Using CIA Spy Skills To Stop Freight Fraud (with Ryan Joyce) | Episode 318

SPEAKER_00: 0:19

Hey, welcome to this week's episode of Freight 360. Got a special guest, Ryan Joyce from Gen Logs, is with us today. Nate is traveling. I believe he's on his anniversary trip this week, actually in Florida, somewhere up north. So it'll be the two of us. And speaking of anniversaries, um, Brian just got back from his honeymoon, recently married. He was traveling all over the country. We just jumped right into it, man. How was it being out on the roads? Dude, it was awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 0:44

I was out on the roads for three and a half weeks. My wife and I were van camping. Uh, and the coolest thing was this van was almost at truck driver level in terms of height. And so I finally got to kind of experience what it's like rolling down the roads and looking left and right. Uh, and and we saw a ton of trucks out there. Um, obviously, from the gen logs perspective, we were constantly looking at it new locations to put up our cameras around the roads. So we actually started a channel internally called Project Honeymoon. And as I was out there, I was marking all of these different places to put our cameras up in the Northeast. We were up in Maine, went to Acadia, New Hampshire, Vermont, and then came down through New York, uh, Pennsylvania into West Virginia. And uh, when I was up in New York, I we were actually right near, uh, went almost closer to Buffalo. And I realized, like, if I'm filling in for Nate this week, I should have been wearing my Bill's jacket. Exactly, instead of my Gen Mog's jacket. But uh I can't fill Nate's shoes, but at least I can uh it's great to fill in and hopefully is a great anniversary.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46

Yeah, and I think it's gonna be a really good episode. Before we jump into like industry stuff and things, I want to lead off with a story that I found out a couple weeks ago about Top Gun. And I just want you to kind of take it from there because one, I mean, I grew up in the 80s, and like that was like the coolest movie. We played in the woods pretending we were Maverick and Goose. So, like, I have so many fond memories of that movie coming out, and an I saw you, you and I have talked, I mean, we've known each other for years now. I had no idea that this story existed. And I just kind of want you to just kick it off of it because I feel like it's a really cool story.

SPEAKER_01: 2:25

Yeah, well, it's it's less my story to tell and more my dad's really cool story, but I'll kind of relay it where my dad actually uh got recruited to the Naval Academy to play lacrosse and graduated in 1979, where he then got slotted to go to flight school. So he went down to Pensacola, uh, started flying uh planes there, and then got selected to go fly the F-14 Tomcat, which was kind of new, slick, just came out in the 70s, and uh they were gearing up. And so he got posted out actually in San Diego and uh flew, did a few deployments, and then got selected to go through Top Gun. Now, back then, Top Gun was not acknowledged publicly. It was kind of a top secret program for the best of the best uh of pilots. And so as he was going through Top Gun, right before he kicked off, uh uh the local newspaper approached the Navy and said, Hey, we've heard of this thing called Top Gun. We would like to write an article about it. Uh, could we do that? And the Navy kind of thought about it and said, you know, maybe that'll actually be good for recruiting the next generation of fighter pilots. So they agreed and they selected my dad and three other classmates to essentially this this journalist was tied at his hip for the few weeks that he went through Top Gun. And each week he would write a little article about it, what it was like to go through this the best of the best fighter town USA Top Gun uh flight school. And uh, and so when that all wrapped up, that those articles were all republished under Aviation magazine under the article titled Top Guns. Well, Paramount bought the rights to that article, Top Guns, and wrote the screenplay Top Gun, literally based off of my dad and those three others going through. And as if that wasn't cool enough, uh, my dad was actually selected to go back to Top Gun as a flight instructor right when they were filming the movie. And so as he was doing the flying end type Top Gun the second time around, they would literally just hand him a helmet, like Goose's helmet, for the day, put the camera in the cockpit, and that's actually my dad doing a lot of those flying scenes in the movie. And he got invited with my mom to the premiere. Uh, they met Tom Cruise, the rest of the cast. Uh, super cool story, and um, and that's the background. And you could look it up, it's like written about before my dad, Tom Joyce, um, has Top Gun fame.

SPEAKER_00: 4:52

What is it and it's honestly like that is so cool because, like, again, like I vividly remember watching that movie like in my living room as I was probably like seven or eight, maybe like maybe around nine, because it's like late 80s, I think, when it came out. And I'm like literally remember running around and playing in the woods and stuff and being like Maverick and Goose and Iceman. And when I saw that, I was like, that is like the coolest shit that I've I it for sure that I've seen all year, if not in a very long time, that like your dad was literally goose in the movie, which is just like I feel like the coolest story ever.

SPEAKER_01: 5:24

And I gotta close it out with like just a story that gives me goosebumps, where I actually went to go see Top Gun 2 with my dad for the first time. Oh, that's awesome. So we're sitting next to each other in the theater, and he says beforehand, almost kind of like teary-eyed, he's like, you know what? I can't wait to watch this movie. It's just sad that they're not gonna have an actual F-14 in the movie because it was decommissioned back in the 90s, like early 2000s. Well, sure enough, for those who have seen, not it's like not to do a little spoiler alert here, yeah. But right at the end, they come across an old F-14. And when they pull off that tarp, I looked to the side and saw my dad, and sure enough, he started to tear up because it was you know that that plane from his youth that now was back in the movie and was frankly like saving the day at the end. I just love that.

SPEAKER_00: 6:13

And it's so cool. Like, I literally have goosebumps because, like, I don't know, as I guess you get older, maybe when you're married, for sure when you have kids, like you just think about those things differently, whether it's the appreciation or the nostalgia. But like to me, like that is so cool because it's like not only was that like very impactful, but for even folks that weren't around then, like that was huge in the 80s because, like, this is like the Cold War. This is like you're growing up in a completely different world than it is now, and like that movie was like the antithesis of exactly that conflict, and it was like all of it kind of came to a head in that movie. So, like anybody thinking back on that period, that is like this quintessential piece of like not only just pop pop culture, but like the whole zeitgeist of the entire world was like that moment in that movie, and it was so cool that they did it again, which was awesome. I thought the second movie was also really good, but then when I saw that, I'm like, that is like the coolest shit that I've seen in recent memories.

SPEAKER_01: 7:10

It's an awesome story. Uh, my dad's my hero, so it's like super cool to be able to tell his story a little bit. Um, but I agree. They did it. It is so rare that you make a sequel that actually matches the the original. And I thought they did a phenomenal job with uh Top Gun 2. I hope there's not a Top Gun 3 because I don't think you could keep it going, but we could leave it at two.

SPEAKER_00: 7:30

Agreed. Um, well, for anybody that kind of doesn't know you, like that's a decent segue into at least a little bit of your career pre-gen logs for just anybody that is new to gen logs and what we've been working on. I know you've been on the show before. We've talked about it a lot, but why don't you give some people because like I think that was pretty foundational into your early adulthood, early career, which actually is how gen logs came to existence in the first place, right?

SPEAKER_01: 7:56

Yeah, for sure. I mean, my dad actually finished his career, uh, decommissioned one of the squadrons, VF-111, which is the Sundowners on the West Coast in California before getting posted to the Pentagon as deputy chief of all naval aviation. So he kind of rose through the ranks. Uh, he was an 06, a captain for those who come out of the military. And uh, and he was in the Pentagon on 9-11 when the plane hit hit his office. Um, fortunately, it hit just underneath his office. He was in the third ring inside the Pentagon on the top floor, and it blew out everything below, and he narrowly escaped with his life that day, as literally the floors caving in, fire everywhere. I mean, it was just a crazy and chaotic time. I was a senior in high school at the time, and I could tell you the morning of September 11th, 2001, all I wanted to do was flirt with girls and play basketball after school. That's literally it. Yep. After that happened, and I thought I had lost my dad, only to find that I hadn't, but it was definitely a wake-up call for me. I didn't know what I wanted to do with the future, uh, my own future. I went to bed that night, committed to learn everything I could about the history, culture, language, or religion of the people that would do that and make sure it never happened again. Fast forward a few years later, I actually studied abroad in the Middle East, I learned Arabic, and I ended up getting recruited into the CIA, where I spent a few uh few years of my life living in the Middle East with a job was to recruit foreign sources, aka al-Qaeda, and ISIS guys, to provide us information, uh secret information to make sure that 9-11 never happened again. And so I followed through on that background. You might wonder, like, what am I doing in freight today?

SPEAKER_00: 9:37

Um, but there's a segue, right? And it all does kind of come together.

SPEAKER_01: 9:42

There is a segue, and you know, it's taken me a little while to really put this into words because I felt it, but I didn't know how to articulate it. And and one of the things that we struggled with inside of CIA. In fact, for anyone who's listening right now, if you go to CIA.gov and you go to the upper right-hand corner, there's a button there that says report information. And sure enough, no matter where you are in the world, it's gonna walk you through how to access the dark web and provide information to the CIA. I mean, it's literally it it walks you through that steps there. So I came about in this in the CIA during this digital era of informants around the world, being able to provide secret information to or bring it to our attention without us ever meeting them face to face to begin with. But for those who know, like uh if you're working with a high risk or high, you know, high loss uh ratio of whatever you might be involved in, you want to at some point meet someone face to face. You want to have a conversation with them. You want to know that they're either not a double agent trying to provide you bad information, or worse, they're not trying to lure you out to kill you. And unfortunately at the CIA, we had gotten it wrong a few times where I've had colleagues that have been killed or injured when they've gone out to meet a source for the first time, only to find out that we were being set up or ambushed. And so at CIA, we had to find a way when you had never met someone face to face, basically you were only having these digital-only transactions. How could you know that you could trust them? How did you know that they were real? How did you know that the information they wanted you to provide you was valid, that they weren't trying to set you up? And the way we solved that at CIA was using satellite sensors or hearing from other sources. It's what we called all source intelligence back in the CIA or in the intelligence community. Fast forward to today, and every broker that's listening to this knows the danger these days of dealing with a digital only persona. You post on DAT or another load board, you get 30 carriers that write in, you know, saying, Hey, I can carry that load for you. And you're trying to sift through who's real that can actually run this load, or who's who's trying to set me up to steal it, um, or or at least double broker it and take a margin. And it is really difficult when you're dealing with digital only identities to figure that out, unless you're using different types of vectors or all source intelligence. And so there was a little bit of a uh a way that I kind of came to Genlogs and my two co-founders, Blake and Joe, were critical in this process. But the bottom line is we decided to take the entire playbook of what we learned the intelligence community, specifically through the last two decades of the global war on terror, and apply it to trucking. So we like to joke that we used to track terrorists and now we track trucks, but it's using CIA caliber methodology to solve a 2025 problem in the trucking industry. And fortunately, we've been successful because we go beyond just this digital-only per vetting capability to actually bring in the physical footprint of carriers into the mix. When we talked about satellite sensors and other sources at CIA, we do the same thing at Genlogs. We've actually invested millions of dollars to put an entire nationwide network of roadside cameras along all major interstates, freight lanes, highways, collecting on truck patterns, truck footprints. We collect now 15 million truck images a day. We just surpassed 2 billion images in our holdings on trucks. And on a regular basis, we're seeing over 90% of four higher carriers in our data. Uh, those last 10%, we believe that they're either sitting out this really bad freight recession, or they're the ones you want to avoid that are not actually out there running freight, but are sitting in Eastern Europe, Mexico, or other places trying to steal your loads. So that's a little bit of background on how this came to be.

SPEAKER_00: 13:39

And I want to do like a kind of like a side tangent on this that I think is really important, right? Because I think when people are trying to optimize, right, like and everybody tries to get more done in less time with less friction, right? So, like for sure, there's a push just from like a capitalism point of view, of businesses needing to get more efficient. But there's always that trade-off, right? Because if you push too far, right, you take on more risk, right? You need those things, but you also need to verify. And the other thing that I think is important for anyone listening is for sure, like the carriers that listen to the show and follow this from the trucking side, is that like this is not a replacement for what you said is like relationships. At the end of the day, like, let's just take the CIA example. You, I mean, literally just stating, like, in a very stressful situation with extremely high stakes where people's lives are on the line, you are going to put your life on the line to meet somebody face to face, of which that other person is going to do. That's how important that piece is, right? And in the freight world, this is not a replacement for having conversations and having relationships, because at the end of the day, that is the goal. What these tools allow you to do is be more efficient in who you're going to choose to meet, whether it is in person, on the phone, spend time with, negotiate either RFPs, loads, lanes, finding the right fit, the right carrier that you can trust, the carrier finding the right broker they can work with, without having to, like you said, sift through dozens and dozens out of a hundred of honestly, like either bad actors, people that have bad faith might steal either the money for the load, the whole load, or mislead somebody. Like the whole point is to create trust faster in a way that is also more efficient for everybody in the market. And it really does benefit all of the parties. We've talked about this even prior to gen logs when we first met of like this really does create like a win, a win and a win for both a shipper having better capacity, better fits, the carrier having better lanes with what they're running, and the broker being able to facilitate these things more efficiently, more effectively, and with higher trust and less loss, right? Which I think, again, for anybody out there, like that is the goal. That's what we should be doing. That's literally our job. But as we've pushed towards profitability and doing things faster, I think a lot of these things have not got as much emphasis or as much time and effort as they should. And I think that's what criminals have taken advantage of. Like they know that, right? Hey, if you're moving fast and you're not paying attention, you're pretty vulnerable to loss, no matter how you define it, right?

SPEAKER_01: 16:12

Yeah, I fully agree. And I think in many ways, we are monitoring the wrong things in the industry. And I'll give you an example. Like there are couldn't agree more. There are carriers that have uh slightly bad out-of-service scores that will not steal your freight. Yep. And there are carriers that have perfect out-of-service scores that will steal your freight. As at or someone posing as that carrier is what I should say. Yes. So, like, there's two different things there's safety and then there's security. You know, bad safety does not necessarily translate to they're definitely now gonna steal your freight. Correct. The other thing, too, is there are absolutely carriers that uh use an office building that another carrier is in. And therefore, they're gonna have an address that's going to have two carriers from that same address. And in many systems, that's gonna be a, hey, sorry, you guys are sharing an address, that is a fraud or a risk issue. And and while I think those things are good to look at, they're good to kind of bring in a more holistic review. It if you're moving too fast and all of a sudden you're saying, like, hey, out of service scores look good, uh, no shared addresses or phone numbers. Uh, they're they have green checks in my digital-only vetting platform. And then boom, freight, you know, freight goes, and you wonder, like, how did that get stolen? Well, I and and we can get into this a little bit more, but GenLog's just completed our 400th investigation for free for the industry. So last November we announced we were going to start providing investigations. If you had a load stolen, you were gonna come to us, we were gonna help out. Um, and and we have, and we followed through on that promise. We don't charge anyone for these investigations, but it does give us incredible insight into the trends that are happening across the industry. And the common thread we have seen is whenever we investigate a stolen load, we look at the carrier and our platform, we look at their physical footprint on the road. Their physical footprint is either one of two things it does not exist, or they are operating in a completely different part of the country or they have a different equipment type than was actually needed for the load that was stolen. And it's really put into perspective for me that you need to measure what matters, or ultimately you could be doing a hundred little things that you hope will all overlap to protect you, but you're missing one big thing. And at Genlogs, where about the one big thing? Is this carrier real? Are they repeatedly running lanes recently and do they have the right equipment?

SPEAKER_00: 18:37

And I want to go back to what you said, right? For anyone out there, guess who also knows what your vetting criteria are? The criminals. So, hey, if you're looking at out of service, if you're looking for this, this, and this checkbox, they can mimic that. They can create the exact same thing where they appear to be the best carrier with the correct insurance with the best out of service. They know that's what they need to get the green light. That is doable, right? So it's not as if like that information is proprietary and that like criminals don't know what these criteria are. Like they're aware they can also either buy brokerages or started them or buy trucking companies. They have the same information that was being used to sift them out. And the thing that gets me the most, this is the thing that bothers me, I think, even almost as much as the theft, is that when a carrier is a victim of fraud, meaning like somebody hacks a carrier, somebody steals a load, all of these systems flag that carrier and go, hey, they were reported for fraud. Now the carrier did nothing wrong. They were a victim. And then every one of these platforms goes, hey, stay away from them. So not only did they end up on the short end of the stick as a victim, but then they're further penalized by all of these systems going, stay away from this carrier because they got hacked. Well, so now they're getting the shaft twice. And like to me, the way the whole industry has gone about addressing this risk has put all of this on the carrier side. And carriers are already in a depressed market, rates are down, there's tons of issues with CDLs and everything else that anyone's seen in the news, with what you know, the FMCSA is trying to crack down on. And we've done a bunch of content on that. So, like, not only are they in a hard situation economically, they have other people on their side of the industry also making it harder. And then when they're a victim of theft, they get further penalized. And to me, nobody just really thought about the fact that, like, we need to cooperate to solve this, not alienate the most important part of the transaction, which is the people actually moving this freight, which is the thing that has always really just gotten to me.

SPEAKER_01: 21:35

Yeah, I mean, uh, for those that spend any time on subreddit freight brokers, you know what carriers think about certain vetting platforms here that they feel like they are getting, you know, they they sneeze the wrong direction, and all of a sudden it's, hey, do not use for the next 60, 90 days. Yep. And and I my heart really goes out to to these carriers, especially when they are victims of some type of hacking event or otherwise. And that's why I think the the smart carriers actually look at gen logs as overwatch and protection rather than you know, uh peering in or any type of like surveillance state. At the end of the day, we actually have uh we do a few things. First of all, we exclude all private vehicles from our data. But recently we we instituted a privacy layer where basically we blur every window of every vehicle that we collect. So we are not in the business of collecting on truck drivers. We're in the business of collecting that a truck was out there at a time and place. That physical footprint is what can protect a carrier that's been hacked from all of a sudden loads getting stolen. That if they're if the brokers they deal with are realizing that, hey, someone like reached out to me about a load, but it didn't match. Like you haven't been there, or you don't even have the right equipment type, like something's amiss here, and then reaching out to that carrier. And you and I have chatted about it because I love that you are the one that says there's like two big things you can do to stop uh fraud. You can, you know, instead of using, let's say you don't even have any of these digital vetting platforms at all, you don't use them at all, but you do these two things. Number one is you check the physical footprint of a carrier out there. Are they real, recent, running the right reins with lanes with the right equipment? That's number one. Number two, if something doesn't add up, you call the number that you've had in your TMS for years now. Yeah. Give that phone number a call, give the last phone number, email, reach out to that to say, hey, what's going on? And like you said, that's where you actually find out what's what's what's what's at stake.

SPEAKER_00: 23:39

And I want to talk about what you guys uncovered in the investigations, but like the thing I want to say is in everyone that has come through us, whether it's clients, brokers, reach out for help, whether I'm sending it to the Genlogs investigation team, in every single one of these, and there's, I mean, probably close to a hundred over the past couple of years that like I was involved in in some way. The first thing I do is go to the oldest phone number in any of the tools, even if it's just the FMCSA, call that old phone number. And in every single one, it's literally my first call, within two minutes, that person tells me exactly what happened. They're like, Yeah, don't book a load. Somebody hacked me, or hey, somebody said they were going to buy my trucking company, they got my login, changed all my info, don't book a load. Every single one. And I'm like, okay, like I know not everybody's going to make a phone call every time they book a load because of all these automations. But like, again, sometimes the oldest, simplest things can be the most effective. Because if a carrier gets their number changed, every every system shows what it used to be. And if you just call that old one and again look at the footprints, those two things, again, I haven't seen any stolen theft where I wasn't able to find out at least what went wrong that quickly, right? And those two things I think are incredible preventative measures that are low cost, pretty low effort. Again, it is a little different than automation. Everybody wanted to run everything on AI. But again, that also makes you more vulnerable. What did you guys find in these hundreds of investigations? Any commonalities, common threads?

SPEAKER_01: 25:13

Yeah. And almost all, you know, I think the the big concerning thing for me, and this gets back to those common threads, is we've actually witnessed a rise in some of the Facebook groups or other groups out there of uh sold USDOTs or USDOTs or MC numbers that are for sale. Um, and I think what's more concerning to me is some of those that are for sale say, hey, it comes with a bank account, an email, and a phone number. And so all of a sudden you realize that holy cow, this carrier that's actually in good standing in all these platforms could be going out of business, selling all of the contact capabilities to now say, like, hey, you did call the phone number, you have that. And that's what I think is kind of the threat vector that concerns me the most. But in in all of those instances where it was even more sophisticated like that, what we noticed is that we saw a carrier every day, let's say, for the last three years. And then all of a sudden, we did not see them for a month. And it was that gap of not seeing a carrier at all that was one of the biggest uh tells that hey, something's amiss, something is different here. Um, and if you permit me, I'll kind of uh show. We had um, for those that have probably heard about the story, Shaquille O'Neal had a hundred and eighty thousand dollar Range Rover stolen uh last week. It was getting detailed um by a company that they were detailing it in Georgia, and the pickup was in Georgia, it was bringing it down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and it vanished. And the police report actually put out what the carrier, the DOT of the carrier and the name, when they were actually uh when when it was stolen. I'm gonna go ahead and try to share screen and I'll explain it for those that are on audio only. So, what I'm showing here is first line trucking LLC. The US DOT was 2543 uh two three six nine uh six nine. That's it. Um once again, two five four two three six nine. Now, when we looked and this I'm showing the genlogs platform here, and you look at where we've seen in the last 30 days there, underneath the carrier, we get the FMCSA contact, and then we have the confirmed locations over the last 30 days. If I zoom out here and look at the entire map of the United States, you have them domiciled down in West Lico, Texas, and they have not been observed anywhere in the United States over the last 30 days. Now they were 90 days ago. They were, if I go a year ago where we've seen them in the last year, we've actually seen them in Texas, we've seen them in California. Um, 90 days we saw them in California, and then boom, they disappeared 30 days ago. They are not, they're just not on the road.

SPEAKER_00: 27:54

Well, and for anyone listening, where that is in Texas, it looks like it is like a stone's throw from Mexico. And I'm not saying that there aren't legitimate businesses there, but again, it does make you want to ask a few questions when you haven't seen any sightings in a month, and they're physically located where there's not a lot of auto moves between anybody.

SPEAKER_01: 28:19

Yeah, 100%. And this is like this is common. I I have dozens of examples of that. When when a theft happens, we ask, hey, what was the USDOT that stole it? And then boom, we look up and you look at the last 30 days and and they just don't exist anymore. When you look at 30 days prior, 90 days prior, they were very active around the roads and all of a sudden they disappeared. And this is just showing what the pattern what is happening. You have a real carrier that's out there, they may be struggling to make ends meet, given where rates are, where insurance has gone up, all of that. They, you know, it's they they're finally, I call it kind of like the last gasp um here that they're like, you know what, I can't do this anymore. And I'm already in debt a little bit, I'm uh filed bankruptcy or whatever. And someone is willing to pay me$20,000 for for my USD or MC if I give them my my cell phone number or associate with it. Sure. That in all of these vetting platforms, they might still look good because they were good yesterday and they were good the day before, but now something's materially changed with their physical footprint on the road. And that's where we're seeing the issues, which is why it can be a little manual. We we or has been over the last year, if you're dealing with a new carrier to have to go into gen logs to say, well, let me type in their DOT, let me take a look and make sure everything looks good. Well, that all changes uh next month. Next month, we're actually releasing our entire compliance suite where it's gonna have all of the, you know, hey, they must have an MC, they they uh must not have changed their legal name recently, and you could put pass or fail or needs review in there. But at the very top of the list, at the very top of the list, we have carrier observations. The carrier must have been observed by gen logs within the last, and then you set the timeline. You want it in the last week because you're even more concerned about high value, high risk loads. Sure, do that. If you want to last 30 days, so be it. But you toggle that on, and you now only uh when you check a DOT or an MC uh from you post on a load board and and it hits your email and you're doing a run and uh check, and we're gonna automate a lot of these checks going forward with both uh integrations right into the TMS or plugins into the email, that's gonna be the first pass fail. Hey, are they still active? If they're not, we just we just saved a$300,000 theft because everything else could still be true, they could still be in good standing on whatever digital vetting platform you use, but they're not active on the roads anymore. And that's a big tell. So this is a great example. When the shack theft happened, I was like, gosh darn, we could have stopped this. Like, had they been just checking the last 30 days, they can't get to Texas to Georgia without going past. A number of our cameras. In fact, uh, you know, yesterday there was a uh an overturned trailer on I-59 Mississippi with a bunch of monkeys that were in there. And they talked about it. Really? I didn't see that. Yeah, like a great. Here's uh for those looking at the screen, they truck hauling monkeys infected with hepatitis C herpes and COVID overturns on a highway. And uh, and that's absolutely true. It happened. Well, minutes, I'm talking 28 minutes before this flipped over. We actually saw that trailer on I-59 in Ellisville, Mississippi. You therefore, like, we have such sensor coverage now that you cannot operate on the roads and not be seen by us, especially if you're doing a lot of heavy interstate travel, which trying to get from Texas up to Georgia, uh, and when you've not been seen at all in the 30 days is just not feasible. And now Shaquille O'Neal, his Range Rovers somewhere, you know, over the Atlantic, headed to Mexico, Europe or Mexico. Yeah. And and yeah, and it all happened because the broker that brokered that that car movement didn't have gem logs or didn't automate the checks. So, anyways, that's I'm gonna get off my soapbox now, but that's just so important because it would solve 99% of these these cases.

SPEAKER_00: 32:28

It would have, right? And again, just to reiterate, what we just showed is that that carrier is located in Texas, was supposed to pick up a vehicle in Georgia and would have had to driven past the sensors in order to pick it up and hasn't been seen in 30 days. That's what we're saying of like verification. Hey, were they just seen one still in business? And the answer to that was no. And second of all, were they seen driving to go pick up my shipment? And the answer to that was no, right? So those two things, you have two giant red flags that would have meant find another carrier. And the thing that I also wanted to talk about there, that I don't know if we chatted about this, but I've had clients now that do just auto transport. And specifically, I had one in Chicago that moved all high-end sports cars, mostly like porches. So, like six-figure and up cars almost every one of their moves. The thing we found, and this was three years ago or two years ago. So it's been a while, and I know this hasn't been fixed. It's likely gotten worse, is that we saw more double brokering in auto transport than any other niche in the entire industry that I've ever seen. Because there's two other load boards that basically most companies use. You can still book auto transport through DAT, and some of that happens, but and I can't, my mind's blanking. There's two specific load boards that really all of the auto moves go through. And how we really uncovered this was since you know he's his customers are literally the dealerships. We started looking at these. I think this is when we started actually getting MVP up, where I was able to see this. And I go, these MCs look strange. So he drove to the dealership, right? And I said, go and either call the guy there selling the car and have him check what truck is picking this up, or go there and see this. And he did this for a month. Honestly, if he moved 40 cars that month, 38 of them were double brokered. None of the trucks that were showing up to pick up these vehicles were the MCs he booked. And what we found, which was completely rampant in that side of the industry, was that the bigger carriers would just book loads all over the load board and then they would double broker them or unlicensed broker them to another smaller carrier, and none of them had insurance. That was the kicker, right? It wasn't necessarily that these cars were getting stolen. But what we realized when we dug in is I'm like, you're moving a$250,000 car on a truck that has no insurance, like literally no insurance. You thought you booked this large carrier with a$500,000 cargo policy. They gave the load to another carrier that had no cargo policy, which is how they were able to move it cheaper because they're not paying for insurance. The big carrier made an extra$200 to give the load to the company with no insurance. And then his cars were just getting shipped all over the country, uninsured, like not underinsured, completely uninsured. And we use some of these things and these tools that we're talking about to literally uncover this, and it was systemic. And it's got to be as rampant as it was then. Because nothing has come along and addressed this other than the tools and the things that we're talking about. Like literally, gen logs was the only way we were able to see these things were occurring, right? And this is three, this is like V1 of Genlogs. Like this is going back when the sensor density was a fraction of what it is now, and it's only gotten better since then.

SPEAKER_01: 35:43

Yeah, a hundred percent. And you know what? It's actually one of my favorite stories uh is we have uh one of our customers is Packer Freight in Green Bay, uh, Wisconsin. And they are they don't do car haulers at all or any auto transport. And yet one of their customers reached out and said, Hey, I I know this is not part of us moving our freight and this and that, but I trust you guys. I got to get a car from Wisconsin down to Florida uh here. Could you help me out? Now, the Packer Freight guys said, you know, it isn't our core uh what we do. And yet we have gen logs, so let's take a look. And and that's exactly what they did. They looked inside of our platform and they said, we're gonna search from just car haulers that can run from Green Bay down to Miami. And and I forget who it was, but in this case, um, I'm pulling up my screen again, and that's the exact search that I did. In this case, Green Bay, Wisconsin, down to Orlando, Florida. We get CRC transport. Uh, we noticed that with our observations of their equipment, they've had 100% car haulers out on the road. Well, if I zoom in on our map, you can actually see the pink dots in our map is where they've been in the last, let's say, 24, 12 to 24 hours. And and we could prove that they were running the lane from Wisconsin down to Florida. And it was the same vehicle running that. So it was a lane that they were repeatedly doing. They had great, like out of service vehicle scores. They didn't have any red flags, none of the above. And so Packer Freight felt like, you know what? We feel comfortable looking at Genlogs to reach out. They they booked that vehicle and they did so cheaper than all of the other quotes that their customer had gotten elsewhere. The vehicle arrived safe on time, and that customer is now even more loyal to them than they, you know, were before. And they had this tool that allowed them to do that and to do so confidently.

SPEAKER_00: 37:36

And not only, right, not only did were they able to find it quickly, right? But they were able to find one, and this is really important, that was the right fit for the carrier and the shipment, right? And when you match those two things up, the cost is lower. The cost is lower because you're not paying a driver to deadhead. You're not paying somebody to go drive all the way out of wherever they're already going to go pick up your shipment, which costs the driver money, right? And everyone kind of doesn't think about that of like, hey, a truck's a truck. Why would I pay more for one or the other? Like, well, because the one's 200 miles away empty, and one is five miles away empty. And that's guy's got to drive there, burn fuel, and get there. And when you can actually get more efficient with choosing the carriers that like actually need and want the load, like they literally probably had empty slots on that car hauler were already in Wisconsin a few times that week, right? So for them, it's like, hey, we can make a couple extra hundred bucks. It's on our way, no problem. And you can see they're doing that. It works for everybody. Like you said, the customer is happy. The broker didn't take additional risk, even though they're not used to shipping these types of commodities. Like it's the first time they moved it, but they were able to do it without taking this giant risk of fielding hundreds of phone calls and trying to guess does this company really do this? Or are they gonna give it to another company? Do they have the equipment? Well, just because they have it, are they actually operating it? Is it really on the roads? And this is all of that obscurity or opaqueness than the industry that like nobody had visibility before, but now Genlogs provides in a way that is like fast, effective, and efficient to actually use.

SPEAKER_01: 39:17

100%. And I'm gonna just share screen one last time for those that are listening. I'll I'll narrate it as well. You know, what I'm showing is here's that footprint, CRC transport. They're doing car haulers. That's what we're observing out there on the roads. This is their footprint over the last three years, but I can go down a year, 90 days, 30 days. I can look where they have been in the last seven days, and you can literally see them up in Wisconsin, down through Georgia, into Florida. But with one button, I can click our view on the asset locator. And when I click that, it is going to pull up that carrier and the images we've observed of that carrier. And here we like can see car haulers. We know that they're running car haulers. I also see them in Wisconsin. I saw them in Wisconsin uh late yesterday, and I can observe that hey, they are real CRC transport. They do have that equipment, they are running in that area. Um, uh, and you can see the blurring that we apply. That's like the privacy that we are now enabling. And but at least me as a broker can look and be like, oh, they're legit. Uh, they have the equipment, they're running the lanes, they're not on anyone's D D and U lists. Now, like I can feel comfortable moving forward. And that's what we want. Like, form that relationship now. Um, do that across, like, we do Heavy Hall, we do Hazmat, we do all of these. We have now our own ability to search for those. So we open up for brokerages, like we say the riches are in the niches, like it is now available to you to get into whatever niche area that's gonna pay better, but it's traditionally been just difficult to source carriers. You can see entire market capacity here, know that they are real, reach out, book, and then move on to the the next load. Uh and I really do believe this. There were the customers that we have, which we're nearing a hundred brokerage customers out there, they talk about freight for uh fraud and theft as if it was now a past issue they had to deal with. And they are now looking at like, how do we grow our brokerage using genlog shipper intelligence data? Um, how do we like tackle harder RFPs that are going to pay better with bigger shippers? Because now we have a track record that we can tell shippers, oh yeah. The last time we had a load stolen was I think it was 2023, 2024. And then they're like, so you don't have to worry about that with us. Let's gain your business. This is how we vet carriers. They show them the genlogs platform, and man, they are signing more and more customers. And so there's really a divergence right now. There's those that are trying to survive in 2025, and there's those that are thriving in 2025. And I and I'm proud to say that we're part of the latter solution.

SPEAKER_00: 42:54

It is. I want to segue and come right back to that point. And the thing that I want to point out, right, is for years, right, trucking companies are like, how do I get more business? But how do I get the right business? And for anyone out there, the reason that this is the case, and I always use this example, is like even the biggest carriers do not run all over the country. Like you can take the largest carriers, whether it's Werner or JB Hunt, like they are not running every lane in the country because it's not efficient and it's not profitable to just send your trucks everywhere all the time. They look for strategic shippers that fit in where they're already running, just front haul, backhaul is a simple example. So, like there are denser areas of certain carriers where they are a better fit. That's how the supply chain operates, right? And it moves depending on what's shipping in the country. So it's not stagnant and it does change. But carriers have always kind of relied on like, I'll put a website together to try to get more business or call brokers and hope they find me, or it's really a lot reactive of hoping they get found for the right loads or posting their trucks up. The thing that I really like about Gen Logs because I'll hear from the carri side of like, oh, well, like everybody is benefiting but us. Everybody is looking at where we work. Why aren't we benefiting? And I'm like, you guys are like, this is free advertising. And not only is it free advertising for the carriers, but it is free advertising to the right customers at no cost because the brokers will find the carriers that are the right fit through this platform without the carrier spending a dime. That example is a perfect example of how you got CRC transport business at no cost to them on a lane that is a perfect fit on a shipment that they made money on without having to do any additional work because you made them more visible to the right people that had the business that they needed, which matched them up, right? And it is not a one side of the coin scenario. Like this is mutually beneficial to both the carriers, the brokers, and again, to the shippers, because they're the ones that need the freight move. And if it's the right carrier, it's all downstream. The shipper gets a better rate, whether it's a car or a truckload of chicken, it doesn't matter, right? The broker does less work, and the carrier didn't have to spend any money to be found. Literally, can you imagine owning a business where people, your perfect customers, just start calling you all the time? Like it's like Google on steroids, where it's just literally advertising at no cost to you, to the right people with the right business that you need.

SPEAKER_01: 45:32

Yeah, I love that. And I'm such a believer in outbound carrier sales. And I think that the reliance on like just post and then, you know, get get a bunch of responses and sift through them and then go with the cheapest rate is what is frankly like really destroying this industry over time. Because that cheapest rate, they are not the best, safest carriers, and they are often the ones that are trying to get access to your freight for for bad purposes. Um, what you just said is so true. And I really am passionate about a vision. I I talk about this often. When I think about 2030, I'm convinced that if Genlogs does our job well, and you kind of paired Gen Logs smartly with some of these uh agentic AI tools, not in a way that takes away from the relationships, but in a way that says, like, hey, at least I'm gonna look at what's coming up on my TMS. I'm gonna then figure out are these carriers like still out there on the roads, running the right lanes, have the right equipment? Um, have they been onboarded with me? And if so, then I'm gonna use some technology to at least to tender those loads out there. Say, hey, would you guys like these loads? Um, and and if you do that, then all of a sudden we can now get this direct kind of, I have a load, I'm finding the right carrier, I'm putting it in their hands. I now know that that carrier is real legitimate. I'm not having to wonder, gosh, this is a new carrier I've never dealt with before, but they're they're cheap and you know, I want to get it done. Um you will be able to find carriers that are like, hey, actually, I do have a truck in Dallas right now and I need to get back to Chicago. And and instead of deadheading, they're gonna take your freight at a reduced rate to market. But you know, you need to know how you're gonna find them. And that's what we really enable. Uh, we we have what I call as the billion-dollar backhaul button. It literally allows you to see which carriers are in certain market right now that likely need backhauls. And that is what uh that that's what's driving margin for our customers. And I'll end by saying this is this is backed by empirical evidence. We have a customer right now that's sharing their margins on every load they are covering. When they uh drive and loads that they post on the load boards, they're getting about 11% margin these days. When they source the carrier through gen logs, that margin goes up to 16 to 18 percent. Wouldn't you love to have 5% more margin across all your loads? Like to me, it's a no-brainer when it's done well.

SPEAKER_00: 48:03

And and not only that too, right? Like, I remember when we were like conceptualizing what this should be able to do, right? And I'm like, we're talking like economically, like your margin should go up. And I was always very curious to see the number you just said in practice, right? Because in theory, an academic, like, yeah, economically with the right carrier and enough information, like you should be able to drive better margins, but also the carrier is getting more money because they're not driving dead miles, they're not driving around empty to reposition themselves. It literally is not the broker made money and the carrier suffered, which is the first thing you said. Yeah. It is everybody ends up doing better, both the carrier, the broker, and the shipper. And like the other thing that this is is it levels the playing field, right? Because somebody asked me this last week, starting a new brokerage. What's the difference between like a CH, a TQL, and an Echo and like a mid-sized company, right, versus a really small one? I'm like, it's just information. They're like, Well, what do you mean? I'm like, at the end of the day, if you can find the it's literally the carrier list. Like 15 years ago, right? Like the best broker for moving pipe in Texas, which all basically moves from like the Houston area out to the oil fields, out to like Odessa and back and forth. He literally had a notebook with like 150 carriers of all of the trucking companies that ran that lane. So anytime there was a pipe load, he could get it covered because of the information he had, right? And yes, there were relationships that had to also be facilitated in there. But like fundamentally, if you have that list, I could just call all of them, introduce myself, and literally be able to provide the same value. It took that guy 30 years to build that list, right? Genlogs puts in the hands of a mid-size or smaller company the advantage that the big ones had to build over decades, right? So at the end of the day, like when you have that information, it doesn't matter if you're a two-person brokerage or a 5,000-person brokerage. That is the differentiator. It is locating the right fit with the right carrier to move that load safely and securely with the correct insurance, which all can be done in one place now.

SPEAKER_01: 51:35

Couldn't agree with you more. And I think the really important piece to this, uh, it's twofold. Number one, some of those very large brokerages you mentioned, they are our customers, which means they evaluated our platform and said, holy cow, we've assembled book on carriers over the last 30 years, and GenLogs has more than we do. We need to get this. And number two, is they all are renewing for their second year right now, which in any type of software product, you just wouldn't do if you weren't seeing the return on investment. And they not only are, but they're doing so at a larger contract value, they're expanding their use of Gen Logs. So it's really great that I know many of the listeners here, you're either contemplating building a brokerage or you're just getting into it, you're starting, or whatnot. You like GenLogs wants to put in your hands the equivalent of all of these large brokerages combined books together. And all of a sudden, you can go to any shipper and compete by saying, Oh, you want like uh yeah, I have access to all of the same carriers, and not only access, but recently we've actually gone the extra mile and we've confirmed dispatch information for 60,000 carriers. And these are the top carriers. We actually took the top carriers on each lane uh that will be reliable, that are running those lanes every day with the right equipment, and those who we went out to and and sourced the contact information. So now you you hop on day one, you have whole of market capacity, you have a way to contact them, you have a way to start building those carrier relationships, and a way to defend against fraud. So you can walk into that first customer that you're trying to land and say, This is what I'm gonna do to keep your freight safe. This is what I'm gonna do to keep rates, you know, uh at uh industry, you know, lower than than industry. And and you're doing it all with intelligence. And that's what made that's what makes the United States the most powerful country in the world is we use, we collect intelligence and we use that to drive advantages over our competitors. And that's what we're putting in your hands.

SPEAKER_00: 53:39

Yes. And I want to point out that where those 60,000 points of contact, phone numbers and emails came from, was not purchasing a database, is not from the FMCSA, is not just, hey, we got this from another company. It was literally verified the old-fashioned way, which is human beings making phone calls, reaching out, talking to those people, and making sure that was correct, right? Which is literally what we started the conversation with, which is like, yeah, you can buy these anywhere. People sell them. I've got carrier lists. Oh, I can plug into this API, these are all good. Most of which I've literally been in the back end of and are not what you think they are and are not verified, or have been verified five years ago. And yeah, at one point they were, but like these are literally phone numbers and email addresses for these carriers that like somebody literally called, talked to the human being, and checked and made sure they were the right points of contact.

SPEAKER_01: 54:35

Yeah, and you're gonna love this story, Benjamin. Is I um that's exactly true. And we also limited to only reaching out to active carriers that were running lanes like every day. And so this isn't someone that went out of business, you know, two years ago. It they had to be active, they had to be running the lanes, which brings me to this story that just happened yesterday is I had a carrier reach out to uh Genlog's contact website or email address directly, which is kind of rare. And they said, like, hey, I just want to figure out how I update my contact information with you guys. Um, we just changed a few things, and it kind of smelled a little funny to me. And so what I wrote back to them is I I wanted to test that you could do this, and it was awesome. Where I said, uh, I looked up the actual trucks of the real carrier out there on the roads, and I got some data points about it. And I looked up to make sure that this data couldn't be found through FMCSA inspection data, and it couldn't. And I said, Hey, do me a favor, uh you just have to answer two simple questions, and then we can update this. Number one, what cab number is associated with this license plate? And then number two, on this specific day, where was this cab uh number running, a different cab number, and what was the commodity that was hauling? The reason I did that is because that first question, you could maybe get luckier see that. Second, you have to have historical knowledge that's in your TMS. And I could see from our images that they were running a load of gravel. Now that's like very specific. Yep. If you're the real carrier, you answer that question. Oh, yeah, we were it was in Idaho, we had, you know, we're running gravel.

SPEAKER_00: 56:11

235 is the cap number.

SPEAKER_01: 56:12

There you go. If you're if you're and guess what? I haven't heard back from them. And so it was a fraudster trying to infiltrate our system. And we could use real physical data to say, just like if you're applying for a mortgage loan or something like that, they run you through that, know your customer and type some of your identity, like have you ever owned in this area? What was this address?

SPEAKER_00: 56:34

Things that only color was the car you had in 2013.

SPEAKER_01: 56:37

There you go. We're doing that with historical data based on two billion images that can very quickly tell us does this, is this the real carrier? Is it someone posing as that carrier? And it's so cool.

SPEAKER_00: 56:49

I know. And to be honest, like learning what I've even learned this summer that we were talking about of just where and how the fraud was being perpetrated. Like, honestly, like there was a period, like July and August, like I was seriously like depressed for like a month or two. Cause I'm like, I don't know that this is fixable unless the government fixes it. And you've been in the government and we've talked about this a lot. And it's like, well, they're trying, and hey, God bless them. It seems like they're moving in that direction, but who knows when they'll be able to do this. This is the thing that makes me so happy, honestly, every week is working on things like this because, like, at the end of the day, like, if we can solve this for the whole industry, like it's better for everybody. It's better for the supply chain. It's safer for everybody, it's more secure for things we ship for the military, things that shouldn't be compromised that we absolutely know are, right? And being able to actually fix this in a way that helps everybody to me makes this like one of the, honestly, it's like one of the high points of like my career of like projects and things to have been working on over the past few years. And also like what I know is coming down the line that like honestly, I'm super excited about all of this because like it doesn't just benefit everyone in here, but down the line, I think there are some even bigger things that it's gonna be able to do for the entire industry.

SPEAKER_01: 58:15

Yeah, and I I I get giddy when I think about what we can do with the data we're sitting on and what we are um what we have coming down our roadmap here in the next year or two, some of the stuff that we've chatted about. So when we actually get there to do some big reveals, we're gonna have a big reveal in January on some uh renewed shipper intelligence that's just gonna like knock people's sops off. And when I say that, I mean we will have 600,000 different shipper locations spinning not only the US but Mexico and Canada, all of their lanes, the equipment types that they run on those lanes, and then also getting down to the the load volume on those lanes as well. Uh that is, I mean, if you're not using that, then you're not interested in growing your business. So yeah, that's coming soon.

SPEAKER_00: 58:58

And and again, like that was one of the things I was most excited about. Literally before the product was rolled out. It's like, like, oh my God. I'm like, if we can see where the trucks are going, then we can see where the shippers are moving, which means if you've got a lane and you need the other end of that, like you could literally go and just put it in gen logs, find the company and call them like, hey, I'm literally driving past your facility every week with one of my drivers. Hey, so like again, and you alluded to this earlier. We kind of like went on the other tangent, but like this is not just securing freight. This is not just preventing fraud. This is not just finding better carriers for loads. It allows you to grow your business by finding the shippers that you should be calling instead of just calling a thousand of them every week, hoping they run a lane that matches up with your network, whether it's a brokerage or a carrier, whatever side of it is.

SPEAKER_01: 59:51

Yeah, work smarter, not harder, man. That's what I say. So we're gonna give you the intelligence to go land that. Yeah, awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 59:57

Any final thoughts? Anything you want to share before we wrap up?

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:01

You know, in Nate's uh in Nate's debt, I'll just say go bills.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:04

And whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.