Ex-Trucker: Gang Heists, Infiltration of the Workforce and the Attempt to Replace You With Machines

24:42Often when you're coming through passes in the west or even in the east through mountain passes, you see a runaway truck lane. Will you explain what that is? So if you're going down a steep grid and you lose control of your truck or the brakes burn off because you're going down the hill not knowing what you're doing, you weren't trained properly, you're supposed to go into one of these lanes. And, you know, it slows you down so you don't wreck, right? You don't run off the road and crash. Right. It's like soft gravel or sand or something. Funny you bring that up. There's been a few incidents. One very recently in a place in Colorado called Wolf Creek Pass, which is the name of a song by a guy named C.W.

25:25McCall, or at least that was his stage name. He's the guy that wrote the song Convoy, and he was very popular back in the 70s. So Wolf Creek Pass has got a number of these runaway truck ramps because it's, I don't know how many thousands of feet up. 11 ,000 or something. It's very high. It's wicked, yeah. And one of these in-source drivers from India went down that hill, apparently had some kind of massive brake failure and couldn't read the signs about runaway truck ramp, didn't know what it was, and then went off the side of the road, truck rolled over numerous times, and he's now dead. You know, there was a crash in Colorado, very famously, where I think the gentleman was from Cuba, went down this hill on Interstate 70 in Colorado and ended up crashing into a bunch of people, set off a giant inferno.

26:12So, you know, he survived. A bunch of other people didn't. Same thing. Didn't know what he was doing. He drove right by all these runaway truck ramps because if you can't read English, then you don't know what runaway truck ramp means. How do you burn your brakes that you said if you don't know what you're doing, you can burn up your brakes? When you're going down the hill, you're supposed to let, you know, your engine, engine compression or an engine brake or, you know, just driving down the hill slowly. Downshift. Yeah. And you have to be taught that. And a lot of these truck driving schools today, again, this process of de-skilling and making people less competent, less proud, which overlaps with the kind of people that won't fight back.

26:52That's just, they don't teach you that. There's a few schools that do. I interviewed a guy that runs a truck driving school in British Columbia who specifically teaches people how to get through the mountains. Very well regarded. But again, he's the edge case. He is the minority in the industry today. Amazing. What are the, before we even get to that, you alluded to it's too windy in Wyoming. What does that mean? So trucks, you know, it's a big wind sail. Imagine a van trailer, a 53-foot van trailer, right? And it's eight feet high. So it's like, you know, it's nearly 500 square feet of like wall, right?

27:28Right. And when you don't have anything in the trailer or you have a very light load, you get a 50, 60, 70 mile an hour wind, it just blows you over, right? And that's so they close the road all the time in Wyoming and other parts of the country where there's really high winds. Kansas, they get these crazy windstorms and they just take you away. So you're supposed to park, right? And again, they have warning signs for this all along various interstates saying, hey, high profile vehicles must stop. You know, if you just showed up here from Somalia and you don't speak English and you just charge right on through and you get blown over by the wind.

28:06that the people that hire these folks not training them, which is part of the point, are setting them up for failure. I mentioned this gentleman who crashed in Colorado on Wolf Creek Pass. There's this thing called the donkey route, which is a human smuggling route that goes through Central America, and they have agents in India. There's been a documentary about this. I'm not making it up. And these young guys in India who are, They see videos of their co-ethnic friends here and cars and girls and houses and, oh, I'm going to go to America and make it. But they can't get visas for whatever reason.

28:42So they go through this donkey route. They get to the Mexican border. They claim asylum. Oh, I'm seeking asylum from Narendra Modi. You know, he's going to attack me because I'm a Calistani. He's not attacking your family who are still at home and who have leveraged everything they have to pay the human smugglers to get you here. And now you are in debt to them, right? and then you go work for some trucking company, usually, but not always, owned by your fellow Indians, and they don't teach you very much of anything, just get in the truck and go make money, and if you don't like it, we'll just send you back home, and now you're$30 ,000 in debt to human smugglers.

29:14Right. So the exploitation going on here, this is not just a matter of beating up on immigrants. Right. We have a massive - The immigrants aren't the evil ones in this story. No, no, no, not at all. No, I agree. No, and the exploitation, and they're the ones getting killed too, right? So all these crashes that have been in the news, there's usually also a guy driving the truck. You know, I went and searched GoFundMe the other day and punched in like truck driver Singh, right? I know this was a few weeks ago and I was writing an article for my Substack. 249 campaigns by Indian families trying to get their husbands, uncles, fathers' remains sent back to India because they came here, got in a truck, had no idea what they were doing, got involved in a collision.

30:02250? Yeah. That's just the one name Singh. I mean, that's not any other nationality. That's not any other last name. Just Singh, Sikhs. Yeah. 250 of these guys with active campaigns run by their families either to pay medical bills or to have their bodies sent back to India. That is shocking. It is. And you know what's even more shocking is the fact that nobody wants to talk about this. So I've been writing about the trucking industry now for a few years, which sort of led to this book, you know, on the side, right? Like I've written for Newsweek and the American Conservative, a few other places, your friend Oren Cass, American Compass.

30:39And I have tried to alert through my various media contacts, folks in the mainstream media or the left, right? Washington Post, New York Times, various smaller leftist places. Guys, we have a problem here in trucking. They were talking about it in the right-wing media because, you know, apparently they're all anti-immigrant secret racists or whatever. But, like, you guys are not talking about it. There's a lot of racism here, but it's not from truckers. It's from the people who run these countries who hate the native populations of these countries. Our countries. Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, UK.

31:15That's just a fact. That's where the racism is. Stop lecturing me about racism. Stop. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's also, like you say, it's so much exploitation, but these guys don't want to talk about it, you know, and when they do, it's these really terrible puff pieces, right? So there was one in the Guardian the other day, Trump is a meanie for enforcing English language rules. There was a couple written back before Christmas, one in the New York Times, one in the LA Times about, you know, California-based Indian trucking companies that can't get drivers anymore because their drivers are afraid of ICE or being abused out on the highway.

31:49the other truckers are racist to them at the truck stop or whatever. But in none of these pieces do they investigate the safety records of the carriers involved? Do they investigate the human smuggling? Do they investigate, you know, the fact that this is kind of a program from Narendra Modi, right? We have this sort of, you know, a profit through emigration policy of sending his people everywhere. This is not just limited to H-1Bs and tech, you know, like this is also in trucking. and India's GDP is now like what, three or 4 % built on remittances. And they're not the only country that does this, but like it's official policy from Narendra Modi, right?

32:26Send my guys over there, let them go. Now they're like less of a political problem to me. They send money home. That's not through, you know, the IMF or some financiers. There's no strings attached to remittances, right? They just come home and get spent however. And it's like a pressure release valve for countries with like dysfunctional economies or dysfunctional governments to just like send all their people into the West. And the whole like, you know, Indians getting into trucking thing is not unique to the United States. It's a problem in Canada, New Zealand, Australia. And, you know, again, the problem is less that, you know, these people are from India.

33:04The problem is that the lack of training in Canada, there's this thing called Driver Incorporated, which is this sort of tax avoidance scam, kind of like, you know, hiring employees on a 1099, which would be misclassification. That's rampant in the Canadian trucking industry. In Australia, they call it sham contracting. And it, you know, it gives the companies that employ these guys a business advantage because now their overheads are lower because they're not paying for, you know, Canada pension plan contributions or unemployment insurance or payroll taxes. They're just not paying any of that, right?

33:38And now the drivers are also precarious because the drivers are so, you know, they're essentially being paid cash, right? And if you don't get paid, then what? You know, there's been a number of stories in Canada of drivers who went to work on this sort of driver incorporated thing, and then they find themselves not being paid. The companies just don't pay them, and then what are you going to do about it? You know, like, it's just another form of, it's exploiting the government, it's exploiting the drivers, It's exploiting everybody. And it introduces a whole lot of people onto our highways, which are a common space, right?

34:10They're our highways. The interstates are paid for by the taxpayer. They were built by our forefathers. The highways are public, and we are allowing people who are engaging in criminality to put untrained, unvetted, oftentimes illiterate people that have no idea what they're doing, who are being economically exploited to be this most critical link in the entire economy, right? Like truckers move everything and we have allowed the entire industry to just be parasitized by foreign gangsters. It's criminal. We pray that the war with Iran ends immediately, but the truth is it doesn't seem to be. If you're the head of household, you need to think through what this could mean for you and the people you're in charge of.

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35:53slash I know it's been a tragedy for you personally, but I'm glad you're not driving anymore because this is, I can't imagine a more informed, articulate, wise observer of what's happening than you. I mean, if you're representative of the average American truck, we need to protect them at all costs. I appreciate the sentiment and the compliment, Tucker. I'm just a guy, man. Like, I was approached to write the book. A friend of mine, my buddy, Oliver Bateman, shout out Oliver, he encouraged me to start a sub stack and a podcast. And I just, I don't know, people said there's something going on here.

36:32Maybe you should look into it. And I said, yes. How dangerous is it as a job? I mean, it seems inherently. It's one of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America, actually, because of the risk of collision and, you know, falling off loading docks and getting in and out of trucks. There's other stuff going on here, but it's mostly all the collisions. you know you're just at risk of being hit by other truckers what's the most dangerous so as someone who's done long-haul trucking what what what did you think were the most dangerous moments oh man good question i mean there's managed danger right like i haul a lot of logs i hauled logs down volcanoes in new zealand when i lived in new zealand and you know i managed if you're trained correctly and you have good well-maintained equipment and you're working for a competent company that cares about you, that pays you well, those dangers are mitigated.

37:21You know, people used to ask me, because I did four seasons up on the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, oh, isn't that crazy? You know, you're driving around on frozen lakes. I'm like, it's boring. They plow the road 100 feet wide. It's totally managed. They have these guys driving around with like ground penetrating radar. They manage the ice. They flood the cracked parts. You're doing 17 miles an hour. There's no cars to interact with. like it's actually the most safe road in the world per ton miles traveled. The most unsafe thing you can do is drive up and down Interstate 81 or across 40 or whatever.

37:54Yeah, 95 over the GW Bridge. Yeah, like it's, yeah, the remote seemingly dangerous things are actually very safe. And the unsafe stuff is to drive around on an American interstate right now. You spent four seasons ice trucking? Yes, sir. You ever seen anything weird? you're just so in the middle of nowhere you're so alive I've seen herds of caribou and arctic foxes and you know when you get north of the tree line on your way to the mine you sort of get out into subarctic tundra it's all very beautiful how cold is it? aurora borealis and stuff at night I've yeah it'll average you know anywhere during the season you know it's in the minus 20s minus 30s most of the time you'll get down below minus 40 I've been outside making a repair on my trailer at like 53 below.

38:43So it can get pretty cold. Wow. And you don't turn the truck off? No, no, no. I just set it on high idle when you're sleeping or unloading or whatever. Yep. What's it like driving through a crowded urban area in a big truck? Well, no. See, that's fun. I used to do a lot of deliveries around Toronto when I was younger, and that's where I sort of like, you know, cut my teeth at this sort of stuff, right? You're driving around places where everyone's driving like a maniac, Akron, there's lots of people around. And that's the challenge. I think one of the more dangerous jobs I ever had was hauling fuel to gas stations.

39:17I did that for about a year or so in the greater Toronto area and people cutting you off and in and out of traffic. And you see people doing really dumb things at gas stations, smoking and just ignoring the fact that there's a truck here with fuel coming out of the hoses into the ground tanks. There's a giant bomb next to them. Yeah, getting too close to you. When you're driving a fuel truck, do you ever imagine what would happen if you had an accident? I mean, you're aware. You try to imagine not getting in one and you try and envision all of the factors at play. When you haul stuff that's considered dangerous like fuel or when you're going down a mountain with logs, you have to have full situational awareness.

40:03You have to be constantly thinking about where's my out if somebody cuts me off? what's going on as I go around this corner what's that guy doing over there it keeps you awake and it's actually pretty mentally and physically draining because you're just always constantly aware this is why I've never been involved in a collision, I've never hit anybody I've been doing this for almost 30 years and it's just because you just have to be fully aware of what's going on at all times Are the trucks moving to automatic transmissions? Oh yeah, it's been going on for decades now Okay, so you're not, you don't have 16 gears and double clutching.

40:40I mean, I don't drive those trucks. They do have, there's still sticks. This is a bit of an interesting trucker culture debate, automatics versus sticks. And in the process, one of my main critiques, I mean, you want to drive an automatic transmission, whatever, but like the development and the imposition of automatic transmissions into big trucks was done on purpose. Why? To de-skill the job and get more people behind the wheel. It may have the fringe benefit now that we've had big truck automatic transmissions for a couple of decades. Yes, in some cases, they get better fuel mileage matched with certain types of engines, and that's fine, and that's great.

41:18But the imposition of them was not for that. It was to reduce the barrier to entry into the job and get more people in it who are less skilled and less competent. And again, you see the results all around you. I don't mean this in a patriotic way but like how did you learn so much about the world I mean if you're driving all the time you can't read while you drive listen to podcasts listen to audiobooks is that common? oh yeah my book will be out on audiobook narrated by me as a matter of fact so if you do it right long haul trucking is like kind of a college course as well as a job it can be part of the reason I wrote this and people say I'm passionate about it and I get worked up about it is that truck driving has been very good to me, right?

42:04It's critical to the economy. Everybody, everything we have here was all delivered by truck. The industrial processes which make everything involve trucking. It's the same in every country. It's an important and critical job. And again, third generation trucker. My dad's a trucker. He's still out on the road. My uncle Chris drove truck for years, established a freight brokerage in Canada, an honest one. Unfortunately, they're not so honest anymore. My Uncle Bruce hauled logs and heavy equipment in northwestern Ontario, the kind of place you would love to go fishing. You know, my grandpa drove truck across the Trans-Canada Highway when it was first built in like 1960 across Lake Superior, you know, in a truck with no bunk, you know, sleeping across the seats, no air conditioning, you know, at threat of the truck freezing up in the winter.

42:48You know, like, well, my grandpa was a tough bastard, and like truckers in general were that way. You know, I mean, the technology has improved and whatnot, but, you know, I feel very strongly about this industry that served my family so well and so many other families so well, you know. And one of the things that's not talked about with this displacement problem as of late is that many multi-generational American trucking companies have gone out of business in the last few years. So since 2022, the freight market has been in what some people call the Great Freight Recession. We're starting to come out of it here in the last few months.

43:27But, you know, there's a website called Freight Waves. I'm friends with the guy that runs it and a few of the people that write there. And they have a section of their website called Layoffs and Bankruptcies. And they have people whose full-time job is to document American trucking companies going out of business or closing or drivers being laid off or having financial difficulties. and it's been humming for four years. Meanwhile, we get more and more people on our highways from places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and India and Pakistan and all across Central America and sending their wages home in remittances or paying human smugglers to get them here and American trucking companies are closing.

44:10And that hasn't stopped under the current administration? Well, there's a bunch of stuff going on right now. You know, Trump, I think President Trump and Transportation Secretary Duffy are trying really hard to fix trucking. It's one of the sort of, you know, I mean, President Trump's up to some interesting things here as of late, but we'll leave that to the side. But I think what they're trying to do to help American truckers is good. They reinforce this English language proficiency thing that was, you know, the enforcement of which was waived under the Obama administration. Interestingly enough, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration functionary who sent out the memo saying, don't put these guys out of service anymore.

44:48He's now in charge of the hazmats division of FMCSA. So this guy that like helped open up the problem is still working there. So maybe Duffy could fire him or something. I don't know. What's his name? I can't remember. And I don't want to be mean to the fella. On the question of the administration doing things, ELP was great, but it's only nibbling around the edges. Okay. Okay, the sort of parasitism of the industry, I think Duffy and the FMCSA and USDOT don't quite understand that we're dealing with people who don't view our safety -driven compliance culture in the same way we do, right? No! So, for instance.

45:30Cultural orientation matters. It certainly does. So, let me give you an example. A few weeks ago, this was all over the news, these gentlemen in India were killed in a very tragic incident where a driver from Kyrgyzstan, working for a company owned by a guy from Kyrgyzstan operating out of Chicago, stopped traffic. Instead of driving into the field to the right, the guy from Kyrgyzstan drove left into oncoming traffic, hit a van with a bunch of Amish guys, and it killed four of them. Tragic incident, okay? So he's been arrested. That's all happening. A week later, on the same road, in the same county in Indiana, another truck blew a stop sign, almost killed somebody else.

46:12The cops pulled the truck over, owned by an Indian company, driven by somebody who illegally immigrated here two years ago. No CDL at all. Commercial driver's license. No commercial driver's license. The CVSA, Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which is this sort of like loose organization of enforcement authorities in Mexico, the United States and Canada, they do these blitzes and then they compile statistics on, you know, what are the violations? What are truckers doing wrong every year, right? One of the number one driver violations is not having a CDL at all or a medical card, right? So what I'm trying to get at here is we have people operating in the American and Canadian trucking industry who do not share our compliance and safety culture.

46:58And because the money they're making is being sent back home to like prop up other countries' economies, they don't care, right? So like ICE could arrest some guy at a truck stop and kick him out of the country. The guy that owns the truck is just going to put another one of his co-ethnics in the truck, right? They have to start seizing trucks. The English language proficiency stuff is like, it's all well and good, but the economic forces at play here, either from the corporations that continue to hire these guys through brokers or the incentives for these guys from overseas to continue sending their people here to parasitize off of our trucking industry are too great.

47:36They are not just going to follow the rules. You can make all the new rules you want. A lot of these guys are not, they're just not going to follow them. You have to remove the people and then you have to seize the trucks. Has that happened? Well, you know, there's been some ICE stuff at a few, like, you know, inspection stations. Some states are cooperating. Oklahoma is a good example of this. There was one in Indiana where, you know, ICE is working with DOT truck inspections, pulling guys out. That's fine. But, you know, again, these corporate lobbyists. So Arizona, they tried to propose a rule to seize the trucks, right?

48:14So if a truck is found to have an illegal immigrant or somebody with like a suspicious work authorization, the truck would be seized, right? And then the company would have to come and explain themselves. Like, why are you hiring these people to drive trucks? Why are you doing all this illegal business? And then maybe you'll get your truck back. Maybe you won't. The people who objected to that were the Arizona Trucking Association. Yeah, yeah. So what's going on here? Let me tell you a little bit of industry lingo. There's something called power only. So this was a model of trucking where the truck and the driving part of a business is subcontracted out.

48:51The trailer, the load, the service is still owned by another company, right? So the people who perfected this was Federal Express. Years and years and years ago, it used to be a good model. You know, you could have your own truck. You could be a subcontractor to FedEx, pull their trailers and make money, and it was fine. That system has run into this sort of importation of in-source illegal migrants, for lack of a better word. And now Amazon does it, right? 90-something percent of Amazon subcontractors are owned by these small carriers that are often headquartered overseas or headquartered in Chicago in ethnic enclaves like Elk Grove Village or Glendale, California with the Armenians.

49:34and they employ their co-ethnics or guys with like suspicious work visas or no work visas or no CDLs and they go and haul all of Amazon stuff through the Amazon Relay Program. And I think six of the executives of the Amazon Relay Program are Indian guys or from India or live in India. I don't know. Anyway, that model, the big trucking companies who are represented by the American Trucking Associations have looked at Amazon and FedEx and said, why should we even bother owning trucks. We'll just have our trailer pools and our customers and we'll subcontract out the driving and the owning of the trucks to all of this cheap labor.

50:13J.B. Hunt does this, Knight Swift, Warner, and they don't want to own trucks because hiring Americans and paying for trucks, there's business reasons for this, too. The cost of compliance, the cost of insurance, the cost of dealing with all this, it's a very hostile business environment. So I sort of understand what they're doing. But the power-only model right now mostly rides on in-sourced labor, right? And what this does is it allows them to say, hey, we are still this American trucking company. Look at us. We're servicing our customers, but they're not actually employing. They're trying to get away from employing people at all and moving to the power-only model.

50:55It's a skin suit. It's not really an American company. Right. Yeah. There's a whole lot of that skin suit stuff going on. And I mean, there's this problem with chameleon carriers, right? So people ask us all the time, like, what's going on with the enforcement? These guys get in crashes, they kill all these people, but then they just pop up again somewhere else. And so we have a problem, which, you know, I think Duffy and Derek Bars of the FMCSA are working towards solving, but a company will register under an LLC and they'll have what's called a motor carrier registration number. and that motor carrier registration number is how all of their, you know, their violations and inspections and whatnot are accumulated to and then the government is supposed to impose accountability on them.

51:37But what happens is, is when a company's motor carrier number gets too many violations, they get too much heat from the feds or whatever state, they just shut that company down. They move the equipment and the drivers to another one under a separate motor carrier number and there's an open market and buying and selling those, which they're supposed to be clamping down on, but I'm not sure how that works. And then they just keep operating, right? There was a very famous incident here where this Cuban migrant working for a company called Hope Trans crashed into a family, killed almost all of them in Texas.

52:09And Hope Trans has been on the Fed's radar forever. You know, I think they're run by people from Moldova. You know, again, they have no skin in the game here in America. Why would they? They don't care. and they hire migrants and people that don't know any better and they backdoor into their electronic logging devices. Yeah, this is another honor thing, okay? So in 2017, American truckers were forced to accept into their trucks this thing called the electronic logging device, right? It's supposed to manage your hours and make it so that you can't cheat on your hours and just keep working. The problem with that is...

52:46And the justification was safety. The justification was safety. And it turns out that it has not improved safety. In fact, it has made it worse. And because of the self-certification process with electronic logging device providers, you can just sort of sign off and say to the government, yep, we met all of your requirements. Meanwhile, there's a guy in an office in Serbia who you text on Telegram when you say, hey, man, I'm almost out of my hours. And they like backdoor into the ELD, rewrite everything, and then you just keep driving. And roadside enforcement people have no way of catching that.

53:17So it's like electronic voting. It can be subverted. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good analogy. Well, anything digital can be subverted. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on. And I mean, even before we became wise to the fact it was being subverted by these foreign actors working in our trucking industry, the ELD mandate never accounted for the incentive structure for drivers, many of whom only get paid by the mile, are constantly being delayed. paid and so you know if you hold them up and they only get to drive so many hours a day and they're only being paid by the mile they end up driving like maniacs right so there was a study done by overdrive online uh trucking magazine in conjunction with these other guys and it proved that after the eld mandate all of the safety concerns it was said to solve you know aggressive driving guys driving tired guys speeding guys getting in crashes all of that stuff went up after the ELD mandate was imposed, right?

54:13And there was this lady who was in charge of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a while named Robin Hutchinson. She was asked about reviewing that. Hey, like, look, the numbers don't match. Well, we're not going to change it, right? When the government has shown that a policy or regulation or mandate they impose on Americans doesn't work, like, they're not going to change it. Like, they have their thing now, right? And, like, whatever you say doesn't matter. you're describing a chaotic and corrupt system that's becoming more chaotic and more corrupt like a lot of systems um and so it i guess i shouldn't be surprised that we just had a tractor trailer full of our nicotine pouches alp stolen and apparently somebody just walked in to the facility with a fake id got in the truck and drove it off and then it just somehow disappeared so that sounded fantastical to me like i couldn't believe that happened Oh, freight fraud and cargo theft is just astronomical.

55:10So that's my question. Yeah. This is not unusual. This is not unusual at all. And in fact, it's like a major, major concern. Like we're talking hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in it. It's not just the cargo theft, right? So there's this thing called double brokering, which is illegal, where a load broker, which is one of these intermediaries that goes between shippers and trucking companies, a shipper will say, hey, load broker, we need to move this load. the load broker will advertise it on some kind of board or an app and then trucking companies will bid on it. Other brokers will get themselves involved and then broker it again and then take their cut.

55:45And then sometimes because there's all these intermediaries and nobody's quite sure who's who and a lot of them are located overseas, just the theft going on with that is incredible. And then there's like organized gangs, for lack of a better word, who, you know, abuse all of the sort of holes in this system that are presented with this sort of technological distance between all of the people involved, right? Like, I'm sure that happened with your case. And I would suggest to your friends at Alp, hire an American trucking company, go talk to them in person. Don't use load brokers. Okay. Well, that's probably wise advice.

56:19So, but how did, I'm a little bit confused by how this works. So, I was aware of the electronic monitoring of truckers because I know some truckers and they resent it. Yes. Right. So I know that a truck is being followed at all times. It's find my phone on a big scale. Yeah. So how could you say, if I take my truck, which is a Chevy Silverado 2017, and try and run away, the authorities can find me because GM will track my truck. But you have an old one too though, right? You've got like a 1980s. I have a 1987 also. Yeah, you should drive that one more. Well, it constantly breaks. So if I was actually going to run away.

56:59I know some good mechanics. I do too. The quote is in my book, yeah. It's just old and it's a bad climate, but it's not about me. My only point is your truck that you have in your driveway that you put your kids in, you know, your pickup truck, can be tracked, period. Yep. All of our vehicles can be tracked by the government and are. How can a thief steal a big rig and not be tracked? I don't, what is going on? Well, I mean, the information doesn't necessarily go to the government right away. No, it doesn't. And then also, you know, they can spoof it. They can switch. You can take a trailer, right, with a truck that's being tracked, meet another guy at a truck stop, drop the trailer, unhook it up to another truck, and keep going.

57:44And that may have been what happened to your load. You know, I recommended my friend Ryan Joyce at Genlog. So you know how these flock camera things are around, like spying on everybody? There's a network in place like that for trucks of video cameras. And this company called Genlogs manages it. You know, I sent Lexi their contacts and maybe they can help you find your Alps. I don't know. But there are all these tracking systems. But again, they can be spoofed. You can switch trucks. When you're dealing with thieves who steal whole truckloads of things, they know this. They're not stupid. It gets unloaded right away, transferred to another reg.

58:21you know, distributed to whoever's going to sell the stolen material. So there's got to be, I mean, there's obviously an entire network of what we used to call fences, people. Many networks, yeah. There was a network of these people in California busted a little while ago, and they were called the Singh Organization because everybody involved had that, you know, Punjabi name, Singh. It's an appellation. It means lion. It means a devotee of Guru Nanak. It's not actually the last name. But there's tons of this. It's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars between stealing the loads, moving them around, stealing the cargo, skimming off truckers.

59:00So like some of these load brokers that are scummy will hire a trucker and just not pay them. They'll get their payment. We're in Serbia. We shut down. Who cares, right? Or some other country. It could be Serbia, Moldova, Colombia, Pakistan. The entire world is involved in the American transportation system. Another interesting development that's come up is that military freight. You know, my friend Danielle has been covering this very well. Everybody should go follow her. Her name is Danielle Chauvin. She writes this subset called Highway Veritas. Excellent researcher. She knows the whole thing top to bottom.

59:33And what we're seeing is that these guys who are here from whatever country, Moldova, Ukraine, India, Russia, are hauling U.S. military freight. Actually? Yeah. They're hauling U.S. military freight. We're at war with half the world. I know. And they're hauling our freight on our highways. The loads are being distributed illegally. What does that mean, distributed illegally? So basically, there's this regulation, and I can't remember the name of it right now, within the United States Military Procurement Stuff Department of War, that says for certain types of military equipment moves, you may not use a broker or a third-party logistics provider.

1:00:13It has to be an approved carrier by the United States military. That regulation is constantly being ignored. You're saying the same thing with the United States Postal Service. The United States Postal Service has a regulation that says nobody but Americans may touch the mail or something like this. And their entire freight contractor network of people who are pulling trailers full of U.S. mail is using all of these carriers, sometimes who are based overseas, many of them using these non-domiciled CDL drivers, don't speak English, dangerous, poor safety records. That's who's hauling our mail. They tried to stop doing that in October and the whole system almost seized up.

1:00:50And they haven't figured out how to like get these guys out or hire back Americans to do the job.

1:00:59And back to the military thing. So on the point about data and these ELDs, all the information about bases, pictures of the loads being hauled, what they are, military documents about the military equipment being moved gets entered into these logging devices because they have interoperability. It's also like accounting and monitoring the truck's performance and sending communications back and forth between the dispatcher of the driver and the driver. So all of that data, all of that metadata about the location of bases and the stuff being moved is being sent overseas. And then to who? Who knows, right?

1:01:38Like it could end up at an office in the Ukraine somewhere. It could end up at an office in Europe or South America or India. And then those guys could be selling it to Russia, to China, to who knows? Nobody knows. All of that, all of these military move metadata is leaving the country via technology that our government forced on us to make us more safe, which did not make us more safe, and is facilitating our replacement by people from overseas. You got it?

1:02:09This is where we're bumping up against the point where this interview is bumming me out too much. Oh, dude, like, hey, man, I want to be trucking. I don't want to be a writer. I'm a little bit of a nerd, but I'm not that much of a nerd. I would like to be out trucking, and I'm not, because the industry doesn't pay. They don't honor skill and competency, and many actors within it would rather hire people from overseas who are exploited labor. End of story. That's all there is to it. it just does challenge the nature of our system um because you can't run a country in the way that we're running it uh because you're just too vulnerable to exploitation and and attack and subversion and destruction um especially if you're in conflict with other big countries It's not going to work.

1:03:01So that makes me sad on that level. It's all very silly. And again, it's not just like me losing my job. This is not some like, oh, woe is me or woe is my fellow truckers. This is a national security issue. Oh, well, that's very obvious. So, okay, I just, I never do this, but I think it's important. End of the Road, Inside the War on Truckers by Gordon Gill is the book. I'm not a bookseller, but I think this book is worth selling. I wish, you know, since I finished writing it, so much more has happened, right? Like I submitted the final manuscript in October. And now, you know, again, back to Duffy and President Trump, the government's trying to respond, but it's in sometimes mealy-mouthed ways where like, you know, everyone and their dog in Congress introduced a new law to deal with the English language stuff.

1:03:50I'm like, it's already a law. Just enforce it. Like you're making a law for no reason. But then there's this other one called Delilah's Law, introduced in the Senate by Senator Jim Banks from Indiana, named after this little girl who President Trump alluded to in his State of the Union speech, who was hit by a driver, an illegal driver from India. And, you know, now she's got cerebral palsy. She was in hospital for months, had to have her brain reconstructed. Terrible, terrible, terrible story. You know, I know her father, Marcus, and that's in front of Congress now. They just introduced some amendments to it yesterday to hopefully clamp down on this.

1:04:29There's a Supreme Court case right now that just finished hearing oral arguments, Montgomery versus Caribe, which hinges on this question of freight brokers, right? Because one of the problems with the safety issue is this division between like the people that own and drive the trucks and the people farming out the loads. And right now, all the load brokers have been taking advantage of the fact that they don't have to do any of the safety checks and they own no liability or accountability. And this Supreme Court case— The all upside economic model that Americans love. Right, yeah. It's all upside.

1:05:02Yeah, so there's another little piece of news here. I've been asked to relate to you by an anonymous source about another court case that's going to be filed here soon by some trucking companies in Oklahoma against J.B. Hunt, against C.H. Robinson, TQL, all these big brokers, you know, that's going to attack this problem and say, like, you guys can't keep doing this. You can't keep using these unsafe carriers and saying it's not our problem. You can't come and take our work, right? Like these guys in Oklahoma are trying to show that we have these customers we haul for. And then the brokers come in, undercut us, don't even use their own trucks and farm the loads out to these operations that are all kind of illegals, right?

1:05:43So that's going to be entered in soon. And I think it's being, I think one of the lawyers involved are Nix Patterson, who are part of the opioid stuff and fighting the tobacco companies. So that's news. That's just yesterday. I just got the document sent to me yesterday. This is such a minor question, but do truckers still smoke? I mean, some do. Some pop zinc, some eat Alp. I don't know. I'm not a nicotine guy. But yeah, I think there's a few guys. How did you make it so many years in the cab without nicotine? Willpower, loud music, and coffee. And staying healthy. I don't know. When you're driving up on the ice in the Northwest Territories and there's no radio reception, what do you do for music?

1:06:22Other satellite radio and, you know, back in the day, CDs, audiobooks, music on your phone, stuff like that. You know, I miss Canada. It's kind of a shame what's going on with it right now. We're going to do a very long segment as soon as I can find the right person to do it on what's happening in your native country, Canada. But I just want to end with your assessment of what is happening in Canada because I feel like it's one of the great undercover stories of this time. Yeah. So, you know, last time I was on your show, I talked about these guys called the Coutts Four. Yeah. And then you went to Alberta and talked about them when nobody else would.

1:06:56And thank you very much for that. Of course. I know all those guys, they extend great gratitude towards your highlighting of their situation. Of course. I love Canada, actually. Yeah. And the Canadian media just either lied about them or, you know, misinformed everybody about it. But they're all out of jail now. there's a uh there's an appeal to the minor charges in their case because the original the the big thing that got everybody scared this conspiracy to murder police officers was thrown out of court not guilty um and it it looks like that they were made into the fall guys by the crown prosecutor involved in the case and there was a number of charter breaches uh and how the case was prosecuted warrants the whole thing is very messy and right now the last two So two guys got out almost two years to the day of their arrest on unrelated charges, which were bogus.

1:07:43They've been out for a while. The other two gentlemen, Chris Carbert and Tony Olianek, were recently released under something called bail on appeal. And those two, there was the minor charges that they were convicted of, which were also BS, are being appealed. And that appeal was, the ruling on that appeal was supposed to come down last month in February. but because it's so hot and the Canadian government is involved, it's going to be September of this year or maybe next year. I'm not 100 % sure. But those guys are out. That's good. My friends Chris Barber and Tamara Leach, you know, they are on house arrest right now.

1:08:17They were the most pursued members of the Freedom Convoy. Tens and tens of millions of dollars were expended by the government to pursue peaceful protesters. And, you know, although that part of the story is coming to an end, This Mark Carney guy, man, like one of the things Trudeau tried to do in the wake of the freedom convoy was clamp down on free speech, right? There was this bill, I think it was called C63. Yeah, end human rights in Canada. Right, pretty much. And that died when they had the election. And now it's being resuscitated under this bill called C9. They don't want you to notice that like youth unemployment is through the roof in Canada.

1:08:53They don't want you to notice that like Chinese companies are buying up Canadian mines. They don't want you to notice that there's like 5 million extra people in the country on temporary work permits that the Carney government is talking about letting some of them stay. They don't want you to notice that like your whole country is just sort of falling apart at the seams economically. They don't want you to notice that like the government just like allows thievery to happen. There was this Stellantis, the guys that own Chrysler, right? The Canadian government gave them$15 billion to invest in Canada.

1:09:26Stellantis ran away with the money, and a couple of days later, they're in the White House with Donald Trump announcing$13 billion worth of investment in the United States, right? Like, they're just thieves. And, you know, Mark Carney and his cabinet, if they had any sense of honor, they would step down, right? Like, there was another, the Supreme Court, not the Supreme Court, there was a Superior Court ruling against Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act against the peaceful protesters from the Freedom Convoy, right? It was the Mosley decision. It found that it was against the charter, unreasonable, unjustified.

1:09:59The government filed an appeal 14 minutes later, thousands of pages of documents, but they were ready to go 14 minutes. And then that ruling on the appeal came down and said, no, you guys did wrong. In the parliamentary system, when members of a cabinet or a government are found to be involved in something so breathtakingly anti-democratic, it's not the rule, but it's sort of accepted practice that you step down, at least from your cabinet position, okay? No, you put in prison people who criticize you. I think that's the rule. Yeah, Carney and like nine of his cabinet ministers were all part of Trudeau.

1:10:37Carney wrote op-eds in the Globe and Mail encouraging Trudeau to freeze everyone's bank accounts and do the Emergencies Act. And he's still wandering around in power, doing his thing, trying to sell Canada to China and the EU and getting in fights with Trump. And it's just all, it's pretty bleak up north right now. Do you feel safe going there? I mean, yeah, whatever. They haven't completely erased free speech yet. I mean, I'm going home in a couple of weeks. Hopefully I don't get arrested, but so far, so good. Gordon McGill, thank you for taking all this time to do this. I think this is, you know, there's so much going on.

1:11:10We're trying to, you know, there's a lot going on, but what's happening here is always the most important thing and how, you know, our economy functions and we get food on the table is maybe the top thing. Yeah. Pretty important to have full grocery stores and gas stations and parts for everything and factories having their stuff delivered to. And that entire system, we've just like sold off to the highest bidder to people from overseas who don't care about us. Amazing. Thank you for doing this. Thank you, sir.