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

Gord, thanks so much for doing this. Oh, hey, thanks for having me. The reason I wanted to do this is because I think it fits. I'm going to give you my like one minute overlay of why I think this is important. And it's always important when people are hassled and destroyed the things they didn't do wrong. But I think the fate of truckers in the United States and Canada is part of a much larger trend. So like 10 years ago, I think this is correct. I put it in a book I wrote that a driving for a living was the number one most common job for high school educated white men in the United States, which is to say that people displaced by deindustrialization. The factories died. The country went from making things to finance and real estate and the people left behind weren't helped. They were destroyed by the Sacklers and drugs and also by kind of relentless hounding and scolding by the ruling class. I don't quite understand what that was, but I just noticed it have noticed it still noticing it. So driving, trucking was not only like a huge part of the working class economy, like at the center of the working class economy in the West, but also sort of symbol of like culture and autonomy. Like I'm behind the wheel, no one can control me. Last American cowboy is or exactly. And it was celebrated by the way in the 70s and early 80s. But you know, Oh, a massive cultural output celebrating and venerating the American trucker. Exactly when you know, Americans, ordinary Americans, whose ancestors built this country were, you know, not considered criminals. So by virtue of being alive. But anyway, I think this is part of a much larger shift and attack on the best people in the country. So, and last thing I'll say is like the other thing a lot of these guys do is go fight wars. Well, hey, my grandfather landed at Normandy D-Day plus three in a Sherman tank in a Canadian uniform fought legitimate real Nazis, not the ones that are the figments of people's imagination. Exactly. And then he went to Canada and eventually got into the trucking business. Of course. I'm a third generation trucker, man. Okay. So there you go. I'm sorry. I just wanted to get my theories out of the way. My dad was in the reserves. Like we got both. We're on both bases, sir. So tell me I'm not surprised at all. So, okay, you've written a book, End of the Road, Inside the War on Truckers. Most people are not aware there is a war on truckers has been ongoing this war on truckers. Give us an overview. What does that mean war on truckers? Well, you know, it's sort of an analogy, right? There's wars on workers, you know, as you mentioned, deindustrialization, shipping manufacturing overseas. They couldn't get rid of truckers, right? Like we're here. This is geography, right? You can't move things around America without being in America or Canada. And so I think what we've seen is that the results of a, they tried to in 1980, open up the market, right? In order to bring the same forces to North America. So you can't ship the jobs away. So let's make it so that the jobs, you know, are more competitive in their speak. So Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes in. And the idea is that the previous regulatory framework for trucking, the old Motor Carrier Act, which had a regulated business, right? So like you had to publish your rates. It took a lot to actually get, you know, what you might call a taxi medallion, like you had to have authority to operate a trucking business that was controlled by the government. They did have an argument that this was like it made things too expensive. It was sort of a cartel. But the reforms went so far in the other direction that basically anybody with $300 in a pulse could sign up to become a truck trucking company. And the effects of that, which were brought by people who wanted free market reforms. Free market. Free market. Yeah. Well, amen. Who isn't? The problem is this is that since then. We didn't get free market. No, we did not. And since then, they have asked the government to help them with the consequences of the reforms they asked for. So after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 comes about intense competition, lots of trucking companies go out of business, lots of drivers quit, people move into other things because now the competition, you got your lower prices, not everybody's going to operate at that price, right? So now they start seeing that drivers are like a little harder to come by, right? Okay. So you just pay them more, figure out your rate structure. Like you asked for a free market reform. It's up to you to fix this problem you asked to be created. But instead of doing that, in 1987, this corporate lobby group, who I have very low opinion of, the American Trucking Associations, come up with this study and claim that if we don't have an additional 600,000 truckers by 1990, the entire economy would collapse. The economy did not collapse. I don't know if they got their 600,000 extra truckers, but what they found is that this was a useful narrative. And for decades since that narrative has gone through the media, everybody believes there's a shortage of truckers. Like we talked about this backstage last time I was on your show, and it's never been true. There's all kinds of people with CDLs. There's all kinds of people like me around. They just don't want to pay. So what they have is a churn and a retention problem where the taxpayer subsidizes CDL mills to produce more truck drivers who discover that the job doesn't pay as good as they say it does. It has a whole lot of problems that nobody wants to solve, and then they quit. So I think some carriers have like a 90% to 100% driver turnover rate every single year, and we're paying for that. So they say, hey, we don't have enough drivers. They go to the government. The government subsidizes the driving schools, or they subsidize the students in many ways. Not completely. You make the students pay for it with these sort of debt arrangements. But in general, the American taxpayer has been financing this sort of bogus narrative basically since the late 1980s. At a certain point, it was inevitable, though not foreseen by me, that the people who regulate this stuff would try to replace the current population of truckers with foreigners, because truckers were white men and Christian white men. And that's the group, obviously. About 70%. There's a lot of black and Hispanic truckers from the United States, too. I would say legacy Americans. People have been here a while. And so there was an attempt, by the way, that's a higher percentage than the American population, so it's pretty high. There was an attempt in the United States to just replace truckers with people from South Asia. It's a recent phenomenon, and it's complex. I don't know if there was necessarily a plan behind this. I think there's a lot of different factors that all came together in the last few years. And yeah, it's starting to look like a replacement operation because you look around on our highways. Most of the truck stops now are... There's a chapter in my book called The Truck Stop of Babel, because everybody's speaking different languages, washing their feet in the sinks. There's just lots of weird, little cultural things going on out on the road. And then a lot of the problems that have come along with this operation, the non-domiciled CDLs, all of this stuff is in the news, is a lot of these people are incompetent because they were never truck drivers where they were back home. They just came here as refugees, asylum seekers, illegal migrants, what have you. And there's these systems in place that already existed to turn through American drivers. There's the lease operator scam, which sort of indentures drivers to the trucks. The company owns the truck, they lease it to you, you lease it back to them, but it's kind of like sharecropping. And it's meant to download the costs onto the driver. And as all these systems start losing customers, because people got wise to this stuff, and then we have the sort of open borders policies of various administrations, which really went on steroids under Biden. The country's flooded with tens of millions of people, and many of them start going into the trucking industry. Some friends of mine have been studying the sort of issue of CDLs by various states. And this has been the sort of locus of Secretary Duffy's investigations into this stuff. Shout out to Shannon and his crew at American Truckers United for doing this. They've found that we're talking hundreds of thousands of CDLs have been issued in a suspicious or outright illegal manner. Many of them to people who do not qualify under federal regulations. So there's an old federal regulation that's been on the books since 1937, which stipulates that to drive a commercial vehicle in the United States, you must have a certain command of the English language. You have to be able to communicate with law enforcement, the motoring public, read information signs, read construction signs. We have signs everywhere on our highways. You know, hey, this lane is closing. There's construction up ahead. You have to put your tire chains on to go over Donner Pass. The wind is too high in Wyoming. And they're all in English. America is for better or worse, an English country. This is a safety sensitive job where you can crash a truck and kill people. You should probably know English. In 2016, the regulation of that, or I should say the enforcement of that regulation was waived in the waning days of the Obama administration. They just said, we're not going to place trucks out of service anymore. We're not going to place a driver out of service. We'll just give them a fine and send them on their way. So this opened up a loophole where you could bring more people in to drive trucks who did not meet this federal requirement. And what was the effect? Well, I mean, we're seeing it all around us, right? Like I think so far in 2025, we had over 30 people in America killed by people who are illegally. The definition of illegal migrant and legal migrant and trucking is a little bit of a chimera, right? Because a lot of these people showed up as fake asylum seekers, right? So they come to America. They say, hey, I'm from the Punjab. I'm a devout Sikh. That means the government hates me because they accuse me of being a calisthenic. Can you please let me into the United States? You know, they get issued a work visa on the spot, an employment authorization document. No vetting. Nobody knows what they did back home. Nobody knows anything about this person, but now they're given this employment authorization document and they can go to the DMV here in Florida or Texas or California. A lot of people have tried to make this political, right? Like this is a blue team, red team thing. They're everyone's blaming Gavin Newsom. No one believes that. Oh, I mean, you know, the number one state for issuing these non-domiciled CDLs is Texas. Of course. The number one states for bribery at DMVs and corruption with issuing these CDLs is Florida, right? So like it's not, this is not just like Democrats doing this. Obviously. And so I mean, the governor and lieutenant governor of Texas are way more liberal than a lot of Democrats I know. And they're both Republicans. I mean, you know, these definitions are not very helpful, right? We're trying to solve an actual problem. And another thing that happens too is like, there's a term I use in my book I got from my friend Ashley called a spreadsheet brain. And there are people who will only acknowledge that there's a problem if the problem has been certified by an authority and it's have been quantitatively measured and we have all the data. We have all the data. Your anecdotal observations of reality are dismissed. The fact that the acquisition of that data is hampered in many ways is also dismissed, right? Because a lot of collisions that are not fatal, right? Maybe somebody just got really hurt. Maybe nobody got hurt, but like the trucks rolled over and all these cars are wrecked. They don't take the immigration status of the driver or where he's from or how he got his CDL. You only get this information if somebody died or if there's like a massive court case that takes place afterwards, right? So there's a whole lot of this stuff that does not show up in official statistics. And so therefore it gets dismissed by people with spreadsheet brain. Cost of living is already making it hard to live here and it's not getting any better. Unfortunately, it's likely to get worse and a lot of Americans fill the gap with credit cards, not just for fancy dinners, but to cover things like groceries and bills. That is a disaster. It's understandable, but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect of survival tax of 20% interest or more. Why would you do that? Why would you hand money to the big banks when you can keep it for your family? Our friends at American Financing have a better way. If you're looking to buy your first home or refinance your current one, they're helping Americans achieve the dream of home ownership with monthly mortgage rates currently in the fives. American Financing saves its customers an average of 800 bucks per month. That's nearly 10 grand every year back to you. This isn't just a loan. It's a total financial reset. So debt is tough, but there's a smart way to do it and a reckless, self-destructive way to do it, credit cards. And so we recommend American Financing. They're salary based, not commission based, which means they actually work for you, not the banks. They're called America's Home for Home Loans for a reason called 800-685-5696. 800-685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net slash Tucker. Imagine if every time Inverse Cramer or another top investor bought a stock you bought it to in your own brokerage account automatically. Well that now exists and it's called Autopilot. Built by the team behind the viral Pelosi stock tracker, Autopilot lets you browse their marketplace of strategies run by proven investors or AI driven models. Just find one with a high return, connect your personal brokerage account like a Schwab or Robinhood and every trade they make, you make automatically. Your money never leaves your own account. Autopilot just mirrors the moves. So now no more guessing, no more staring at charts, and no more checking the market between meetings. With over $1.3 billion already invested, you can find Autopilot on the App Store or go to joinautopilot.com. That's joinautopilot.com. Investing has risks like the loss of principal. Before we proceed on policy questions, you're a truck driver. Yeah, I've been my whole life. I mean I'm not right now because I've been displaced out of my own industry by all this nonsense. I haven't turned a wheel in two and a half years. What's long haul trucking like to describe the job? Oh man. Well, the trucking industry is very diverse. And I mean in the truest sense of the word, right? Like there's different types of freight, different lanes, some truckers are regional, some guys are long haul going coast to coast, some guys work within specific industries. They only haul one product. I've kind of done quite a bit of things. I started out working for these guys. Shout out to my friends the Paddocks back home in Stony Creek, Ontario. Having steel coils, hauling heavy equipment, you know, farm equipment, did all kinds of stuff for those guys. Where are you hauling it? When I first started, and this is going to speak to the training stuff, at first when I was a teenager, I got my license when I was 18, but I stayed very close to home. So I'm like, I'm preloading trailers for long haul guys, you know, chaining downloads, tarping loads, learning how to do things correctly. So for a couple of years, you know, Hamilton, Toronto, Southern Ontario, then they let me go a little ways further, Montreal, Detroit, and a little further away again. And then eventually, you know, I did the whole cross country OTR thing. I've been to all 48 continental states. What's OTR mean? Over the road. That's the sort of industry slang for people who go far away and spend, you know, days and weeks away from home hauling the really long haul stuff long distance. What's that like? I mean, it's an interesting sort of lifestyle. It's not for everybody. You know, you have to be psychologically in tune with yourself and happy in your own company because you spend an awful lot of time by yourself in the truck. You also have to have a certain inner strength to deal with just all the problems you get. You know, a big issue in trucking is detention time. You'll show up at places to get loaded or unloaded and they take two hours, four hours, six hours an entire day. For many drivers, they don't get paid for that. And that's sort of one of the sources of this claim that there's a driver shortage. It's actually a capacity utilization problem. And this was studied by a guy at MIT named David Corell, who told the Biden administration in 2021, by the way, that we don't need to import more drivers from overseas or expand, you know, issues of CDL. You just need to get the trucks moving, right? So they dismissed that in favor of ATA propaganda about a shortage. But anyhow, yeah, you have weather problems. You have to be able to deal with the truck breakdowns, right? Like you have to be a little bit mechanically adept, dealing with cold or really hot. Like you could be going anywhere in the continent. So like you sort of have to, you know, be able to deal with adversity and just roll with the many punches that are thrown your way when you're out on the road. Where do you spend the night? Do you sleep in the truck? Yep. What's that like? Pretty cozy, actually. For the long day, most of my most comfortable, restful sleeps have been in the back of a Kenworth or a Peterbilt. What do you eat? Hopefully not truck stop food. No, I mean, guys, some guys have fridges and freezers in their trucks and, you know, some guys cook on the road, some guys eat at restaurants, some guys eat too much fast food or junk from the, you know, the, there's like a, another issue I think we have in the industry is a dwindling number of like, you know, old school sort of home style home cook truck stops. That's sort of gone the way of the dodo in favor of fast truck stops and fast food places instead of sit down restaurants. So the quality of the food is declined. Yeah. In many ways. There's, there's a few. Again, there's always notable exceptions to these things, but in general, yes. What happens if you blow a tire? Well, that's a good question. Back in the old days, you changed it yourself. And when I was in Australia, I changed my own tires. They still do that sort of thing down there. What's that like? I drove road trains for a company in Western Australia. And when you're, What's a road train? A road train is a truck with like two long trailers or three or four, depending on what part of the country you're in because it's a road train. Yeah, exactly. It's a train on the road. The name describes it. So that's something I've always wanted to do. You know, I've been a trucker my whole life and that's kind of like one of the holy grails of trucking in our sort of culture and world is to go drive in the outback and pull all these trailers. So it took me three different attempts at doing it, but I finally got a visa figured out and I went and worked for these guys in Perth. And when you're, you know, 700 miles north of Perth in the middle of nowhere, you can't just call Bridgestone or whoever to come rescue you. Probably hauling ore, I would imagine. I never did the ore stuff. I hauled equipment for offshore drilling rigs because you went there. You went to damp here, didn't you? Yeah. When you were on tour in Australia. Well, off that coast, there's one of the world's largest deposits of natural gas. And so I was hauling equipment and drilling mud and salt and all the different things they need on drilling rigs. And there was also an onshore natural gas processing facility in a little place called Onslow. I hauled equipment and, you know, scrap and all kinds of stuff in and out of. I'm used to haul some things to Newman. So yeah, but like, you know, on the question of changing tires and fixing your own equipment, you know, when you're in these remote areas, you have to be able to sort of do that. You have to have a skill level and a competency level to look after look after your gear. And that is something that, you know, has at least here in America and Canada been slowly been attacked, right? They don't want you to change your own tire. Just call a tire guy. They don't want you working on the truck. They're like, they've attacked the idea that you are a skilled, competent operator that knows what you're doing, right? Because they want things done cheap. Get somebody that's just a steering wheel holder and, you know, dozen are told and looks into the driver facing camera and, you know, submits to the electronic logging device that manages your hours and, you know, don't even, you know, just don't, you know, you don't you don't have any choice. You don't have any agency behind the wheel anymore. Right. That's what that's what the industry is moving towards before they know nothing about the machine. You're just the guy holding the steering wheel. Yes. The system in place to train drivers in North America for the most part operates on that premise. So it's degraded the pride that people have in holding the job. In many ways, yes. Yeah. So it's it's turned men ever closer into machines. Right. Of course. Yeah. You're the human robot. I get it. This is part of, again, of a larger. Oh, it's much larger. Yeah. What was last time you heard someone on their death bed saying they wish they'd spent more time working, particularly filling out forms or even gathering possessions that's never happened. In the end, all you're really going to care about is the people you love. And that's why life insurance is important. It's a great way to make certain that you still support your loved ones even when you're gone. We highly recommend life insurance through ethos. Why? Because ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy. It's 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes and get same day coverage. There's no medical exam. All you have to do is answer a few simple health questions. Up to $3 million in coverage with some policies as low as $30 a month. Low rates from a vast network of trusted carriers. That's the key, competition. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos. Get your free quoted ethos.com slash Tucker. That's ethos.ethos.com slash Tucker. Application times and rates may vary. WA police confidential is true crime in real time. We've got seven good suspects. Did a packet of beef jerky help you catch a killer? You can hear the screams coming from the window. He could not recall how many people he had killed. Every week we take you inside real active police investigations. How do you solve a murder without a body? How do you catch a professional hitman? All the latest on cold case mysteries and a whole lot more. WA police confidential, the official WA police podcast every week wherever you get your podcasts. Very. Often 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 it slows you down so you don't rack, right? You don't run off the road and crash. 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. McCall or at least that was the stage name. He's the guy that wrote the song Convoy and you're very popular back in the 70s. So Wolf Creek Pass has got a number of these runaway truck ramps because you know, it's I don't know how many thousands of feet up 11,000 or something. It's very high. It's wicked. 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. You know, he survived. A bunch of other people didn't. Same thing. Didn't know what he was doing. Didn't, 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? Well, 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, you know, overlaps with the kind of people that won't fight back. That's just, they don't teach you that. You know, there's a few schools that do. I interviewed a guy that runs a truck driving school in British Columbia who specifically teaches people how to get through the mountains, very well regarded. But again, he's the edge case. He is the minority in the industry today. Amazing. 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 sale. 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? 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 wind storms 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, you know, that the people that hire these folks, not training them, which is part of the point, are setting them up for failure. You know, 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. You know, there's been a documentary about this. I'm not making it up. And these young guys in India who are, you know, they see videos of, you know, their co-ethnic friends here and cars and girls and houses and, oh, I'm going to go to America and make it. But, you know, they can't get visas for whatever reason. So 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 Calisthenic. He's not attacking your family who are still at home and who have leveraged everything they have to pay the human smugglers to get you here. And now you 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. Right. Right. So the exploitation going on here, this is not just a matter of like beating up on immigrants. Right. We have a math. The immigrants aren't the evil ones in this story. No, I agree. No. But and the exploitation and the and they're the ones getting killed too. Right. So all these 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 is a few weeks ago and I was writing an article for my sub stack. 249 campaigns by Indian families trying to get their husband's uncle's father's remains sent back to India because they came here, got in a truck, had no idea what they were doing, got involved in a collision. 250? Yeah. That's just the one name Singh. I mean, that's not any other nationality. That's not any other name. Just Singh seeks. Yeah. 250 of these guys with active campaigns run by their families, either to pay medical bills or to have their bodies sent back to India. That is shocking. It is. And you know, it'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, Orrin Cass, American Compass. And 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. We're talking about it in the right wing media because, you know, apparently they're all anti-immigrant secret racists or whatever. But like you guys are not talking about it. 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. That's just a fact. That's for the racism. Stop lecturing about racism. Stop. 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. The 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 his, 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 four percent built on remittances. And they're not the only country that does this, but like it's official policy from Narendra Modi, right? Send 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, it gets 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. The problem is that the lack of training in Canada, there's this thing called driver incorporated, which is this sort of tax avoidance scam, kind of like, you know, hiring employees on the 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? And 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, it's just another form of it's, 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? They'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 to 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, 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. Don't wait for disaster to strike to ensure that you have the basics covered. Food, water, light, energy. And that's exactly why we started a company called Last Country Supply. It's our store that carries the same preparedness products that we have, well, in this barn, for example, the products that give any head of household peace of mind, knowing that if something bad happened, you could take care of the people you're responsible for. So continue to pray for an end to war and violence, but also at the same time, make sure that your family is ready. Stock up on the products that we trust at lastcountrysupply.com slash Tucker. 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, if you're a representative of the average American trucker, we need to protect them at all costs. I appreciate the sentiment and the compliment, Tucker. I'm just a guy, man. I was approached to write the book. A friend of mine, my buddy, Oliver Bateman, shouted 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. Maybe 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 hauled a lot of logs. I hauled logs down volcanoes in New Zealand when I lived in New Zealand. And, you know, I managed it. 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. You know, I, 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. Yeah, 95 of 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 see anything weird? You're just so in the middle of nowhere. You're so loud. 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? The roar of 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 her a pair on my trailer at like 53 below. So it can get pretty cold. Wow. And you don't turn the truck off? No, no, no, no. I just, you 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 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 and 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. I did that for about a year or so in the greater Toronto area and people cutting you off and in and out of traffic and you see people doing really dumb things at gas stations, you know, smoking and, you know, just ignoring the fact that there's like a truck here with fuel coming out of the hoses into the ground tanks. There's a giant bomb next to it. 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 that play your constantly. You have, when you haul stuff that's like, you know, considered dangerous like fuel or, you know, when you're going down a mountain with logs, it's just, you have to have full situational awareness, right? You 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? You're just, you're constantly, it keeps you awake and it's actually pretty mentally and physically draining because you're just always constantly aware. You know, I mean, this is why I've never been involved in a collision. Like I've never hit anybody, you know, 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, that's been going on for decades now. Okay, so you're not, you don't have 16 gears and double clutching. I don't drive those trucks. They do have, there's still sticks. There's 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. But 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. Again, you see the results all around you. How are we, I don't mean to set a patriotic way, but like, how did you learn so much about the world? Were you, I mean, if you're driving all the time, you can't read while you drive. How do you listen to podcasts, listen to audio books, you know? Is that common? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My book will be out on audiobook narrated by me as a matter of fact. So, I mean, so if you do it right, like 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 I, you know, people say I'm passionate about it and I get worked up about it is that truck driving has been very good to me, right? It's been, it's critical to the economy. Everybody, everything we have here was all delivered by truck. The process, the industrial processes which make everything involve trucking. It's the same in every country. Like it's an important and critical job. And, you know, 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 and 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, you know, at threat of the truck freezing up in the winter. You 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, but, 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 right 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 and remittances or paying human smugglers to get them here and American trucking companies are closing. And 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, he'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. The sort of parasitism of the industry, I think Duffy and the FMCSA and US DOT 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? So, no, for instance, cultural 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. The 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. And 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. They 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? So 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 the business is subcontracted out. The 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 the sort of importation of insourced 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, you know, Glendale, California with the Armenians. And 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. JB Hunt does this, Night Swift, Warner, and they don't want to own trucks because hiring Americans and paying for trucks, there's business reasons for this to write too. Like, the cost of compliance, the cost of insurance, the cost of dealing with all this is 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. It'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 getting 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 Bards of the FMCSA are working towards solving, but a company will register under an LLC and then 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. But what happens is, is when a company's motor carrier number gets too many violations, they get too much heat from the FADs 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 HopeTrans crashed into a family, killed almost all of them in Texas. And HopeTrans has been on the FADs 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, you know, they hire migrants and people that don't know any better. And, you know, 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- And the justification with safety. The justification with 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. So it's like electronic voting. It can be subverted. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good analogy. Well, it's any 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. 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 Trucking Magazine in conjunction with these other guys, and it proved that after the ELD mandate, all of the safety concerns that 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? And the woman there was this lady who was in charge of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a while named Robin Hutchison, she was asked about reviewing that, hey, like, look, this is, you know, 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 it, 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. 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. So 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? Like, so there's this thing called double brokering, which is illegal. We're a load broker, which is one of these intermediaries that goes between shippers and trucking companies. Well, a shipper will say, hey, load broker, we need to move this load. The load broker will advertise it on some kind of board or an app, and then trucking companies will bid on it. Other brokers will get themselves involved and then broker it again and then take their cut. And then sometimes, because there's all these intermediaries, and nobody's quite sure who's who, and a lot of them are located overseas, just the theft going on, 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, I heard American trucking company go talk to them in person. Don't use load brokers. Okay. Well, that's probably wise advice. So, 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. So how could you, 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, right? You've got like a 1980s. 1987 also. Yeah, you should drive that one more. Well, it constantly breaks. So if I was actually going to run away. I know some good mechanics. I do too. 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. All of our vehicles can be tracked by the government and are. How can, how can a thief steal a big rig and not be tracked? I don't, what is going on? 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. So like, you can take a trailer, right? With a truck that's being tracked, meet another guy at a truck stop, drop the trailer on hook from it, hook it up to another truck and keep going. And that may have been what happened to your load. You know, I recommended my friend, Ryan Joyce at Genlog. So you know, all 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 rig, you 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. 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, a Punjabi name saying it's an appellation. It means lion. It means a devotee of Guru Nanak. It's not actually a 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. So 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 Chaffin. She writes this a substat called Highway Veritas. Excellent researcher. She knows the whole thing top to bottom. And what we're seeing is that these guys who are here from whatever country, Moldova, Ukraine, India, Russia are hauling US military freight. And that military... Actually? Yeah. They're hauling US military. 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 like, for certain types of military equipment moves, you may not use a broker or like a third party logistics provider. It 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 US mail is using all of these carriers sometimes who are based overseas, many of them using these non-domiciled CDL drivers, don't speak English, dangerous poor safety records. That's who's hauling our mail. They tried to stop doing that in October and the whole system almost seized up and they haven't figured out how to like get these guys out or hire back Americans to do the job. And 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 trucks 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? Like 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? This is worth, we're bumping up against the point where this interview was bumming me out too much. 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 because you can't run a country in the way that we're running it because you're just too vulnerable to exploitation and attack and subversion and destruction, especially if you're in conflict with other big countries. It's not going to work. That makes me sad on that level. It's all very silly. Again, it's not just me losing my job. This is not some like, whoa is me or whoa is my fellow truckers. This is a national security issue. Oh, well, that's very obvious. Okay, I just, I never do this, but I think it's important. End of the Road Inside the War on Truckers by Gord Mangel 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 in their dog and Congress introduced a new law to deal with the English language stuff. I mean, it's already, 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 and 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. There's a Supreme Court case right now that just finished hearing oral arguments, Montgomery versus Corribe, 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 like 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, no one- It's all upside. Yeah, so there's another, 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 JB Hunt, against C.H. Robinson, TQL, all these big brokers, you know, that that's going to attack this problem and say like you guys can't keep doing this. 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? So that's going to be entered in soon. And I think it's being, I think one of the lawyers involved are Nick Patterson who are part of the opioid stuff and fighting the tobacco companies. 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 zins, some eat alp. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I'm not a nicotine guy. But yeah, I think there's a few guys- How did she make it so many years in the cab without nicotine? Willpower allowed music and coffee and staying healthy? I don't know. When you're driving up on the ice in the Northwest Territories, there's no radio reception. What do you do for music? Other 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 think it's one of the great undercovered stories of this time. Yeah. So, you know, last time I was on your show, I talked about these guys called the Coots 4. And then you went to Alberta and talked about them when nobody else would. And thank you very much for that. I know all those guys, they extend great gratitude towards your highlighting of their situation. Of course, I love Canada, actually. Yeah. 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 an appeal to the minor charges in their case, because the original, the big thing that got everybody scared, this conspiracy to murder police officers was thrown out of court, not guilty. And 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 in how the case was prosecuted, warrants. The whole thing is very messy. And right now the last two guys, so two guys got out almost two years to the day of their arrest on unrelated charges, which were bogus. They've been out for a while. The other two gentlemen, Chris Carbert and Tony Olianick, were recently released under something called bail and 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. They 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 it, you know, although that part of the story is coming to an end, this Mark Kearney 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, and 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. They 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 Kearney 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, there was this Stalantis, the guys that owned Chrysler, right? The Canadian government gave them $15 billion to invest in Canada. Stalantis 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? They're like, they're just thieves. And you know, Mark Kearney and his cabinet, if they had any sense of honour, 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 Mawsley decision. It found that it was, you know, against the charter unreasonable, unjustified. The government filed an appeal 14 minutes later, you know, 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. And the parliamentary system, when, you know, members of a cabinet or a government are found to be involved in something so like breathtakingly anti-democratic, it's not the rule, but it's sort of accepted practice that you step down, at least from your cabinet position, okay? No, you put in prison, people criticize you, I think. Yeah, no, that's the rule. Yeah, Kearney and like nine of his cabinet ministers were all part of Trudeau. Kearney like 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, there's so much going on. We'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, and 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.