stops and shows up under another one. The illegitimate ones, all the lines overlap, right? You're like, oh, all of these MCs have been run this year with this VIN. And you're like, okay, well, clearly that's not just a leased on driver working for a period of time, they're just throwing magnets on the truck every other day to change the MC, to run another load.

Speaker 2: 58:42

Ryan Joyce. Linkedin is like some of the most entertaining like freight fraud stuff out there. He just, you know, his day job before getting into trucking was he was tracking terrorists. So he's just using the same tricks and tools that they used doing that on these guys and I just it's it sucks because like not enough people like know about Jen Logs and like what he's doing. I'll go on like Reddit and someone will say like oh, my trailer got stolen and they'll post a picture of it and I'll DM that photo to Ryan and within three seconds he's like boom, yeah, got it in our system. We have a track Like he just he tracks down everything.

Speaker 3: 59:16

Yeah, the other thing too, nate, to your question on what I think the government can do, and we talked about this last week. But like I researched this after because I'm like, wait a minute, everybody's arguing from the government side that like they don't want to allocate money to the FMCSA to do more of anything, right, like, and we guys we talked about this off air and then I was thinking I was like, but wait a minute, like the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, does not use taxpayer money to certify medications. What they do is they charge the drug company to pay for them to run the trials before they can make a drug safe. Why in the world can't the fmcsa have an eld certification that is paid for by the eld companies that are supposed to be set to this standard? Make them pay for it, make them pay a premium to what it costs the fmc to certify them, and then the excess money could go in to fund other things in the FMCSA and you'd have a smaller number.

Speaker 3: 1:00:11

Because when you don't, when you can self-certify, there is no reason why I wouldn't just spin up 15 ELD companies with the same servers behind me, because I can just keep putting a different brand on it every day and all I got to do is fill out a paperwork and the FMCSA goes rubber stamp. If they just treated it the same safety that they treat medications, with 85,000 pound trucks driving down the roads with everybody in civilization, why can't they charge the ELD companies $5,000, $10,000 to pay for their own certification to be able to sell that product, to literally keep roads safe? Like that is the whole point of that certification. Like to me that is the most asinine aspect of the entire system.

Speaker 2: 1:00:50

Not only that, a lot of these companies because they're based overseas. That's where all your data is ending up. So, just on a national security level, why would you want foreign actors knowing where all your trucks and freight are at any given time?

Speaker 3: 1:01:06

You can't get a freight broker's license without being physically in the United States and paying taxes with a tax ID number. But for some reason the software that sees all of the literally vital, important information, like literally to a national security level, on like DOD loads and things, is just housed overseas by God knows who, going God knows knows where, and nobody's looking at any of it.

Speaker 2: 1:01:29

Yeah, yeah, no, when we really started putting that all together, that that was like. That was like my aha moment, Cause, um, that was where you know they're getting all this, all this info from you. You talk to carriers that are, um, there's a lot of brands on Twitter now posting about like, oh, I had, uh had, an entire trailer load of our sports drink, you know, get hijacked or whatever. And it's like I DM the CEO and I talk to him, I go back and forth and I say this is usually how a lot of these guys operate. You know, they got phished or they got into your email or did this or that.

Speaker 1: 1:01:59

At no point did I ever consider like, oh, it was on the carrier side where they were phished and they just sent someone out there, uh, ahead of them just about every incident of well, it is every incident of freight theft that I've personally dealt with this year involves the carrier having their identity, having their email hacked, typically through like a phishing scam or something like that yeah, you know it's great.

Speaker 4: 1:02:24

Like the one aspect of that is when you talk to like some of these shippers and receivers and you ask them like hey, can you do us a favor? Like when the driver checks in, just go walk outside and look at the name on the side of the truck or whatever, and they lose their mind. Like you want me to walk 50 feet?

Speaker 2: 1:02:40

I'm not step outside in the parking lot, but it's not out there but this is the last.

Speaker 1: 1:02:47

Let me give you another example. This is one that actually Ryan with Genlogs, him and his team, have been helping me out with in my company is. We had one it was actually two two loads that a carrier was, you know. We went above and beyond, vetted, you know, very diligently. We even like told the shipper like hey, here's the two trucks they're going to show up their name and mc is this, please verify that. So the shipper, before they load them, takes pictures, sure as shit, the right name, the right mc.

Speaker 1: 1:03:18

They even throw tracking on the freight itself. We're tracking through a gps um application and, um, the freight gets stolen. And we go on gen logs and the. They were smart enough to get like professional looking placards tied to impersonate somebody and they had hacked a legit carrier's email to get the right information and all that. But they weren't smart enough to like put a fake VIN number or something like that. So they, their actual VIN number was there. So we tied the VIN number to photos on gen logs of their actual trucks without the fake placards on there. But it's like we're, we're doing all of all of that and then we're like, oh well, we could have prevented it if we use this additional software that costs three grand a month, because that would have required, you know, multi-factor authentication.

Speaker 1: 1:04:13

Blah, blah, blah, or this other tool that tracks the eld and it's like, well, the eld could be, you know, act fraudulent as it is, so eld tracking is not 100 going to save you. The mfa could be hacked if they. You know there's all these things that could be.

Speaker 2: 1:04:21

You know there's like no perfect system and it's just insane the amount of just like fraud and bad actors that are out there hurting the like, the people that have good intentions, that just want to do good business I wish I wish the fbi would create some kind of like trucking task force, because you know there's so much of the fraud and theft and everything that goes on it's it's a low enough level that it's not really like a priority for them because they want to go after, like you know, terrorists and bad guys that want to blow up stuff. But you know, when you put it all together it's like you know billions and billions of dollars of freight theft that goes on every single year. And you know so a little bit more about my background.

Speaker 2: 1:05:03

My family moved to Florida in 1997. My dad started a company with some friends in the Air Force called IST, innovative Surveillance Technology, and they built surveillance vans for the government. And so you talk to some of these agents over time and they all kind of have like the same motivational drive. They just want like a nice big juicy case that they can hang their hat on and say I busted up these guys. And say I busted up these guys and like if they created some kind of like trucking task force that just went after crime rings that were involved with all this stuff, it's one of the greatest like target rich environments we have right now. Yeah, I remember.

Speaker 1: 1:05:38

Ben, I've told this story before, but we had someone had tried to like pose as our brokerage and coordinated like basically freight theft in a nutshell and it was like 300 some k worth of apparel like adidas pants or something like that, and we knew where it went. Um, it got like taken to a warehouse in la. I contacted la county's da, like they're the da's office district attorney, and they basically told me yeah, dollar amounts like not like that, that dollar amount's not gonna get on our radar. Like sorry, and I'm like three hundred thousand dollars like what?

Speaker 2: 1:06:17

like yeah, I mean sorry, but like we just you know that's small potatoes and I'm like this is you get and you would, you would think like this is because they're only looking at that one, that one. But they've got to realize if they bust that up, it's multiple cases. They've done that.

Speaker 1: 1:06:34

Yeah, exactly, I've actually had some pretty good success and it's long and drawn out, but I've had some success with local FBI offices. Depending on where the like, where the fraud happens, you'll get some agents that are like they're happy to like hop on that, because they either don't either they're newer or they just don't have a caseload that's going to make them look good or get their job done. I've also had some good luck with the, the IG's office under the DOT. So, like the investigative what is it? The inspector general or I don't know whatever the investigative like subset of the department of transportation I I've had at least one specific agent from there that I've worked with for years on certain larger cases where, like they're able, they're able to start building up a larger case based on tips and complaints they're getting from various different brokers. But overall, most of these individual agencies are just like, yeah, I mean they just see one case, not enough. And on to the next thing.

Speaker 2: 1:07:35

So, yeah, they're not looking at the holistic picture. One of my biggest white pills in all this stuff going on is that a lot of these shady carriers are trying to get involved in the US mail. I'm like, please do, please. I mean it's going to suck if your mail gets stolen. But yeah, the postal inspectors, they have a 98% conviction rate and if they have you in your sights you are toast. They're not fast, they're very methodical, but, speaking as a former postal employee, typically what they'll do is they'll bait you.

Speaker 2: 1:08:05

So if you're a letter carrier, on your route you open up somebody's mailbox, put mail in there. There might be $100 in cash sitting there. It's a sting. They bait guys all the time. You might get away with the first one, you might get away with the second one. Then they just sit there and they wait. They wait because they know if you're doing that, you're going to do something else. They just wait and they build a huge case on you and they just slam you with it. I'm hoping that's what they're doing right now with cases like Hope Trans and others, but you know it's going to take time.

Speaker 3: 1:08:33

Well, the other thing, too, is like they need the information to be able to do this. We were talking off air, Like, if you've got VIN level data in a database and you can start tagging these VINs that are associated with theft, you can start to see the spider web, right. You can see all of the other VINs that are associated with it, right. And if you have that, all you need is, like allow law enforcement access to that information and allow them to start towing these vehicles away when they're seen on the road, not just giving them a fine they're not going to pay and allow them to continue driving To. To me, that is absolutely also asinine.

Speaker 4: 1:09:09

Like can you imagine we talk about duis.

Speaker 3: 1:09:11

Like imagine if you got a dui and the cop's like, well, just be safe driving home, have a good one. Like but yeah, a guy can just not sleep for three days, drive 80 000 pounds and he's like here's a fine you be safe out there.

Speaker 1: 1:09:23

Service you know what I mean. Like they don't put a lot of service.

Speaker 4: 1:09:27

They don't put a boot on your truck they don't put a boot on nothing.

Speaker 2: 1:09:30

That's so common in the hotshot sector too. Like I talked to a guy who got into it during COVID, no CDL, so he's just running a hotshot driving a pickup truck and he racked up tens of thousands of dollars in fines and was put out of service almost every other night. And I was like so what the hell do you do? And he's like, oh, as soon as the guy drives away, I just turn the truck on and keep going. He just did not care. And that's how a lot of these guys are they just don't care. So you have to take away their toys, take away their trucks, take away their equipment, take away their employees, Otherwise they're just going to keep running.

Speaker 3: 1:09:59

Well, to your point, right and again. Like if you're not paying taxes, then getting a fine does nothing, why would you care? It's a piece of paper. Like, if I'm already not paying taxes and I'm already not doing what I'm supposed to and I fraudulently got my CDL, why in the world would I care? If I got a ticket, like you, just throw it in the gull blocks with the other one and run your next load until you get paid at the end of the week. There's literally no repercussions.

Speaker 2: 1:10:25

And I talked to so many good carriers and they're sweating bullets because they're like oh, my driver got a fine Because they're chasing the high-end freight, so you have to go through much higher betting and anything that damages your score for that kind of freight is just devastating to your business. So a lot of this stuff is happening just on the low-end driving-hand side, but everyone's getting crushed under their premiums right now because so much of this stuff is out there eating up, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:10:51

And you would. You would think that there would just be like enough people coming together and being like this. This has to stop. Like you know, enough is enough.

Speaker 1: 1:10:58

Yeah, all right. Well, that will put a put a bow on this episode, just based on how long we've been talking, but we've got a lot more we're going to start. We're going to be covering here in the coming weeks. So, if you guys don't follow Justin, we'll throw a link to his ex-account Super Trucker in the show notes or in the YouTube description. Make sure to follow him and check out his stuff. Justin, anything you want to wrap up with on this episode?

Speaker 2: 1:11:27

Yeah, if you're on the brokerage side, you really got to vet your carriers. If they're offering you a low ball rate, you're going to get what you pay for. Sometimes, and on the driver's side, like, hey, you don't like hearing this. Trucking is a commodity and you need to act accordingly, and sometimes having a good broker on your side is the only way you're going to survive through this.

Speaker 1: 1:11:46

Yeah, those are two really good points. Um, steven, you got any last thoughts on it no, it's the whole thing's crazy.

Speaker 4: 1:11:53

It's such a rat's nest of stuff. And uh, I will say to the drivers out there, especially the ones that are like they're a year and a half, two years in kind. Of like justin said, if, if you are looking for employment somewhere like uh, the vetting software is expensive but search carriers is free, and if you're looking to like, go onto a business, like, at least look up the company in search carriers and see what they got, and that'll at least give you a little bit of insight into who your next employer might be.

Speaker 1: 1:12:24

Yeah, we're gonna have Garrett involved at some point to share some data to to really put like actual factual numbers to a lot of the stuff we're talking about. So, and he's the one that built search carriers. So cool, appreciate everyone's time, ben. Final thoughts on your end.

Speaker 3: 1:12:44

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

Speaker 1: 1:12:48

And until next time go bills.